[Corpora-List] Something to think about: metadata in Google Books

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On 3/21/2011 5:40 AM, chris brew wrote:
> Google is a company. How much will providing a service for scholars 
> increase value for
> Google's shareholders?

     Yes.  As Andrew Lewis said, "If you are not paying for it, you're 
not the customer; you're the product being sold."  Google is not the 
government, and it does not have a responsibility to provide academics 
with anything beyond what was in its agreements with the donor 
libraries.  Google Books is a huge step forward, not a step back.

      Incidentally, the two biggest sources of data for my negation 
study were Google Books and the government-sponsored BNF digital 
library.  I didn't find the metadata on the BNF library to be 
particularly useful.  That's why I created my own database linking to 
both catalogs, and other texts available online.

     People who don't like Google's metadata can create their own 
alternative catalog that links to their scans.  People who don't like 
the capitalist business model can get a government to pay for that 
alternative catalog.  Nothing in the structure of Google Books precludes 
this.

     The main thing I think Nunberg is responding to is not Google Books 
itself, but the overreaching claims made for it by Erez Lieberman and 
his collaborators.  As I understand it, he's the one who pushed Google 
to make their Ngram viewer publicly available and published articles 
claiming that it had reliable results.

-- 
				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
				Saint John's University
				grvsmth at panix.com


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