Historian Criticizes Google Book Search Quality

[Jonathan Lighter]

AOLs Live Search Books is vastly superior in quality but offers far fewer books, no periodicals, and virtually nothing after 1923.

  What's there, however, is really there, with title pages and publication/copyright dates easily viewable.

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Historian Criticizes Google Book Search Quality
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>From Library Journal Academic Newswire...

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http://www.libraryjournal.com/clear/CA6438999.html?nid=2673
Early Reviews: Historian Criticizes Google Book Search Quality
How history will judge Google Book Search remains an open question,
but one historian has offered a pretty harsh assessment of its current
efforts. "Over the past three months, I spent a fair amount of time on
[Google Book Search] as part of a research project on the early
history of the profession," historian and assistant director for
research and publications for the American Historical Association,
(AHA) Robert Townsend, writes on the AHA blog. "And from a
researcher's point of view, I have to say the results were deeply
disconcerting." As a user, a publisher, and a scholar studying the
work of historians, Townsend has a strong base from which to judge
Google's efforts, and warns that the project is "piling mistake upon
mistake with little evidence of basic quality control."
[snip]
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Links to: http://blog.historians.org/articles/204/google-books-whats-not-to-like

Townsend and the commenters on his post cover many of the same gripes
about GBS that have come up on ADS-L recently.


--Ben Zimmer

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