Historian Criticizes Google Book Search Quality

[Grant Barrett]

A talked with someone from GBS last week and not only gave him an
earful over the phone, but followed up with details and examples in
an email. He was noncommittal but said they are working on improvements.

One thing I learned is that reason there is duplication of texts in
GBS is that Google will not accept it when authors, publishers, or
other rightsholders say, "Oh, yes, you've already scanned the copy of
our book when you did Stanford's library. Here's our permission to
make the whole thing freely available." Instead, the book has to be
resubmitted and rescanned.

He had no explanation for bad dates for journals, in which the entire
run seems to take the date of the first issue. He did say, "Please be
assured that our engineers are currently working to improve the
bibliographic information that we display on our book pages, and they
are aware that multi-volume works are often marked without proper
citation."

Grant Barrett
Vice President of Communications and Technology
American Dialect Society
http://www.americandialect.org

On May 3, 2007, at 17:20, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

>> From Library Journal Academic Newswire...
>
> -----
> 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]
> -----
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org