Google Book Search misdating (was Re: "Better Dead Than Red")

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 2:59 AM, Victor <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A couple more notes on Google Books. There appears to be a serious
> problem with periodicals.
>
> Among other things, Google Books lists The American Mercury as a 1924
> source for "Better dead than red". In fact, the snippet shows that it
> includes both that and the inverse version! The only problem is that the
> publication data may not be accurate. The American Mercury was *founded*
> in 1924, which is why it is listed as 1924 in Google.
<snip>

This is a problem that all of us using Google Book Search for
antedating purposes have run up against. There's some hope for
improvement now that the Hathi Trust has gotten involved (for
public-domain material) and Google's lawsuits have been settled (for
in-copyright material), as I've discussed on Language Log:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=602
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=780

In the meantime, there are some tricks for dealing with misdated periodicals.

1. A misdated record may actually have good metadata, if you know
where to look. For periodicals, never go by the year listed in the
main search results page (even though this is what's used when
restricting searches to a particular date range). Instead, look at
what's listed under "More details" on the About the Book Page. This
often shows the correct date, or at least a range of a year or two.

Example: http://books.google.com/books?id=FcAdAAAAMAAJ
Year listed as 1969, metadata shows it's from 1996

2. The metadata might at least tell you the correct volume/issue
number, which you can then check elsewhere for the correct date.

Example: http://books.google.com/books?id=ut-2AAAAIAAJ
Year listed as 1960, metadata shows it's from v.384 no.8544-8548
[turns out to be Sep. 2007]

3. You might be able to see the correct year or range of years on the
small title page image on the About The Book page.

Example: http://books.google.com/books?id=FQwVAAAAIAAJ
Year listed as 1937, title page shows it's from 1962-1963

4. As a last resort, you can try "Search in This Book" for year
numbers to see what shows up in the results (assuming you can see at
least snippet view).

Example: http://books.google.com/books?id=aZmNAAAAIAAJ
Year listed as 1996, search on year numbers shows it's from 2001

On the bright side, it does seem that some of the old misdatings have
actually been corrected or at least improved. So they're aware of the
problem and are trying to do something about it.


--Ben Zimmer

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