OT: Communicating with Google about errors in the Google Books archive

[victor steinbok]

Although Garson has mentioned this once before, there is a general
problem with this approach--there are simply too many errors to report
them individually. When in the process of single search--especially
for a word that is either common or commonly misinterpreted by
OCR--there can be dozens of errors just within a set of research
alone, let alone the products of multiple searches. If Google really
has any interest in fixing problems, it should have a check-off list
accompanying every entry--e.g., have check-boxes for "incorrect date",
"incorrect title/author" (or other bibliographic info), "multiple
books scanned", "missing pages", "mis-scanned pages" (or other
scanning errors), "incomplete bibiliographic information" (i.e.,
impossible to determine the actual book), "incorrect classification"
(limited preview rather than full scan or vice versa), "incorrect
subject categorization" (the error rate for this one is over 80%
easily), "OCR errors". I am far less concerned with OCR errors than
the rest of the menagerie.

VS-)

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Garson -- I might try this sometime.  Apparently not all
> feedback with corrections ends up in that big waste bin in the
> ether.  Or was the comment you received "a greatly appreciated
> constructive and personal response" for, complimentary??
>
> Joel
>
> At 3/14/2010 08:07 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:
>>Joel S. Berson wrote
>> > That's hard for me to do when there is no way (that I have yet
>> > discovered) to give Google Books feedback on its errors.
>>
>>Have you ever received feedback when submitting error information
>>through the blog interface at Inside Google Books? There is a "contact
>>us" link in the right column that leads to a form for feedback and
>>suggestions. The feedback webpage includes the following sentence "If
>>you are reporting issues with specific content, please use this form
>>instead." If you click "this form" then you are redirected to another
>>form. There is a drop-down menu  with several choices, e.g., "Error
>>with bibliographic information", "Misnumbered page", "Missing page",
>>"Books merged together" and "Bad image scan".
>>
>>http://booksearch.blogspot.com/
>>
>>So far I have received primarily automated responses. Once I was sent
>>a greatly appreciated constructive and personal response.
>>
>>Garson

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