On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8237271.stm
Interesting story there. Hadn't realised there was even a lawsuit in progress.
"With Google books, any student anywhere in the US will have the books in the greatest libraries of the world at their fingertips." Which is terrific, if you happen to be in the USA.
I have a few questions about Google Books, which in general as a service makes it much easier for me to find references.
- Do we have an approved and sensible citation style for GB?
The point is that some people simply paste in the very long GB URL for a page. I tend to do the other thing, which is to treat it no differently from a book I have open in front of me.
- How much do we know about visibility of GB pages in various countries
round the world?
This obviously affects what to do about 1. (There is a clear contradiction to our mission if the given reference as URL appears broken in various parts of the world.)
- The GB interface is in beta, I think, and the recent upgrade appeared
to be largely cosmetic (and unhelpful to people like me who would like to copy-and-paste citation details, since the year of publication was moved). Can we influence their designers?
There is the issue: could there be a button so that a full citation (GB URL _plus_ traditional page reference) was made available? Since the metadata is (sadly) often substandard, could there be a routine way of reporting this to Google as feedback? In general, could the WMF get its act together as a potential large-scale "customer" likely to link to many relatively obscure scholarly texts on GB, and explain our requirements to make good linking as easy as possible?
Good points. As well as responses on this list, you might want to raise this on foundation-l and on-wiki somewhere. I'd search in the Wikipedia namespace for "Google Books" and hope we have some helpful citation instructions already that would be a starting point. You might also want to check that external links thingy that can tell you how many links we have to Google Books.
Carcharoth