Category: ‘puters

If anyone asks you about the whole “libraries and weblogs thing” anytime soon, just send them straight to this page and then ask “any questions?” I bet there won’t be, except maybe “why don’t I know more about this woman?”

I am feeling better so I am messing with Google Print. Andrea inquired whether, in addition to showing us places where we could buy these books, Google Print might use its comfy relationship with OCLC Worldcat to also show us where we could borrow these books. The reply she received was not encouraging. Tara has more info on Google Print from a discussion with a Google rep. Google does specifically say they are not a library in their FAQ.

A few other things you might want to know about Google Print…

• Publishers can join for free. Google serves their “relevant” ads next to publisher’s content & splits the ad revenue with the publisher. I was pleasantly surprised to see a book by McFarland [my publisher] available.
• Google print currently only accepts — and dismantles — print copies of books and cannot currently accept pdfs or other digital formats. This will be a great bar trivia question a few years from now “which company destroys the most books? Google!”
• Google claims that “pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content.” and yet that’s not strictly true [see figure 1 and figure 2] The page image actually displays as a background image in a weird inline stylesheet, but it’s just a jpg with a URL like any other image on the web. More explanation here.
• Tara has a few more tricks up her sleeve. Can’t afford Library Journal? Read it via Google Print.
• According to Jason Kottke’s non-scientific method, Google Print had about 8,000 titles on December 2003. This was back when you could search for the acronym ISBN in the URL, limit results to Google Print, and get a title list. There’s no longer a handy ISBN in the URL, you’ll notice his title links from that entry no longer work.
• Once you’re looking at a book, searching for a word like “the” can give you a rough idea of how much of the book’s content is available
• scary line in publishers terms: “Google may retain and use for its own purposes all information You provide”

This ebook/library press release [which was emailed to me in its entirely in my comment box] makes the “virtual library” that patrons get to use until the new library is built sound about as fun as watching the Macy’s Parade on a tiny black and white television. Residents of Cherry Hill do get to visit the Cherry Hill Digital Community Center [sponsored by Sirsi, makers of non-Netscape compliant OPACs] which the library web site says is “an online place” available for residents. I’ve got nothing against eBooks conceptually, but can we agree that, just like Google Answers, they’re supplemental to other library services, not replacements for them? Just like the profession’s reliance on major book distributors has narrowed our easily-purchased titles to a smaller subsection of available books, so does the eBook program’s interaction with big name publishers subtly, or not so subtly, shift the library’s collection focus from comprehensive to popular? Library/business/vendor partnerships can be a really good thing, but they have to be entered into thoughtfully and consciously. Do you think overdrive’s privacy policy is the same as your library’s?

Andrea looks at Cantfindongoogle.com a list of failed searches. When people ask me, as they often do “how do librarians stay relevant in the age of Google” I tell them that Google is a very powerful tool that very few people know how to use well. I’ve been reading Tara’s Web Search Garage lately and even I’m learning more about how to massage information out of Google. Sometimes it’s as simple as explaining to the patron that if you’re looking for LTD Consortium, it’s going to be pretty important to use both words. Or maybe telling the patron who is trying to find the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that the key word to include in her search is “Boston.” This is second knowledge to me, and many of us, but it’s not to my patrons. Google is so fast and so useful that I’ve taken to remembering some web pages just by the search terms that I can use to find them, since I can never remember their URLs. I’m also pretty good at ballparking whether some information that I need either can or can NOT be found in Google before I waste a lot of time looking. That’s powerful stuff, and a useful skillset, so it’s good to remember that some people don’t have that mojo, either because they haven’t learned, don’t care, or give up too easily.

Karen Schneider has a great post summing up some of the major problems with the existing E-rate discount program and why libraries and schools might be better off lobbying for a different solution than reviving this one.