Nov
02
The Latest on Google’s Print “Card Catalog”
Posted under Books
I had heard a lot about Google’s plan to scan books to be added to an Internet based ‘card catalog’. There was alot of up-in-arms by authors, as if Google would be buying books off the shelves at Barnes and Noble and scanning them into the Google search engine.
The plan isn’t quite that bad, they want to scan unavailable Public domain, orphaned and out of print books to make them available to readers. Yesterday, they were supposed to resume scanning…
Link: Official Google Blog: Discovering hard-to-find books.
As always, the focus of our library effort is on scanning books that are unique to libraries including many public domain books, orphaned works and out-of-print titles. We’re starting with library stacks that mostly contain older and out-of-circulation books, but also some newer books. That said, we want to make all books easier to find, and as we get through the older parts of the libraries we’ll start scanning the stacks that house newer books.
These older books are the ones most inaccessible to users, and make up the vast majority of books - a conservative estimate would be 80 percent. Our digital card catalog will let people discover these books through Google search, see their bibliographic information, view short snippets related to their queries (never the full text), and offer them links to places where they can buy the book or find it in a local library.
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