If you you don't feel very confident in trying new things on the internet, don't worry. It's really, really easy to use. You can type in a title or the name of an author and come up with a list of books matching your search term. You can type in a word you want to find books about and get a list. You can type in phrases or passages of text and find the work(s) they were published in.
Titles have a wide variety of information associated with them. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows only shows a cover image and lists some basic information about the book, for example; the author, illustrator, publisher, target age groups, page number ISBN numbers, and a short summary. But Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic also includes multiple pages of the actual book
for us to read online. The entire book is not online, however, we can read quite a bit of it before we would need to find a copy in a bookstore or a library. Unfortunately Google can't yet tell you that it is in our library. You will have to check our online catalog yourself to do that, but I'm sure this feature will improve over time. Today the closest library it found with This Rough Magic was 602 miles away in Emereyville, CA, but that's okay. I'm not worried because I know it's actually just a few
steps away in our fiction collection. If you are looking to buy a copy of the book for yourself it will link you to sites such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble to name a just a few. Titles that are no longer copyright protected will have the entire book online - that is, when they have found a partner to give them access to the book. Dante's The Divine Comedy gives you the entire book to read online or download as a pdf file.
You can even search the text of books. If you can't remember who said "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" just type it into Google Book Search and you'll get a list of results including one for Richard III - Page 104. You can find genealogy books as well. I did a search for the Delavan family and got several results. A family history, which is still under copyright, was among those. Consequently the pages were not online, but the entry listed surnames and and a Google map showing
geographical locations associated with the book. I also found other histories mentioning Delavan as a family or a geographical location, both of which had the entire book online. I also searched for a line from a poem. I did know which poem it was from and the author, as it is a favorite of mine, but a lot of people come into the library looking for what poem a certain line belongs to and this is a great place to check. I looked for "And now I live, and now my life is done." I got 240 results, most of which contained the poem I wanted.Not every book will show up on Google Book Search. It is being added to every day, but there are problems that may keep a book from having the full text added to Google's database as well. Some of the old books that would be really neat to have accessible online may not be in good enough condition to be digitized. Librarians working with the Google project have to balance protecting the copy entrusted to their care with the idea of making their books accessible the world over. When I attended ALA this past June one session involved a panel of people involved in the Google Book Project. Librarians from some of the first libraries to partner with Google and techs from Google talked about the challenges in finding copies of some of the older books that were physically in good enough condition that the process of digitization would not further harm the condition of the original. It was very interesting to hear how far they have come and it is exciting to think about all of the information it has made available to all of us!
There are many uses for Google Book Search and many more features associated with it than I have been able to cover. Take a look for yourself.
Elizabeth
No comments:
Post a Comment