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Google Books vs. BISON - 6/15/2008 - Library Journal

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Saved by 11 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-06-17


Public Comment

on 2008-06-18 by justinleetyler

"Google Books averaged 1,111 hits for these searches, which had fewer than ten results in our catalog." So? What matters is that patrons find what they need. It's about quality; not quantity.

Public Sticky notes

ust as the Internet is likely to be one of the most disruptive overall technologies of our lifetimes, Google Books may become one of the most disruptive technologies for academic libraries. The immediate challenge is that Google Books' deeper indexing and more advanced relevancy ranking usually works better than that of our local catalogs—and it always returns results.

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As Google Books grows to contain the best collections of the best libraries, it is unclear where middle-tier, flat-budget academic libraries will be left. Do we become a delivery mechanism for books found through Google instead of a search provider in our own right? Certainly, Google Books' “find in a library” link into WorldCat enables a user to check our holdings and allows us to perform the delivery function. But as the online holdings of Google Books increases, will delivery request traffic dwindle? With this background in mind, we decided to put Google Books to the test.

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Although Google Books assumes a Boolean “and” between words, a slightly larger number of hits results from using the “+”. (As an example, search “war and peace” and compare the results to “war + peace”.) This revealed a problem we had not expected: users were possibly getting zero results in our OPAC because they were using Google search syntax!

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f we look at searches where our catalog probably has too little for the users, the results are also eye-opening. For searches yielding between two and ten results in BISON, Google Books returned up to 10,800 results! Google Books averaged 1,111 hits for these searches, which had fewer than ten results in our catalog. For searches returning a useful number of hits in BISON, i.e., 11–50 and 51–100, Google Books also returned more material, averaging 2,202 and 2,809, respectively. As the searches became too general for meaningful results, both systems returned high numbers of hits. In all cases, Google Books' relevancy ranking somehow brought interesting material to the top, while BISON's were rather random, without any obvious organization.

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Some would respond that the BISON results, although fewer, were better than those from Google Books because they were more precise, and the chance of relevance to users was much greater because the retrieved results were based on subject headings. In actuality, many of the Google Books results were relevant and useful. Although users don't always see complete full text, the detail is usually sufficient for them to vet results and determine what is useful. And while users do need to watch out for the Google Books “doughnut hole,” i.e., the gap between scanned material out of copyright and new born-digital books fresh from publishers, materials in Google Books are far more visible and accessible than those in the local catalog and our collections. Google Books often allows a “search inside the book” and provides a cover image, table of contents, etc. For old canonical works, full text is generally available, often in multiple formats.

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Our study also points out the necessity for librarians to investigate aggressively and stay abreast of disruptive technology and build it into new services wherever possible. Libraries and librarians must constantly be attuned to patrons' behavior; we need to consider how we can use our unique qualities and collections to everyone's advantage. The bar has been raised. The maturing Internet and evolving array of Web 2.0 services has turned our customer base into what many have called a “Google Generation.” We can debate that moniker, but, clearly, no one is calling this the “Academic Library Generation.”

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