Google Book Search or Who Needs Subject Cataloging When You Can Search Every Word in the Book?
It seems a lot of people have a bee in their bonnet about Google Book Search. It also seems a lot of people (like librarians) are pretty excited about it. I have to say that I fall into the latter category. I have to admit that I haven’t used Google Book Search very extensively, but from what I’ve seen in the short time I’ve been researching it for my class discussion, I’ve been very impressed. This expands the idea of subject access to new levels that were never before thought possible.
In the good old days of card catalogs, every book had its main entry card and then subject entries that referred to the main entry. Obviously it was impossible to create subject cards for every single idea that was covered in every book. It would have been impossible to create that many cards for every book in a library, let alone house them in the drawers of a physical card catalog.
Even now with digital cataloging and online databases, it is impossible for catalogers to note every subject that is touched upon in every book in a library. Even though the time-consuming card making and filing isn’t an issue with digital cataloging, it still takes time to catalog digitally, and all of this information takes up space in digital memory.
Google Book Search allows the entire text of a book to be searched. This allows users not just to search by general topic, (ie-photography) but they can search specific aspects of a topic that would never be cataloged as an individual subject (ie-Photographing lions in Africa). Not only does Google Book Search find books where the character-strings appear, it also lets you view those parts, “snippets,” of the book where the words appear and shows them as highlighted text. This goes way beyond anything that has been done with standard cataloging.
With all that being said, I am an enormous fan of controlled vocabulary, and I believe that when it’s used well, it can provide very precise results to search queries. Google Book Search is anything but precise, but this lack of precision brings in the element of serendipity and possibly stumbling across a title that you wouldn’t have found otherwise. I think there is a place for Google Book Search, but I don’t think it’s going to replace traditional cataloging and subject access. The two can work together to give patrons a variety of options when looking for sources.
The Google Book Search website provides a lot of information on the legal and technical aspects of the project, but it also has quotes from satisfied users. Many of them had similar stories about not being able to find a reference they were looking for, and then turning to Google Book Search to help them find the book on the shelves or at a nearby library. Tom Bruno, a library assistant at (an unnamed library at) Harvard gave the following quote:
"For the third time in the past week, I've been able to answer thorny reference questions using Google Book Search that I otherwise would have simply given up on. I tried Google Book Search and lo and behold – there was my mystery reference. That was more than enough to steer me to the proper volume on the shelves here at the library. Mission accomplished! Google Book Search and similar endeavors have given me a burst of optimism. Not only will scholarship be enhanced as a result of digitization, but it will become more relevant as well. The more that is scanned and made searchable, the more humanity as a whole will benefit."
This is just the tip of the iceberg of Google Book Search. Tune in next week when I host a class discussion on this topic.
- Beth Wodnick