Tim Spalding wrote:
> So, it seems to me that these conversations are fundamentally
> off-kilter from how real scholarship takes place. Maybe we should
> judge tools some other way, like how quickly they get you started, or
> whether they leverage the intelligence of scholars and graduate
> students. It seems to me that Google wins on both fronts right
> now—it's quick and inherently based on crowdsourced opinion—but I
> don't want to be dogmatic. I'm not sure the right tools have been
> invented for really helping scholars.
But how about a purely practical task? As I've said repeatedly, if a tool can't even bring together the different volumes of a bookset, then I have serious reservations about how it's doing the hard stuff.
Go to Google Books and try finding the seven-volume set of the 1794 Dublin edition of the complete works of Laurence Sterne. It was all published. One beautiful volume is at: http://books.google.com/books?id=ve8pAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=complete+works+of+laurence+sterne&as_brr=1
I have no doubt it's all in there, but after digging, I can only find a few volumes, and then I just now found the "link" which says, "The Works of Laurence Sterne: M.A. in Seven Volumes ...‎" but when you click, the title is: in 8 volumes.
I've been checking this bookset in Google Books for a few years now and it never gets any better, only worse. Maybe somebody knows of some way of bringing all of these things together besides human intervention, but it looks to me like a long way away. Maybe at least on this we can agree that Google can't quite cut the mustard. And you can probably understand my skepticism when I see this absolutely elementary thing totally messed up, and then we are supposed to believe that the system can do the really hard stuff? To me, that's like a weather man who can't predict tomorrow's weather, trying to convince you that in 100 years what the weather will be.
Yeah, sure.
Another problem is what I have the exact title, exact year, exact everything, and I'm still looking at 10,000 hits. Why? Because Google is indexing all of this stuff out of the advertisements at the ends of the books! And then we're stuck with this idiot "irrelevant" order and powerless to change it.
In spite of all of this, I love Google Books. I really do.
Certainly, citations are vitally important in research, but also knowing what a specific author has written or what has been put out by a corporate body is also important. I would normally add subjects, but I have been cataloging some books lately and the subject analysis has really gone down the tubes in the last decade or so. They do it from the title page only, picking out some keywords and throwing them in. If that's the best they can do, either because of lack of training or time constraints, maybe it is best to just dump it.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 11:05:53 EST