Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
> And yet, it is hard to say if they will succeed.
> Using Europeana makes me rather skeptical.
I'm very sure those politicians who decide these things
are not aware of the true size of "cultural heritage" as a
whole or even library holdings as part of it, and what
investments would be necessary for serious attempts on
a large scale. What does it cost to scan 1 book and make
it findable and accessible in a decently convenient way?
How many books are involved? Then, how many will 2.6 mio
Euro get done? But they are not talking merely books!
What is the size of GBS's total investment up to now,
for how many books? (But we want to do better, don't we?
And ask all the rightsholders as well...)
If you ask me, it looks more like the proverbial drop in the
ocean what this new project can achieve in 5 years.
On the side:
Recently, I pulled a sample 100 books from our collection,
all German, old ones as well as recent. Then, I checked
GBS's coverage of this sample:
Full text available: 2
Snippets: 11 (i.e., full text exists and could be shown)
Just metadata 71
Series metadata 2
Not found 12
Here's the title list with the details:
http://www.allegro-c.de/google/volldok.htm#stich
So, there's still a lot to do. Only when seen as a catalog can GBS
already claim a fairly good coverage. From where, however, did
they get those metadata, and what is their search performance with
regard to metadata when compared to catalogs?
B.Eversberg
Received on Thu Dec 03 2009 - 04:39:51 EST