Everybody's Libraries

March 30, 2009

How to find complete multi-volume works in Google Books

Filed under: online books — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 10:15 pm

While Google’s agreement on copyrighted books has been the subject of much discussion lately, they’ve also been continuing to add public domain titles at a brisk pace.  For instance, they announced in February that they now had 1.5 million public domain volumes formatted for mobile devices.  And last week, they noted that they had completed their scans of hundreds of thousands of volumes of 19th century public domain books from Oxford’s Bodleian library.

If you look at the three example book links in their Oxford post, you’ll notice that each of them goes to a volume of a multi-volume edition.   Works from the nineteenth century and before were often originally published in multiple volumes, such as the “three-decker” format common for Victorian novels.  When such books are reprinted today, they’re usually printed as a single volume, but to read all of many Google titles, you’ll have to range over multiple volumes.

Unfortunately, as various readers have noted, it can be quite difficult to find readable copies of all of the volumes in a multi-volume edition.  For various reasons, they often don’t all come up when you do a search for a particular title.  This can make readers think there are no complete digital editions of a work they’re seeking, even when there are.

In working with people who have helped me fill requests for public domain books, I’ve compiled a series of techniques for finding complete multi-volume sets in Google Books.  I’d be happy to hear additional tips from readers.

  • First, do a search for full-view volumes of the work you’re looking for.  One good way to do this is to go to Google’s advanced book search page, select the “full view only” option, and enter author and title words in the appropriate blanks.
  • If you get a hit, check the start and the end of the scan, to verify which volumes are actually present. Sometimes you’ll find more than one volume in the scan, either because multiple volumes were bound together, or because Google combined volumes in its scan.
  • Go to the “about this book” page for the scan, and look in the lower regions to see if there is an “Other editions” section. This often includes links to other volumes, not just other editions. If there’s a “See more” at the bottom of such a section, click on it to see more volumes or editions.  (Sometimes Google will have multiple editions as well as multiple volumes for the same work.  It’s best when possible to compile volumes from the same edition.  You can do this by matching publishers and dates between volumes, though keep in mind that some multivolume editions came out over the course of multiple years.  Editions from different publishers, or from different times, may have inconsistent content, and might not divide into volumes at the same points.)
  • If the book is from the University of Michigan (as reported either in the “about this book” page or in the scanned front pages) check the Mirlyn catalog for the book. Sometimes this will turn up volumes scanned by Google that have been put in the Hathi Trust repository, or in Google Book Search itself, but that for some reason don’t show up in an ordinary Google books search. Some other Hathi Trust libraries also have links to digitizations of their content; see this page for details.
  • If this didn’t turn up all the volumes you’re looking for, repeat the process above for the other volumes in your initial hit list. Sometimes those will have “Other editions” links to additional volumes that didn’t appear with the earlier hits.
  • If you manage to complete a set this way, consider sharing your success with other readers.  If you fill in my book suggestion form with the volumes you find,  I can list a neatly consolidated edition of all the volumes on The Online Books Page, and help other people avoid going through all the trouble you just did.  (Give the book’s title, URL for the first volume, and other information in the appropriate blanks, and then add URLs for subsequent volumes in the “Anything else we should know?” section of the form.)
  • Even if you only partially succeeded, if it’s a work you’re particularly interested in you can use my suggestion form to let me know what you’ve been able to find.  If I can’t easily find the other volumes myself, I can at least list what was found on my works-in-progress page. With luck, someone coming along later will find or digitize the remaining volumes, and I can list the set.

Similar techniques can be used for compiling runs of historic serials, which are also present in Google, and can be of great interest to readers.

If you find these suggestions useful, I hope you’ll help me compile sets of your favorite public domain works, so we can take advantage of all this wonderful old material that Google and others are digitizing.

March 24, 2009

Gloriana St. Clair: A brief appreciation

Filed under: awards,libraries,people — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 10:50 pm
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The organizer of today’s Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in technology, says that women need female role models they can emulate.  I’d add that men can use female role models as well.  There are at least two obvious reasons. First of all, we get a wider range of inspiration when our role models aren’t limited to half the population.  But also, people can be rather clueless about groups of people that they don’t normally see much, and that cluelessness can hold people back needlessly.

I don’t recall being consciously sexist when I entered grad school in computer science, but I wasn’t the most clueful person either.  When I noticed that there were only 4 women in our entering class of 36 (a ratio unfortunately not too far off the one I saw in undergraduate computer science), one of the first things I blurted out to one of those women was something like “gee, there’s going to be a lot of romantic competition for you four,” thinking about them more as potential dates than as fellow computer science colleagues.

I was fortunate, however, to have multiple female role models to learn from in my time as a graduate student.  Mary Shaw inspired me and many others to gain mastery over all kinds of challenges, from software engineering to bicycle trekking, through systematic and rigorous information gathering and analysis.  Jeannette Wing contributed some of the key technical  foundations to my own dissertation work (in her work with Barbara Liskov on type substitutability), and as a member of my dissertation committee repeatedly challenged me to write more clearly and logically, helping ensure that my ideas were sound and understandable.  And I don’t have the space here to enumerate, or express full thanks for, what I’ve learned from Mary Mark since I met her.

I also found another role model who I’d like to talk about today: Gloriana St. Clair, dean of libraries at Carnegie Mellon.  Unlike the other women I’ve mentioned above, she has no “technology” degree, but she’s played very important roles in bringing together technology and librarianship, to the benefit of both.

She has long emphasized the importance of digital technology to the future of libraries, featuring it prominently in strategic plans and library organization, and cultivating people with the skills and knowledge to design and improve the digital library.  (And not just her own staff; she encouraged me, while still in the computer science department, to get out to library conferences to find out more what people were doing and thinking, and even gave me a ride to a CNI forum in Washington, DC.)

She’s also helped educate technologists about the important roles that libraries and librarianship play in managing information.  While at Carnegie Mellon, I got involved in a computer science-led project to build a massive digital book collection, where much of the early thinking seemed to assume that the problem was largely a matter of committing enough technology and funding.  I was very happy to see Gloriana get involved and show how sound librarianship could make that project, as well as other digital library initiatives I’d dabbled in previously, much more effective, usable, and preservable than a purely engineering-oriented project would have been.

She’s also been unafraid to take a leap into a new area or initiative when called for.  Not content to settle for an MLS degree as a librarian, she went on to get a PhD in literature, and an MBA that she’s used both to help manage libraries and teach others about library management.  And when a commercial publisher bought the library science journal she edited and raised its prices, she organized a mass exodus of editors to a new, lower-cost journal founded under the auspices of SPARC.

My own career jump, from a computer science department at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to a library at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was made easier in a number of ways by her help and example.  Indeed, after I got more acclimated to library culture, I  gained a better appreciation of how well she accomplished one of the great functions of librarians: to build bridges and spread knowledge among a variety of different disciplines.  I also grew to appreciate the importance of building such bridges for librarianship itself.  Librarians can be another set of folks that many faculty and professionals don’t see much of, and that they can be correspondingly clueless about.  If libraries and their users are not to be held back needlessly, we need to build better bridges between each other.

I’m not alone in my appreciation for Gloriana.  Just a few weeks ago, the Association of College and Research Libraries named her Academic/Research Librarian of the Year.  To their award, I’d like to add my own personal and professional thanks.  And thanks as well to the many other women in technology who have, knowingly or not, given me knowledge, inspiration, encouragement, and some helpful clues.  I hope I can make a suitable contribution in turn.

March 18, 2009

The Google Books settlement: A symposium, and a call for library action

Filed under: libraries,metadata,online books,open access,reading,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 2:14 pm

Last Friday I went to a fascinating symposium at the Columbia Law School: “The Google Books Settlement: What Will it Mean for the Long Term?” The symposium included presentations by US copyright register Marybeth Peters, and antitrust expert Randal Picker [slides], followed by panels featuring speakers from the legal, publishing, and library world, as well as a few folks representing Google, authors, international publishing groups, and photographers.  The audience filled most of a large room, and included listeners from all these communities.  I prepared for the day by going through Walt Crawford’s lengthy summary of the settlement and its commentators, which I recommend to anyone needing to get up to speed on the issues.

Cornell’s Peter Hirtle has posted a useful summary of the proceedings, and I’ve also seen some interesting commentary on aspects of the meeting from Peter Brantley and Adam Hodgkin.  (The session was also live-Twittered.)

What I heard from audience members, both during and between sessions, was interesting as well.  Like Peter Hirtle, I didn’t hear many people saying directly that the settlement should not go forward (though I did hear that from a few people who were there but not on the stage).  I did hear repeated concerns over how the deal came about, and how it made substantial changes to the contours of copyright through class action litigation rather than legislation; and I also heard substantial concerns over the monopolies given to Google and the Book Rights Registry, and how those monopolies might stifle innovation and competition, drive up prices for online access to books, and infringe on rights of readers.  (Despite its name, the Book Rights Registry is not simply a passive store of information; it also actively negotiates terms and prices of online book uses on behalf of rightsholders, and manages the distribution of revenues from these uses.)

There was also some concern about whether those not involved in the negotiations, such as small publishers, unknowing owners of out-of-print works, foreign authors and publishers, and illustrators and photographers, were being properly respected.  Though with these latter concerns, there seemed to be more of a desire for a voice and piece of the action than a desire to stop the settlement from happening.

My basic take on the settlement didn’t change much. I’m guardedly hopeful about it, and would much rather see the settlement go forward than fail, because of the new and enhanced access it will give to millions of books for readers throughout the US.   That’s not to say it doesn’t pose some problems and dangers, many of the relevant ones having been  well-expressed by James Grimmelmann back in November. (Grimmelmann made additional remarks in one of the panels.)  The symposium did give me some new appreciation of some of the pitfalls to watch for, and some more ideas on how libraries might respond to them.  It also gave me a stronger impression that trying to modify the settlement itself is not likely to be a very fruitful response; my lay understanding is that the judge will likely just rule up or down on it with little or no modifications, with any major changes in terms requiring starting over negotiations with all the parties involved.

Still, there were some important constituencies that weren’t really addressed in the formal sessions.  One of them, noted late in the day by Harvard’s Robert Darnton, was individual readers.  (If you haven’t read Darnton’s pessimistic take on the settlement, or the response from Michigan’s Paul Courant, who was also there, you should.)  But another, I’d argue, was libraries as active agents in shaping the future of reading in the electronic age.  For libraries, I kept hearing questions like: Should they endorse or protest the settlement?  Should they buy or forgo the institutional subscriptions that will be offered?  Should they accept or pass on any of four digitization partnership deals that the settlement allows?  These are important questions, but they’re basically all reactive: choosing to go with or against the flow, without considering how we might shape or rechannel it.

How might libraries reshape this flow? Going into full detail would require a number of additional blog posts at least, but among other things, we can work individually and collectively to

  • Safeguard readers’ privacy (as we do now to some extent via proxy servers).
  • Ensure the preservation of digital and print books (through efforts like Hathi Trust and shared print collection management).
  • Collectively press for reasonable pricing and terms of use, respecting traditional user rights under copyright law, for institutional subscriptions.
  • Encourage Congress to pass legislation that would give other digitizers the rights to offer similar services to what Google will; enable the more widespread use of orphan works; and apply appropriate oversight to the monopolistic aspects of the Book Rights Registry.  In her talk, Marybeth Peters said that no one from Congress had asked the Copyright Office for comment on the proposed settlement.  While her office doesn’t appear interested in petitioning Congress, libraries can and should do so.
  • Integrate book digitization (and not just Google’s) with our library’s operations and services, so our users can make the most of what’s available digitally.   This can include integrating digital copy information and links in our catalogs, and pressing for links from those copies back to our library services (not just indirectly via OCLC’s “find in a library” link, but also direct links through technologies like OpenURL).
  • Promote and support the widespread, open sharing of information about digital books and their rights.  This information will make it easier to expand and improve what’s available online, and bring it to the widest possible audience.  We can’t rely on Google and the Registry to do all the work for us. Google’s own digitizations and metadata will not be perfect or incomplete.  The Book Rights Registry will not be freely sharing all of its information, and in any case will be more interested in paying rights claimants than in, say, enhancing access to the public domain.  If we want to solve this problem, we’ll need to continue to address some more general issues with sharing metadata more broadly.

We don’t have to wait for the settlement to go forward, or break down, to start thinking and experimenting in these areas.  I hope that a lot of libraries will be considering the issues raised in the Columbia symposium, and deciding how best to act (and not just react) to best serve our readers in a world where millions of books are accessible online.

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