Comments on: Why Google Books Should Have an API

By: How many texts have been digitized? « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

How many texts have been digitized? « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:51:22 +0000

[...] integrated into the collection (as Token-X is with the Willa Cather Archive), invoked through an API, or run on collections that we build ourselves by downloading relevant resources. And we need to [...]

By: The Virginia Quarterly Review » Blog » Content with Digitization

The Virginia Quarterly Review » Blog » Content with Digitization — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:21:25 +0000

[...] the sort of thing that would allow their digital book collection join the microformat web. Dan Cohen recently made his own pitch for a Google Books API, while Alexis Turner has found tantalizing evidence that Google is already sharing their book data [...]

By: Alexis

Alexis — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:49:01 +0000

Dan,

I’ve been prodding Google Books a lot over the last week or so, and I found some interesting correlations between it and the OCLC Worldcat site. I’m kind of wondering if they aren’t sharing a backend somehow, which might explain Google’s reluctance to allow an API (OCLC prohibits the use of automated processes on its data).

See my post at http://redheadedstepchild.org/lists/scratchpad/entry58/ for a description of how I came to this hypothesis. It’s pure speculation at this point, but some of the parallels are interesting.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:30:48 +0000

Ooohh!!!! Update!

As of 3 minutes ago, I entered a generic search term (”social”) and Google Books offered a subject search to me! It appears to work using subject:yourseach as the method.

http://books.google.com/books?q=social+subject:%22Democracy%22&as_brr=1

It still doesn’t allow spidering or offer an API, but allowing broader use of metadata is a huge development, if you ask me.

By: Hope Greenberg

Hope Greenberg — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:40:21 +0000

Thank you for suggesting this. It’s hard to believe that Google fell for the classic blunder that many digital text collections make: the belief that people want to find and read specific works rather than mine them for information. As a historian focusing on the 19th century (in my case, on material culture as well as women’s reading and writing) I want to look at things like what women were reading and how they wrote about it, or about how books and magazines feature in women’s writing, or where works by women writers are found in periodicals of the time. Additionally, I want to find examples of what women bought, what they wore, how they bought it, and how they spoke about their purchases.

As a different example, a colleague who studies proverbs is interested in finding examples of specific proverbs in works, then exploring how they are used. In other words, he is looking for the phrase first, then at the context.

In both these examples, trying to choose a select body of works is counterproductive. The broader the selection of materials, the more useful the collection.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:01:18 +0000

That’s funny, I was just last week whining that Google Books doesn’t have an API, or, for that matter, even the ability to do a moderately complex search using metadata at all. Of course, my complaint was a little less academic than your own (being entitled, I believe, “Google Book Search Blows.”)