Google Books vs. Peninsula College Library Catalog

Don Quijote
Image Credit: [noone]

"La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierran la tierra y el mar: por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida."

-Don Quijote de la Mancha-

A Response to: “Google Books vs. BISON”
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6566451.html

An article by Mark J. Ludwig & Margaret R. Wells in Library Journal (6/15/2008) says: “…Google Books' deeper indexing and more advanced relevancy ranking usually works better than that of our local catalogs.”

I respectfully disagree.

Google Books often cannot even compete with our small, rural, community college library catalog (with 62,000 holdings) when the playing field is level, i.e., when the search parameters are identical.

In the last century (the 20th century) I remember studying at the University of Washington, consulting the catalog, climbing the stairs of Suzzallo Library, and pulling books out of the stacks. I did that daily for years. I had the full-text in my hands minutes after a catalog search. I was in heaven. Now, in 2008, Google Books cannot even come close to giving me the full-text I want.

Whereas for most search results with Google Books you do not get the full-text to read, in a library you do get full text of e-books (and more full text in print sources, along with some exercise, if you walk to the stacks).

Google Books default is “All Books,” which includes "full view" and "limited preview" books. To make the comparison of immediate full text accessibility more accurate, the “full view only” option should be selected in Google Advanced Book Search. The Peninsula College Library catalog often does better than Google Advanced Book Search "full view only."

Recently I was searching for books on leadership and did a Google Books search for books in English, published between 2000 and 2008, with the word “leadership” in the title. I wanted recent books, and access to full text, and I did a title keyword search to insure relevancy, since I wasn’t interested in items found by Google Books with the word “leadership” mentioned once on page 153. I repeated the identical search in the Peninsula College Library catalog.

A Peninsula College Library Catalog search retrieved more titles than a Google Books "full view only" search: 22 times more! For students in the PC Library all books are "full view." Some are e-books immediately available online (those reported below in the searches), and additional print sources require a few minutes walk to the stacks.

I then tried other topics using the same search parameters. PC Library contained more "full view" e-books than Google Books (full view only) on many of the topics searched.

Searches in both sources used identical parameters: title keyword search for books in English published between 2000 and 2008. Here is my search history:

LEADERSHIP
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 179 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 8 full-view titles

Hmmm… Google Books "full view only" did not do well, when compared to Peninsula College Library Catalog, to get immediate access to full text.

Maybe that was a fluke. Let’s try another search for the word “globalization” in the title.

GLOBALIZATION
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 130 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 5 full-view titles

Maybe they were both flukes. Let’s try another…

PHILOSOPHY
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 220 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 3 full-view titles

Ouch!

Let's try a couple more...

COMPUTER
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 152 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 4 full-view titles

PSYCHOANALYSIS
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 22 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 0 full-view titles

Not only does our small Peninsula College Library frequently have more titles to offer students than Google Books, the quality of our copyrighted offerings are likely superior, coming from academic publisher content, content which Google Books cannot provide in full text due to copyright restrictions.

Topics like leadership, philosophy, psychoanalysis, computers, and globalization are not esoteric, yet Google Book Search delivers from zero to five percent of the number of titles available in the Peninsula College Library Catalog. I would say that is an accurate reflection of the real world, since Google has digitized less than 10% of the 86 million unique titles in WorldCat, titles that are available in libraries. Anyone limiting themselves to Google Book Search will miss more than 90% of the literature in existence.

Additionally, if a student does a default Google Books search (this frequently happens), instead of an advanced search with limiters, he or she would have to wade through the no-preview titles (no full-text), the “limited preview” titles (peek-a-boo full-text), the books published before 1920 and public domain books (not copyrighted), and the books in languages other than English, to find recent full-text titles in English (if Google Books has any).

Peninsula College Library does deliver the full-text. And, for the 30,000 e-books in our collection, students in the library don’t even have to go to the stacks... and even more full-text is available in print monographs after a short walk to the stacks.

Now, if a student wanted to find books to request on interlibrary loan, then a default Google Books search might be useful (although I would go with WorldCat, which has records for millions more documents: books, articles, theses, etc., and more search options, than Google Books).

For our students I think the Peninsula College Library is their best bet to retrieve full text, and WorldCat is best to identify titles for interlibrary loan that Google Books does not have.

Peninsula College Library is small but mighty… you might say it is a Google Books slayer.