Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2005 Issue
All Books and All Knowledge: Coming Soon to <i>Your</i> Computer
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This concept is not exactly new. In fact, it looks remarkably like Amazon's "Search Inside the Book." Amazon offers this word search, displaying the page on which the term appears plus two pages forward and two pages back, on its site and through its A9 search engine. They were first, but as Microsoft has proven, being first doesn't always matter.
To see the earliest stages of what Google is doing, go to their website at www.google.com. Type in a subject of interest preceded by "books about" (without the quotation marks). At the top of the page, you will get up to three results from more recent (copyrighted) books. For example, I typed in "books about gerrit smith" and received three matches for books which mentioned this obscure abolitionist who knew Frederick Douglass and John Brown. When you click these links, it takes you directly to the page on which Smith's name appears, and lets you see the two preceding and succeeding pages. Since these are copyrighted works, that's all you get to see, not the whole text.
While the addition of full texts to its searchable database has gathered the most attention, there is another book-related project going on at Google. They have been adding OCLC listings to the material they search as well. OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) is a cooperative database of card catalogue listings from thousands of libraries. It's a way to find out in which libraries a book you seek is located.
This is also a work in progress, but some books are now showing up. However, finding these listings points to a weakness in the process. Google searches frequently return thousands if not millions of matches. Unless a match shows up in the first ten or twenty, it is unlikely to be seen. OCLC matches don't seem to show up very high. With a few exceptions, I found I had to search especially for them. OCLC matches show up with the URL (web address) www.worldcatlibraries.com, so if you type this in, along with the book or author, you have a better chance of finding the listing. To see an example of what you can find, go to Google and search the following: "innocents abroad worldcatlibraries" (without the quotation marks). This will provide a link to their site, and if you click it, it will take you to a form where you can enter your zip code to find the nearest library with a copy of Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad." In my case, it located three libraries, and told me how far away they are (3, 5, and 30 miles).
