Letter from the Editor
Features:
Google Book Search Settlement
Google Book Search comes to mobile
New content on Google
Best of the Inside Google Book Search Blog - the last 6 months:
"But where to start?"
"Book search everywhere with new partnerships and tools"
"A first for France: the city of Lyon and Google partner up to digitize books"
Product Announcements:
Knol
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Letter from the Editor:
After a 9-month hiatus, the Google Librarian Newsletter has returned!
A lot’s happened since
our last newsletter went out. In our "Features" section, we have
several updates on Google Book Search, including the recent settlement
of the lawsuit brought on by the AAP and the Author's Guild as well as
the launch of Google Book Search on mobile phones. We also wanted to
tell you about the addition of several new types of content on Google
properties - from magazines and news archives to millions of historic
images from the Time/Life collection.
In our next section, we wanted to share some interesting posts from the Inside Google Book Search blog. Check out the "Best of the Blog" to see some of the highlights over the past 6 months, including our new iGoogle gadget with personalized Book recommendations, a new tool that enables you to embed books and results from Google Book Search on your website, and a new partnership with the municipal library of Lyon in France.
Lastly, the "Products Announcements" section contains an article on Knol, a new collaborative editing product that we recently launched.
As always, feel free to drop us a line if you have comments, questions or feedback to share.
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Features:
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Increasing access to books: the Google Book Search settlement agreement
by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director for Google Book Search
If you were at ALA Midwinter this year, you may have attended the panel where Paul Courant, Karen Coyle, and I discussed the settlement agreement that Google announced with a broad class of authors and publishers this past fall. The agreement, which settles two lawsuits brought against the Google Books Library Project, proposes to dramatically increase access to millions of books in the U.S., while at the same time expanding the opportunities for authors and publishers to earn money from their works. The agreement also provides a wealth of new opportunities for libraries, academics, and researchers, a few of which we'd like to share with you:
This
agreement would not have been possible without the work of librarians
who have preserved and maintained books for years, and Google Book Search's library partners,
who worked with Google to make so many of them discoverable online. To
learn more about what they have to say about the agreement, check out
our thoughts and opinions page.
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1.5 million books in your pocket
by Frances Haugen, Book Search Mobile Team
One
of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to
play Pacman while stuck in line at the post office. Sometimes though,
we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.
What if you could also access literature's greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain's hilarious travelogue, Roughing It?
On February 5th we announced the launch of a mobile version of Google
Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in
the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while
buying your postage.
While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these
new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try
it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or
Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.
There's an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so
many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll
notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing
physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from
a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's small screen.
Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from
the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any
other web page. Yet the extraction of text from page images is a
difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books' pages, fancy
fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the
extracted text. Yet despite the technical challenges, we'll continue to
make enhancements to our technologies. With this launch, we believe
that we've taken an important step toward more universal access to
books.
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New content on Google Search
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful. In the past few months, we announced
the launch of several initiatives that expand the scope of our efforts
on digitizing and bringing more types of content online.
Magazines on Google Book Search
In December we announced an initiative to help bring more magazine
archives and
current magazines online on Google Book Search, partnering with
publishers to digitize millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony. You
can search for magazines through Google Book Search. For queries with
relevant results, you'll find magazine articles alongside book results.
When you click on a magazine result, you can read articles in full
color and
in their original context, just as you would in the printed magazine.
Read the full announcement here.
Newspaper Archives
In September, we announced new partnerships with newspaper publishers to
digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let's say you want to
learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for "Americans
walk on moon" on Google News Archive Search, and you'll be able to find
and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Not
only
will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able
to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs,
headlines, articles, advertisements and all. Read the full announcement here.
Time/Life Images on Google Image Search
In November we launched a never-before-seen collection of images from
the LIFE photo archive. From the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination to the Mansell Collection
from London, this collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s. Read the full announcement here.
Ocean and Roman History come to Google Earth
On
February 2nd Google Earth became much more complete with the addition
of a detailed map of the ocean floors, so you can actually drop below
the
surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D. While
you're there you can explore thousands of data points including videos
and images of ocean life, details on the best surf spots, logs of real
ocean expeditions, and much more. Read the full announcement here.
In November, the Google Earth team introduced the ability to go back in time and explore Rome
as it existed in 320 AD -- in 3D! Through the Ancient Rome 3D
layer in Google Earth, you can explore over 6,700 3D buildings and 250 placemarks
from this
fascinating period of history. So go ahead, fly down to the Roman Forum
and experience what it may have felt like to stand on the Rostra of
Augusta and make a political speech. Read the full announcement here.
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Best of the Inside Google Book Search Blog - the last 6 months:
"But Where to Start?"
In October, Product Manager Frances Haugen introduced a new iGoogle
gadget which allows you to manage your Google Book Search Library and
receive customized recommendations based on the books you save. Read the full post.
"Book Search Everywhere with New Partnerships and Tools"
In September, Product Manager Alex Diaz introduced a set of free tools
that allow libraries, retailers, publishers, and anyone with a web site
to embed books from the Google Book Search index. We are also providing
new ways for these sites to display full-text search results from Book
Search, and even integrate with social features such as ratings,
reviews, and readers' book collections. By providing tools that help
sites connect readers with books in new and interesting ways, we hope
publishers and authors will find even wider audiences for their works. Read the full post.
"The Most Important Single Work in Science"
In February, guest writer Michael Williams of the Oxford University
Library wrote a post commemorating the 200th anniversary of Charles
Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his
seminal work On the Origin of Species.
Working with the Oxford Library, we digitized one of the very few
first-edition copies of the book that are still well-preserved. Read the full post.
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Product Announcements:
Knol:Revealing the crowd behind the wisdom
by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager
Some of the clearest memories I have of elementary
school are my research reports. Our teacher would take us to the
library and introduce us to the card catalog, and for the next few
weeks we would spend time in the library researching and learning about
a new topic. It was all pretty empowering for an elementary student,
and I loved it. As I got older, the card catalog was quickly replaced
by the internet, and with it came the constant refrain, "make sure to
always check your sources ..." Information became easier to find, yet
oddly, sometimes harder to trust. Books had authors and publishers, and
even if they were sometimes biased, you at least knew where they came
from. The internet, on the other hand, didn't always have authors, and
you could never be sure who or what was behind some of what you read.
At Google, we launched Knol to make the source of online information more clear. Knol is a collaborative web publishing tool. Much like a wiki, Knol makes it easy for anyone to write or contribute to an article about a subject they know well. More importantly, however, each Knol also clearly identifies its authors and contributors so that readers can easily tell where the information is coming from. In other words, Knol lets you check your sources online.
With over 100,000 knols published in the five months since the product launched, Knol is quickly becoming a valuable research tool. From Osteoporosis to Backpacking, you can find many topics on Knol, with more being added every day. You can even write one yourself. Just pick a topic you know well and start writing. So next time you're helping a student with a research project, tell them about Knol, and remind them to check their sources.
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