Mar

22

Google Books in Academic Research

March 22, 2007 |

There is a good discussion about the use of Google Books in academia going on in the blogosphere today.

Tim O’Reilly is referencing a Berkeley grad student who is doing researching on what I assume to be the cultural history of roads. While he has to fight his quaint little specialized library and the librarian to find a book he needs, it turns out to be available for an easy download online. His conclusion:

What this signals, by the way, is the opportunity for a new age of scholarship. Cultural and image analysis used to be painfully time-consuming, heavy lifting, involving rare kinds of access, full fellowships, immense travel, and long waits for delicate books. Comparison between different cultural sources was even harder, placing absurd demands on the cultural historian’s personal memory and note-taking skills. […] Now all that is changing. Comparing a hundred images is no longer a problem for a year’s labor in an out-of-the-way museum reading room. Comparing a hundred personal accounts from working men is no longer a task to eat up a social historian’s entire year

My own experience is very similar. I wasted hours and hours trying to Interlibrary Loan to get me very rare editions of medieval cartularies (basically, collections of documents produced by a medieval institution such as a monastery). Often, I couldn’t get them.

Now a quick search on Google Books gets me a lot of what I need within a minute. It is almost too easy.

But the real advantage is not only in easily getting a book. It is in being able to do a full-text search in what is essentially a complete library. I have found numerous connections I would have never even thought about in just doing a keyword search in Google Books. Normal references in a database are at best incomplete and at worst plain wrong. In doing research in academia, it might often not even be the text that gets one to find interesting stuff, it might just be a footnote - something that would have been impossible to find just a year ago.

Thanks to this, we can now expand our horizon, while our predecessors spend their time idly and impatiently waiting for some crucial text to arrive by interlibrary loan.

One questions:

  • What does that mean for the future of libraries? I know for the undergraduate students in my school, the library is a place to go and study - the books are mere decoration to them.

tags: , , , , , , ,


Share This

Related Posts

Comments