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The Google Books Metadata Debate

Now this is an interesting debate that will go on a while.
Here’s some links to get you started:
Google Books Metadata Includes Millions of Errors by Thomas Claburn
Google Books and Lousy Indexing (Steve Arnold and Beyond Search)
Google Books As “Train Wreck” For Scholars
Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Finding and Fixing Errors in Google’s Book Catalog
Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck
Google response (so far)
Google Books: The Metadata Mess
Google Book Settlement Conference
(29 page PDF)
UC Berkeley, August 28, 2009
Geoff Nunberg, School of Information
Now I thought that OCLC had a relationship with WorldCat and Google. I wonder why there are these metadata issues when there is a decent crowdsourced database like WorldCat available.
This reminds me of one of my favourite daily blogs:
Typo of the day for librarians
Nobody’s perfect.
Stephen

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Posted on: September 8, 2009, 9:04 am Category: Uncategorized

One Response

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  1. OCLC is the organization which developed and runs Worldcat.
    I am unaware of any official relationship between OCLC and Google. I don’t think that they are directly part of the Google Books project, certainly some of the libraries which are participating are also OCLC members.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Michael:
    Here’s the OCLC Google press release about the relationship:
    http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200811.htm
    SA