why you can’t google a library book
The January 22 Guardian has an interesting article called “Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine: Finding a book at your local library should just involve a simple web search. But thanks to a US cataloguing site, that is far from the case”:
Despite the internet’s origins as an academic network, when it comes to finding a book, e-commerce rules. Put any book title into your favourite search engine, and the hits will be dominated by commercial sites run by retailers, publishers, even authors. But even with your postcode, you won’t find the nearest library where you can borrow that book. (The exception is Google Books, and even that is limited.)
That’s strange, because almost every library has an electronic database of its books – searchable either at the library’s own website or via its local council. The wrinkle is that at the book level, those databases aren’t accessible to the search engines; and you may not be able to search all the libraries in your area at once.
Bibliographic data
Yet there is an alternative that few people seem aware of: Worldcat worldcat.org), which offers web access to the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world – from the 40-year-old Ohio-based non-profit Online Computer Library Center oclc.org). But Worldcat suffers from the same problem on a larger scale. OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search.
You might expect forward-thinking libraries to put their databases online, to encourage people through their doors. But they can’t. Even though they created the data, pay to have records added to the database and pay to download them, they can’t.
In November, OCLC announced new rules covering the use of Worldcat data due to go live on 19 February. Among other things, the new policy prohibits any use – transfer, sharing – that “substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat”. In other words, no publicly searchable databases.
“It’s safe to say that the policy change is a direct response to Open Library,” says Aaron Swartz, the founder of Open Library openlibrary.org), a project to give every published book its own Wikipedia-style page. “Since the beginning of Open Library, OCLC has been threatening funders, pressuring libraries not to work with us, and using tricks to try to shut us down. It didn’t work – and so now this.”
For the whole article:
h/t to Librarian.net:
Posted by Rich
