Librarians, Jelly Beans, and Google Book Search. (cover story)

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Author: Dillard, David1 jwne@temple.edu

UNTIL relatively recently, researchers needed to memorize or tediously record the key resources and places within sources that held valuable information vital to their work. Reference librarians made mental notes or kept card files of vital resources on a wide range of topics and of key sources for specialized information. Finding which works had been published with content on a topic was a slow and unsure process with duplication of effort as the work of others in the same topic area was often undiscoverable.

The last third of the 20th century witnessed machine indexing of content on computer networks that reached a steadily growing audience. Then came the full-text searchable and readable text from computerized databases of newspaper, magazine, and journal publications. We were increasingly able to find specific specialized content buried within articles that were previously untrackable. However, the internal content of books continued to be uncharted territory until the advent of full-text searching of books in Amazon and Google databases. That's only been realized in the last couple of years. These tools promise to be joined by Yahoo! and Microsoft ventures in this area, and I suspect that other projects and resources will follow over time.

I have long felt that it was only a matter of time before a large collection of books would become an aggregated text searchable database, enabling us to find topical content in the far corners of one or more monographs. In 1999, David Dorman ("The E-Rook: Pipe Dream or Potential Disaster?" American Libraries, February 1999, v. 30, no. g, p. 36) quoted me as saying, "The electronic book has many values … but without the ability to aggregate the contents of e-books in the same way that we now aggregate the contents of periodical databases, one will not be able to find specialized information, such as Ronald Reagan's relationship to jelly beans, without great difficulty. To be able in minutes to locate very specific information in one or more books would be a giant reap forward in information retrieval."

Search capability for even minor content within books has indeed become the case with the advent of Google Book Search.

I post a substantial number of bibliographies on specialized topics to the Net-Gold [http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/net-gold] and other discussion groups on the Internet. Increasingly I cite books with content that has been discovered on these topics with specific relevant pages cited because of searches of the Google Books project indicating that this content is within these books. The Ronald Reagan relationship to the jelly bean is trackable today in books with the use of Google Books, rather than being the search pipe dream that it was in 1999.

Here are a few examples of books with coverage of this vital issue of jelly bean consumption and love by President Reagan from a search of Google Book Search.

Presidential Anecdotes Paul Boller
Oxford University Press US Apr 1, 1996

Page 360
Page 361
Page 437

Reagan Ronald Reagan Simon and Schuster
Sep 23, 2003

Page 88
Page 665
Page 666

The Cookie Never Crumbles Wally Amos,
Eden-Lee Murray St. Martin's Press Oct 1, 2002

Page 122

The White House in Miniature Gail Buckland
W. W. Norton & Company Oct 1, 1094

Page 125

Don't Know Much About the Presidents
Kenneth C, Davis HarperCollins Jan 1, 2004

Page 58

First Father, First Daughter Maureen Reagan
Little, Brown and Company Sep 1, 2001

Page 316

There are 90 pages in books found by this Google Book search of the phrase jelly beans and the name Reagan.

Full-text databases of a huge collection of be ok content will revolutionize research, since very minor and picky topics will now be supported. Content on the most obscure subjects wig be found buried in books now that search tools such as Google Books can locate these text segments. Although Google Book Search lacks the complex searching capabilities of search tools like those of Dialog, DataStar, Ovid, FirstSearch, and other similar databanks, the demand for books will inevitably, in my view, grow as a result of scholars, searchers, and researchers learning of narrow specialized content being covered in nooks and crannies of books they would never have suspected of dealing with these topics. Librarians should celebrate this enhanced access. The indexing tools covering books prior to the advent of full-text book searching did little to reveal the true content within a book's covers.

Hence, those needing to learn about specific matters will use tools like Google Book Search. This will lead them to want to purchase the books or hook parts they uncover that meet their information needs. They will obtain part or all of that book to have personal access to this content found through searching full-text book databases. Revenue brought in by books should invariably increase as more people learn of books containing answers to their information needs and as books increasingly become part of the resources fitting the information needs of researchers and library customers who find out about buried book content.

Comments? E-mail letters to the editor to marydee@xmission.com.

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By David Dillard

David Dillard [jwne@temple.edu] is a reference librarian at Temple University.