Access Services Faculty & Researcher Work
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item An Assessment of Google Books’ Metadata(Taylor and Francis, 2012-02-28) James, Ryan; Weiss, AndrewThis article reports on a study of error rates found in the metadata records of texts scanned by the Google Books digitization project. A review of the author, title, publisher, and publication year metadata elements for 400 randomly selected Google Books records was undertaken. The results show 36% of sampled books in the digitization project contained metadata errors. This error rate is higher than one would expect to find in a typical library online catalog.Item An Assessment of the Legibility of Google Books(2010-04-29T11:47:23Z) James, RyanGoogle books has been criticized for faulty metadata, problems with search functionality, copyright infringement, and legibility of scanned texts. This paper explores only the legibility of texts scanned by Google Books. A review of 2500 pages from 50 randomly selected books was undertaken. The results show less than 1% of pages had errors that affected their legibility. This paper concludes that while Google Books is not perfect, the majority of texts sampled were legible.