cummings libr 202 term paper

Running header: CUMMINGS GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH

Google Book Search

Darcy Cummings

LIBR 202-313

December 9, 2013

San Jose State University

CUMMINGS GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Google Book Search. This paper draws on the history of

the project including the Google Book and Google Library Projects and the response from the

academic community in terms of critique and praise. This paper also explores the search

functionality of Google Book Search both its shortcomings and its strengths. Although it is

impossible to discuss any of these projects without referring to the copyright lawsuits against

Google, this paper will only give a brief overview of the court cases and instead focus on how

copyright affects the search capabilities of Google Book Search.

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Introduction

There are major efforts underway globally to digitize the print materials of the world. All

of these endeavors have caught the attention of academics, scholars, librarians and the general

public, but none more so than Google’s initiative— the Google Book Project and the Google

Library Project. Possibly because of the high-profile and lengthy court battle over copyright

infringement, or possibly just due to the high-profile of Google as a company, the world has been

following the Google Book Project since its inception in 2004. There is a lot of excitement

surrounding the possibilities of the Google Book Project, but there is also a lot of skepticism. On

the one hand, Google is financing the entire enterprise, has the resources to complete the task and

has proven its efficiency as a search engine. On the other hand, Google is a private, for-profit

company deriving its capital from advertisers; there are many questions surrounding the secrecy

of the project, from the contracts (not all of which are public) with the partnering libraries to

number of books scanned; the quality of material scanned has come under scrutiny; and the end

use of and access to the material scanned for the project has been questioned.

Until November 14, 2013, there was also the major issue of copyright: authors and

publishers argued that the scanning and indexing of in-copyright works without their permission

constituted copyright infringement, and Google argued that because they were not selling or

making available to view the full text of any works that were in copyright without author or

publisher permission, the project constituted “fair use” under copyright law. Google also argued

that because it provided links to either purchase a book or find a book in a library, that it was

promoting works and increasing revenue for authors and publishers. Lackie (2008) stated:

“Google has the resources to preserve texts digitally while a smaller library may not…. Google

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states—and many agree—that libraries, publishers, authors, and booksellers gain increased

visibility for their texts with this free search feature of Google” (p. 38).

The creation of digital libraries ultimately benefits society as a whole. It preserves and

makes available for use material that would otherwise be lost or inaccessible to the majority of

people. There is, obviously, no possible way to know what Google’s intentions or reasons for

their digitization project are, but the result of these projects will clearly alter the way information

is searched for and retrieved as well as the amount of information available to be used. It also

presents people without access to an academic library or other scholarly database a viable option

for finding necessary information. Issues with metadata and poor scan quality can be resolved,

maybe not by Google, but certainly efforts to create a solid, quality, reliable digital academic

library will begin or continue with vigor.

Discussion

Background

In 2002 Google began, privately, to research the possibilities of scanning the entirety of

the world’s books (Google, n.d.). As part of that research Larry Page, co-founder of Google,

Inc., visited the University of Michigan and estimated that Google could scan the University’s

seven million books in just six years, rather than the University’s estimate of one thousand years

(Google, n.d.). In 2004 Google announced to the public that it would be launching the Google

Books Project (then called Google Print) and the Google Books Library Project with the

ambition “to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all

languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers” (Google,

n.d.). The combined efforts of these two projects provided the database material for Google

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Book Search (GBS), which is the prime focus of this paper. Like Google’s news, video or maps

search, GBS limits the returns of a user’s query to books.

The Google Library Project partnered with libraries to scan and digitize the participating

libraries’ books. The original five library partners were the University of Michigan, Harvard

University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and the Bodleian Library at

Oxford University (Eichenlaub, 2013, p. 4). In short, the partner libraries were some of the most

reputable libraries in the world. Lackie (2008) elaborated that “Google’s original mission for the

project was to digitize every book ever published, index them, and make them fully searchable

online for free” (p.37). Each library partner had their own contract with Google: some libraries

chose to only provide limited amounts of their collections, others chose to provide their entire

collections; most libraries only provided out of copyright works, but some provided works that

were still in copyright (Baksik, 2011, p. 1984).

In 2005 Google hit its first major snag when the U.S. Authors Guild and the Association

of American Publishers filed a lawsuit against Google citing major copyright infringement

(Lesk, 2006, p. 80). Google’s response was that the project fell under the copyright clause of

“fair use” and was, therefore, not in violation of copyright (Baksik, 2011, p. 1987; Lesk, 2006, p.

80). In 2008 a settlement was agreed upon, but in 2011 the settlement was rejected by the court

citing multiple objections (Eichenlaub, 2013, p. 6). On November 14, 2013 Judge Denny Chin

declared that the Google Book Project did, indeed, fall under the “fair use” principle of copyright

law (The Authors Guild, Inc. vs. Google, Inc., 2013). Although it’s impossible to discuss GBS

without mentioning the copyright lawsuits, for the purposes of this paper it will only hereafter be

discussed when it has bearing on the search functions of GBS.

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Lackie (2008) stated: “whatever some may think of this Google initiative… this book

digitization project have [sic] obviously been seen as a serious wake-up call to libraries and

information services, in general, around the world—the time to digitize book collections is here”

(p. 47). Google is not the first, nor the last, to undertake such a project. As Dougherty (2010)

stated:

To be clear, what Google has begun is not really anything new, either from a

technological perspective or as a joint effort with higher-education institutions and

publishers. Other projects with similar aims, such as JSTOR, Project Muse, and the

Internet Archive have been around longer than Google existed as a company. (p. 86)

Additionally, there is the online library catalog. Chen (2011) posed the research

question: “can or will Google Books become more useful than or replace local library

catalogues” (p. 509)? There are a few obvious reasons that Google would be preferred to an

online library catalog: Google is already the preferred search engine for many people, Google’s

interface design is simple and straightforward, Google automatically constructs a query in to a

Boolean phrase for the user and Google allows for easy search restrictions (Hill, 2009).

However, there are concerns over the quality and reliability of the GBS images and metadata.

The Partner Libraries

As of December 2013, Google (n.d.) lists twenty-one library partners on its website. The

domestic library partners include: University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin- Madison,

University of Virginia, University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, Princeton University,

the New York Public Library, University of California, Cornell University, Harvard University,

Columbia University and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation which is comprised of

fifteen universities. International partners include: the University Library of Lausanne,

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University Computense of Madrid, Oxford University, The National Library of Catalonia, Lyon

Municipal Library, Ghent University Library, the Austrian National Library and the Bavarian

State Library. Some of these partners have limited the material GBS can use for its Library

Project, while others, like the University of Michigan have allowed Google full access to its

library materials. The immensity of material these libraries can provide is almost overwhelming.

Search Functionality of GBS

The details of Google’s search algorithms and search technology are proprietary and

therefore not available to the public. Much of what is known about Google’s search functions

has been inferred through scholarly research and study. However, some basic functioning of

Google’s indexing and search functions was disclosed during the lengthy copyright infringement

lawsuits. Following is Google’s explanation:

Google analyzes each scan and creates an overall index of all scanned books. The index

links each word or phrase appearing in each book with all of the locations in all of the

books in which that word or phrase is found. The index allows a search for a particular

word or phrase to return a result that includes the most relevant books in which the word

or phrase is found…. Because the full texts of books are digitized, a user can search the

full text of all the books in the Google Books corpus. (The Authors Guild, Inc. vs.

Google, Inc., 2013, p. 7)

The advanced search of GBS presents many different ways to broaden or narrow a search

as well as multiple means to find a document based on ISBN, publisher, author, title, etc.

Several issues have been found with search results: Chen (2011) found that “a title search for

Narthang Tanjur on Google Books advanced search yielded three hits, while a keyword search

returned nothing…. A keyword search normally yields more hits than a title search” (p. 513);

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and Hill (2009) found that: “one of the major difficulties in examining Google search results is

Google’s use of the ‘and’ and then ‘or’ in its search results, bringing up countless numbers of

hits with decreasing precision, thus overinflating the result counts” (p. 306). Hill’s example is

one where Google’s automation of Boolean search words is less useful, rather than more. Even

to the inexperienced, general search user, a search returning too many irrelevant results is

frustrating. There are certainly benefits to GBS, though, as Jones (2009) illustrated:

Google Books provides full-text indexing, something of incalculable value that would

have been inconceivable had these volumes not been scanned. This indexing allows one

to search both within individual volumes and across the entire collection, facilitating text-

based research in general, but especially historical research and comparison of variant

texts. (p. 86)

GBS has four categories of view that range from basic bibliographic information to the

full text of a document that can be downloaded, saved and printed. Works that are still in

copyright or that GBS does not have permission from the author or publisher to show fall under

the “no preview available” (Google, n.d.) category. One issue found with this occurs with

government documents published after 1923. Townsend (2007) observed that: “according to the

U.S. Copyright Office, ‘works by the U.S. government are not eligible for U.S. copyright

protection.’ But Google locks all government documents published after 1922 behind the same

wall as any other copyrighted work” (Truncated Public Domain section, para. 1). Although these

documents are in the public domain because they are government documents, Google does not

allow full text search because it catalogued them as in copyright due to their date (Sare, 2012, p.

5-6). Sare (2012) conducted an experiment comparing GBS to HathiTrust, another digital

library, in terms of government documents. She found that “only fourteen government

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publications were available in full-text online due to Google Books’ policy of including federal

publications with books in copyright that were published between 1923 and 1963 as they were

scanning them” (p. 6).

The next level of viewing capability is a “snippet” (Google, n.d.) view, which allows

users to see basic information about the book and a few key sentences. These books are in

copyright. Google (n.d.) described in this way: “the Snippet View, like a card catalog, shows

information about the book plus a few snippets—a few sentences to display your search term in

context.” Sare (2012) commented that:

the Google Books records are more helpful than HathiTrust’s ‘Limited’ view, since the

‘Limited’ view only shows the user the number of times the search term appeared on

certain pages, whereas the Google Books shows where within the document the search

term is located. (p. 8)

Concern was voiced over users being able to view the entirety of a work by performing multiple

searches and retrieving multiple snippet views. However, Google refuted these fears due to the

fact that:

A user cannot cause the system to return different sets of snippets for the same search

query… only the first responsive snippet available on any given page will be returned in

response to a query; one of the snippets on each page is ‘black-listed’… and at least one

out of ten entire pages in each book is black-listed.” (The Authors Guild, Inc. vs. Google,

Inc., 2013)

Beyond the snippet view is the “limited preview” (Google, n.d.). These are works where the

author or publisher has granted Google permission to show a limited percentage of the work.

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Finally, GBS offers full view of books “out of copyright or if the publisher or author has

asked for it to be full view” (Google, n.d.). If the book is in the public domain, users can

download the full text, print or save it. There is also an ebook feature where the user can

download a digital copy if it is available. Leonardo (2012) stated that: “the availability of full

text printed primary sources in the public domain via Google Books provides unprecedented

access to content which would otherwise not be readily available in the United States to a myriad

of users” (p. 106). The possibilities of being able to search full text databases of books,

especially on the scale that GBS is promising, are immense and would certainly benefit the

research community in general.

Criticism of Google Book Search

Copyright infringement has not been the only complaint against the GBS project. Many

people had hoped that with Google’s technically savvy, proven high-performance search

algorithms and financial backing, all combined with the aid of some of the most prestigious

academic and public libraries in the nation, GBS would be a quality, cumulative electronic

oeuvre of the world’s books. As Duguid (2007) stated: “libraries would provide collections

assembled with well-honed skills of selection and preservation, while Google would add its

remarkable technological expertise to prise the covers from the text” (p. 2).

According to Baksik (2011), “many librarians have expressed excitement and praise, but

the project has also raised suspicions and provoked criticism” (p. 1985). Some of the criticisms

Baksik highlighted were the privacy of users, the agreements made with most partnering libraries

not being made public, a fear that the digital copies would replace the physical copies in

libraries, a commercial company controlling access to the digital books and the fact that Google

is a commercial company that earns its revenue from advertisers who might influence ranking

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and access (p. 1986). Dougherty (2010) added, “if such a system were to become depended

upon, it must be reliable” (p. 87). The question then is whether GBS provides accurate and

reliable information to users of all kinds.

Duguid (2007) said: “to grasp the value of Google’s endeavor, we need among other

things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging”

(p. 1). Duguid’s (2007) experiment used a single book to search for in an attempt to assess this

quality. He found several issues that could impede a user’s search. The first issue was poor

quality scanning. He noted that certain pages were missing partial text due to the fold in the

book at the binding, some whole pages were completely missing and there were serious issues

with volume numbers as well as multiple volumes being ignored completely or misrepresented

numerically (p. 3-10).

A study by James (2010) that analyzed the legibility of GBS samples, found a combined

major and minor error rate of 0.96% (p. 226). James (2010) defined major errors as ones that

caused the text to be completely illegible: “extremely blurred pages, missing pages, and scans of

fingers turning pages. The end result is that significant information was lost during the scanning

process” (p. 224). James (2010) defined minor errors as:

ones where the text is still decipherable, but the effort required on the part of the user

rises to such a level as to be an obstacle to legibility. Examples include missing letters

from a sizable number of words, blurred sections of pages, and contrast and resolution

problems. (p. 224-5)

James’ (2010) assessment of such an error rate was that it rendered GBS unacceptable to

scholars or anyone conducting a thorough investigation of a book (p. 227).

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A study of GBS’s metadata by Pope and Holley (2010) found serious flaws in GBS’s

metadata, specifically, inaccurate dates, errors of classification and titles and authors incorrectly

attributed. The examples of those found were:

[dates:] 1899 apparently saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain,

The Portable Dorothy Parker, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction

of Virginia Woolf, Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, and the Portuguese edition

of the book version of Yellow Submarine…. [classifications:] Jane Eyre is classified as

‘History,’ ‘Governesses in literature,’ Love Stories, ‘Architecture,’ and Antiques &

Collectibles, depending on the edition…. [inaccurate authors and titles:] Madame Bovary

by Henry James; The Mosaic Navigator: The essential guide to the Internet Interface by

Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. (p. 4)

These errors obviously create serious issues for retrieval when searching for an item: most users

would be unable to find their search criteria because it was inaccurately catalogued. As Pope

and Holley (2010) themselves stated: “while the project is making a valuable contribution by

providing online access to a vast amount of material, unless it draws certain lessons from library

science, this contribution will be diminished by uneven and inadequate metadata that limits

retrieval” (p. 11).

There are two underlying causes for most of GBS’s metadata errors: the use of optical

character recognition (OCR) and the non-standardization of the metadata itself. The Online

Dictionary for Library and Information Science (ODLIS) (2013) defined OCR as “a process by

which characters typed or printed on a page are electronically scanned, analyzed, and if found

recognizable on the basis of appearance, converted into a digital character code capable of being

processed by a computer.” OCR is much less time consuming than manual conversion, however,

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results can be flawed especially when dealing with a degraded original document, unusual fonts

or unknown characters (ODLIS, 2013). Martin (2008) confirmed, saying, “the accuracy of OCR

is not great. So it often transcribes words incorrectly, especially when there are odd fonts. . . .

OCR does not recognize the structure of the text. There is no differentiation for paragraphs,

typeface changes, italics, or the like” (p. 143).

Library metadata is subject to standardization. For example: subject headings in most

public and academic libraries adhere to either the Library of Congress Subject Headings or the

Dewey Decimal Classification systems, which use controlled vocabularies used for cataloguing.

The use of such standard classifications enables users to find materials that match specific

subject criteria. Sare (2012) noted that, “another frequently found metadata issue was Google

Books’ provision of pseudo subject headings” (p. 17). The classification errors mentioned above

in Pope & Holley’s study also provided substantial evidence that GBS is miscataloging metadata.

Beall (2010) elaborated: “computer programs generate Google’s metadata, but humans create

most metadata in library catalogs. Additionally, Google’s metadata is chiefly non-standard, but

library metadata strives to conform to international standards” (p. 52).

The non-standardization of GBS’s cataloguing presents a problem in terms of accuracy of

retrieval; lack of OCR quality represents a challenge for researchers looking for accuracy in

retrieved material. Dougherty (2010) agreed, saying, “in one example… Shakespeare’s Hamlet

is classified under ‘Antiques and Collectibles.’ While there may be some truth to this heading, a

scholar is not likely to use this as a search criterion” (p. 87). Martin (2008) concluded that:

“currently, Google does an admirable job of making content available to the general reader; it

does not presently serve all the needs of scholarly audiences” (p. 144). In order for GBS to

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achieve the status of a seriously regarded research tool for academics and scholars, these errors

must be fixed or at the very least improved upon.

Judge Chin’s Decision

The impact of Judge Chin’s decision to deem the Google Book and Library Projects as

“fair use” is unknown at the present time. However, it is a major milestone not only for GBS,

but for other digitization projects in the United States as well. The copyright infringement suit

against Google has been going on for almost ten years now. Baksik (2011) stated: “the

community has debated and the publishers have sued, and all the while Google has scanned” (p.

1991). The decision in The Authors Guild, Inc. vs. Google Inc. (2013) stated that Google had

“scanned more than twenty million books” (p. 1). Judge Chin’s decision is summarized in his

statement that:

In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress

of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of

authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of

copyright holders. It has become an invaluable research tool that permits students,

teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books. It has given

scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of

books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been

forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to

books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations. It generates new

audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all

society benefits. (The Authors Guild, Inc. vs. Google, Inc., 2013, p. 26)

Conclusion

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Despite the expansive criticism of and concern over GBS, its value in providing a

digitized and searchable index of the world’s print material is undeniable. There are certainly

serious issues regarding the quality of GBS’s metadata and scan quality, which will have to be

addressed by Google in order for GBS to reach its full potential for academics and scholars and,

hopefully, Google will rely on the proven expertise of library science professionals and

institutions to help with these issues. For the moment, there does not seem to be any turning

back from the incredible accomplishment GBS has made with its digitization project. In fact,

Google (n.d.) stated: “due to technical constraints with our system, we’re unable to modify or

overwrite scanned files.” Also, since 2006 Google’s list of partner libraries has only continued

to grow in spite of the legal battle.

It might be more beneficial to society if a non-commercial company controlled the

majority of digitized works rather than a company funded by advertisers. That being said, it is

unlikely that a non-profit organization would have the financial backing or general resources to

complete a project like GBS or to have been able to weather the drawn out legal battle that

finally approved that project. Many people would probably have been more comfortable had the

project to digitize the world’s books been spearheaded by a library funded organization, but there

is still time for that to happen. It will be important to remember, and to remind younger

generations, that just because you cannot find a book using GBS does not mean that it does not

exist.

Google has paved the way for many other library digitization projects; it’s difficult to tell

whether GBS will continue to be the largest holder of digital material or if other, non-

commercial organizations will surpass Google in the endeavor. One thing is sure, through one

channel or another, the world’s print material will be digitized because of the demand for it.

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Already other digitization efforts are underway: Europeana in Europe, HathiTrust in the United

States, the Digital Public Library of America, which is a new digital library inspired by Robert

Darnton of Harvard University, the OCLC’s WorldCat, which is an established resource for

finding scholarly works and many others on smaller scales. In addition to these efforts, all of the

contracts Google has with its library partners are non-exclusive so the libraries are open to

partner with any other organization for digitization projects.

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Works Referenced

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Baksik, C. (2011). Google book search library project. In Encyclopedia of Library and

Information Sciences (3rd ed.). Retrieved from

http://www.tandfonline.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/action/doSearch?

quickLinkJournal=&journalText=&quickLink=true&type=simple&filter=multiple&stem

ming=yes&searchText=google+book+search+library+project&publication=43931186&s

earchType=journals

Beall, J. (2010). How Google uses metadata to improve search results. The Serials Libarian, 59,

40-53. doi: 10.1080/03615260903524222

Chen, X. (2011). Google Books and WorldCat: a comparison of their content. Online

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Dougherty, W. (2010). The Google Books Project: will it make libraries obsolete? The Journal

of Academic Librarianship, 36(1), 86-89.

Duguid, P. (2007). Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books. First Monday, 12(8).

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Eichenlaub, N. (2013). Checking in with Google Books, HathiTrust and the DPLA. Computers

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