Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Google has launched a new feature that will enable "users [to] see book excerpts alongside ordinary Google Web page search results. The book excerpts will carry a link to buy the book from a choice of online book retailers." (Reuters).

Fairly similar to Amazon's 'Look inside the book' search feature, as far as I can tell.

I'm not totally convinced by this, at least as it stands, for the fairly obvious reason that it relies on free-text searching, as far as I can see. Free-text searching is problematic enough when applied to the internet - imagine the problems we'll have when we try free-text searching of our libraries.

Meanwhile, Brewster Kahle is promising universal access to all human knowledge (Boing Boing) at the Web 2.0 Conference. Something along the lines of digitising the entire Library of Congress (it'd fit on a bookshelf, take up 26TB and cost US$60, 000 for the disk space). No mention of indexing or subject access. Which initially made me think it was a non-starter. Except....duh! It's LoC. Subject access (LCSH) and metadata already exists. Oh, that, and the fact that Kahle is the guy who founded the Internet Archive.

Thanks to Bridget for the link to the first story

| posted by Simon at 5:03 pm