From Salon.com
By Laura Miller
Depending on who you ask, Google Books -- the pioneering tech company's ambitious plan to "digitally scan every book in the world" and make them searchable over the Web and in libraries -- is either a marvelous, utopian scheme or an unprecedented copyright power-grab. The people who can claim to fully understand the Google Books Search Settlement -- the resolution of a class-action suit filed against the company by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers -- may be as few as those who comprehend the theory of special relativity.
But everyone seems to agree that Google Book Search represents a revolutionary boon to scholars, especially people embarked on specialized research but without ready access to a university library. But is it? As UC-Berkeley [School of Information] professor Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education last year (expanded from a post on the blog Language Log), a research library is only as useful as the tools required to extract its riches. And there are some serious problems with the bibliographic information attached to many of the digital texts in Google Books.
Nunberg, a linguist interested in how word usage changes over time, noticed "endemic" errors in Google Books, especially when it comes to publication dates. A search for books published before 1950 and containing the word "Internet" turned up the unlikely bounty of 527 results. Woody Allen is mentioned in 325 books ostensibly published before he was born....
I've already written about inadequate metadata -- specifically how it can curtail readers' choices. So I gave Nunberg a call to find out how flawed metadata affects historians and other scholars....