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Google Books

DiRT (Digital Research Tools) has a new home! Please visit Bamboo DiRT to explore this excellent collection of research tools.

 

Web site: http://books.google.com/

Date of first review/ name of reviewer: 6/09/08 [Eric Frierson]

Additional reviewer(s):

Produced by:  Google

Cost: Free to search for books; some titles may not be viewable due to copyright restrictions

Description: Google Books searches through millions of full text of books, journals, and other printed materials digitized through the Google Book Search Library Project and the Google Book Search Partner Program.

License: Some results are available as full text PDF documents; other results may only allow viewing of some pages or snippets; still others will allow no viewing of the books.

Maturity: Constantly updated with new books.  Project began in late 2004 with 5 libraries

 

Features:

  • Search through the contents of books and journals
  • Download full-text PDF documents for items that are out of copyright
  • Locate your search results in a library or at a bookstore
  • Advance search features allow searching by language, title, subject, and other fields
  • Links to reviews and related resources for each result
  • "My Library" feature allows the creation of publicly viewable lists of books with links to their results pages

 

Advantages:

  • Never before have the contents of books been fully searchable - discover passages in books that have sat hidden in the stacks for years!
  • Google's search algorithm gets applied to books, making searching easy and effective
  • "Find in a Library" and "Buy this Book" features facilitate the collecting process, making it easy for searchers to get their hands on a copy
  • Even when full-text PDFs are not available, many titles will provide limited preview or snippet view, which allow searchers to identify pages of books and journals on which their search terms appear with the "Search within this book" feature
  • Easy-to-navigate interface (Cover View is particularly beautiful)

 

Disadvantages:

  • Advanced searching capabilities are not terrible sophisticated (but should suit the needs of most searchers)
  • Many results offer no preview and no way of identifying page numbers or passages that are relavant to the search terms
  • Multiple editions of books sometimes fill the results list with duplications
  • "My Library" feature does not allow the creation of subcollections; all items in your collection appear in one long list
  • Importing and Exporting from "My Library" to bibliographic management software (like EndNote or RefWorks) is not supported

 

Tips:

  • Use the "Find in a Library" link to access the Worldcat.org record for the book - the Worldcat.org record will let you export to bibliographic management software with ease, create lists of books (rather than the one long list allowed through "My Library" though Google Books"), and locate titles in nearby libraries.
  • Google Books works with other tools in the DiRT wiki, including Zotero and LibX.  See the pages for these tools to learn more.

 

Tutorials:

Because Google Books is under constant revision, some of the tutorials linked here may have out-of-date screen shots.  Your best bet for up-to-date help with Google Books is Google's own Google Book Search Help Page.

 

 

More information:

 

 

 

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