Google Books as a Supplement to Interlibrary Loan

This morning I woke up thinking about Google Books and wondering what I was going to write for my assignment.    Oddly enough I was also thinking about my time at SDSU as a graduate student in the history department.   Maybe all this is related because I was thinking of where to start my research, what sources to review, and the time crunch I placed on myself.  The list goes on and on. Then I thought: can Google books function as a supplement to the interlibrary loan (ILL) service offered by libraries?   The logical response is yes, Google Books can do that but what about the quality and relevancy of materials retrieved?

Google Books would’ve been great when I was trying to locate sources!  The ILL wait time would’ve been cut down and I would’ve known almost instantly if I should use my time on a specific resource.  I couldn’t tell you an exact percentage of how many ILL items I received that were duds but there were a lot.   I earned my MA in History in 2000 and while I did receive a few items quickly via scan and deliver (the librarian printed it out at that time), most of my sources came via snail mail which took awhile.

Google has scanned approximately 25 million books from major university libraries.   While this is far from all the books available on the face of the Earth, it’s a start despite reports that Google has slowed its progress and that there are problems with "cataloging" the scanned books.   Google’s book project has opened libraries to patrons across the world that would otherwise never have access including patrons with disabilities. The beauty of Google Books is that a patron types in a few words or phrases and a search engine provides an outcome.   It is then up to the patron to determine if the source is worthwhile.

As an experiment with Google Books, I took a two part approach to see if the service could be used as a supplement to ILL.  First, I completed a search of the history of travel and tourism in Mexico.  This yielded 46,600 hits including many guidebooks about traveling to Mexico and secondary source materials.   A search of 20^th century works yielded one page of possible resources.   That’s a start.

My second approach was to dust off my thesis (The Travel and Tourism Industry of Mexico, 1939-1970), flip to the works cited pages and found a few sources (both primary and secondary) to test for availability.  In my very unscientific experiment, I was not too particular about which sources I selected; it was rather random with a couple of exceptions.    

I selected books and articles written in both English and Spanish.  I selected one item that I thought would be in Google books because the works were published by university libraries that participate in the scanning project.   I also selected one item produced by the U.S. government. I decided to look for the following works:

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

I suspected this book would be available because subsequent editions are published by the University of California, one of the participants in the Google books project.  MacCannell’s book is under copy write because it is in its third edition so it is not wholly available online.  However, there is enough information available such as introduction, table of contents, and excellent snippets of a few pages that would make me want to request this book through the ILL.

Pani, Alberto. Tres Monografias. Mexico City: Talleres del la Editorial, 1941.

Interestingly Google Books has a listing for this source but nothing has been scanned.  Google Books provides bibliographic data and a link to find it in a library through WorldCat.  Many of the University of California schools have this item in their collection making it a good candidate for traditional ILL.

“Student Rioters Threaten the Olympics.” U.S. News and World Report, 7 October 1968, 10.

Again, Google has a listing for this article but no way to access it except through traditional ILL or through a paid library database.

U.S. Bureau of the Census: Money Income in the United States: 1997. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1998.

Not surprisingly this work is in the public domain and available through Google Books.

Crow, John C. Mexico Today. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1957.

Google Books has scanned this book and offers snippets.  However, the snippets are useless. While I do not expect to read an entire book for free, I do need more information than this:

What I have learned with my very unscientific review?   For my particular topic, it is better to find initial sources through an internet or library catalog / database search.  This could then be followed by a search of Google Books to determine if sources are worthwhile or even available before turning to ILL.  Perhaps research via Google Books is geared more towards interesting topics like the history of fashion in the United States; that search yielded more than two million hits. 

How does all this relate to researchers who require adaptive technology and want to look for sources on Google Books?  For the researcher that uses magnification software only, there should be minimal issues.    If the researcher is blind or magnification software is not an option, then there may be issues. For example, what is the researcher supposed to do with snippets like the example above from Mexico Today?  Screen reading programs such as JAWS, just reads what is presented on the screen.  That is going to be frustrating.   

Works Cited

Bonnet, Travis. “A Good or Raw Deal for Libraries? Google Books and its Implications for Libraries.” Accessed from: www.ala.org/rt/nmrt/news/footnotes/february2010/a_good_or_raw_deal_for_libraries_bonnett_

Howard, Jennifer. “What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan Millions of Library Books?” Ed Surge. Accessed from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books .  August 10, 2017.

Rosenberg, Scott. “How Google Books Search Got Lost.” Wired Magazine. Accessed from https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-lost/ April 11, 2017.

Simmons, Jenifer Swift. The Travel and Tourism Industry of Mexico: 1939-1970. Pages 93-91. N.P. 2000.

Townsend, Robert B. “Google Books: What’s not to Like?” AHA Today website.  Accessed from: blog.historians.org/2007/04/google-books-whats-not-to-like.  August 30, 2007.