With its ambitious goal of putting up the world’s largest digital library, Google’s Book Search has been heralded as the ultimate information resource for scholarly research. But Geoffrey Nunberg, an American linguist and information professor at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that as of today, Google’s Book Search is a veritable disaster for scholars. In an article written for the August 31, 2009 issue of
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nunberg says “it’s so disappointing that the book search’s metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.”
He cites the following as among the major pitfalls in Google’s Book Search:
—The endemic misdatings of the publication year of books, such that the major works of certain authors published decades or even centuries earlier or later—among them Stephen King, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler, and Dorothy Parker—are all listed under the year 1899.
—Many absurd classification errors, among which is H.L. Mencken’s
The American Language being classified under “Family & Relationships,” a French edition of
Hamlet and a Japanese edition of
Madame Bovary being both classified under “Antiques and Collectibles,” and an edition of Herman Melvile’s
Moby Dick being classified under “Computers.”
—Numerous entries that mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers of introductions, such as the attribution “Madame Bovary By Henry James” for a page from an edition of a French book (the true author is Gustave Flaubert), and the attribution to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones of a book entitled
The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface.
Nunberg suggests that if Google doesn’t want its ambitious book digitization project to become a running scholarly joke, the company should make every effort now to rectify these weaknesses of Google’s Book Search. And he is hopeful that the company can do this fast. After all, he says, “If recent history teaches us anything, it’s that Google is a very quick study.”
Read Geoffrey Nunberg’s “Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars” now!
