Information and the Future

This is the blog of the Information and the Future task force of the Rolfing Library at Trinity International University. The IF task force exists to explore the role of libraries in the future of Christian higher education.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Google Books back-up

It sounds like a group of universities has been working on a back-up to Google books. They are creating a collective database of the digital books Google Books has scanned from their libraries. It's called HathiTrust. It sounds like they don't have a search engine for the collection yet, but they're working on. They also will publish a comprehensive list of what is included (unlike Google, which hasn't done that).

And an interesting tidbit on Wikipedia... A study was done of 100 words from history textbooks, which were typed into Google. Wikipedia came up as the first hit 87 out of 100 times. It was the second item listed 12 times, and third once. So wikipedia was listed among the top 3 Google hits 100% of the time. (I have to confess - I've started going to the wikipedia links most often when I'm doing a google search. The definitions are often more straightforward than other sites, and it seems comparatively more reliable than sites put up by one person.)

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