Andrew Weiss

An Assessment of Google Books’ Metadata

This article reports on a study of error rates found in the metadata records of texts scanned by the Google Books digitization project. A review of the author, title, publisher, and publication year metadata elements for 400 randomly selected Google Books records was undertaken. The results show 36% of sampled books in the digitization project contained metadata errors. This error rate is higher than one would expect to find in a typical library online catalog.

An Examination of Massive Digital Libraries' Coverage of Spanish Language Materials: Issues of Multi-lingual Accessibility in a Decentralized, Mass-Digitized World

Google Books has been shown to have limitations in the coverage and access of Hawaiian and Pacific books. This paper investigates the results of an ensuing study that examines the coverage and accessibility of Spanish language books in four Massive Digital Libraries (MDLs): Google Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Open Library. A random sample of 1,200 books was taken from a Masters-degree awarding university library in the United States. In this study, 400 titles from the librarys general collection were compared to 400 Spanish-language titles. Levels of accessibility for each title in the four MDLs were recorded, ranging from no record, record only, partial view, to full-view. Results showed little difference in accessibility between Spanish and English books in Google Books (7% Spanish fully accessible vs. 8% English). However, differences in accessibility were found in the Internet Archive (2% vs. 8%), HathiTrust (6% vs.11%), and Open Library (5% vs. 16%). Issues related to accessibility and non-English collections in MDLs are also addressed.

Examining Massive Digital Libraries (MDLs) and Their Impact on Reference Services

ABSTRACT Massive Digital Libraries such as Google Books and the HathiTrust can provide libraries with virtual ready-reference collections that match the scope of print collections. Their impact reaches into the tens of millions of public domain and copyrighted titles. Yet, problems persist with these digitized book collections. This article examines some of the flaws and unintended consequences of relying on Massive Digital Libraries at the expense of local print collections. Such problems include lack of metadata accuracy, poorly implemented optical character recognition, lack of quality control in the mass-digitization process, the problem of linguistic representation, and the lack of subject diversity in the source collections.

Making Journals Accessible Front & Back: Examining Open Journal Systems at CSU Northridge

Purpose – This study aims to examine Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS) for its overall web accessibility and compliance with the Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act, also known as Section 508. Design/methodology/approach – Twenty-one individual web pages in the CSUN test instance of PKP’s OJS version 2.4.0 used in three back-end journal development user roles were examined using three web-accessibility tools (WAVE, Fangs, Functional Accessibility Evaluator). Errors in accessibility were then logged and mapped to specific Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) criteria. Findings – In all, 202 accessibility errors were reported across the 21 OJS pages selected for testing. Because of this, the OJS cannot be efficiently utilized by assistive technologies and therefore does not pass the minimal level of acceptability as described in the WCAG 2.0. However, the authors found that the types of errors reported in this study could be simply an...

Comparing the Access to and Legibility of Japanese Language Texts in Massive Digital Libraries

A random sample of 800 Japanese-language books with publication dates prior to 1943 was extracted from the OCLC World Cat database and 409 were examined. The book titles were queried in both Google Books and HathiTrust. The texts were then examined for their level of typical user access, their accuracy in metadata, and their scan quality. Despite their likely public domain status within Japan and in the United States, 0.2% (N=1) of the sampled texts were visible in Google Books as full texts. While 12.5% (N=50) of the sample were visible in HathiTrust. Within the full view texts, errors in scanning and metadata were identified, including problems with legibility (blurred characters) in 68% of visible texts, distorted content (slanted and upside-down pages) in 90%, motion or blur of turning pages captured by digital cameras in 48%, extra-textual objects (3-D items not part of text, i.e. Fingers, hands, book holders, etc.) in 94%, and use of heavily-defaced, dirty or fragile source material in 28%. The most common metadata errors were missing bibliographic information, especially missing page numbers (in 18% of texts) and incomplete tables of contents (in 22%), and problems associated with poor OCR, especially unusable keywords and common phrases (in 50% of texts) that appear to be random words, articles, and unpronounceable symbols.