The recent controversy about the Google Book Search Settlement seems to have taken up peoples’ Google-watching attention so much that advances in the way GBS actually works have been getting overlooked. Several notable improvements were made during the summer, for example, that got very little recognition. Another change that seems to have gotten little recognition is that Google web searches have begun to include links to books in GBS in the last 1-2 years (as in the example at left). Particularly in searching for historical topics, I’ve been seeing searches recently in which the majority of the first 10 hits are from GBS — A great advance, I think, for historical research. Up to now, my experience has been that history has been a fairly weak subject on the Web — Locked away in books, not on Web pages.

I had occasion to take advantage of the newly accessible books from GBS recently, when I was least expecting it, while having a discussion with my son David, who’s a long-distance runner, about track runners of the past at the University of Iowa. I remembered that one particular runner on the team, Ted Wheeler, ran on the US Olympic team in the 1950’s, and that he later went on to become the coach for the UI track team (I especially knew about him because while he was the coach he married Sheila Creth, the University Librarian at the University of Iowa Libraries, where I work). David knew that Wheeler had been in the Olympics, and thought that he had been an assistant coach at Iowa, rather than the head coach. So … of course I turned to Google to settle the “discussion.” It turned out to be a surprisingly difficult search. I assumed that it would be fairly easy to find records of recent track coaches at a large, Big Ten program like Iowa. But it wasn’t — I tried several search terms without success before — Bingo! — I finally hit upon the combination that turned up the page shown here, establishing that Wheeler was, indeed, the UI track coach from 1978 to 1996 — with the added benefit of a great picture!

The point of this little story: I think integrating GBS links into Google web search is a great advance, and deserves more attention. As I said above, there’s been so much negative press for Google in recent discussions of the Settlement that everything they do is interpreted negatively — I saw a link in the last couple of weeks, that I unfortunately didn’t keep track of, decrying Google’s putting GBS links in Web search results because someone thought Google was trying to unfairly boost their own content. Really?? I think there’s such a treasure in old books that the world will benefit from Google’s making them more accessible. There are questions, certainly, about the algorithm used by Google to determine which books are included in Web search results, and I hope Google will say more about that. But it’s not only Google that’s saying little on the subject — I haven’t seen much discussion at all by anybody on the integration of GBS books in Google web search results –  If anyone can find it, please add a comment or contact me by Twitter or Email.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Many possible takes on this picture. What comes to my mind first is the idea of the Attention Economy –The idea that in the days of the traditional library, before the Internet, information was a limited resource. Libraries could afford to work under the assumption that “we’ve got the good stuff, and our users have to to come to us to get it.” There was little motivation to improve overly-complicated search interfaces like the picture on the right above, because users had no choice. In the new environment of the Internet, however, the limiting factor is not information, but attention. The problem of users now is not finding information, but being flooded by too much information. In this environment, users naturally gravitate to the easiest information to find, which, of course, Apple, Google et al are glad to provide.

Another take on this is the high cost of Simplicity –The simple interfaces of Apple and Google are just the tip of the iceberg, built upon the costly labor of armies of engineers. Libraries just can’t afford to compete with this sort of juggernaut. Personally, I consider myself lucky, as a librarian, to be working in a medical library — Medical libraries have a long history of generous federal support, in the interests of the country’s health, which has enabled the creation of tools to streamline access to medical information, from Index Medicus to PubMed. For libraries generally, however, it’s still hard to compete with the resources of dotcom information providers. To end on a hopeful note — It’s encouraging to see that libraries are increasingly realizing the importance of providing Google-like interfaces for their catalogs, to gain back the attention from users that they’ve lost in recent few years.

The picture above, and the title of this post, are adapted from an article by Scott Monty — Thanks!

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Realizing how slowly the wheels turn in a large organization like NLM, then, a better name for MedlinPlus is probably unlikely to happen soon. But how about a quick fix for the name of the link in Google OneBox, to take advantage of the fire-hose of potential traffic from Google? My idea for a simple change, that I think would draw more traffic, as shown in the enhanced screen shot here, is to change the link name from “Medline Plus” to “Natl Lib Med.” I think this simple abbreviation would be recognized and respected by users, and boost clicks to NLM.

As far as a new name for MedlinePlus, I don’t have any ideas so far. If anyone else does, please make a comment, or send to me via email or Twitter.

Accompanying article: MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

In August, Google launched Google Health OneBox (left). This puts the National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus right at the top of the search results, and is potentially a valuable new source of traffic for NLM.

There are factors, however, that work against MLP — The three prominent links on the left, which are likely to get the bulk of OneBox clicks (Asthma, Google Health, & thumbnail) go to the Google Health Topics page (below). This has the same text and pictures as the MLP Encyclopedia/ADAM page that’s linked from the OneBox Medline Plus link. But there’s an important difference — The Google Health version of ADAM has Symptoms as the first section after Overview. The MLP version of ADAM, on the other hand (see further down on this page) has Causes as the first section. …

This may seem to be a minor difference. But I’ve learned — through long experience with Hardin MD and brief experience with the short-lived Medical Library Association-Google Health Coop project — that symptoms are a very popular, heavily searched topic for users (which Google certainly knows!). So I suspect that users who try out the Google Health and Medline Plus OneBox links will quickly learn to prefer Google Health because it features the symptoms information they’re looking for. It IS a positive for NLM that the Google Health page has a prominent link to MLP. But it’s rather surprising that there’s no clear credit given to ADAM as the original provider of the information — ADAM is credited only at the bottom of the page, where few users will see it (and I suspect many will consider it copyright-free, since they’ll presume that it’s from a government site.)

MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox — How NLM can boost traffic

Change the order of sections on ADAM Encyclopedia pages, to put Symptoms at the top, as Google does. This would make the pages more interesting to most users.

Surprisingly, MLP Encyclopedia pages, which is what Google OneBox links to, have no links to equivalent MLP Health Topic pages (Example: there is no link between the Asthma pages in the Encyclopedia and in Health Topics) — After all, it’s the MLP Health Topic pages that NLM staff creates and maintains, so how about making links to them from Encyclopedia pages, so the surging clickers from Google OneBox can find them!

See follow-up article: MedlinePlus Needs a New Name

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

I was actually thinking of taking Dempsey’s thought a step further, and proposing the idea of including Google’s word clouds in library catalogs. But when I started looking more closely at GBS word clouds I found problems — The first thing I noticed in the cloud for Origin of Species (below and here at GBS [scroll down to Common terms and phrases]) is that it has the plant-related words “seeds,” “pistil,” and “pollen,” but does not have the word “plant(s).” Hmm, that’s odd — So I searched for “plants” and found that there are in fact 100 occurrences of it in the book. Then I clicked some of the terms in the cloud shown below, and found that the number of results often does not correlate well with the font size of the word (which is what’s supposed to happen in a word cloud) …

Note that the words “admit,” “cause,” and “male,” which are in the smallest font, have more occurrences than other terms with larger fonts — “Asa Gray” and “pistil” in particular.

I tried several books, and found similar results in all of them — The font size of terms in the word cloud does not show much correlation with the number of occurrences of words in the books. In Snippet view books (as at least one of the books in Dempsey’s article is) the problem is not apparent because the number of search results is limited to three links in the book, making it impossible to determine how many occurrences of the term there are.

I suspect that the GBS word cloud problem has not been noticed more because the word clouds are rather “buried” — Not on the default Read (Front cover) page, but inconspicuously down in the middle of the Overview page, probably not seen by the vast majority of users.

We need more documentation about word clouds in GBS — How are they derived? What exactly are they intended to mean? Google has said about other metadata problems that they are working on them, and that they’ll slowly get fixed. Hopefully, that will apply to word clouds also. Maybe Google thinks of word clouds as still being “in beta” — they were, after all, only launched in July — and that’s why they’re giving them a low profile.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

All Hardin MD (HMD) pages have tags at the bottom, to make them more visible for search engines i.e. Google. We have been doing tagging in HMD since 2000, and it works very well. As shown in the example to the left, the tags are for variant spellings (measels), variant terms (rubeola), and words and word combinations relating to pictures (we have found that the word “pictures” is especially favored by Google).

One of the things that has made HMD fun has been applying longstanding practices of librarianship to a web-based system. Having been a cataloger for a brief time early in my library career, it seemed natural to put tags at the bottom of the web page, just like subject headings are at the bottom of cards in the card catalog. Including mis-spellings in the tags to help users find the page seemed natural, too — As a cataloger, I had been taught to put x-ref cards in the catalog for variant ways that patrons might look for a book, and following the same principle on web pages, it became possible to apply it on a much larger scale.

It continues to surprise me that this simple idea — Putting tags on web pages — has not been more widely applied. I have seen very few cases of it at other sites. I suspect part of the reason for this is that people have tended to think the hidden meta keyword field was the place to put tags, rather than “cluttering up” their pages by putting them on the page. Google’s announcement a few days ago that they ignore meta keywords finally puts an end to that idea. But many SEO people have thought meta keywords were ineffective for a long time, and it was certainly our experience — Around the time we began putting tags on pages in 2000, we compared meta field tagging and on-page tagging, and found that meta field tagging seemed to be ignored by Google.

Another factor that may have discouraged people from putting tags inconspicuously at the bottom of the page is that SEO people generally say that words need to be in a prominent place on the page, preferably near the top, to be found by Google. That’s no doubt true for common words that have a lot of competition, but for relatively uncommon words, like variant spellings of medical diseases, placement at the bottom of the page works well. (One proviso: Our pages with HMD are relatively small, usually no more than two screens. Putting tags at the bottom of larger pages may not work as well.)

I suspect a reason that people don’t think more of experimenting with tagging and Google visibility is that it is a lengthy process. Google’s not going to see new words on your page right away. It may take several weeks or even months. So it requires careful record-keeping, to note when words are added, and having a regular schedule of Google checking to see if your pages are starting to appear in search results.

Google, of course, puts the book at the top of the list because its deep metadata indicates that metadata is an important topic, and PageRank likely indicates that other people also value Weinberger’s discussion of the topic.

So, why don’t library catalogs find the book? — The problem is the subject headings assigned by the Library of Congress, and used in most all library catalogs:

Knowledge management.
Information technology — Management.
Information technology — Social aspects.
Personal information management.
Information resources management.
Order.

Even though the book discusses metadata at length and on many pages, it’s not deemed important enough to be a heading — The problem is that the traditional catalog is what Weinberger calls a “second order” resource, being limited to the small number of subject headings that will fit on a card in the (bygone) catalog. Given resources to assign a larger number of subject headings, no doubt metadata would be included.

So … Librarians can’t afford to be smug about metadata — Google has problems (as discussed in Geoff Nunberg articles linked below). But libraries have their own problems. In many ways the traditional library catalog lacks metadata features that have become common in Google, Amazon, and other sites.

Hope for Libraries — WorldCat does find the book with the david weinberger metadata search (#2 in results), because it has additional tags listed in its “Abstract” (scroll down) which include metadata — Sooner or later, maybe libraries will add the WorldCat Abstract to their catalogs to “enrich their metadata.”

Context: Recent articles by Geoff Nunberg:
Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck, Language Log blog
Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars, Chronicle of Higher Education

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Context: Recent articles by Geoff Nunberg:
Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck, Language Log blog
Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars, Chronicle of Higher Education

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Readers will be the creators of the most important metadata describing books. Period. There is no second-guessing that conclusion, which has been proved again and again in every hypertext environment in human history. Defining the problem of book metadata without treating the reader as the fulcrum of the process is missing the point.

Poking around a bit more to find connections between “metadata” and the “metaphorical marginalia” of user annotations, I found interesting commentary in 2005 around David Weinberger’s article Crunching the metadata (Excerpt from Weinberger, boldface added):

We’re going to need massive collections of metadata about each book. Some of this metadata will come from the publishers. But much of it will come from users who write reviews, add comments and annotations to the digital text, and draw connections.

As the digital revolution continues, and as we generate more and more ways of organizing and linking books–integrating information from publishers, libraries and, most radically, other readers–all this metadata will not only let us find books, it will provide the context within which we read them. … The real challenge to traditional publishing today comes not from the digitizing of books, then, but from the very nature of the Web itself. Using metadata to assemble ideas and content from multiple sources, online readers become not passive recipients of bound ideas but active librarians, reviewers, anthologists, editors, commentators, even (re)publishers.

Weinberger doesn’t use the word “marginalia.” But the word IS used in Ben Vershbow’s articles commenting on Weinberger. In Vershbow’s first article (tagged with “marginalia”) he says:

The book in the network is a barnacled spirit, carrying with it the sum of its various accretions. Each book is also its own library by virtue not only of what it links to itself, but of what its readers are linking to, of what its readers are reading.

And in another article by Vershbow that continues on the same theme, Daniel Anderson, in a comment, is reminded of Billy Collins’ poem, “Marginalia,” which, he says, “points to the conversations that take place as readers jot their reactions in the margins of books.” Excerpt from the poem, as quoted by Anderson:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. …

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer . . .

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

****************

The Talmud page with marginalia at left is from Vershbow’s article Web marginalia.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey