Nick @ Education.au

There was a great post today on O’Reilly Radar referencing a post by Jo Guldi: “How Google Books is Changing Academic History”.

To quote:

I was idly trying a search on “roads” to see what sort of a literature would turn up for the period of my dissertation research, 1740-1850. I didn’t expect much. I’ve spent the last two years wandering through the Yale, Harvard, and California libraries, the British Library, Britain’s National Archives, and the immense reserves of North American Inter Library Loan reading every book on London, pavement, or travel I could get my hands on.
Surprise. In a single idle search I just added twenty extra full-text books to my list.
Which are, by the way, full-text searchable –
– and subject to word-count analysis –
– and replete with full illustrations –
– and instantly digestable into visuals for powerpoint presentations.

Hallelujah, GoogleBooks. And holy mackeral! Good work.
By now, the first half of the nineteenth century exists in a very complete form on Google Books. In the last six months, while academic history has meandered in its habituated paths of grinding research, the possibilities of scholarship have been utterly transformed.

I’ve previously posted about how the availability of digital information saves me weeks of elapsed time on a daily basis. But the effort of a couple of minutes of searching compared to years spent trawling though libraries really shows how the effective digitizing resources really is.

Jo doesn’t link to the search she used in her blog post, but if you aren’t familiar with Google’s book search it’s worth looking at my guess of what her search looked like. She does link to the Google Book “About” page for Henry Parnell’s A Treatise on Roads though, which is a fascinating example of a way to display rich metadata. Features like the “Places mentioned in this book” are excellent examples of quickly summarizing information in a use-friendly way.