medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Apologies in advance for a long post.
Microsoft has recently made available in beta form their book search service:
http://books.live.com/
See also:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3647626
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/12/6/6197
In a quick survey I've found both advantages and disadvantages of
WLBS in comparison to Google Books Search (GBS). My comments are
based on my brief experience with the former and moderate but
narrowly focused experience with the latter and so shouldn't be taken
too seriously; in addition, both services are obviously still very
young and will continue to change.
Books at WLBS load faster on my machine and the interface seems
cleaner, although fairly broad top and bottom frames mean that less
of a book page is visible than in GBS. You can toggle the view from
the default of the width matching the frame, making it necessary to
scroll up and down to see the whole image (unless you have a large or
rotatable monitor) to one that shrinks the page to fit entirely
within that frame, although that obviously makes the print smaller
too.
A few weeks ago GBS changed their interface so that the book viewing
frame is continuous; now you can go to a different page either by
using a page number, a page-by-page backwards or forwards navigation
arrow, or by using the scroll bar for the viewing frame. At this
point the WLBS web interface only allows navigation page by page, nor
is there an indication of page number for either file or physical
book. Both provide short contextual linked results for the term you
used for your search, so you can go directly to those linked pages.
These navigational limitations of course are only for the web site,
and if you download the entire book from either site you can use your
.pdf viewer's navigational tools to their full extent.
GBS .pdf files provide only electronic page numbers, which frequently
don't match the book's page numbers. WLBS includes both numbering
systems.
A minor thing I noticed is that GBS watermarks every page image both
at the web site and in the downloaded .pdf; WLBS watermarks all pages
when viewed at the site, but the downloaded files aren't watermarked
at all.
Whereas my impression is that Google Book page images in general are
about 95% in black and white, WLBS page images are all color, which
is arguably more attractive but can make them harder to read and much
more problematic to print out. One title which I noticed both search
engines have made available is Swete's _Patristic Study_, and the
dark sepia print on cream paper at WLBS is a little harder to read
than the plain black on white images one usually finds at GBS. This
seems to be more of a problem when viewing images in the browser than
when looking at the downloaded copy in a .pdf viewer. (Unusually, in
the Swete book GBS actually has color images of all pages except 4-11
and 14-15, but the contrast on those black-and-white pages makes them
a little easier to read.)
Although I've looked at a lot fewer WLBS page images, all that I've
seen have been clear and sharp; none have been blurred, cut off,
unreadable, or included gloved fingers, nor have I noticed any page
gaps. (If I were one of the institutions who'd made an agreement with
Google, I'd be hopping mad that they'd taken my books and subjected
them to the stresses of scanning with such appallingly poor results.)
A *major* advantage of WLBS .pdf files over GBS is that they're
searchable using your .pdf viewer. Both files show page images rather
than text, but the WLBS files apparently includes in the file's code
an OCRed version of the image which both Acrobat Reader and Preview
are able to search. To judge by the many misspellings in search
results I've seen this won't be perfect (and of course will miss all
hyphenated occurrences of terms), but it will certainly be helpful
[[1]].
Searching Swete's book for "Augustine" at the web site yields 30 page
hits at GBS and 34 at WLBS, suggesting the OCR is roughly comparable
at the two services but that WLBS's might be slightly better. This
may be random, though; a sample of one isn't much to go by.
A major difference between the two collections is that Google has
digitized books without regard to copyright or permission from the
copyright holders, although they make available only single pages or
snippets of protected titles, and Microsoft has restricted itself at
this point to public domain books.
All of WLBS's books are available to download, whereas Google's (even
PD titles) are very hit-and-miss. Looking at a semi-random sample,
just two of the 13 GBS titles I have in my Zotero Latin grammar
folder are downloadable. Why Norden's _Antike Kunstprosa_ (volume 2
only) should be available for download, and Neue's _Formenlehre_ -
both volumes scanned, fortunately! - isn't downloadable is entirely
obscure.
One of the concerns Europeans had about Google Books Search was that
it would be very (Anglo-)American in scope, but in my searches there
I've been pleased to find many, many books in French and German, with
a handful in other European languages, including Russian. I haven't
run across any in East Asian or African languages, but that could
simply be an artifact of the sorts of things I've been looking for.
At WLBS, I've not found a single book published outside the US or UK.
There are editions of non-English-language books (e.g, an edition of
two books of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and of part of the Adv.
Haer. of Irenaeus), but I haven't seen any books in French or German,
and I've searched with terms like "Migne," "lateinische,"
"Textkritik," "vulgata," and others.
Bibliographical information seems on average to be slightly better
for WLBS than for GBS, but that might be entirely an artifact of the
relatively small number of periodicals and books in series at the
former. Once they have more less-conventional books they might end up
in the same boat. I noticed for example that many EETS volumes are
listed simply as "[Publications]. Original Series. by Early English
Text Society" (or "Extra Series" as appropriate), with a date and
number of pages, and only by going to the book's page can you see
which title it is.
I haven't exhaustively tested the browsers on the three Macs I have
access to (I don't have ready access to a Windows PC), but the site
works with Firefox 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 on Mac OS 10.3 and 10.4.
Unfortunately my main machine is still running OS 10.2 and the only
browser I've found that works on this one is Camino, a Mac-specific
Mozilla-based browser. WLBS also doesn't work with the ancient final
IE for Mac, but I expect it does with the current Windows IE. It
doesn't work with Opera on any of the systems I've checked, and I
read a report suggesting it doesn't work on Opera for PCs either, nor
does WLBS work with Safari 1.x nor 2.0. The Ars Technica page for
which I gave the URL above includes a comment from someone for whom
Firefox didn't work, but without more information about his set-up
that might or might not be significant.
All in all, I'm very pleased with WLBS. I hope that they'll add more
navigational features and perhaps rework the search page to give more
space to the book images, and offering black-and-white versions of
the files more suitable for printing would be nice but perhaps too
much to ask. I expect they'll broaden the scope of the collection as
they upload more books. The browser limitation on my OS 10.2 machine
is unfortunate but not unexpected given that it's so far behind the
times, and I'm happy it works on Firefox elsewhere.
John
[[1]] Here's a sample OCR passage from WLBS: That ver. 1 efl eets the
transition from the genealogies to the following enumeration of the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, and so forms properly the clo.se of the
geneiilogies in ch. ii.-viii., is so ...
P.S. I haven't forgotten my promise of links to the GBS digitized
Migne PG. I'm still working on it but hope to provide information
within the next couple of weeks. J.
--
*** John McChesney-Young ** panis~at~pacbell.net ** Berkeley,
California, U.S.A. ***
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