Posts Tagged ‘Google Books’

Algebra, Boole, Computers, Display

Posted on November 3rd, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp

There’s a small book display on the ground floor of the GCW University Library to mark the end of Boolefest (“a celebration of the life of George Boole“), a week-long arts and sciences festival which has been organised by Dave Kenyon in the Faculty of Media, Humanities & Technology.

Photograph of the Boolefest book display in the GCW

It consists of:

Logo of the Boolefest arts and sciences festivalGeorge Boole was born the son of a cobbler in the centre of the city of Lincoln almost 200 years ago, on November 2nd 1815.  Despite having no advanced formal education, he became an internationally acclaimed mathematics professor who developed the theory of binary logic which underpins all our modern technology; from medicine to music via communications and all points between.

Google magazines (slight return)

Posted on August 20th, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp

I’ve just recreated my list of magazines from Google Books for the University’s e-journals site.

Google now hosts 199 digitised magazine titles, and for the sake of 10 minutes’ work every few months it would be a shame to miss out on the extra full-text coverage, which often complements the “library” sources for a title.

E.g. for the frankly un-put-downable Estonian Journal of Archaeology (available as an Open Access (OA) journal from 2006-, and indexed in Art Full Text), Google provides the missing articles from 1997 (vol.1) up to 2006.

Record for the 'Estonian Journal of Archaeology' on the University of Lincoln's list of e-journals.

I’d like to be able to harvest the Google Books content to build my list using the standard mashlib toolkit (Google spreadsheets; Yahoo! Pipes; some coffee)… but while use of Google’s =ImportHtml() function is limited to 50 per spreadsheet, and because Google search pages block robots.txt files, I can’t figure out a way of doing so.

Instead, I’ve been copying-and-pasting the search results pages into an ordinary Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (thanks, again, Google, for making this possible through your magazine browse page), then using a custom Excel function to ‘unmask’ the URL hidden behind each hyperlinked magazine title.

Google Books magazine browse page, pasted into an Excel spreadsheet.

Finally, I use a bit of text-to-column splitting, search/replace, and filling-in of package-wide fields, to give me a compatible, tab-delimited text file which I then upload to our e-journals knowledge base (which happens to be EBSCO A-to-Z) – I used EBSCO’s custom notes feature to link to Google’s cover image to each entry in the file.