That’s in Google Books? Really?!

Much talk has been made about Google Books over the last year. I have poked around some, and even wrote about it last year. But, I continue to be amazed at the scope! Today I needed a classic mathematics paper from 1882, one by Enneper that was originally published in Zeitschrift fur Mathematik und Physik. My library owns the print, but like most of our users, I wanted to get it quickly online.

I usually search  Numdam, and Gallica, and if I am looking for a book, Google Books. But, I was in a hurry, and thinking that this was a journal, I didn’t even THINK of looking in Google Books! I hadn’t found it online, so I submitted an ILL request. It is just a normal part of my ILL department’s work process to check in Google Books, so they did, and shot me a link to find it online. And, lo, and behold, my 1882 journal article is in Google Books. It is really amazing. Now, this weekend I must find time to catch up on the old Popular Science issues!

And, I have to think about how our discovery tools work with Google Books.

And, how they might work better in the future!

Google Books

I am not going to discuss the settlement, but do want to think about how GoogleBooks changes the process for telephone reference. I got a telephone reference call today, and the user wanted to know if we had a certain book. My usual process is to check the library catalog, and then, if we don’t have the book, to look into Worldcat to see if another local library owns it. In this case, it was owned by a local library, and that was the end of the search. But is it? If I’m looking for an article, I often continue on to Google, and search, just to see if we might find a copy lingering out on the web on someone’s cv or institutional repository. But I don’t do that with books. Until now.  My interlibrary loan director had talked recently about a soon to be published article by Barbara Coopey, Assistant Head of Access Services, Penn State University built upon the poster session, “Utilizing Google Books to Fulfill Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Requests.”  So, this popped into my mind–I NEED to check Googlebooks. And it was there, or at least almost all of it, except the first 38 pages.  It is really quite extraordinary. And lifechanging.

Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Posted by the resourceshelf:

A new paper by Jamali, Hamid R. and Nicholas, David:

From the Abstract:

The study examines two aspects of information seeking
behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for
keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The
relationship between academic status and research field of users with
their information seeking behaviour was investigated.
Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey
of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at
University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate)
participated in the survey. Findings – The study reveals differences
among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of
information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of
looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper
understanding of the information behaviour of scientists.
Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate
intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of
scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of
information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers.

Direct to Article (PDF)

Source: Aslib Proceedings, 2008