Google books
Many of the titles I searched are not available in fulltext in Google Books. I do not see many differences between a search in Google Books and a normal Google search.
Although Google Books sounds like a good idea, especially if it becomes a catalogue of all the books in the world, I am still not sure how this will benefit users if Google wants to charge libraries to subscribe to it. I can see libraries will move away or get rid of their print copy books once they have electronic copies. Users will not be able to just walk in to a library to read books anymore. They will have to become a member of the library to be able to read books online. In an academic environment, due to license restrictions, only enrolled students and staff are allowed to have remote access to most of the electronic resources. If a small library can not afford to subscribe to Google Books, it means their users will not have anything to read.
I believe Google Books is a good idea only if it is open to everyone freely. I do not want to see a good project become a tool to divide people into those who can afford and who can not afford information once Google achieves its goal to digitize every book in the world.
Can libraries benefit from Google Books? I think it will make our life easier if we can use it as a union catalogue to find and locate materials.
LibraryThing
LibraryThing is a very good tool. It definitely can replace our index cards at home. The drawback is that we have to go online to check everything. LibraryThing gets all bibliographic information from professional sources and saves people from putting in bibliographic details themselves, and the information can be shared with other people. I wonder whether it allows export of bibliographic information into a Word document. If so, we may be able to use that to replace EndNote. The Web 2.0 function in LibraryThing offers more information than EndNote program allows. The tagging function also allows people to organize similar bibliographic information together.
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Try thinking of Google Books as an index to the full text of monographs. If you're looking for ephemeral information, something small that won't end up on a subject heading, you won't know which books to find it in without an index to monographs. You probably won't have full text available on Google Books, but you will have a reference you can look up, and maybe get it in on Doc Del. Cheers, Julanne
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