Submission + - Google magazine search hides a poverty of sources (facebook.com)
smurgy writes: "Google recently announced implementation of magazine searching.
As a professional librarian, I was interested to see what range of coverage this new functionality offered. A search found nothing, but revealed other industry professionals were asking the same questions.
This poses a problem to both librarians and non-librarians alike, as conducting research on an unscoped source will lead to hits of unverifiable quality. In this case, google books searches "a few dozen" magazine titles according to an email from "Yana" (no surname) at the Google Book Search Team (full transcript here.) Compare this to library and academic industry standard journal database Proquest Social Sciences — only one part of the Proquest offering, and listing 547 titles.
Google is free, but through public and academic libraries databases such as Proquest (of which I am in no way a representative) achieve a nearly similar coverage for virtually free. The facebook group is added as it is a method I am using to promote concern over this issue and a repository for communications with google. Slashdot readers interested in joining a more enduring facebook group may go here."
As a professional librarian, I was interested to see what range of coverage this new functionality offered. A search found nothing, but revealed other industry professionals were asking the same questions.
This poses a problem to both librarians and non-librarians alike, as conducting research on an unscoped source will lead to hits of unverifiable quality. In this case, google books searches "a few dozen" magazine titles according to an email from "Yana" (no surname) at the Google Book Search Team (full transcript here.) Compare this to library and academic industry standard journal database Proquest Social Sciences — only one part of the Proquest offering, and listing 547 titles.
Google is free, but through public and academic libraries databases such as Proquest (of which I am in no way a representative) achieve a nearly similar coverage for virtually free. The facebook group is added as it is a method I am using to promote concern over this issue and a repository for communications with google. Slashdot readers interested in joining a more enduring facebook group may go here."
