Coming up on our earlier discussion, here's more detail on Geoffrey Nunberg's altercation that Google Books could prove detrimental to academics and other scholars. new Nunberg gave a talk at a seminar claiming that the metadata in Google Books is riddled with errors and is classified in a scheme unfit for scholarly use. This blog post was fleshed out somewhat a few days later in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Quoting from the latter: "Start with ventilation dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a learned annus mirabilis, which saw the issuance of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The handy Dorothy Parker, [and] Stephen King's Christine... A search on 'internet' in books written before 1950 and turns up 527 hits. ... [Google blames some errors on the originating libraries.] ...the libraries can't be obligation for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those panoply are drawn from the Book bunch a must and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves. ... In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great scrutiny collections and interchangeable them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore." The head of metadata for Google Books, Jon Orwant, has responded in detail to Numberg's complaints in a comment on the primordial

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