[MUSIC PLAYING]
JO GULDI: My name is Jo Guldi.
I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the history
department.
I work on the history of the British road system.
I'm interested in the roads as a social and cultural rather
than an economic expansion.
And I am in the process of writing a dissertation, a PhD
dissertation.
And this requires flying all over the world looking at
libraries on different continents, in my case,
looking at 18th century, 19th century private records in all
sorts of archives.
I was doing an internet search and one of the names of an
obscure road engineer--
nobody should know about this road engineer except me-- and
I was having such troubles finding even primary source
material on him, even in the libraries, even by the most
rigorous of the old methods.
And I thought, I wonder what Google knows.
So I typed in the name of this obscure road engineer and up
popped this entire volume about his work.
ERIN MCKEAN: I'm Erin McKean and I'm the blogger behind the
blog "A Dress A Day," and also the blog "Dictionary
Evangelist." And my day job is that I'm the chief consulting
editor for American Dictionaries for Oxford
University Press.
My blog, "A Dress A Day," is really just that.
I post something about a dress or something dress-related
almost every day.
And a lot of the time I talk about writing
that's about dresses.
So I'll link to a book that talks about dresses.
So I'll put into Google Book Search a couple words at
random, one of which is always the word dress, and
see what comes up.
And it's always surprising what comes up.
In fact I did it today.
What I found was a description of the dresses worn at a White
House event by Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, the first lady.
So I thought that was just really interesting.
And it's not a book that you can walk into most libraries
and pull off the shelf.
There are not a lot of copies of this kind of thing.
JO GULDI: The standard scholar looking for all of the
resources on the subject spends a lot of time getting
familiar with the interlibrary loan system of the library.
But now instead of continuously submitting these
requests to interlibrary loan I'm on Google Book Search
seeing if there happens to be a digitized copy of the
manuscript.
I can just look through it.
I can do a full text search.
ERIN MCKEAN: I was reliant on books' indexes which, I know a
lot of indexers and they're great, but they can't predict
everything that a person is going to want to look up in an
index, and indexes can only be so big.
So they are constrained by the number of pages devoted to
them and by the amount of time the indexer is given
to index the book.
So Google Book Search, you can look for things that indexer
didn't think were worth indexing, or that they didn't
think anybody would want to look up.
JO GULDI: There are so many beautiful rich books that
cover this era when London's shape and
architecture is changing.
And most of these have been digitized now so you can now
go in see these lithographs upon lithographs and prints
upon prints of all of the new streets that are being built,
all of the new churches, the architectural splendor, the
shopping arcades.
This sort of very specific, honed research is made
possible by keyword searching.
It's not the scholars only tool but it's a new tool of a
great deal of agility and precision that scholars didn't
used to have that's suddenly being made new
by Google Book Search.
ERIN MCKEAN: When you scan a book and when you make the
contents available for word-by-workd searching you
unleash a whole lot of information that was in that
book that was just trapped there, that people
couldn't get at.
They didn't know the book existed, they didn't know it
talked about this if it did exist. And it frees people to
find connections where they wouldn't find it otherwise.
Google Book Search has triggered a lot of
book buying for me.
Books about the emotional language of Japanese, and some
dictionaries, and some books that I just ran across that
had nothing to do with my project that I wanted anyway.
They make it so easy.
There are lists right there on the right-hand side.
You can click through to any number of
booksellers and find a copy.
JO GULDI: It's also performing a huge service in the name of
spreading knowledge, spreading learning,
and spreading access.
Google Book Search is spreading knowledge and making
knowledge infinitely accessible.
ERIN MCKEAN: I think one of the things that Google Book
Search and that all search engines really do well is
they, if you use them right, you can increase the amount of
happy accidents in your life.