What I personally find so fascinating about the Google Book Search (GBS) metadata conversation is that Google's metadata team is grappling with the same issues that metadata librarians are dealing with also (if not right now, they we will be in the future).
- Where do you get your metadata from?
- At what point in the digitization workflow do you capture/create metadata?
- If you outsource metadata creation, do you do quality control in-house and how much (or do you leave it up to the outsourcing company?)
- Do you see metadata capture/creation as a one-time-only process or as an iterative process?
- Who (or in the case of automatic extraction, what) creates the metadata?
- Do you build in human review after the automatic extraction process?
- What is the users' role in metadata creation?
- If you have several sources to choose from, what's the best source?
- If you have several records to choose from, what's the best record and can you automate this choice?
Google book’s records come from data providers (mostly from libraries which catalogue books using MARC). Sometimes Google takes information which has mistakes. They are creating a collection by means of agreements with publishers and libraries.
In my opinion, Google book’s cataloguing method is great because it uses foreign metadata to catalogue the bibliographical sources from its collection. However, this method requires to be controlled by professionals so as to avoid the errors that the system can’t detect. Human review is necessary.
Furthermore, metadata capture should be an iterative process because, as I have said before, the process needs to be controlled.
To solve the problem of which sources to choose, I think that Google could study them and elaborate a ranking of the most reliable ones.
In conclusion, Google Book Search needs to improve its method of cataloguing.
Posted by: Vincent | Friday, November 06, 2009 at 10:42 AM