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37 DttP 26 (2009)
What Was Lost, Now Is Found: Using Google Books and Internet Archive to Enhance a Government Documents Collection with Digital Documents

handle is hein.journals/dttp37 and id is 120 raw text is: FEATURE What Was Lost, Now Is Found Using Google Books and Internet Archive to Enhance a Government Documents Collection with Digital Documents Rebecca Blakeley T his article compares two free online repositories, Google Books and Internet Archive, used to discover, collect, and disseminate digitized government documents in the context of augmenting a government documents collection. Positive and negative aspects of each repository will be examined, includ- ing various search strategies used to unearth the digitized gov- ernment document treasures contained within. The damage McNeese State University's government documents depository sustained from Hurricane Rita must be acknowledged as it led to the idea of using Google Books and Internet Archive to find and replenish the collection of documents that was lost. Google Books (books.google.com) was the first online repository used to find digitized government documents for patrons, especially those documents that were lost to Hurricane Rita. I learned of its My Library feature that allows you to collect, share, and promote books found within the Google Books repository.' The McNeese Government Documents Department used it to create the MSUGovDoc's Google Book Library (tinyurl.com/4z6cf5) that consists mostly of govern- ment documents, complete with RSS feeds to keep track of new additions and tagging features to group books by topic (figure 1). One such tag, immigration, depicts several books about immigration, including the government document Importing Women for Immoral Purposes (figure 2).2 Clicking on any of the book entries within your Google Books Library or within Google Books search results, including Importing Women for Immoral Purposes, opens up the PDF full text, which may or may not be of high quality. Since Google partners with large libraries to scan books in mass quantities very quickly, you may at times find a hand or finger cover- ing a page or the occasional blurred text. Such quality issues aside, the default display of the digital document contains several efficient features for viewing the document, including a zoom button, a one-page view (the default), a two-page view, thumbnails, full screen, and plain-text view. Clicking on the PDF button downloads a copy of the document for you to open or save. The Clip button allows you to highlight, share, and embed chunks of text, either as text or image. The Link button gives you the option to paste a link to the document or embed the document in a website. The search box on the left allows you to search for keywords throughout the entire book and displays the highlighted search term as a snippet view from each page in relevancy-ranked order. Clicking on the Overview link displays some metadata that is often sparse or contains inconsistent periodical titles or publisher names. Keywords and broad subject terms to describe the document are also listed and linked so that they can be searched for within the document. Government documents can also be found by using the advanced search for entering keywords and using this search string in the publisher field: GPO OR Government Printing Office OR Govt. Print. Off. OR Gov't. This search string was created and recommended by Julia Tryon in her August 2007 Free Government Information (FGI) blog posts about federal documents in Google Books.' Tryon was unable to locate any information or data on the amount of govern- ment documents within Google Books, so using this search string to gain an estimate, Tryon received 187,522 results. Eighteen months later, I tried the exact search and received 364,170 results. However, to claim this number as the total number of government documents digitized within Google Books would be misleading, as both of our searches were con- ducted a day or so later and the results had either drastically risen or fallen by 30,000 results. It is truly a mystery and one explanation for this might be that certain metadata or dupli- cate documents were removed or added. You can also try searching by agency (e.g., Department of the Interior) by simply typing the name of the agency in 26 DttP: Documents to the People Fall 2009

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