[PW] Crediting Google Books or Amazon Search Inside as sources?

[Bye, Dan J]

Electronic books are quite common now.  You cite the version you've looked at: so, if you've viewed the electronic version of a book, you cite that.  If you've viewed the paper version, you cite that.  The same principle applies to Google Books.  

Another consideration, especially if one point of referencing is to assist someone else in locating your source, is that Google Books metadata is not guaranteed to be accurate.  How do you know that the date of publication or edition number is correct? There are scanning errors (pages double scanned, missed out, completely unreadable), etc  It would be misleading to pretend you have had the paper version in your hands, and more honest to say "this is from google books". 

Dan
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org 
> [mailto:project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org] On 
> Behalf Of Even Flood
> Sent: 17 April 2008 18:53
> To: list at project-wombat.org
> Subject: Re: [PW] Crediting Google Books or Amazon Search 
> Inside as sources?
> 
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 8:25 PM, John Henderson 
> <jhenderson at ithaca.edu> wrote:
> > Just finished working with a student using Google Books to 
> locate a  
> > book written by an advisor to Herbert Hoover. It was available in  
> > full view, downloaded from Harvard. To print out the pages 
> he needed,  
> > we had to download the whole book as a pdf first, but Google Books  
> > has a button to let you do that. Once the whole book was 
> downloaded,  
> > it was no problem printing as much of it as we needed (2 pages in  
> > this student's case). He asked me whether or not he needed to cite  
> > Google Books. I indicated that one of the purposes of 
> citations is to  
> > assist someone in finding the material again, so that if a 
> book was  
> > retrieved from Google Books, rather than located in the 
> collection,  
> > that might be important information to include.
> 
> I am not sure if I agree with you, John. Would not the 
> consequence of that logic be that you also included 
> information about the library you borrowed a book from when 
> citing a book? Or the bookstore where you bought it? Google 
> books is one of many copies of the book, but not the only 
> one. (I hope??)
> 
> Even
> 
> --
> Even Hartmann Flood, Senior Academic Librarian Ilevollen 3e N