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Hand Scanned in Google Book Search  (View post)

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
14 years ago9,692 views

LOLLLL!!!
they really scanning it one page at a time?
thats stupid..

and the man seems to be black...
is he doing a black job? kinda like slavery?
just kidding just kidding :)

Aaron Myers [PersonRank 2]

14 years ago #

Looks like they tried to take the fingures out of the other pictures..

books.google.com/books?vid=OCL ...

Almost looks like they were using Microsoft Paint (haha.)

Elias KAI [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Yeop, let's hope we won't find the ring next time .

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Really funny :-)
But even with Google translator I can't see that

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

David, I think your remark is kinda racist, or am I misunderstanding you?

Son [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Why don't they scan a nicer copy without writing on it? (Look at the picture Aaron posted.) It's not like this is a hard to find book.

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Philipp, youve misunderstood me..
i was kidding :)
   dont get me wrong..Im not racist.. just a funny remark :)

if it hurt anyone, im sorry :)

OREO [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

The fact that there's a hand in Google Book search is kind of disturbing. I say Google needs to fix that.

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

they need to find the book first (at their library) :P

Jon M [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

slaves have been of all races over the course of history so to correlate people who have dark colored skin with slavery is a blantantly racist comment.

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it David, but I think Philipp should remove your comment.

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

i didnt..

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

you're being too politically correct

gary price [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Greetings from your librarian pal.

Another "fingers" post made the rounds ast week on a librarian list. In fact, it was about another occurrence of "fingers" in the scan. I'm trying to find the post now and will report back as soon as I find it. Apologies to PL for not posting when I first noticed it.

As we all know (but often forget) Google is not the first and not the only ones to be doing mass book scanning.

Before taking my new job at Ask, I posted about the book digitization efforts at the University of Toronto.

This post has details (U of T has been scanning books for years) . You'll also find a link to a story about an actual human "scanner" and a cool video of a scanning machine that operates in both manual and auto modes.
blog.searchenginewatch.com/blo ...

Building an Online Library, One Volume at a Time (via WSJ, free)
tinyurl.com/8a5xz

See Also: Video of Book Scanning Robot
archive.org/details/scanning_r ...

More soon.

Btw, University of Toronto is a member of the Open Content Alliance
opencontentalliance.org/contri ...

Jim [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Shortest joke: Poor jew. Am I a racist? People should not be afraid to make fun from anything.

Utills [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I think Philipp should remove all of these comments regarding the skin colour mostly due to the fact that it is just going to detract from the whole point of the post. I thought the comment was slightly racist but mostly naive and ignorant. With everyone's permission I think all such comments including this one should be removed (not censorship but same principle as removing spam) and the post's real purpose should be discussed.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Gary : thanks to the pointer on UFT .. .. I have seen simliar "mistakes" happend with handheld usage...espeically when a large Ciggerate Mngt was digitizing all the court documents.. This happens when its a manul process and (2) when there is no time for edits... Again the real question here is that if "lousy" copies have crept into the Booksearch, then one needs to ask.. what else has been digitzied which may or rather "not" so funny!!

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I didn't realize this was anything new, I've seen a video (i think part of a past press day) where it showed the process, how they can the books then use algos to crop, raise the contrast on text (but not images) and recognize the text (for search purposes)

/pd [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Calab: I wonder how Goo's can OCR a hand and get not Errors!!

Oh well, if they can do that so flawlessly, then I'll be first to give my handprints up for archiving!!

gary price [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

The video I shared is not of Google but of the digitization "robot" at the University of Toronto.

To /pd: if you want to see some gorgeous book digitization, take a look at this collection of Shakepeare material from the Univ of Victoria in Canada.
It's the first post here along with other sources of digitized Shakespeare content.
See first item here:
resourceshelf.com/2006/06/15/s ...

You can find even more scanned books (or text only books) here:
What a site and just look at how much is added each day.

onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

New Books (and link to FEED): WOW!!!
onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ ...

Goes to show that many others are busy digitizing material.

gary price [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

ON A RELATED NOTE: What about newspaper digitization?

Many libraries are offering FREE (all you need is a library card) and without having to visit the library (24x7x365) access full text (searchable, full text, full image, save as PDF) every page ever published in the NYT back to 1851. From ProQuest who is in the process of digitizing other major papers.
See:
proquest.com/products_pq/hnp/

Also, a service I've been posting about since January on ResourceShelf is
NewspaperARCHIVE.com. It's a fee-based service BUT (this is good) they offer tens of thousands of pages for free, full text, full image and searchable. Save, copy, whatever you like. Pages delivered as PDF files.

These "special collections" are built around a theme.
Here are a few posts with direct links to many:
1) More Free Historical Newspaper Archives From NewspaperARCHIVE.com
resourceshelf.com/2006/06/19/r ...

2) Digitized Newspapers Database: NewspaperArchive.com Blasts Off With SpaceProgramArchive.com
resourceshelf.com/2006/06/02/r ...

3) + Immigrationarchive.com
50,000 articles from hundreds of papers. Also browse.
immigrationarchive.com/
+ Globalwarmingarchive.com
globalwarmingarchive.com/

4) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Archive
resourceshelf.com/2006/01/15/n ...

Complete List:
newspaperarchive.com/DesktopMo ...

Frog29 [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

Well, in case anyone still cares, there are more fingers..., on page 5, lxxv, and 25,
Then some wierd/ messed up pages on 23, and 35,
on 39 you can see the inside of the back cover...
And, well you get the point...

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Someone can make a link to view theses pages of this book entirely ?
Because when I tried to see that, even with translate.google.com, I see no picture or in the best case I can see that :


img441.imageshack.us/img441/51 ...



Thanks in advance

Elias KAI [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I had the feeling that this hand will cause some disputes.
David, Of course you will never see a white lady hand with latest minicures and latest brandy rings.

Gary [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Ah found it. The blog post P.L. points to talks about one book. Someone on a library list pointed out some issues with a book of Shakespeare's plays.

I discovered one or two more during my review:

Title:
Complete Works: With a Memoir, and Essay on His Genius
(Note: This book is linked in several instances from the Google Shakespeare page.

+ Here's the cover of the book difficult to read and not centered.
books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...

+ books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ... Page
Page M
You can view the clip holding the page to the scanner.

books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...
Page M
Something?

+ books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...
Page 290: Fingers?

books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...
Page 340: Fingers?

books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...
Page 368. Might not be a finger but some other material at the bottom of the page. As P.L. pointed out last week some of this scanned material is also hard to read. Google should offer a tool (like Amazon's SITB does) to enlarge the copy. Again, another example, <

books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...
This page is very difficult to read online. Another example:
books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ...

+ We do appreciate the
books.google.com/books?vid=0sV ... table of contents but issues abound. For example, Winter's Tale is supposed to begin on page 483. However, the hyperlink goes to 446. This is a beta issue that will likely be fixed quickly.

rollmops [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

Found a few more, one even with a full hand covering a page:

rollmops.wordpress.com/2006/06 ...

Thank you guys for your interesting links & infos here!

rollmops [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

too bad, the Language-Tool-Trick doesn't seem to work anymore :(
Any other suggestion to get it from germany?

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

As for the TOC links being off, it's because they are vertically displaced downward. Mouse around and look for the hand to see what I mean.

Lzygenius [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

In the same book is the example below, where nearly half the page is obscured:

books.google.com/books?vid=OCL ...

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