Home » post » Estimates and observations about govdocs in Google Books

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Estimates and observations about govdocs in Google Books

Julia Tryon, Government Documents Librarian of the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College posted some interesting information about the intersection of Federal Publications and Google Books to govdoc-l this week. She is quoted here with permisssion:
 

 

My director has asked me to discover what I may about the amount of documents available in Google's digital projects.  I've been looking at Google, partners' websites, articles, blogs, etc.  I have found a lot of chit-chat but very little substantive information.  Maybe I am just not looking for it the right way or in the right places.

It seems that there is a blackout on reporting statistics for these projects. Google and most of the partners give no statistical data at all. Stanford did have a page with statistics that was buried on their project's website but the information had not been updated since 2004.

To figure out the statistics on my own, I have tried searching Google Books, Stanford, and University of Michigan; but there is no way to limit a search to government documents. On Google I was able to search by publisher and, using various abbreviations for GPO that are used in
the publisher field, I came up with 187,522 (GPO-141,600; Gov't-2322; Government Printing Office-43,600). The university catalogs did not allow me to search by publisher.

When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view. And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used. I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.

 

 

Have you done your own study/poking around/etc with Google Books and Federal Documents? Share your findings with us!

 

 


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Archives

%d bloggers like this:
http://freegovinfo.info/node/1355
freegovinfo.info
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-17
73161
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:4CUAOVC4JIMBS34Z2SSQH5OL6ASRDL4N
<urn:uuid:61fb00ad-1e8a-4a44-9c7b-2deda19202d4>
2017-04-30T20:45:33Z
104.28.18.38
sha1:GPSERUCQWM2W3P7INRLSQNI7GYMA36SK
<urn:uuid:cce13fc4-284d-4fff-a767-29035bb15777>
http://freegovinfo.info/node/1355
length
response
<urn:uuid:b3a183dd-2cf0-422b-9f76-f31554538953>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-167-34.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-17
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf