Much like Google Books Search, the Microsoft’s Live Books Search also offers a much overlooked resource for free genealogy searches and free downloadable books in the public domain.

There are a few things Microsoft does better than Google, much as I hate to admit it. They have more accurate OCR conversions that Google Books, from what I’ve seen. And that offers easier cut and paste usage of text from the books, which is a real time saver when using info from these books.

Microsoft offers downloadable PDF files of public domain books that include the text layer so that you can keyword search the files offline and even save the books as text, or just paste parts you want into your databases and web pages.

But Microsoft’s historical offerings are a bit slimmer than Google and the search/web interface is much harder to use to read books online.

And it’s weird, when is the last time you heard anything about Microsoft books? They seemed to get into it as a defensive reaction to Google Books and they’re apparently still working as part of a consortium and are donating public domain books to the Internet Archive project as far as I could tell. I can’t tell if they’re still scanning books.

Try to find Live’s Book Search from the Microsoft Live site. Hello? It’s not even off the More menu like Google hides their books search. It’s not even on the Betas page linked from the More menu. It’s a bit hard to tell if they’re even still actively scanning books, but it’s there, if I search Google for it. Go figure.

It looks like it launched in December 2006 and has had no press since then. And, wow, http://books.live.com gets me there but redirects to a different URL.

But there is content there not found on Google Books and vice versa.

Microsoft’s attention to detail shows. But the interface sucks and it looks like they are hiding it and hoping we’ll forget it’s there less than a year after the beta launched.

At this point it’s still a useful tool and worth doing some genealogy searches on to see what you may find. If you find a useful book download a copy, and get Google Desktop to index it for you so you can search your Microsoft Books locally.

I started to tack on some other thoughts and info on Google and Microsoft’s book search tools on my last post but thought it would be better to break out this part from the news about the new “My Library” tools that Google Books just launched.

If you hadn’t already noticed, Google Books Search has become an incredibly valuable research tool, and one that’s very useful for genealogists. They’re giving away access to the same public domain data other companies are trying to sell us.

They’re constantly adding new books as they continue scanning libraries around the country and many of these are in the public domain and are fully readable and downloadable for free.

Google Books offers a huge library of history and genealogy data that can be keyword searched for free. It also means that books that previously could only be seen by driving to distant libraries or by paying reprint or CD-ROM companies for copies of long out of print books can now be searched from home. Many of these books are not well indexed in printed form but now you can find any name in the book, in theory.
A few weeks ago Google Books added an “Accessibility” feature allowing you to see (and copy) text versions of the book images and this is wonderful.

In practice Google seems a little sloppy in the OCR conversions. How could a title like
PRUNSYLNANIA ARRHINES by MATTHEW S. QUAY - 1876 slip by spell checks? I’ve also found cases where a keyword search found once instance of “Graham” in a book and my reading the book found other instances, or missing pages.

When you click on Google’s Accessibility/text feature you may see that some of the text is garbled but you can easily cut and paste from the text and save a lot of time in transcribing excerpts.

For example, here’s a book of Chester County PA tax records that is just begging to be diced up into USGENWEB/PA Roots/Rootsweb pages for each township. Most of the work already done, it just needs to be copied, reformatted and carefully cross-checked for accuracy.

I had some issues with columns and poor OCR conversions in Google Books last time I checked. The downloadable PDF files didn’t seem to include the OCR text layers and this means they aren’t searchable offline, and aren’t indexed by Google Desktop. But I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.

I’m hoping that as Google adds new books the PDF text layer will be there. I’d also like to see them re-compile the old PDFs, and to use a more consistent file naming system that clearly identifies a book as volume 1, 2 or Series 3, book 9.

While they’re at it they could ad a custom hidden text data table for Google Desktop to compile a “My Desktop Library” index of local PDF Google books sortable by title, author, year, etc. That could easily be exported to be “mashed” into other useful tools.

Which reminds me, how about adding OCR interpretation to Google Desktop’s PDF scanning, Google? You clearly do OCR conversions on the fly for PDF to HTML conversions in Google web searches and it would be nice if my downloaded Google Books library could be indexed locally.

Google Books also offers no way to report problems with specific books. The many books with partial or missing pages and no way to report it other than the feedback comments suggests they just don’t care. I don’t get it. They’ve digitized some of the best libraries in the country but made it look like a rush job. Surely they want to fix the problems. Let us flag them for you.

Google still doesn’t do a great job of clearly identifying editions and books with similar titles and doesn’t include relevant volume info in the search summary snippets or many of the About this Book pages. It really should show volume info on the header with the truncated titles by the author info.

For example, see the many volumes of Pennsylvania Archives that all try to save as the same book title and that don’t clearly state volume and book number in the About this Book pages. There are at least 10 series of these books and over 100 volumes. Try finding the Sixth Series, Volume XII on the search results above. This volume at least includes the series/volume info on the About page so maybe they’ve started adding more info in more recent scans.

Anyway, despite any shortcomings I love Google Books. I suspect they’re going to change our world and the way many of us interact with books. There’s a lot of needles in those haystacks and Google Books Search acts like a magnet to pull them out for you.

I seems like every week or even every few days Google adds some new feature or service that wows me. And this time they added features that do what I asked for in feedback I sent a few weeks ago. I’m sure they were working on it anyway, but it’s like my Christmas came early this year and I got what I wanted.

These features may seem like an obvious advancement but it is revolutionary and radical when it comes to what it represents. This marks a radical shift that will have a broad impact culturally in how people relate to books and use them. I’m sure of it. It adds value to the content. It’s a hugely effective tool to streamline productivity for researchers. and it can make sharing books fun.

It’s the YouTube of Books added as a front end to what has to be the worlds largest virtual library. Electronic books have started growing up to transcend what we can do with printed books. It smells a little like Amazon’s listmania but it throws in full text searches and free b0oks.

Here’s my Google Books “Library“and new custom search engine. I’m not putting the tags or reviews to good use yet. I just got click happy paging through search results building a basic catalog for my interests in Quakers, early colonial Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Delaware and the Carolinas, and England, Scotland, Ireland and Presbyterian history.

In less than a few hours I created a custom genealogy index of over 500 books that I know contain useful info on my ancestors.

In less time than I could do a look-up in a printed book index I can search the full text of over hundreds of books I selected because I know or suspect they are relevant to my research. Sure, I could search thousands more books just going to Google Books, but what I need are more ways to filter the world’s largest library to quickly find relevant results.

Now we have the tools to catalog, reference, review and share what we find in this virtual library.
“My Library” in this case also functions as custom genealogy search engine for me and other people much in the way my Google Custom Search Engine Genealogy search does..

Here’s the Google Books blog post announcing this new personalized library feature, including a critical link to the FAQ that seems to be missing from the “My Library” pages themselves so far.

The FAQ sums it up:

“You can now create personalized libraries on Google Book Search where you can label, review, rate, and of course, full-text search, a customized selection of books. These collections will live online and be accessible anywhere you can log in to your Google account. Once you’ve built a collection, you can share it with friends by sending them a link to your library in Google Book Search. You can even set up RSS feeds with friends so that they’re alerted when you add new books to your collection.”

This is really great news. And really useful.

Anyway, one thing I really wanted was a better way to track if I had already looked at specific books before, and I thought that adding tags, review and social networking along the lines of Amazon lists or YouTube videos would be a great way to open up more functional ways to create and share custom libraries. And that’s exactly what they rolled out with the new feature.You can now add Google’s books to your own library and add tags to help you manage and filter them. And you can add reviews, share links to your book collection, export lists, and best of all, you can search within your library and offer that search feature to others.

Think about this for a minute. This isn’t just a way to share cool videos or recommend books. It’s a way to mine data in public domain books for research, school projects and much more. It’s essentially a way to build custom book search engines along the lines of the Google Customer Search Engine (CSE) web tools they offer.

It would be nice if they’d add the ability to add tags to advanced searches so you can filter better, and to create sub-libraries so I could create multiple libraries of books lists specific to Pennsylvania history, Virginia history, etc. I’m sure we’ll see that eventually. I’d also like to see a way to save “Favorite Searches” and to automate them harvesting new books as they are added to flag them for you.

As it is now it’s a very useful tool and I expect it’s going to catch on quick for bloggers, researchers and academics who want to offer custom book searches.

The export feature opens up use of other tools to do mash-ups, mapping, and custom affiliate linked book lists to Amazon, library searches and much more.

And this isn’t just limited to public domain books. The searches will search indexed content that you many not be able to see the results of other than snippets, and this makes it easier to create lists of books to hunt down in libraries.

Google Book Search effectively trumps traditional library card catalogs by offering rich, full indexes of books that can be searched down to specific words, names and locations even if that info isn’t in the traditional printed index.

It’s starting to feel like we’re really in the 21st century. This can totally change the way we search for info in libraries and bookstores. If publishers can’t see the value in people being able to find their content even if they can’t read it free online then they’re living in the past. Surely this will sell more books even if it’s indexing books that aren’t in the public domain and despite Google giving away more books that you could fit in any single family home.

And now Google adds a way to make sharing books fun and useful and as cool as sharing a link to a video but infinitely more useful. We will see experts on various topics filtering for us to create useful subsets of data we can search.

It doesn’t replace printed books. It makes them easier to find, buy, read and reference.

It took me about 10 minutes to add 137 books specific to Colonial Pennsylvania history and/or specific surnames I’m researching. This becomes a custom search tool for me any anyone else who wants to use it.

The tagging and reviews can take it all a step further. Reviews and tags can be used to annotate books and track and share what we find in them.