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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 6:49 am and is filed under Search tools, genealogy search tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.