Fun with Google Books or What to do when they don't give you an API

Kenton Good, Dale Askey, Kathryn Paul, John Durno, Devin Crawley

The Problem

• Google books in Catalogue?

   
  

  Our History Faculty have asked if we could include links from our (Voyager) Catalogue to the freely provided out-of-copyright digitized books in GoogleBooks … as we have links from catalogue records into Amazon.com and Worldcat. They’d have to be title level links, and reasonably free of errors.. is this doable?

  (question: MARC records for google’s books would definitely be useful. Do you know if there’s a list of all of these available somewhere at google or elsewhere?)

   

What About MARC?

• Incremental loads would not be sustainable - would need to load full set every time

Plan B - Two Approaches

1. Google Book Search SFX Target
2. Catalogue Mashup
   

Google Book Search SFX Target

• Using the Google Scholar target parser as a template, created a Google Books target in SFX.
• This target only appears if the OpenURL contains a book title
• Setting the attribute as_brr to 1 limits a Google Book query to full text only (i.e.- free books), so that was added to the parser for all outbound links

Live demo

Simple Book Title Search

Link Resolver Services Menu

Results in Google Books

Catalogue Mashup

Not Voyager ...

Webvoyage links rely on ISBNs

Need to send parameters derived programmatically from search results (eg. title, author)

Live Demo