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These Google scans are also available in the HathiTrust [1], an organization built from the big academic libraries that participated in early book digitization
by philipkglass 2y ago
These Google scans are also available in the HathiTrust [1], an organization built from the big academic libraries that participated in early book digitization efforts. The HathiTrust is better about letting the public read books that have actually fallen into the public domain. I have found many books that are "snippet view" only on Google Books but freely visible on HathiTrust.
If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of books that are still in copyright.
The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.
[1] https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/
- acidburnNSA 2y agoHathitrust has been absolutely transformative for me, as an amateur nuclear enterprise historian.
- germinalphrase 2y ago“…nuclear enterprise…” As in, the business of running a nuclear energy plant?
- acidburnNSA 2y agoYes. Electricity, propulsion, desalination, space heating, etc.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoThe old Lia pocket warmer?
- acidburnNSA 2y agoYes!
- dredmorbius 2y agoHathiTrust is a fine example of a repository which is in theory useful but in practice all but useless. Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US) libraries. Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole, but rather can be saved one page at a time as PDFs. I'm pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and the additional generation of conversion and republication further degrades the quality of original-publication formats. (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or manually-converted documents, but those of course lose all the characteristics of original publication.) And of course, many materials still under copyright are not accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure. I'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted to HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047> (thread). And my request still stands. Anyone with an academic affiliation who can check <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503 https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503> and see how it relates to this post (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841>) would have my gratitude.
- bgoated01 2y agoI just put in a request at my university library for that item. I'll let you know what it turns up.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThank you so much!
- bgoated01 2y agoFor some reason the copy my library has doesn't have that page the same as it appears on hathitrust. Other nearby pages match the snippets I see on google books, but that page does not, and none of the nearby pages do, either. So I'm afraid my search here is a dead end.
- consf 2y ago[dead]