Google Books metadata meta-wreck
September 4th, 2009 by davidw
Geoff Nunberg has a fantastic post warning about the poor quality of the metadata attached to the books Google is scanning into its soon to be dominant-to-the-point-of-monopoly digital library. Apparently, the attempt to gather metadata automatically from the scans has resulted in the introduction of legions of errors. But the real problems are, as Geoff points out, that Google seems not to have a plan for dealing with this problem and that it has not opened up the metadata design process.
