University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

I spend a lot of time searching the web for bibliographic metadata and
links to digitised versions of publications. Sometimes I search Google
and get nothing, sometimes I get the article I\'m after, but often I get
something like this:  
  
![Google](http://lh6.ggpht.com/-ULRrbfCzLP4/UUBO4VIgHJI/AAAAAAAACg8/oNVBC5w5L3g/google.png?imgmax=800 "google.png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="407" height="599"}  
  
If I search for [Die cestoden der
Vogel](http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Die%20cestoden%20der%20Vogel) in
Google I get masses of hits for the same thing from multiple sources
(e.g., Google Books, Amazon, other booksellers, etc.). For this query we
can happily click through pages and pages of results that are all, in
some sense, the same thing. Sometimes I get the similar results when
searching for an article, multiple hits from sites with metadata on that
article, but few, if any with an actual link to the article itself.  
  
One byproduct of putting bibliographic metadata on the web is that we
are starting to pollute web space with repetitions of the same (or
closely similar) metadata. This makes searching for definitive metadata
difficult, never mind actually finding the content itself. In some cases
we can use tools such as Google Scholar, which clusters multiple
versions of the same reference, but Google Scholar is often poor for the
kind of literature I am after (e.g., older taxonomic publications).  
  
As Alan Ruttenberg
([@alanruttenberg](https://twitter.com/alanruttenberg/)[points
out](https://twitter.com/alanruttenberg/status/311621450241028097),
books would seem to be a case where Google could extend its knowledge
graph and cluster the books together (using ISBNs, title matching,
etc.). But meantime if you think simply pumping out bibliographic
metadata is a good thing, spare a thought for those of us trying to wade
through the metadata soup looking for the \"good stuff\".


I spend a lot of time searching the web for bibliographic metadata and links to digitised versions of publications.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Bibliographic metadata pollution