Some librarians love to bash Google, as if it has no redeeming qualities for serious research. Others (well, probably not many librarians) claim that Google is so far superior to online library catalogs that the only way to save them is to make them as much like Google as possible. Well, I think Google is great, but it is not a library catalog and cannot find things that an online library catalog can. Google cannot find anything that is not online, including lots of library materials. Even Google Books has its problems. I will have something more to say about it in another post, but as I was playing around with it, I entered the title of a book that was sitting on my desk, published only about thirty years ago. Google Books couldn’t find it. Then I looked for my own book, The Trombone: Its History and Music, 1697-1811 (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988) using my name (with middle initial) as the search term. There it was, about six items down. (My second book doesn’t come out until next year. Where did all that other stuff come from?) There was no link for finding it in a library, … Continue reading →