Amongst Google’s many cool prod­ucts, one of my favorites is Google Books. The com­pany has part­nered with a num­ber of major libraries (includ­ing UW-Madison) to scan a mas­sive num­ber of books. Some books are avail­able in com­plete dig­i­tal ver­sions, some have lim­ited pre­views, and oth­ers aren’t view­able online — depend­ing on each book’s copy­right sta­tus. Beyond this coop­er­a­tion with libraries, Google has a part­ner­ship pro­gram by which pub­lish­ers can make their books avail­able. A pend­ing agree­ment with pub­lish­ers may soon allow Google to pro­vide access to out-of-print but still in-copyright mate­r­ial, as well.

I’ve found Google Books to be a very use­ful resource in the course of my research for my var­i­ous musi­col­ogy classes. There’s a fully view­able (and down­load­able!) copy of the Ency­clopédie de la musique et dic­tio­n­naire du Con­ser­va­toire, a ref­er­ence book printed in 1931 that I have used on mul­ti­ple occa­sions. For a recent project deal­ing with gen­der and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of mytho­log­i­cal char­ac­ters in the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Phillippe Rameau, I was able to access a Rameau biog­ra­phy, an old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythol­ogy, and a num­ber of works by clas­si­cal authors. It’s cer­tainly much faster than inter­li­brary loan, and some­times lets me be lazy and not ven­ture up to the sixth or sev­enth floor of our library just to check something.

Of course, there are many more fun titles avail­able, too. You can find Alice in Won­der­land and Through the Looking-Glass with the orig­i­nal John Ten­niel illus­tra­tions. If you’re look­ing for short (and far from com­pre­hen­sive) sum­maries of The Bard’s plays, you can read Shake­speare in Lim­er­ick Google has recently started adding mag­a­zines as well, such as Pop­u­lar Sci­ence and Men’s Health.

As one might expect from Google, by far the best fea­ture of Google Books is its full-text search. Many books — even titles that aren’t view­able online at all — are com­pletely search­able. This has a num­ber of appli­ca­tions. It can help you locate ref­er­ences that you might not find via sim­ple title, sub­ject, or author searches. You can also, as I men­tioned above, spot check some­thing before decid­ing if you need to acquire a phys­i­cal copy. What prompted me to write this lit­tle pæan today is the abil­ity to search a book you already have in front of you.

Ear­lier this after­noon, I picked up a book I’d requested via inter­li­brary loan. I turned first, as I usu­ally do with research mate­ri­als, to the back of the book to con­sult the index; there wasn’t one. Luck­ily, the book is avail­able on Google Books, so I was able to search for the terms in which I was inter­ested. The book’s lim­ited pre­view didn’t allow me to see every page that con­tained my search terms. But, a won­der­ful fea­ture of the search tool is that is still gives you page num­bers for every result. Google Books can thus act as a dig­i­tal index for a phys­i­cal object. Pretty cool, huh?