News from the Library: Browse Library books directly from your desktop

The collection of electronic books held by the Library is steadily expanding, but there are still many titles not available online. However, to some extent Google is bridging the gap.

Google Books is an initiative launched by Google in 2004, in collaboration with a range of publishers and large libraries, which provides the books online and enables searches of the text from cover to cover. For titles that are out of copyright, or in cases where Google has struck an agreement with the publisher, the entire books can be read online. For other books, users can still search in the entire text but, depending on the agreement reached with the publisher, they may only be able to read a limited amount of pages (limited preview) or a few lines of text (known as snippets). Google Books also provides additional information such as reviews and links to related titles. Today, there are more than 15 million scanned books in Google Books.

Over the last few weeks, Google Books has been "mashed up" with CERN's digital library. All book records are now linked to the digital version when they become available in Google Books. This opens up a new universe for library users; now one can simply look up a text string or a formula, launching a search inside books that previously had always veen on loan. This will be particularly useful for popular titles such as Introduction to High Energy Physics by Perkins and Statistical Data Analysis by Cowan, which are not yet available online from the publisher.

This service is a useful complement to the Library's 15,000-strong e-book collection and will continue to be further integrated with the catalogue. To take advantage of this new function without getting lost in all of Perkins' books, just search for the book in CDS and click on the Google Book link from the "detailed record".

Please send any feedback to library.desk@cern.ch.

by CERN Library