So you remember seeing an equation or some vital bit of information somewhere in your vast collection of engineering books – but how can you find it quickly?  Which book was it?  What page was it on?  Maybe you are preparing for the professional engineering exam.  You want to be able to locate pertinent info quickly; how can you prepare?

Google Books to the rescue. You can search over the full text of some seven million books through Google Books. For books that are still in copyright, the results are like a card catalog; Google shows you info about the book and, generally, a few snippets of text showing your search term in context.   Google has also partnered with over 20,000 publishers and authors to make their books discoverable on Google. You can flip through a few preview pages of these books, just like you would browse them at a bookstore or library.   Today Google is able to show a few snippets of text for most of the in-copyright books they have scanned through their Library Project.

This is all well and good – but how does this help us with our personal book collection?  Well they also have another feature called “My Library.”  You have to sign in to your Google account to use this feature.  You enter books into your library by entering the ISBN number (usually found on the book cover – and if not it is inside on one of the first few pages).   Matt Cutts suggested using an inexpensive bar-code scanner for this task.  His demo video is embedded below.  This makes sense if you have a lot of books, but it is not too difficult to enter them by hand if you have only a modest number of books. 

The cool thing, once you have your own library “imported” you can search within just your own books.  There is an option below the search box to:  Search “this user’s library”

This means that you can quickly “look” through all of your books.  The results will be shown in either “list view” or “cover view.” 

 Some of the “snippets” may be difficult to read, but they will help you located the book and page number where the info can be found!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.