One of the great frustrations of Australian studies in the digital age is that some of the best resources in Google Books are only available in the US. In a cruel irony, these books—which were written printed, bound and distributed in Australia and are long out of copyright—cannot be released to Australian ISPs. Thankfully, a colleague has shown me that there's a way around the restrictions which I'll explain here. I've been applying this system for my lexicographic research which explains the examples that I use.
These tips work for any browser, but I prefer Chrome because the address bar and search bar are one and the same. This makes life simpler, especially if you have multiple tabs open at a time.
How to hack Google Books
The Google Books archive offers access in four ways:
- No Preview Available provides bibliographic details with no access to content
- Snippet View offers bibliographic details plus a few sentences. Sometimes there is a 'contents' section which may bear little relation to the actual contents of the book.
- Limited Preview lets you search the content and get access to small sections of text
- Full View allows you to see, search and download the whole lot.
Because of territorial licensing arrangements with US libraries, many texts that come up as Snippet View or Limited Preview in Australia and elsewhere are available as Full View in the US.
Users in Australia can get around some of these territorial restrictions by using what's called a web anonymiser. This is a system that makes use of a ‘proxy’ IP address borrowed from the US. Using a US proxy is a way of tricking Google into thinking that you're in the Land of the Free (Content).
Here's how to use an anonymiser.
- Go ahead and search for your word in Google Books. If you’re not permitted to search the text of the book, it will probably look something like this:
Don’t cry. Select and copy everything in the address bar then open a new tab by pressing Apple + T or CTRL + T on a PC.- In this new tab, open an anonymiser. At the time of writing an effective anonymiser was MyNinjaProxy. Anonymisers seem to change fairly regularly so by the time you read this it may not work for you.
- Paste the contents of your search bar into the blank field provided. In MyNinjaProxy it looks like this (next to the button that says 'Surf Now!'):
Hit 'Surf Now!' (or 'Go', or equivalent) The same page you were looking at in Google Books will (fingers crossed) now turn up in the new tab as if you are in America. Voila!
If you don't notice any difference between the Australian and American versions of the page you are looking at then it means that the licensing restrictions apply equally to both countries. With any luck though, the US version will be offered as Full View. As a rule, 20th-century publications and later remain under wraps. Luckily for me, much of my research is on 19th-century texts.
Note
- It’s not illegal to use anonymisers. As far as I know it’s Google’s responsibility, not yours, to keep this material in the US, if that’s what was in the terms of the scanning negotiations with the libraries
- Because the information is travelling from Australia to the US and back again the pages will take longer to load. Sometimes you may need to reload the page entirely (press the reload button on your browser or click inside the address bar and press return)
- You cannot physically download the PDF version in Full View texts accessed via a proxy. In my experience a PDF file will download but for some reason it’s blank. If anyone has any luck doing this, let me know.
- You can't always go directly to the page you want and may have to click through page by page. This seems to be inconsistent from book to book.
- You cannot link directly to a Google Books page that is routed through an anonymiser, nor save it as a bookmark. In order to avoid going through the whole performance of finding the same part of the text again, I simply make a screen shot of a page. In a Mac, make sure the full page is visible on the screen and then press Apple+Shift+4. A cross will appear. Click and drag over the page area then release all your fingers. An image of the page will be sent to your desktop.
- To check the accuracy of Google's bibliographic metadata click on the icon showing a representation of the front cover of the book to go directly to the beginning, then click forward page by page until you get to the title page. In the image reproduced in Step 5 above, the front-cover icon is the green thing in the top left corner, under the word ‘Report’.
What to do if you still can't get into Full View using an anonymiser
If after all this you don't get a Full or Snippet view, or you don't have access to the pages that contain the bibliographic data, open another tab on your browser and go to www.archive.org. Many of Google's archived books are also archived here and can be accessed without an anonymiser. The search bar, however, will only let you search for the title of a book not the text. This is usually not a problem, because if you've got this far you will already know what book you're interested in. There is also a way around this problem: see What to do if the search function provided by an online archive is dodgy, below.
Once you have the book you are interested in, choose ‘Read online’ to look at the original images of the books which are searchable in this interface. Note that the search is not always reliable, and I don't know why this is the case. It's worth going to Full Text to see the warts-and-all OCR text behind the images, and to rely on your computer's own system of text search, eg, Apple + F.
What to do if the search function provided by an online archive is dodgy
Online archives like Trove have very reliable in-built search functions. When you type in a word, you can be reasonably confident that it’s going to dredge up everything of relevance, provided your search term matches an existing transcription. The search function in Archive.org, on the other hand, is pretty dodgy. I’m probably doing it wrong but I can’t seem to search for anything other than titles of books, rather than the text. Other sites, like the University of Michigan’s digital collection, appear to give you everything when they’re actually inadvertently holding certain results back.
Here’s how to get behind the scenes of an online archive and do searches on your own terms.
1. Go to your online archive. In this case I’m opening Archive.org
2. Ignore the word ‘Search’ and the tantalising rectangular space to its right. Instead, put your cursor in the address bar and add this text before the address “site:”. It will now look like this:
Important: if you are using a browser other than Chrome, then don’t do this in the Address bar. Instead, use the search bar with the magnifying glass.
3. Don’t press return yet. Add the word or words you are interested in prior to the address. Eg, the word ‘mangurt’, like this:
This is how the same thing will look in Safari:
Now press return. Google’s own search function will do the work of searching for the ‘mangurt’ within archive.org. So you will get results that look like this:
This is effectively a Google search with results limited to what’s found within Archive.org.
4. In this case I’m not happy with the way that Google has tried to guess what I really wanted to find. It came up with “man hurt” and other rubbish. So this time I will put my word in inverted commas thus:
Now I get very useful results:
This brings me to....
How get around Google’s automatic spell check correction
Google has recently decided that if you spell something in a non-standard way or are searching for a rare or obsolete word, it offers you ‘improved’ alternatives. This is frustrating for lexicographers but fortunately it’s a simple as using double quotation marks, as if you were searching for an exact phrase. Thus a search “mangurt” will only look for words spelled exactly that way. This works in conjunction with other Boolean notation.
Take the following search:
“mangurt” “marn grook” -mango -“yoghurt” location:au
This will return results with the exact spelling of mangurt as well as the exact phrase “marn grook”, excluding all results with the word ‘mango’ and the exact spelling of the word yoghurt, but allowing alternative spellings such as ‘yogurt’ and only from sites that are based in Australia.
Meanwhile this search:
“mangurt” “marn grook” -mango -“yoghurt” site:www.archive.org
...will do the same thing but limit results to pages that appear within archive.org.
