One of the justifications for that infernal invention known as "snippet view" is that it allows researchers to identify a source and ILL it later. A relatively rare periodical, The Edinburgh Christian Instructor, happens to have a long book review that I would like to see. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the volume is available in snippet view only (despite being rather out of copyright, to say the least). After many valiant attempts at finding the beginning and end of the review, I made a (semi-) educated guess and, crossing my fingers, my toes, and my cats' toes, sent it off to our ILL office. Alas, my semi-educated guess may not have been educated enough, because...apparently, nobody can find either the right volume or the right page. Or what I think is the right volume or the right page, because, you know, I can't determine that from what GB has made available. I suppose I could always trek to Yale or to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary...
As always, I have no objections in theory to GoogleBooks, which ought to be a terrific resource for academics in my underfunded situation. At times, it is a terrific resource. But the sloppy execution is very, very frustrating, and actively undermines GB's scholarly usefulness.
I tried using the "search in this book" feature using some random words from the snippets you linked, and then I realized that if they converted the title page to text, the date might be there. So, searching for "january" yields a header "No. CL - January, 1823, Vol XXII - No I." Searching on "vol" also gets this as the first hit, so it seems like a good bet.
Posted by: oliviacw | June 17, 2008 at 06:31 PM