Department of things that make utterly no sense: GoogleBooks, snippet view, and the public domain

1.  I have a citation in Victorian Reformations to double-check.  It's in The Month, one of the leading Victorian Catholic magazines, and appeared in 1866.  Unfortunately, the copy I used is in the Huntington Library, which happens to be on the other side of the country; while I wouldn't mind being in California right now (it is, after all, thirty degrees outside), I fear that I can't really justify the plane ticket.

2.  Luckily, as a general rule, things that appeared in 1866 are now out of copyright.  Perhaps someone at Google scanned the right volume!

3.  Oh look, someone did.

4.  Unfortunately, that general rule about things that appeared in 1866 does not apply here.  Google only has the volume in snippet view, because of copyright issues.  If someone actually holds copyright, they would appear to be in a state of advanced undeath.  A vampire, perhaps?

5.  I contemplate the outcome of a vampire copyright suit, and decide that it might turn on whether or not the vampires sparkle.

6.  I go to archive.org, which has other volumes of The Month, but not this one.  Curses, foiled again, etc.

7.  I go to Hathitrust.org, which has the right volume of The Month.  It's the volume of The Month scanned by Google! Which Hathitrust.org has in full view! Because they know that something published in 1866 is now in public domain!

8.  I proceed to dance around the room in celebration, before remembering that I now have papers to grade.

In all seriousness, this is now the umpteenth time that I've found a scan with a Google watermark that cannot be accessed in full text on Google, but can elsewhere.  This makes genuinely no sense to me, but presumably makes sense to Google.   

Comments

[tatiana.larina]

The same thing happens at archive.org - they have full scans of books scanned by Google which are not available on GoogleBooks. On Google Books there is somewhere an option where you can report that the book is in public domain and should therefore be available in full, but it's so well buried that in most cases I don't have time to look for it.

Oh, and thanks to you I've learnt about HathiTrust. A great option when both Archive.org and GoogleBooks fail.

[Mr Punch]

Does this perhaps have to do with the library from which the Google scan came? Harvard, for example, formerly participated in Google's project, but withdrew.

[Brian Ogilvie]

I think it has more to do with the fact that Google Books started without a single bibliographer on its staff. They do an abysmal job with periodicals, serials, and multi-volume works. And the publication date is determined by an algorithm, resulting in ridiculous results, such as this catalogue of medical books from Quaritch, published (according to Google) in 1589: http://books.google.com/books?id=hrsEAQAAIAAJ