Paleonet: Using Google Books

[Mike Everhart]

All,

Many of you may know about this already, but I thought I would share 
something about Google Books that is new to me....

Clicking on this URL will get you to the Google Books site....

http://books.google.com/books

Lots of books... and a ton of LIFE magazines to browse through... (a fun 
way to waste some time).

.... but did you know that you can also look at digitized copies of 
dozens of scientific journals?  .... and go back to Volume 1 of the 
American Journal of Science, The American Naturalist, Science, Quarterly 
Journal of the Geological Society of London, etc?..... That's way 
back.... to the early 1800s and beyond in some cases.... My oldest 
download to date is:

*Camper, P. 1786. Conjectures relative to the petrifications found in 
St. Peters Mountain near Maastricht. Philosophical Transactions of the 
Royal Society London. 76:443-456, pls. 15-16.*


If you are looking for an old article, just input the name of the 
journal.... after it pops up, usually at the top of the column, select 
"Full view only" at the left side of the screen, then click on "More 
editions" under the journal title....

You should be able to go back to the volume / year that you want using 
the Google "next" feature at the bottom of the page.

Once you've found the volume, you can either go to index, or the page 
number of the article..... In many cases, in the index the article 
titles in blue are linked to the article

Of course, you can read it online if you want, or download the whole 
volume as a pdf, but if you want to just save a copy of the paper, use 
the "Clip" function at the top right side of the screen...

Highlight the page you want to copy, and a small box will be 
superimposed on the page.... If you copy the URL for the IMAGE, you 
should get something that looks like this:

http://books.google.com/books?id=f6IUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR1&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1otoutqlMCKzFMhrejXLDnQhZLbQ&ci=92%2C105%2C774%2C1124&edge=0

... you can paste it into your browser, click on it, and then see a .png 
image file of the page that you can save.....

The png files (some figures are .jpgs) can be pasted into a program like 
Adobe InDesign (or PageMaker) to create a pdf...... The pdfs are usually 
fairly small in size.

.... Sounds a bit complicated at first, but the process is really easy 
once you get into it... I've created more than a hundred pdfs regarding 
the paleontology work done in Kansas and elsewhere during the 1800s....

Note that tracking down some older articles can be something like 
solving a puzzle.... Papers are often cited by the date that they were 
presented orally, not by the date that the journal was actually published.

Regards


Mike Everhart
Adjunct Curator of Paleontology
Sternberg Museum of Natural History
Fort Hays State University, Hays, KS
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