More on Google Book Spider
5 Sep. 2007
Poking around Google Books a little more, discovered the following path from which metadata can be snagged to compile full details of item:
On results page, click on "about this book." Yeah. That's it. Duh. Of course, you still can't actually search on metadata, but at least it's there...you could automate a search and retrieve everything for certain keywords, then use the metadata to do a secondary "weeding."
Or, you could do this:
Google Books, search only "full view" to find complete e-books ->
On results page follow "Find this book in a library" for OCLC results ->
OCLC site, retrieve metadata for object.
Oops, is my face red. Sort of. At the same time, really, if the metadata is there, if each record is already tied to an OCLC record, is it really necessary to prevent users from searching the fields directly? Still, at least there seem to be workarounds.