Google Scholar
Google has launched Google Scholar, a sub-search engine of Google that will only search "scholarly resources." Trouble is, they don’t tell us what qualifies as scholarly.
Google Scholar has been reviewed in many places already, among them: Research Buzz, Free Range Librarian, librarian.net, and ResourceShelf. The reviews are lukewarm at best, and point to Google’s bastardizing of the article database and "Wal-Mart-izing" of the information world. Shirl Kennedy & Gary Price write:
Might this be a golden opportunity for the library community to tell people — look, we have access to this stuff and MUCH MUCH MORE? We have better ways to search it, and you might not even have to pay for it? Well, yeah…but if what we’ve seen in the past is any indication, this is not going to happen. Maybe this time it will be different. Bottom line: It’s very difficult to compete with the Google marketing machine. In the meantime, we’ll be extremely interested in the response to Google Scholar from fee-based database publishers. Some might ask, are specialized database tools still necessary? Info pros know they are but we sure haven’t done a good job of explaining why.
I want to like Google Scholar, really I do. I just can’t, at least not yet.
November 22nd, 2004 at 6:46 pm
Google Scholar seems to be a rival to academic A&I databases, especially that it does federated searching, which libraries have been working on for a long time.
If students find an article they like which happens to be in a journal eg. Phytomedicine, they will only have access if they subscribe with the publisher, what if this journal is in an aggregator such as Proquest..will Google Scholar know this?
At the college I work at we only have access to Phytomedicine via Proquest (aggregator). If we encourage students to use Google Scholar the federated one-stop shop A&I database (besides all the free stuff you get)they will not be linked to our full-text access as Google will not point to aggregators???. Although if they use LINKOUT in Pubmed they will have access to full-text via Proquest.
Google needs to know multiple points of access available for a subscription document, other than just the publisher, as a lot of libraries use aggregators as their only choice of full-text.
November 23rd, 2004 at 5:19 pm
Agreed on all points. Google will not know if a person has authorized access to a journal. Patrons/students will become frustrated if they try to use Google Scholar and are told they don’t have proper access. This is a major problem with Google Scholar (among several others).