Google is moving into the world of libraries in a big way
From the About Page:
“Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.”
Check out scholar.google.com and see what you think. There’s Brief Mention on Reuters, as well as The AP.
Exciting!
I tried it out. I for one am not too worried about the competition. For most of the searches I tried I only got citation results, which would mean I would have to go to the library (either virtually or in person) to get the actual article or book it was pointing me to. Most of the book results had a “search in your library” kind of link to Open Worldcat, which is great–maybe it will cause people to make that leap to associate searching on Google *with* going to the library rather than as an alternative.
What I hope happens from this: people use Google to find scholarly works (yay!) and it entices them to use the library (yay!) and Google’s move encourages vendors to work toward designing simpler interfaces that people will actually want to use (big yay!). People use Google partly because it’s a lot easier than Ebsco or Gale or Wilson databases. It’d be nice if vendors could figure out a way to make library databases a little easier to use. Not everyone wants to be a power searcher!
Re:Exciting!
Please note though–that not all the results are “scholarly”–some are from popular magazines in specific fields. Google’s definition of scholar does not necessarily mean academic or peer reviewed. I do like in the FAQ though how they do refer people to their local academic library.
Google Scholar
The system searches well by surname and initials.
For a complete author search, enter surname and initials in the following form:
“dh kraft” OR “kraft dh”
Re:Google Scholar
For a description of Google Scholar, see:
Sullivan, Danny. Google Scholar Offers Access To Academic Information. Search Engine Watch. November 18, 2004.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3437471
I for one am worried about the competition
Because: It has amazing marketing powers, it’s free, it’s easy to use, and worst of all, it’s good enough most of the time.
It’s nothing new, nothing exciting, and nothing really original, but it’s enough to stop a few more people from thinking they ever need to go to the library again.
For a less-librarian-y perspective…
Slashdot has a thread on Google Scholar (mixed in with some satellite imaging discussion). It’s kind of interesting to hear what the (mostly) non-librarian folks are saying.
Re:I for one am worried about the competition
I think we’re (as a profession) up for the challenge. This appears to be the outgrowth of Google’s discussions about OAI harvesting of institutional repositories, plus more! The citation analysis and clustering looks interesting, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that the basic indexing and abstracting database are where the impact will be felt the most.
“Schoogle” (as it is coming to be known — a combination of “scholar” and “google”) may start pushing the boundaries of what is scholarly literature with the inclusion of OAI-harvested materials out of knowledge repositories and digital collections. Those are not (yet — as far as I know) in traditional databases, so Google’s service is the first shot across the bow of wide-scale “non-traditional” indexing. Will indexing and abstracting services need to pick up that content in order to remain competitive?