Category: ‘puters

Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price give us an overview of Google Scholar. A few quick facts to supplement their about page.

• Google won’t say what it does and does not consider “scholarly”. My search turned up lots of books which then allowed me to do either a “library search” [worldcat, natch] or a web search [Google] for the title which I found strange.
• no ads on Google Scholar pages
• Some citation linking, some full text, same old problem of getting a good cite and then hitting a subscription database wall.

Upshot? Don’t know. As a public librarian, I find less and less reason to dig around in scholarly archives. On the other hand, just as I fear that WorldCat searching will become inaccurately synonymous with “find it at a library” I don’t want to see this filling in for “find it in a research paper” Librarians know the difference, does everyone else?

Why doesn’t the library community band together to do some collaborative software development and free ourselves from vendor tyranny? If you just like to watch, keep an eye on the open-ils blog as they work through some of the decisions involved in creating a large library automation system.

One of the search engines that ALA is contemplating the replace the one on their site is the Google search appliance. I’m still mucking about with the various options, but it seems that there are definite benefits to having a search engine that many if not most ALA members (and the public) already know how to use…. or do they? Tara links to Google’s cheet sheet and then adds a few additional syntaxes you might not know about.

Michael Stephens has an article in Library Journal Technoplans vs. Technolust about the difference between being a gear fetishinst and having a solid technology plan.

I just posted a short chat interview with Matt Haughey the Creative Director of the Creative Commons project about copyright and librarians and music.