Google Scholar

[Scott Drone-Silvers]

Steve, et al;

I don't want to make light of anyone's concerns at all. We do need to take
Google Scholar seriously. I still think that we need to have a delegation
approach Google to talk about our concerns, and to propose an alliance that
makes this a more useful product. But I think that we all need to take a
deep breath and think hard about this - especially those of us who report to
deans/provosts/VPs who are getting reports of this from the Chronicle, the
NYT, and elsewhere.

My AVP called me about this last Friday, after she had read the Chronicle
online article. She is a very technology-oriented person, and she has some
interesting ideas about how technology will change things in the library.
She told me that she had tried GS out, and that she wasn't overly impressed
with the "scholarly" nature of some of the resources - and she also noted
the fact that she couldn't get much of the content (we don't have JSTOR).
She found it frustrating that she could see the indexing / abstracting, but
was going to have to fork over money to buy an article without being able to
read it fully to determine if it is really useful to her. My response to her
is that I don't see many people willing to do that. This isn't iTunes, where
if someone downloads something that turn out not to need, it only costs them
$.99. 

Therein lies the crux of GS's limitations to my mind (not all of them, but
one of the most significant). Unless the publishing market changes far more
drastically and far faster than I can imagine it, I can't see that many
publishers giving away free access to their full text anytime soon (oh, some
will, and initiatives like Creative Commons and PubMed will add to this).
They may want independent scholars (or anyone else) to buy articles on a
per-article basis to make some more money. But IMHO, they aren't going to
gamble on regular Joe/Jane Student forking over their dough in that model
and abandon licensing content to libraries. YMMV, of course.

Maybe this is where we need to step in to work with Google. If we can set up
a way to configure GS so that it creates a link to our libraries where  our
students can obtain full text of articles retrieved through GS, then it
seems to me that we are helping ourselves and our students while
simultaneously hitching ourselves to Google's marketing star for the
service. 

For a practical example of the "this isn't  iTunes" argument,  I keyed a
search on "interlibrary loan" into GS. Among the results retrieved was a
2000 article from New Library World that was available FT from Ingenta - for
$25. A search for the title in my online periodical holding found the issue
available from one of my subscription databases - which would cost the
student the $15 in library fees that we collect each semester, but would let
them get as many FT articles for that $15 as they want - plus reference
databases, et cetera. Now, if I didn't have the journal/article in question,
then we can still offer the ILL option. If they don't want to wait, then
they can buy it on their own. Some will do so - but I don't think it will
ever be enough to make publishers stop licensing content to libraries

The question is, what technologies will be required of individual libraries
to make such an arrangement work? Will we all need to get an Open URL
resolver? If so, there's another $10 large a year - but it would probably be
worth it.. Someone with more technical knowledge will need to step up there
and explain how that might work.

Just my $.04. Anyone else have any bright ideas?


Scott Drone-Silvers
Director of Library Services
Lake Land College
5001 Lake Land Blvd.
Mattoon, IL 61938
(217) 234-5338 / FAX (217) 234-5533
Web Page: http://www.lakelandcollege.edu/library/