[Web4lib] google & library catalogs

[Casey Bisson]

Sara,

With more than 80 million Americans searching the web on any given  
day, and major search engines handling five billion searches per  
month, it's hard to imagine not wanting to make library resources  
findable and available to those users.

Google scares and confuses most of us, but I like to describe it as a  
giant OPAC with cataloging rules much like those we're already  
familiar with (even if those rules are different from what we're  
familiar with). Unfortunately, many of our systems are built in ways  
that contradict those rules and make our content difficult to index  
and find.

But it's a challenge we can meet. And considering that a good number  
of those billions of monthly searches could benefit from the  
knowledge available within libraries, it's a challenge that's worth  
our effort.

That's the philosophy, here's some practice:

WPopac[1] is my project to improve the findability of our resources  
by following the rules of the Google Economy[2]. In doing so it's  
already highly ranked for at least one search[3], and the logs show  
that it's getting a large number of hits from search engines for  
terms like "di vinci code" (yes, note the misspelling)  and "assisted  
suicide" along with a few hundred more. How many hits? In the less  
than three months that the prototype has been open to the public,  
it's received more than 550,000 page loads (that count excludes my  
own activity), about as many as official Plymouth State University  
catalog received in 12 months last year.

1: http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133/

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy

3: http://www.google.com/search?q=joe+monninger

Casey Bisson
__________________________________________

e-Learning Application Developer
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/
ph: 603-535-2256


On Apr 10, 2006, at 5:55 PM, Sara Brownmiller wrote:

>
> There is interest here in allowing google (google the search  
> engine, not
> google scholar) to spider, or crawl, our library catalog.  Since many
> students start their research in google, they might identify  
> information
> easily available to them.  It would also help increase exposure to
> materials in our digital collections and our special collections and
> manuscripts.
>
> Has anyone allowed a search engine to crawl their catalog?  What  
> impact
> did it have on the performance?  Does your library have a policy about
> search engines crawling your catalog?  What factors influenced your
> decision?
>
> I would also be very interested in locating some records in google  
> that
> came from a library catalog to see how the user is linked to the  
> catalog
> or to see how the material is identified with a specific institution.
>
> thanks, Sara
>
> Sara Brownmiller			University of Oregon Libraries
> Director, Library Systems 		1299 University of Oregon
> Women's Studies Librarian		Eugene, OR  97403-1299
> 					541/346-2368 (voice)
> snb at uoregon.edu				541/346-3485 (fax)
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