[Web4lib] Science Direct via Google

[Bob Duncan]

On Thu, 05 Jul 2007 14:12:10 -0400
  Thomas Dowling <tdowling at ohiolink.edu> wrote:
> On 7/5/2007 1:49 PM, B.G. Sloan wrote:
> 
>>  
>>   From a brief article by Peter Brantley of O'Reilly Radar:
>>    
>>   "Elsevier has now undertaken to have the majority of its SD journals 
>>(those for which it holds or can obtain the copyrights) crawled and indexed 
>>by Google. Both Google and Google Scholar are slowly incorporating an 
>>increasing amount of this content, and these data will be appearing in search 
>>results for Google and Google Scholar."
>> . . . 
> Like other publishers and aggregators, they'll probably find that their
> citations never (well, hardly ever) make the top of the list in Google
> proper.  Regardless, I hope they take some responsibility for getting
> users to the right link resolver whenever possible.

And I hope that someday Google Scholar will abandon its idiotic (IMO) practice 
of generating OpenURL links based on a library's holdings.  The most 
appropriate resource for patrons of smaller libraries is often the ILL request 
form that a link resolver provides when the publication is not in the 
library's holdings.  But since GS won't generate an OpenURL link for our 
patrons unless we tell GS that we have access to the journal, our patrons 
often don't see any link resolver in GS results.

If GS would join the rest of the OpenURL world and generate OpenURLs for all 
results and let those of us who configure the link resolvers determine what's 
appropriate for our users, the news that they will start crawling Science 
Direct would be welcomed; but since we have very limited access to Science 
Direct titles, this falls in the not-so-good news column for me.

Bob Duncan

~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
David Bishop Skillman Library
Lafayette College
Easton, PA  18042
duncanr at lafayette.edu
http://www.library.lafayette.edu/