FW: [Web4lib] Science Direct via Google

[Michael L. Champion]

For fear of repeating myself too often, I think Bob's comment begs the
question: Why count on Google to index or provide OpenURL links to
content?  Wouldn't it be more appropriate if we, as librarians,
collected the metadata from all these services and placed them in our
individual catalogs along with our individual collection of metadata
regarding our physical holdings?  Then we could control which links our
patron's see, who or who does not get access, and the linkage between
metadata records as well.

There have been a number of projects that have shown this to be not only
possible but relatively simple to accomplish technically.  The TOCROSS
project is of particular interest
(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_pals2/project_tocro
ss.aspx) but a web crawler designed to collect metadata, much as Google
does, and load it into the catalog would work as well.

There are some technical and workflow issues that would have to be
worked out but nothing "show stopping."

I could even see a multi-level licensing agreement with vendors that
would provide permissions to get just the metadata, just access, or even
allow secondary holdings using a project like LOCKSS
(http://www.lockss.org).  That way we might have the metadata for those
items we can only get via ILL or Document Delivery services.

I have been thinking about this a lot and can discover no compelling
reason why we should not be doing this and only excuses as to why we are
not currently doing so.  I would greatly appreciate other people's
thoughts on this subject.  

I am often mistaken and rarely afraid to admit it. :-)

Michael Champion
Head, Information Technology Services
Lake Villa District Library


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Bob Duncan
Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2007 12:08 PM
To: Thomas Dowling; web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Science Direct via Google

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/
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