A giant now off my shoulders

I have been reading, thinking and writing lots about academic librarianship and information technology as of late but you won't see the results of this work at this here blog.

That's because I, along with my Scholars Portage partner, Stacy Allison-Cassin, have just released a white paper called Scholr 2.0 on its very own blog to take advantage of the commenting goodness from the CommentPress WordPress theme.

While the purpose of the paper is to generate discussion among the librarians in the consortium that we both belong to, the conversation is open to anyone. Please join in.

Is Google Dead Without Metasearch?

When Roy Tennant spoke to the 2005 SMUG Annual Meeting, the title of his presentation was Google Scholar: Is Metasearch Dead? And I remember that during his talk, Roy searched for the word hamlet in Google Scholar and the first hit returned was Hamlet and the Holodeck.

Now if you search Google Scholar for hamlet, you get this article: Partition testing does not inspire confidence [program testing]. Why? Its by D. Hamlet.

Search plain-vanilla Google for hamlet and the first entry is not surprisingly, from Wikipedia. What's amusing, although not together unsurprising, is the the Spark Notes for Hamlet outranks the actual play. What was surprising to me is that if you search for Hamlet in Google Book Search, you get only 6 hits returned. The University of Windsor has 95 titles that begin with that word. Search WorldCat for Hamlet and you are offered over 13,000 items.

Far from being dead, it looks like Google needs Metasearch.

More evidence against indexes

Van Orsdel and Born report that Google has relentlessly ‘strengthened its claim as the ubiquitous front door to the web and all of its content’, including scholarly content. They found that Google is responsible for referring 56% of the users of HighWire journals, and our own study shows that over 70% of researchers use it routinely to find scholarly content. Moreover, web search engine referrals also appear to account for the vast majority of accesses to institutional repositories.

[Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and their Services]

CrossRef DOIs and SFX

While testing out Google Scholar links with our LibX Firefox Extension, we discovered that there was something amiss with the University of Windsor SFX links that used CrossRef's DOI service.

(OCUL librarians: some of your doi links don't work either:

• Brock
• Carleton
  
• Laurentian
• Ottawa
• Queen's
• Toronto
• Wilfrid Laurier
• York
  

that leaves these libraries who have doi linking enabled:

• Guelph
• Lakehead
  
• McMaster
• Nippising
• Ryerson
• Trent
• UOIT
• Waterloo
• Western
• Windsor)

There are instructions that detail how to set up for doi linking within SFX in the SFX 3.0 User Guide Part Two, section 1. I mention this because after we set up our doi linking, the quality of our Google Scholar SFX links seems to have improved.