Aaron has a great list of tips for making sure your tech works at your library. I can not stress #4 enough. If you want to provide public access computing and you don’t have time or money to train the entire public on your weird banjaxed system, make the computers in the library work like the ones they use at home and at work, or provide clear instructions when they don’t.
Category: ‘puters
Google as shill for fee based services
I was consoling a friend yesterday who is an expert in online and database searching. “Everyone wants to hear about Google” he said “my job is becoming all Google all the time” I paraphrase, but we all know how it is. I’ve become increasingly leery of Google lately as they form more and more partnerships with fee-based publishers and vendors and also index their sites for Google’s master index. Can anyone explain to me why a Google search for jessamyn ineligible academy [backstory] nets me five results, one of which is a PDF, with no accompanying “show as HTML” link, and flavortext that is from the article itself [or its abstract] that is not available via the linked site except through a subscription? I’m sure there’s an obvious explanation — like maybe the article was online for free and now it’s not — but why no HTML link, and where did that text come from if it’s not in the linked page? I sent Google a note and trolled their FAQ for details, but all I can deterrmine is that, according to the current FAQ, Google isn’t supposed to do that. I’d love to hear some reasons why it does.
Note from a reader, apparently Google Scholar may crawl full text, and show the abstract in the results, even if it only allows access to a citation. Is it too much to ask that Google have a way to avoid these fee-based results, or mark them somehow? I know how to remove PDFs from my search results, but not how to remove all non-full test sources. Even my library can do that. Then again, they’re not trying to make money off of their search results.
About Google Scholar crawling the full text from certain publisher sites — here’s what a Google spokesperson told us today: “…where we have permission to crawl a doc we will do so, but will only show an abstract.”
LoC Catalog Enrichment Initiative
The titles that libraries are removing to remote storage facilities often are the same ones that have the least rich library records, thus dooming them forever to being less and less frequently accessed. What to do? Enter the Library of Congress Catalog Enrichment Initiative.
users who rely on browsing the library shelf for the purposes of discovery and selection risk missing more and more material that might be of interest. Anecdotal and transaction log evidence has it that few use the browse feature of library online catalogs, not only because it is uninteresting visually but because the information users need in order to select what they want is not present. Until recently there has been no recourse except to the stacks.
google scholar, some more perspectives
Jeremy at Digital Librarian has a few more words about Google Scholar [or as some are calling it, schoogle] that sums up a lot of how I feel about it. [see also: metafilter and slashdot]
We need to stop be re-active, and start being proactive. Our vendors are not going to move us forward in the ways we need; they are reactive to our needs, not to our future. It is very easy to be passive as a community, and to let outside forces map our route. It is much harder to take control of the wheel and do the mapping ourselves. But until we do, the “Where do we want to go today?” will continue to be the rhetorical question that is only answered by the company (or vendor community) that asks it.
google scholar, let the feeding frenzy begin
Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price give us an overview of Google Scholar. A few quick facts to supplement their about page.
- Google won’t say what it does and does not consider “scholarly”. My search turned up lots of books which then allowed me to do either a “library search” [worldcat, natch] or a web search [Google] for the title which I found strange.
- no ads on Google Scholar pages
- Some citation linking, some full text, same old problem of getting a good cite and then hitting a subscription database wall.
Upshot? Don’t know. As a public librarian, I find less and less reason to dig around in scholarly archives. On the other hand, just as I fear that WorldCat searching will become inaccurately synonymous with “find it at a library” I don’t want to see this filling in for “find it in a research paper” Librarians know the difference, does everyone else?