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Author: jessamyn
Clinton Library opens, umbrellas confiscated
Some photos of the new Clinton Library.
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?
is it just that we don’t like to work together? why don’t we build an OPAC?
Why doesn’t the library community band together to do some collaborative software development and free ourselves from vendor tyranny? If you just like to watch, keep an eye on the open-ils blog as they work through some of the decisions involved in creating a large library automation system.
free range librarian looks at Yahoo/OCLC toolbar
Karen gives her feedback about the YahoOCLC toolbar gadget.
I wouldn’t use Yahoo-see-el-see, based on this experience, because I don’t trust it. I’ll start with my local catalog and go from there. Still, in the realm of hot new cool tools, kinda fun. Though if users believe this is a trustworthy resource, but it’s not leading people to YOUR local catalog, beware, beware. “Yahoo says it’s not there!” Go ahead and talk yourself blue in the face about how your catalog works… it won’t matter.