Month: November 2004

google scholar, some more perspectives

Posted on by jessamyn

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.

ranganathan’s laws, updated

Posted on by jessamyn

My pal Fred from ibiblio said he met Lennart Björneborn this week. I checked out his site and he’s adapted Ranganathan’s five principles of library science to the web world. Even though they are copyrighted [?], I’ll include them here:

  • Links are for use – the very essence of hypertext
  • Every surfer his or her link – the rich diversity of links across topics and genres
  • Every link its surfer – ditto
  • Save the time of the surfer – visualizing web clusters and small-world shortcuts
  • The Web is a growing organism

google scholar, let the feeding frenzy begin

Posted on by jessamyn

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?