100 Colleges Sign Up With Google to Speed Access to Library Resources.

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Author: Young, Jeffrey R.

MORE THAN 100 colleges and universities have arranged to give people using the Google Scholar search engine on their campuses more-direct access to library materials.

Google Scholar is a free tool that searches scholarly materials on the Web and in academic databases (http://scholar.google.com).

The new arrangements essentially let Google know which online databases the colleges subscribe to, as well as what is in their library catalogs, so that Google Scholar can point users to those campus resources.

As a result, at participating colleges, a Google Scholar search result now includes direct links to online copies of works if the institution has purchased online access. The results also include data on printed works in a library's collection.

For instance, when a user searches for a journal article and the library has an online subscription to that journal, a link leads to the online article. If the institution does not have an online subscription but holds a copy on the shelf, the results point users to the item's location.

Users who are not on participating campuses usually see a link to a journal publisher's Web site rather than to an article's full text.

"This is one of the things that libraries have wanted all along," Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google, said in an interview. "The advantage is fairly substantial."

He emphasized that the company was offering the service free, and that it hoped to work with more colleges. "Our goal is to make it really easy for all libraries to participate," he said.

In return, Google gets "more happy users, which is what we look for almost always," Mr. Acharya said. "Usage is what drives everything else around here."

A policy statement on the Google Scholar Web site promises that the company will not share any of the library information, either detailed or in aggregate, with third parties.

The company unveiled its Google Scholar search engine in December, although the tool remains in "beta" mode, meaning that it is still being refined. Librarians have praised the new service, but many have faulted some aspects of it.

The biggest complaint is that Google officials refuse to say what materials Google Scholar is indexing, what it considers scholarly, and how extensive the data collection is. Most academic databases provide such information so that librarians know what they are getting and can help users make their searches as comprehensive as possible.

"We're not sharing detailed information at this point," said Mr. Acharya, though he said Google might eventually do so.

The service remains free of advertising--at least for now. "We're focusing on trying to get the functionality to be what we want it to be before focusing on monetization," he said.

Google Scholar is separate from Google's pilot project to scan millions of books in five academic libraries, known as Google Print, although the two services might one day be integrated, Mr. Acharya said.

Steven J. Bell, library director at Philadelphia University, said not all college libraries would be able to join Google Scholar because some, including his own, have not bought the database tools that allow Google to bridge its index and library databases. "This is good for those users whose libraries have the technology," he said.

Mr. Bell also said that while Google Scholar is useful in some instances, it is not appropriate for all research needs. "It sometimes doesn't have complete information," he explained. "You can go in and search any topic, and if you know that discipline, you'll probably see that there are things missing--recent things particularly."

To use the new service, people at participating colleges must select an option on Google Scholar that lets the system know they are on such a campus.

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By Jeffrey R. Young