Google Scholar beta expands
11 May 2005
More than 100 colleges and universities have reached agreements with Google to allow people using the Google Scholar search engine on their campuses more direct access to library materials on the service.
A small Google Scholar pilot that went live in February allowed around 30 libraries and institutions to provide direct links to articles found in the Google Scholar database.
The pilot is now being expanded and now any library or institution that has the proper link resolving software can link to Google Scholar, a service that the library community has reportedly been requesting since Google Scholar launched last November.
Google has released a help page for the new service and has increased the number of journals and books to which it can link directly. Previously, only articles with DOIs (digital object identifiers) or PMIDs (PubMed unique identifier) would work, but the search engine has now gained access to local hostings information for a specific institution or library, to help provide direct links to articles.
The new upgrade will enable Google Scholar users to take advantage of direct links when they are accessing the database off-campus or via a computer that is not on the campus network.
The Google Scholar results pages has been changed to reflect the searcher's preferred library and provide direct links to any relevant material there. The link will now be found directly next to the title of the article or book and may even appear in a different color than other parts of the entry. Users who are not on participating campuses usually see a link to a journal publisher's website 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."
Google Scholar remains in beta testing mode and the service currently remains free from advertising. It is completely 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.
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