The Search Principle blog

1) The advent of Google Scholar may jumpstart scholars into cooperating with the open access repository movement, but that is speculation at this point. So librarians study use data, correlate use to price, and cut every journal that is not essential, while publishers labor over complicated pricing models looking for a way to maintain revenue in a struggling market. More….LJ April 15th

2) “I don’t think [Google Scholar] will compete with traditional A&I databases that are done well, but would definitely compete with any providers that are searching the open web,” observed John McDonald, acquisitions librarian at Caltech. Among the link resolvers involved are SFX by Ex Libris, Article Linker by Serials Solutions, and 1Cate by Openly Informatics. “We would like to work with everybody,” said Anurag Acharya, the principal engineer behind Google Scholar. The pilot is expanding: Serials Solutions in March invited some 200 of its Article Linker clients to join the experiment. More…at Library Journal.

2005 is about the 4 Cs:

1) Cooperation, 2) Commercialization, 3) Containerization and 4) Consolidations.

Cooperation: publishers, advertisers and search partnering around highly contextual audiences, authors and markets (weblogs, wikis and social networks), institutional clients and content technologists, instiutions and public content outlets.

Commercialization: Google Scholar, Rich Data mining technologies, monetizing in open contexts (Reuters.com, BBC/Moreover, CCC, ValeoIP), empower users as aggregators (RSS, desktop search, iPod, Weed, collaboration tools).

Containerization: more options, DRM is the beginning of letting content be useful, but a taboo word, eBooks growing.

Consolidation: Collapse of quality mass print circulation, titles search for identity in a search-centric ad world, huge multiples for key companies that fit (Capital IQ for functions, MarketWatch for ad pages).

Taken from Content Industry Outlook, April 12th, 2005

[ACRL Librarians] ..asked to pick among three choices

From Library Journal, Duplication Is Ubiquitous–Online Databases
By Carol Tenopir — 4/1/2005

Google Scholar is good at uncovering multiple versions of the same (or nearly the same) scholarly article or just multiple places for the same version. For example, for one astronomy article on “brown dwarfs,” Google Scholar offered me the choice of the final published version in Astrophysical Journal on the publisher’s password-protected e-journal system, a free PDF e-print from arXiv.org, and a PDF on an author’s web site.

Duplication is a fact of library life. Metasearch engines, link resolvers, and Google Scholar are revealing multiple sources and sometimes multiple versions. Technology helps us uncover multiple versions. The next step is to make sure we don’t pay multiple times for the same article.