Google Scholar: thin edge of the wedge?

Information Outlook, Jan, 2005 by Stephen Abram

The University of Toronto has experimented with offering its OPAC through a Microsoft Research Pane, allowing for ubiquitous, browserless access to its collections across its communities. It's a great idea. With so many colleges, universities, and corporate intranets having some degree of control over their users' desktops, laptops, and PDAs for their communities, learners, and staff, this degree of driving users to the best, right, or most cost-effective content and tools is acceptable and desirable.

Federated search tools offer our best chance to imitate Google search breadth and functionality while still directing folks to the tools that have been explicitly chosen to support their research or scholarly efforts. If your enterprise hasn't implemented one yet and you haven't tuned it to the various needs of the niche communities you serve, run, don't walk, to do so.

The OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) group has been working on a Scholar's Portal for the universities of Ontario and, potentially, beyond. It has attracted wide interest. The Ontario Scholars Portal is an initiative of the ontario Council of University Libraries, a consortium of academic libraries across the province of Ontario, to give researchers a single point of electronic access to high-quality published journals from a broad range of disciplines. This site contains 5.7 million articles from close to 5,000 full-text journals published by Academic Press, American Psychological Association, American Chemical Society, Berkeley Electronic Press, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier Science, Kluwer, Oxford University Press, Project MUSE, Springer-Verlag, and John Wiley & Sons. We must move all of our portals to the next generation environment where we meet the needs of communities of users in an effective way while offering more that 'just' information.

I have attended countless presentations on Information Commons and Learning Commons. There are also those great intranets designed for private research. The work here is very good but it's just a foundation. Too often these are discussed primarily in their physical manifestation. We must remind ourselves that most use doesn't happen in the lab, the library or the campus--and it especially doesn't happen in person. It happens from where the researcher happens to be. There is work to be done here. We have a good foundation but we need to build the customized, personalized space that relates to the specific curriculum, research task, or researcher. And let's not forget to put the information coach/librarian at the center of this environment. The foundation is there for many institutions. Time to grow it.

Clearly, there are loads of opportunities for libraries to implement an enterprise vision for scholarly research. I believe that this would be best done collaboratively and by sharing the tools that work with others. Some places to work on this are in the area of customized toolbars, ASP programs to simplify work and search, tuned OpenURL linking to free and for-fee materials, making our repositories even more open-access, and even developing cool "book-marklets" for all.