The Library as Search Engine, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 5, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
At the Technology Forum, a discussion of online archives and their role in academe brought together Daniel Greenstein, associate vice provost for scholarly information and university librarian at the California Digital Library of the University of California; Adam Smith, group business-product manager for the Google Book Search and Google Scholar programs; and Danielle Tiedt, general manager of Windows Live Premium Search. Following are excerpts from their introductory remarks. Scott Carlson, a senior reporter at The Chronicle, was the moderator.
Greenstein: Libraries are really all about access....So when folks from Microsoft and Google want to make books widely accessible, it generates a lot of enthusiasm among a lot of librarians. And it is hard to underestimate the power of that promise of public access to vast quantities of information, especially for public institutions like the Universities of California and Michigan and others that are involved in these activities, whose collections are built with public funds and managed as a public trust....
There are 10 campuses in the University of California, each with its own library. Two or three years ago, the campuses sponsored an investigation into the use of their online catalogs. What we discovered did not surprise us: These cataloging systems are discovery systems that are basically designed according to a conceptual framework developed 40 years ago, and they do not provide what people now expect from searches.
We did all of these user studies, and I remember one showing academics looking for material. They had two screens up on their computers — one the library catalog, and the other Amazon's search inside a book. And they were using Amazon to search inside the book before they made a decision about whether or not they wanted to get it off the shelf.
What folks are actually looking for in a library search is the kind of search and discovery that they are getting on the Internet....
Smith: ...Google Book Search is a historic effort to make the full text of all the world's books searchable. We are doing this to make books as easy to search as Web pages are today....
One of the key attributes of Google Book Search is going to be comprehensiveness. For it to really be a powerful tool, we need to ensure that you can search all the world's books....
Where copyright law allows, we will give users more access [than just a discovery tool]; where it does not, we will show what is effectively an enhanced card catalog....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/06/2007 10:10:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
