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Monday, August 27, 2007

New developments at Google Scholar

Barbara Quint, Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya, Information Today NewsBreaks, August 27, 2007.  Excerpt:

...[A]nnouncements about changes in the constantly evolving service seem to occur rarely and with little ballyhoo. For example, did you know that Google Scholar has launched its own digitization project, separate from the high-profile Google Book Search mass digitization? Or what about the new Key Author feature? Or the expansion into non-English languages and non-U.S./Western European content? A conversation with Anurag Acharya, the designer and missionary behind Google Scholar, helped us catch up on the latest developments.

As to how much content Google Scholar now reaches, Acharya couldn’t say, beyond the understatement, “pretty large.” However, he described the growth in the volume of users as exponential. Arrangements with major content providers continue to expand Google Scholar’s reach. Acharya mentioned that Google was just completing the indexing of Elsevier’s Science Direct collection, with several new publishers on the horizon....

Representing another effort to reach currently inaccessible content, Google Scholar now has its own digitization program. “It’s a small program,” said Acharya. “We mainly look for journals that would otherwise never get digitized. Under our proposal, we will digitize and host journal articles with the provision that they must be openly reachable in collaboration with publishers, fully downloadable, and fully readable. Once you get out of the U.S. and Western European space into the rest of the world, the opportunities to get and digitize research are very limited. They are often grateful for the help. It gives us the opportunity to get that country’s material or make that scholarly society more visible.” ...

[T]his NewsBreak may represent the main public announcement of the existence of the Google Scholar digitization effort. No press release appeared describing the service....

However, a great many scholarly publications digitized by Google will not enter Google Scholar. Google Book Search has masses of back issues of journals digitized, as the bound volumes of periodicals come into the program from the stacks of its library partners. However, the metadata that Google Scholar needs to identify specific articles in specific issues does not exist and, at least for now, Acharya has no plans to create it. Searchers will have to remember to make a second search in Google Books, particularly for older journal content. However, scholarly book citations from Google Book Search do sometimes appear in Google Scholar search results.

Not only does Google Scholar continue to expand its content, but also its search features....

PS:  I covered Google Scholar’s journal digitization project in December 2006, but admittedly without a public announcement from Google.