Champ

The internet giant is out to make life easier for students/scholars. If you don’t want to spend hours browsing through heaps of books and journals in a library, here is an option for you — Google Scholar.

Google Scholar searches “scholarly literature” such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, pre-prints, abstracts and technical reports.

Plus, it also promises to open the ‘invisible content’. The Google Inc has joined hands with publishers of the specialised journals. While earlier the content of these journal was only available to subscribers, with the new Google service, all surfers can access it.

However, there is a catch: Not entire content of the subscription protected text will be available to surfers. The Google scholar will just extract a summary…if one wants the entire text, one has subscribe to the respective journal.

“Further, responding to complaints of research librarians, Google scholar has expanded its usefulness for campus-based users. Its new institutional access feature links Google Scholar users to electronic versions—and print —of journals accessible through library collections. Any library using OpenURLs and meeting Google Scholar’s conditions can join. Google offers the institutional link resolving at its usual attractive rate—free. Within days of the announcement, 150 libraries had joined.” (careo.elearning.ubc.ca). A similar offer has also been made to publishers.

The services created Google Scholar has revolutionised the human quest for information and its access to the way we access information. However, at the same time it puts a question mark over the future of our normal libraries.

Consequently, the role of Information Literacy has also come under scanner. The pendulum is swinging, but it is almost a lost cause. “The war is over. Google won” — goes the punch line. (This blog does not gives the option to hyper-link a headline, so scroll down and Check out “Some thoughts on ACRL”).

As expected, googal scholar has triggered a huge scholarly debate over the complete domination of the
Silicon Valley based company over the WWW. Studies are being done to review Google Scholar. The site is being compared with other web options available.
1. ATLA vs. Google Scholar

2. Google Scholar vs Native Search

Despite debates and comparisons, there is little doubt that google is marching ahead. Web is filled with librarians’ confessions where they admit that their favourite place for searching scholarly literature has moved to google.

With librarians’ moving to google, I think we have little reason to hold ourselves back, so guys lets hop on to the new service.

With Google Scholar, the search giants have started a new ranking system. I’m not sure how it works…does anyone knows…and is it effective?

PS: I quite liked the punch line of the Google Scholar “Stand on the shoulders of giants”.

Check out some Blogs on Googal Scholar:
1. UBC Google Scholar Blog
2. On Google Scholar