More Than 100 Colleges Work With Google to Speed Campus Users to Library Resources

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

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More than 100 colleges and universities have made arrangements with Google that will give people using the Google Scholar search engine on their campuses more direct access to library materials there.

The arrangements essentially let Google know which online databases the colleges subscribe to, as well as what's in their library catalogs, so that Google Scholar can point users to those campus resources.

This means that, at participating colleges, a Google Scholar search result now includes direct links to online copies of works if the institution has purchased online access to them. The results also include data on printed works in a library's collection.

When a user searches for a journal article and the library has an online subscription to the journal, for instance, a link leads to the online article. If the institution does not have an online subscription but holds a copy on the shelf, Google Scholar points users to the item's location in the library.

Users who are not on participating campuses usually see a link to a journal publisher's Web site rather than to an article's full text.

"This is one of the things that libraries have wanted all along," Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google, said in an interview. "The advantage is fairly substantial."

Mr. Acharya stressed that the company is offering the service free and that it hopes to work with more colleges. Details about the effort are available on Google's Web site. "Our goal is to make it really easy for all libraries to participate," he added.

What does Google get in return?

"More happy users, which is what we look for almost always," Mr. Acharya said. "Usage is what drives everything else around here."

A policy statement on the Google Scholar Web site promises that the company will not share any of the library information, either detailed or in aggregate, with third parties.

Google unveiled its Google Scholar search engine in December, though the tool remains in "beta" mode, meaning that the company is still refining it. Although librarians have praised the service, many have faulted some aspects of the tool.

The biggest complaint is that Google officials refuse to say what materials Google Scholar is indexing, what it considers scholarly, and how expansive the data collection is. Most academic databases provide such information so that librarians know what they're getting and can help users make their searches as comprehensive as possible.

"We're not sharing detailed information at this point," said Mr. Acharya, though he added that Google might eventually do so.

The service remains free of advertising -- at least for now, Mr. Acharya said. "We're focusing on trying to get the functionality to be what we want it to be before focusing on monetization."

Google Scholar is completely separate from Google's pilot project to scan millions of books in five academic libraries, known as Google Print, although the two services might one day be integrated, Mr. Acharya said.

Steven J. Bell, library director at Philadelphia University, said that not all college libraries would be able to join Google Scholar because some, including his own, have not bought the database tools that allow Google to bridge their index and library databases. "This is good for those users whose libraries have the technology," he said.

Mr. Bell also said that while Google Scholar is useful in some instances, it is not appropriate for all research needs. "It sometimes doesn't have complete information," he said. "You can go in and search any topic, and if you know that discipline, you'll probably see that there are things missing -- recent things particularly."

To use the new service, people on participating campuses must select an option on Google Scholar that lets the system know they are on such a campus.

• Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Top Research Libraries (1/7/2005)

• Google Unveils a Search Engine Focused on Scholarly Materials (12/3/2004)