Ab’s Blog

This little note was squeezed into the middle of an All My Eye entry about Ingenta at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

We’ve been working closely with Google for over 2 years now, and the latest development is that we will be making our library holdings data available to Google Scholar’s Library Links program.

The full press release is dated September 25 and I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before today.

So scholars within an institution’s IP range (on campus or using proxied Scholar links) will get appropriate copy links to Ingenta content without an intermediate OpenURL layer; Ingenta presumably gets its contented highlighted in some way; and Google gets data about library holdings, which it may already have in the case of libraries who participate in the Library Links program. The downside is that the scholar may have no idea why he or she is entitled to the full text, unless the library ponies up for IngentaConnect Premium, which adds branding to the Ingenta site.

It is unclear to me what the user will see for content the library doesn’t license and how the distinction will be made. All in all, an interesting development and one to watch.

At least library catalogs aren’t the only search tools with problems:

When I search for “A Food Website Spiced with Attitude”, the NYT’s search engine should take a wild, off-the-wall guess about what article I might be looking for, and not return zero results.

At This is Broken

An interesting discussion ensues concerning what search engines should and shouldn’t be expected to do.

Microsoft has launched Windows Live Academic. According to the site it “currently indexes content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas.”

The results interface has some interesting features, including a split panel that shows results on the left and an abstract or more info about one citation on the right, as well as a slider that allows you to see more or less information about each citation and therefore more or fewer citations in the results list.