Vol. 2, No. 2 Spring 2005

Director's Report

A prime topic of conversation among academic librarians nationally and here at Loyola/Notre Dame Library (LNDL) over the last three months has been the emergence of Google Scholar as a new search engine that enables users of the Internet to access scholarly and proprietary materials owned by libraries; this capability has not generally been available through the original Google metasearch tool. This technology has the potential to radically change the ways in which faculty and students access library materials. The professional literature has been full of articles, commentaries, and reports focusing on the pros and cons of this new product, particularly on the impact Google Scholar may have on the core business of academic libraries - the provision of scholarly content. “Whatever it does, Google Scholar will be wildly popular with students,” predicts Carol Tenopir, a columnist for Library Journal who comments regularly on online trends. I agree, keeping in mind that the marketplace drives technological adaptations in academic libraries. That is why we have begun to participate in a beta test with Google Scholar, along with some other prominent academic libraries, to assess its impact on campus use. (See Patty MacDonald’s article in this issue for specifics.)

LNDL has been committed to adapting and bringing the latest effective information technologies to faculty and students at both colleges. As part of the new Strategic Plan, the Library promises to make available state-of-the-art information technologies that enable campus users to both conduct research and create academic work products. The primary, overarching goal in information access is to provide the user with one-stop searching and the retrieval of the most relevant results. The expectation among faculty and students will be that those results are full-text documents. In the space below, I would like to give my assessment of the opportunities that Google Scholar presents for our library. For more information, point toward http://scholar.google.com.

The Internet provides capabilities for distributing digital content that have enabled academics to more readily share institutional heritage, both college history and faculty scholarship, than was previously possible through print media. Libraries have begun to develop digital repositories of institutional scholarly materials to permanently archive the knowledge produced at each college and university. (Charles Lockwood, in a related article in this issue, discusses one such pilot project at Loyola College.) This type of project allows the library to shift its focus from only collecting published materials, readily available from commercial sources, to also providing and distributing unique material unavailable anywhere else. Thus, the power of the Web and Google can be utilized to promote an institution’s scholarly reputation while sharing its accumulated knowledge.

For three years, through the ENCompass digital library system, the library has been storing and organizing institutional resources that include dissertations, faculty research, online journals, and now digital media; these materials are being provided through one central resource or repository. We can adapt our system to include both Google and Google Scholar within ENCompass as search options, or allow them to function as portals so that students and faculty members can more easily access a broader spectrum of material. Over the next year, the Loyola/Notre Dame Library will be working in parallel with Google Scholar to further integrate our online catalog holdings, online journal subscriptions, and local scholarly works into one central access point for maximum efficiency, utilizing the strength of the “public” Google search engine (10,000+ servers) for super-quick access to our repository of holdings that matches the needs of the Loyola and Notre Dame curricula.

A frequent question I get from administrators and others is whether the Web will put academic libraries out of business. Let me answer that query in the context of the discussion above.

      

An example of the type of resource that will be available to Web users through Google Scholar is Open WorldCat from the OCLC library cooperative. Open WorldCat will enable a user to search the 57 million bibliographic records and their concomitant holdings in some 9,000 libraries. Currently our holdings and those of other OCLC members are available in WorldCat, which is accessible from our current library Website. A related project through Google Print promises that several major research libraries, including Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford and the New York Public Library, will be working with Google to digitize significant portions of their book collections and make them available on the Web, subject to copyright restrictions—an important caveat. However, acceptance of books in digital form by the general and scholarly public has been slow. Significant works in the public domain, such as a version of the Bible or James Joyce’s Ulysses, would be available to digitize. While chapter and verse of a book of the Old Testament or gospel of the New Testament can be easily read or printed from the Web and therefore practical to access, Ulysses presents a significant problem—it is too long to easily read or print. In fact, any novel would be hard to read or efficiently print from the Web. Research indicates that the maximum number of pages users are willing to read online is between seven and ten. With a Web search results list, the average user scrolls down no more than three screens. The best format for books to adopt in order to be usable on the Web is a structure of discrete chapters organized like a textbook. Extended works of literature, philosophy, and history are difficult to work with online unless students or faculty are interested in only a brief portion of the text.