Saturday, March 04, 2006

British Library documents via Google Scholar?!

Sorry about, ágain a post about what Google is doing ..... but i can not ignore this. Dean Giustini mentioned it in his blog. It seems that the British Library has joined forces with Google Scholar to get desktop delivery of articles to researchers, students and academics. "In fact, GS searches now link to BL’s document service. Results are matched against library holdings and when a match is made, searchers can click for British Library Direct - direct.bl.uk. You'll need a credit card - BL charges in pounds sterling!"
My experience with the BL's document service is that they are very expensive, slow and only used by us as a last resort. Ok, doctors often do not care about the costs, but they also could easily order articles that are freely available for them via their libraries, via free resources or just much cheaper via for instance Subito Libraries should ALL make their Print AND Fulltext holdings available to/via Google Scholar and connect the users to you delivery system. Dean askes himself if: "Could the National Library of Medicine (NLM) strike a similar deal with Google Scholar? What a great way to link GS and NLM's collections, via Loansome Doc." For European Libraries this would be great too, but not with Loansome Doc.

No comments: