MSU Partners with Google and Innovative Interfaces to Deliver Journal Articles Online
07/19/2005
Have you ever enountered a reference to an article in an academic journal, and then felt frustrated trying to locate an online copy of the complete article? Michigan State University, in partnership with MSU’s online catalog vendor, Innovative Interfaces, and with Google, is working to address that problem. The project will allow members of the MSU community to find journal articles via Google, and then read the full text of journals that are part of the university’s online collection.
Google Scholar indexes scholarly material – i.e. academic journals — at the article level. In the past, a library patron would find the article they wanted, but not know whether they would have access to the article. Libraries must pay license fees to publishers in order to provide their faculty, staff and students access to scholarly materials. Now, with this project, a library patron will perform a search using Google Scholar and see a hyperlink to the online versions of those articles that come from journals that MSU owns or licenses.
As part of this project, MSU will provide information about those resources that MSU owns or licenses. Google in turn will add MSU’s “holdings” information to the Google Scholar index, thus enabling Google to offer a link to the full text of any article that MSU has in its collection.
To accomplish this, Innovative Interfaces has developed software that will generate the MSU holdings in a format that Google can recognize and create the links. This software has been installed at Michigan State University and Oregon State and both libraries are in the process of making their own links available in Google Scholar now.
MSU is still working with its partners to fully deploy the new service, but you can get an idea for the process by visiting http://scholar.google.com and doing a search for an area of interest — say, biocatalysis. For every “hit” that corresponds to holdings at MSU, you’ll see an extra link that says “MSU Holdings.” Click on that link. If MSU has the article online, you’ll be linked to the database and the article in question. For journal articles not online at MSU, you’ll be linked to the Magic catalog where you can locate the physical journal copy.
This project reverses the normal method of finding full-text materials. In the past, a patron would find an article in an index and then either search the online catalog to see if it is owned by the library, or search the publisher ’s site to see if they have access. In this case, Google Scholar is taking a different approach–they are crawling the file created by this new development software. With that model Google Scholar can check the library’s holdings before offering the link. This allows Google Scholar to make the link more prominent if the library has clear holdings for the cited materials. The patron will find out quicker if they have access, and be taken directly to the article in some cases, without having to leave Google Scholar. This is a more seamless approach for patrons and should make the research process much easier.
Librarians do remind patrons that not all materials will be indexed by Google Scholar or be available in full-text, so patrons conducting in-depth research should consult with a reference librarian.
