The last day of the conference, and Marco Streefkerk from the Netherlands is introducing a discussion about the relationship between Google Scholar and Digital Libraries. The question for users of SFX has been particularly discussed following the introduction of a tool by Ex Libris which allows libraries to register with Google Scholar, indicate to which items they have available in full-text, which in turn allows end users to choose to see links to their institutional OpenURL resolver in the Google Scholar results.

This sharing of data with Google has raised a wide variety of concerns – giving information to Google for ‘free’, the need to keep Google up-to-date with holdings, the question of full-text linking versus general linking. These concerns run alongside the more general concerns about Google and it’s impact on the library world.

At the US SFX/Metalib User Group earlier this year, Anurag Acharya, the principal engineer for Google Scholar presented on Google Scholar and Libraries. Unfortunately we don’t have a representative from Google here today, I hope the discussion is going to be interesting nonetheless.

One of the main issues seems the amount of ‘unknown’ stuff about Google Scholar – I’m not going to go into all this as it has been well covered elsewhere. However, one interesting point made by Anurag in his presentation in the US was that by harvesting library holdings and including OpenURLs, Google is including ‘uncrawled’ URLs for the first time ever, and by offering links to institutional resolvers in it’s results is also a break from Google’s usual practice.

I think our users worry much less about ‘unknowns’ than us. One theme of this week (for me) has been our (professional) over-eagerness to expose all information to our users – sometimes ignorance is bliss. We can clearly see ourselves, as a profession, protecting users (and perhaps more grandly, society in general) from knowledge being limited by specific providers or interest groups, but this may not be what our users want us to spend (all) our time doing.