A really interesting conclusion to the talk from Marco Streefkerk – his SWOT analysis of Google Scholar, and some questions for the SFX/MetaLib and wider library communities:

Finally Marco is summing up his feelings about Google Scholar:

Strengths

• Googles reputation and familarity
• Googles speed and user friendliness
• Relevance ranking based on citations
• Extra services
• Multi-disciplinarity

Weaknesses

• Heterogeneousness of the material
• Content is arbitrary
• Risk of dead-ends (users find the citation, but can’t access the full text)
• No expert search
• Anglo-Saxon (English language) focus

Opportunities

• Offer an easy starting point
• Reach new user groups
• Reach new content
• Easy and exper search fully integrated using OpenURL
• Higher usage of valuable (expensive) content

Threats

• Lost sight (control) of indexing policy
• Possibility of censorship
• Users get lost/confused
• User ends up at wrong copy (i.e. doesn’t get to the institutional subscription)
• Print collection becom less visible
• Information skills will disappear
• Library services become less visible

Questions

• Do we want to give full-text prominence
• Can we consider GS as a normal resource
• Is GS a better service than Google when looking for a public domain copies
• Is GS better than citation linker or catalogue for tracking known items
• Is GS better than MetaLib’s QuickSearch
• What’s the P R of GS compared to MetaSearch and native searches
• What’s the commercial drive for GS