With so much comment flying around various lists and blogs I thought this 2 page ALA summary might be a welcome change for interested people to consult.
And continuing on the Google theme here is another recently published comparison between Google Scholar and a range of databases.
‘Google Scholar Search Performance: Comparative Recall and Precision’ William H Walters. Portal : Libraries and the Academy. Baltimore: Jan 2009. Sorry for lack of direct url but we have access via Project Muse database.
From the abstract ‘This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Google Scholar and 11 other bibliographic
databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS
International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX),…’
Dave Clemens
this is one of my favourite library journals. There’s also an interesting article on facebook in this issue.
Should we add GoogleScholar to our A-Z list of databases?
Janette
I think it’d be a good idea to add Google Scholar to the A-Z – it would let us add a note explaining how to set it up to show which articles the Library provides access to.
Re the Facebook article, it discusses the situation where a library sets up an account almost as if it a person. Facebook has added a way for institutions to set up a profile page which Facebook members can become "fans" of – this doesn’t have the same "friending" issues. A lot of libraries have taken this up though I think there’s still a lot using the old method too.
Deborah
A couple of subject guides have included GS in their list of databases (see Geological Sciences Databases) so it is easy enough to add it to A-Z also. This wasn’t done at the time because GS was seen to need a caution re usage.
Deirdre