So listen, I have this article I need to find. I know the
author's name and the title of the article. How do I find
it.
What's the library response today?
The quickest response is go to google scholar and type in
the
author's name in quotes (or the title in quotes). And click
on
the link you get.
The teaching response is probably much longer, and to be
honest,
with the depth of indexing in google scholar with only a few
major publishers holding out, a teaching response is
probably
going to not do much more than slow the user down, or lose
them
and send them to google rather than try to do it the
"right" way.
Because the teaching response is first you pick a database.
Which
database, well, that depends on what you know about the
article,
the journal it's in, the date of the article. If a
librarian
tries to send me to the library catalog, why should I go
there, I
don't want the JOURNAL, I want the article. If you send me
to a
database, someone has to determine first if the journal with
the
date I want is IN a specific database. And I don't really
NEED to
do that to get to many publisher website articles anymore.
And what do I think if I go to google scholar and find the
article and click on the link and get the article? Well the
most
obvious conclusion is why did I need a library in the first
place
if it's free on the web?
Librarians MIGHT know its not free on the web, that I am
only
getting the article because someone paid the bill, but then
again, other staff in the library might NOT know its because
someone paid the bill. And the end user isn't asking WHY
they got
it; they just know they got it.
So, for a modest proposal. Along with the obligatory
copyright
statement, could publishers please add, so its prints when
the
article prints, an obligatory THIS ARTICLE BROUGHT TO YOU
BUY
UNIVERSITY XYZ?
With otherwise well educated and net savy users, I'm having
a
problem, even with those who know something of what I spend
my
days doing--getting them to believe that if they found it on
google scholar that the Library and University had anything
to do
with them actually getting the article. This is dangerous
for all
sorts of reasons, and the biggest danger is de-funding of
library
purchasing. If an educated net savy user can't tell that
the
article was paid for by someone, we can hear a lot of
"I found it
free on the net" when it is anything but free.
The alternative, an XML file from each university library
with an
open URL resolver set up with Google so the library can be
selected in "Scholar Preferences" is the only
other option for
suggesting to library users that a specific library had
something
to do with getting their article. But that option is too
much for
many libraries to provide: either they don't have a
resolver or
may not have the know-how to create the XML file in the
format
Google needs. That still doesn't tell the casual user the
article
is paid for by a library.
So how about it? Can we get a brought to you by statement
printed
right next to that copyright statement?
Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical
Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
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