Librarian Way

Google Scholar is in beta. Per their “about” blurb
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

I tried it by typing in the search box: author: credaro humor
It returned one entry for Amanda Credaro’s book with two links: one link called “library search” goes to the WorldCat database with links to my local library; the other link is called “web search” and gives the usual Google Web search results for Web pages about Credaro’s book.

I like Google Scholar. I will leave it to others to discuss the implications in relation to OpenURL, copyright, and whether this is leading to the obsolescence of librarians.

Some links to discussions:

Google Scholar Offers Access To Academic Information
Traffick: Minding the Search Engines’ Business

[Alerted to this via posting on the web4lib e-list.]

On January 7, I mentioned that I discovered an RSS feed for Librarians’ Index to the Internet. Karen Schneider, director of LII, posted that it was not quite ready. Today, on the Web4Lib e-list, she posted that it is now ready, and that they have also prepared a tutorial on using RSS to view the weekly Thursday postings.

Update: LII reorganized. The new link to RSS information is at: Understanding RSS

I was thinking of adding a list of journals I read to the sidebar, but I will instead give you links to where you can find out about journals. The most comprehensive Web site I have found is Peter Scott’s Libdex Library journals, newsletters, and zines. Most links work, though there are a few dead links because the remote sites have changed their URL or the journal went out of business.

One link that moved is for a magazine that I have started reading: Information Today, Inc. - ONLINE Magazine. This magazine has articles about Web issues, such as search strategies, information quality, Web site site management, and topic-specific online resources.
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