OK, I haven’t had a chance to try it from off campus, but we’re introducing Google Scholar to our EZProxy server in the hopes that if we authenticate our students first, they will be able to access the content we have licensed when using Google Scholar. Of course this would mean the student would have to come to our library page first to go in to Scholar through our door.
Here’s an idea though. What if libraries were able to work with Google to provide them with some proxy information, and what if Google allowed folks to use their appropriate proxy info right from the Google Scholar page? Here are some images I slapped together to illustrate what I have in mind:
Right on the front page would be a question along the lines of, "Are you affiliated with a College or University?" 
An off campus student or faculty member would then be taken to a page that would look something like this:
The student would either drill down geographically, or (why not go to the strength of the tool) search for and find his/her home institution. Select it, and from that time forward their proxy information would be correctly appended (or prepended, I guess would be correct with EZProxy…) and any search results would know the student was allowed acccess to Ingenta or whatever, just as if they had been sitting on campus. I think the student would have to authenticate before searching in order for this to work.
The marketing twist – since Google Scholar knows which institution the student is affiliated with, the full access links should read, "access provided by the University of Calgary Library" or something similar so the students are well aware that this stuff isn’t really free. And of course this would also allow the Library Search bit to work as it does for the on-campus folks.
It might work something like this:
And that’s how I think it could work. Aside from the bit about getting Google to go along with it, what am I missing?
Comments
14 Responses to “How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students”
The Distant Librarian: How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students
A very interesting posting by Paul Pival (The Distant Librarian) about introducing Google Scholar to their EZProxy server at the University of Calgary. How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students…
Thanks for this post (and the one that followed)! You’ve described in some detail something I had been pondering in a discussion board at school – whether it’d be terribly difficult for Google to work with libraries to provide exactly this sort of access that’s available through the library services.
One thing I might add – as a part-time Syracuse student, I get access to a large number of databases and articles through Syracuse’s library. However, I’m also a member of a couple professional organizations, and some of the research articles published by these organizations are not available for free via Syracuse. Assuming Google is able to crawl these articles, I would like not only to provide Schoogle with my SU proxy information, but also the appropriate SLA information to allow me to access their online pubs, and the proxy/login information for any number of other scholarly/professional repositories that are not covered by my library but to which I have access. Just as you’ve illustrated above, I’d expect each result to indicate the access level I have, and through which mechanism (university, organization membership, corporate membership, etc.)
Thanks for the thoughts Beth. I guess I didn’t put it in my original post, but I had thought this location information would be saved, probably with a cookie, and there would of course be the option to change your location (affiliation) at any time. Perhaps Schoogle could remember multiple affiliations (personalization, anyone? A9?) and allow you to quickly switch back and forth between them, but if we’re talking proxy servers I don’t *think* you could search two (or more) simultaneously, though I may be wrong.
‘Cause what if your two affiliations were both running EZProxy… You’d only be able to log in to one each time…
This would require you to run any search twice, which while workable, is less than optimal.
Interesting problem. I guess that’s always been a problem with multiple affiliations though. At least this way you’d be getting a uniform interface, which maybe is a step in the right direction.
Nice post and possible solutions explored. One idea that might work is working with Google on customization options.. so, we’d have “My Google Scholar,” and allow users to a) customize to work with their Library’s databases (might be possible) and b) allow users to add personal databases and access information into the portal.
Best,
DrWeb
The Distant Librarian: How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students
Link: The Distant Librarian: How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students. Monday, November 22, 2004 How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students OK, I haven’t had a chance to try it from off campus, but we’re introducing Goog…
The Distant Librarian: How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students
The Distant Librarian: How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students.Monday, November 22, 2004How to make Google Scholar work for the distance studentsOK, I haven’t had a chance to try it from off campus, but we’re introducing Google Schola…
Google scholar
Il y a une semaine environ, Google lançait son outil de recherche de publications scientifiques, Google scholar (encore en version bêta et uniquement en Anglais).
Les blogs en ont bien fait l’écho, et l’information s’est diffusée rapidement. Mais…
Hi Paul,
Don’t forget us folks working in corporate, special and government libraries. We’d like to help our end-users access licensed resources in a similar way. The wording might be rewritten to include us too. Thanks.
I go to Rutgers University and in order to access the library databases off campus we need to connect through a proxy. Since I already have my browser set up to do that, if I click on a link in Google Scholar and Rutgers has access to the content, the proxy connection box pops up, and I can directly access the content. So if your library is set up to work through proxies rather than just password authentication, I imagine it should work.
And don’t forget OpenURL linking: once Google Scholar knows how to generate OpenURLs (it will, won’t it? please?), it should know the base url of my institution’s resolver, so that the appropriate copy problem goes away.
Maybe the best way for Google to handle the EZproxy requirement to generate URL prefixes is to use the EZproxy OPAC Proxying option. Each institution would need to set up an EZproxy config to make this work, and Google would provide a proxied URL to Google Scholar for individual institutions. Clicking on this URL from within GS would transparently launch an EZproxy session and the URLs within GS would automatically be rewritten to be proxied URLs. Authentication would be required only at the point of access.
Google Scholar and OpenURL
One of the problems with Google Scholar is that the links shown in the search results point at the articles at the publishers’ website. That is useless when you don’t have a subscription there. It does happen frequently that your library does give acce…
The Distant Librarian: How to make Google Scholar work for the distance students
A very interesting posting by Paul Pival (The Distant Librarian) about introducing Google Scholar to their EZProxy server at the University of Calgary. And even more enticing are his ideas about working with Google to create a more streamlined GS/EZPro…
Good post
Kristal