I missed this announcement it seems. No libraries outside the US are involved in the beta – are any of you? Can you share your experience and/or some screenshots on how the final link is made?
A leading library supplier is allowing the Internet’s top search
engines to index its previously restricted reference material, hoping
to open a new online avenue that transports more traffic to local
libraries.
About 5,000 public, academic and military libraries nationwide are
participating in the pilot program announced Thursday by Thomson Gale
Link: Library materials given to search engines.
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One response to “Library materials given to search engines”
Here’s the email I sent to my fellow Reference folks here at work. I haven’t made up my mind about this yet.
“Gale has announced (http://www.gale.com/servlet/PressArchiveDetailServlet?articleID=200506_accessmy) AccessMyLibrary, an open search of Gale’s Premium content. By going to http://accessmylibrary.com/, you can do a search on some portion of Gale’s databases. When you click on a title in the results list, you get an abstract and an option to log in via “Your Library”. You drill down geographically to the point where you select the library you have an account with, then you can log in. I was able to log in with just my ID number–NO PASSWORD! Once you log in, you don’t have to log in again to get another article. (The Terms of Use indicates that this is a permanent cookie. So far I’ve closed and reopened Internet Explorer twice and haven’t had to log back in. And there doesn’t seem to be a way of logging out.) You can Print and Email the text files.
All of the results I’ve tried so far have been from InfoTrac OneFile, so I don’t know if there is any other content in here. (The press release doesn’t say, and the About page seems to be broken.)
This is a Beta program, so it will probably change (and possibly break). The intent, according to the press release, is to have search engines spider the content, so presumably these will start come up in things like Google Scholar and Yahoo’s Search Subscriptions (http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions), as well as general web searches.
Interesting… ”