Back last November when Google Scholar appeared, I wrote up a little piece about how it needed to work for the distance student, and others agreed.
Fast forward a few months, and holy cow, take a look at what Ross Singer at the Georgia Institute of Techology has built: WAG the Dog Web Localizer. Wow! It does take some server work on the local end, but with only a single click by the end user this thing will customize not only Google Scholar results, but database links at other institutions, and database results from sites such as Scirus — all places your distance students are likely to find their way to w/o having visited your library to authenticate first. As long as you can get them in the habit of clicking this one bookmarklet they’ll still be shown results available from your library. Too cool! I have got to find someone who can help me set this up on my campus! I’d wax on longer about this but have to run – check it out! (Oh, and I do realize he built this a couple of months ago – that’s just me being buried and not taking a look at it before now ;-))