Today I used Google Scholar to illustrate how results lists are arranged differently in what I now call Google Popular versus Google Scholar, and that led naturally into a discussion of popular versus scholarly sources, citation and scholarship.
I searched for an article in Nature (“Earthquakes and Friction Loss”) then asked if they thought we could get the full-text from Google Scholar. There was a full-text link. The link showed a subscription or article fee is required, which led naturally into explaining how the library already subscribes to deep web databases with full-text. To illustrate I took them to Academic Search Premier, repeated the search, and opened the PDF file. Voila, they just saved $22.50 because they have already paid tuition for access to our full-text library databases.
Then I talked a bit about field searching and demonstrated an advanced title keyword search in the OPAC and Google Popular. I then illustrated the “Find a Library” feature in Google Scholar. (Our zip code brought up the University of Victoria, but not any USA libraries! I saw looks of disappointment and disbelief on students’ faces. Google failed them!)
An active learning hands-on exercise had them choose a topic — from a list of nine topics I know are well-represented in our OPAC — and search that topic (doing both a keyword anywhere search and an advanced title keyword search) in four sources: OPAC, Academic Search Premier, Google Popular. From the results they could see the differences in retrieval when doing field searching instead of “keyword anywhere” searching. (No one in the class had ever done an advanced title keyword search in Google Popular).
They then did the search in Google Scholar. From examining the results list no one detected the way the results are ordered.
Post-instruction evaluation feedback had comments like these (errors left intact):
The Peninsula College Library website is a lot more easier to find the information then regular search engines like google.
i didn’t know that we had access to reascher in our library
Why even bother with using google, if it is too broad to find exactly what you are looking for, or have to subscribe to?
I am able to access full books through the library without paying for it
I’m seeing Google Scholar as a convenient way to introduce concepts, playing off the search engine most students already feel comfortable with, and then being able to show how the library can often provide the full-text of information cited in Google Scholar — without paying. They appreciate helpful efforts to save them money, and now they have a new appreciation of our deep web library databases.
KENT, David – First Google Scholar instruction .In Information Literacy Instruction List [mensagem em linha]. EUA: ALA/ACRL Instruction Section. 2004-11-29
