Google Scholar and More: New Google Applications and Tools for Libraries and Library Users

Citation

Neville, K. (2010), "Google Scholar and More: New Google Applications and Tools for Libraries and Library Users", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 333-334. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378831011047794

The majority of librarians and library users employ Google on a daily basis for quick information searches, and while Google Scholar is increasingly well‐known, there are several other Google applications that are not widely used. These include Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Co‐op, Google News and Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google has introduced many new features in addition to simple information searches in the last few years, and this book provides the basic information to allow librarians to use these new, free features both for work and recreation purposes. William Miller states in the introduction that “it is remarkable that these applications are available without charge to libraries, and incumbent upon us to experiment with and evaluate them for potential use”.

Google Scholar and More: New Google Applications and Tools for Libraries and Library Users is a special publication of the Journal of Library Administration that updates the 2005 book, Libraries and Google (Haworth Press, 2005). Some of the new features mentioned in this book include Google Groups, which is a social network site, and Google Notebook, Docs and Spreadsheet which, as the name suggests, is a way to share notes, text documents and spreadsheets. Google Calendar is similar to MS Outlook in that it allows events to be scheduled and enables guests to be invited to events via email. It has some extra features compared to Outlook, such as sharing calendars and automatically inserting location maps into events as links when a street address is added.

Each chapter is written by a different expert in the area, and many of the sections have lists of useful references and notes to further enhance the text. Google Scholar and More describes the basic and added features of Google in a straightforward style with hints on how to use the features for both work and personal reasons. The book begins with a chapter written by Richard Robinson outlining a chronology of Google from the early days of the internet to 2007, when Google introduced “universal search” and increased its digitised book programme with the co‐operation of 12 university libraries. The University of Michigan currently hosts for Google the “shared digital repository” of books that are out of copyright.

Various chapters in the book describe applications such as Google Scholar, Google News and Google Calendar and provide the reader with ideas on how to make the maximum use of the programs. Jim Galbraith discusses Google News and its shortcomings, including the weakness in the currency of news reports and in‐depth research. In Chapter 6 Kay Cahill considers the reasons for the end of Google Answers, which started as a fee‐based reference service with all questions, answers and user comments owned by Google and freely available. Over 100,000 questions were posted in four years of operation – until the service was discontinued in November 2006 when the demand dropped. The author speculates that the end of Google Answers was caused by strong competition from Yahoo! Answers and “internal” reasons such as its promotion of “cheap information”, yet using high level researchers.

This book is aimed at practising librarians from a range of areas, but particularly reference librarians and academic staff. I would recommend this book for any librarian wishing to increase his or her knowledge of Google and to utilise fully the additional features that have been incorporated in recent years in the product.