Google Scholar

so, google scholar has been released. it's a new service from google that crawls academic literature. apparently it even crawls subscription databases for citations. i've done a few cursory searches and it is indeed impressive. i searched for "blood pressure" and got articles from the nih as well as from pubmed. when i searched for "poetry" i got a list of books and a link to worldcat so i could find the books in a library near me.

the library world is atwitter with news of this resource... but i don't think they've decided on positive or negative twitter. of course, there are the rampant rumors of google replacing librarians (again). i think that's not likely to happen, at least in academic libraries, because i know from experience that students wouldn't know good research material if it bit them in the ass (even if google sicced it on them) so they're always gonna need us to parse the wide world of information for them. but there are some major drawbacks. once again, google won't say how big their database is, and they won't explain how the decide what constitutes "scholarly" material.

i'll be interested to see how this all pans out.