Library Briefings

Google gets brainy

Google Scholar: A new window on Library collections

With a new tool called Google Scholar, Northwestern students and faculty can use the famous Google interface to search the Library’s vast holdings of journals, books, proceedings, reports, and other documents.

Google Scholar is especially valuable for searching online journal collections such as JSTOR, ScienceDirect, or other restricted-access sources. Journal title information is available to anyone conducting a search, but members of the Northwestern community working on campus or authenticating via VPN or EZproxy will have access to full text.

The search tool is available to Northwestern users as the result of an agreement reached in December between Northwestern and Google, Inc. To use Google Scholar, go to the Google page at www.google.com and select “Scholar” from the options above the search box. At the Google Scholar page, choose “Scholar Preferences.” Then enter “Northwestern” as library of choice and “Save Preferences.” This ensures that each time you access Google Scholar you will be treated, subject to authentication, as a member of the Northwestern community.

Google Scholar offers a familiar, intuitive, and constantly improving interface to tap into Northwestern University Library’s holdings--providing access to many items that are not listed in NUcat or cannot be located using the Library’s new Einstein system.

For the serious researcher, Google Scholar should be used with the understanding that more specialized search capabilities, both online and offline, may yield more complete results. It is important to note that Google Scholar does not “crawl” NUcat, which means that it does not provide information on every book on the Library’s shelves. While Google Scholar shows information on many books from Northwestern’s collection, as well as books from Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and the New York Public Library, it may miss the perfect source for a particular query. It is still necessary to search NUcat and to use powerful, specialized tools within a specific discipline, such as MLA, PsycArticles, or EconLit. For example, only a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online will provide users with access to 150,000 books published during the 18th century. A database such as Historical Newspapers Online is invaluable for its collection of early issues of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. For the best results, Google Scholar should be used in conjunction with other key library sources.

While Google Scholar may not yet be as scholarly as the name suggests, it is an exciting new tool to unlock the riches at Northwestern University Library.

Jeff Garrett