infobong.com

Google has launched Google Scholar, a search engine for academic papers. It seems to be geared primarily toward science and engineering folks; in the ten minutes I spent playing with it, I haven't really found a use for it. A search for "Donna Haraway" simply spits out a list of her articles, but I suppose clicking the "cited" link might take me to some interesting pieces. A search for "blog historiography" didn't turn up anything useful and searching for "actor-network blog" turned up nothing at all. Perhaps this simply means there are areas waiting to be explored in media studies, but a search for "Marlene Dietrich," mostly results in articles irrelevant to the well-examined movie star.

Another problem is see with Google Scholar is that it largely points readers to journal articles in commercial databases like ingenta.com, which I need to access through the UT Library into order to pull up articles. This NYTimes story suggests Google may feature advertising on the site at a later date, but I suspect this is a product Google plans to sell to academic libraries for indexing and searching electronic resources in-house. Still, I wonder how successful they will be. According to Don Turnbull, copyright restrictions limit UT's ability to create a comprehensive search feature for the many database systems it subscribes to.