Digital Libraries meet Google Scholar: Investigating the changing face of scholarly search using the Google Scholar front-end

1 Introduction 1.1 Study Rationale and Objectives "Like it or not, Internet search engines have forever changed how users will approach searching for information on a topic. And like it or not there are some lessons to be learned from how search engines serve user."(Pace, 2003) The above statement is certainly valid of Google, which has had a profound influence on the way users seek information. Since its existence the search community has depended much upon Google to provide quick and reliable results even though this is not always the case. Lesk (2005) remarks "users of Google and other search engines are accustomed to just using them….nevertheless, some people are frustrated, and perhaps more important is the fact that many people could get better results than they do. Searching is still often hit-or-miss." Furthermore digital libraries providing journals and scholarly material, including those coexisting under Google Scholar's front end, consist of usability problems of their own. These for example include clarity relating to access restrictions preventing users from accessing material (Mark et al, forthcoming), lack of searching support, (Adams and Blandford, 2002) problems working with many different digital library interfaces ( Klas et al, 2004) and much more. With these respective problems surfacing, we argue that an examination of the precise elements that Google Scholar helps academics with in seeking scholarly material and a study of the problems that still remain with its usage, some valuable lessons can be learned as to the solved and unsolved problems with digital library searches conducted from Google Scholar. Such an investigation can help us to provide design insights for either improving usability of Google Scholar, or Digital Libraries or both. The study will therefore aim to explore in depth aspects of information seeking that Google Scholar as a gateway to digital libraries makes easy and aspects of information seeking that are difficult. Current efforts have largely unexamined this use of Google Scholar for digital library searches. By attempting to explore the way academics perform current searches, their feelings and thoughts in using Google Scholar for academic content, the study will aim to uncover these issues and hope to make practical recommendations. 1.11 Overview of the study The report begins with a literature review of Google Scholar and Digital Libraries respectively. We first seek to explore literature capturing the benefits of locating scholarly material through Google Scholar. Google Scholar suggests minimal time or effort to operate, simple to use, little need for skills and provides its users with more freedom and control than rivals. These benefits are then followed by its weaknesses. The lack of clarity of what precisely Google Scholar covers i.e. which publishers and its presentation of results are shown to be relative weaknesses of Google Scholar. Subsequently literature on usability problems with digital libraries are explored, in particular issues that affect user's information seeking process. We highlight 5