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

inconsistent interfaces, access issues, poor feedback and lack of search support as 
major factors impacting digital library usability.  
The literature review is then followed by our methodology for observing academics 
use Google Scholar for digital library searches. The observations were based around 
eight Masters students, performing a series of think aloud tasks designed to uncover 
potential difficulties they face when using Google Scholar for digital library 
searchers. Interviews before and after the tasks were conducted, investigating 
participant's use and perception of both digital libraries and Google Scholar.  The 
observations were transcribed and related issues were identified and grouped together 
within our findings section next. The study finds that participants are far more 
inclined towards using Google Scholar due it its simple interface, coverage, 
efficiency, ranking and relevancy. The relative weakness of these factors within 
digital libraries meant that participants resisted in continuing to dig deeper within 
digital libraries.  Participants did, however, highlight that digital libraries are well 
integrated when it comes to chaining i.e. following up references, citings, links to 
other articles etc and felt that such integration helps them to navigate around sources a 
lot easier. The biggest problem impacting users' ability to search effectively were 
access issues in both Google Scholar and digital libraries. This was due to a lack of 
clarity surrounding the access restrictions in digital libraries and dysfunctional links 
within the results of Google Scholar hampering users' ability to effectively seek 
material. 
 
The insights gained from the findings allowed us to make recommendations such as a 
hybrid design, utilising the positive elements from both digital libraries and Google 
Scholar and bridging them together to enhance users search support. The findings also 
lead to insights where they separately needed to be improved. 
 
Finally, relevant areas for future work arising from this study are discussed that can 
potentially benefit usability of both digital libraries and Google Scholar further. This 
includes similar study to be undertaken with novices and investigating how academics 
go about learning information seeking skills.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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2 Literature review 
2.1 Overview of Google Scholar's Literature 
 
The review of Google Scholar literature begins by examining the nature of its impact 
on users. This is followed by an examination of benefits of using Google Scholar for 
locating scholarly material and its pitfalls. 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. 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. 
2.12 Google Scholar is Here to Last  
 
It hardly comes as a surprise when mention of Google appears in texts related to 
online libraries. Such is the impact of Google that researches often go as far as 
describing it as a role model for providing searches. In many aspects this is rightly so. 
A worthy example is highlighted in Pace's book the Ultimate Digital Library where he 
goes as far to ask "what does Google teach libraries?" concluding that "at the very 
least, it teaches all web service providers that users expect fast and simple access to 
indexed surrogate records". (Pace, 2003) And one can little argue that this 'fast and 
simple access' capability has been Google's trademark since it began operating, 
attracting a significant proportion of global users ever since. Furthermore it seems to 
bring back good results too by "guiding users to those resources that are highly 
travelled and implicitly highly regarded." (Campbell and Fast, 2004) No one can 
therefore deny that Google Scholar as one of the most widely used provider of 
scholarly material is here to last, and so efforts need to be made in ensuring that 
information retrieval through Google Scholar is satisfying. 
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 2.2 Google Scholar's benefits for locating Scholarly material 
2.21 Time/effort 
 
At the click of a button one finds Google Scholar providing access to user's topics 
with little effort. For users the issue of time and effort is pivotal in continuing to use a 
service such as Google Scholar. In an exploratory study of how university students 
perceive and interact with Google Scholar compared to Web-based OPACs, Fast and 
Campbell (2004) highlighted that "time and effort were a recurring theme." Students 
talked about how important it was to quickly go from starting the search process to 
getting a list of results and finding a few relevant items." (Fast and Campbell, 2004)  
 
The study also highlights that "most students felt the OPAC took longer to search and 
required more effort" while on the other hand "Google searching produces immediate 
results, for better or for worse: the engine retrieves documents with no significant 
waiting time." Students explained that OPAC's require "more complex interactions 
than Google." (Fast and Campbell, 2004) The less imposing nature of Google Scholar 
therefore suggests that users are able to quickly get on with the searching process and 
maximise their time and effort purely on finding the desired material rather than 
spending time and effort on learning to use the system.  
2.22 Simplicity 
 
It can be argued that the saved time and effort in using Google scholar is closely 
related with its simplistic looking interface. We see many online libraries comprising 
complex looking interfaces and features that significantly delay retrieving information 
and so turn away users from using the service. For example the online library "OPAC 
suggests delay; delay while manipulating the complicated features such as controlled 
vocabularies, or authorized headings; delay while acquiring the necessary skill set to 
use these features more efficiently." While advantages offered by OPACs or other 
online libraries are recognised, preferences for Google Scholar still remain largely 
unaffected as Fast and Campbells (2004) research shows due to its simplistic 
interface.  
2.23 Skill 
 
Another problem that Google Scholar solves is that it does not require much 
imagination or skill to use. Fast and Campbell (2004) from analysis of their study 
highlighted that "Google is perceived as easy, and as a tool that requires very few 
specialized skills to use" where other online libraries with their complex features 
make searching material much harder. Considering that not all users are homogenous 
or technically capable Google Scholar thus provides the confidence users need to 
operate it where other online libraries fail to do so because of their complexities or 
restrictions.  Nielsen (2004) suggests that "if a design works well without a certain 
element, kill it. The old analogy is somebody who goes to see a theatre performance: 
when they leave the theatre, you want them to be discussing how great the play was 
and not how great the costumes were."  Unlike online libraries such as OPACs, 
Google Scholar hides all the unnecessary costumes (design elements), the result of 
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which is not only saved user time/effort in retrieving information but as Fast and 
Campbell (2004) describe "a simple system with a lows skills threshold". 
2.24 Freedom and Control 
 
Google scholar gives users the freedom and control in retrieving information where 
other libraries are more controlling. Again Fast and Campbell (2004) highlighted that 
the library OPAC was often described by students as both a controlled environment 
and a controlling environment where Google was described as "free" and  "open". The 
concept of freedom and control is attributive of Google Scholar in contrast with 
online libraries. Google Scholar empowers the user because it is less restrictive and 
also because it offers control in terms of much broader access to scholarly content 
than most online libraries do. "The coverage of Google is impressively broad and 
includes the most important scholarly publishers—an important service for those who 
do not have access to the most appropriate fee-based indexing/abstracting databases". 
Content of online libraries is a "drop in the ocean compared with Google's 
capabilities." (Gorman, 2006)  
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2.3 Google Scholars' shortcomings for locating Scholarly material 
 
While Google Scholar provides users with a good starting point for scholarly 
searchers, it certainly has some shortcomings which are categorised below: 
2.31 Clarity of Coverage 
 
Jasco in his research with Google Scholar highlights that "the underlying problem 
with Google Scholar is that Google is as secretive about its coverage as the North 
Korean government about the famine in the country. There is no information about 
the publishers whose archive Google is allowed to search, let alone about the specific 
journals and the host sites covered by Google Scholar." (Jasco, 2005) While this may 
not be a problem for the casual searcher, someone who is trying to locate articles from 
a particular publisher, not indexed in Google scholar, would find it quiet frustrating 
and waste time trying to locate it. It is as if trying to find a treasure on a particular 
island, not knowing that the treasure doesn't exist their, yet you consume your effort 
and energy in the hope that you may somehow find it. Google Scholar presents itself 
in the same way, an island where you are not sure what you may or may not find. 
2.32 Presentation of Results 
 
"The rather enigmatic presentation of the results befuddles many users and the lack of 
any sort options frustrates the savvy searchers." (Jasco, 2005) The reason for this is 
that "Google scholar treats the highly structured records of scholarly articles the same 
way as the billions of unstructured web pages". (Jasco, 2005)   As a result one often 
finds Google Scholar providing unorganised links to books, articles, journals, 
citations, or even dead-links, whilst one may be seeking to locate articles only.  
This is where online libraries such as OPACs have an advantage over Google Scholar, 
as they allow users several search specific options before results are presented. In 
fairness to Google Scholar, it does have a rather 'hidden' advanced search option, 
however we hypothesise that this often goes unused, not as sophisticated as the 
OPACs and results not always reliable as Jasco highlights; "the advanced template 
was introduced with good tips for providing additional search criteria to refine the 
searches although some of them (such as the publication year) are not totally reliable". 
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 2.4 Overview of Digital Library literature 
 
The review of Digital Libraries literature begins in the same way as with Google 
Scholar by examining the nature of its impact on current day users and the need to 
better. This is followed by an examination of digital library usability problems. 
2.41 Digital Libraries are here to Last  
 
Chowdhury and Chowdhury (2003) in their book Introduction to Digital Libraries 
provide a clear picture of why digital libraries are here to last. "Digital Libraries have 
the potential to make a tremendous impact on our everyday life. They will bring a 
paradigm shift in the ways we create, distribute, seek and use information, and thus 
will make significant impacts on the way we do our day-to-day work – study, 
research, jobs, problems solving, decision making, and so on. Digital libraries will 
also have a tremendous impact on the information industry, affecting the information 
generators, publishers and distributors, and information service providers." Schatz 
(1997) alludes that the emergence of the internet "has made the process of organizing 
and searching digital collections a critical international need. As the internet itself 
becomes increasingly part of the structure of the world, so will the process of creating 
useful digital libraries become a critical part of society." One can not therefore deny 
the significance and need for research to be undertaken where digital library usability 
is made optimal for users. Our study hopes to do this by examining academics using 
digital libraries via the Google Scholar front-end. 
2.42 Current Usability Problems with Digital Libraries, causes and implications 
 
Borgman (1984) highlights that usability issues in digital libraries and other forms of 
information systems persist, despite the technological advances of the last two 
decades." She asserts that the usability problems may be associated with the 
emergence of "new community of users" that lack the "technological orientation" and 
are much "less tolerant of unfriendly and poorly designed systems." Where before 
"people were expected to adapt to systems…the situation is different with these new 
class of users. They have come to expect better systems and rightly so". Especially for 
academics it is critical that they expect better support from digital libraries. Adams 
and Blandford (2002) highlight that "digital libraries have the potential to transform 
aspects of the education process. However the invisible presence of these resources, 
their poor usability and user support has made their impact less dramatic. These issues 
cannot be avoided as digital libraries become more and more influential in academia." 
Therefore unless digital library usability is improved the effect on technologically 
incompetent academics could potentially be huge and consequently the progression of 
academic research. Fundamentally, the usability of current digital libraries needs to be 
developed in order to ensure that potential users are not left stranded.  Borgman 
(1984) thus argues, "Digital libraries should be easy to learn, to use and to relearn. 
They should be flexible in adapting to a more diverse user population." The surge of 
academics shifting towards use of digital libraries for locating scholarly material will 
likely have different skills, tolerance and expectations. 
 
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