Google Teams Up with 17 Colleges to Test Searches of Scholarly Materials

Google has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions' collections of scholarly papers. A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. Google has long indexed university Web pages, but the new project will allow users to direct their searches to on-campus repositories of scholarly materials, sometimes known as superarchives. These archives contain copies of academic papers, technical reports, drafts of articles, and other work by the university's professors. Scholars can choose whether their works will be available to all Internet users or only to others on their own campuses. The participating universities have tagged all the materials in their superarchives with "metadata tags" -- hidden codes that contain catalog information and summaries -- that can help a search engine like Google sort through the material. If all goes as planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months.

(Chronicle of Higher Education April 9, 2004)

Posted by Tom on April 09, 2004