RE: I have this article I need to find

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

This happens with databases too. Somewhere I have a copy of an 
article from the student newspaper of one of our members. 
Basically an editorial asking why the school needed a library 
when students could get all this stuff on the Web for free.

Anyone in the know realized right away after reading the 
editorial that the student was describing one of the library's 
subscription e-resource databases. Because there was no "brought 
to you by XYZ" attribution anywhere the student automatically 
assumed that they had stumbled on some cool "free" Web resource.

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hamaker, Charles
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 6:32 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: I have this article I need to find

So listen, I have this article I need to find. I know the 
author's name and the title of the article. How do I find it.

What's the library response today?

The quickest response is go to google scholar and type in the 
author's name in quotes (or the title in quotes). And click on 
the link you get.

The teaching response is probably much longer, and to be honest, 
with the depth of indexing in google scholar with only a few 
major publishers holding out, a teaching response is probably 
going to not do much more than slow the user down, or lose them 
and send them to google rather than try to do it the "right" way. 
Because the teaching response is first you pick a database. Which 
database, well, that depends on what you know about the article, 
the journal it's in, the date of the article. If a librarian 
tries to send me to the library catalog, why should I go there, I 
don't want the JOURNAL, I want the article. If you send me to a 
database, someone has to determine first if the journal with the 
date I want is IN a specific database. And I don't really NEED to 
do that to get to many publisher website articles anymore.

And what do I think if I go to google scholar and find the 
article and click on the link and get the article? Well the most 
obvious conclusion is why did I need a library in the first place 
if it's free on the web?

Librarians MIGHT know its not free on the web, that I am only 
getting the article because someone paid the bill, but then 
again, other staff in the library might NOT know its because 
someone paid the bill. And the end user isn't asking WHY they got 
it; they just know they got it.

So, for a modest proposal. Along with the obligatory copyright 
statement, could publishers please add, so its prints when the 
article prints, an obligatory THIS ARTICLE BROUGHT TO YOU BUY 
UNIVERSITY XYZ?

With otherwise well educated and net savy users, I'm having a 
problem, even with those who know something of what I spend my 
days doing--getting them to believe that if they found it on 
google scholar that the Library and University had anything to do 
with them actually getting the article. This is dangerous for all 
sorts of reasons, and the biggest danger is de-funding of library 
purchasing.  If an educated net savy user can't tell that the 
article was paid for by someone, we can hear a lot of "I found it 
free on the net" when it is anything but free.

The alternative, an XML file from each university library with an 
open URL resolver set up with Google so the library can be 
selected in "Scholar Preferences" is the only other option for 
suggesting to library users that a specific library had something 
to do with getting their article. But that option is too much for 
many libraries to provide: either they don't have a resolver or 
may not have the know-how to create the XML file in the format 
Google needs. That still doesn't tell the casual user the article 
is paid for by a library.

So how about it? Can we get a brought to you by statement printed 
right next to that copyright statement?

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223