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Walden's Librarians on Google Scholar (and, the read/write web and social networking as your backup brain)

As Peter Nguyen said when I told him this story, "I love it when stuff like this happens..."

I post much of what I write for work and for class on my blog. David Brussin saw my post last night about the lost email from Walden's Library. Apparently I had forwarded it to him at the time, so he simply sent it back to me along with the message "Looking for this?"

Here it is. This is not the whole exchange, but captures Jay's concerns and philosophy, which of course is not nearly as conservative as I remembered it. (I also think I was remember the review that it links to as work of the Walden Library.)

HI!

This appears to be an excellent tool to find materials to supplement what you will find in ERIC, the primary scholarly database for your discipline. It is and will remain our practice to get students to use the most comprehensive indexes of the scholarly literature first and supplement their efforts by using tools like Scholar Google. Why? Well, the vast majority of scholarly research is not on the Internet and Scholar Google and other Internet search engines are limited to what is on the Internet.

We hope to have a Web page with links to this and other resources that do a decent job of finding scholarly material on the Internet in the future, so please do continue to send us Web sites you find useful in your Walden
work. Also let us know as you use Scholar Google whether or not your opinion changes over time, we get excited over a new toy until the novelty wears off and we discover the drawbacks of using the new toy. If you use it over the next several months and it remains a useful toy let us know, this will reinforce your original take on this tool.

Rita sent us a review article of this new search engine from Google:

http://www.resourceshelf.com/2004/11/wow-its-google-scholar.html

By the way, you are the third student to email us about this new search engine and it appears Rita has met someone or several someones at the current residency in Texas who also have mentioned it, so while you weren't the first you are on the cutting edge :)

Is everything else going well for you?

Jay

I hope this is interesting and/or useful to some of you.

-Mark