Google Scholar becomes direct link to British Library

The British Library (BL) became a directly linked resource for scientific and academic information on the Google Scholar search engine following a deal between the two parties today. Search results in Google Scholar will now feature – if the article is in the national collection – a BL Direct tag alongside the cache and citation links ( click here to see).

The Google Scholar search engine will now match its results against the holdings of the British Library Direct document delivery service which provides researchers, students and academics with electronic scans of journal articles. A direct link will appear in the results giving users the option of instantly purchasing knowledge online.

Greater integration between the BL Direct and Google Scholar services allows Google to search BL collections and order form fields containing bibliographic details will already be filled out, making the e-commerce experience faster and easier. The British Library is describing the service as a "discovery-to-desktop-delivery process".

"Linking up with partners like Google is the way forward," said Matt Pfleger, BL Head of Sales and Marketing, adding, "They get richer search results and content and we get to make our collections more easily available. Research libraries must try to reach new audiences and Google is the way of doing that for libraries to remain relevant." Pfleger said Google Scholar was now widely respected in academic and information circles.

Lynne Brindley, BL Chief Executive said, "We give priority to initiatives that make our collections more accessible. By partnering with Google Scholar, the British Library will enable users to identify and locate relevant articles more effectively."

The library expects issues such as medicine, pharmacy, science, agriculture, economics, education, engineering, environmental and law to be the main traffic producers. BL Direct ( click here for more news) already appears in the top 10 Google Scholar search results for avian flu.

This is the second deal the BL has inked with a major online services provider in the last four months ( click here for more news). In December 2005 the library announced a deal with the software giant which sees 25 million pages of out of copyright book titles digitised and placed on MSN BookSearch, an online book searching service to rival Google Book Search, also launched last year.