The UBC Academic Search Google Scholar Blog first alerted me to the Blackboard and Google partnership announcement. Blackboard's learning system will be integrated with Google Scholar, providing quick access to millions of scholarly references directly from courses within the Blackboard system. Blackboard software is used by millions of students and educators to access academic materials and resources. According to the announcement "Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, book abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other organizations."

On Blackboard's site under "Extend Blackboard" the Google Scholar Building Block (under New Building Blocks) "enables Blackboard instructors to: construct queries for their students to execute in Google Scholar, and - browse Google Scholar from within their course environment and contextually add content directly from Google Scholar INTO their course with a single click."

I am all for making getting information as close to "one stop shopping" as we can get, but I am also a little nervous of about Google Scholar integrating into Blackboard. Google Scholar is a great tool for some things, we medical librarians all know that it has some serious limitations when searching the medical literature, specifically things indexed in PubMed. Heck we don't even know what specific resources Google Scholar covers so we don't know what we are missing when we search it. Many students just simply/blindly hop onto Google Scholar and retrieve whatever they can get freely. Depending on how you have your library links and resources set up, they might be missing a lot of information that you have and paid for.

This new partnership means a lot of thing for libraries and online resources. What is essential is that libraries must have their link resolvers and their catalogs work with Google Scholar. Serials Solutions, Ebsco and SFX all work with Google Scholar. No brainer right? Well you would be surprised at some of the academic medical libraries who are NOT listed within Google Scholar's Library Links (located under Scholar Preferences to the right of the Search button), take a moment and look for some. Without mentioning any names I was surprised that some very well known academic and medical libraries were not listed.

Additionally, we librarians have go to get the message out better about linking to our resources through Google Scholar. Often we think we have communicated the message until we are blue in the face, but we haven't and what we say is often a little verbose and confusing. We need to be clear, concise and repeat the message often. We are trying to reach students who may not be coming into the library and now will be using Blackboard to get the full text articles, not the library's website. Perhaps a statement on the Blackboard page would be helpful.

The integration of Google Scholar and Blackboard is a great opportunity to reach out to and educate current and new users.