[Dspace-general] Google Scholar inclusion of DSpace repositories

[MacKenzie Smith]

Hi all,

I wanted to mention that the new Google Scholar search 
(http://scholar.google.com) is including items from
DSpace repositories in the results, as long as they're open for harvesting 
the full-text. I did notice that some
institutions running DSpace that should be there aren't yet, so I've asked 
Google why they're missing.

It can be a little tricky to figure out if you're institution is getting 
included or not -- search some known items
from your repository and plow through all the results, and be sure to check 
all the versions since your copy
might not be one of the first listed. If you're there, great, and if you're 
not (and want to be) then first make
sure your repository's web server isn't blocking crawlers, and then write 
to me or them directly
(scholar-support at google.com) to make sure they crawl your site.

They also wanted me to mention that if you have limited access material 
that you would like to get indexed
by Google but not cached by them for display, they're very interested in 
working with you. For example, at
MIT we have some book titles from the MIT Press in our DSpace repository 
which are only available for free
to the MIT community. Google proposes to index them, but not cache them, so 
that when a searcher finds
one of them in a result set in google.com they're returned to DSpace to 
view the item and can get to the
Press's online ordering system from there. More traffic for the book, more 
money for the Press. Let me
know if you're interested in this and I'll put you in touch with the Google 
folks. Remember: if your DSpace
content is freely available to the public then Google and the other web 
search engines should *already* be
harvesting it so you don't need to do anything...

MacKenzie


MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu