My Local Library

If you are a student, researcher or both, you've probably come across scientific search engines before, like Google Scholar or Microsoft's Live Search Academic. Although the latter sports a spiffy interface with live previews, my favorite is Google Scholar for the simple reason that it actually works in Safari (plus, it's not from MS, which gives it those extra coolness points).

The only thing that often drove me nuts, was when all 11 or so versions of an article were found on websites, that try to make money off of them. Although it sometimes helped to disguise yourself as the Google Bot, or simply use Google's cache, many times these work-arounds did not apply. Those were then the rare cases where my local University library actually justified its existence.

So imagine my happiness when I recently found the following annotations included with my searches in Scholar:

Notice the 'Volltext@ubkaiserslautern'. Now, I never remember actually telling Google that I study there, but I guess I like that side of the all-knowing evil overload Google. Anyway, I wasn't really sure what to make of it, so I browsed over to the Scholar help page, and there you go: This link really means that my University library has the article available. Clicking it by the way, leads me to some other site, which is kind of unfortunate (I would much rather be led to the university site, where I can reserve the article or find out where it is). I hope that this will be fixed in the future though. For now, I am happy to have such functionality at all.

BTW, I did check Microsoft's site for similar functionality. I don't have an account there, so I had to insert my location information manually. But after doing so, I could find my local Uni library as well. It was many more clicks away then the convenient Google solution, but that might be due to me not having an MS Live account. Happy researching!