As course instructors and librarians, we know that students often turn to Google as a starting point or even, alas, as their main tool for their term paper research. The good people at Google also know this and have been developing a version of Google - Google Scholar - with the specific aim of putting students and researchers in touch with academic publications that may be available freely on the Internet (a few), available online from publishers or other vendors at a price, or (ideally) available at no charge to researchers through their own institutions' libraries.
This is a laudable venture, but, still in a beta phase of development, there are many shortcomings to this tool and researchers will usually still be much better served by using the more supple search interfaces of the indexing/abstracting (A&I) databases available directly from a University's library website. Even for interdisciplinary research, for which subject-specific A&I databases (e.g., Sociological Abstracts or GeoRef), may not be ideal tools, there are much better tools for researchers than Google Scholar, excellent library-based examples being Scholars Portal and Web of Science.
Having said all that, Google has taken steps to provide greater access to researchers to library materials found as references through their searching in Google Scholar. Individuals affiliated with a given institution, such as York University, can obtain access to e-resources licensed by their own university library: when set up, York searchers will see a "Find it @ York" tag in the Google listing, much like they would see when searching library databases. The Libraries are in the process of setting this up now at York.
As a guide for students, the Libraries have developed an entry page for Google Scholar that we will place in various places on our website. This page gives some brief information on the pros and cons of using the product and directs users to other, still better, search tools that are available to the York community.
