JSTOR in Google only as pilot

FRom Newslink-- a news service of InfoToday.com

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Letter to Editor

I just read Paula Hane's article, "Google's Projects Continue to Generate Shock Waves" in the [March 1] InfoToday NewsLink E-newsletter (http://www.infotoday.com/newslink/newslink0503.htm), and thought it would be appropriate to clarify the statements attributed to John Lewis Needham at the NFAIS meeting (as reported by Marydee Ojala) regarding Google's activities with JSTOR.

The comments attributed to Mr. Needham overstated Google's involvement with JSTOR when he announced that "Google Scholar was adding JSTOR journals". In fact, JSTOR has only initiated a pilot project with Google to investigate the possibilities of enhancing the resource location alternatives for the journal content archived by JSTOR.

JSTOR does not presently have an agreement in place with Google to include any content from the JSTOR archive in Google Scholar. The pilot project, as it stands now, only includes the indexing of a small number of titles within the main Google engine. We are in the process of evaluating this pilot project with Google - as well as possible projects with other similar resource location search engines - to understand better the benefits to our participating researchers, libraries, and publishers.

Ms. Hane also reported that Ms. Ojala wrote that the journals archived by JSTOR and included in Google Scholar are all in the discipline of economics. The pilot project with Google currently includes 20 journals found in JSTOR, ranging in a variety of disciplines. All of the content from these journals has not yet been indexed by Google, so it could be that Ms. Ojala was only
able to locate articles from journals in the discipline of economics.

Sincerely,
Bruce Heterick
Director, Library Relations
JSTOR