Microsoft Beta Testing WindowsLive Academic Search
The Big M puts Google Scholar in its cross hairs, project partners include CrossRef, OCLC, and publishers
By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 5/15/2006
Microsoft April 12 announced the beta launch of WindowsLive Academic Search (academic.live.com), a scholarly version of its WindowsLive Search service, with peer-reviewed content both from societies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Institute of Physics and ten publishers, including John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, and Elsevier. Currently, the service is focusing on computer science, electrical engineering, and physics, with additional topics to be added over time—there is no clear time frame, however.
Microsoft is partnering with CrossRef for journal records and OCLC, which is providing metadata from more than 280,000 WorldCat records. All materials—six million records from roughly 4300 journals and 2000 conferences—are in English.
Microsoft announced the new program, saying it is “designed to help students, researchers, and university faculty conduct research across a spectrum of academic journals.” The initial launch is in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia.
Going after Google
The obvious comparison is with Google Scholar, but unlike that resource, WindowsLive Academic Search is not a web crawler and includes information on whether the articles appearing in the results list are the published versions or not. There is also a list of publishers and journal content sources, neither of which is available on Google Scholar.
Other neat features of the Microsoft tool are a preview pane showing quick abstracts, citation support in two bibliographic formats, author “live links” connecting to the search results of articles associated with an individual author, a detail slider to limit or expand the amount of information shown in search results, and support for macros and RSS. In the preview pane, the left side of the screen shows titles and author, but when you pass your cursor over it, an abstract appears on the right side of the screen—pretty cool. The results also can be sorted by relevance, author, journal, conference, and date (oldest/newest).
Looking for librarians
Microsoft is soliciting librarians as linking partners and for providing feedback on development and implementation. Regarding the former, the company says it wants “to link to the Library OpenURL resolvers for every search result—as long as Academic search identifies that the user is affiliated with an institution served by that library.” Microsoft is working with link resolver providers to make this happen. Microsoft also wants librarians’ “input and suggestions—we value your expertise and encourage you to share your ideas on how we can make a better product for the academic user community.”
Microsoft is trying to lure librarians, sweet-talking them by asserting that joining the beta project will increase the use of library collections—“which, in turn, will increase your libraries’ value to your patrons.” Librarians interested in joining the beta test must first contact their library’s link resolver provider. Those facilities without one can contact Microsoft directly (academic.live.com/librarians).
