Has Google gone library or has the library gone Google? As the pencil-thin line between library resources and the free Web becomes harder and harder to detect, just who is influencing whom in pursuit of the perfect scholarly research interface? Projects such as Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic, Scirus, Open WorldCat, and WorldCat.org all take traditional library resources and put a user-driven spin on them. In addition to gearing the interface design toward the keyword searcher within all of us, these resources also play the card that makes the Web itself so popular--they're free!

So why haven't library resources been entirely priced out of the market? To put it simply, library resources are still in the game because the content to which free resources point is often not free, making institutional subscriptions and library services still very necessary. However, unlike other open Web resources that point to fee-based content only to leave users at a dead end, resources such as Google Scholar and Google Book Search got smart and, through cookies, IP-authentication, link resolvers, and good, old-fashioned partnering with libraries, have begun to bring users the best of both worlds--free search tools configured to offer appropriate copy access to the content to which users have the right to access. However the question remains: Who influenced whom? Have libraries finally conceded to the free Web or has the free Web finally recognized the power of libraries?

OCLC Goes Open Web

OCLC's Open WorldCat has been part of the Web landscape in one form or another for 5 years. In August 2006, the ante was officially upped with the introduction of WorldCat.org [http://www.worldcat.org]. With WorldCat.org, users have free Web access to FRBRizied (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) versions of 66 million-plus records in the WorldCat database. If anyone doubted OCLC's commitment to making its vast storehouse of library holdings information available to the public for free, they must certainly change their tune now.

The Open WorldCat project has steadily developed partnerships since its inception in late 2001 and early 2002 when it began testing the concept with a few Web-based book vendors. With the addition of open Web mainstays such as Google in 2003 and Yahoo! Search in 2004, OCLC continued to the test the technical aspects of the endeavor as well as the perceived value to partners and users. Early results were not without their concerns. As Barbara Quint noted in an October 2003 NewsBreak, "The programming algorithms that rank search results [in Google] involve linguistic frequency as well as popularity statistics. OCLC bibliographic records, by Google spidering standards, are very thin" [http://www. infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031027-2.shtml]. This lack of page-one placement is still an issue in both Google and Yahoo! Search. Assuming the giant search engines find the OCLC records, the issue remains as to the somewhat cumbersome variety of techniques for limiting results to strictly Open WorldCat records. For example, to insure that users get WorldCat results, the WorldCat.org Web site advises users to include the following limits with search terms: "find...