Gary Price and others have long advocated the humble public or academic library's online database offerings as a free alternative to fee-based subscription services that often have much the same content. The problem has always been that libraries have done a poor job of marketing the availability of their online collections. Now Thomson Gale, which supplies many libraries with databases of articles and other content, has followed the lead of major fee-based content providers (see previous OutsellNow post) and is making an index of those library databases available to the big search engines. From the press release:
With the launch of AccessMyLibrary.com, Thomson Gale has enabled its content to be crawled and indexed by major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google ... Once desired content has been identified and made visible through the search engine's results, it becomes available through AccessMyLibrary.com if the searcher is an authorized user of a library that subscribes to that content.
This adds an interesting new twist to the introduction of the new Yahoo! Search Subscriptions beta. Online content from these Thomson Gale databases, which is free to card-carrying patrons of specific participating libraries, will appear side-by-side with content from the subscription-based services like The Wall Street Journal Online, Factiva, and the others. Watch for more developments, but this move could be a shot in the arm for library collections that are aggressively going digital but have been slow to match the marketing muscle of the commercial providers.
