Academic Resource Center
Google Scholar Provides Inspiration for the ARC

Several years ago, my wife and I were heading to the movies when she remembered that she had to stop at her office for a few minutes. While she was looking in her file cabinet, I was looking at the calendar program on her office computer. My recollection of how it worked—admittedly seen now through the rose-colored glasses prescribed by time—was that you could simply press a button and be able to figure out a free time for all meeting participants, to schedule a room, and to put the meeting on everybody's calendar. (I suppose that there was another button for World Peace.)

I remember thinking how nice it would be to have that application for scheduling dissertation defenses. Frankly, I was jealous.

Then, one fine day, I noticed that Yahoo! offered a calendar program. It was free! You could create e-mail and cell phone reminders for your appointments. You could even set up a shared-group work calendar. I could use the service to create the same type of work environment that my wife had established for herself. I was happy. My university, laboring hard and spending money to support me, was no doubt happy also. It had one less responsibility.

One weekend, a few years later, I was watching over my wife's shoulder as she was getting something off of her work e-mail. I happened to notice how many e-mail folders she had, and how many messages there were with large attachments. She must have had access to a ton of server disk space! Once again, I was jealous.

Then, one fine day, Google announced Gmail, with 2 gigabytes of storage. The service was free. It had great search capabilities. I was very happy. My university, laboring hard and spending money to create tens of thousands of student e-mail accounts, was no doubt happy also. Another responsibility turned over to an off-campus entrepreneur.

And now we are up to the present time. These days I log in to my library's home page, look for articles I want to read, retrieve them in PDF format—all from my desk. Of course, I wouldn't want to go back to digging quarters out of my pocket in front of the library copy machine, but the current situation is less than ideal. The interface is clunky, response time is slow, sometimes you can't get to the PDF file even though the library has an electronic subscription, and if you happen to want a psychology article you have to back up three slow steps because those articles do not appear in the business article database.

Then, one fine day, a colleague told me about Google Scholar, a search engine for academic papers that boasts the elegant, stay-out-of-your way, stripped-down Google interface we all know. Universities can arrange with Google so as to allow authenticated users access to subscription materials. You can find everything from working papers to finished journal articles.

With Google Scholar, I can find any paper available, and with e-mail I can write papers with anybody in any time zone. The upshot is that I become less dependent on local conditions at my university, and more connected to scholars all over the world. Sometimes, when I am in my office communicating with colleagues in Europe or Australia, I wish I knew the people in my own hallway a little better, but perhaps that is the subject of some future column.

For now, let me leave it that I am really impressed at the potential of Google Scholar. In terms of the ARC, I am thinking that the weekly table of contents service could have links to Google Scholar allowing article lookups. I am still kicking around the best way to implement this, but look for a change on this later.

My goal is to keep moving the ARC forward as a one-stop shop for all marketing academics, whether you are looking for teaching, research, or career information.

I hope that you will react to the ARC the way I reacted to my wife's software—except that you won't be jealous, since you DO have access to the ARC.