Librarian Central

Welcome to the fifth issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter

The last few months have brought many exciting developments relevant to the library community, so we're dedicating this newsletter to sharing them with you.

In this issue, you'll find updates on a wide variety of tools to help your patrons track down the information they're looking for – both on the web and in libraries. You'll also find new downloads – a poster, flyer and quiz – you can use as educational resources.

You may have noticed that this newsletter looks a little different from our past issues. To make it easier to read, we've changed the format so you can quickly skim the headlines to find topics and articles you're interested in. We hope you like it. As always, we invite you to contact us with your feedback, ideas and suggestions for making this newsletter more useful.

Thanks for reading,

We launched PDF downloads for out-of-copyright books, making the public domain treasures in some of the world's greatest library collections more accessible to people everywhere. Now, anyone can freely download full copies of well-known classics like Shakespeare's Hamlet and obscure gems like John Joseph Ogle's The Free Library.

We also rolled out two key features to help connect more people to materials in libraries:

• More (a lot more!) books have links to help users find them in their local library. When users click on these links, they see results from OCLC's Open WorldCat and other catalog services around the world.
• Library Catalog Search – While searching the full text of books, people can also search and see results from national union library catalogs if they're relevant. And by choosing the "Library catalogs" mode in Advanced Search, they also have the option of searching only library catalogs.

We'd love to see more libraries and union catalogs participating. If you're interested in making your holdings visible to people using Google Book Search, we encourage you to contact us.

Google Scholar Poster and Flyer

Eager to help your patrons push their research beyond a typical web search? We've created a poster that gives you the basics on Google Scholar, a search tool for finding relevant scholarly publications. We also created a flyer that contains the same information, so it's easy for your patrons to take it home with them.

Google News Archive Search

Ever wish that Google News covered more than the last 30 days of news? Now you can search articles stretching back more than 200 years, from the archives of Time Magazine, The Guardian, CNN, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Washington Post and aggregators like LexisNexis and Factiva.

Try searching for " The Battle of Stalingrad," "Jackie Kennedy" or any other topic you'd like to see in historical context. For any search query, you have the option of seeing a "timeline view," which highlights the most important dates.

Google Accessible Search

The web can be a frustrating place for the visually impaired, so we created Google Accessible Search – a search engine that identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users.

Google Help

After months of creative brainstorming, we've launched Google Help – an umbrella support portal to help people learn the ins and outs of our many search tools and services. We hope having a single “go to” page makes it easier for you and your patrons to find the support information you need.

Google Help

Quiz: Test Your Google Knowledge

At this year's ALA conference in New Orleans, we passed out a quiz to test your knowledge about specialized Google search tools. Most attendees aced it (natch), but many of you asked us to post the quiz online so you could test colleagues and friends. Now we've updated the quiz and made it available for download at the Librarian Central, along with an answer key. Go ahead – give it a whirl, and feel free to use it as a teaching tool for patrons and students as well.