As the title of the conference suggests, the majority of the delegates were either directly or indirectly involved in supporting academics here at the University in the creation, management and marketing of research. The key message of the talk was that once a record is created in eScholar and made open access we then do all we can to maximise the visibility of that record on the web.
During the presentation we demonstrated some of the core dissemination features of the service by showing how users can find eScholar content...
...directly via Manchester eScholar Search...
...or via the JRUL Vertical Search service...
...or via the main University of Manchester Search service...
...or via a link on the main University Researcher Staff Profile pages...
...or via a link on the School/Faculty Researcher Staff Profile pages...
...or (and perhaps most importantly) via Google.
However after the presentation a delegate asked us whether eScholar content was indexed by Google Scholar as this is clearly a very common way for researchers to find papers. Our answer was, 'No, but it should be.'
A quick search this morning revealed that many of the top UK Institutional Repositories do have their content indexed by Google Scholar and so clearly we'll need to act swiftly to ensure that our academics aren't disadvantaged for too long by having their eScholar records overlooked by the Google robots.
A look at Google's documentation suggests that the first two steps are to ensure that our web-pages are configured according to the Google Scholar inclusion guidelines and then to contact the Google Scholar team to be considered for inclusion.
We'll post again soon with further news.
