Google co-op and reference services

Earlier this week Ryan Eby mentioned Google’s new co-op service and possibly using it for reference services.

We’re replacing our existing electronic resources system with libdata. Since I helped with the project, I knew enough about the system to have it spit out a subscribed links file.

You can test out the MSU Libraries Getting Started Guides subscribed links by subscribing to it in my Co-op profile.

If you run libdata and know Python, you can also try using the libdata co-op export script.

This is just the start of what’s possible. Labeling specific sites will allow reference librarians to tag authoritative and scholarly sites. No more building lists of URLs in libdata or another custom software platform. We can then have users subscribe to our expert’s sources.  Instead of telling students that Google is bad, we can work to improve it.