Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price pry open the cover of Google Scholar to reveal details lurking within the new service, while speculating on the future role of librarians, the viability of libraries, and the evolution of specialilzed online database and research services. A small excerpt—

More facts:
+ Material accessible via Google Scholar can also be in the main Google index.
+ Google Scholar results pages *will not contain advertising* — at least for now.
+ Some examples of material from major publishers whose material you'll find (we know Google has been working with many)? Google will not provide us with a complete list, but look for content from ACM, IEEE, and yes, Open Worldcat material from OCLC. We also don't know precisely what is and is not available, date ranges, etc.
+ In some cases Google will be crawling and searching the full text of an article but users will either have to have a subscription to the content or pay for access to an individual articles.
+ VERY COOL! For many citations, you'll find a direct link to other articles in the Google Scholar database that cite the article you've selected. Yes, Google Scholar is a citation database too! This reminds me of two specialized databases that focus on specific types of scholarly content accessible on the open web that have been online for many years and remain EXCELLENT tools.