The Chronicle.com

Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions’ collections of scholarly papers, according to university officials.

A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. If all goes as planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months, said MacKenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT’s libraries. She said the search would probably be an option on Google’s advanced-search page.

“A lot of times the richest scholarly literature is buried” in search-engine results, said Ms. Smith. “As more and more content is on the Web, it’s harder and harder to find the high-quality stuff that you need.”

Google has long indexed university Web pages, but the new project will allow users to direct their searches to on-campus repositories of scholarly materials, sometimes known as superarchives. Those archives contain copies of academic papers, technical reports, drafts of articles, and other work by a university’s professors. Scholars can choose whether their works will be available to all Internet users or only to others on their own campuses.

The participating universities have tagged all the materials in their superarchives with “metadata tags” — hidden codes that contain catalog information and summaries — that can help a search engine like Google’s sort through the material.

MIT has developed free software, called DSpace, that colleges and universities can use to set up superarchives. About 125 universities have done so, but no one had created a tool that searches across the archives, said Ms. Smith.