People I missed on SciFoo Camp, 2007: The Google Scholar team

There were around 200 campers at the SciFoo Camp, but there are at least 10 times more who could also be easily invited by the same token. There was only real surprise to me concerning the missing: I’ve never found the Google Scholar team members. Where were the Scholar founders, Anurag Acharya and Alex Verstak, or Robert Tansley, software engineers or Christian DiCarlo, responsible for content partnerships who helps to develop relationships with publishers and libraries to make more scholarly literature discoverable online? It would be so good to get some first hand information on the future directions of Google Scholar but at least I was unable to identify any Scholar people in the crowd at the Googleplex. Maybe some of them visited SciFooin 2006, I don’t know.

After all, Google Scholar is Google’s own scholarly search engine with the mission as Acharya said: “I have a simple goal — or, rather, a simple-to-state goal. I would like Google Scholar to be a place that you can go to find all scholarly literature — across all areas, all languages, all the way back in time.”