LibraryJournal.com

It is a Google world, and librarians just live in it. Really? Certainly Google's famously simple interface, ease of use, and enormous popularity challenge librarians to think about their users' needs in very different ways.

For starters, Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines raise questions about expensive, proprietary databases. While the latter deliver precise and high-quality results, users may find them too complex and not be willing to learn how to work with them. But can librarians ever accept providing the public with "good enough" results as opposed to the "best quality" results that are so much a part of our professional mantra?

Beyond commercial databases, Google's search box and relevancy ranking are pushing new designs for accessing cataloged content. Witness the Research Library Group's RedLightGreen project. If Google were to prevail as a model for library research, how would that shape information literacy efforts?

These questions, and more, were taken on at the debate "Googlizers and Resistors: Librarian's Role in a Googlized World," held at the Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference, October 27, in King of Prussia. Although the debate was sponsored by the association's College and Research Libraries Division, it attracted academic and public librarians in nearly equal numbers.

The panel—helped out by a lively, standing-room-only audience—included Googlizers Judy Luther, president, Informed Strategies; and Richard Sweeney, university librarian, New Jersey Institute of Technology. Steven Bell, director of the library, Philadelphia University; and Suzanne Bedell, VP, publishing, ProQuest Information and Learning, represented the Resistors. Mignon Adams, library director, University of Sciences in Philadelphia, moderated. Their discussion is excerpted below.

Bell: We hear time and time again that library systems are too complex, that no one gets it, that libraries need to emulate Google and Amazon…. Give me a break! I don't deny that fully utilizing our systems requires some knowledge, but I would say that is a good thing. Anyone who invests a short time in learning traditional search technology will save hours in the long run.

Sweeney: My librarians keep saying that we need to put more of the catalog on Google. We put up one box so we could search our [Endeavor] Voyager catalog right from our web site. And during a focus group this year we asked students sitting at computers to find the library hours. They went to the catalog box and put in library hours. They didn't understand the distinction and they didn't want to understand the distinction.

Luther: We are requiring that our students know how information is put together, know sophisticated searching in order to find an answer…and that's not realistic. They need to evaluate what they find, but they don't need to be taught to be more like us.

Audience: My hallmark of a good software program has always been one where I didn't need to consult a manual to use it. I'm with Steven; most of the search tools for our databases aren't all that complicated. But my ideal…would be one tool you could use to find everything—whether that would be through Google or something we develop as a library community.

Bell: Googlization sends our users a dangerous message. It suggests that we no longer believe in the advantages provided by traditional techniques like field search, or in the power of controlled vocabularies. If it all works like Google, why would these powerful search tools be necessary?… Consider a ProQuest Smartsearch: Even when people type in a bad first search it comes back with…some additional ways to find information on this topic. It will take a search that was typed in as a phrase and turn it into a Boolean search. It will provide you with subject headings from the controlled vocabulary. Google doesn't care what happens.

Audience: We should provide a better interface for users. At my library we have over 110 databases, with dozens of different interfaces. Why do we have to teach students 12 different ways to find information?

Luther: Researchers today have access to information that is more accurate, more current, and faster than we ever had in the [print] world…. Librarians tell me that the Internet is replacing a good part of their reference collections, especially directories. Gone is the era where we are the gatekeepers, when we must stand between our users and their access to information.... There has been tremendous unmet need for access to information in this market. Google alone has 80 million unique users every month, 200 million searches a day.

Sweeney: I prepared for this by doing a Google search on Steven Bell's research.... I went to his web site and printed out his citations, then I charged into Wilson Omnifile, then ABI/Inform to see what was available. It took much longer to do the search in Wilson Omnifile, because he was listed under "Bell, S.J." and I didn't know that was Steven. When I finished I compared the results: there were more citations, and it was much quicker, through his site on Google.

Bell: You may find all of my articles with a Google search, but that's only because I've put a list there. Not everyone is so egotistical. On the other hand, what if you go to Google and only find what I've written on a topic. What are you going to be missing? That's what it always comes down to: not what you're finding but what you're missing. That's what [librarians are] all about—helping people get it all, being comprehensive.

Bedell: No one can deny the power of a Google search. To do so is to deny the power of the web, of millions of people posting billions of pages of their own accord, and in doing so trumping the fourth estate as a marketplace of ideas. These people are driven by passion and not shackled by the need for commercial viability. I use Google often, but as an information professional I know what not to find in Google, just like I know not to find a recipe in a dictionary.

Bell: What are we resisting and why? Both Suzanne and I have products to market, so we understand it is important to pay attention to user needs and demographic trends, to retain our relevance to our user community…. We are concerned about being marginalized, but the "make it like Google and they will come" mentality greatly concerns us. We should resist the desire to give in to Googlization because if we don't put user education first, we will be marginalizing ourselves.

Sweeney: In the past it was about selection, control, gatekeeping. Now it is about finding, and the answers are coming faster through Google…. John Regazzi [managing director]of Elsevier has said that it is already the search engine of choice among scientists…. We must make as much information as we can available through Google. For example, at my institution we took some 3600 theses and dissertations and started adding them so that you could search the metadata through Google. We've gone from 50 uses a year to 500,000 in the first three years…. It's location, location, location. Where are the people? On Google. We're going to where the people are.

Bedell: Let's test-drive Google with an ABI-like search. Type "marketing management and automotive companies" into Google. You get about 2.4 million results in .21 seconds.... Not much matches the request…. Google freely admits that almost 50 percent of its searches come back with no appropriate results. In ABI/INFORM, when you combine the appropriate NAICS [North American Industry Classification System] code from a drop-down box and the controlled vocabulary term "marketing management" from the subject search drop-down box, 107 articles are found.... Google as a search tool for scholarly content is of limited value for scholars and researchers who have limited time but need very specific results.

Luther: In August, I got Lyme disease. Within 48 hours I was able to diagnose myself because I found the Center for Disease Control on the web via Google. I would never have found that information if I didn't have such easy access to authoritative content.

Bedell: Because of the nature of scientific discovery, and that so much of it is underwritten by tax dollars, we are going to find more and more [scientific information] freely available on the web. The specificity of the language, especially around medical content, lends itself to keyword search. But that is not the case for disciplines such as business and social science that have a much softer terminology around them. They require the intervention of editors and controlled vocabularies in order for researchers to retrieve the information they need.

Sweeney: I agree that controlled terms are a powerful advantage, but they are not limited to specific search engines…. [OCLC's] WorldCat has put up search terms. This is just one example of a whole growing array of projects that are searchable with controlled terms through Google.

Bell: Googlizers will tell you that our students will do just fine with results that are good enough. At my institute we aspire to lofty learning outcomes for our students. Our faculty members haven't lowered their standards. As academic librarians, we shouldn't lower ours. We should maintain that just good enough isn't acceptable.

Sweeney: Good enough is good enough. The faculty, students, and researchers have spoken with their fingers. They have said that Google works, it gives us what we need…perhaps not in every instance. That is their preferred mode. Our solution is to jump on board and make our material researchable through Google. No comprehensive search can be done today by searching just one search engine…. You must go to different places, and indeed Google is one of those places. As Steven has written [about commercial databases], "[they] are now so loaded down with journals of questionable value that searches often yield results that are not much better than Google."

Bedell: When you invest in a commercial database such as ProQuest, one of the things you pay for is the indexing and abstracting so researchers can retrieve these articles precisely, quickly, and easily. If we moved into a Google world we would replace this abstracting and indexing with keyword search. Why would academic librarians as customers want less for their money? Simply because there is an unproven belief that by doing so we would entice users to use it?

Bell: If you want to avoid being marginalized…integrate yourself and your library into the teaching and learning at your institution.

Bedell: In the article Judy coauthored with Stephen Abram ("Born with the Chip," LJ 5/1/04, p. 34–37), she writes, "With digital production cheaply available to all on the web, any interest group—harmful or helpful—can publish information and make it appear authoritative." Media literacy skills are essential for this generation to help them evaluate the information they find. If we take Google as a model there will be no one to teach media literacy skills because Google will have disintermediated librarians and their budgets.

Luther: I won't deny that there is a need for info literacy. In fact I would say it is more important today than it ever was.

Sweeney: Information literacy will not be disintermediated…we will, instead, be able to help people at the point of need. We are doing this in New Jersey through Q&A New Jersey and in other states. This can happen with Google.

Bell: Wouldn't it be great if all people needed was directory information? I needed directions to this hotel, and Google was great. But often the reality is we need information that goes far beyond simple searching…. We need to educate about the full spectrum.

Audience: I'm a Googlizer…. I think we do our users a disservice when we don't teach them to be better Google users. Google does provide a lot of advance searching techniques, and if we are teaching students to be good web users, then we need to be teaching them to use Google well and not just the commercial databases.

Sweeney: The most effective way to draw users to high-quality research is both to help users to formulate Google searches and to think critically. That's our future.

Bedell: As part of my research I looked at Google Hacks [O'Reilly, 2003]…. When you look at these Google hacks you see that…the syntax is like programming and is much harder to use than a subject search…. Perhaps ProQuest should make its databases more complicated so that only hackers and techies can figure them out.

Bell: Academic librarians must help our students understand that taking the results of a poorly thought-out, simplistic search that yields far too much irrelevant and questionable content and then wrapping it in a professional-looking clear plastic binder is no way to access the path that will lead to lifelong learning and success…. Setting high standards, assessing the learning methods we use to achieve them, and evaluating the effectiveness of our efforts is hard work.

Audience: Thinking beyond an academic setting, there are a lot of people out there who are not going to have the benefit of formal information literacy. If Google is the first thing they turn to for information resources, we need to make sure that they are getting pointed at least to our library catalogs and other resources…. Even with college students, it's not their first thought to go and research at the library.

Audience: I'm a Drexel University student and a young adult librarian…. My issue is that of censorship. Google has not claimed to be committed to serious information seeking; it contains ads and paid link placements. But as it has become a publicly traded company, its bottom line has moved to the forefront. According to a recent article in Slashdot.com… with its expansion into the Chinese market, Google has agreed to restrict search content to conform to the Chinese government's restrictions. This is not a model of information seeking that should be glorified in the library context.

Sweeney: The Chinese content on Google may be censored, but if you go into ABI/Inform, will you find Chinese content? Will you find the Chinese scientific literature in Scopus? I think the whole idea of selection is another name for censorship. By putting things in, we excluded other things, and someone made that judgment…[the process] doesn't let the user decide…. Probably the best way is to put everything out there, then give people some guidelines.

Audience: I'm a community college director, and I resist Google because of the weight of the responses. An uninformed student will get two million responses, and lately the first two or three pages have been almost all advertisements and commercial sources. They take the first thing they find and accept it without critique.

Bedell: As librarians you mediate the collections, you pay license fees for high-quality content, design interfaces and search routines specifically to support the needs of your students and researchers, and deliver it all in a reasonably priced package. This is a different value proposition than Google's and one that will continue to have resonance long after Google has become merely another vehicle for advertising.

Audience: I'm in the middle. Ease and convenience are both recognized by our society, and clearly Google makes it easy and convenient to access information. The problem is, as Steven pointed out, what is it that [Google is] leaving out? Because if the majority thinks Google is all there is, how does that affect our democracy?

Brian Kenney is Editor, LJ netConnect