Google “Controversy”

A post in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog, “Librarians Accuse Google of Using and Discarding Them” has generated quite a bit of commentary/controversy. The issue the article focuses on, that Google has discarded libraries by abandoning its librarian-focused initiatives and presence at our conferences, doesn’t seem all that significant to me. But the comments are kind of amazing! Along with the serious debate about the issue at hand, there’s quite a bit of venom directed at the author, some lighthearted comments (do we really need those light-up icecubes they handed out at the booth?), and a lot of red herrings. One person suggested that the problem stemmed from the fact that the librarians who had signed contracts with Google did not have faculty status. I’ve had faculty status before, and I’m sure I wasn’t smarter or more qualified at that time (I also don’t think I was more respected).

We have been having some really interesting conversations about Google in some of our working group meetings. For example, in our meetings about the CLUE tutorial, we are more certain than ever that Google keeps getting better, that it is no longer useful in any way to set ourselves up in a dichotomous relationship with Google, and that Google is a point of reference that resonates with our audience. Some of our old examples that use Google in contrast to databases are no longer correct or relevant, some of our old metaphors (e.g. the phone book) have been made irrelevant by Google, and some of our suggestions about the most efficient/effective searching need to be carefully examined. I think most librarians I know are in this same boat… we don’t see ourselves as being in competition with Google, it’s just another piece of the information universe to keep up with.

Will we still be teaching “finding”?

This is a topic that I’ve been grappling with lately, and I know that others have too. It seems like in library instruction we mostly start with “finding” for a variety of reasons: finding has been difficult, finding is the “library part,” finding connects users to our collections, and finding is where we can show off what we know best. Of course many of us spend time on other skills in library instruction sessions – topic formation, evaluation, citing. And some of us work, usually in collaboration with faculty, to promote other skills such as analysis.

But in my recent experience, our (perceived?) focus on finding creates some negative publicity for library instruction programs. Why are we so focused on teaching people to search when library interfaces are becoming easier to use, people will be discovering all content through Google, and so on. These all seem like valid questions, and my initial thoughts have been that if finding really does become such a non-issue, there will certainly be plenty of other areas where learners need our support, like evaluating the results of a Google search.  But I also think that there’s plenty of research that people are not so good at finding, so we really need to look into the “finding is easy” assumption first.

A very interesting post on ACRLog refers to some new research by the very famous web usability expert Jacob Nielsen on this topic. According to Nielsen, users face three problems: inability to revise their strategy, inability to understand search results and evaluate for potential usefulness, inability to sort through search results. I’m still figuring out the distinctions between the last two, so go to the source for the full story. The ACRLog post includes some other interesting leads as well.