It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:

Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.

So I’m continually surprised to find people defending our old, broken search systems in the face of pressure from internet search services that we’ve all come to depend on.

Thing is, where’s the greater criticism in this?

Google’s simplicity and impressive search prowess trick students into thinking they are good all-around searchers, and when they fail in library searches, they are ashamed as well as confused.

Does the above serve to emphasize the “laziness” and “intellectual inferiority” that seem to be the theme of so many of our discussions about “today’s students?” Or does it instead show how backward we and our systems are?

I second Peter Binkley’s retort, but I also want to point out the huge wedge being driven between academic libraries and our patrons. We see it in the two perspectives on that quote above. Right now it’s a matter of not meeting patron needs, but I’m also worried about what happens when those students become faculty, and later, administrators. How will they value the library then?

(Title graphic from GoogleAlive. Go play, it’s fun.)

google, information, information behavior, information search and retrieval, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, online behavior, peter binkley, search behavior, search engines, search practice, Steven Cohen, web searching

These pictures are mostly foolish, but here’s a small point: none of us had ever seen a cop pull over a cab — certainly not a cab with passengers — before this, so we were all rather curious about why. In front of us stood a question, an example of the many questions we all encounter every day, and it’s the kind of question that few of us would ever suggest going to the library to answer.

Later on we found Jason, who taught us a bit of history we probably should have known, and clearly could have taught us some more. But when asked about how he’d settle a bar bet, he said he’d likely go to Google. He noted that he’d look at the search results carefully, but admitted that he probably wouldn’t be found going to his library for answers.

cambridge, cambridge ma, future libraries, future library, information, information behavior, information seeking, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, massachusetts, police, question, questions, reference, reference information, sign, silly

Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&T and Information Today.

Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads:

overviews of more than 70 conceptual frameworks for understanding how people seek, manage, share, and use information in different contexts.

Request, can we have another LiS Radio webcast where these theories are discussed?

tags: information, information behavior, librarian, libraries, library, lis, lisradio, manage, radio, seek, share, use

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.

In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.

Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls. Jenny concludes that the move might have sold an extra subscription here or there, but completely killed the online linking that made LJ’s articles so authoritative in search engines.

Roger at Electric Forest struck to the heart of this recently:

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

In this new world, value is measured by search engine rankings, which are largely a measure of the number of links pointing to a resource. Because it’s impossible to link to things behind authwalls, or to material that isn’t online at all, Google et all have turned that scarcity = value equation on its head.

Today, in order to be relevant…in order to gain value, material must be available, linkable, indexable, and usable. Over the long haul, the best way to increase your Page Rank is to create outstanding content and make it freely available to everyone.

This is (part of) what got Zach blogging and it’s exactly what make’s Google’s non-hierarchical world work. Soon to be very related: social bookmarking as made famous by del.icio.us, now Yahoo! feature.

tags: accessibility, accessible resources, authoritative, electric forest, google, google economy, information, jenny levine, new york times, oclc, scarcity, scarcity = value, search engines, the shifted librarian, value, value equation, value theory

I love libraries, and I love books, but there the needs of our students and limitations of our budgets have no room for misplaced romantic attachments. That’s why I’ve found myself paraphrasing something from Ibiblio’s Paul Jones (via Teleread):

That smell of an old book, that smell of old libraries? That’s the smell of the books rotting.

We must remember that libraries catalog and share information and knowledge, not books. Our students and faculty have already voted with their feet and demonstrated that our paper (and microform) collections of periodicals are useless compared to the online, fully searchable versions. How long before the same happens for books as well?

Connections: some people don’t get this, but there are a number who do (too many to list, actually). This issue is bigger than ebooks alone, but OpenReader deserves a plug here too.

Technorati Tags: book, books, budgets, education, ibiblio, information, libraries, library, paul jones, romantic attachments, rot, rotting, smell

Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

I’ve been calling this the “Google Economy,” where the value of information is directly proportional to its accessibility. This is a foreign land to libraries, where isolation and division of information is the norm (just count the number of unrelated search boxes linked on your library site), but it’s something I see a few people working to overcome. Kudos to Roger and others for a lot of great work.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, accessible resources, google, google economy, information, integration, kudos, leading the way, libraries, library, open access, search, trustworthy, wikipedia