A while ago I reported on the Pew Internet Project’s November 2005 report on increased use of search engines. Here’s what I had to say at the time:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

Walt Crawford properly took me to task, noting:

The report that’s downloadable does show that people aren’t being asked an open-ended “what did you do on the Internet today?” question. They’re being asked to respond to a list. If “searching a library OPAC” isn’t on the list, it is absolutely guaranteed not to be in the results.

It’s taken me some time, but I’m finally following up on that point. The question seems to revolve around how the list of activities was generated, and to answer it I contacted project director Lee Rainie. Lee explained that the intent of the project and the surveys is to help us understand how people use the internet and does not consider other activities. Regarding the list of ten online activities in this survey, he noted that it was a list he chose as “an illustrative list, rather than comprehensive list.”

Lee was careful to emphasize the way he values libraries and wanted to be clear that though the Project has tracked 90 online activities in its many surveys, they haven’t yet asked internet users about their use of online library services. I don’t know if it was just because I was asking the questions, or if he’s been thinking about this for some time, but he did suggest that the project might include library-related questions in a future study.

I was putting Lee in a tough spot, as the real question we want him to answer is something along the lines of “did the survey not include questions about online library usage because it’s statistically insignificant or was it an oversight?” Lee is a smart guy, smart enough not to answer that — smart enough to avoid stepping into our internal debates — so the following is based on my continued research into the question, not my conversation with him.

As it turns out, while much of the most interesting data in the November 20 2005 report comes from the project’s phone survey, the report uses data from comScore to support those phone survey results. While Walt is right about the phone survey, the comScore data doesn’t appear subject to those limitations:

The comScore data cited in this report come from comScore Media Metrix, an internet audience measurement service that uses a massive cross-section of more than 1.5 million U.S. consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

In a comment to my previous post, KateZ expressed some concern that the comScore data was only tracking top search engines; comScore offers many reports based on their usage tracking, the qSearch report is a keyword optimization tool and doesn’t reflect the full breadth of data harvested by the company. It doesn’t answer the question on its own, but can we not assume that a company that makes is business by tracking the every online activity of its research subjects would investigate any library-related activity if such activity was significant enough to reveal trends in consumer interest or behavior?

Elsewhere, in the PIP’s August 11 2004 report on The Internet and Daily Life, we find some detailed insights on how those phone survey questions are selected:

To assemble a good list of activities, we followed insights gained from previous research and divided online activities into four categories: information seeking; communications; transactions; and entertainment. We chose several examples for each category. These examples are not meant to cover all kinds of activities, but rather to represent everyday tasks and typical recreations that Americans enjoy. We chose activities that would broadly represent what the Internet has to offer, that would resonate with a broad audience, and that would tap into our understanding of the Internet use gained from our past research. Recognizing, of course, our choice of particular activities might influence the findings, we tried to observe the specific but then draw generalizations from our observations.

And in the November 2 2005 report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers, we learn that the project uses focus groups and small surveys with open ended questions to help shape their research and larger surveys. In that case:

Four focus groups were also conducted with a total of 38 high school and middle school students.

…teens took an online survey of multiple choice, open-ended and short-answer-style questions…

Full details on page 25 of the PDF.

So, I can’t really offer the answers we all want, but my gut feeling is that if library usage was a statistically significant activity for American internet users, the Pew Internet folks would have picked up on it and asked more detailed questions.

Sadly, I’ve been so slow to followup on all this that it may not matter anymore. OCLC released their Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report in early December. The report revealed that patrons are generally happier using search engines than their libraries when asked to rate both in terms of volume, quality, speed, and overall experience.

This is scary to some, but good news to the libraries that are willing to take advantage of it. It means the tools, the access, and the information literacy are all coming together for our patrons. Now it’s just up to us to participate.

I’ll be talking about this in my ALA Midwinter presentation, see you in San Antonio.

search engines, library, libraries, library usage, online library, online libraries, online activities, pew internet project, pew internet and american life project, internet, internet usage, online behavior, lib20, library20, library 2.0, library evolution, search engine, search engine use, web searching

So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.

Here’s the quesiton:

Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by Total Respondents

Based on the most recent search you conducted through [search engine used most recently],how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a search engine.

Based on your most recent experience seeking assistance from a librarian for help with a search or locating information,how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a librarian.

It appears on page 22 of part two.

Sadly, search engines beat libraries on all four points: volume, quality, speed, and overall experience. These numbers are alarming, and many will see this wrongly. The correct way to see this is how much value search engines can bring to the library experience.

compare, future, google, google economy, internet, libraries, library, library 2.0, library20, oclc, oclc report, perception, perceptions, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), report, search engine, search engines, user behavior

According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

tags: google, google vs. the opac, libraries, library, library catalog, opac, pew internet, pew internet and american life project, report, search engine, search engines

A9, the search engine from Amazon.com, does some pretty interesting things that libraries should be aware of. First, any library considering a metasearch product should look at what can be done for free, and second, libraries should take a look at the OpenSearch technology that drives it.

So now, when searching for Harry Potter, you’ll also find relevant results from Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library. We’re not the first library — I think Seattle Public was — and my work mostly follows the cookbook written up by Ryan Eby, of Michigan State University Libraries. Thanks also go to our university IT sysadmins who installed the XSLT extension for PHP5 earlier this week.

tags: a9, lamson library, metasearch, michigan state university, opensearch, plymouth state university, ryan eby, search engine, search engines, search technology, seattle public library, university, web search, websearch, xslt

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”

The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the gardens of our mind. Argument is good. Here’s my side.

It’s important that we understand how modern search engines work. On the web, each link is a citation, and citation analysis is an important component among the many algorithms used to rank search results. Highly ranked content appears at the top because it is frequently cited (linked). This is obvious to many, but what is harder to fathom is that we (those who publish web content, anyway), not the search engines are responsible for identifying value on the web. Each link is a value statement about the resource we link to.

Think about that in the context of this comment:

Just because a document is findable, this does not mean that its contents are *better* or more truthful than a document that is not findable.

My point is that findability is in fact a measure of value. A perhaps incomplete and indirect measure, but one that has shown a remarkable ability to deliver valuable and useful information on demand.

Unfortunately, not all content is available online, and not all online content is linkable. Sadly, many web OPAC pages are not linkable, as is true of most every A&I and full-text database (or the content is linkable but inaccessible behind an authwall).

So now this quote:

As librarians, we are supposed to be experts on helping people find and retrieve quality information.

And I have to follow this with the following question: How better to help our patrons find high quality, accurate, and authoritative information than to take advantage of the search engines that already answer hundreds of millions of questions each day?

As stewards of knowledge, we need to understand the Google Economy. We need to build applications that embrace it. We need to invest the value that librarians bring to the search for knowledge in our online services.

Feh, libraries are full of people smarter than me. Hopefully they’ll forgive me for speaking out of turn.

tags: authority, citation analysis, findability, google, google economy, libraries, library, library systems, quality data, research methods, search, search engine, search engines, web opac, wikipedia

Search Engine Watch did a story about how to use Google and Amazon’s tools to search full-text content inside books.

The gist? when you can get to the tools and where they’ve got content, it does a lot to make books as accessible and open as electronic content.

Sort of related: I’ve spoken of Google Print before and there’s more in the Libraries and Networked Information category.

tags: amazon, book search, electronic content, full text content, google, google print, inside books, search engine, search engine watch, search full text, search inside the book