Information Takes Over

Read Doug’s Mind
I’ve never quite been able to get anyone to tell me what it is that we do in libraries as our core business. If, in fact, we “acquire and provide access to collections of information”, we have a bit of a problem … that is precisely what google claims as their mission.

Many times have libraries questioned their roles, and many times it seems that the answer leaves a nagging doubt in the back of the mind.

Today we had a discussion in our Collection Management lecture, that perhaps can shed light on what libraries might be doing in the future.

The discussion rose out of that hoary chestnut known as “Google will steal our jobs”. It was commented that while the library pays for access to online datasources, students use Google Scholar to actually search for things. The students then don’t realise that the fact that they were able to get the full text ‘through google’, was because they were sitting in a university that had already negotiated access to that publishers output.

It was thought that the library was being bypassed in the user’s mind. When the students do not physically come to the library except to use some study space, the library ceases to have so much meaning, even though it was the library that negotiated that access.

Whether there is a solution or not to this, I do not know. But we should certainly be aware, that with the emergence of Library 2.0 applications, there is a danger that the library will not necessarilly be seen, while the results are.

Maybe we need to become better at marketing ourselves to our users. Rather than saying “we do books, ain’t they lovely”, we should be saying “we have negotiated access to these services for you so that they work with whichever search engine is of the moment.”

Dare I be really radical and suggest that Google has something that libraries don’t have, it is publicly known as being the place to search. Why don’t we as a proffession use that to our advantage, shouting about all the things that we are developing to work with Google’s services, and stealing a few ideas about usability and user expectation.
And for those that worry about world domination of Google, if we have created services such as SFX that Google can easily integrate into their systems, then there is no reason why we cannot create new services that we use in our own systems, and if we do it right, our users may like that better than Google!

Technorati Tags: google, library2.0, library 2.0

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 10:58 and is filed under Library. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.