The earth is flat!

An article by Paul    2 Comments

…and people still use libraries as their primary source of knowledge when conducting homework, research etc.. – yeah right!

I deliberately entitled this blog post with a statement after noting the last three posts I have written were all in the form of a question.

I want to touch on the subject of Google in this post.

Today I’ve attended meetings where I met with a vendor telling me about how hard it is for libraries to counter the ‘threat of Google’ when it comes to getting their digital resources utilised by their customers.

Later on tonight I’ve read a short opinion piece by another blogger that in sum said “libraries and librarians are good and Google is just there to make money period”.

Now I’m no Google fan boy, I’ve researched the firm, watched a number of ‘inside the ‘googleplex’ type docos exploring the culture of the company, and am well aware of how big a global player this business has become not to mention it’s reach and power of influence over the wide user base that it enjoys.

That said, it frustrates me that some people in the information profession simplify things down in their mind to Google = bad, libraries etc. = good and then start preaching this gospel to anyone who cares to listen.

This is not helpful.

I think Google is not the threat, it’s some in the information professions attitude towards it.

Google has enabled effective Internet search on a scale and speed that is simply mind-blowing when you look at the infrastructure and algorithmic grunt that goes on behind the one billion plus searches undertaken daily across our globe.

To me there is no fight to be had here – Google won the battle (if you really think there ever was one) long ago – just ask Microsoft and Yahoo.

Where libraries (or to be more precise the people that occupy those roles) and others in the information profession game can bring benefit to the customer in this early part of this new century is in the area of context.

Sure, a search engine may return 1000 hits in 0.0003 secs and the top five look like they are sites you are interested.

But a human being (let’s say a librarian) is going to be able to offer a far more contextually richer result for their customer by leveraging off that search engine information as a starting point for an enriched dialogue with their customer.

This is not new news…. but why do I feel like I need to labour the point?

I’ll tell you why, because of the people and their mindset I’ve spotlighted in my opening piece above.

Here’s an idea….

Let’s stop bagging the corporate giant that is Google and instead choose to leverage our business and service proposition off a platform that a large chunk of the worlds population chooses to use.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but is that not also the same customer base information professionals would like to help too?

Let’s stop focussing on the search engine hits and instead offer customers something they can use – contextually helpful insight based on perfected reference enquiry skills combined with lighting fast (but not always completely relevant) search engine results.