Tag: library

I’ve been rattling this post around in my head for a few days, and it hasn’t gone away, so here we go:

I really hate the newest Google Librarian Newsletter.

This pains me to say it, especially since it’s written by one of my favorite bibliobloggers, Karen Schneider. And I don’t hate all of it…but I do think that it’s a continuation of a potentially misleading aspect of information evaluation that librarians have been forwarding for years.

To the quotes!

Karen sets up the discussion with a reasonably simple question:

Okay, so your favorite search engine has turned up thousands of web sites on the topic of your choosing. Which ones should you trust?

Then says:

Whether we’re selecting new web sites for our newsletter or deciding whether to toss or keep sites already in our collection, we rely primarily on what we call the “big five show-stoppers”: availability, credibility, authorship, external links and legality.

This is, I think, a conflation of two very different factors: the question is asking “what do you trust?” which I interpret to mean something roughly like “what is true/correct/factual?” The second is more a collection development policy. And the two don’t always go together.

Under “credibility”, Karen says:

We’re always surprised when potentially good web sites don’t provide information about the author’s credentials right up front. If we aren’t sure about a site, we write the author. If they don’t respond, or we’re not convinced of their credibility when they answer, we reject the site.

Shortcut: Look for an “About” page or an author biography.

Shortcut: There are some sources that you can nearly always trust. Many librarians busy helping patrons at the desk, over the phone, or in instant messaging sessions use Google searches limited to the .edu or .gov domains to quickly winnow the search to sites known to be authoritative. For example, a Google search for “breast cancer site:gov” will yield high-quality web sites.

As I think I may have mentioned, Authority is my pet peeve when it comes to information evaluation. We’ve seen the sorts of trouble we get into when we put to much stock in authority. Why do we keep using it? I believe that it’s a holdover from a pre-network, pre-Internet, pre-digital world, where cross-checking many things was simply too difficult to manage. We upheld authority in those cases due to a simple inability to compare pieces of information easily and determine what is supported by research and what is not. That’s not the case anymore, however…nearly anything is easily fact-checked, or at the very least examined to determine if it coheres with other facts.

The .edu and .gov trick is another thing that annoys me every time I read it. Edu sites are a dime a dozen, and any random student (or professor!) can say nearly any piece of nonsense they desire, and have it hosted by their university (or high school, these days). And I don’t think we want to get started on whether or not a large portion of the government sites may or may not be trustworthy. I certainly wouldn’t trust this administration to present balanced information on nearly any scientific topic, for instance. This is another bit of librarian-backed laziness forwarded upon our students (and now, via Google, on the world!).

Reliance on Authority as an evaluation of truth of information is simply wrong. The truth of any piece of information should be a seperate question, verified by cross checking it with multiple sources and building a coherent web of facts. That’s the purpose and goal of research, as I understand it. Authority short circuits this goal, causes lazy research, and undermines the critical thinking necessary to do real research.

The author of a legitimate web site will ensure that she is legally entitled to publish the content on her site, working within copyright and fair use guidelines.
…
Shortcut: Avoid fan sites, lyric sites, paper mills, and any site posting newspaper or magazine articles (the full articles, not quotes or links) without also posting explicit permission statements.

I can definitely see this as a collection development policy…I mean, why include copies of something when you can just include the actual article? But as a measure of…what was it again…oh yeah, “trust”, I’m not sure it follows. Do I care if a lyric site is copying some other lyric site when all I want to know is what the hell Maynard is whispering at the end of the Perfect Circle song “Passive“? No, not really. The legality of the information is again seperate from its truth or falsehood. If I’m doing research on something, the only thing that I’m really concerned about is the validity of the information itself, devoid of source.

Here’s another in the long string of things that I find to disagree with Michael Gorman about. At the Online Information Conference in London, he came up with a few more priceless gems of wisdom (from Information World Review):

Controversy has broken out over the Google digitisation project with Michael Gorman, outspoken head of the American Library Association , slammed it as a waste of money. Speaking at the Online Information Conference in London, Gorman also attacked librarians for being “too interested in technology”.

“…too interested in technology.” Perhaps he hasn’t noticed, but….that’s the way that our patrons are interacting with the information they need these days. I suppose we could go back to card catalogs, but I’m guessing we’ll get some pushback from our users.

His comments have met with opposition from librarians. “The Google project has been enthusiastically embraced and I think that is a mistake. I am not speaking on behalf of the ALA. That has no position on the Google digitisation project. I, on the other hand, do,” said Gorman.

Christ on a cracker…Gorman, the reason you’re invited to speak at things like the Online Information Conference is because you’re the ALA president. It certainly isn’t because you are forward-thinking and innovative.

“So we digitise – I would prefer to say atomise. Very little-used books are reduced to a bunch of paragraphs, searchable by free text searching, the very worst kind of searching.”

I’m sorry…I can barely parse that last sentence. The very worst kind of searching? Being able to search the full text of a work…the “very worst” kind of searching? *boggle* I’ll give him that full-text searching with no ranking or other evaluatory device behind it might be bad…but that’s certainly not what anyone will be doing. Google certainly isn’t going to digitize thousands of works and then return full-text searches with random results based on the fact that the word “otter” is on page 5. It’s going to make very complicated ranking decisions, weight them, and return results with other factors taken into account. What are those factors? Could be lots of things, including bibliographic metadata or the last thing you clicked on…but it will be a damn sight better than current OPAC results. If you haven’t had a chance yet, Mr. Gorman, I recommend you take a look at the Univ. of California’s BSTF Final Report for a good summary of how our current OPAC/Bib. Services need to be altered.

“Google Book Search is not an effective way of finding books – it is better to go to a library catalogue or Amazon ,” he said

*sigh* Either of those might be decent choices if you know what you are looking for. With a title in hand, a syphilitic monkey could find a book on Amazon. The issue comes when you don’t have a title or author…just a topic or question. How good is your library OPAC at locating books based on topics, when the searcher isn’t knowledgable? I’m betting that Google Book Search will outperform many OPAC searches when doing an unsophisticated search. I wish my OPAC were as easy to use as Amazon.