Gary Price on What We Can Learn from Google
After reading my thoughts about the New York Times piece about Internet search engines and librarians, Gary sent me a link to his November-December piece in Searcher magazine that also explores the intersection of search engines and librarianship. It would not surprise me to learn that the NYT journalist read this as prepwork for his article because his resulting article seems to pick a few of Gary’s points and focus on them. (Why he didn’t acknowledge Gary is beyond me.)
Gary talks about why Google has caught on while librarians haven’t, what information professionals can learn from Google to help reach our clients, and the many other rich sources libraries often have that Google can’t touch.
Here are a few passages that struck me:
“I don’t need to waste your time highlighting what we can offer that Google can’t. Let me just point to one thing: that we can offer our skills in making choices on where to start searching, on information authority, and more quality issues. In other words, we can save people time in acquiring accurate and timely information.
True, Google will always give you something, but links are not the same as answers—let alone authoritative answers.”
“I talk to journalists on a regular basis, and when I show them what’s available to potentially help get them an answer I always receive something along the lines of, ‘Amazing, I didn’t know that this was available.’ I probably should ask if they have ever considered asking a librarian for help.”
“The library world hasn’t done enough to keep up with the Google juggernaut in defining our role in the Web age. We must do better and we must start now.”
Now that I’ve read the piece a few times, it seems like a recurring theme in Gary’s words is marketing. Google is popular because it has done a lot to market its product and services. Are we doing enough to market ourselves, our libraries, our services, and our collections? If we really were, wouldn’t we be as popular as Google?
