I loved the following quote (from our Week 8 Readings):
Google has taught us, quite powerfully, that the user just wants a search box. Arguments as to whether or not this is “best” for the user are moot—it doesn’t matter if it’s best if nobody uses it. Moreover, as both Google and Amazon have demonstrated, users have a funny way of determining for themselves what is best for them. —Todd Miller
Right on! I mean, I love highbrow, ivory tower discussion as much as the next girl, but what it really needs to come down to is, “How can we engage the user? What will they use?” And, not to get too far off topic, but this is an issue that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. You see, before I started seriously considering librarianship as a profession–and admitting this out here in the open is a little weird for me–I didn’t go to the public library. At all. (There’s this whole thing about how the library in my hometown was my favorite place in the world until I turned 12 or 13, and then suddenly I realized the librarians were looking at me with … some negative emotion I didn’t bother defining, at the time. Having worked in a public library, myself, and having thought about it a bit, I realize it was probably dread. Teenagers are scary, because they’re hard to relate to. We remember being teenagers, but we also remember what we thought of adults. You know what I mean?) I dearly loved the library at my university, but I retained my fear of librarians. How sad! I had absorbed that common misperception of librarians as cranky, bespectacled old ladies with book carts and stern expressions, and it didn’t occur to me to ask them questions–even the obviously not old, not bespectacled, sometimes not even female librarians at UVA. Then I went to graduate school, where the Engineering & Science Library (where I work now!) was good as a silent study space, between classes, on days when I could deal with the oppressiveness of it all–something the students who wanted silence exuded, not something inherent to the library itself. (That part of it is still a problem for me. I hate walking past the study carrels. Though as time goes on, I become more sure of myself, and I imagine to myself that they realize I have work to do, to keep the library running.) I didn’t know the librarians were super friendly and wanted to answer my questions! I wouldn’t have dreamed of bothering them! I did all my searches online, in a combination of Google Scholar and IEEE Explore (which, admittedly, did pretty much encompass my research).
This is all a very long-winded lead-up to the question: how do we deal with potential patrons like I was? I was too shy to ask for help. Frankly, I was too shy to venture into the library, except to study. I was intimidated by the catalog and by the shelves upon shelves of books. … I guess therein lies a lot of the benefit of digital libraries; if shy patrons can find us online, at least they’ll have access to some of our resources. But I’d like to address the bigger question, as it relates to brick-and-mortar libraries, at some point in the future. I’ll keep thinking on it. Your comments are welcome!
Now to the much more relevant idea of federated search. I am interested in this. I was considering applying to PhD programs and trying to get funding to build a search utility that would go through a library’s catalog and all of its databases, because <rant>the current way we do things is so backward and involved and frustrating. Why, after 8 weeks of doing reference for at least a few hours a week, am I still feeling less than confident in my ability to find absolutely everything in our system? That’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. Sure, if you know the name of the journal you want to search, I can help you. And I have a passing familiarity with a growing subset of our journal offerings–and the databases that house them–so that I can find certain types of articles pretty well. But why should I have to know what every journal/database contains, in order to help a patron find the answer to a question I understand? [I get why I have to understand their questions.] Why can’t I just type something in a search box?</rant> (I realize I’m proposing something that might end up putting some of us out of jobs, if ever implemented well. I think this is a noble goal, really. We’re smart people; we’ll find something to do. What’s important is that information can be retrieved–ideally by everyone–right?)
It seems to me this is what federated search is out to solve (slowly, and with great limitations). I’m a little embarrassed that I thought nobody else had tried to solve this problem, admittedly, but I guess such is the dilemma of a grad student. Better that I’m thinking of solutions, even if they’re already implemented (in some form or another) than that I … don’t? Eh.
There are still, clearly, significant hurdles to be overcome in all of this.
The D-Lib article was published in 2004; I wonder what academic libraries have done, since then, to respond to this problem–for those who don’t feel like clicking, the problem is a lack of acknowledgment, on the part of academic libraries, of the tremendous amount of academic resources on the Web. My guess: not much. (I love academia, but I acknowledge its imperfections, slowness being a major one.)
Muddiest Point: Does the Greenstone installation on the lab computers do anything besides show us the demo library? Can we build libraries and burn them to CD at the lab? (This is of great importance, since Greenstone isn’t installing properly on Dreamhost, and I have a Mac. Also, an unwillingness to install Apache on my Mac.)
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