George Plosker says that he and his fellow panelists at the Special Libraries Association conference "became increasingly concerned that professionals and researchers sincerely believe that searching the Open Web, particularly Google, is 'good enough.' Groups with degrees from excellent schools, Ph.D.s in environments that included technical R&D, and even biomedical and pharmaceutical professionals were using Google, not recognizing the significant differences in authority and quality between the Open Web and premium subscription content typically provided by the information centers/libraries." Google now gets 250 million search requests a day, and Searcher editor Barbara Quint says it is getting more searches in three days than all libraries combined globally get in one year. An amazing service! Plosker and his colleagues conclude that "what remains to be done is to inform and educate users that there is more to the content world than the Open Web." At the same time, the profession "can no longer resist these influences on the content environment, nor maintain dated points of view. What we learned in library school is not enough. We cannot sit at the reference desk and proclaim, 'We only support premium content databases.'"
posted by Marcus Zillman |
6:34 PM
