Give Them What They Want.

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Author: Kennedy, Shirley Duglin1 sdkennedy@tampabay.rr.com

There needs to be a balance between integrating library resources into Google and educating users to understand that they sometimes need to be where the library is.

Steven Bell, author of the article from which the above quote was taken, is library director at Pennsylvania's Philadelphia University. In the article. Bell goes on to delineate yet another fault line in our profession-the one between those who feel that library resources need to be more Google-like (since that is what people are used to) and those who feel instead that we should be educating customers to take advantage of the library's high-quality electronic resources and not to be satisfied with "good enough" research results.

Bell works in a lovely facility on a beautiful campus. (I know because my undergraduate degree is from Philadelphia University.) And I am a loyal follower of his informative Weblog--The Kept-Up Academic Librarian (http://keptup.typepad.com)-which I routinely recommend to the professional colleagues who attend my Weblog Boot Camp workshops.

I work on a military base. Our library shares a building with the base education center, which provides classroom space for the handful of colleges that offer courses there. Our library supports these colleges to a certain extent as well as various military professional education programs. This actually makes me a de facto academic librarian (at least some of the time).

Let me tell you about my students. Most of them value education; they want it badly enough to squeeze classroom time into days and weeks that are already filled with erratic work schedules, temporary duty at other bases, family responsibilities, and, sometimes, deployment. We get the occasional interlibrary loan request from Qatar or Iraq; plenty of GIs are using their overseas downtime productively, thanks to distance learning.

The rest of my customers are a mix of retirees, active duty military, and civilian personnel who work on the base (military families and contractors). So I am also a special librarian, a public librarian, and a children's librarian occasionally. Bless your heart, Steven B., but I cannot relate to my "end users" as the homogeneous group you discuss in your article.

This is why we cannot allow academic librarians to hijack the so-called "Googlization debate." I say this with no intended disrespect for academic librarians (I've actually worked in a couple of "gen-yoo-wine" academic libraries, and, OK, here it comes … some of my best friends are academic librarians). But when we talk at professional functions, it's clear that their end users are not my end users.

Bibliographic instruction? Puh-leeease! I specialize in quick, cheap, and dirty guerrilla research training on-the-fly. Yes, people are going to use Google. Almost certainly, they are going to use it first, and, in many cases, it's all they are going to use. So they might as well know how to use it effectively. I make sure they know about phrase searching and how to choose good keywords that will at least trim down the size of the haystack where they are trying to find a needle. I point out that "everything" is not available "in Google" and that they may need to try other search engines. I even suggest quality non-commercial sites like the Librarian's Index to the Internet.

Finally, I attempt to introduce those who seem receptive to end-user-friendly commercial services such as InfoTrac, taking great pains to explain that the Air Force pays good money for a subscription because quality content like this is largely unavailable on the open Web for free. I show them how to log in, how to select appropriate databases, bow to restrict their search to full-text and/or academic publications, and not much more than that. Most of them catch on quickly; I have confidence that they will go back to their workplaces or homes, log in when they have a few spare minutes, and turn up enough decent material to complete whatever project they're working on.

My point here is this: Regardless of what kind of library you work in, you are the one in the best position to know what your customers want and need. You also know that when it comes to providing services, one size does not fit all. I once worked in an engineering library where some of the engineers were not at all interested in learning how to search databases. "Just get me a few good articles," they would say. Other engineers preferred to be very bands on; they wanted detailed instructions so they could do their own searching. "I want to see everything," these patrons would say.

Some people "get" commercial databases immediately, see the value of subscription services, want to learn as much as they can, and are willing to wrangle with less-than-user-friendly resources. Others have neither the time nor the inclination to "mess with this stuff," and if they can't get you to do their research for them, they'll head straight for Google. For them, "good enough" is "good enough."

I've found that it is often possible to "upsell" many in this latter group to Gk)ogle Scholar. As Bell pointed out, librarians may be disturbed by "a lack of clarity about what is included in the collection, the inclusion of significant amounts of non-scholarly material, and a search system that not only yields questionable results but that also has difficulty with even some simplistic searches. …" But do you really think that your average end user frets about this kind of stuff? As far as I'm concerned, it's to everyone's advantage that librarians make as many of the resources available as possible via Google Scholar, since it's something people will use.

So now you know which side of the fault line I am on: the pragmatic side.

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By Shirley Duglin Kennedy

Shirley Duglin Kennedy is the reference librarian at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., co-editor of ResourceShelf.com, editor of DocuTicker.com, and the author of The Savvy Guide to Motorcycles. Her e-mail address is sdkennedy@tampabay.rr.com. Send your comments about this column to itletters@infotoday.com.