"Getting Thousands of Hits" - Ban This Meme

Our colleague Lorcan Dempsey's post to his blog yesterday was about library strategic plans and searching from library web sites. One commenter to Lorcan's posting worries about (my words, not his) dumbing down the library's search interface to the simplicity offered by Google, fearing the result would be "thousands of hits."

I have often heard this sentiment expressed by librarians with regard to ordinary people using generic search engines. Indeed, the president-elect of ALA did that in his piece on Google Print. (abstract only here...spend $$ to see the whole article) The notion is that, because of the size of the web, using simple search terms, or imprecise ones, yields way too much information, undifferentiated and untethered from helpful structures such as LCSH.

I am announcing my official renunciation of this needlessly binary view of searching. It's unhelpful, breeds complacency, and is myopic.

Pretend you've never ever been in a large library. Pretend you know absolutely nothing about taxonomies. Pretend you don't know the difference between a magazine, a journal, an index and a book. Pretend you don't know what you don't know, and don't know how to articulate your unknowingness. Once you've pretended all this, make a pretend visit to a very large library for the first time.

And then tell me why it would be easier to find information in this situation than it would be to find information in a set of Google or Yahoo! search results? If you're pretending to be in a physical large library, maybe you'll ask for help, but there's a good chance you wouldn't. And if you're pretending to visit this large library virtually, chances are you can't see any human presence at all. In both places, the pretend you might wander around a bit, poking this button or looking at that printed object. But in the absence of any knowledge of how the "thousands of hits" in a library may be found, let alone investigated, the ordinary searcher might leave the library with nothing. A scarcity of information.

Yes, people get thousands of hits when they search Google, and they do because it's easy. But, it is a convenient fiction librarians tell themselves that nothing of any use is found this way because of the abundance of information. It just isn't true. I say so in the introduction to The Environmental Scan: almost all of the 250+ references in the bibliography were found using Google, using keywords. So, let's get past this unhelpful "us vs them" mentality and work a lot harder at making the valuable information we curate easy to find.

In November 2004 I blogged about Google Scholar and wrote about a post from a blog called Dog News. I said: "This is how scholarly material is going to come to "the people" rather than the people coming to scholarly material which is the current paradigm at work in libraryland, and one that consistently fails to be attractive to searchers."

Dog News caught my mention and commented on it, saying, in part, this:

"I GET this, why not make a real world example of it, so everyone else, those of us who aren't brilliant librarians, can GET it too. Google Scholar can change the world! and I can help to point the way... knowledge is power, leveraging knowledge to your goals is even more powerful."

Exactly.