[WEB4LIB] Re: Joe Janes on Google

[Joseph Murphy]

On Tuesday, September 24, 2002, at 02:35 PM, perkins m wrote:

> Whenever listening to anything Joe Janes says it is good to remember 
> that
> he is fond of saying that "bibliographic instruction is like teaching 
> pigs
> to sing; it doesn't work, and you just piss off the pigs".

I've gotten out my baton, white tie and tails and stepped into the sty 
enough times to know Janes has a point here, sometimes. (I've also seen 
enough BI sessions go well to know he's not always right.) Our faults 
lie not in our search engines, but in ourselves; a room full of annoyed 
pigs probably doesn't understand why it can't just go on the web and get 
the same information, and it doesn't know because we didn't tell it.

Another big pitfall for highly technical BI is "good enough" research. 
It's easy to forget that every user doesn't need to know the power 
tricks for a database. If a student needs to find one article and 
critique it, a Google-ized search (of the relevant database) may be 
fine. (And the user probably knows that much... which is why they're 
ticked.)

To an extent, this is what I'd love to see a partnership with Google 
create - better intro search screens, better performance, more relevant 
results. Probably starting with large full-text sources, since that's 
their experience base. (Clearly, the folks at LexisNexis know this too, 
and showed it with the recent redesign of LN Academic.) And if Google 
has something to bring to the table that works better for highly 
structured metadata, more power to them. I have yet to meet the system 
that couldn't stand improving.

<Gordon Gecko> Google, for lack of a better word, is good. Google is 
right. Google works.</Gordon Gecko>

(And in a point to Gary Price, I couldn't find that copyrighted material 
with Google... had to hit IMDB. Pity that they seem to be part of the 
invisible web.)

Joe Murphy
Librarian and Technology Consultant
Library and Information Services
Kenyon College
murphyjm at kenyon.edu
740/427-5120