[WEB4LIB] Re: Joe Janes on Google

[Edward Wigg]

At 11:34 AM 9/24/2002 -0700,  Mike Perkins <mperkins at rohan.sdsu.edu> 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".  This attitude
>towards end users coupled with an overconfidence in technology can lead to
>questionable conclusions.  Google's goals are the same as any search
>engine; to get as many people as possible to use it and to use those
>numbers to sell advertising and preferential ranking of search results.
>Helping people find information is simply a means to this end, not a goal.
>If the profit goal is not met, Google will go away.

Pretty much every service offered by institutions public and private, for
profit and non-profit, is a means to an end, not and end in itself.
Libraries help people find information because that information can be
_used_ in some other way: for class work, for research for a product, to
become a better citizen, for amusement, and so on. We provide enough
perceived benefit that someone, a parent institution or the taxpayer, is
willing to pay us to keep doing it. The connection between keeping the
people who pay the bills happy and continued funding may be less direct
than in the non-library world but it is no less real.

If a Google service doesn't deliver enough eyeballs it will not survive,
but is that much different than a public library cancelling or moving story
times if nobody attends? 

As with the "libraries should be more like Amazon" debates of yore, there
are lessons to be learned just by thinking about the similarities and
differences of goals and methods. We need not presume that an idea is
tainted just because it was adopted by a for-profit entity, any more than
we should presume that libraries always know the best way of doing things.
Are the interests of libraries and Google perfectly aligned? Almost
certainly not. Can we learn from each other? I would hope so! Can we
persuade them to modify their services in ways that would benefit us?
Perhaps, if we can show them that it would be to their benefit too.

Bibliographic instruction has its place, but equally we know that many
users just want the information, they have no time or patience for being
"instructed" in how we do things in libraryland. Reasonable people may
disagree on whether to try to change the patrons' minds or to take them as
they come, and neither position need be construed as an "attitude" or as a
disqualification for expressing a desire for closer cooperation with Google.

Edward