[WEB4LIB] Re: In defense of stupid users

[Jimm Wetherbee]

Patricia,

you wrote:

| I'm hearing a lot about Google or the library in this discussion, but
| there is a lot more available for web searching than Google. What about
| the federated web search engine, a9?  

A9 does look nice (a quick search on 'Plantinga and "Ontological Argument"'
yielded useful sites) but I think Google was being used not as a contrast to
other Internet search engines but against online catalogs and commercial
databases on one hand and librarians' expectations of what sort of
competencies patrons really ought to have.

On the one hand there is the lamentable state of affairs where patrons
(often high school and college students) simply want answers, as if
databases were some sort of gum-ball machine.  Research often requires one
to clarify and reformulate one's topic and accept a bit of what one is after
from a number of sources before coming to a whole.  This, however, is often
confused with the mechanics of the search where patrons must adapt to limits
of media (in this case databases) in order to properly interact with it.
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lux et fides

The insightful ideas are the delusions of a madman.  The rest are mine.
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