Info 202 Fall 2011

This blog-post in Good seems to touch on a number of 202
issues talked about in the Discipline of Organizing reading. The post sums up
the findings of an ethnographic research project at Illinois which looked into their
students ability to conduct academic research. Researchers found that although
the students grew up using search engines, like Google, and are adept at
picking out key words, they don’t know how to seek out academic sources, such
as journals or research databases. They also do not consult librarians to aid
them in their research or whom could point them towards these collections.

Although it is not too much of a shock that students need to
be educated on how to conduct academic research and the use of search engines
does not bestow expertise in conducting research, it does touch on the differences
between the traditional highly organized information kept in libraries and the
IR focus of the web. Google has effectively trained a generation to think in
these terms—not some sort of categorization that someone else made ahead of
time, but rather simple terms and keywords whose results are generated on the
fly and have been refined through the millions of clicks that came before. Meanwhile,
the journals and databases are extensively curated collections of resources,
compiled long before and hopefully updated by a librarian with some frequency,
and these sometimes have a friendly IR frontend, and other times not. 

Although this piece place blame on search engines for making
students lazy and ignorant of the library’s resources, I cannot help but think
the opposite; that the library is lagging behind in their antiquated extensive
IO rather than embracing a more fluid less curated system. This opinion is
certainly shaped by my own experiences conducting literature reviews for my MS
in Architecture. The UC Berkeley library has a daunting number of databases
with collections for most every discipline. Researching a specific topic that
the librarians have had the foresight to make a database for is made easier.
But these databases are compiled by each individual library and that makes
multidisciplinary research more difficult. It often requires running around to
different libraries on campus to find out what database might be of use to you.
This problem is exacerbated in niche disciplines such as building science. My
own research was on thermal comfort, a subject that spans architecture, design,
mechanical engineering, and physiology. Although there is a sparse building
science database in the Environmental Design Library, it certainly does not
adequately address the varied multidisciplinary nature of my field. In the end,
even the librarians concluded that Google Scholar—Google’s attempt at an
academic IR—was the more efficient way to search.

Ultimately, the traditional extensive IO and curation into
library databases is antiquated and the future is going to be a Google
Scholar-esque system.