Steven J. Bell
Has Google Won? A Librarian Says Students Have More Data Than They Know What to Do With
By SCOTT CARLSON
Like many other librarians, Steven J. Bell has watched students go to online databases, enter a few search terms, and get hundreds of articles in return. Swamped with information, and doubtless on a deadline, these students print out the first several articles -- making no effort to evaluate their quality -- and then run off to write their papers. Now Mr. Bell, library director at Philadelphia University, asks a question that might seem heretical for someone in his field: Is more information always better?
Mr. Bell, who poses that question in an article in this month's issue of American Libraries, the American Library Association's magazine, discussed his concerns in an interview with The Chronicle:
Q. Many librarians and instructors say that students aren't getting the most out of the library's electronic resources. The librarians tend to fault the study habits and search skills of those students. You, however, find fault elsewhere.
A. Yes. I'm not saying that study habits couldn't use some improvement as well. ... But I'm suggesting that we're throwing masses of full-text information at the students, and it's overwhelming them. I question whether this is such a good thing. The aggregators [companies that collect journal articles in databases] often use this as a selling point: "We offer more full text than our competitor." It seems to be that they are caught in a race to increase the full text rather than think creatively about what we can do to make the databases more appropriate to the needs of student researchers.
There was a very interesting article recently in College & Research Libraries News ["Facing the Competition," December 2002] that basically said, We're giving up on information literacy because we can't reach the students anymore, and we're just hoping to come up with ways that they can search our Web site to come up with some information that will help them. That, to me, is throwing up the white flag and saying, Google has won. I think if we keep working with the people who create the databases, maybe we can come up with a product that has a better balance. ... There are loads of techniques that could improve searching, and they've got to be built into the systems better.
Q. So what are some practical solutions?
A. Well, we should rethink this whole issue of adding more and more full text, and think about the quality of the full text that is being added. Perhaps we could think about restructuring these databases. ... It would be good to have high concentrations of full text, but perhaps just from limited numbers of core publications that represent the highest-quality publications in the discipline. ... We could try to make sure that users can very easily segment databases into their subject area. It may be some sort of device that takes a user through a pre-search process -- instead of automatically searching 5,000 things, I could search just 500 that are very appropriate to my topic.
Q. So more organization up front.
A. Yes. ... One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the services have a check box that says "full text." You click that, and you are eliminating what could be some very good articles that are available only in citation or abstract format. ... In the article, I call it "full-text fixation." We're creating a generation of researchers and scholars who are losing touch completely with the value of getting a citation that is on target for the topic, then walking to the shelf to find a hard copy or finding it in another database.
Q. Poor search skills were around even before the Internet. So how do you think full-text databases have affected search skills over the long term?
A. To some extent, this is a problem that was around in the days of paper indexes. From my perspective, in the electronic environment we've exacerbated the problem. It's become deceptively simple: You can have a search box, type in a phrase or a few words, and immediately receive hundreds or thousands of articles. ... A lot of this full text that is being put into the database is of questionable quality. At least back in the days of paper resources, you had indexes that were indexing a few hundred journals. Now you multiply that by hundreds, and lot of the publications are not that high-quality. ... It's now much easier to get into a whole lot of trouble so much faster.
Q. A lot of these databases put the power in the hands of the user, and even allow the user to do library research alone and at home. But because of the expansion of information, it seems users should rely on librarians more than ever.
A. I don't think any librarian would disagree with you. ... How we communicate that to the public and to our users -- that's becoming really important. I could bring you into the library and watch students do research. I could know that they are struggling, and go over and say, Do you need help? But they say, No, I'm fine. The mind-set is that all the information is out there, and that they just need to plug in a few words to find it.
