As the systems librarian for our school, I put Google’s toolbar on all of the library’s open systems cause I love the highlighter when trying to find keywords in a long page. I know others toolbars do the same but our IT dept. is not “enlightened” enough to support Firefox on campus yet.

I use search engines to help find more keywords, phrases, and related topics when the student is researching a difficult or obscure topic or if the database’s controlled vocab doesn’t produce any other terms to pursue.

Thanks for the tip on citation searching and fan sites. I can use that.

And I’d go further. We need to (re)design our libraries with this reality in mind. At my library, for instance, we can walk the user over to a stand-up OPAC and help them search for a book (DVD, video, etc., etc.), but we can’t do the same for an online search.

Yet this is often what the situation (and user) warrants.

Just this evening, for instance, I described an information search that Google (or whatever) would have answered. But (mea culpa) I chose to answer the user’s question rather than his information need.

This was due, in part, to the physical accessibility (or inaccessibility) of our Internet-connected public-access computers.

Ideally, our OPACs would enable Web browsing. On the other hand, users would have to be “barred” from using these WebPACs for emailing, surfing or chatting. (Otherwise they’d almost never be available for the very situation we’re describing.)

My post is here: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/infomikevictoria?id=31

Any ideas?

The problem that I have with Google is not the engine itself. In fact, it can be too good at times. Too good that librarians could forget that other engines may provide better results under similar circumstances. By defaulting to Google, it becomes an instant reaction to use for any question posed.

You actually took my post a step further by actually mentioining other search engines and that’s exactly what I appreciate about your post. My beef was with always using Google. We all know (do we?) that Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN all have pretty low cross-results (I think it’s in the 30% or so).

To NOT use other search engines, as well as subject specific directories and the fee-based databases, is actually doing our users a disservice. In addition (and I mentioned this in my post), anyone can default to Google. What librarians can do is go beyond what the general public can do. Anyone can type in a few words in Google. It’s the increased where-with-all that librarians have with filtering unwanted data, focused research, and advanced knowledge that makes us special and needed behind the reference desk.

If Google can’t solve every problem, we shouldn’t be automatically defaulting to it. If it could, we should. And maybe it is because I worked in a special library for 5 years that the nature of the questions pushed me beyond Google into free and fee-based databases and that I learned from that.

Or, maybe it was the many times that attorneys asked me to “Google something”, and I brought them back better results from other search resources that planted a seed in my brain to not default to Google.

Or maybe I’m just jealous that 50 bazillion people use Google and far less than that use our nations libraries for research.

Stealing citations from relevant articles is also a favorite strategy of mine and one which is good for your PhD students who want “everything” they can find, and Google is helpful here as well. “Stolen citations” are usually a good way of getting the “classic” works on a subject area — moreso than the databases, which usually favor currency — and for some reason I cannot fathom — positivist literature.

Google rules — it’s the learning strategies that suck. Google can only get people so far. That’s why I always advocate an information search plan. Even for the time-pressed student, having a plan of attack is much better than slogging through hit-or-miss strategies.