Seriously, I just don’t get it.
So, Google used to have a blog just for librarians called Librarian Central. I remember hearing about it from lots of folks way back when, but I didn’t read it because I figured if Google came out with something cool, I’d hear about it from someone’s blog. Apparently, the blog has not been updated since late June 2007, right after ALA Annual in DC. Google also didn’t exhibit at this year’s ALA Annual, which is probably even more glaring because it was a short plane ride away from their headquarters.
Some people are up in arms because they feel that Google has some obligation to libraries beyond the contractual obligations to those they’re working with. Some people feel like librarians have been used. I must be missing something, because I don’t feel anything of the kind. Marketing is designed to make you like a company or product. Their marketing worked.
It seems to me that between 2005 and 2007, Google was making a big push to get partner libraries for their book scanning project. To do that, it made good sense to market to libraries, which is why they exhibited, gave talks, and had a blog. Perhaps they have enough partners now to keep them busy for a gazillion years. Perhaps they’re realizing that this wasn’t such a great market to get into. I have no idea. But I really don’t see anything more nefarious or insulting behind that blog ceasing its existence.
Maybe I’m not so up in arms because I never actually thought that Google cared about librarians. Google is a company. Their goal is to turn a profit. Even when they are engaging in activities that benefit people and where we can’t exactly figure out how they’d make money from this, their goal is to make money. It’s just like any of our vendors. Readex, for example, digitizes old journals that they get from libraries all around the country. When they have a big enough collection of digital content, they sell it for BIG BUCKS. At least we’re getting Google’s products for free (well, with a heapin’ helping of ads of course).
So, there are all these libraries with awesome collections that aren’t being digitized. Google comes in and says “hey, we’ll digitize your books for free and let you have the digital copies for your students.” Google was not doing this for the good of those libraries; they were doing it for the good of Google. But clearly the Universities also saw how this project was in their best interests or their lawyers wouldn’t have signed off on it. These Universities now have tons of their books in digital format that students, faculty and staff can enjoy from anywhere. University of Michigan makes them available in their catalog. It’s awesome. Maybe I’m naive, but none of this really gets me up in arms.
As someone who supports distance learners studying military history, I am insanely grateful to Google Books (and the Internet Archive). So many of the pre-1923 works that my students are looking for are available online! It’s saved us money. It’s also making our special collections materials more accessible to our online students as so many of the books up there (which can’t circulate) are in Google Books. And now with the API that Google released, we may soon be able to have links to Google Books show up in the catalog. Google Books has benefitted my library and its students tremendously… and it’s cost us nothing. Again, awesome.
I was asked to be on PBWiki’s Educational Advisory Board way back when. Trust me that I wasn’t honored to be asked, nor did I think that PBWiki truly and genuinely cared about librarians and educators. They just wanted to get our feedback to make their products better. And that’s fine with me because I thought I could help make a product I liked better meet my needs. Win win. When they started to ask me to talk up PBWiki to the press and to basically do their marketing for them, I quit. But it’s not as if I was disillusioned. They never gave a damn about librarians other than what the could get from us. And you know what? I didn’t care about PBWiki beyond what I could get from them either. My only feelings for PBWiki come from the quality of their product, which has gone rapidly downhill with their new 2.0 wiki.
Where does this “Google punked us” idea come from? What were we expecting that we didn’t get? How has Google left “us in the information dust to rot like an old microfilm machine?” People are making it sound like these Universities who got into bed was Google were like some poor drunk co-ed who thought the guy she was sleeping with really cared about her, but wakes up to find him gone. I obviously wasn’t privy to the backroom machinations that went into these deals, but I don’t think these major Universities went into this deal blindly. I’m wondering if any people working at the libraries involved in the Google Books project feel like Google cheated us.
I like Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Custom Search for my work in libraries just as much as I did before. I like them not because Google told me to or gave me a shirt (which they didn’t) or said nice things about libraries in a blog. I like them because they’re useful to me and to my students. End of story. Who actually promoted Google’s products only because of their marketing specifically to librarians?
If we’re promoting companies because they’re nice to us, then we are doing a disservice to every person who reads our blogs. Folks from PBWiki asked for my address several times so they could send me schwag and I ignored each of those emails. If I like a product, it’s because it works, not because the people who created it were nice to me or nice to librarians. My love isn’t for sale.
Meredith, you hit the nail on the head for me. I see no reason to ask for apologies or explanations. As you stated, they are a company. I’m sure “it’s just business” would have been their “apology”. Let’s stop fooling ourselves, right? Also I love your attitude and appreciate that you aren’t for sale.
Thanks for posting this!
Wow, I was completely unaware of the resentful sentiment against Google that you describe. Google isn’t a library vendor; they’ll only show up at a major library conference if they feel like they can reap some benefit from it. Do other internet search engines send representatives to library conferences? I’ve never noticed any, nor have my colleagues ever mentioned any to me. Maybe people who visited the Google booth at the 2007 ALA Annual should remember it as “the library conference where Google showed up.”
Hi there!
Yay! SOMEone out there agrees with me!
Actually, from what I’ve been reading, a number of librarians don’t regard this issue as a huge honkin’ Google v. Librarians divorce so much as a minor tiff.
I think that the main issue here (and really I’m just speculating, so feel free to put me in my place) is that back in the late 90s, Google was the scariest thing to hit the library community.
Remember Webcrawler? Remember METAcrawler? These were web search engines that would scour the internet and bring you a whole bunch of sites that were somehow vaguely related to your search, and half of them porn. (so it wasn’t ALL bad) Then Google came along, and it was good. Somehow they managed to intuitively find exactly what the user was looking for. Again, not perfect, but a hill o’ beans better than anything else out there.
Suddenly, librarians seemed a little long in the tooth. Whenever I give a library instruction class, I still have students asking me: “Why don’t we just use GOOGLE??” Google is actually a VERB now. 🙁
Then Google came down from the mountain and told us: “Awww, what’s wrong librarians? No one wants to play with you anymore? You’re still paying off student loans from your MLS degree and no one’s asking you questions? C’mere, we’ll play with you!”. And then the big kid across the street played ball with us, and gave us our self-esteem back, and we were happy.
Trouble is, we thought that Google would be our best buddy, come to us for advice, let us play with all the cool toys, and invite us up to their big mountain to sit next to them at a place of honor. And really, Google IS still our friends, they just don’t think of us in THAT way. It’s cute the way we’re always coming around wearing our Google t-shirts and inviting them to our parties, but they have OTHER friends, too. I don’t think that Google “snubbed” librarians by not showing up at ALA, I think it was just a case of: “Sorry, I have to stay home and wash my hair that night”.
I think we can still be friends though. And not that whiny kind of ex that hangs around thinking they still have a chance, hoping that the other one will get drunk enough one night that for one last uninhibited act of …
Wow, I’m really taking this analogy too far, aren’t I?
But I think we can still be friends with Google. Um … The End. [blush]
At the risk of doing a annoying “me-too”, it’s nice to see a blogger out there that opinions lie with me. I always thought the Google library blog was slightly lame. And give the choice between a cute blog and scanning a couple thousand more books, I know what I want.
After all, there’s still works in the public domain that are hard to get that I want to read and I’m hoping Google or OCA will get to them at some point.
Yeah, I’m selfish, but I think it’s a good selfish, right?
As one of those complaining about Google, I never expected love from Google. I guess I am one of those unfortunate people that expects more from a company such as an explanation when they stop offering a service or discontinue a publication. I usually agree with you on most things Meredith but must respectfully disagree with you in this. I know of at least one library vendor where the founders of the company still care about their users beyond the almighty dollar. I believe Google Incorporated should do so as well. Imagine expecting ethical treatment from them. What an original idea! 😉
I just added this comment to the thread on Library Stuff: I just went through all of the postings on the Librarian Central Blog and was struck by how very few comments there were (and none, as far as I can tell, from the bloggers who seem most distressed and taken advantage of). Perhaps the Google folks decided that since librarians didn’t seem very interested in engaging with them on the blog that it wasn’t worth the time and energy that they were putting into it. One way of looking at this is that Google made a good faith effort to develop a stronger relationship with the library community through the blog and the newsletter and the librarian community didn’t step up.
Comments were turned off most of the time!
Hi Bill. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree in this case. 🙂
The fact is, it’s a blog. It’s not like they stopped providing gmail or access to Google Books (or another actual service). Blogs are not official publications. Blogs come and go all the time. I read lots of blogs where the author just stops posting. And who can blame them for stopping when there was so little dialog going on, which had been their goal in the first place. I’d stop blogging if people showed that little interest in what I had to say.
I also have to wonder why people are only up in arms now. It’s been a year, but it seems like people are only noticing that they’d stopped posting because of posts from Sarah and Steven. If it was that important to any of us, you’d think we’d have heard something before.
I really can’t see how discontinuing a blog is unethical. I, too, expect a certain standard of ethical behavior and I feel that Google has met that standard thus far.
Ah, Bill, I hadn’t seen your comment until I posted mine. I wonder why the comments were turned off most of the time, especially when they seem to be on now even. Either way, I didn’t see a lot of dialog about the blog on other blogs either. Either way, I don’t see anything unethical about discontinuing a blog.
Bill — I’m not sure that’s accurate. I’ve just gone back to look at the time stamps on the comments that do appear and they seem to range from the same date as the original post to weeks or months afterwards. The first post to show comments is the third one, from January 23. One of those comments says thank you for enabling comments, from which I gather that comments were not enabled during the first week of the blog’s existence. But unless I’m missing something, comments were open after that.
Perhaps they are simply too busy with new acquisitions to deal with it right now. One site reported the blogger no longer works for Google and the answer could be as simple as not having hired a person to fill the position as of yet.
Just because a site has not been updated in a good while doesn’t mean Google is out to get us.
I agree that I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I guess my point is that based on Google’s past superficial attempts to “be our friend” why would their current total disregard for the library community (except those places where they are mining the collection for digital gold) come as any surprise. That both google and microsoft were not on the exhibit floor in anaheim certainly didn’t bother me. Except for lost revenue to ALA, I would say we all benefitted because their space was taken up by more valued vendors – like Nintendo. Actually I did get a couple of WORD questions answered at the MSFT booth which was a big help. Google’s presence however offered nothing to be learned and it was, quite frankly, very sad to see librarians falling all over themselves to win a cheap toy by answering mindless questions. I say good riddance to their exhibit booth and their phony librarians news center.
Google’s share price isn’t what it is because they’re nice guys who do no evil. I think that Google is creepy but for more significant reasons than they have abandoned libraries… They have too much power over information.
Once again, you’re right, Meredith. Google is a large corporation. They tried some marketing ideas, probably found other priorities more pressing, and let this one go. My god, that’s day to day business in most corporate settings, including (yes) corporate libraries. It’s never a personal decision and I agree with many others here that I’d rather see the good end results of priority marketing (such as Google Books) than some half baked blog that never said anything original or important. I think some of these academic/public types need to get out more. 🙂
I agree with you. I wondered occasionally if the Google newsletter would come back, but I didn’t feel betrayed over its absence.
Still, it’s interesting that just as the brouhaha has erupted, Google updates its newsletter (available on its site and by e-mail).
Oh my gosh – “after a year’s hiatus, the Google Librarian’s Newsletter has returned!”
http://www.google.com/librariancenter/newsletter/0807.html
Perhaps the moral of the story is: always complain. [wink]
I too find it interesting that after all the commotion what appears in my inbox today but the newest Google Librarian Newsletter. Coincidence? Perhaps…
I can guarantee you that that newsletter is in your Inbox because of this brouhaha. Does that mean Google cares about librarians? Perhaps. Does that mean Google cares about bad publicity? Definitely!
So let’s review this discussion. Meredith wonders what prompts the whiny “Google doesn’t really care about libraries” attitude. She and other proud pragmatists proclaim that’s a silly stance, because Google, after all, is a business, driven cynically by its own self-interest, nothing more. Then, voila!, Google responds by giving the whiners what they want. The company’s intentions are dubious at best, but results are results.
Quoting Meredith, I must be missing something. Perhaps it’s unwise to “feel” like libraries have been “used” by Google, but the fact of it having occurred doesn’t seem to be in dispute here. Google uses libraries–Google giveth and Google taketh away–because Google is a company: that’s the message I take from this discussion.
To be honest I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that Google had a blog for librarians or a newsletter. I think I remember looking at it and thinking I can get this same information else where and it will be less biased than Google.
I don’t understand why is the fact that Google has a blog for librarians so important or the fact that their stopping it? We’re information professionals and it seems like we’re asking Google to cater to us. How many blogs or other sites die without a moment’s notice? Things happen, its life. So Google didn’t let us know they weren’t going to be updating their blog. It isn’t like it had groundbreaking info.
Thanks for saying what a whole bunch of us were thinking. It always surprises me that librarians are offended by how the capitalist world outside the utopia of libraries works. (Or maybe I’m just jaded from having worked in sales before fleeing to academia.) Either way, a nice wake up call to librarians that Google is not some benevolent behemoth that necessarily shares our mission and values.
Personally, I use so many of Google’s tools and web-based programs for both myself and my patrons that I fail to see how they’re “punking us.” If anything, I’m “punking” them, even though I do recommend tools like Google Docs to library patrons all the time. You want to talk about getting punked, go out and buy MS Office and see how you feel!
I also agree with T. Scott’s assessment that maybe the librarian community didn’t step up and give Google a whole lot of incentive to cater to them. Maybe we should look in the mirror a bit before claiming we all got duped.
My first thought when this discussion came to light was that it wouldn’t be the first time that Google tried something out, either got what they wanted from it or found it wasn’t working the way they needed it to, and discontinued the service. A friend of mine used to freelance for Google Answers, which was discontinued some time ago. From what I knew of the service, I couldn’t figure out how they were making it cost-effective, let alone profitable, and though the quality of answers was generally high you can get the same service and quality from a librarian for free.
Amen!
But this is the rantiest post I have ever seen on your blog…Are you sure you’re not up-in-arms? Or maybe you are up-in-arms at librarians’ ignorance, and not at Google…I guess this is warranted. But you made your point in the first paragraph and then went on.
Forgive my freshness, I am on Day 5 of the comment challenge (albeit behind the rest of the world).
Thank you.
Respectfully submitted……..
I think that the people who are up in arms about this have a slightly different take on the matter. In many respects I don’t care if Google wants to talk to librarians or not – it’s their call. However, once they put things into place to appeal to and interest librarians, and make it (apparently) clear that they want to talk to us then they’re making a particular statement.
I think it’s fairly sensible on their part because librarians do often act as a medium between the company and users. Admittedly we’re only small in number, but I like to think that librarians punch above their weight. One might also think that Google feels the same way, because they have come to library conventions, at least in the US and UK – I can’t speak for anywhere else – so it’s a logical assumption.
So I don’t think it’s an ‘obligation’ at all, but one of their goals. I don’t actually care that much if they change their mind, but what I, and a number of other librarians object to is the slipshod way they’ve behaved. I think it’s a bit like inviting a guest into your home and then leave them hanging around by themselves for a few hours – it’s rather rude. Clearly their marketing in this instance *hasn’t* worked because they dropped the ball.
I don’t believe that Google has any intention of continuing with their librarian newsletter – they got caught out by constant references in librarian blogs to the lack of updates and finally felt that they had to do something to quieten it down. I also don’t believe that they want a two way dialogue – given that I emailed them as suggested and they never responded. So what annoys me is their fickle nature, what *I* see as contempt for librarians and a basic dishonesty and I don’t particularly care to deal with companies that treat me in that manner. Clearly you see it differently, or don’t care, which is entirely up to you. Bottom line: Google doesn’t care about librarians. Why should librarians care about Google? That’s good marketing?
According to the most recent Google Librarian Newsletter it looks like they are no longer updating the blog but will continue with the email newsletter. But, no, I don’t feel “cheated” by Google – why should we? If we were investing our money in their services (and I, too, would like to hear from the libraries that worked with Google Book Search) I could possibly understand the rift, but as it is their resources are freely available to the public and their products are helpful (to a point) for librarians. I look at it like a give-and-take relationship but I don’t think anyone’s getting the short end of the stick through their involvement with Google. And wouldn’t it be more productive to voice any concern directly to Google rather than complaining on the interwebs? 😉
Why would you assume that people *haven’t* also voiced their concerns directly to Google?
Good point, Phil. And honestly, I’m of the mind that voicing concerns publicly on a blog is often more productive than taking it up with the company. I remember emailing Bloglines about the fact that my blog posts were not coming up in their aggregator. I waited 2 weeks and never heard back. Then I complained about it on my blog and I suddenly heard from folks from Bloglines. Sadly, with many companies, you’re more powerful as a blogger (publicly exposing their bad service) than you are as an individual customer.