Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for May 2004
I don’t remember exactly where I saw it; but a while ago, on a T-shirt or a coffee mug or an online discussion list or somewhere, I ran across a catchy little slogan: “Librarians: The Best Search Engines”—or words to that effect.
At first I thought it was kind of cute and harmless. It’s facile, to be sure, and I’ve subsequently seen it elsewhere; it’s certainly not widespread (perversely, I did a little web searching for variants and didn’t find very much). Even so, that phrase has stayed with me over the months and I thought it might be worth poking at it a bit to see what lurks beneath.
First of all, it raises the question: What is a search engine? The American Heritage Dictionary gives us this: “A software program that searches a database and gathers and reports information that contains or is related to specified terms.” Fine; if you asked most normal people what a search engine is, I think they’d say something like “a place to find stuff on the Web” or “that little box you type words into.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the obvious comparisons between that and what a librarian does. To be sure, both are ways to get answers to questions; so in a sense both librarians and search engines are “answerers.” It does seem an odd parallel, though; we never got ourselves compared (much less compared ourselves) to databases, catalogs, reference books, or the like.
I think I know where this notion comes from: Some librarians, not without justification, might see search engines as competition. It’s not at all difficult to look at the rise of free and easy Internet searching and the simultaneous and sometimes precipitous drop in reference statistics and put two and two together. And that may well be a big part of what’s going on. So why not portray ourselves as the preferred alternative, in the same ballpark?
Because it’s dangerous, that’s why. Sure, you can get an answer out of Vivísimo or Teoma, and you can also get an answer out of one of your local public library’s telephone reference service. The answer from Vivísimo might even be faster. (It might even be right.) But it’ll also be mindless. And unconcerned with quality, evaluation, instruction, or meeting your specific needs. There’s also a good chance it’d be a good answer to a question you weren’t really asking.
This is not a game we want to play. If we see search engines as our competition and try to beat them at their own game, we can’t possibly win. They will always be faster and cheaper and easier to use, in almost any circumstance, than any library. Why in the world would we want to try to compete with them?
If I were running a search engine company, I’d love to be compared to libraries. The metaphor attaches all the features of librarians and librarianship to the rather cold and unthinking search engine. (Other attempts at humanizing search technology include the Ask Jeeves butler and the Google holiday logos.)
What we are, what we do
Surely we can do better than this. We can recognize that what we are, and what we do, are superior to search engines: We help people know what they really want, we know lots of ways of searching for it, we know how to evaluate stuff, we care about quality, we know about and have access to lots of other kinds of resources beyond the free Web, we know when to stop searching, and so on.
And we can tell that story, over and over and over again, in every way we can think of, until people understand it and internalize it and believe it.
Back to dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the first sense of the word “computer” was “[o]ne who computes; a calculator, reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc.” A person. The earliest cited usage for this sense is 1646; it isn’t until 1897 that the sense of computer-as-machine appears.
So for generations, those computers went about their lives, did their work, went home and had dinner with their families, until they got overtaken by machines that went by the same name. We can only hope for better for the word “librarian” . . . but that’s another story.