Books Are for Use
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for January 2004
I recently heard that two old friends were getting make-overs—and not in the better-living-through-hair-paste/flat-front-pants/indirect-lighting way, either. Within days of each other, Amazon launched its “Search inside the Book” feature and OCLC announced it was exporting 2 million high-holdings records to Google.
Amazon’s product is pretty straightforward, allowing searching of the full text of many thousands of books. It caused an immediate stir, enabling significantly enhanced access to books (presumably to encourage their purchase) and also cheesing off some folks in the Authors Guild who saw this as a way for people to print out snippets of books without paying.
The OCLC/Google thing is a bit more complex. Google will include records for items held by at least 100 libraries. When retrieved they will direct users to a site requesting ZIP code or country information, and then to nearby libraries holding the item, perhaps also providing the catalog or driving directions. This is part of OCLC’s excellent ongoing strategy to maximize the use (and usefulness) of the union catalog.
One of the challenges here is investing those records with enough stuff to get highly ranked by Google. Since Google’s rankings are based in no small part on the number of times search words occur on web pages, MARC records are particularly ill-suited to that approach. Someone will have to come up with some way to inflate the rankings so those pages get seen.
It’s intriguing that both of these High Tech Tools of Tomorrow focus on a 15th-century technology. Wasn’t it only a couple of years ago we were waving goodbye to the codex and embracing netLibrary and other e-book products? They’re still here, to be sure, but they’ve kind of plateaued lately, and Amazon is still trying to sell dead trees more than electrons.
Amazon’s toy immediately reminded me of a research report from 25 years ago titled Books Are for Use, by a team led by Pauline Atherton (now Cochrane). It concluded that enabling searching of table-of-contents and index information within a library catalog would significantly improve intellectual access to monographic materials. Chalk up another great idea to librarianship—another one we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make real. Shame on us.
I digress. The Amazon tool is up and running, representing the newest example of a significant Internet trend: putting greater searching power in greater numbers of hands. Presumably, the Google/OCLC project will do the same.
This is a good thing, right? Sure. But. . . .
Is it too much power? My second reaction to Amazon’s announcement was that this was going to be a great idea and a big help in a few settings: people looking for specific mentions of people or characters in books with forgotten titles or unfamiliar works, or for making new connections between authors, genres, literatures, and so on. The search examples Amazon lists in its promotional material are things like “Multnomah Falls,” “Product price elasticity,” and something called “resistojet.” All very specific, unambiguous searches. Fine.
In other circumstances, though, this could be a right royal pain. Imagine the false drops and huge retrieval sets this will unleash, and the concomitant confusion and possible frustration on the part of users unfamiliar or unable to cope with it. What about people searching for “Bush”? (I got 44,972 results.) “China”? (71,314.) “Fish”? (68,094.) It’s recall at the expense of precision, the inevitable offspring of the shotgun marriage of free-text searching and full-text databases without benefit of controlled vocabulary.
Boy, I sound like such a librarian, don’t I? Tut-tutting about those pesky ignorant users muddling around in our business, where they don’t know what they’re doing. Next thing you know I’ll be shushing people in the stacks, brandishing a date-due stamp.
People will use these tools, badly and well, with and without our help, further redefining and reconceptual-izing the information environment. And yet again we have to be ready to adjust—the seemingly eternal pas de deux of 21st-century librarianship.
I found out about these two projects just days after getting an iPod for my birthday (thanks, Jan!) and iTunes for Windows. It all prompted me to wonder when we’ll have equivalent broad-based search capabilities for sound and music (not to mention images, moving images, etc.) to help me spend even more money at the Apple Music Store. . . but that’s another story.
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