Google: Friend or Foe?

Just how afraid of Google and other new technologies should academic librarians be?
That was the essential question at the core of a Web-based panel Saturday, “Googlelizers, Visualization, Metasearch, and Other Disruptive Search Technologies,” sponsored in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries. The panelists more or less divided themselves into “resisters” and “Googlelizers” (or “evil Googlelizers,” as one of the self-described resisters, Steven J. Bell, characterized them, with tongue planted, mostly, in cheek).
“The war is over, and Google won,” said Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a proud Googlelizer. He and Judy Luther, a consultant on library technology issues, both praised Google for making information more accessible to a much broader range of users. Sweeney compared searching in Google to the kind of video and other gaming that many young people do, where once a user achieves a certain level of success, “you can move on to the next level."
By offering simple and advanced searching, Luther said, Google makes users, particularly young ones, feel “like they’re in control” and encourages them to do searches and get results.” Academic librarians, she said, “can build upon that” over time to transform those young people into consumers of what the libraries have to offer. She, too, drew a parallel to gaming, in which players typically try to “get around” those in positions of responsibility and lean heavily on their “strategy coaches.”
Librarians need to become coaches, she said, to help users figure out “how they can find the best information.”

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/11/google