Here’s the link.
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/odell.pdf
O’Dell, J. (2009). Libraries and the future of search. Library Philosophy & Practice, 11(1), 1-13.
Ms. O’Dell writes a good analysis of where search is going. She analyzes both Google’s mindset in where to go next as well as where libraries should be headed. The idea of the “smart search” is where we’re headed. This can take many forms, but essentially it knows what the users wants no matter how the question is formualted. This goal is far off, but were it to be achieved, there’d be not much use at all for users understanding how libraries organize information. Essentially they could have their own personal reference library at their fingertips. Efforts to move this forward are exploring more focused searching, more personalized searching, and using words as concepts instead of just keywords.
She also sees online public access catalogs (OPACs) as inefficient, as they don’t leverage all the data they could. She explores why users are preferring Google. The best point made here are that poor Google searches are more effective than poor OPAC searches. Additionally, users tend to like the interface better on Google, it is cleaner and there’s less pages to navigate before a results page is reached.
This article is a very good analysis or where OPACs and library’s search need to go. She makes a good point that “catalogs empower librarians, who understand how to use them” (p. 5). This makes search in library a much more powerful tool for librarians than it does for the patrons. I think she raises a good point here, that if the library is going to match Google in terms of use, it must reevaluate how search is being done. There must be a way to move towards simpler more user friendly search without sacrificing the quality scholarly research that library tools excels at.
Another good point that the author makes is that “librarians move away from teaching people to use tools and become more involved in the development of those tools” (p. 7). Librarians need to take a more active role in what is being used to search in libraries. OPACs are outdated by the web’s standard, and librarians need to move into the field of leveraging their previous knowledge of organizing information and retrieval with the new technologies and expected norms present. Instead of merely reacting for or against the new tools, it’s important to find a way to modify them for the libraries needs or create completely new ones. She ends with some commentary about those resisting the “Googlization” of libraries. She advocates for working with this new paradigm instead of fighting against it. Good advice.
