We librarians have a love/hate relationship with Google (when I said Librarian, I mean Reference/Instructional Librarian, not you catalogers! hehe). We obviously have the same goal to bring information to the masses. But since Google make it so easy to search information that everyone in the world now think they are experts and can find information without any help. In addition, Google present so much information to a typical user that a user would not understand why they need even more information from other sources (to have authoritative and relevant sources rather than just plain quantitative sources as in typical Google search results) We (at least the librarians who works in academic settings) always trying to divert students from relying solely on Google for their research. It is because the result of a typical Google search is all machine determined, even though they are already the best in the search technology, there’s still many undesirable results mix in. Students can get more reliable scholarly resources from books and journals in print or digital forms than searching the internet on their own.

But then again Google is much better than what comes before, not to mention their ambitions drive their innovations to a level not found in many companies. You can’t deny the usefulness of their Scholar Search and Book Search despite any copyright controversies. The ability to view the entirety of many out of copyright classics online is wonderful. I no longer have to worry if our copy of Hamlet is checked out if another student is looking for it. Their apps from email to Docs and Sheets are extremely useful for collaboration. Accessing my work documents from different campuses and home (mac) is a lot easier. Their Maps and Earth sparked the revolution of Mashup data that help tremendously to get information across in a much easier way than before. Setting up a Librarian Central to communicate with us doesn’t hurt either. So I dunno, this love/hate relationship with Google is just gonna continue indefinitely.

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Tagged: Google · Librarian