LibraryTechtonics

Today I attended a webinar, “Convincing Your Boss That It’s Not All Free on the Web” presented by Mary Ellen Bates (the Goddess of the Web Search) and sponsored by Factiva. According to the announcement at the end of the presentation, the archive of the LiveMeeting will be available on Factiva’s web site starting Monday, November 15, 2004, and I’d recommend it to all librarians who have ever had to explain this concept to their boss, a patron, an acquaintance at a party, or anyone else, even if you already have a pat answer.

As a sidenote, I must say that I love LiveMeeting. It’s so cool. At least, I think so. And webinars rock.

The presentation covered a lot of what librarians have already been trying to explain about how Google is not infallable. It also touches on the indexed web versus the invisible web, and how hard it can be to get to invisible web information. A nice stat that Mary Ellen cited was that 50% of all searches fail, with the main reasons being:

• inappropriate source selection, where she compared how patrons/users/bosses don’t really think about what search engine their using, and it boils down to the idea of looking up a word’s definition in a phone book
• not knowing the syntax of the specific search engine, poor keyword selection, poor search string syntax
• poor user interface

I find it interesting is that much of the information in the presentation, and this information in particular, was news to any business/corporate librarian/information professional (the target audience of the webinar itself, being as it was sponsored by Factiva). I think librarians and information professionals know a lot of this stuff, but Mary Ellen definitely organizes it in a way that makes it a more presentable argument, and thus easier for someone to verbalize.

At one point Mary Ellen, answering a question from a librarian about why invisible web content is hard to get at through web search engines, used the USPTO Patent Database site to explain how spiders get past the home page of some invisible web sites because they are database driven, and search engine spiders “can’t type” to get at the database contents. While this is very much normally the case, I know that at least Yahoo! (using the patent <patentNumber> search shortcut) and Google (which has no official shortcut, but using the same syntax as the Yahoo! shortcut) can pass the patent number to the USPTO search, and get you directly to a patent record in the USPTO database. I tried a keyword search in both search engines, just to see if it would work, using the string patent “computer network search engine”, and I did get hits off of USPTO database, though very few, and not to the patent I specifically had in mind.

Does this mean that Mary Ellen Bates is wrong when she says that not everything can be found in a web search engine for free? Goodness no! Shut your mouth, that’s crazy talk. The fact is that it’s still very true. It just goes to show that as librarians we all really need to stay on top of web search engine and federated search engine technology, so we can help each other out, make ourselves relevant, make our bosses believe us, and help our patrons. It’s about being a step ahead of the technology, and our patrons/users/clients. It’s also about attending webinars, seminars, and conferences and following up on the information given to us by our esteemed colleagues, so that we can really add maximum learning value to our professional development experiences.

It’s also about calling the search engines on the efficacy of their technology, and possibly helping them to make them better. Search engines and librarians aren’t really strange bedfellows, after all. Perhaps we could merge our powers for good, instead of being in costant competition with each other. But this isn’t a new theory.

The section of the presentation where she covered overcoming your boss’s/client’s objections to using fee-based systems to get the information you need is really super useful. She lays out just how you can actually get your boss to buy in on a pay service. Accounting and dollar signs speak to people (especially in the business world). If you can show using a fee-based service now and again is cost-effective and can be tracked, and is overall less expensive than the consequences of the “lack of information”, then you can convince your boss it’s a worthwhile venture. That, in conjunction with a bit of the FUD tactic (FUD = fear, uncertainty, and doubt; used by marketers/salespeople to convince a potential client/customer that perhaps relying on another product or method isn’t the most sure-fire way of going about something), can really get you what you need, or at least get your foot in the door.

A librarian brought up the important question of learning curve for new online resources, since some librarians don’t have the time or funding to learn these new services. Mary Ellen noted that many online services are getting much better at not only giving tutorial materials, but making their interfaces easier to use. While this is true, the question definitely speaks to one of several current Catch 22s in librarianship: how to get experience without being able to wrangle the time, how to get time without experience or clout in the organization? Sometimes we just need to be sneaky, I s’pose, using other resources than we normally would to answer a question, or just go to a local public or academic library (as accessible) with the online resources we want know better and learn it on our own time. If our libraries won’t add value to us, we must find a way to add value to ourselves.

While the presentation was very Google-centric in discussing web searching, Mary Ellen did something awesome in answering someone’s question at the end of the presentation on how to find free online sources on the web. She mentioned Teoma and their resources bit at the bottom of each search set, as well as BUBL’s business research directory, and DMOZ. It was a nice plug for online resources other than Google, and a cool insight into her process of searching online, and how many different resources she hits.

The presentation was very cool, and took about an hour. There was way more covered than I comment on here, so definitely check it out.

Tags: continuing education, technology