The Answer.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Google vs. the vendors who have been making lots of money selling us “search” for a while now. Someone brought up the idea that users like the simplicity of the Google front-end, and users also like the faceted searching, recommendations, and all of the other options provided by places like Amazon. The obvious response to me is “wait … what do they like?” … simplicity and a single search box, or all kinds of options for search? They don’t seem like the same thing to me …

The answer comes in the form of a simple quote: “It’s not about the searching, it’s about the finding”.

Sorry to be so obvious, but people like finding the information that they’re looking for no matter what engine is used to deliver that information. A remarkably simplistic, or even downright ugly page that gives me everything that I need will be my favourite site every time. Oddly, Google and Amazon do have a lot in common. Both utilize a huge database of user information to provide me with added value in my searching. Amazon provides me with basic string-matching initially, with the option to start drilling down through the social data if I wish. Google just goes right ahead and does the string-matching and combining with social data before I see a single result.

Of course, this is what I expect from these tools. Most of my Amazon visits are for things that I am already aware of. I may also check the social aspects of it’s search if that looks interesting. Google, on the other hand, is the tool of choice if connections are my primary interest … if I just type in “Merton science social” I want to have all of the relevance calculated and presented and then have “cited by” and “related” links. When the results are uncannily relevant, I am happy.

I like them both. I don’t care what they look like. The vendors make me work much harder for the same result.

That’s it.

More google-y thoughts …

Sitting at the reference desk has caused me to think even more about Google Scholar, and why it has become my primary research tool (this has just happened without thinking about it …. I’m trying to figure out why). Of course, the easy answer is that I get results, and I get them fast.  Lately, students having been sitting down at the desk, we’ve done searches on vendor-supplied tools, and then as a last check, we skip over to Google.  We then do the same search and become very happy.  Google is absolutely kicking butt when it comes to relevance.  It’s often kind of spooky how well they are managing to get precisely what I want at the the top of the list.

I suspect that at least some librarians will suggest that I’m just not using all of the tools of the vendor-supplied indexes and they could be right. However, if I can just type terms into a box and get the results that I need, I am very unlikely to bother to learn all of the little syntax-tricks etc that are supplied with Ebsco, CSA etc.  That’s just not going to happen.  There are also features of Google Scholar that these vendors just can not compete with.  First, not only does relevant material appear at the top of the list, but it also supplies “related items” as a link, and those items are actually related … this is a thing of beauty and a display of the fact that Google actually understands how research is conducted (by finding the network of related materials, not by endless discreet string-matching searches).  Second, Google supplies the “cited by” link, once again displaying an understanding of just what it is we’re trying to accomplish …

… this brings up and EXTREMELY important point.  When Google is searching, it is dealing with all of the literature available to it, not just the chunk that it happens to control access to.  Thus, they can provide links to all of the items related to and citing the article that is your new favourite.  Whereas everyone else demands that you open new windows and catalogs to search for cited articles, Google links directly to them with a single click, and allows you to continue on your related article search.

Now, my most common advice to students doing difficult searches is to find one good article with a decent bibliography, then follow it’s citations and follow the citations of the cited articles … it doesn’t take long to get a grip on the important works in the field as determined by the people actually doing research on the topic. Vendor-supplied tools do not really facilitate this process … although they supply lots of “hits”, they do a far worse job of describing the relationship between articles and researchers.  Of course, the type of searching that you’re doing in these things would seem to be pretty much strictly literal string-matching.  While the article may have all of the terms desired in it, the student and I quite often sit there wondering what the heck this article has to do with the topic (other than  the fact that the words requested appear in it).  This is the magic that Google has worked long and hard (and successfully) on.  Their search has always been about the relationships between articles … not only that the words appear, but also that the article is “significant” in this area of research because of its relationship to other articles.   Thus, the first step of finding that one good article is quite often done for you … there it is at the top of the list.  All of the connections are then supplied and you’re ready to go.

What this brings me around to is that I’m pretty much done with literal string-matching.  It seems like a primitive and clunky way to do any searching outside of looking for something that you already know the precise title of.  Recent improvements that it would seem have happened at Google (Google Scholar has not always been such a satisfying experience) have made it even more obvious that the “journal indexes” are a second-rate search system.  Even when they work well, they lack simplicity of searching for related and cited articles that are active links to the rest of the literature, and this is what research has always been about.  Google has demonstrated to me that they understand research and are trying to make a tool that facilitates that process, rather than a tool that demands that researchers adapt themselves to the tool.  Vendors, on the other hand, demonstrate that they lack the willingness to work on this, but have a great interest in dividing the literature into little islands of property with walls between them, and then charging you a lot to access their little island isolated from the rest of the world.

The problem is that I can’t quite just ditch all of the Ebscos and Ovids, and CSAs, because they still have the full-text in their limited domain.  Although more and more people are by-passing their front-end and just jumping from Google to their content (through the “Get it at Guelph” button), these folks are going to continue to charge a premium for this content, and may be perfectly happy to de-emphasize search in favour of just controlling the knowledge … this part needs to be solved as well.

As may be obvious, I’m not one of those people who are resentful of Google’s efforts … in fact, I resent the fact that all of the vendors have supplied us with mediocre tools at high prices, and have been quite content with their mediocrity.  I am happy that Google has finally got around to making this situation obvious and at least attempting to create a research tool that is suitable for research … I look forward to their next steps.

A corner seems to have been turned …

I haven’t used a blog in a long time (more often these days turning to Twitter, Facebook etc), but this thought require s a little more real estate.  I’ve been noticing recently that reference desk queries have been relying more and more lately on Google as not only the starting point, but also as the primary tool. A real change in this behaviour seems to have coincided with the introduction of new library catalog. Rather than navigate (the sometimes less than friendly) system, students simply go to Google schoalr, type in terms and then link back to our system for holdings, etc.  While this has traditionally been considered to be a bad thing in libraries, I’m finding myself making this choice as well.  Fact is, faced with having to find an article I think about navigating our system to a level numerous links deep, or going to Google and typing things into a single box.  Considering the success rate with the single box, Google is winning. Information research has shown for decades that anyone will choose the simplest route to the answer even if the answer isn’t quite as good as through a more complex route.  Lately, the answer through the simple route has been just as good … and less clicking is involved … and its intuitive … and …

I guess an interaction today really made this obvious to me.  A student was looking for material on techniques for parents socializing autistic children.  We first went through commercial journal indexes and had limited success with the terms “autism” “technique” “parent” and ”socialization”.  The articles coming up were not particularly relevent and it was clear that we’d have to start messing about with our choice of terms to refine the search. At a certain point I just decided to jump over to Google scholar to see what happened.  The same four terms provided articles right on the topic, beginning with those most relevant … it was just staring me right in the face … this was a better route.  The student was very happy and able to link back to our holdings, and I was left feeling like I’d somehow cheated … I even told her to make sure that she does use the commercial indexes at some point in her searching (but I’m not sure why …).  

I keep seeing library science articles in my mind suggesting that we should be forming more efficient search queries to get better results, or that there’s some reason for suspicion of the sources found in Google.  In short … I have no desire to refine my search if Google is going to retrieve relevent material with the searches that I’ve already done, and I’m going back through our system to actually view the material, so I assume these are decent sources. (plus … really … I’m quite capable of figuring that part out).

The simplest route to the answer …

Another reason to move to Europe

So, the Pirate Party has won at least one seat in the European Parliament, representing Sweden.  For those of you who have no idea, the folks who run the Pirate Bay file sharing site have a spin-off political party that got a rather small number of votes in the last election.  Since then, the Pirate Bay has been through the courts and convicted of something (aiding in copyright violation, or some such thing). Of course, the Pirate Bay obviously doesn’t even hide the fact that the do aid folks in violation of current copyright laws, although, to be fair, they host no content and do not provide any copyrighted material at all (they are an index to Torrents that are provided by other people).  The part that makes this really outrageous to their supporters is that it seems that the judge on the case has a conflict of interest, and the rather ludicrous claims of how much money is being lost as a direct result of the activities of the Pirate Bay.  It turns out that enough people were outraged by all of this that the Pirate Party received quite a few votes … enough, in fact, to trun them from a novelty into a real live sitting, participating,  political party.  In fact, among Swedes in their 20’s, they received about 20% of the vote.

No matter what you think about this, it is quite clear that the folks who want to protect copyright are playing this about as badly as is humanly possible.  By punishing the Pirate Bay in court, they have created a legitimate political party and created a world-wide news story that does not lo0k good (and will attract even more young people). In effect, they have created a movement that runs entirely against their cause.

There were far better options:

If the motion picture industry (for example) had the slightest bit of brain-power devoted to this they might have had a far more positive effect by convincing the Pirate Bay folks to hand over the site and have nothing to do with it in exchange for not being penalized for all of their “piracy”.  In fact, they might even have told them to keep on running Pirate Bay, but under certain conditions.  These conditions would be that the motion picture industry would provide nice, high-quality versions of all of the films found, to be offered for download at a reasonable price as an alternative to the often crappy handheld things to be found normally. The most important thing that the Pirate Bay has is visitors … bazillions of them … worth infinitely more than the fine that has been imposed on its founders, who shifted the site elsewhere where it hums along like nothing ever happened and still makes no money for the copyright holders. As a user of Torrent sites, I assure that if I could get a really nice copy of a hard to find film for a few bucks, I would pay … no problem … I would gladly pay.  There are millions like me, searching for millions of films.  

The money would roll in … I will not, however, go to HMV and spend 25 dollars on a 40-yr old film, so that I can own the phsyical media … that’s just plain stupid. (oh, and iTunes …the collection is nowhere near big enough for the back catalog, and the movies come along way too late in new releases).  Unfortunately, the motion picture industry is completely incapable of understanding that they could be making money on films that they are otherwise not making money on, and that the market is already there … fully formed … waiting to be offered product.  Instead, they try to shut down the market and force people to go back to HMV and buy a movie in a box, in a format that will be outdated next year.

Remarkably, they have also managed to create an entire social movement devoted to opposing them, and have now managed to create seats in the European parliament devoted to opposing them. Great strategy.

Changing Nature of the Journal

 

 

In short, the paper has become the nearly universal currency of the scholarly enterprise. As

a consequence, the members of the invisible colleges, the movers and shakers in every discipline

and subspecialty thereof must press not only his/her local library, but the libraries of

other institutions that might have some bearing upon his/her position to subscribe to and hold

those journals in which he/she defines and delimits his/her turf and portrays his/her excellence.

Despite its relative irrelevance to his/her information-gathering needs, which are better

served by other technologies, the journal is absolutely requisite to defining his/her place

in a discipline and confirming and validating his/her place in the invisible college.

Comment on the journal … once the central communication tool of a discipline, but with much better tools now available, its role for the scholar has changed: 

“In short, the paper has become the nearly universal currency of the scholarly enterprise. As a consequence, the members of the invisible colleges, the movers and shakers in every discipline and subspecialty thereof must press not only his/her local library, but the libraries of

other institutions that might have some bearing upon his/her position to subscribe to and hold those journals in which he/she defines and delimits his/her turf and portrays his/her excellence. Despite its relative irrelevance to his/her information-gathering needs, which are better served by other technologies, the journal is absolutely requisite to defining his/her place in a discipline and confirming and validating his/her place in the invisible college.”

“Invisible Colleges, Information and Libraries” … Richard Abel, at the Charleston Conference, 1990.

Supporting scientists … maybe.

Another in a series of seemingly unrelated quotes on scientific communication … they’re too long to Tweet (and I’m tired of tweeting in general), and I like them.

” It is clear, however, that the productive scientist cannot be an isolated scholar who devotes years to reading scientific literature related to the phenomenon he wishes to research … Nor is he the recluse, more or less ignored by society, who can privately pursue his own intuition. … Instead, the scientist relies heavily on informal networks of information exchange to keep abreast of current activities and all of the current views of the community  on the value and relevance of specific research problems.”

“Scientific Communication: Its Role in the Conduct of Research and Creation of Knowledge”, Garvey and Griffith in Key Papers in Information Science, 1980.

Are we serving the research process in the best possible way?

More on informal communication:

“There appears to be no study of information seeking behaviour that shows libraries as the first place researchers look for information. Libraries are in effect part of the formal spectrum of information transfer, and as such, among the last places that scientists and engineers look for information.

As he describes the characteristics of the organizational gatekeeper, Allen writes: “librarians and other purveyors of information might well be able to perform their functions better if the were to know the identity of the gatekeepers in their orgnaization.” (Thomas J. Allen, Managing the Flow of Technology, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977) By identifying and interacting with the gatekeepers in his or her organization, the librarian can be more involved in the informal communication network.”

Jean Poland “Informal Communication Among Scientists and Engineers: A Review of the Literature” , Science and Technology Libraries, v.11, no.3, 1991.

Formal/informal sources

Commenting on the often circuitous routes that scientists may take to find reliable information (i.e. – not the formal routes but personal connections:

“it was hoped that this procedure would, on the one hand, illumine the operation of the informal avenues of communication, and that it would, on the other hand, point up the services which the formal reference facilities fail to perform. Eventually, such knowledge may may suggest ways of having the formal facilities do more adequately the job they presently fail to do.”

“It is to be hoped that most searches for information lead to their goal less circuitously, at least when the goal is so close at hand.  It is worth noting that the informal source of information, once located, proved very effective.  This episode indicates that much would be gained if finding the right personal source of information could be made more efficient.  It may well be possible to  make better formal arrangements for locating such informal source of information, even where it would not be practical or economical to have the actual information carried in the formal media.”

Barber and Hirsch, The Sociology of Science

Quick question.

I’ve got this question forming very slowly in my mind … what is the purpose of the ILS? (Integrated Library System for you non-library types)  I don’t call it the “library catalog” because that answers the question and is far too limiting … the catalog is, in fact, a catalog, and we should be far past considering that a great achievement.  Why do we have an ILS, and what are we attempting to do when we design a new ILS?  Is it simply an index?  Is it just a database of items that we allow to people to search, or is there more?  

You see, I’m beginning to suspect that the library business has been caught up in the business of creating ever more feature rich databases and has completely forgotten to step back and wonder exactly why we’re doing this.  Is it our primary purpose to facilitate searching through a lot of stuff and provide as accurate string matches as we possibly can (i.e. – keyword or phrase matches)?

If so, carry on.

However, my belief is that libraries have been far more involved (and interested in) supporting the processes of research, teaching, and learning, of which string matching is but a tiny little part.  Research is a far more complex process than just finding matching information buried in a big pile of other information … if you really look into the process of research as practiced by academics (and others) there are a lot of very complex social interactions that go on to complete successful research.  One of interest that librarians should already know about, is the idea of the invisible college … whatever you call it, fields of study, areas of interest, etc. become collections of people who become aware of others who are doing work in similar fields … and then they communicate, share information, read each others work, cite each other, and become familiar with the literature.  Serious researchers are often aware of pretty much everything in their field before it is published and will be more likely to be unpleasantly surprised by the absence of a work in the collection of their library than pleasantly surprised by its presence.

What am I talking about? Search can be done well by anybody … that has been clearly demonstrated.  Supporting research, however, is something that librarians should have a talent for, and our expertise goes far beyond the ability to efficiently type keywords in to a search string (that is also something that we are good at, but there is less and less demand for that).  If we truly want to support research, rather than just searching, I think that we need to consider what that process entails, first of all, and then decide how to create systems that actually support more of that process than just the search … that process is rich and social, but our systems provide an isolated and very non-social experience … I truly think that there is something to think deeply about here … I’m going to go off and think deeply about it some more …  (and no, I’m not suggesting that researchers should just use Facebook more …)

TV?

I just finished doing my once-a-term “Tech Trends” talk for a consumer studies course and it has left me with lots of thoughts (it may not have left the students with any, but at least it helps me).  This term I was able to tie in an experience from just last weekend. 

I have always mentioned that television seems to be a concept on the way out, but last weekend it became really clear to me that it’s already becoming obsolete.  Now, what I’m talking about is TV as a model … having a device that requires that you subscribe to a service (like cable or satellite) and then watch things based on the schedule of that service provider. Last weekend the college basketball tournament was on “TV”, but it turned out that CBS was also providing all of the games in semi-HD over the web.  The picture was better than on my TV, I could choose between games, and I could watch multiple games at once.  CBS also supplied an archive, should I miss anything. This was perfect.  I was also amazed that CBS had realized that they could benefit from doing this … they were still selling advertising and likely could guarantee more viewers for ads than on TV, given that they didn’t have to deal with all of the local cable and satellite providers who insert their own ads.

While this all made me happy, there was an obvious question.  Why can’t I always just watch my programming streaming live over the web, in glorious HD, and with the ability to just watch whatever I choose?  The only thing between me and this viewing nirvana would seem to be the willingness of CBS (or whoever) to turn on the taps.   I’m sure there are more complications and perhaps this particular programming was well subsidized by various advertisers, or perhaps the bandwidth was donated by someone,  but still … if the only thing stopping this type of service is that fact that middle-men don’t like it, then let’s cut them out and continue the march of progress.   

(this reminds me of a question I’ve been asking for years … TV, when it was being received by an antenna from the “airwaves” was financed entirely by advertising.  Then cable came along and I had to pay for this “service” in addition to still having to watch advertising.  Where, exactly, had the value increased for me to justify my increased bills?  Same content, more people to pay.  Getting my content free over the web just seems like a return to sanity. I will watch ads if I’m not expected to also pay for the privilege.)