“How to compete with Google: Simple Resource Discovery Systems for Libraries”

Report on the JIBS User Group Workshop, 13th November 2008

The idea for this workshop was sparked by a recent discussion on the 'lis-infoliteracy' list: Isinformation literacy training essential for students to get the best out of their library resources orshould we just be making our resource discovery systems easier to use?

“Compared with academic studies, opinion and anecdotal evidence would have you believe thatInternet is the answer to everything - the first port of call for information, communicating withand making friends. Multi- tasking in an electronic environment disguises poor information-seeking skills”. (Martin Wolf, University of Liverpool Lis-infoliteracy email discussion list 2/1/2008)

The morning was given to papers and the afternoon to demonstrations of ‘one stop shop’software that showed how HE libraries were competing with Google. The day began withpresentations by Maggie Fieldhouse, Lecturer at University College London and MarkHepworth, Senior Lecturer at the University of Loughborough. Maggie Fieldhouse summarisedthe findings of the CIBER Report which was commissioned by the British Library and JISCearly this year (Information behaviour of the researcher of the future: a CIBER briefing paper(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/downloads/) and both the research presented in theCIBER report and Hepworth’s paper concluded that despite all that the internet offered, therewas a dire need for information skills training in HE – for both students and academics. Thefollowing is a summary of the papers presented by Fieldhouse and Hepworth.

The two quotes from the CIBER report indicate the findings of the report:

“ We know that younger scholars especially have only a very limited knowledge of the manyLibrary sponsored services that are on offer to them. The problem is one of both raisingawareness of this expensive and valuable content and making the interfaces much more standardand easier to use”.

“This discussion points to an interesting dilemma, certainly for H.E. librarians, that strikes atthe heart of our dual roles as service providers and, increasingly, educators. As serviceproviders we want our electronic services to be as simple to use as possible, minimising thebarriers between users and information. As educators, we want students (and academics!) to beable to distinguish critically between different types of information”. (CIBER Report ExecutiveSummary, p. 30)

The Cyber report suggests that the information seeking behaviour of library users, including thatof researchers and academics has been conditioned by emails and executive summaries, i.e.,digested ‘bytes’ of information. Most users view content online for less than two minutes. They

all want quick wins or print out longer articles that are never get read. “Power browsing, i.e.devouring titles, contents, pages, abstracts, horizontal scanning, flicking/channel hopping are thenorm” (CIBER, p. 31). Massive choice of content encourages this bouncing behaviour. Usersare generally spending longer finding content than reading it. This type of information seekingbehaviour has resulted in a trivialisation of information and a false sense of confidence and oftenresults in little deep understanding or learning taking place.

What are the implications of this trivialisation of information – especially in the self-directedlearning landscape? Could all this be true: Users have a false sense of confidence, a lack ofcognitive or metal understanding of the structure of the web, a lack of understanding of howsearch engines work and an inability to select identify search terms or keywords? Users tend touse of natural language or a random conversational style language which results in an inaccuratelist of hits that may not be relevant or useful. And yet there is a blinding trust in what is foundon Google. This is how most users come to us when they begin their higher education studies.Many have developed these coping skills – getting by as they have not been taught informationliteracy skills on how to develop the search capabilities appropriate to the demands of HE andresearch. They are further in the habit of cutting and pasting and have little notion of thecopyright implications of what they are doing.

Fieldhouse questioned whether we are heading for a world of ‘eminent’ researchers who rely oninformation from ‘Wikipedia’ or contacts on ‘Facebook’ or ‘LinkedIn’ rather than ‘ScienceDirect’ and who write blogs rather than essays. There is little planned research as ‘quickanswers to difficult questions’ is the underlying strategy used by most students. Many studentsdo not know or understand the importance of evaluating the information resources they comeacross. They do not know if the information is from a serious refereed work or may becomposed of shallow ideas. The 2002 PEW report (http://www.pewinternet.org) found that61% of internet users perceive the internet as a library. Huge quantities of information areignored by web crawlers. Google Scholar may list links to academic sources, but access isdenied and users are often asked to pay for material. There is a lack of understanding of howsearch engines work and the commercial gains these search engines make. Common searchfailures are a result of spelling mistakes, a poor understanding of their information needs whichlead to problems developing search strategies and generating alternative terms such assynonyms, alternative spellings, inability to formulate queries, inability to identify multipleconcepts which all result in incorrect or skewed results. The common user experience is toomuch, too little, not relevant, not knowing where to go and not knowing how systems work, notbeing familiar with the domain.

What resources do academics use and how? Are they entrenched in using a narrow range oftools or are they receptive to new ones? Are we guilty of the same behaviour? These are allinteresting questions and ones worth exploring if we want to find out who our users are and howwe can gear our service to fit these needs. Fieldhouse suggests that HE libraries should beinvesting in finding out more about our users’ information seeking behaviours, how they accessor want to access library resources, how we can make content easier to use and have systems thatare as intuitive to use as Google. We need to address the complexity of search interfaces and theinconsistency of terminology, search functions and refining mechanisms across different

platforms. This is how commercial organisations such as supermarkets operate. Why areacademic libraries not doing the same?

Both Fieldhouse and Hepworth questioned why Library Management Software (LMS) suppliershave not used the advances in technology and created systems that incorporate Web 2.0 features.This has resulted in libraries purchasing add-on software packages to compete with Google.However, even federated searching is old hat now as it distinguishes between catalogues,electronic journals and other resources. Both speakers (and later the presenters) suggested thatthe time had come to make a return on investment for the decades spent creating good qualitycatalogue records because many of the new technologies depend on the ‘richness’ of the record,i.e. the metadata (the richer the descriptions of the information objects, the more that can beextracted). Used in the appropriate way, Web 2.0 features such as tag clouds and facetedclassifications allow different views and enable refining, i.e. narrowing down or broadening asearch.

The afternoon was spent looking at how some university libraries are using Simple ResourceDiscovery Systems (SRDS) to compete with Google and promote their libraries. The foursystems demonstrated were: Exlibris’ PRIMO (University of East Anglia), ENCORE (GlasgowUniversity), ELIN (University of Portsmouth and University of Bath – both require user signonto access their SRDS) and AQUABROWSER (University of Edinburgh). These SRDS use Web2.0 functionalities so results are listed by relevance, there is no differentiation of media, theyallow refinements, use tag clouds, suggest possibilities, spellings, etc. The appendix to this reporthas a summary of the key points from three of the presentations these products and some screenshots showing how the products are being used in HE libraries in the UK. ELIN has not beenincluded as there were some serious concerns about the lack of support and documentation.

Of the SRDS demonstrated in the afternoon, I believe Aquabrowser it is the least expensive andwould consider it as it has been proven to work with Webfeat (which Edinburgh have alsopurchased). However, I expect that the SRDS demonstrated at JIBS will evolve and becomemore sophisticated. Users should be able to see if an item is available in the library from the topscreen (i.e. without having to click on a link) and also to be able to export references intoRefWorks/End Note, Zotero, CiteULike, etc.

Nazlin BhimaniSchool Liaison Manager

EIS & iWBLNovember 2008

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