LJ Talks to Gary Price

Andrew Richard Albanese -- Library Journal, 3/20/2006

Just don't call him Jeeves. But you can now call Gary Price, the founder of Resource Shelf and DocuTicker, the librarians' go-to-to guy at search engine Ask.com, where Price recently became director of online Information Resources. LJ recently caught up with Price to see how his new duties and his old ones will come together.

So, how did you wind up with Ask.com and what kinds of things will you be doing?

I've always heard from a lot of people, that it would be great if there was a person at one of the large search engines whose job it was to actually interact on a day-to-day basis with library community, and that's now one of my main roles at Ask.com. I'll be a face in the crowd, so to speak, an actual go-to person for the library community, and will help make the Ask.com product better for everybody. But I'm still doing what I've always done. I just did two presentations last week, one for SLA and Simmons in Boston, and one for NELINET. I'm not out there giving four hour Ask.com presentations. I'm not a salesman for Ask.com.

A librarians' go-to guy at a search engine: that sounds like a pretty big job, yes?

Well, it is. I would categorize it three different ways. I'm doing outreach, going to libraries and K-12 communities. I'm doing, well, in-reach, if that's an actual word! I'm letting people at Ask. Com know what services libraries have offered and the great things librarians are doing on the open web. There's a lot of great stuff librarians have done in terms of organizing information on the web, so that's something I want to let Ask.com know about, kind of piggybacking on some of the great work librarians have done. Third, I'm helping Ask.com with product development.

So it's been a busy time for you? What's changing, what's not changing in Gary Price's world?

Well, my second week at Ask.com is also the tenth anniversary of my becoming a librarian and the fifth anniversary of Resource Shelf. It's been quite a couple of weeks. Resource Shelf is definitely continuing. It's never been more popular. There will be nothing different—absolutely nothing. If you look at it since I started at Ask.com nothing there would suggest that Resource Shelf will become a vehicle for Ask.com. This is very important to me. If they had wanted me to become an evangelist or salesman for them I probably wouldn't have taken the job. Yes, my interest and focus is in Ask.com and how to improve the product, but the coverage on Resource Shelf and on DocuTicker is not a place to just talk about Ask.com. I maintain complete editorial freedom and I still own both Resource shelf and DocuTicker, so that's another great part of this opportunity that Ask.com has given me.

Let's talk searching. What are the most common mistakes you see searchers make?

I think a common mistake people make, and to some degree this may even go for some librarians, unfortunately, is that they know one thing and that's it. There's a lot of money being put into specialized search tools and databases, or what the industry calls verticals. Librarians know that there isn't one book or database, or one reference to answer every question. It's one thing for me to talk about alternatives, it's another thing for people to actually invest the time and effort and money to build and develop these things. For example, take Research Index, which has been around for a long time, I think eight years. It's a database that crawls the open web for scholarly information, and gives citation information and a lot of other value added features, but do people know about it? So a big challenge is just letting people know what's out there.

Is there a generational component? Are younger generations more, or too comfortable using search engines vs. those with experience using traditional library service?

I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done not only teaching students to be better searchers but teachers, too. This isn't really an Ask.com issue as much as it's a library marketing issue, and I know this is much easier said than done. Putting a face to the resources, putting a face to the library is very, very important. Especially for that younger group it's really important to get them to check more than one or two sources and to evaluate where that information is coming from. Making people better searchers requires training. I wouldn't say education, but training. Short doses of showing people what they can use. It's my experience that a little goes a long way and once you turn people on to the concept of alternatives, people will get excited. But you can't use something unless you know about it. So I think that's something the library community needs to do better as a whole, we offer not only our skills but all these unique resources, that, in my experience, most people don't even know about.

In looking at a recent Pew Report on searching, 44 percent said they go to one place, and 92 percent still said they were confident in their search skills. Is there a disconnect there?

I think that's because they just don't know anything else exists. If 92 percent are confident, well consider that probably 99 percent of all searches that go through the major search engines aren't using any of the advanced functions they offer. People are just taking what they can get. I think that will become a bigger challenge as we move forward. More importantly, another part of this is how long is it taking them to be satisfied? That's another huge issue here, one which also transcends my new job at Ask.com, time. I think this is one of the most marketable commodities that the library profession offers: saving time. We can use our jargon, and i use it as much as anybody, but in coming up with a message that will resonate with the general public, saving time is a phrase everyone will understand, whether an eighth-grader or a senior citizen. That's a concept we should think more about in selling our services and our abilities.