Google is Not the Net

If librarians find Google’s ubiquitous presence a bit troubling, the company hardly played down those fears at the 2006 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans. Its gargantuan booth sat on prime real estate smack in the middle of the show floor. Inside the booth, the company premiered its “library movie,” a short that rivaled I am Cuba in its earnest attempt to define the common fate of Google and libraries. In fact, so wary of Google are some librarians that at a boozy reception people joked that the blinking red buttons given away at the booth were in fact tiny scanners, part of a pilot program to suck up and transmit to Google anything within ten feet of an attached librarian.

While Google’s public relations machine hummed on the ALA show floor, California Digital Library user services architect and LJ columnist Roy Tennant moderated a standing-room-only session entitled “The Future of Search.” With his first question, Tennant gave voice to librarians’ broader concern. He asked his panel, consisting of the University of Washington’s Joe Janes and SirsiDynix’s Stephen Abram, if commercial search firms like Google would replace the need for libraries.

“If the millions of searches going to them were to come to us,” Janes replied “we’d be overwhelmed in about 20 minutes.” Abram was equally blunt. “Wrong question,” he said. “No one comes to libraries to search. Users come to us for learning, community, and other services.”

Call it the information world’s version of An Inconvenient Truth. According to University of California–Berkeley professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, the world now creates no less than five exabytes of information each year, enough to replicate the Library of Congress’s entire print collection 37,000 times over. Outsell Inc. estimated that information was worth about $285 billion to the U.S. economy in 2005. Yes, the icecaps that once throttled access to information are shrinking. Flooding us with more information than we can possibly handle is big business. And whether or not it makes us uncomfortable, and as imperfect as such services are, we need the Googles of the world.

Still, it’s not hard to understand why Google creates such unease among librarians. “Google is so pervasive in so many realms that used to be specifically what libraries did,” Janes explains. “It is a collection, it is a way of searching, a navigation mechanism. It is doing all these things that look like what people used to go to libraries and librarians for.” Google, he says, “is the 800-pound gorilla.”

The profession, however, can’t afford to be myopic when it comes to Google. As inescapable as it is, Google is not the Internet. And as the web evolves, new opportunities and challenges loom larger for libraries than who’s capturing the bulk of the search or email markets, or who’s giving us driving directions.

In just a decade, the evolution of the Internet has upset the balance in an information ecology that had served libraries for centuries. What will the next decade look like? Blogs and RSS feeds have changed the way we gather and look at news. Wikipedia, the living, free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is changing how we think about reference. Services offered by Amazon.com and NetFlix are winning the hearts, minds—and habits—of our users.

“All of these things,” Janes says, “are opportunities.” Libraries today, he observes, cannot affort to be paralyzed, wed to old modes of service, bureaucratically pinned-down, or too reticent to take advantage of the fact that, in a world drowning in information, libraries should be more vital than ever.

“Many librarians today don’t really know what they do best, so here they are concerned about competing in Google’s space instead of choosing to compete in what we do best,” Abram says. “That is creating context, learning, community, and improving the quality of the question.”

If you think Google represents your big challenge, consider this: MySpace.com, Rupert Murdoch’s popular social networking site, has surpassed Google in terms of traffic. In June 2006, it logged nearly 46 million unique users, most of them young, spending an average of two hours at a time on the site, according to Nielsen Net ratings. They maintain profiles including things like their favorite books and movies; they blog, host photos, videos, email, chat, and post “bulletins” on message boards—all free. All wrapped in slick advertising powered by, you guessed it, Google. So popular is MySpace, in fact, its search function ranks sixth among all commercial search engines. Want to guess where your patrons are?

Social networks, Abram says, everything from MySpace and Facebook to blogs, to creating folksonomies and message boards, or even the simple act of letting users append reviews to the library catalog is the long-term trend. These represent a big opportunity for libraries.

Yet, despite the site’s surging popularity, access to MySpace, often portrayed in the major media as little more than a haven for spammers, identity thieves, and predators, remains blocked in many libraries, schools, and workplaces. Library administrators, burdened by everything from endless task forces and preconceptions of what library service is to federal legislation like the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) or, potentially, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) or even just the fear of facing disgruntled parents, have been slow to harness the power of social networks. The Internet, however, waits for no librarian.

“We’ll study things to death until death,” Abram says. Meanwhile, he notes, a generation of users go online, and libraries risk losing virtually uncontested a generation of potential library patrons to commercial ventures.

Brooklyn College’s Beth Evans is one of a handful of librarians whose library has been given a MySpace identity, an idea she got not from a professional conference or staff meeting but from her 15-year-old daughter, Nell. “Some people were like 'that’s not what a library looks like,’” she concedes. “But I don’t buy that. There’s no definition of what a library is supposed to look like, how a library is supposed to behave, or how librarians are supposed to look. It just seemed like a smart outreach move.”

Evans tells the story of one student who emailed the library through MySpace.com asking what the library was doing with a profile. Evans wrote back to the student and played a little game. She included a call number and instructions for doing a catalog search that led the student to his favorite book. “He was like, 'Whoa, that is so cool!’” she recalls. “I’m hoping that student will be hanging out with friends one night and say, 'Hey, let me tell you what the library did!’” (See also the Editorial, p. 8.)

Such informal interactions online, Evans believes, are crucial to the future of libraries. “You can really recognize the individuality that you tend not to see in a regular reference interview,” she says. “When students write you, and you bother to look at what they are all about and then relate it to what we do here, it registers. It makes them feel like somebody is bothering to care.”

Is it possible that students working on assignments might email reference questions to their “friends” at the library through Myspace.com? Perhaps, Evans says, but that’s not really the point—at least not yet. She compares the library’s Myspace.com profile with the library’s decision to put a reference table in the college dining hall. The point, she says, is to be where your users are.

In addition to MySpace, libraries can learn and take advantage of other networking advances. “I’d love a NetFlix thing at my library,” Janes says. “If I could put ten or 15 things on a list at my library’s web site and when I return one item I get another one sent to me, how great is that? How hard is that?”

At present, very hard. Aside from the technological challenges, most libraries, fearful of hackers and subpoenas, won’t keep circulation records for more than a few days much less use that information to enable social networking services like NetFlix or Amazon’s book recommendations, services users have increasingly come to enjoy—and expect. “Since we refuse in libraries to create the minimum level of links you need to create social networking, we can’t create social networks,” Abram says flatly. “And it’s always easier to blame the network than actually look at ourselves and say we won’t allow even adult patrons to choose their own level of privacy.”

“From a library’s perspective,” Janes says, “they just don’t want the responsibility, and I understand the burden and can respect the professional ethic.” The Microsofts, Googles, and Amazons that do collect such information, he notes, do so not without controversy and have “huge enterprises” dedicated to protecting user information. But the fact remains that users readily hand over the same information to commercial ventures—to Google when they search, to Amazon when they buy books, to NetFlix when they rent movies.

“I think people are willing to do the same at the library,” Janes says. “I also know that my library will fight harder on my behalf. My take is let the user make the decision. If I, as a user, want to give my information knowing it might be subpoenaed or hijacked, in return for the enhanced service I might get, it’s my choice.” In fact, patrons have already shown this willingness through ventures like Library ELF, which sends reminders when books are due (see LJ netConnect, Summer 2006, p. 2ff.).

No one is saying abandon patron privacy, Abram insists. But as users enjoy certain levels of service offered by commercial ventures and get more comfortable with the risks, he suggests, how long can we continue to force our patrons through the “horror of the card catalog”? Libraries should be prepared, he says, to allow tagging on “every single catalog record” and “Post-it™ notes” all over library web sites, to “radically trust” our patrons to beat their own multidisciplinary paths.

At the American Council of Learned Societies, Ron Musto and Eileen Gardiner have devoted the last seven years to pioneering ebooks, and to them the idea that future generations will commit themselves to creating flat, staid, extended print texts, eschewing multimedia, seems impossible. “The argument against ebooks was always that people don’t read online,” Gardiner says. “That argument no longer applies.” People today do read online, she notes, everything from online editions of newspapers to blogs, emails, newsfeeds, and, yes, even books.

In his landmark 1994 article, “Economy of Ideas,” John Perry Barlow noted that we have entered an age on the Internet akin to “selling wine without bottles.” For libraries not to prepare for and embrace that future, Abram says, would be devastating. “We still like objects we can stick barcodes on,” Abram says. “How many libraries are experimenting with streaming media?”

What should be greeted as liberation, however, instead all too often meets resistance. “The vast majority of people now are not text-based learners,” Abram says. “But in libraries, we’re hanging on to our text-based preferences, our tendency to prefer print over almost anything in particular. As long as we keep print our primary product, almost our only product in some cases, we will have issues.”

This doesn’t mean libraries should abandon the book. Ebooks have yet to prove they’re ready for prime time. With electronic resources mitigating the library’s need to put things on shelves, however, librarians can focus more effort on getting resources and services into users’ hands. That includes helping users better evaluate resources, putting more effort into solving thorny preservation and archival issues, working toward standards for ebooks, and better caring for, cataloging, and making available the loads of special collections effectively lost in our bins.

“Managing abundance” is how New York University cultural historian Siva Vaidhyanathan frames what’s facing our information future. And challenges abound. We face an intellectual property regime vastly out of balance, from digital copyright to patent law. At the very time the concept of fair use faces grave obstacles, he notes in a recent blog posting, Google Book Search is “piling more weight” on it. Online video aggregator You Tube faces a lawsuit; the recording industry is suing children and dead people to stifle downloading; and peer-to-peer networking, the true future of the Internet experts say, is also being sued into oblivion. Legislatively, DOPA threatens to pull federal funding from libraries that don’t filter social networks. Librarians can make the difference.

“Anybody can be a better librarian using Amazon, Google, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, You Tube, any of those,” says Janes, “because now you have access to content and tools you never had access to before. You can know your clients better than before, and when you add these to the things you already have, you have this enormously broader repertoire.”

How librarians adapt over the next generation could be the difference between a vibrant future for libraries and a steady descent into insignificance. The Internet constantly changes, Janes observes, and so must the profession. “You can’t fight it, so you shouldn’t. The web is about information. So are we. It’s about community. So are we. What we as a profession must do is figure out those things we do better or differently and do those things.”