On the Same Screen

"Are we on the same page?" Not too long from now this metaphor will be as anachronistic as icebox is for refrigerator.

We all know the metaphor in this phrase figuratively means "Are we focusing on the same subject?" But the literal image, of more than one person looking at the same page of some printed material, is rapidly becoming passé. For many librarians as well as our users, it would be more accurate to say, "Are we on the same screen?" After all, very few of us write with anything but a computer, and as for reading, email has replaced snail mail for most business and private correspondence. Of course, what is still conventionally printed on 8½" × 11" paper is often composed on a screen about half that size.

It isn't that I'm such a purist about language usage. I think there could be some practical benefits if more of us got in the habit of saying screen even when we mean page in this figurative sense. Many of us have to remember to scroll down, or click through to an Internet page to see what is "below the fold" (to use another useful old-fashioned term borrowed from newspapers). What is easy to see by turning a copy of USA Today over to read the bottom half of the page can be just as easily missed if we forget to—or choose not to—scroll down, or click through the online version of the same newspaper.

This spatial difference has intellectual consequences. In the era of sound bites on TV and quick information fixes on the Internet, many people no longer have the patience to read a standard page of information presented in a printed newspaper, magazine, or book. It's not just that attention spans are shorter than they used to be, as some argue. Many of us simply don't believe that a page that has to be read—and maybe reread—is worth the effort when a screen is so easily accessible.

A computer screen, as opposed to a conventional printed page, seems to encourage scanning or skimming information rather than the slower, deliberative process of reading. Many people, grown-up professionals as well as students and kids, have less tolerance for reading printed pages because today's electronic media have conditioned them to expect information to be presented in short, entertaining chunks.

That's why sound bite and factoid were coined. Today, convenience and speed often trump accuracy. The streamlined information package has become as popular as fast food. Unfortunately, the result may be intellectually just as nonnutritious.

Some librarians are trying to stem this tide, but it may be a losing battle. I wonder how many of us actually believe accurate and precise information is more important than quick access? If we insisted on showing our users how to get the right information instead of the quickest hits, we'd be even less popular, but, in the long run, we'd be more professional.

Personally, I don't buy the argument that our customers are always right. User satisfaction is far too easy to achieve when libraries come more and more to resemble video arcades. Some reference librarians are all too willing to show users simply how to formulate a search in an index rather than help them to evaluate their results. We decode citations and think our job is done, when really it is just beginning.

Perhaps there is something negatively revealing about how we truly regard such lists when we refer to them as a list of "hits" (as if this were a hit list?), or that the search was "quick and dirty" (suggesting, surely, that a slow and clean search is better but not usually provided?).

We certainly perform a useful service with quick searches, leading to lists of potentially helpful "hits." But how much real, lasting, educational benefit is there in only showing users how to perform the mechanics of searching indexes, online catalogs, and search engines?

True, sometimes we don't have the time to help users learn how to critique the results of the database searching we have taught them. But at other moments, it's not time we lack but motivation. If teachers and librarians don't insist that students take the opportunity to sift through sources to determine the difference among good, better, and best, most of these users will continue to settle for second-best.

Maybe the problem is that we are on the same screen, rather than on the same page as our users. Maybe we're goo-gooing with a Google-like mentality even when we're searching more intellectually sophisticated resources than those on the open Internet. It isn't, after all, conducive to customer satisfaction to tell a user he or she may have to spend more time identifying, locating, and photocopying the most exact source in a printed journal or book rather than the "sort of all right" source online.