Google and the Capitalization of Failure | Peer to Peer Review

Siva Vaidhyanathan warns that Google is taking advantage of higher education's failures

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 05/21/2009

In collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book, Siva Vaidhyanathan is putting drafts of his work in progress, The Googlization of Everything, online. His latest chapter, "The Googlization of Universities," is one I'd love to discuss with faculty at my college. The implications are far-ranging, as Google provides everything from "free" basic services like e-mail hosting (creating life-long customers as well as a massive minable pile of personal data about a coveted age demographic) to cloud computing (which Vaidhyanathan worries will change the way we define statistical significance and meaning). But it's what he says about libraries and scholarly communication that particularly intrigues me.

Higher education: FAIL
According to Vaidhyanathan, "Google has capitalized on a 'public failure.'" At the same time that high tuition excludes many citizens from access to knowledge, universities are turning to Google to provide systems that appear free to everyone, not just to higher education. (It's this sense that Google is "free to all" that made so many citizens take Google's side when Harvard's librarian, Robert Darnton, criticized the terms of the Google book settlement.) Google is becoming the public university and the world's academic library, or so it seems on the surface.

Google has even adapted the concept of peer review for its ranking algorithm (though it's really not review at all—more of a merger between the concept of impact factor and American Idol). The algorithm helps searchers find relevant links based on how many people have "cited" a site and how authoritative (or at least how often linked-to) those citing pages are. Google has also provided the world (with the help of scholarly publishers and academic libraries) a very large collection of books and a federated search of scholarly publications, letting people bypass a particular library by searching the vast Google library.

The irony is that Google Scholar and Google Book Search don't provide actual information, at least not in formats that are under copyright and which publishers are willing to make freely available. What Google does is offer us a glimpse with links to purchase–or to borrow it from a library. It provides the search, but someone else has to pay for the content.

Information torrents, critical literacy
Because the search itself doesn't distinguish well among disciplines or between high-quality sources and piles of seemingly relevant but less significant research, students need more help than ever. Vaidhyanathan describes the distinction that Tara Brabazon has made between "operational literacy" (how do I use tools to find stuff?), and "critical literacy" (what do I do with what I find?).

"The production of sound arguments, interpretations, and analyses has become more of a challenge in the age of constant connectivity and information torrents," says Vaidhyanathan, yet students are not being provided with tools for performing the work of critical literacy. "Google Scholar therefore makes the role of librarian central to and more visible within every part of the academic mission. Paradoxically, the more we use Google Scholar, the more we need librarians to help us stumble through the fog of data and scholarship that it offers."

But isn't that need already there? Many libraries provide federated search engines that offer the same interdisciplinary torrent that Google Scholar does. With or without Google, we need to do more to help students use what they find. And we need to do far more than that: we need to make the fruits of our research more available.

The privatization of public knowledge
Vaidhyanathan concludes that universities "must assert their values and interests on Google as the company assumes greater control over many aspects of information distribution." I disagree—or rather, I think when it comes to information distribution, the issue is much broader than Google. Universities must assert their right to share the scholarly content they create. As it is, we give it to commercial publishers and have to buy it back. All that Google does is provide a popular branded search of that commercialized content (paid for in micropayments of personal information). They are competing for our students' attention by offering a free version of proprietary aggregators for which libraries have spent a lot of money to provide access to content they can't afford to own.

Equating the commercialization of search with the commercialization of content leaves out the fact that before Google was even born we ceded our intellectual work—misconstrued as "property"—to commercial entities. In an essay in Nature published in 1996, John Ziman warned about the dire outcome of treating intellectual work as property, saying "most academic science may no longer be so committed to the principle of 'public knowledge'—traditionally the linchpin of academic science." He was referring to patenting research done at universities and the growing corporate influence on research programs, but he could just as easily have been talking about our unhealthy reliance on commercial publishing to distribute research results, a practice that predates Google and continues to vex us.

This is our failure, and it's not a failure for which Google Scholar offers a fix. The scholarly community creates the content. If we really put our minds to it, we could set it free.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

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