CAL2005: Googleization: A Discussion

George Jaramillo & David Domenico, Colorado State University

I spoke to the presenters in advance of their session and they admitted that beyond showing the Googlezon short film as a discussion starter, they had no specific presentation planned. Hey, winging is what I do half the time so I'm never going to hold that against anyone...

• “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible an useful.”
• Shown: Googlezon by Robin Sloan
• Audience reactions
• Plausible
• “Truth no more”
• We choose who's interpretation we listen to
• Wikipedia
• fact vs. opinion
• You still need to evaluate
• The power of the many over the power of the few
• To have computers determine what you're reading scares me
• Privacy issues are a concern
• Identity theft issues?
• We're reacting as if it's the only source
• People are selecting what they want today
• Can people evaluate?
• Kids today are forced to learn how to evaluate since there's so much more, is this true? studies disagree
• “Everything that's bad for you is good” (book)
• how much choice do we really have?
• bad information also propagates quickly
• risk of people being stuck in their own narrow view
• people don't want to dig deeper than the first 10 sites
• you've always asked your friends first, not the official resources, now it's just on a much larger scale
• who controls the algorithms
• CSU: “I found this on Google Scholar” but we're spending $$$ on databases
• Is Google a threat to libraries?
• The library community are questioning our relevance
• We talk about Google too much
• We need to be their partner
• Frustrated by the ease of Google vs. databases
• Might the technology make evaluation easier?
• More content creation & peer-review i.e. social software
• Google is an additional resource
• Is this not what we've been discs sing for years?
• learning curve on the databases we buy, they're more difficult to use
• Googlezon will probably not be a monopoly
• Privacy, privacy, privacy
• Google is responding to the demands of the public
• Maybe we as librarians need to create their own Google-like resource
• The potential of the opposite is there... maybe there will be more players than there are right now.
• “Reach them where they live” -- start the kids with what they know (Google) then move on to the library resources
• Small libraries can't afford and therefore don't have access to those subscription databases
• Should we give up the evaluation to someone else
• Maybe we (librarians) should be the ones writing the algorithms
• Business is going to drive all this
• Google is fast and easy, no struggle.
• Social networks
• make the library's homepage come up when a patron connects to the library's WiFi
• we need to be thinking about teaching our patrons about these issues
• we suck at marketing
• why are we threatened?
• let's do what we do best
• the reference interview is still important