Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

October 2006 Volume 4(5)

Strengthening the library brand?

A ‘parasite’ on services financed by libraries or a valuable tool for users? However Google is perceived it should act as an urgent call for libraries to collaborate and digitise, says John MacColl.

It is more and more the case that any discussion we have on digital library services needs to include Google – a company whose services we have not asked for, and have not paid for, but which nonetheless are in daily use by ourselves and our user communities, and are perhaps more used than any of the services we create ourselves, purchase or license and make available to our users.

We worry about Google because we feel that we have a professional responsibility to users of information, and that left to Google and its devices, users will get poor quality information and won’t realise it. Even more worrying is the prospect that our users will regard Google as an adequate replacement for library services.
Google itself says different things at different times about what its aims are. Sometimes it talks about being a library, and at other times it talks about partnering with libraries (and indeed with publishers). Could it replace libraries?

Google is massive. It has appeared in ‘our’ space, and it can’t be ignored. Some of us want to ignore it, but how can we ignore a beast this big doing some of the things which we believe we should be doing, and doing them with a budget which no library or library organisation or library company has ever had at its disposal?
Valued at USD 125 billion, Google is one of the world’s largest companies, and it dwarfs other ‘library’ companies, even Elsevier which looks like a minnow beside it. Since Google launched its Book Search service in 2005, and at a stroke moved away from services based on meta-information only to full-text, libraries have begun to wonder whether this is a genuine challenge to much of their core business. If Google does create a comprehensive full-text resource from the out-of-copyright books it is scanning, it should prove a valuable service to scholarship.

Nonetheless, Google Book Search is still claiming to be primarily an index. But users are likely to become frustrated if they can’t get the full-text easily from the index. By their nature, indexes are used by people with intentions. Intention is aroused by hits which are found in indexes, which is the secret of Google’s success in selling advertising. But if that condition is not fulfilled, then there can be frustration leading to a demand for fulfilment. Is this a deliberate commercial strategy? Will the current options (‘Find this book in a library’ or ‘Purchase this book from Amazon’) eventually be succeeded by ‘Pay to view this book online’ in a profit-splitting rental or purchase deal with publishers?

But it is another Google service, Google Scholar, with which it is now really challenging research libraries. Google Scholar is a very powerful tool – more powerful in many ways than any of the bibliographic databases, or ejournal services, which academic libraries provide to their users. Its power lies in its instantaneous responsiveness, and for known-item searching, which is the type of searching routinely done by many academics, it can seem almost unbeatable (it is much poorer at subject searching). Google Scholar can also seem to provide a very effective fulfilment service, due in part to its excellent coverage of free sources of content (including institutional repositories and other open archives), and in part to the fact that we librarians cooperate with it by hooking up our ejournal holdings to it, so that often the article which Google Scholar seems magically to find, is in fact one that the library has paid for. What is clever about this is the fact that Google manages to take the credit for both the indexing and the fulfilment.

But Google Scholar does not satisfy librarians because it does not tell us what sources it searches. We cannot see its selection boundary. It appears to be a deep web tool, unlike native Google which is very definitely a shallow web tool. But it only works within the parts of the deep web which are easy for it to reach. And of course, it is (arguably) a parasite upon the fulfilment services paid for by the library.
Google is no more than a symptom of the digital world with which libraries must learn to deal. The need now is for new library identity to be asserted: a new sense of what we are and what our brand is. Should we ‘Google-ise’? Yes, if that means that we can deliver the cleanliness of the Google interface together with the instant responsiveness of its results. And we should of course make use of Google Book Search and Google Scholar inasmuch as they provide support for our overall information missions, and can be blended into our operations.

But more important now is our need to collaborate professionally with each other, as the universe of materials – research and reference materials – goes digital. We need to create and deliver services at a collaborative level. The institutional library will remain as a place which provides a study environment and human-fronted library services, but much of the rest of our professional activity has to become a shared and collaborative endeavour at the network level, because institutional libraries cannot do it on their own.
Libraries need urgently to digitise, and to tip the balance down on the side of the digital corpus. Then Google will become less important, and libraries will be visible once again. Collections will reappear, and equality of access will again be controlled by libraries, rather than being out of control as at present.

Ultimately, despite all of its marketing power and awareness of what sells, the brand ‘library’ is a stronger and more enduring one than the brand Google.

John MacColl is Head, Digital Library Division, Edinburgh University Library.

Information Scotland Vol. 4(5) October 2006

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Last updated: 08-Dec-2006