Date: 22 Jun 2004 13:21:14 -0000
From: farooque
It's a very interesting article published on June 21,in NewYork Times by
Katie Hafner.
Old Search Engine, the Library, Tries to Fit Into a Google World
Katarina Maxianova, who received her bachelor's degree in comparative
literature from Columbia University in May, took a seminar last year in
which the professor assigned two articles from New Left Review magazine.
She found one immediately throug Google; for the other, she had to trek
the library tacks."Everyone in class tried to get those articles online,"
she said, "and some people didn't even bother to go to the stacks when
they couldn't Google them."For the last few years, librarians have
increasingly seen people use online search sites not to supplement
research libraries but to replace them. Yet only recently have librarians
stopped lamenting the trend and started working to close the gap between
traditional scholarly research and the incomplete, often random results of
a Google search."We can't pretend people will go back to walking into a
library and talking to a reference librarian," said Kate Wittenberg,
director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University.
Ms. Wittenberg's group recently finished a three-year study of research
habits, including surveys of 1,233 students across the country, that
concluded that electronic resources have become the main tool for
information gathering, particularly among undergraduates."We have to
respond to these new ways," Ms. Wittenberg said, and come up with a way to
make better research material available online.That means working with
commercial search engines like Google and Yahoo to make ever more
digital-research materials searchable. Undergraduates like Ms. Maxianova
and her classmates are not the only ones conducting research from their
computers. Faculty members also do it."One of the rarest things to find is
a member of the faculty in the library stacks," said Paul Duguid, an
information researcher who will teach a class this fall at the University
of California, Berkeley on judging the authenticity of information found
on the Web. In the Columbia survey, 90 percent of the faculty members who
responded said they used electronic resources in their research several
times a week or more. Nearly all said it was a valuable resource. While
the accuracy of online information is notoriously uneven, the ubiquity of
the Web means that a trip to the stacks is no longer the way most academic
research begins. "The nature of discovery is changing," said Joseph Janes,
associate professor and chairman of library and information science at the
University of Washington. "I think the digital revolution and the use of
digital resources in general is really the beginning of a change in the
way humanity thinks and presents itself."A few research librarians say
Google could eventually take on more of the role of a universal
library."If you could use Google to just look across digital libraries,
into any digital library collection, now that would be cool," said Daniel
Greenstein, university librarian of the California Digital Library, the
digital branch of the University of California library system."It would
help libraries achieve something that we haven't yet been able to achieve
by ourselves," Dr. Greenstein said, "which is to place all of our publicly
accessible digital library collections in a common pool."The biggest
problem is that search engines like Google skim only the thinnest layers
of information that has been digitized. Most have no access to the
so-alled deep Web, where information is contained in isolated databases
like online library catalogs. Search engines seek so-called static Web
pages, which generally do not have search functions of their own.
Information on the deep Web, on the other hand, comes to the surface only
as the result of a database query from within a particular site. Use
Google, for instance, to research Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for
governor of California, and you will miss an entire collection of
pamphlets accessible only from the University of California at Los
Angeles's archive of digitized campaign literature.
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Farooque,
IBM Global Services (India) Pvt Ltd.
First floor, GT Annexe,
Airport Road, Bangalore-17
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email... farooque@in.ibm.com
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