Thursday, May 15, 2014

Lili's librarianship thought of the day

If your local librarian speaks of "Google" or Google Search as though it is, or is promoted as, an internet archive or a reference resource or an online library or a question answering website or a public service, she or he shouldn't be working as a librarian. Google Search is a web search engine owned by a large corporation. Sure enough, in the internet you can find an internet archive and many fantastically useful reference resources and important online libraries and a number of (collaborative) question answering websites of varying quality, but none of them are Google. Did Google Search ever claim to be something that it is not? I don't think it ever did. 

If your local librarian boasts that he or she can provide a better reference service than "Google", as some public librarians do, then I think such a claim rests on some kind of false belief or false claim and I believe it shows up the principal librarian as confused or confusing, which isn't a good look for an "information professional". 

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