Chris Woolley: Reading #3 The Infodiet

Many students have lost the ability to find good information. Today everyone wants to find information fast and easy. This is made possible by search engines like Google that give you a lot of results for your searches. Few students take the time to use databases that libraries are paying millions of dollars to subscribe to every year. Librarians are trying to find new ways to get students to use the databases to find good information not just a lot of bad information like a Google search gives. Students want searching a database to be easy like searching Google, but all the search interfaces on library databases are designed for users to have to work hard to find the good specific information that is needed for writing a well written paper. Some librarians say that research is not supposed to be easy and it is part of the process to search through these interfaces to find the information that is needed. Others think that maybe libraries should start listening to their customers and make it easier to search the databases. The draw back of making the databases like Google is that you will have to sift through a lot of irrelevant information to discover the info you are looking for. This is why library databases are set up how they are today, so experts can make a well developed search and find the exact relevant info they are looking for. I think that if the technology exists to make searching databases easier than libraries and database publishers should use these technologies. The point of technology is to make life easier and if it is possible to search the databases more effectively then we should definitely do this. This would be for the greater good of the libraries because more students would use the resources and that is why libraries exist in the first place.