The Ultimate Debate : Who Controls the Future of Search

Stephen Abram and Joseph Janes are participating in the debate regarding “Who Controls the Future of Search”, Roy Tennant is moderating the debate.

Six questions to debate:

• Will search services offered by large commerical companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft replace the need for libraries

• Janes – that’s a market decision. If the services are sufficiently powerful, ubiquitious, taylored, etc then people will go there. If that many searches came to libraries we would be overwhelmed. Some of those searches we really don’t want nor are we set up to deal with those searches. People vote with their feet.Difficult to dismiss the power of search. Algorithmic search will only take commericial services so far and they are adding things on top of it. Search is a means to an end. The point of the search was to get you to something else.5 years ago Google was only getting you a piece of the Internet, and the deep web. However, now they are incorporating this content Google Book Search, and Google Scholar.
• Abrams – Wrong questions, who care. Were libraries ever about search? People never came to use for search. People came to libraries, for learning and community. Why are libraries are trying to be another Google? We should be worried if these services started to provide community and learning. Worry about services are creating experience, social networking (Flickr, Del.ico.us).Commercial search tools prioritize by needs to advertising, rather than by quality. Google Local Search, uses IP to aim at a particular type of user. Deliver ads to users, optimizing search for this. Partisan information delivery. Does popularity equal quality?The question we need to ask is what search does well and what does search do badly. Search stinks at How and Why questions? Libraries are meant to help with creating and finding information on How and Why questions. The reference question is dead. Within 5 years 75 million books will be available. The problem of the future is winowing.

• Abrams – At some point we need to build more intelligence into the interface. Interface needs to be designed around a critical thinking, problem solving generating where facts doesn’t matter. Ask the question in the environment where the question is being asked. Commercial software is geared to the individuals. The work of the future is geared towards teams and group problem solving. Need to focus more on learning.Teams are contextual. People operate in teams because they can’t solve a problem alone. The current search tools are in the mass market and want to get into the niche market. Libraries create relationships with small teams. We work with small teams and contextualize it.
• Janes – The team thing connects back to the social connectivity. The commerical software is figuring out the power of the social network. For younger people, that kind of social network is very powerful. Younger people are much more involved in social networks online. Commercial vendors are trying to work on this but hasn’t made it work well.Tennant – Libraries have people’s feet. They have people coming into the building.

• Abram – Our competitor isn’t access its ignorance. Sure give up our metadata. If we don’t have virtual reference we are saying there is no need to a person in the interaction.If you believe in OpenWorldCat then you believe that people find things through metadata. People want to be format agnostic. Make arbitrary decisions about what our users want. Ability to create customization and personalization is greatly limited by our “values” in privacy. Don’t protect people’s privacy while making their users research process more difficult.Allow people to make choices about they’re own privacy. My value system is keeping me from building experiences that are valuable for our users.Its time for a new debate around this issues.
• Janes – Imagine what would happen if we made Open WorldCat open source? The value that the Internet community could add to WorldCat could be unimaginable. It could be a transformation in how we view knowledge. Link Open WorldCat with electronic book projects out there. Make stuff available and things would happen. Search can be an immediate means to an end to be transformative. The power of Google is the speed at which you can connect dots.One of the impediments of understanding what people want, is that we can’t look at records on a personal level. Privacy and legal impediment. There are legacies. We’ve done things for decades for a set of reasons. Automate what we’ve already done. Burden to protect it because we believe that people believe that we are going to protect it. We already believe that companies are going to give us up.

• Abrams – They already are : AquaBrowser, Endeca. Librarians believe that we are the alpha-user and don’t understand the needs of our users. Most people like visual interface not lists. The evidence is that people receive information in a very different way from how librarians are comfortable receiving information. Visual search engines break our sets and help you refine the question. We frankly owe our users an apology.The OPAC is not broken libraries are! (Karen Schneider) We are not going to fix the problem by focusing on the OPAC we are going to fix it by understanding how people learn and want to use our information in a context that is relevant to them.
• Janes – Not soon enough! People who went into librarianship loved to search and loved to show off that knowledge. It gave librarians power, control and precision. This bespoke a professional knowledge set. Information is hard. Algorithmic searching makes it looks easy. What’s in it for us to come up with great search tools because we will be needed even less.The OPAC is not going to change because the MARC record isn’t going to change. There is just so much you can do with a MARC record. There is just so little there. What is search going to grab on to and use? We get stuck in tradition and past practices. We are a conservative professional because we have the human record at stake.

• Janes – What would perfect search look like? The perfect search was the lightest search possible. Least effort and best results (return on investment). Worst nightmare nothing changes and we wither and die as a profession. It isn’t hard to imagine because we are afraid to change. Finest vision, maybe we put Google out of business. Maybe people forget free commercial web services.
• Abrams – Worst nightmare, that everyone (vendors, librarians, etc) will continue say that “your side of the boat is sinking”. We will continue to play the pass the buck game. Focusing on the wrong things, and are fighting internally with one another. Finest vision, we have to get better at advocacy and call a spade a spade. I want to see transformations not transactions. I want us to go to community and learning and not be about “information”. Service and programming, community important.

Abrams – We need to get to the point where we have radical trust with our users. Library 2.0 what the world looks like when the users becomes predominant and we are the information coach. Trust our users to lay paths.

Janes – We are in the business of helping people matter and hearing the stories who came before and told their stories. For a long time, this meant that to be “heard” you had to published. Its a lot easier to speak and to be heard. For years we could only deal with published materials. It is a radical change that now producers can be consumers and comsumers can be producers. Have to come to terms with how we support and faciliate people’s creative proceses and communication processes.

Abram – Are we really delighting our customer? Books selected by end-users are much more likely to circulate than those chosen by librarians. Users have to decide whether or not they were successful. The questions have gotten way harder. We aren’t looking at reference questions as part of the chain. Have to understand where we are in the chain of the user’s experience.
Janes – People were asking very complicated questions that had no answer. Gave up on the idea of answering anyone’s question, and focused on moving forward. That whoever asked that question has a better sense of things than before. User decides whether or not it was successful. Being inserted into the process at all the relevant points.