Category: Search and Discovery

Thinking about the things that I like about Google or about library databases in comparison with each other after my last post, I realized that library databases need crazy-easy URLs. I don’t click through 2 or 3 layers of a website to get to Google. I type “goo” into my address bar, which fills in the rest, which takes me to Google. If I could type “MLA” into the address bar and get to even something as complicated as “MLAbib.csa.com,” life would be easier. Sure beats my current option:
http://www.csa.com.ezproxy.carleton.edu/htbin/dbrng.cgi?username=carl&access=[gobbledygook]&db=mla-set-c&adv=1

If I could also set a cookie that would authenticate me from my own home computer, life would be even easier.

Still need to work on the seamless access to full text part of the equation, though.

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Tipping point: reached.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing “real” library research on the free web. “The kids are doing it” was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that “the kids” would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it’s not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it’s now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do “real” library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that’s impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it’s faster, and there’s a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you’re searching for something that hasn’t had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author’s choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they’re used to, but they’re often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they’re shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the “access to full text” piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can’t actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you’d have to be on campus or logged in to your library’s proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they’ll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it’s still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn’t make researchers jump to the conclusion that we’re “hiding” stuff from Google, or that we’re being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do “complex” searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we’re balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.

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We’re knee-deep in our MetaLib implementation project, and as we do our best to make decisions about our interface, we keep removing all the extra links and options and tabs that clutter up the default interface. Do we really need two different ways to get to the database list? Do we really need both Simple and Advanced Search options when the Advanced search only adds one search box to the already existing search box? Do we really need a button to switch languages when we only have an English interface? Little by little we try to strike a balance between simplicity and function. One by one, buttons and options and tabs disappear and the interface starts to make a little more sense.

Then, today, I watched a TED talk in which Barry Schwartz talks about his theories about how increased choice does not, in fact, make for better decision-making outcomes. Apparently greater choice means (unsurprisingly) more brain time spent making decisions, but even beyond that it raises our expectations that the outcomes will be wonderful. When the outcome is just good and not absolutely amazing, we’re more easily disappointed now that our expectations have been raised. So while our decisions may actually be better, we’re less happy. If you want the long version of these theories, he has a whole book out: The Paradox of Choice. (Also, if you watch the TED talk you’ll notice at about minute 6:10 that even TED people don’t get wifi at their conference hotel. This makes me feel just a teensy bit better about every conference I’ve ever been to. But I digress.)

Being a librarian with search interfaces on the brain, I couldn’t help but think about all those calls for beautiful, simple, Google-like, single search boxes. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in both cases people hope that by reducing options, the experience will be improved. With the single search box, there’s never any doubt what you’re supposed to do or how to do it at least minimally effectively. It’s such a wonderful goal.

But there’s a catch. The simpler the interface is, the more powerful the behind-the-scenes mechanisms have to be. They have to do more interpretation of search terms, smarter retrieval, more robust relevance ranking. If I can’t specify how things should look when I’m done searching, then things had better be done in a way I would have anticipated to begin with or I’ll get frustrated with the lack of options to “fix” my results. Google didn’t get famous because it had a single search box. It got famous because that single search box yields consistent results based on an algorithm that’s incredibly complex and equally secret.

So while I’d love to be able to reduce our interface down to just a couple of well-chosen elements, we still have to compensate for the fact that the behind-the-scenes mechanisms just aren’t up to that kind of challenge. And so we’re left doing our balancing act: how much can we strip away in the interests of removing excess choice, and how much do we have to leave so that people can manipulate the system enough to get it to spit back results they can use.

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