On Friday, I attended the long-running “Friday afternoon seminar,” (also known as the “Buckland-Larson-Lynch seminar,” also known by its formal course title…) at UC Berkeley. The seminar is available through the iSchool (formerly known as the “School for Information Management and Studies,” formerly known as the “School of Library and Information Studies”…) and is available to the general public.
Cliff Lynch gave a reprise of a talk given earlier this month on Internet Search in the Year 2017. While Cliff did not make a lot of predictions, he did make some interesting observations. Among these…
Content is where the biggest change has been in the last 10 years. Search engines used to all work from the same data set, the web. Now search engines make deals with content providers. This has transformed search engines from businesses that could be started in a garage (with a few clever people, a good algorithm, and a couple of fast machines) to businesses that have more in common with a cable network. Search engines also encourage the creation of content: think blogs, images, etc.
Cliff does not think that personalization services will have much uptake. He sees a lot of resistance from users to the idea registering and giving enough data for this to work. Interestingly, he also does not see a lot of movement in interfaces. What we have is likely what we’ll continue to have.
As a sidenote to the remarks on content, Cliff talked about worry within the library community, that users are not starting search at the catalog. This has led to much hand ringing, and the “OPACs really suck” discussion. What generally missed in this conversation is what led users to search engines in the first place. For the low, low price of one more click you get the data you wanted. Immediate gratification wins out over being told that the book is available in the library, or worse, available in a storage facility and you can get it in a few days.
I think there are a few more factors at play here, not mentioned during the talk but worth mentioning here. They are already at the search engine for other reasons. While looking for weather or a place to eat, why not also do research? Search engines have massive piles of information, and why would you want to limit yourself to a smaller bucket of information. Even if it is limited to good stuff, most of “our” piles of good stuff still need to be searched individually.
To consider and discuss. Hopefully a topic at our Discovery to Delivery in New Contexts symposium, for RLG Program Partners.
Merrilee Proffitt is Senior Manager for the OCLC RLP. She provides community development skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.