Google and Librarians: why it shouldn't be us and them

In preparing to speak to us today .. Clare Duddy did some Googling. In Google's browser. She warns us upfront, in case we hadn't clocked, that she's pro-Google.

Clare is a Masters student at London Met university who won a UKSG competition to present her views on information discovery in the Google generation. I am torn between wishing that I'd had an opportunity like this when I was a student, and thinking how petrifying it must be to present to an audience of professionals eager to hear your views. Clare tells us she's nervous but proceeds to speak confidently and knowledgeably on a subject that while familiar to us all, still holds surprises.

Us and them
Clare already works part time at Oxford University libraries as an electronic journals assistant. Interestingly, she sees the "us and them" of the information world as librarians vs Google (not, as some of the other UKSG delegates might see it, as librarians vs publishers). Between her work and her thesis, Clare spends a lot of time looking for information. "I've been online for more than half of my life, and search engines were already prevalent by the time I started my academic career - I've never had to find information without them." She quotes a friend: "Google is an extension of my memory - I don't have to keep facts in my head."

Finding information
There is a new balance in education as we keep up with emerging technologies. Google has 63% share of the search engine market (13.5bn searches in the US in Jan 09); OCLC research shows that 89% of college students start searches on search engines and Clare confirms it's her first port of call for all her information needs from academic to social. It's a known known. Perhaps less known is that the same research shows only 1% of users starting their search in an online database.

The Google generation
The Google generation is not defined by an age group but by a demographic - "always connected"; multi-tasking; computer literate. Clare says we might also see this group as "impatient, gullible and lazy" - taking the first result they find in a search engine and giving librarians sleepless nights. As we know, the main problems with using search engines as our point of entry to research are:

Material not indexed
* deep web
* access controlled
* non-linked
* robot-excluded
* non-HTML
* no static URL)
Despite this, Google has value - it highlights "informal literature" - the non-traditional materials that other library resources don't surface so effectively, if at all. Through Google Scholar you can filter your search to authoritative content, and the Library Links program enables libraries to direct users to licensed content. And because of Google's power and influence, they drive exposure and sensible structuring of content (e.g. Harvard has redesigned its website to expose its digital collections more effectively; National Libraries of Australia have created stable URLs and metadata for individual items in their image collection). There is a sense that we overestimate what you can't find, and underestimate the value of what you can find.

Quality of material online
"Democratic" (user-generated) publishing - famously exemplified by Wikipedia - concerns librarians and publishers, the gatekeepers of authoritative content. But Wikipedia's advantage is its breadth - over 2.7 million entries in comparison to Oxford Reference Online's 1.3 million (yes, there could be an apples and oranges issue here). "We have to assume that we can't control the web or impose our authority on it any kind of comprehensive way", so how do we manage our response to what we find? With "a pinch of salt"; the widespread news coverage of Wikipedia's flaws, and our own knowledge of how simply we can publish what we want, helps us understand that not everything we find can be trusted. Librarians spend a lot of time already training users about the quirks of different online resources; why not include Google and Wikipedia (etc) in that training.

Deskilling search
Clare recalls a lecturer harking back to the glory days where "users were not allowed near the computers and had to use a librarian to find information", but "librarians are no longer required in that role" - they feel displaced; is their reticence about broad search resources based on frustration? There is a context in which "one-box" search engines are in fact the best way to find something. But still users have need of more complex search interfaces and despite their fondness for simplicity they do recognise the value of more sophisticated search.

Conclusion
"Young people today need to be educated to use these tools properly, just as we had to be taught to use a library and book properly in the past". We shouldn't assume there is one Google generation with one set of characteristics - users are still a complex group with varying needs. It can only be helpful for us to acknowledge the place of Google in our users' lives and to help grow their understanding of this tool in the context of the other tools we offer.

(see next post for question and answer session revealing more of Clare's online behaviour)

Coda: Clare's presentation was excellent - not only interesting and well-informed in terms of the material covered but ably and compellingly presented. The feedback about this session has already been overwhelmingly positive and we'll definitely be thinking about how to follow up with more user input at next year's conference.

Use and Abuse of Usage Measures - Ian Bannerman, Managing Director for Journals, Taylor & Francis

Ian Bannerman is offering a slightly contrasting view to the previous two speakers

COUNTER and the Usage Factor
Launched in 2002 this attempt to make usage data creditable and countable. COUNTER conceived by Herbert Van de Sompel and Colleagues in 2006. An invitation to tendor is now out.

Thomson Scientific Impact Factor: total cites for items published and total items published
Usage Factor: total usage of published items.

Implicit assumptions of usage statistics

• Usage data is consistent, credible and compatible
• Usage factor would be a meaningful indicator of something

COUNTER guidelines on filtering for robots and pre-fetching are in draft (release 3) - they will filter a list of known robots Ian Bannerman does not think these go far enough though. Downloads may not be accurate either - not all downloads are successful or intentionally/human initiated. Also most known robots won't get past acces control on subscribed content but it's the unknown ones that distort the numbers (those within IP range of university - amateur attempts to mine data).

Ian has brought up an example article - many many access in one Russian institution - accessed once every 9 seconds or so by some local error (COUNTER would ignore that); another example shows every article in a journal being accessed about 57 times by a Korean institutions - look suspiciously like a robot but the stats arrive 3 months after the event; a further example is an uncited article (and an obscure one) being accessed 1,183 times - not clear why! There is a lot of noise in the system and it's hard to identify or understand it all.

Is usage a meaningful indicator anyway?
Ian Bannerman cites Davis & Price (2006) [eJournal Interface can influence usage statistics: implications for libraries, publishers and Project COUNTER. JASIST v.57 n.9, 1243-1248] in showing the impact of an interface on usage which, he claims, is at odds with the meaning of usage statistics. In particular he talks about those journals that require viewing of full text HTML before downloading a PDF - COUNTER would count this twice at present! Bannerman adds that if people's careers relied on usage (rather than impact) of publications you would clearly have some issues here.

Bannerman is also concerned about the impact on publishing usage statistics and the lack of transparancy that may occur if financial success dependent on them - the Observer Effect. "By measuring the literature we may change the literature." Issues at author or publisher level include (and this is on impact factor): self-citing; alerting authors to content they "should" cite; seeking out prolific high quality authors (who may self cite); publishing most citable articles early in the year (larger window for citation and impact factor); targeting topical areas rather than long term studies (affects funding); publising review articles; etc.

Additional issues for usage factor may be worse: getting friends, your neighbour etc. to download articles (or writing a bot to do it); temptation to leave usage data unfiltered; publishing for students not for researchers (impact factor for citations is prestige amongst peer group, usage is based on numbers); sexing-up title and key-words; using abstract to tease rather than inform; stopping printed journals; blogging it, tagging it and posting it; broadcasting metadata but keeping articles where they are counted - not in OA repositories (although your blogger here feels this is as things are, you could do counting from OA repositories).

Impact Factor - not all attempts to change and improve impact factor are "bad", leave an audit trail, act of citing usually meaningful (you stake your reputation on it). Usage trails not (as) trackable, no reputation impact as practically anonymous.

Recommendations

• Extreme caution in over interpretating usage data
• Further research into factors that influence article downloads
• Improved guidelines for identifying and filtering robots
• Awareness of the Observer Effect

Information-seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar: from use to users - David Nicholas, UCL

David began by addressing the issue of disconnection from the user. We monitor activity rather than actual users. The virtual audience differs in composition from previous audience - we also can't even see it and we find they move elsewhere (accessing material from publisher sites for instance). Content was kind. Now the consumer is king.

We need to identify best practice, find scholarly outcomes and achieve satisfaction.

David has a slide up to illustrate the Virtual Scholar: a portfolio of services used by these users. This information is evidence based including:

• UK National e-Books Observatory, JISC, 2008-9
• Impact of Open Access Journal Publising, OUP, 2006-
• RIN study on use and impact of journals, RIN, 2008
• Behavious of the Researcher of the Future (Google Generation), 2008

Digital information footprints allow a complex view of information seeking behaviour which is rich in detail.

Profiling Information Seeking Behaviour

• There are huge numbers of scholars and high demand for scholarly product driven by ubiquitous access (on buses, trains, hotels etc, existing users can search more freely and flexibly); huge usage numbers; spiralling growth; usage is not the outcome.
• Some issue in the fact that many users are overseas - UK government funded scholarly websites have less than a third of their users in the UK; Asia loves OA; what issues does this raise?
• Many users are young - information seeking behaviour is very different; spend lots of time online and some still see them as "noise" in the stats
• Robots are always an issue - around half of all scholarly site visits are by robots (in some cases 90% of users are robots); now mimic human behaviour (Google's are particularly shrewd)

Human/Human-like behaviour

• Shop around (40% of visitors never visit again)
• Bounce (1-3 pages only of the many available - overseas visitors bounce less, young people more)
• Flicking (a kind of channel hopping behaviour)
• View (humans conditioned by emailing, text etc.
• Don't view articles for more than 2 minutes
• Spend more time reading short articles than long articles online; if it is long either read the abstract or squirrel away for later)
• Power browse (you can hoover through titles, contents, abstracts etc at huge rate);
• Books now opened-up great view
• Horizontal rather than vertical
• Navigate (we spend half our time navigating to content)
• We are not all the same (national differences, e.g. Germans most successful searchers and most active information seekers; age differences; gender differences (women are less permiscuous!))
• Brands very complex but imporant (difficult to identify where authority lies (especially with authorised resources - hard to tell how your access is occuring)
• What you think is the brand is not what other people will see as the brand, and some are cool, some are not)
• Do not behave like a librarian!
• Behave like an e-shopper (use a common platform, multitask, information pedigree of some of key e-commerce giants: Amazon and Google)

Impacts, outcomes etc. best summed up by Guardian (quoting Marshall McLuhan's "Gutenberg galaxy").

David Nicholas compared power browsing and information seeking etc. to alcoholics anonomous: people don't want to admit they do these things. We are all behaving like this though - not just the young! Although older users have different conceptual framework for this behaviour.

Access is no longer the outcome - need to go beyond having that access be easy and quick, now we need to profile behaviours in order to find best practice and see what works and what does not. Establishing the good and the bad needed to establish development of information literacy. We also need to know how we justify our spend on information resources by proving value.

"We are not fighting Google, the battle is with ourselves"

Unless we connect with our users we will dissipate.

How to make your IR effective as a publishing platform for grey literature

"I know nothing about IRs", admits Toby Green, "but I once wrote a paper about tidying up our grey literature at OECD, which seems to have garnered a lot of interest." Today he tells us he'll cover:

• Post-it-and-hope-Google-finds-it approaches to dissemination of content
• What does it take to satisfy the needs of various stakeholders
• What did the OECD do with its working papers

Post and hope
Out of 40 starters at this year's Grand National, 14 finished. Rank outsiders enter what is one of the country's hardest courses - perhaps hoping that everyone else will fall over and allow the rank outsider to win. Is "post it and hope" an equally unlikely strategy for success? It relies on a single discoverability system (search) which puts considerable pressure on metadata to be of sufficient quality to drive successful discovery. And it's a "survival of the fittest" environment: if you are not part of the "short head" (the blockbuster opposite of the long tail) your chances of discovery through major search engines are also limited. It's a passive strategy that is author-, rather than reader-centric. Ultimately, says Toby, it doesn't work. The OECD.org website is a platform for authors to upload their content - which they do - and 90% of it is *never* downloaded.

Stakeholder needs
What do the various stakeholder groups require from literature repositories? As a group - made up of representatives from libraries, publishers, agents, intermediaries - we brainstormed some of the things that different user groups require from a publishing system.

Authors

• need a channel for dissemination
• need visibility/recognition for career development
• need to be read
• need to claim ownership of ideas
• need to fulfil mandates (from funders, institutions)
• need an easy process, preferably with others doing as much as possible
• need reports on how the work has been used
• need archiving
• need links/dissemination to other platforms where they want to be visible/involved
  

Readers

• need full text but don't want to have to read it
  
• need integration with other workflow tools
• need easy discoverability - and access - for free
• need related data and inter-literature links
• need an indication that the content is authoritative
• need reliability/predictability of content's location
• need awareness and other contextual services

Institutional administrators; bosses

• need reports on usage, financial aspects (value for money), who has been published
• need prominent branding / enhancement of reputation
• need budget - and usage - a critical mass of deposits
  
• need quality to meet institution's standards and reduce later work

Librarians

• need more time, resource and better equipment
  
• need training
• need standards
• need tools to support processes
• need clearer legal guidelines from publishers
  

Funders

• need reports (on usage/what's been published) to show that grants are producing sufficient material
• need visibility, research profile
  
• need dissemination to expedite ongoing research

Intermediaries

• agents
• aggregators
• publishers need copyright and brand to be respected/protected; credit where due

What did the OECD do to meet these needs?
Originally, authors could post what they wanted, when they wanted. Readers, however, struggled to find this material. Administrators were concerned about quality control and reputation; funders were asking questions about impact and ROI. Librarians - were laughing - despairingly? Authors weren't asking for OECD's assistance; administrators didn't think it had anything to do with OECD. Papers were presented in a jumble on the OECD website

• no metadata standards
• no quality control
• no underlying database/workflow
• no common vision
• no knowledge of what readers need
• no understanding of discovery systems
  

OECD's solution was to get the publishing staff involved to

• establish metadata standards
• establish quality control steps
• create underlying database/workflow
• build common vision
• research readers'/librarian needs
• exploit discovery systems
• monitor results.

Metadata is key:

• analyse the papers to identify metadata fields
• add additional fields to meet industry standards
• sign off fields so database can be built
• QA existing metadata; fix numbering problems
• Fill and QA the database

OECD then created a workflow to minimise effort and create efficiencies - converting the paper to a PDF for hosting and onward dissemination. A single webpage now categorises the papers and links through to organised lists of papers within categories. Metadata is consistent and comprehensive (DOI, abstracts, keywords etc.), and is submitted to RePEc - vastly improving that database's coverage of this content, since authors had previously not been diligent in uploading their own content. And at the full text level, the workflow system adds a templated cover page with improved, consistent branding and clear, exportable citations.

Following this overhaul of the workflow, traffic to the working papers has more than doubled.

• authors needs are being met: data is more visible in more locations, the data is marketed within the OECD platform, reports are available from OECD and its partner platforms, and authors are not required to carry out any of the processes
• readers can access the full text and improved metadata helps them understand it without reading it, citations can be exported, content is discoverable, background data is linked, citation linking and "more like this" links are forthcoming, the content is clearly trustworthy and well serviced with awareness alerting
• administrators can download usage reports and assess financial value, branding has improved, quality is controlled (inappropriate content is rejected)
• librarians are not required to carry out any of the processes, legal guidance is clear
• funders are getting good value for money without additional expenditure.

In conclusion:

• QA - requires filtering to protect institution's reputation
• Distribute to disseminate - content needs to be widely discoverable with supporting capabilities such as MARC records
• Promotion - internal awareness-raising with authors so they understand why the process is valuable to them
• Reports and 'ego' tools (RePEc has good ones); reader tool
• Institutional repositories need to either outsource to a publisher, or employ people with publishing skills to manage the process effectively
  

The Best in Show!!

Now that I am back from the UKSG meeting and have had a chance to reflect on the meeting, I wanted to offer a few thoughts. At the first plenary session where we were waiting to see the two industry giants Google and Microsoft deliver speech's that would change our view of the world, it was the third speaker that really hit the home run. T. Scott Plutchak, the medical library Director from the University of Alabama, Birminhgam with his speech on "The Librarian: Fantastic Adventures in the Digital World" provided the most valuable insight into where we are heading in this digital world.

As librarians we often confuse the term library and librarians and Scott made it clear that the two terms or not synonyms. Many of us are afraid that the library that we know and love is being marginalize. With the shift to digital collections and the influence of Google and Microsoft this decline in importance of the library is accelerating. Many librarians are attempting to do battle with the Google trying to show how misleading searches can be or how limited the information is in certain fields. Give it up!

In Scott's view that is ok to see the library declining in importance as it is the librarian that is the important component in this equation. We have always had a major role in the print world and we will continue to have a major role in the digital age. According to Scott "Librarians fundamental purpose has been to support the process of research and education of our community." The primary tool in the print world was the library. Now as we move into the digital world we need to carry on the same role as before but just change the tools.

Scott's presentation provided a number of examples with the librarian working outside of the library with researchers in their labs and offices and identified this activity to be part of the role in the future. As a librarian I can see the fantastic adventure developing in the digital world. Librarian's are going to have an even greater opportunity to use our creativity to further the interests of our community.

So it is time to stop putting our energy into trying to stonewall the Google's of the world and begin to utilize our information gathering, analysis, and organizational skills to help our community make the most out of the new tools that technology and creative software developers have provided.

Dan Tonkery

Battle of the Giants: Microsoft vs Google!

The first plenary session at UKSG 2007 provided a rare treat; a chance to see two industry giants in action. Microsoft's Cliff Guren, Director of Publishing Evangelism, and Google's Philippe Colombet, Manager, Strategic Partner Development, presented their take on the world - interesting to see Microsoft's embryonic competitor products to Google's Scholar and Book Search. Even more interesting was the fact that Google announced a powerpoint solution on the last day of our conference (that was kept very quiet!) which suggests more of a step into each other's areas.

However several speakers at the conference referred to the 'googleization' of students in academia; perhaps the move to make them 'Microsoftized' has come too late when it comes to sophisticated searching tools and digitisation solutions? Or is it simply a case of 'watch this space'?

"The old git slot:": a life in scholarly publishing flashing before our eyes

"I've drawn the old git slot," said John Cox ruefully as he took the stage, and then proceeded to confirm that judgement by listing the plethora of modern office necessities not yet invented when he started in publishing, and bemoaning the "witless wonders" that are our modern youth.

Yet plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Scholarly publishing is essentially the same industry as it was when UKSG was founded 30 years ago - and in fact the principles on which publishing rested 300 years ago are still relevant today. Even commercial publishing has been around longer than we think; Cox cited examples from the 18th and 19th centuries. And back at the beginning of Cox's career, journal publishing was rudely healthy. Librarians had ample funding and researchers' appetites for information were not yet overwhelmed. But social changes began to limit the growth of libraries' budgets such that journals began to be cancelled and success for new journals was not so immediate (as Paul Calow noted in yesterday's "Financial Imperatives" session, it now takes 7 years for a new title to break even).

Then along came a spider ... or, in fact, its Web. The shift from print to online may not yet be complete, but about 90% of scholarly journals are now online, and this has changed the way that libraries and publishers do business together - for example, with consortial purchasing. One consequence of online publishing is the hunger for Open Access - an unproven business model which has not yet shown itself to be sustainable, says Cox, particularly across the broader and non-scientific literature. Further, as Sally Morris had noted this morning, the Open Archive movement is potentially damaging to the scholarly journal; the world's 850 institutional repositories may currently be scantly populated (with academics actually admitting they are "distinctly unwilling" to deposit), but they are being supported by a number of major funding agencies, and may yet grow sufficiently to change the current landscape.

Cox took a detour at this point to acknowledge the effect on scholarly communications of Google, "the search engine of choice for most of us" (albeit propounding the common misconception that the search giant has indexed "most journals" in Google Scholar ). Google is getting closer and closer to us and will "shape the development of our industry over the next 5 to 10 years", having already revolutionised things with its page rank algorithm.

The future for publishers, therefore, is in the functionality within which they wrap their content. If the research itself is freely available - and easily discoverable - elsewhere, publishers have to differentiate themselves with truly useful features (e.g. supporting datasets, taxonomies, community facilities). Cox praises OECD's SourceOECD for using the capabilities of online to add massive value over the print, and Alexander Street Press for building communities in the humanities - demonstrating the value across different sectors.

Web 2.0 "will bring further changes", of which user-generated content and folksonomies have most relevance to scholarly publishing. They represent the value-adds which can differentiate publisher platforms from institutional repositories - if publishers are willing or able to make the necessary investment in technology, and to make the transition to being service providers rather than manufacturers.

"The Great Age of Librarians is Just Beginning" or will the "Wisdom of Crowds" Reign?

Monday 16th April, morning session

Today I learned that being a librarian is probably quite an exciting occupation to be in right now, not just a soon to be extinct vocation for those who like the smell of (possibly dusty) printed paper. If Plutchak is right, librarians can take advantage of the digital age and the plethora of search engines to free themselves from standing behind desks and start to work with researchers within their departments and thereby become more involved in the reason for the research. He suggested that the librarian can help the researcher find the "joy and delight" in the act of discovering and using research.

On the other hand, you might argue that the librarian's days are numbered and that Google's philosophy of the "wisdom of crowds" will dominate, making the masses the arbiters of what is a high quality and appropriate resource for a researcher to use. Phillipe Columbet from Google confirmed that the "wisdom of crowds" is still their philosophy but didn't actually say he thought librarian's days were numbered. Clifford Guren at Microsoft reported that the Live Search Academic draws on the need for qualification of content that is added to a search index, and that in the future search engines will need to start to rely on rankings based on criteria such as peer review.

Ultimately I think we need to tackle the overwhelming amount of information that researchers are faced with from both directions. Online research communities will intervene and provide the "wisdom of [small] crowds". Librarians should be encouraged by their institutions and beyond, to go out and spread their advice within research contexts. Indexers of content should continue to capture the breadth of content so that the obsure is available, but also consider offering quality indicators for the content in their databases. (IMHO)