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The New York Times (registration required) looks at how libraries can be a good resource when web searching fails.
One of my favorite librarians, Joe Janes, gets his two cents in:
"When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B," said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is teaching a course on Google this quarter. "Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google."
Thanks also to librarian Joe Thompson of the Baltimore County Public Library, for pointing out "Good information still costs money, and people forget that[.]"
It's worth noting that Jenny over at Shifted Librarian has some insightful comments on this article and what it means for libraries.
People have their own ways of finding information, from asking friends to searching Google. We don't have to be the intermediary for every information transaction. What we need to be is ready to step in when that transaction fails. Teach people to fish, but help them find the fish when they're casting in the wrong part of the lake. But to do that, you have to be prepared, waiting in the wings, and increasingly those wings aren't in your physical building. We need to integrate our services into the user's environment.
(via LISNews)
Posted by Hilary at February 6, 2004 03:47 PM