Optimising metadata to make high-value content more accessible to Google users/My Commentary/J. Colannino

To Alan Dawson and Val Hamilton,Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Dear Alan and Val,

Thank you for not bemoaning Google and wallowing in self-pity. Thank you for not being condescending to ignoramuses like me who forego the benefits of controlled vocabulary and search without real library tools. Thank you for giving me concrete proof that some academics get it. Thank you for sparing me the hot thin air at the intellectual summit.

Someone you do not know,

Joe

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P.S. Dawson and Hamilton have this assessment:

Google is great.

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Pardon me, but let me revel in the moment.

Directly under that headline came words I was beginning to think I would never read in an LIS journal:

“The achievements of Google are often either taken for granted or not given due acknowledgement in academic circles, so it is worth summarising them here. Google is extremely fast and reliable, it works on a massive scale, it produces useful results much of the time, it searches the full text of documents, it indexes multiple document types, including HTML, PDF and Word documents, it generates contextual summaries that are often useful, it is constantly updated, it has many advanced features for those who can be bothered to use them, it is very simple to use, and it is entirely free to users worldwide.”

Now to the elitists in my profession, I know this may seem a bit of a shock, but those of us who use Google are well aware of its shortcomings – and (this is the part that may confuse you) – we still use Google. We use it because it doesn’t suffer from the irony of a profession that claims intimacy with HCI and usability, yet exhibits an inability to craft a single tool that doesn’t require a college semester to learn how to use. We use it, because it does almost everything we need faster and better than LORA or WorldCAT or our university website.

Most of the time.

And sometimes, Google fails. And when it does, there is no substitute for the help of a skilled professional. And sometimes, even when it doesn’t fail, there is no substitute for the help of a skilled professional. And there never will be… because people are better than machines. But it is nice to know that someone has bothered to understand how we think instead of presuming we need to think a new way.

What makes Dawson and Hamilton’s article great is that they had the temerity to suggest that library science professionals could actually make search better for those who have no intention of joining their club. For all the talk that library science spouts about increasing usage and awareness and empowering patrons and democratizing information, Dawson and Hamilton seem to be the first to have shared the recipe: practical guidelines for rending the veil of the hidden web, at least partially. We would do well as information professionals to dedicate our lives to this effort.

Google is great.

I am a nobody. In 100 years, no one will know my name. I do not know my great grandfather’s name, and I have no hope of being remembered by those after me, even those who will have owed me for their existence and whose grandfather will have loved me. And yet, if you do a Google search on “combustion modeling Colannino” without the quotes, the first 100 entries will be about me. Most will be about a book that fewer than 500 people will read and fewer will understand. If you do a Google search on “Joseph Colannino” without the quotes, one of my blogs will be the number two entry. If you do a search on “Colannino”, the first entry will be my nephew’s website. The fourth entry will be the blog for this class. What other tool does that?

Google is great.