Any Academic Reference Librarian knows what I’m talking about.

Professors have noticed the quality of research papers dropping as students get access to the internet.

Some people say they can get everything they need for free on the internet. A few decades ago, these people wouldn’t have been going to the library anyway. If their net feeds dried up for some reason today, they still wouldn’t go. So why are we listening to them now?

The Google Generation is not “able to find information quickly and discern the best nuggets”. They’re able to find information quickly and discern SOME nuggets. But, often enough, a limited set of information is repeated again and again, sometimes in slightly different forms and sometimes verbatim, in web page after web page. So they might be finding the best nuggets available after all.

If web pages provided the same quality of information as books, then they’ll be hundreds of pages long. Books are that long because that’s how long it takes to tell the story. But nobody has the patience to read that much web page. Me included. Somehow I can just have so much more patience with a book.

If they allow themselves to be pigeonholed or even actively embrace the notion that the public library is for popular materials only, and that shelf space is valuable, that every item must earn its keep by checking out 1.2 times per year or whatever, and that the patrons want DVD’s and computers and not books etc – things they don’t value when money is tight – then – yes the library administration bears some responsibility.

;)

They already know about Journal X. They also know about Journal X’, the translated version of Journal X because Journal X was orignally published in Russian. What they want is access to the X” derivative of Article 4 from Journal X volume 4, in PDF format with full Optical Character Recognition, with no scanning or copying blemishes, within 1 minute or less from the moment they discovered they want the article. Mind you, due to the delay in translation, the volume numbers, page numbers and even article order between the two journals differ!

Too often, the results that I got from the library were horrendous. Number one, the original scans would be blemished to the point that I could not read them – and a ILL request is useless if the information is not legible! Yes, I realize that it is difficult to scan the areas of the journal next to the binding, but having scanned over four figures worth of articles myself, I can tell you that it is very well possible to do it. Furthermore, the PDFs that I received had very poor digital editing appled [the margins were black] and the character recognition was often spotty at best – my scholar employer responded by getting our own OCR software and we cleaned the pages up to a presentable level using editing software. And finally, librarians proved to be utterly useless when it came to navigating Russian Journals and their English Translation counterparts. You’d think research librarians would be good at connecting these dots together, but time after time after time…epic fail. End result? The lab did the article research on our own and just used the library as an ILL delevery service.

Very few librarians have the background to even begin to understand the content of that article…so the librarian will not be much use in the research part of gathering information – they don’t know what information is important and which information is common knowledge within the field. Where the scholars need librarians to be fluent are in the skills necessary to gain full access to the content.

The greatest issue is that the scholar might be looking for Journal X and have no idea that it has been translated into Journal X’. Furthermore, in some cases Journal X gets broken up into 1X’, 2X’, and 3X’, where each section in X is divided into it’s own journal section in English. And the final nails: the names of these journals change at least once every 10 to 25 years, further complicating the issue!

So inshort, librarians don’t need to understand the content in the article. They need to understand the bibliographic origins of the article [the original journal title/titles], the derivatives of the article[english, russian, french, greman versions], and they need to simply get that article in the best possible format for scholarly use [In most cases, the english version is most desireable]. And they need to be familiar with the tools and skills necessary to produce professional digital documents.

But this is only in academic libraries – I’m sure it’s different in other places.

- Access, Access, Access!