College Students Prefer Google Over The Library – Again

leeb says:

Speak the language of the user
Yes, the reliability, authenticity, reputation of the information on the internet is often questionable. That is the downside of internet. Having said that, some useful information that would never be published (e.g. because of political correctness, or subject is too controversial) is made available. This is the big advantage of internet. At the end of the day, the internet is only a medium, just like a book, video, or CD. The quality of the information contained in all these formats should be checked out and not accepted blindly as gospel truth.
In these circumstances, the library is in an ideal position to marry the traditional library services and the internet technology to make the library more appealing to students. This means building (amalgamated) gateways to traditonal library resources (i.e. books, videos, etc.) and credible internet resources. The old way of having the Windows-based library OPACs that essentially contain text (MARC records, LC subject headings, Dewey numbers that is foreign to many students) have to be abandoned. The new library system has to resemble the internet so that it appeals to students. The library has to speak the language of the user, in this case, the language of the internet, not MARC and LC subject headings. (Analogy: I can give beautiful poetry in Swahili to someone that doesn’t know Swahili. And that person isn’t going to read the poetry simply because he or she doesn’t understand the language.) Librarians and cataloguers may choose to use the archaic MARC and LC subject headings in the background, but when the information is presented on the screen it should mimic the internet. For example, the library system should support muliple languages so the title of a Japanese book, for example, is actually displayed in Japanese (hiragana & katakana & kanji) and not in transliteration. The internet does. When the libary can do this, then students will line up to use the library.

leeb says:

Vendor has vested interest
Library system vendors have vested interest to maintain the status quo and proprietary systems as otherwise they would lose control. At the end of the day, the end-users choose what they want to use, and they choose to use what is user-friendly, convenient, and familiar, i.e. Internet.