Nancy K. Humphries gets to the heart of the matter in this Huffington Post piece.
“Google often fails to serve people who search it or the people trying to get their sites noticed. All too often Google’s results completely miss the mark….
Google will never equal the library in precision and accuracy because this company is too arrogant to even listen to a librarian. Google employees are young, so young they still believe that only they know how to do things.
I personally witnessed a speaker from Google tell members of The American Society of Indexers at a San Francisco conference that Google had gotten rid of the one librarian on staff in Palo Alto. She was a former cataloger; she was too “nitpicky.””
Just yesterday
Just yesterday a cataloger I know found a patron a book because of good cataloging. The information the patron had was partially correct. Cataloger broadened up the search in our OPAC and because some important keywords were put into the record when the item was cataloged they found the item the patron wanted. It was very clear from looking at the record that if the cataloger had not entered as many terms when they created the record the item would not have been found.
Smallest library
Venn diagram showing library with Internet:
Smallest library
Smallest library with one item not on Internet that also has Internet access is bigger than the Internet.
Uers Relationship Management
Google came into existance in 21st century or It’s birth is due to digital. When Librarian serve the users the following elements are involved which are missing in Google.
1) Human touch
2) Interaction
3) Understaning users
4) Evaluation of content
Google is an secondary and tertiary reference tools for library professionals. But it can’t replace the library professionals. I would like to quote here: “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” ? Neil Gaiman