Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet

Lossau, Norbert. Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries; Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet. D-Lib Magazine, 10(6), June 2004.
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In any market situation it is of paramount importance to take a close look at potential customers and their usage behaviour. For librarians this might sound obvious as it is their genuine perception that they consider implicitly the demands of users — or rather what they consider to be the demands of their users. But the new, competitive situation forces libraries to see things much more from the perspective of the user. First of all, this is an acknowledgement that, particularly at universities, libraries deal with a range of users with often different usage behaviours. It almost goes without saying that an undergraduate has other demands for information than a qualified researcher, and their usage behaviours can vary substantially. Young undergraduates will try much harder to transfer their general information seeking behaviour (using internet search engines) to the specific, academic environment, while established researchers have better accommodated the use of specific search tools. Before the WWW had been developed, this differentiation was, from the librarian's point of view, only relevant with respect to the level of training that various user groups required in order to use the library's resource discovery tools (printed catalogue, online catalogue, digital library portal). Today, with a whole range of general search engines available, users have the opportunity to use other catalogues (public or academic), and portals than those found in the library. Library users have been "empowered" by Google-like search engines to make their own choice about a search tool and to approach the world of information without any training. While librarians are mainly worried about the quality of information resources that are covered by mainstream search indexes, their users love these new tools and they would like to use them for any type of information search.

As a survey carried out at Bielefeld University in November 2002 revealed, students still make intensive use of the online library catalogue, but they would much prefer to access the catalogue through a "Google-like"-interface [16]. The simple reason why they still use the online catalogue is that, for this information type, they don't have an available alternative, as internet search engines usually don't cover the so called "deep" or "invisible" web. In any area where students think that they can find information, especially when they are looking for documents and full text, general search engines are even now much more popular than databases that have been made available through libraries. And it is only because of their level of experience and a certain habit that researchers still use databases, e-journals etc. that are not indexed by internet indexes. But a new generation of researchers will be coming in a few years time that will have grown up with popular internet search tools.
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[16] 625 undergraduates and graduates returned the questionnaire within a week.
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