Don’t Just Google It
February 12th, 2006In a post today about private investigator work, Michael McGrorty had this to say:
“If I could teach anything to librarians, it would be to adopt the private eye model of information seeking, whose basic tenet is not to approach information but to penetrate it. That, and I’d like to introduce the trade to the doctrine of necessity: the idea that one has to provide a good answer, no matter what. About half the time when I make online or email requests to libraries with online reference services, I get a dead end or a reference to a reference. How I sometimes wish they, like I, had to find an answer or not get paid! I’ve suggested this and been told that “Librarians have more questions to answer than an investigator.” Fair enough. How about we pro-rate them with adjustments to existing salary levels—a sort of piece-rate system? And remember, private eyes work a 24-hour day and a seven-day week for their money; there is nobody else to refer the question to.”
It’s no wonder why I love this guy so much (and it’s not just that he has had some nice things to say about me in the past). Michael gets it. The new generation of librarians who will be performing hardcore research everyday should be providing the best answer “no matter what”. That is what is going to keep our profession from falling into the hands of amateur researchers. If you are in library school and plan to work in research in any form of another, do yourself a favor and take as many classes as possible on database searching. Know Lexis, Westlaw, and Dialog from the inside out. Know how to use every syntax available in every major search engine (I get squeamish when a librarian tells me that they “Googled” something - give me a break!) out there.
Thanks for the post Michael. I hope our colleagues take your advice.