Stop Dismissing Google and Wiki, Librarians!
I recently started an internship at one of Northwestern’s libraries at their downtown campus. It is my first time actually working in a library and, while I haven’t done terribly much yet, I have already witnessed something I find maddening: a librarian who thinks using Google and Wikipedia is a bad idea.
A patron came in looking for a DVD and she said the title of it was “God of Carnage”. My coworker stepped in and reminded me how to search for a DVD through Northwestern’s catalog. This is fine, especially considering how new I was at the job, but my first instinct was to Google “God of Carnage”. With my coworker hovering over my back, I did as he suggested, and, while the search came up with some results they were mostly clips that could be downloaded from the internet. My coworker told the patron that we didn’t have the DVD and she left.
I had a few spare minutes so I googled “God of Carnage” to see what information that would get me. Sure enough, within minutes I figured out that “God of Carnage” is a play, and the film version of the play is actually just titled “Carnage”. Northwestern did not have the film, but I could have requested it from interlibrary loan, and, at the very least, letting the patron know that she was looking for the wrong title could have spared her some confusion down the road. Sure, googling this with an actual user there at the desk waiting may have added to the time it took to find the desired resource, but, in this instance and probably many others, doing this simple thing will help ensure that a desired thing actually exists!
I have heard numerous instances of Wikipedia and Google being put down from library school students. I have found this to be, for the most part, frustratingly misguided. These resources are, at the very least, an excellent place to start. Luckily, take such a dim view: Wikimedia, a collaboration between librarians and Wikipedia has a mission “ to empower and engage people around the world to collaboratively collect and develop open educational content, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. We see libraries as our natural partners in this endeavor. Working together, we can promote scholarly and cultural knowledge, information literacy, and open access” (“Libraries the Wikimedia Way”) .
The weird antipathy towards Google, Wikipedia, and other easy, non-librarycentric ways of finding and disambiguating information hurts libraries more than it helps them.
Libraries. The Wikimedia way. (2015). Retrieved from https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Loves_Libraries
