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June 26, 2007, 03:53 PM ET
Librarians Find a Place in a 'Web 2.0' World
With the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the various ventures that fall under the big tent of Web 2.0, it would be easy for researchers to feel that they've entered the era of do-it-yourself scholarly searching. But there are chinks in the armor of even the most sophisticated search engines and folksonomies, writes Thomas Mann, author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research.
In a lengthy essay (available online in PDF), Mr. Mann demonstrates how a fairly straightforward request for information -- in this case, a query on the system of tribute payments among Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War -- can expose the shortcomings of Web searching. Google's search engine can furnish a list of some 78,400 Web sites that include the terms "Peloponnesian" and "tribute," and its Book Search service can find nearly 700 books containing the same words.
But only a human guide or a classification system controlled by librarians can effectively sort the wheat from the chaff, Mr. Mann writes. Google "hides the existence and the extent of relevant sources on most topics" by "burying the good sources that it does find within massive and incomprehensible retrievals," he says.
Mr. Mann is not an anti-technology activist: He argues that much of the Web is well suited to the "inexpensive indexing methods" used by Google and Web aggregators. But academic work is still grounded in books, not Web sites, and his essay is a reminder that scholars still benefit from librarians' ability to organize those books in a fashion that rigorous researchers will find useful. (Thanks to David Weinberger for the link.) --Brock Read
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