Guiding the Googlers
How will the search engine giant's big deal affect K–12 students?
By Evan St. Lifer, Editor -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2005
The library community has been discussing, planning, lamenting and, yes, obsessing over this moment for years. In case you haven't heard, Google, flush with more than $1 billion after a stratospheric initial public offering, has forged agreements with some of the world's leading research libraries to digitize most of their content. The project could take as long as a decade and cost upwards of $150 million.
The romantic notion of the virtual library—or what I prefer to call the "transportable library," a veritable Library of Congress that's easy to reach from one's handheld device—is now upon us. It's not that digital libraries are anything new: several well-established digital initiatives are thriving, with more on the way. It's Google's ability to ratchet up the stakes: a major player is about to digitize the entire book collections of prominent research institutions, including the Stanford and University of Michigan libraries, and a smaller portion of Harvard's and Oxford's collections. This unprecedented deal will pave the way for other Net giants—Yahoo!, Microsoft, and more—to create similar agreements to rival Google's deal, as well as the Library of Congress's own digitization efforts.
While the media (see the New York Times editorial "The Electronic Library," December 21, 2004) and the library field speculate about the impact of Google's latest move on research libraries, I am more concerned about the effect on our younger generations. I'm talking about K–12 students who use "Google" as a verb; the students for whom a research project means a 10- to 12-minute Google search session. Google is what they do, not where they go.
If the world's library holdings are eventually online, how do we defend the use of the physical library? We can't, and we shouldn't. One of the largest and most recent surveys of teens and their online habits, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, indicates how ingrained the Internet is in their everyday lives. Seven out of 10 teens reported using the Internet for their last big project, and nearly eight out of 10 use the Web to help them with schoolwork.
Librarians can continue to use their information skills to be the gatekeepers of essential knowledge, to guide students through an ever expanding online world, and to play a leading role in honing students' critical thinking skills and promoting inquiry-based learning. Librarians need to help organize this frontier into something more meaningful. Otherwise the Internet runs the risk of devolving into a Googlized version of virtual reality—one in which Google becomes the arbiter of what is relevant.
This month's feature "Instant Web Sites! (Just Add Content)," which begins on page 50, offers some practical advice on how librarians can meet students' and teachers' online needs. While the endeavor is not as simple as the title would have you believe, media specialist Adam Janowski presents an easy-to-follow plan for providing essential Web services, which every librarian who works with children and young adults should offer.
Evan St. Lifer
Editor
estlifer@reedbusiness.com
