This is librarians fighting a PR battle we can't win. I doubt most people
care about these assertions, and I certainly don't think they stand a
chance of swaying anyone. This is like the old "librarians need to promote
themselves better" chestnut. Losing strategies, in my opinion. Rather than
trying to refight a battle with search technology that search technology
has already won, libraries and librarians need to reinvent the technology
and themselves. Semantic technologies, in particular, provide Information
Science with extraordinary avenues for reinvention. We need to make search
more effective and approachable, rather than wagging our finger at people
who we think aren't searching "correctly". In the short term, data provides
powerful opportunities. And it isn't all about writing code or wrangling
data . . . informatics, metadata, systematic reviews, all of these are
fertile ground for additional development. Digitization projects and other
efforts to make special collections materials broadly accessible are
exciting stuff, as are the developing technologies that support those
efforts. We should be seizing the argument and shaping it, rather than
trying to invent new bromides to support a losing fight.

Best regards,

*Jason Bengtson, MLIS, MA*
Assistant Director, IT Services
K-State Libraries
414 Hale Library
Manhattan, KS 66506
785-532-7450
[log in to unmask]
www.jasonbengtson.com

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 3:17 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Apr 5, 2016, at 11:12 PM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Eric, there were studies done a few decades ago using factual questions.
> Here's a critical round-up of some of the studies:
> http://www.jstor.org/stable/25828215  Basically, 40-60% correct, but
> possibly the questions were not representative -- so possibly the results
> are really worse :(
>
> Karen, interesting article, and thank you for bringing it to our
> attention. —Eric
>