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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 >