Reading 4: Infodieting

According to this article, search engines are the bane of the librarian. More and more students are turning to google to do their research while abandoning libraries altogether. The attitude for many students is, "I had no idea we had a library, but why would I ever want to go to one when I have the internet at my disposal?" This line of thinking is exactly what is causing headaches for countless librarians apparently. A man by the name of James Morris has created the term "infobesity" in regards to googling for research. It is low-level searching that yields low level results which in turn creates sub-par papers. The trick he feels, is to get students to go from infobesity to infodieting.

With the idea of infodieting comes the argument for making school databases more like google. Students apparently don't like school databases due to their cumbersome nature and odd manner of structure. For a while librarians have been crying out to the database producing companies to create more user friendly databases, and up til now those cries have fallen upon deaf ears. But now the company ProQuest has unveiled a more user friendly database. Another important step towards "googlization" is the RedLightGreen project, which has an interface much like google's and also makes suggestions for the user to get better results.

Another step for ensuring that students still use the library is having initiatives in place that will make professors have their students have to find research material that is in the library. This could lead to more information literacy of students and an increase in the usage of the library.

I for one think that changing the format of most of the databases is a wonderful idea. It is far easier to type in a google-esque interface than to worry about various fields and to deal with selecting "and" or "or" among other things. On top of this, having professors make their students actually do research in the library would increase the traffic in the library quite a bit. Especially if the interfaces used for finding information were simplified in a manner that is easy for all to understand. If things don't change, this infobesity issue will only become more and more prominent.