NYTimes, A1, A14, June 21, 2004
By KATIE HAFNER
SAN
FRANCISCO, June 20 - Katarina Maxianova, who received
her
bachelor's degree in comparative literature from
Columbia
University in May, took a seminar last year in
which
the professor assigned two articles from New Left
Review
magazine. She found one immediately through Google;
for
the other, she had to trek to the library stacks.
"Everyone
in class tried to get those articles online," she
said,
"and some people didn't even bother to go to the
stacks
when they couldn't Google them."
For
the last few years, librarians have increasingly seen
people
use online search sites not to supplement research
libraries
but to replace them. Yet only recently have
librarians
stopped lamenting the trend and started working
to
close the gap between traditional scholarly research and
the
incomplete, often random results of a Google search.
"We
can't pretend people will go back to walking into a
library
and talking to a reference librarian," said Kate
Wittenberg,
director of the Electronic Publishing
Initiative
at Columbia University.
Ms.
Wittenberg's group recently finished a three-year study
of
research habits, including surveys of 1,233 students
across
the country, that concluded that electronic
resources
have become the main tool for information
gathering,
particularly among undergraduates.
"We
have to respond to these new ways," Ms. Wittenberg
said,
and come up with a way to make better research
material
available online.
That
means working with commercial search engines like
Google
and Yahoo to make ever more digital-research
materials
searchable.
Undergraduates
like Ms. Maxianova and her classmates are
not
the only ones conducting research from their computers.
Faculty
members also do it.
"One
of the rarest things to find is a member of the
faculty
in the library stacks," said Paul Duguid, an
information
researcher who will teach a class this fall at
the
University of California, Berkeley on judging the
authenticity
of information found on the Web.
In
the Columbia survey, 90 percent of the faculty members
who
responded said they used electronic resources in their
research
several times a week or more. Nearly all said it
was a
valuable resource.
While
the accuracy of online information is notoriously
uneven,
the ubiquity of the Web means that a trip to the
stacks
is no longer the way most academic research begins.
"The
nature of discovery is changing," said Joseph Janes,
associate
professor and chairman of library and information
science
at the University of Washington. "I think the
digital
revolution and the use of digital resources in
general
is really the beginning of a change in the way
humanity
thinks and presents itself."
A few
research librarians say Google could eventually take
on
more of the role of a universal library.
"If
you could use Google to just look across digital
libraries,
into any digital library collection, now that
would
be cool," said Daniel Greenstein, university
librarian
of the California Digital Library, the digital
branch
of the University of California library system.
"It
would help libraries achieve something that we haven't
yet
been able to achieve by ourselves," Dr. Greenstein
said,
"which is to place all of our publicly accessible
digital
library collections in a common pool."
The
biggest problem is that search engines like Google skim
only
the thinnest layers of information that has been
digitized.
Most have no access to the so-called deep Web,
where
information is contained in isolated databases like
online
library catalogs.
Search
engines seek so-called static Web pages, which
generally
do not have search functions of their own.
Information
on the deep Web, on the other hand, comes to
the
surface only as the result of a database query from
within
a particular site.
Use
Google, for instance, to research Upton Sinclair's 1934
campaign
for governor of California, and you will miss an
entire
collection of pamphlets accessible only from the
University
of California at Los Angeles's archive of
digitized
campaign literature.
"Google
searches an index at the first layers of any Web
site
it goes to, and as you delve beneath the surface, it
starts
to miss stuff," said Mr. Duguid, co-author of "The
Social
Life of Information." "When you go deeper, the
number
of pages just becomes absolutely mind-boggling."
Some
estimates put the number of Web pages that are hidden
from
the view of most search engines at 500 billion.
Reference
librarians are trying to bring material from the
deep
Web to the surface. In recent months, dozens of
research
libraries began working with Google and other
search
engines to help put their collections within reach
of a
broader public.
Carnegie-Mellon
University, for instance, has digitally
scanned
1.6 million pages of archival material from the
papers
of Carnegie-Mellon scientists like Herbert Simon, a
Nobel
Prize winner for economics and a computer chess
expert.
Now, a Google search for "Herbert Simon and
Carnegie
Mellon" turns up the Simon papers.
Google
has also indexed two million book titles through the
Online
Computer Library Center, which manages a database of
catalogs
from 12,000 libraries around the world.
Other
search sites are striking similar deals. Yahoo
recently
signed an agreement with the online library center
to
index its catalogs, and four months ago, it started
carrying
out a plan to make more of the deep Web reachable
through
Yahoo.
Yahoo
has also signed agreements with the University of
Michigan
to make searchable the university's compendium of
academic
collections from more than 250 institutions. And
it
has indexed a digital repository at Northwestern
University
of more than 2,000 hours of Supreme Court oral
arguments.
Yet
for every archive that has become searchable by
commercial
Web engines, scores are not accessible. "There's
lots
of great stuff that isn't available digitally and
likely
never will be," Dr. Janes said. Most books published
before
1995 fit into this category, he said, as do many
older
magazines, newspapers and journals, as well as
historical
maps, archives, letters, diaries, older census
statistics
and genealogical materials.
"We
have to figure out how to adapt to a world where people
will
prefer digital stuff," Dr. Janes said, "yet not forgo
the
investment in print and analog collections and the work
involved
in mapping and maintaining those collections."
Research
institutions are investing heavily in combining
the
new with the old. At Columbia's Butler Library, the
stacks
are not only alive and well, Ms. Wittenberg said,
but
have been modernized to allow for better physical
access
to the seven million volumes in the collection.
During
the renovation, work areas with network connections
were
placed throughout the library.
"A
student or faculty member could work for a whole day in
what
looks and feels like a very traditional library, while
accessing
either the print collection or the large and
rapidly
growing collection of electronic resources," Ms.
Wittenberg
said.
Many
experts, even those who specialize in digital
material,
say that losing the tactile experience of books
and
relying too heavily on electronic resources is certain
to
exact a price.
"How
do you know it's the appropriate universe from which
to
draw your research materials?" said Dr. Greenstein. "It
has
huge ramifications for the nature of instruction and
scholarship."
At
the same time, many research librarians say that the new
reliance
on electronic resources is making their role as
guides
to undiscovered material more important than ever.
Thomas
Mann, a reference librarian in the main reading room
of
the Library of Congress, was reminded of this recently
while
helping a visitor who was researching a famine in
Greece
that occurred in 1942. A Google search had yielded
little
useful information.
"While
he was looking at newspaper articles from the 1940's
that
we have digitized," Dr. Mann said, "I set up a search
on
the terminal next to him in another database of
historical
abstracts and history journals."
In
less than a minute, he pulled up citations for five
scholarly
articles about the famine and helped the visitor
put
in requests for the paper copies from the stacks. "We
can
show people things they don't ask for," Dr. Mann said.
"The
historical database I got into hit it right on the
button."
Some
library experts welcome the change with few
reservations.
"Although
it seems like an apocalyptic change now, over
time
we'll see that young people will grow up using many
ways
of finding information," said Abby Smith, director of
programs
at the Council on Library and Information
Resources,
a nonprofit group in Washington.
"We'll
see the current generation we accuse of doing
research
in their pajamas develop highly sophisticated
searching
strategies to find high quality information on
the
Web," Dr. Smith said. "It's this transition period
we're
in, when not all high-quality information is
available
on the Web - that's what we lament."
Dr.
Janes said that, like many others, he occasionally
pined
for the days spent in musty library stacks, where one
could
chance upon scholarly gems by browsing the shelves.
"You
can think of electronic research as a more
impoverished
experience," Dr. Janes said. "But in some ways
it's
a richer one, because you have so much more access to
so
much more information. The potential is there for this
to be
a real bonus to humanity, because we can see more and
read
more and do more with it. But it is going to be very
different
in lots of ways."