From Library Babel Fish, June 12, 2014
One thing that a faculty member said a few weeks ago when we were discussing threshold concepts may have actually been a threshold concept for me. These concepts are the ones that are troublesome, irreversible, integrative, and transformative. It takes you a while to wrap your head around them, and they may disturb the way you think about the world, but they can also change the way you think in some profound way. This new insight of mine may not seem all that profound, but it put a burr under my intellectual saddle and is really making me think. She said that Google seems to flatten knowledge.
Wow. Yeah. Wait, what?
This clicks with my concern that, in trying to emulate the convenience and simplicity of Google and Amazon, libraries are (once again) putting too high a value on volume of information and too little on curation. We have told vendors that we want as much full text as possible in the databases we subscribe to, which has made it harder, not easier, for undergraduates to use a database like Academic Search Premier and find articles they can understand that have been published in journals whose titles their teachers will recognize. Librarians tend to assume that access to more information is always a good thing, and it’s an understandable position to take. Access is important. It is also understandable that librarians have lost faith in their own ability to curate wisely. Most academic libraries in the past bought large numbers of books that nobody ever used – 40 percent isn’t unusual. When money was flush, use was irrelevant; the size of a collections mattered. But now, that kind of more-the-merrier collection building in print seems both filter failure and a gigantic waste of resources. If the same percentage of digital resources we subscribe to aren’t used, at least they aren’t taking up space. Subscribing to bundles also relieves us from the time that curation takes and the risk that we will become censors, choosing not to include in our collections things that are on the fringe, not mainstream. If someone else does the curation, that’s their problem.
But it also snaps into place with my bemusement about the way we make our collections discoverable. When we ported the contents of card catalogs into databases, we kept the same data structures. We could search by authors, titles, and subjects, and included bits of description and local location information. The same thing happened in the shift from indexes and abstracts to database retrieval. The only index that did things differently was the Science Citation Index. That tool, originally printed in tiny typeface on tissue-thin paper, tried to make knowledge discoverable through the citation network – tying together work that was related because authors cited or were cited by other authors. The Web of Science reproduced that as a database, but it really only became simple and a highly visible function when Google Scholar was built out of publishers’