by Ryan Jones, Pubget

Researchers are turning to free search engines over licensed databases because of familiarity, simplicity and access to free content. By starting there, though, they face a fragmented experience across free and paid resources that’s fraught with dead ends, different formats and broken user interfaces. They also may pass up a perfect resource because it doesn’t crop up on the first page of the many results on Google. These shortcomings make up the Google Gap.

The Google Gap (or PubMed Gap or Science Direct Gap, etc) has been well explored by the library community. Technologies like link resolvers and federated search have cropped up to bridge the gap—with limited success. Link resolvers often mean errors in holdings (subscription collections), confusing resource choices and more dead ends. Meanwhile, federated search solutions connect resources at too high a level to provide a satisfactory experience and ignore holdings, the quality of metadata and the format, and usability of content.

So if link resolvers and federated search won’t do, what can bridge the gap between closed and web-based data? The “what” has to be something with enough computing power to provide a simple experience, yet span the web, free and paid content.  It has to be something with a high understanding of all the content types that sit at the end of each search task. The answer, it turns out is not a website or database at all. 

It’s an app.

Apps, as you’ve come to experience them on your phone or desktop, host more purpose-built code and processing power than traditional websites (as Chris Anderson wrote in this excellent piece in Wired ). Apps can provide enough intelligence to overcome content fragmentation among the user, the web, and library resources to deliver the simple yet powerful experience users ask for. They connect content destinations in highly customized ways, with intelligence, and can thereby standardize user experience across disparate resources. Apps can perform tasks in the background, fetching resources or content in anticipation of users’ needs. Apps can present a familiar and simple interface to the user.

This extra intelligence benefits the library, too. Apps can provide comprehensive data from both users and platforms, which in turn means better content management and more efficient libraries.

At Pubget, we think more intelligence is needed in the way users, the web, and resources are connected. As Chris Anderson says, “The World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.” At Pubget, we think there’s an app for that.

Ryan Jones is the President of Pubget, which provides full-text access to life sciences research. You can follow them on twitter.

by Aaron Schmidt

Libraries have been following trends in the larger  information world in an attempt to remain relevant. Libraries have strived to be nimble, flexible, and experimental, integrating popular tools and devices so that their offerings make sense to their patrons. Top Tech Trends panels at conferences prime librarians for what’s coming down the pike with the implication that libraries will gain some ground if they’re early adopters.

All of this is fine. Necessary, even. But it isn’t going to secure libraries a place in the future. Why?

This approach is reactive and it makes libraries beholden to the whims of industry. The current eBook quagmire is a perfect example of this. Most people that use commercial digital content are getting their needs filled outside of libraries. Some librarians cling to the notion of libraries as commercial content providers and are trying to fight over the remaining scraps.

This approach is shallow. It emphasizes matching library operations with people’s behaviors, not their motivations. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that some library users use Twitter. What really matters is that some library users want to broadcast their lives and read about other people’s lives. Libraries shouldn’t be concerned with using a hammer. They should be concerned with building something.

Instead of looking to technology for relevance, libraries ought to look at the lives of their patrons and the issues in their communities. Libraries user research budgets should be as big as their tech budgets. Libraries that do things like develop patron personas and conduct ethnographic studies will know not just what people do, but why they do it and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Those libraries can evolve into supportive, problem solving institutions, integrated into their communities.

Aaron Schmidt is the Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library while residing in Portland, Oregon. For more information, view his blog, walkingpaper.org.

Ian Palmer, Europe Chapter

British chemist William J. Henry (1774-1836) was quoted as saying “What is research, but a blind date with knowledge.” Blind dates can be exciting and filled with promise. They can also be unpredictable, unless, there is at least some science, method, or variable utilized to better predict which engagements may lead to desired outcomes. This premise is equally true in application to knowledge and information services.

Dating sites have made their mark because of this approach. Many of our own businesses survive and thrive because of our own investments in research. Personally, my own experiences as a community advocate and a communications professional in the information industry have changed my “world view” approach to customer engagement and how I encourage customers I work with in libraries and information centers to approach their own customers and (importantly!) potential customers.

Research is critical to the success of any service provider, whether a corporation such the ones we work for or for an information professional like you. Research requires curiosity – to ask, listen, learn and validate – resources to dedicate, and commitment to initiate and respond with action. It can be formal or informal.

For all of us who provide information services to users, my rule of thumb is that we should all dedicate some percentage of our resources (time and money) to primary research. You may not have experience or a strong competency in conducting primary research to see what else you and your team can do, but hiring an expert to help or “learning by doing” is better than not conducting any research at all. Possibilities for success will increase by focusing on existing core users as well as new ones with characteristics that make them likely to benefit from your services.

So whether you are looking for ways to better serve users who rely on information services you make available, finding new users to serve, or discovering other valuable and strategic gems to guide you in your job, I encourage you to include blind dating as a budget line item and in your strategic plan. Go on a blind date with research and ask those questions you’ve not yet asked and find answers to questions you have yet to answer. You may be surprised to find more than one match and many positive outcomes.

Ian Palmer is Head of Marketing at Reprints Desk. He is a member of multiple SLA Divisions in scientific and medical practice areas.