Welcome to my new blog, The Search Principle.
The new blog has been a long time in coming. Even though the new name has ‘search’ in its title, I won’t limit myself to search. I plan to write about issues of interest to doctors, health professionals, academic librarians and educators, and will include a wide range of topics including the impact of social media on our digital workflow.
The mission of the new blog is fairly simple: to talk about the basics of good searching. For without access to reliable information in the digital age, very little can get done and finding solutions to society’s most intractable problems will be that much more difficult.
All knowledge-workers should understand the search principle:
- First, to learn how to develop good search strategies every time (to save time); but also to learn more about sources of information
- Second, to know how ‘iterative searching & playing on the web (i.e. surfability)’ differs from ‘efficient finding & cumulating evidence‘;
- Finally, the future web will be more about media and peer-to-peer sharing, filtering and less about search.
Why? Google and Google scholar have changed how we, and our users in medicine, interact around health information. Even though Google scholar changed how academics find things – it’s not the huge threat we thought it’d be. We’ve learned that academic librarians still need to purchase access to proprietary databases in order to locate information efficiently.
The duality between open search on the web and proprietary search tools like OvidSP, EBSCO and MDConsult will continue to have an impact on our work in the digital age. Librarians need to articulate why we need these tools and why media literacy (not just information literacy) will be part of staying current.
This, for me, is the search principle. Welcome to a new era. ~Dean
2 replies on “Here Comes ‘The Search Principle’ – A new era”
I understand why a librarian would want to make the distinction between iterative search&play (Google) and efficient finding and cumulating (Ovid, EBSCO etc). But I don’t think the distinction stands up to much scrutiny. If a Cochrane Review comes out near the top of a Google search I’d call that pretty efficient; a freely available NLH annual update seems a pretty efficient accumulation.
I do agree though that the key thing is knowing which are the right sources. I believe that the main role of a librarian today should be to make sure the best sources are surfaced on the Web so that when users search they find good material.
Hi Ben,
And thank you for your comment.
Notice I say “understand how the two search types differ”.
I agree with you that Google can be efficient but not in cumulation.
cheers,
Dean