David Nicholas, whose career does not seem to have suffered in spite of having to teach me subject bibliography at the Polytechnic of North London on the postgraduate course in 1983, talked to a full house at CILIP in London's AGM on his research into the Google generation. I and others tweeted throughout, and you can see the archive at http://twapperkeeper.com/index.php#ggcilip. Those tweeting, apart from me, were @brunellalongo, @metalibrarian, @plasticspam and @woodsiegirl. Update, December 2014, Brunella tells me that Twitter account was hacked and she may now be found at @Brunella_Longo
David's work has had considerable exposure, not least through his appearance in the recent BBC television programme, the Virtual Revolution, but for this audience David concentrated, for the first time in public, on the lessons for librarians. Libraries and librarians are in danger of become decoupled from those they serve. Everyone has a choice and can be their own librarian. We are no longer the gatekeepers.
He cited the iPad launch in Britain at the end of the month and government interest in e-health and e-government as proof that these are unstoppable forces. Access is ubiquitous. It's telling that, though Google has transformed the information landscape, CILIP has never given it an award.
David said that in the print environment, it was possible to see what users are doing, but hard to assess the use they make of information; by contrast, online, we can decipher millions of footprints.
The impetus for the project was the need for adults to understand children's behaviour online. What happens when these children reach the job market? But in truth we are all the Google generation, the children are those who have never known anything else. So David recounted a meeting of doctors he had addressed who were scathing about junior doctors recourse to Google, but they themselves used it.
The virtual scholar: there is a huge and growing demand for scholarly information online, a demand fed by incresing availability. [Here I disagree to an extent: yes, an institution such as UCL will have the resources to subscribe to a lot, though not all, of the content that its scholars need; this is not the case for smaller, less wealthy institutions and the trend is for more and more content to disappear behind paywalls-TR]. Libraries ought to be part of this growth in the information market, but we aren't.
He quoted work they had done with the House of Commons. 90% of the hits on the House of Commons intranet were from robots [this is not unusual: I'm not sure why he thought it was-TR]. Do we allow robots into the library? Users are promiscuous: 40% never return to a site, Horizontal has replaced vertical: users skitter from site to site, skimming the surfaces. They will construct search statements of two or three words, and only look at the first page of results. Viewing is replacing reading; most users prefer abstracts to full text [this was true of doctors use of Medline a long time ago-TR] so Oxford University Press is to start charging for abstract but delivers full text free [I should like to know more about this. Where? TR] . Users believe that, through digital osmosis, the intellectual content can be absorbed simply by viewing a screen. We're all foxes now: the hedgehogs have been squashed.
He told an anecdote about his daughter channel-hopping; when he remonstrated with her to ask which channel she was really watching she replied, 'Dad I'm watching it all'. Is that bad or good behaviour, he asked? [ It seems to me futile to turn this into a moral question-TR]. He also quoted students at UCL who ask which of the books on the reading list is the one they should read, and do they have to read it all. Only librarians ask for and use advanced searching functions
Brand and authority are now considerably more complicated in the digital world. He cited the case of an NHS patient health information system set up in a branch of Tesco. Users presumed the information was provided by Tesco, not the NHS ,and were disappointed to discover the truth. Users don't look at the branding of information and don't evaluate it. Young people are the biggest multi-takers, but not necessarily the best. Lots of users will use friends as information sources, rather than authoritative sources. He cited a (rather old) article by John Naughton, Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read.
Librarians don't bang our drum enough: as information and its retrieval becomes more and more complex, we can help, if we can show how we can help people and organisations achieve the outcomes they want; in a university this might be showing how we can help students achieve better grades or researchers gain higher impact for their work. We cannot count on loyalty anymore.
Our services need to have modern interfaces, rather than looking like Dialog in the 1960s. Information literacy programmes are misnamed, and must abandon the preconception that their aim is to cure the user of bad information habits.
As an illustration of the power of user recommendation, he referred to his experience as a young library assistant in Mare Street library, then the central library of the London Borough of Hackney. On a Saturday his job was to shelve the returned books, but he never got further than a few yards with his trolley, as readers would fall on the returned books; if someone else borrowed it, it must be good,
Three hour written examinations don't work anymore. Students can't write for three hours [I'm not sure quite what relevance this had-TR].
If we want to secure the future, we need to get into bed with publishers, who have money, brand and content. Are we wasting an opportunity to make everyone a scholar?
And with that, David was gone. It's a great pity there was no opportunity to question and debate, for much of what he said rang true, but much was controversial, in particular his assumptions about libraries and librarians, and the old and the young. Moreover, we wasted time at the start on a shambolically-conducted AGM. But still more regrettably some of the audience demonstrated that they hadn't grasped David's message by upbraiding people in the audience who were live-tweeting the event. See WoodsieGirl's experience and that of Librarytwopointzero
Though I was not tweeting in those days, I remember my first experience of the old Library Association's London and Home Counties Branch, nearly thirty years ago, was as equally inhospitable to young professionals. It seemed to be a club for sending chief public librarians on foreign jaunts. I'm pleased to say that CILIP in London's admirable Sekforde Arms meetings are not nearly as cliquey and unfriendly.
For the detailed work of the project see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/