By Traci Avet

Many years passed during which my grandmother badly needed an answering machine. We come from a large, close-knit, phone-loving family, and every moment spent running her many errands held an array of imagined emergencies. She had thoughtful, fully formed reasons why every single one of her relatives might have needed her at the very moment she drove away. We all knew that having an answering machine would ease her worries, so we tried talking her into learning how to use one. (This was before Caller ID.)

Each existing family machine used its simplicity and accessibility to compete for her affections, but she wasn't having any of it. This new technology was scary, it was 'after her time,' and it was just another 20th-century gadget infinitely more trouble than it was worth. In looking at this snippet of my family history, can you find any parallels to the steadfast reluctance some library staffers have today in using Google to find information? No? Well, neither can I.

It would be much easier, and much less interpersonally messy, to divide the Google gap within that pre-existing comfort-with-technology bipolarity, but unfortunately it really isn't that simple. Or, rather, it is that simple. You see, if you are reading this article, chances are you are aware of Google and all the controversy surrounding it. Chances are you are familiar enough with the Internet to know what kinds of information may or may not show up when performing a search. And chances are you'd still be in pretty good shape if the Internet was down and you had to consult those old, dusty reference books for the answers.

Pride in the source

I would venture to say that the catch-phrase that prevents us from bridging the Google gap would have to be pride in the source. Should we be less proud of finding a complicated answer in less than two minutes on Google than in the local directory or statistical almanac? If we can assume, as professionals, that our coworkers, as professionals, have taken the time and consideration to explore and appreciate the resources available to us - both electronic and print - should that assumption be weakened by our coworkers' decision to 'google it first'? Should it be, as one of my library school professors believed, that there is 'the lazy way and the print way'?

Certainly, exploring our resources in order to determine their full potential in information-seeking is a necessary part of our ongoing education and training as information professionals. By all means, we should explore every resource available to us in order to make the best judgments when relevant queries are introduced. But if one key to great information service is to provide the needed information in a timely and effective manner, why should a quick spin on the resource very often right at our fingertips at the time of the query put a bleary smudge on our pride in source?

Apples and oranges

If we can grant our information colleagues the professional courtesy of taking their work seriously, then we must assume that some of the information on the Internet is valid. Here's an example: a patron walks up to our desk and says he wants to know about Physician X. We type in 'florida physician profiling' and presto! One of many specific Department of Health web sites with impossibly long URLs shows up right on top. It's fast and effective (read efficient), and we get page after page of education credits, hospital affiliations, board specialties, professional memberships, and liability information in less than 30 seconds. What's more, the information we're giving this patron (er, the lazy way) comes from a primary source document, in this case, a government publication that happens to be available online.

This information could have been attained in a number of ways, none of which detract from this particular method, for it is the object and source of attainment - not necessarily the method - that is the real focus of our profession: providing reliable information to our patrons. Regardless of how silly Google's homepage icons for the day might be, Google itself is not the source - it is a tool we use to locate the source, i.e., our Department of Health physician profiling database. For those of us whose mental processing is slightly quicker than our tired knees, it's much more efficient, and that, for me, isn't lazy.

The above example helps to counter the suspicion that the very process of Googling is necessarily haphazard. On the contrary, those who google their information always keep a small arsenal of ways to increase their chances of getting better search results. These might include Boolean searching, knowing when to use the plus or minus signs, using mental (or print!) thesauri to word the search more effectively for the results desired, or even just rearranging the order of search terms used (which can, and often does, affect the results).

Finally, those who use Google to find information know very well that they don't always find what they need. In such cases, as with all other print and electronic resources, they simply move on to the next, potentially more effective way of searching. They have not lost any more than if they had flipped through a well-known reference book, did not find the answer, and then moved on to the next.

The land of plenty

Remember, the information on the Internet - as soupy and fragmented as it is - holds plenty of reliable answers, or answer-leads, that our patrons are seeking. Google indexes the results according to the search terms used, how the sites are written, etc. There is much gunk, but we need not question any librarian's ability to sift through that gunk, given the resources we have on evaluating web site credibility.

Given the mental stamina devoted to answering long-winded reference questions the best we can and the long hours we spend staring at words on a page and on a computer screen, we shouldn't challenge the hard-earned standards of a coworker who googles a company zipcode rather than walking the mere 20 feet to fetch the 100-pound zip code directory from its shelf. To ignore Google's resourcefulness is to ignore a potentially useful - and thus valuable - resource at our fingertips.

The question remains: did my grandmother ever learn how to operate an answering machine? No, of course not. She uses Caller ID. It's much more efficient.