I spoke at the State Librarians’ Meeting at OCLC last week. Myself and Phyllis Spies participated in a session with the Board of the Michigan Library Consortium this week where we were asked to discuss general information trends, the OCLC environmental scan, and OCLC directions.
In each case, much of the discussion focused on how the library demonstrated value in a world where Amazon and Google increasingly defined users’ information horizon. In each case also, there was quite a bit of discussion of whether a ‘baby boomer’ librarian generation was responding appropriately to the needs of ‘net generation’ users.
In this context I was interested to follow the link to Carol Tenopir’s article in LJ which asked Is Google the competition. I was a little disappointed with the discussion there.
John Regazzi, managing director of market development at Elsevier, described studies that show 70 percent of professionals use the Internet in their work (even 91 percent of those over age 55 use it six or seven times each week). When Elsevier researchers asked librarians and scientists to name the top three most reliable online services, librarians named ScienceDirect, ISI’s Web of Science, and Medline. Scientists, on the other hand, named Google, Yahoo!, and PubMed. [Library Journal – Is Google the Competition?]
