The library as a web app
On Web4Lib list yesterday Bernie Sloan posted a March Library Journal article by WebFeat president Todd Miller on why libraries should be simple like Google. Tom Miller is eloquently saying what many other have also said: the library web tools aren’t working. Users don’t like them and don’t want to use them. It’s as simple as that.
In addition to making basic search easier, however, we also should be looking at the library web prsence as a whole. One crucial point that doesn’t seem to get enough overt attention is that web interfaces for libraries are, like Google, web applications. Just like in the world of desktop applications, there is no one solution to rule them all. Different users have different needs. For instance, Apple doesn’t just offer iMovie as the solution for all video editing and the reason is obvious: iMovie is for consumers who just want to do a simple job quickly. If the user needs to do anything beyond basic video work, iMovie just won’t cut it and the user will have to turn to Final Cut Pro.
Why would research be any different? It’s not. Google only provides a small percentage of what’s available through an academic library, even only counting electronic resources. There’s simply far more functionality. Just like you can’t slap the iMovie interface on FCP and still have all the power of FCP, you can’t slap a stripped down interface on an academic library and still have the power. What Apple does is work on refining FCP’s complex interface and making it easy to use while still increasingly powerful, and libraries should do the same.
Sure, I use Google all day every day, but I also need the power of the library during my research as a student. I’m a ‘pro’ information user because, like most academic researchers, I need more than Google can offer. The problem with library interfaces today isn’t that they are bad because they aren’t like Google, it’s that they are bad, period. It’s a world of extremes, with the stripped down, basic Google application and the awkward, intimidating and illogical library interfaces.
Obviously, federated search is the Next Big ThingTM for libraries. Federated searching is beginning to solve some of the weakest points in library research, but it’s just one part of the larger problem. Todd Miller agrees that the advanced controls should continue to be there, but there’s an assumption that they already exist in a way that works for advanced users. They don’t, so we are still stuck in the pre-FCP world. Federated search is one step in the right direction, but it’s only one part of a whole package that needs to be fixed.
In follow-up posts a couple people have mentioned how Tom Miller’s article is in line with this great quote from Roy Tennant: “Only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find.” Very, very true, but that doesn’t mean that library user interfaces can’t consist of anything more than a single search field à la Google.
If librarians consciously recognized that library web interfaces as a whole are web applications that need to have UIs which behave as expected, patrons wouldn’t be turned off by them. Google isn’t going to go anywhere. Therefore, the natural role of the library is as an advanced information retrieval system, and the interfaces should reflect that role.
The web presence of a large academic library (the only kind of library I know about) has become a web application to the users, but the user interfaces have not caught up. That’s probably the most fundamental difference between Google and libraries today: Google recognizes that it is an application and immediately provides you with the UI while libraries are still stuck in the mindset of web ‘pages.’