Librarians feel used by Google?

I ran across a most interesting post the other day. Steven Cohen, author of the blog Library Stuff claimed he felt libraries were used and abused by Google. It portrays Google as this slick con artist and the librarians its victims. I didn't agree with it at all, but, alas, I am but a loyal minion of Google. There's a fantastic discussion in this posts' comments, so check it out.

I am totally flustered at why librarians are so upset that they're not getting paid attention to by Google. Is their little newsletter from Google that critical? Dude, seriously, who cares? Google does so much for librarians in making things easier to search for both us and the patrons. It provides all kinds of fantastic services like maps, word processing, spreadsheets, web-building, free jumbo email, chat client, calendars, etc.

Google doesn't owe us sh*t. They are a business and I think that if we were a little more business savvy and not so high, mighty and noble, we could understand that. Nothing comes for free. Oh, except Google products.

1 comment:

Melissa Donovan said...

I have to agree with you. I took a look at that article and it's completely unclear what the librarians want from Google. One would think the massive amounts of indexing, features and benefits like maps, and oh yes, the search tool, would be a huge help to the librarians. So what are they complaining about? Hmm.

On a side note, I used to want to be a librarian and still think it would be an incredibly interesting profession.

Melissa Donovan at Writing Forward