Thoughts on the Gryphon Lecture

I’ve been meaning to post about the Center for Children’s Books’ Gryphon Lecture for some time now. I had been waiting to try to get the powerpoint files, but will post without them. Allison Druin gave a lecture on “Children's Search Experiences in the Age of Google, Today and Tomorrow.“ The audio file for the lecture can be found here: http://waterfall.lis.illinois.edu/dl/events/gryphonlecture/druinmar05_10.mp3. It was fascinating.

Her team of researchers, sponsored by Google, conducted research on children’s search strategies and behaviors. They found and classified several different types of searchers, and also made findings based on age and gender. Some of the searchers that she talked about included those thought that one site could find all their information needs (I think the example was a Spongebob site!), or those that would prefer to find the information visually or through a video and thus continued searching this way even if they were unsuccessful. For further details, please listen to the audio file. Unfortunately, I didn’t take detailed notes.

The lecture made me think a lot of about the way we go about teaching information literacy. We spend so much time teaching people how to develop appropriate search techniques and explaining these work the best. But WHY do these techniques work best? Simply put, it is because it is generally the best way to find information using the CURRENT system. But what if the current system is FLAWED? Instead of spending all this time educating users on how to search in ways that aren't intuitive, wouldn't it be easier to just improve the system?

ENTER GOOGLE.

Google has completely changed the way users go about finding information. Not only has it opened the door to multiple formats for learning information (text, image, video, map, audio, etc) and allowed users greater access to an expansive wealth of information at the click of a button, but it has also diminished the need for users to bother saving favorite sites or to develop good search habits. So many of the weaknesses (correct spelling only, no thesaurus/plural, no phrases, etc) of past databases that influenced good search strategy techniques are practically rendered obsolete through Google's improvements. Given this what do we as librarians do? What skills can we teach that will remain relevant?

What new technologies could be created to help? Here are some ideas:

- * A Reader/IGoogle/delicious type of a thing where pages/sites can be represented topically by image icon (perhaps the site's favicon?). Not only could there be a science type icon for a great science site, but that bookmark could fall under a "school" icon. Ways to organize in an intuitive, fun way, would be excellent. And it would be so nice if you could just drag and create easily/quickly (i.e bookmark, check mark the pictoral icons it should fall under). I realize that delicious already does this with tags and browsers do this with bookmarks, but I feel the tags don't map the sites (maybe verbally but not visually) in enough interesting ways, and it certainly doesn't seem as fun as images would be. I see this new delicious/bookmark as being more like a internet-based (universally accessible) desktop for your computer or a home page of all your sites (where you can easily see all your categories visually). It would look and act like a library webpage of your personal bookmarks.

o Ex/Zoo bookmark filed under two tags: animal, Chicago

§ To access your bookmark. Click on animal icon, click on the zoo icon (link to site). You could also click on the Chicago icon, and then click on the zoo icon (link to site). This way children might actually use the sites that we tell them about. I admit, I hardly use the sites that I find in class. They are great, but I forget about them or don't have easy access to them when I need them (lose the paper, can't find the site/forgot the name of site, don't have bookmarks with me, etc).

- * Searches:

When typing in a search box, Google could automatically aggregate the search term with the most likely related Google image next to the predicted word list. This might help in situations where you have "D-O-L" but don't know how to spell "dolphin" and there are several possibilities given that you can’t read (Ex/ for pizza: pizza hut (brand logo), pizza planet (brand logo), etc.)