Not that long ago books, newspapers, magazines and journals were the principal sources of content and information. The researcher or student was in control, easily assessing and evaluating the authority of each resource, able to indulge in slow, careful reading of relatively limited information sources in order to gain the desired knowledge.
However, these days communication itself is the new information source and content is but the catalyst. Yet why?
To explain this evolution it’s worth considering the role of librarians and information professionals as teachers, educators and instructors.
The time when librarians lead a class or student body in order to show them how to search, develop basic skills, and navigate resources is over. This is now a lecturer’s task and responsibility. It may well be necessary to educate the lecturer as a means of professional development but it seems a redundant use of time repeating this information to students of a lecturer who hasn’t mastered, or at least grappled with, how to integrate information resources into their teaching. How could they claim to be successful educators if they are unable to explain how to use information effectively? The ability use new search tools and navigate databases, for example, are no longer specialist skills; they are fundamental, necessary abilities crucial for education.
The era of collaborating, communicating and integrating resources flexibly and online is not a passing fad, it’s now the norm and it’s here to stay. Many argue that every interactive tool and social media platform should be used and leveraged by libraries and research facilities to support learning, teaching and communicating with and between students. How widely has this been recognised, and, more pointedly, how quickly have educators and students embraced these advancements?
So how does this relate to content?
These days, researchers and students alike are confronted with a seemingly insurmountable quantity of information and ‘facts’, yet how many critically consider just what this amount of source material actually means?
The authority and relevance of a source can easily be lost when confronted with, for example, pages and pages of search results that require laborious and painful sifting and verification. The all too tempting and easy option is to quickly latch onto something and sidestep the challenge to actively engage in questioning the sources in question.
These issues cannot be overcome without taking into consideration the potentially problematic nature of using several systems (on- or offline) in tandem and semantic search – improving search accuracy by understanding searcher intent. Current working and research practices mean users are creating data one minute and data mining the next.
Ultimately, semantic search is intrinsically dependent on metadata tags and those tags are based on the knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses found in all collections of data. It is reliant on how ‘items’ are both defined and linked. Duplicate and meaningless content is created by poor search engine optimisation (SEO) and keyword stuffing. Therefore, the quantity of information and ‘facts’ continues to grow and grow and grow. Duplicate Content Issues Visualized: Collection of Useful Infographics published in The Search Engine Journal outlines the issues pictorially.
Improved SEO is not enough though, better search functionality and specifically customised search engine options are also crucial, particularly for in-depth, scientific research. This is where an A&I database underpinned by a powerful thesaurus and dictionary comes into its own. Users then have the ability to, for example:
- search and browse the thesaurus for specific terms
- expand those terms to find broader and narrower terms
- find synonyms
- see related search terms
- see how those terms have been used previously
- use filters to narrow down search results
- combine keywords with other keywords and free text to get very exact results.
Does content still rule? That all depends…
The King is Dead. Long live the King.
(Image Credit: deFig at www.freeimages.com)
