Reading Report 4: “The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google”.

“The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google”. By: Bell, Steven J., Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982, 2/20/2004, Vol. 50, Issue 24

Since 2003, Google has been a “symbol of competition to the academic library”. Academic libraries are faced with the struggle of getting the students on campus to use their facility and online resources. Students are used to a easy information format that Google and other internet browsers use, and thus prefer the internet to searching through a libraries database. The article makes a point to comparing the Google trend to supersizing in McDonalds, saying that “the library's complex information environment caters poorly to those who want fast, easy access to unlimited, full-text content using interfaces that require no critical thought or evaluation”. “James Morris, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has coined the term "infobesity," which nicely describes the outcome of Google-izing research: a junk-information diet, consisting of overwhelming amounts of low-quality material that is hard to digest and leads to research papers of equally low quality.” He goes on further to say that the student population needs to switch from “infobesity” to “infodieting”, allowing them to explore the true abilities of the databases, and discover how “google-ized” they can be. The article talks about the different ways that databases can be revamped to make them more accessible, like Google and other internet search engines.

I think if changes were made to academic databases and the libraries that provide them to students, then said students would be more open to using them as a first resource. I personally don’t have a real problem with using databases, and try to avoid just google searching, unless searching for general or generic information.