Libraries set up rival to slow search engines

An international group of academic libraries is setting up a reference desk online to rival ineffective search engines.

The Collaborative Digital Reference Service expects to be fully operational by next June, when it will become a free 24-hour global electronic reference service.

Hosted by the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the group is pooling its reference knowledge in the hope of bettering commercial search engines.

The national libraries of Canada and Australia and several university libraries, including Harvard, Yale and Cornell, are among the 60 government, university and public institutions volunteering resources on the pilot project and taking advantage of both the expertise of reference librarians and their collections.

"It's the reference librarian's time to hop on board," said Franceen Gaudet, of the National Library of Canada, after returning from Washington and meeting colleagues working on the service.

It is estimated that no current search engine covers more than 18 per cent of the internet's content, with little consistency in the descriptors that help search out that information.

Ms Gaudet said: "I think the 'wow factor' has gone out of the web." She pointed out that internet use was beginning to drop in the United States, perhaps in part due to frustration felt with search engines coming up with too much unnecessary information.

The CDRS will differ from most search engines by going one-on-one with the client who calls up the service. Those libraries that are open at the time of the request and most qualified to answer the question will field the query by tapping into a collection of reference knowledge.

While the costs are being absorbed by member institutions, it is hoped that with one bank of collected knowledge resources will not be taxed and reference librarians will have more time with clients.

Canadian libraries have seen a 20 per cent drop in reference desk queries in the past three years, mainly due to the push for students to rely more on their own search skills.

Fran Groen, McGill University's director of libraries, hopes that this type of project will show those independent students the difference between looking for a cancer cure on a "quack" site and going through the authoritative medicine database at the National Library.

lcweb.loc.gov/rr/digiref/cdrshome.html