Spinning a Web Search

Lager, Mark. (1996). Spinning a Web Search. Untangling the Web. Santa Barbara, CA : University of California. retrieved on July 2, 2009 (http://www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/lager.html)

ABSTRACT:
One of the major responsibilities of a librarian is to provide relevant materials in response to a client's query. With the advent of computers and internet, information is more accessible to everyone, anywhere. But, this new source of information which most users perceive as perfect is "chaotic, often not organized and includes information not of high quality." Due to lack of separation (Ex. academic information is combined with social culture information and with personal home pages and blogs) information retrieval using the internet often cause "information anxiety" or the overwhelming feeling one gets from having too much information (Nelson, 1994). Recall and precision is often an issue in web search. Recall should be coupled with high precision to give the most relevant information sought but with over 3 million host computers on the web, it is difficult to imagine finding only relevant, precise information in the midst of all the data (Pike, 1995). Indeed, modern techniques/trends in IR are being introduced, but as long as the world wide web continues to open the publishing world to anyone with computer and internet access, it will be an unending challenge for the web to provide only the relevant information a user is looking for.

MY THOUGHTS / REFLECTION:
I must admit that this article was published 13 years ago, this is a part of proceedings of the Conference sponsored by the Librarians Association of the University of California Santa Barbara and friends of the UCSB library. I still chose this article as my RA for the week because I believe that the issues it present is still a dilemma. I remember a newly graduate library client asked, will librarians still be in demand few years from now? What will be your roles, we already have the internet? I was startled by the question, I have to be honest, I am a librarian but I seldom used the library during my undergraduate years. I was a bit frightened with her words because there's truth in it. But after reading the article (and my search for this week's RA proved it), I learned that:
> It is easier to search for information through the internet. With just a click of the search button, thousands of data will be retrieved. But the question of relevancy comes in, are they all what I'm looking for? Good thing in my case, I have an idea of my topic, but what about a researcher who doesn't have any idea of what he's researching? How will he know which ones are correct? How will he be sure he's not mislead?
> Information is much accessible and current. This is the positive side of web search, wherever you are, information is at the tip of your fingers. I, for an instance is just using my mobile internet to search and get through this RA. The currency of information is also a positive factor. An event that had just transpired seconds ago can be searched and retrieved especially if there's an industrious uploader.
> The credibility of the authors of information that users retrieve through a web search is always in question. How will a researcher know if the article he's reading is written by an expert in the field he's looking for? Anyone can publish anything (truths and lies) and the sad part is, all can be retrieved and accessed.

The widespread use of the internet over libraries' collection should be a challenge to all of us, librarians. We must prove to our clients that we are professionally trained experts who can provide reliable, relevant and most importantly credible information.