The Competitive Edge for Libraries

All the survey's say information seekers routinely turn to Google because its fast, simple and familiar. One of the reasons libraries have struggled to provide a definitive role in this new information jungle is their failure to adopt competitive strategies such as simple search results. Today's library users must navigate through a haggard collection of information silos scattered virtually across a website and physically across a building. In addition to selecting a silo the user must recall how to execute the search function for a variety of interfaces, some offering the full content others requiring additional tricks to discover the golden text.

While libraries diligently offer assistance in navigation and continually seek improvement of current information portals and traditional catalogs, much consternation is being wasted when really what we should be doing is uniting behind a common interface and search mechanism for the entirety of a library collection. WorldCat offers the size and scale needed to compete and as Mark Dahl (2009, 7) highlights " With WorldCat.org, OCLC takes a lesson from Google and Amazon and understands that Web scale matters. In order for library content to be noticed on the Web, it needs to be presented by a global player, not in a diluted fashion from thousands of separately managed library catalogs."

By adopting a standard interface such as WorldCat, libraries can offer conventional search features much in the same way as Google and provide well created metadata for everyone on the web Libraries benefit from mimicking strategies of their competitor but at the same time enhancing that which must be their core competency: providing quality descriptive metadata and facilitating understanding of it.

While others may have lost faith in the role of libraries in my own experience I can still identify the necessity and importance of providing access to information and information literacy instruction to the public. There must always be an alternative organization offering access to proprietary information resources and offering assistance in making sense of it all.

Libraries adopting standard virtual spaces and forming networks at the size allowable with today’s technology would mean increased satisfaction rates for constituents and increased buying power with vendors. The ability to provide specialized collections through libraries which are searched again in a familiar manner will also strengthen the competencies of libraries.

Libraries failed to recognize the changing modes of information production and lost their comparative advantages to innovative business models and competencies such as those offered by Google. The slow and at times moralistic fight against adoption of new modes has left the library at a disadvantage. However recognition of core competencies in accordance with the changing information environment could provide the competitive edge libraries need.

Dahl, Mark. 2009. The Evolution of Library Discovery Systems in the Web Environment. Oregon Library Association Quarterly 15(1): 5-9