14 - The library as social institution

Summary

Introduction

The significant part of the claim cited earlier that libraries would soon be defunct is the question of access to the ‘necessary technology’, as well as the ability of search engines to carry out effective searches with high precision and relevance (see Chapter 13). While there is little doubt that access to the web has grown rapidly in the last few years, it remains the case that not everyone is able to access the internet, either because the technology is beyond their financial means or because they lack the required computer literacy – or both. While primary school pupils in the UK learn to search the web, the older generation, for example, are becoming a bigger and bigger proportion of the population but often lack the necessary skills to use a computer and the financial means to acquire one in the first place. Nor are they the only ones in such a situation: single parents and those on low incomes have other demands on their resources, and even with falling prices are hard-pushed to afford even the basic technology. There is a digital divide on both a national and an international scale and it is difficult to know how long it will take to bridge it.

Searching and organizing the web

As Part 3 shows, we can also question (for the present at least) the efficacy of the various search tools available. Anyone who has ever Googled a search term or used any of the other search engines will have seen the pages of hits, sometimes running into the millions, in no obvious order that can result (sometimes preceded by ‘sponsored links’ or advertisements). This is because search engines largely do not distinguish the context of the words they identify in web pages, and so present a link to any page which contains the required word or words regardless of actual relevance to the user's enquiry (although, as Part 5 indicates, relevance ranking is used to some extent). Add to that the number of sites of dubious accuracy, and effective retrieval becomes difficult. Little wonder that many users do not go beyond the first one or two pages of links found by a search engine.