Zipf and the Amazoogle

Citation

Bawden, D. (2005), "Zipf and the Amazoogle", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2005.27861daa.001

Zipf and the Amazoogle

Zipf and the Amazoogle

The review section of this issue features reviews of several recent books on various aspects of the development and use of digital libraries. Ranging from the technical to the sociological, and from the research to everyday practice, they illustrate the way in which this new form of library service has moved to centre-stage in the provision of “formal” recorded information. New forms of service provide access to new types of resource, and to new ways of accessing conventional resources, with greater speed, convenience and accessibility, including access to rare “heritage” resources, hitherto available only to a few scholars. This might suggest that libraries are about to take a more central place in information provision, unencumbered by any stereotypes of musty collections, outdated and difficult to use.

Alas, things are not so simple. Digital libraries are being somewhat overshadowed by the influence which Dempsey has described as the Amazoogle effect. The all-pervasive influence of systems such as Google and Amazon has evoked an expectation of what digital information systems “should” be like: seemingly all-encompassing and entirely simple to use. This is typified by the views expressed by the writer of an article in Scientific American:

In less than a decade, Internet search engines have completely changed how people gather information. No longer must we run to a library to look up something; rather we can pull up documents with just a few clicks on a keyboard. Now ... “Googling” has become synonymous with doing research... (Mostafa, 2005).

When the limitations of such systems, and the advantages of the more controlled and structured “library type” environments, are pointed out, these may be appreciated without the popularity of the less structured systems suffering. In a study of comparative attitudes to web search engines and bibliographic sources, Fast and Campbell (2004) found that students

... admired the organisation of (an) OPAC, but preferred to use the Web in spite of its disorganised state.

We seem here to be facing, as always, the impossibility of over-coming Zipf's law, which tells us, in essence in the information seeking context, that simple, easy-to-use and familiar sources will be preferred over those known to be superior in some respect, but with the convenience of use.

The difficulty facing the designers and operators of digital libraries is to what extent user expectations can be met, and to what extent they should be managed. Can such systems be made to look like Amazoogle? Certainly. Is this a sensible thing to do, in order to provide the most appropriate functionality, and ensure that users know what the system is doing and why? That is by no means such an obvious question to answer. Is it better then digital libraries look different, in order to point up the underlying differences in structure, metadata, etc.?

This issue is likely to become more, rather than less, significant, as systems like Google Scholar and Google Print, and their equivalents from other providers, become widely used. It may be that, over time, developing technologies will enable convergence between the two, such that the sort of questions posed above will be meaningless. That time is not yet, and the kind of research, and research-based practice reported in this Journal should help to mould the final outcome.

David Bawden

Further readingDempsey, L. (2005), “The sound of words: Amazoogle and Googlezon”, available at: http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000562.html (accessed 29 January 2005).