Legal Research

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I picked up This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson.

I'm only five chapters into the book, but I think Johnson really gets the importance of librarians and libraries. As she writes:

Google and Yahoo! and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers. It can't explain in simple language how e-mails (let alone the rules of capitalization!) work, or how to navigate government websites. You can only get so far without human help (p. 20).

On the next page, she gives an excellent example: a library patron looking for a book on "bootyism." What the patron really want: books on Buddhism. Try entering that into a search engine!