She mistakenly wrote her post when angry. The system did not read her mind and do what she wanted it to do, so therefore it’s horrible. As a result, she appears to be a spoiled brat.

I’m sure she is, in reality, an fairly intelligent woman under a lot of pressure. However, she herself summed up the situation so very well: “The upcoming Google generation will be a challenge for all information professionals because it is very hard to teach someone something that they think they already know.”

All librarians will face this challenge, and everyone will be approaching it from a different angle. We work in different environments so that’s okay.

I feel sorry for Anna. She will continue to err by thinking the world should be nothing more than a big Google search engine. This will be a detriment to her if she plans to continue on her chosen career path as a professional writer and researcher.

Librarians and others have reached out to her. Now, it’s her turn to come to gripes with something the best authors have known for years: assistance is a great thing.

Thank you for proving a place for us to comment on your article.

I think it is important that people are able to say “this ain’t right” even if they are unable to put forward a solution.

In general terms, sure.

In this case, no.

If Anna or Ben have nothing more to offer than “it should be easier,” they should perhaps consider that they’re preaching to the choir.

Everyone would like PubMed to be easier- but unless they have specific ideas on how to make that happen, their kvetching just makes useless noise.

Patrons are steered toward self-reliance. When that goes awry, suddenly the message becomes “why were you trying to do this by yourself?”

A good point, but again, that’s not what happened here. Anna was given both excellent options (documentation available that is clear to the average 5th-grader or instruction from one of many competant, friendly librarians) and rejected each in turn.

Here are some more.

First, remind me never to vent on a blog after a particularly frustrating experience.

Second, I think it is important that people are able to say “this ain’t right” even if they are unable to put forward a solution. For example, even if I can’t produce a photovoltaic cell, I should still be able to say we ought to be able to harness the sun’s energy. Sometimes, I’m in a position to say something is amiss. Other times, I’m in the position where I should be listening to someone saying something is amiss. (I would even go so far as to say people who don’t have a solution may be the best people to point out a flaw in the system as they don’t have any preconceived notions on what the limits are.) I hate to sound managemental, but to ignore or condemn someone pointing out a flaw is to miss out on an opportunity.

Finally, I think this situation illustrates a mixed message given by libraries. Patrons are steered toward self-reliance. When that goes awry, suddenly the message becomes “why were you trying to do this by yourself?” I realize librarians are put between a rock and a hard place on that, but, from a patron’s perspective, it seems a bit inconsistent.

Now, I’ll go back to my work space and be quiet.

It’s neither vast nor complex.

Ben, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Mine is that 18 million records that are indexed with a complex controlled vocabulary and lots of metadata can accurately be described as both “vast” and “complex.”

Even if the dataset were complex there is no reason why the search tool should be complex, and no reason why you should need to go an a training course or read a manual to use the dataset.

Please elaborate on how a tool might finely search this data set and not be complex? The NLM, I’m certain, will be anxious to implement any idea which is feasible given present technological capabilities.

Ms Kushnir’s point is that she doesn’t want to be offered help. She wants the resources to be made easier to use.

And I wish books to shelve themselves. They don’t and the technology that would allow for book-shelving robots isn’t in my library’s budget. In the meanwhile, it is a reasonable expectation of the person managing a one-person library that he shelve books.

She’s right and I can’t help but feel some of the contributions illustrate why she’s right.

You lost me there. What contributions are you referring to?

Karen Schneider has a nice phrase which summarises the discussion: “If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow’s cobblers.”

Except I’m not fetishizing the format. Despite the efforts of many to come up with better interfaces for the data PubMed searches, PubMed is still the best for most purposes. Is it not at all unreasonable to suggest that a PhD student should spend the little time it takes to learn to use the primary research tool of her field.

I’m all for making interfaces better and more intuitive. I caught flack for expressing the belief that a library’s OPAC should be as easy to search as amazon.com. What I find “scary wrong,” Ben, is hearing librarians make sweeping generalizations about “this should be better” without offering a single idea about how to accomplish it.

For example: “The index of biomedical literature searched from PubMed is a vast and complex set of data.”

- It’s neither vast nor complex. Pubmed is about 18M records of a fairly uniform nature, each of which is semantically well structured. It’s probably no more than about 80GB in totlal – in other words it would fit onto the notebook omputer on which this message is being written.

- Even if the dataset were complex there is no reason why the search tool should be complex, and no reason why you should need to go an a training course or read a manual to use the dataset.

- Ms Kushnir’s point is that she doesn’t want to be offered help. She wants the resources to be made easier to use.

- She’s right and I can’t help but feel some of the contributions illustrate why she’s right.

- Karen Schneider has a nice phrase which summarises the discussion: “If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow’s cobblers.”

I also don’t think a single person serves as an accurate measurement for the success or failure of anything regarding a librar*…

Agreed entirely.