Researcher: Internet search engines prompted transformation for U.S. librarians

Although librarians adopted Internet technology quickly, they initially dismissed search engines, which duplicated tasks they considered integral to their field.

Their eventual embrace of the technology required a reinvention of their occupational identity, according to a study by University of Oregon researchers.

The story of the successful transition into a new identity is a good example for professionals in other fields who have faced or currently face such challenges, says Andrew Nelson, a professor of management and the Bramsen Faculty Fellow in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability in the UO's Lundquist College of Business.

"We not only found that new technologies can disrupt occupations, which others have found before, but showed how members of an occupation can redefine themselves in relation to the technology to maintain a new role and a new relevance in society," Nelson said.

Librarians, the researchers found, have gone from thinking of themselves as the knowledgeable person with the best answer to a patron's question to being an interpreter and connector who points patrons to helpful materials for their consideration.

The findings are in a study placed online ahead of regular publication in the Academy of Management Journal. Nelson and co-author Jennifer Irwin, a former librarian and now a business professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, analyzed 22 years of journal articles — 199 in all — written by and for U.S.-based librarians about the Internet.

Early on, the researchers wrote that: "Librarians initially described Internet search technology as a niche and emphasized their own unique (and superior) value." The emerging technology was dismissed, Nelson said, "as something that wasn't going to spread and be widely used." But that idea began to fade as more than 70 online search engines emerged between 1989 and 2011.

The research was able to document a four-step transition, beginning with librarians "dismissing the technology as something that wasn't going to spread and be widely used," Nelson said. Next librarians began to differentiate themselves, accepting Internet searches as a way to provide simple answers because they preferred to interpret web-based search information for patrons.

Eventually, Nelson said, librarians decided to capture the technology and offer their expertise in collaboration with companies that were generating search engines, but the companies chose to go their own way.

Finally, librarians "evolved their approach" by working to develop scholarly-based search engines, such as Google Scholar, and others tied specifically to library holdings. "Really we find librarians, at this point, redefining their identity," Nelson said.

"So often we view technologies as having a life of their own," he said. "The technology appears and, therefore, the application is obvious, including the way that it is simply going to supplant or replace workers. This paper shows that idea is a vast oversimplification and, in fact, not wholly the truth. If we look deeply into this case of the Internet and how librarians responded, there was much more ability for the people themselves to react and to shape the path of this technology."

- from the UO Office of Research, Innovation and Graduate Education