"Searching" vs. "Finding"

So, it turns out that the class script I posted yesterday wasn't ANYTHING like what my faculty person wanted; fortunately, he called me at about 11AM today to clarify and I think I was able to give them something useful.

I always learn something when I teach, and what I learned is an idea that may not be groundbreaking for you, but which stopped me in my tracks when it occurred to me. I'm talking about the difference between "searching" and "finding."

Searching is what librarians are REALLY good at: we build strategies, use thesauri, cross databases, and generally think of every way we possibly can to get at information. The mechanics of searching are complex: using the Clipboard in PubMed is one of the mechanics of searching, and there are a lot of little technical minutiae just like that.

However, the mechanics of searching actually have very little to do with finding (and this was the Ah-ha! for me). Finding is getting to some piece of information that will actually meet your information need. It has absolutely nothing to do with the process of looking for what you eventually find. Good searching can help you find, and bad searching can keep you from finding, but searching is not and never will be finding.

What this means is that I'm REALLY TEMPTED to stop showing the MeSH browser in PubMed. I'm REALLY TEMPTED to tell people that for most searching, a keyword and limits and the "related articles" link will find them something useful. I'm REALLY TEMPTED to start talking about finding instead of spending all my time on searching.

Librarians in general and medical librarians especially scream at this sort of thinking. If there's a life on the line, by golly, you better be running the most robust search you can. Yes, of course you should. But, how many hospitals live without librarians these days? And WHAT CLINICIAN CAN ACTUALLY DO A DECENT SEARCH? I mean, really? I would rather have a half-assed search find something in PubMed than have a clinican with no access to a librarian stumbling around in Ovid (or worse).

I say, Amen! to NCBI for figuring out that finding is what we're trying to do, and making it as easy as possible to find something. Why aren't all library systems like this? Why don't they all map an incredibly sophisticated and robust taxonomy to an even more sophisticatedmetathesaurus?

Of course sophisticated systems that make finding possible without a lot of searching crap takes out the obvious need for a librarian, which might be a wee bit of a snicker, but otherwise it is pure genius. And frankly, once our obvious reasons for existence are gone, we can start looking for real ways to make a difference.