Research Reviews

The use of Google, commenced in 1996, and Wikipedia, started in 2001, has changed the way that people search for information. Continuing resource investments have been made to libraries in order to constantly improve their collections of books, magazines, newspapers, ebooks and ejournals, videos, music, maps, oral history and websites. A question that is likely to arise is about the place and value of libraries in education, in a networked world. Although one can understand the concern among librarians about the increased popularity of Google and Wikipedia, the differences may be quite stark. For instance, the expertise that librarians utilise for deep searching does not seem likely when searching online. In a recently published article of an exploratory investigation into the queries and search terms used in a large library and on Google and Wikipedia, the results demonstrated a number of differences. Searching where for what: A comparison of use of the library catalogue, Google and Wikipedia published in the open online journal Library and Information Research is revealing.