Google Presents: Tales, Tips & Tricks for Librarians

My favourite session today was Google Presents: Tales, Tips & Tools for Librarians. Jodi Healy, Library Partnership Manager at Google, took the crowded room on a tour of Google’s usual suspects and some of its sexier new features. While I didn’t learn anything new, per se, about Google’s tools, I realized that during the training sessions on Google that we run at my library, we cover pretty much exactly the same ground as a presentation BY Google. It was reassuring; we’re on the right track!

First Healy discussed the new universal search interface. The Google homepage recently changed from the single search box with tabs (for images, news, etc.) directly above it. The linked tabs are now just text links to five other popular Google services, and are found at the top left of the page; the “more” link gives you a dropdown list of the other Google products. Results from image, product, book, news, etc., searches now appear grouped in the web results page. Healy explained that people weren’t using the vertical search tabs as much as Google would have liked, so they integrated them into the web search results.

She then covered the basics of Google search operators and explained where to find ready-made, full-colour posters to educate users. We have used these posters ourselves, and they are really nicely designed. People love them.

Next up was Language Tools. There is a new aspect of the translation service that allows you to search pages written in other languages in your own language. She went on to Hot Trends (formerly Zeitgeist), Custom Search (create your own search vertical), gave an update on Book Search, showed some examples from Patent Search, and lastly, talked about the relatively new News Archive feature, which offers links to news more than 30 days old--and in some cases, from way back in the ‘50s. There is a fee associatated with some of this content.

Google Librarian Central has lots of other ideas and resources for teaching your users how to best use Google.

I stuck around for a few Q&A, and someone asked “Does Google have a library?”. Healy had to reply, with I think was a bit of hesitation (or maybe embarrassment), “No, we don’t” and oh,  the tsk-ing and disapproval in the room--I’m sure you can imagine!

Comments

[Tracy Z. Maleeff]

Thanks for posting this. I was going to reach out to the blog to see if anybody had notes from this session. I really wanted to attend, but I had a conflict.

[Tracy Z. Maleeff]

Oh, wait...we've corresponded off-list before the conference. Drop me a note at reflib05@yahoo.com if you want to meet up. Thanks.