The Information Professional versus Google

CILIP’s website includes “Practical Guides” written by their Information and Advice Team which are considered of sufficient value to be password protected. One of them, The Information Professional versus Google, seems to be intended as a crib sheet for librarians to use when their role is being questioned. One would expect it to gather together and articulate the strongest arguments in favour of our profession. Unfortunately, it is a shocking example of bad writing, grammatical inconsistency, and the muddled thinking and poor reasoning that blight our discourse.

These are its main arguments:

• "A course at CILIP mentions that in 2007 Google only indexes 6% of the web."
• "Most material on the web is not vetted."
• "Information Professionals have a role in teaching information literacy; we are often in a good position to educate people about the web".
• Young people tend to skim read articles. Librarians are good at writing abstracts.
• "Information Professionals are often providing a service for the public good, not every one can afford to subscribe to the internet or afford books."
  
• "Information Professionals are developing IT skills to encourage users to library websites." (Is this wise?)
  
• "Information professionals save time. Frank Ryan says the three things he has learnt are that time has a value, the internet is not free (it still takes staff time to find free material) and pay-as-you-go pricing does not work for users." (Who is Frank Ryan?)
• "With the growth of web 2.0 and social media the role of information professional has changed, our role can often now be of "moderator" – providing quality control rather than being susceptible to popular low-quality information." (Eh?)
• "Search engines are constantly being updated to improve the service; this can result in them going offline, addresses changing or "broken links". Information professionals are able to update and index their own collections in a consistent manner." (What does this mean?)
• "Archives of things such as news items often go offline after a while. Libraries often have access to buy in online or physical collections." (“Things such as news items”!)
• "The cost of digitising a library is approximately $10 a book so physical libraries are likely to exist for some time. It has taken Google book search 3 years to digitize a million books, so it is likely to take 200 years to index all the books." (Assuming, that is, there are no further advances in scanning technology in the next 200 years)

Maybe CILIP should consider "vetting" its own material on the web?