The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) meets every two years – this year the conference was held in lovely, weird Portland, Oregon. The weather was wonderfully warm for the end of March. As this was my first trip to Portland, I really enjoyed the weather, the food, downtown, and the light rail system.
The exhibits hall scene was focused on academic libraries and their needs and issues. The poster sessions were extremely well attended, and the topics were primarily centered around information literacy, not surprisingly. This subject is the most pressing for most academic libraries — students simply don’t know how to find information, or, at least, the right kind of authoritative information. Internet searching won’t do for rigorous research.
Following up on that endless quest to get students to understand and use authoritative resources and information sources, I attended a fascinating, deeply troubling session on bias in Google Search. UCLA’s Dr. Safiyah Noble reported on her research into the bias in search engine results for women and girls. The message – we cannot trust Google or other commercial search engines to give unbiased results for academic or even casual searches. There is an agenda and it is money-making. Dr. Noble’s examples were thorough and highly disturbing. I recommended taking a deep look at Dr. Noble’s research before you search Google again.