But I started paying attention in earnest once Google started sending out public signals that it saw ChatGPT as a potentially existential threat and Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Regardless of how sanguine you are about the encroachment of AI in our lives, there are practical uses for ChatGPT today. Here are the applications I see most relevant to information professionals and researchers.

* Summarize search results. “Find reliable web sites on the EV battery industry” produces a summary of seven sites that I consider reasonably useful, including associations, market research firms, and two trade periodicals. “Find me reliable sources for teaching about misinformation” yields seven trustworthy resources, including the Media Litercy Project, FactCheck.org and the News Literacy Project.

* Identify (some) authorities in a field. “Find well-regarded authors on electric vehicle batteries” produces a list of eight authors, along with information on where they work and why they are considered authoritative — e.g., “John B. Goodenough, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and awarded Nobel prize in chemistry in 2019 for his work on lithium-ion batteries.”

* Create a write-up of common knowledge, useful for the type of questions you might answer with a quick Google search. “What’s the best strategy for finding reliable solar panel installers” generates a list of seven considerations, such as asking for references, gettine multiple quotes, asking about ongoing maintenance, and seeing whether the company is affiliated with the Solar Energy Industries Association. “What is a no-fear veterinary practice” yields a clear summary of what this kind of practice entails.

* Generate a checklist of facets of a research project. “How do I research the market for kombucha” produces eight suggestions, including exploring various sales channels (grocery stores, on-tap at restaurants), consumer preferences (flavor, packaging), growth potential and potential for new entrants.

* Summarize existing content. Paste a body of text into ChatGPT’s query box and it will produce a serviceable summary of the content. If a YouTube video has a transcript, simply copy and paste it into ChatGPT’s query box with a request to summarize it, and ChatGPT generates a 200-word summary. (You can also install the Glasp extension for Chrome to do this with a single click.)

* Generate simple boilerplate text. Ask ChatGPT to “Write a letter inviting an expert to speak at an upcoming conference” and you will get a decent first draft that you then can modify for your needs. I was surprised at the quality of the letter produced by the request to “write a letter to a used car salesperson offering them a job as a psychotherapist.”

What other research uses (or awesome queries) have you found for ChatGPT?

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• Sometimes close enough is good enough
• Answer the question you can

For researchers and info pros, this sounds like anathema; shouldn’t we aim to directly address a client’s information needs? Well, yes and… As I reminded the workshop participants, when clients come to us for help in finding information or insight, they have already tried finding the answer, usually by Googling it. We get the questions for which information isn’t readily available—highly specialized questions on which no one has collected the data, questions requiring resources we can’t afford or don’t have access to, or information that has not been published but can only be gleaned by interviewing experts, for example.

In these cases, when I can tell by the sound of the question that it’s not likely that I will be able to provide an answer within the budget constraints of the client, I ask a question that often serves me well: If I can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, what would be second best? The magic of this question is that it often gets at the underlying question—the question behind the question. I will see what might serve as signals or indicators of the elusive information my client is seeking. If I can’t get information on the market for fleet management services in rural parts of Arkansas, for example, I can look for adjacent industries that might provide clues or indicators of the potential market—identifying regional trade shows relevant to business owners likely to have a rural fleet of vehicles, perhaps.

So, when faced with one of those questions where we are fairly sure the time required to answer it would not be justified, we can ask ourselves and our client:

• What would 80% of the answer look like?
• What parallel or adjacent “signals” might indicate an answer?
• How can we expand or narrow the question in order to find an answer?

One of the challenges of experienced info pros is that we love the thrill of the chase, and we know how many nooks and crannies there are in the info landscape. We take it as a professional challenge to find that elusive insight or obscure statistic, even when that might not be the best use of our time. It’s useful to remind ourselves that striving for perfection doesn’t always serve us… or our clients. Sometimes close enough really is good enough.

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I had mentioned that I have sometimes included a slide from a presentation deck in a client deliverable, although I always hesitate when I do. I described a project in which I simply couldn’t find any reliable information other than from a slide deck that an association executive had given a year ago. I reached out to the executive to confirm that the statistics were still correct and that the information had not been published elsewhere and, with a bit of trepidation, I included the slide and explanation to my client. One of the Roundtable participants asked me what the client’s reaction was to the unexpected content and I answered that he didn’t give the format a second thought. He assumed that, because he brought me in as the information expert, whatever I gave him would be reliable and the best that I could find.

And that sparked a Roundtable conversation about the importance of us information professionals stepping up and claiming our role as information experts. Sure, we may find information on the open web, or through a library resource directly available to the client. But our clients are coming to us because they trust that we bring an extra layer of skill to searching for hard-to-find information and a practiced eye for the most credible sources.

As we search experts continue to expand our information reach into grey literature and deep web resources, we need to feel comfortable sharing those results with our clients, along with an explanation of how we have evaluated and validated nontraditional content.

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I am reminded of the iconic Apple Macintosh “1984” ad, in which a Big Brother-like figure is speaking on a large screen in a darkened auditorium. As he drones on, a runner emerges, throwing a hammer through the screen, shocking the spellbound audience and introducing them to the new age of liberated information technology. Fast-forward 33 years, replace Big Brother with any boring conference speaker, and you get the same desire for liberation of learning.

To the dismay of conference organizers, learning has become open sourced. Knowledge is not scarce; it is abundant and free. From online universities and MOOCs to MeetUp and Facebook groups, we are finding new ways to share knowledge and gain new skills that don’t involve several thousand people meeting together in a convention center. While I may not be able to throw a hammer through a projection screen, consider the following my invitation for the liberation of the professional conference.

We are active learners, not passive information absorbers. In any conference room, the speaker is just one brain among many. Engage all the participants; give us opportunities to share our perspectives with others. Encourage social media engagement, not just social media marketing.

Address what we care about now. Make the conference relevant to me today. Some professional library associations have their conference programming planned 12-18 months out. How can a conference be relevant when its topics were set a year and a half ago? Remember, you are competing with every other medium I can use to get new ideas and learn new skills. You have to earn our attention with what I care about today.

Lectures and panels are deadly. Attendees want to be provoked; we want to think, and participate. We are not paying a registration fee because we to hear “someone from Google”. We want to hear someone who will get us thinking differently. Bring in someone who will disrupt things, not just someone from a leading company.

No speaker needs more than 45 minutes, and after that, we want to start talking. Get speakers who can turn 45 minutes into an amazing experience in which everyone learns. Bring speakers are willing to challenge their audience, to get them to change their thinking and their actions.

Expect more from your speakers. Just because they know something doesn’t mean they are able to inspire an audience. Can they provoke comment? Do they invite participant involvement? Do they encourage learning from each other?  Will they interact with your audience afterward? What do your attendees say about how they benefited from the speaker?

Make it worth my while. We are paying several thousand dollars to attend your conference. We have to justify that cost and our time. We want something that we can take back and put into action. Who did I meet and talk with? How did this conference change how I think and what I do?

I have no illusions that the conference world will change dramatically over the next few years. The planners who understand today’s world of liberated learning will continue to create great conferences. The rest of them may want to look into other lines of work, as their jobs here are done.

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Many of these zero-click results are fine; if you ask Google for the population of Poughkeepsie, you’ll get a figure from 2017 US Census Bureau data (30,614 to be exact).

However, I just tried asking Google about a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. When I typed in the query who said If you want to test a man’s character, give him power, the zero-click result repeated the erroneous attribution, even though the first organic search result is to a Snopes.com article which explains that the quote was actually said about Lincoln by writer and orator Robert Ingersoll almost two decades after Lincoln’s death. Had I asked Google about this quote on a device that does not display the first result, I would have relied on popular but incorrect information.

The next time you’re tempted to rely on that quick answer at the top of your Google search results, consider scrolling down to see what other information may be out there.

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When preparing for my part in the Search Skills Academy at Internet Librarian International, I was asked to come up with a couple of search tips (in addition to what I’d developed for Internet Librarian, downloadable here). As I thought about it, I realized that my biggest lesson from the last year could be summarized as “search ugly, deliver pretty”. What do I mean by that?

Search ugly: Many of us long-time info pros pride ourselves in the complexity of our search queries. Nested logic? Sure! Multiple adjacency operators? Bring ’em on! Internal truncation and field-delimited terms? Of course! We often try to find exactly what we are looking for, assuming that a well-constructed search ensures high-quality, comprehensive results. While these power search tools are useful in the professional online services such as ProQuest Dialog or LexisNexis, a better approach when searching open sources is to simplify, simplify, simplify.

Search engines are designed for the “average” query—who won the game last night? is the restaurant open now? what’s that new movie about? We’re more likely to get useful results if we keep our searches short and sweet, using words that are as specific as possible. Tips for building an “ugly” but useful query include:

• Use words likely to show up on a useful page. For example, if you are looking for consumer attitudes toward hydraulic fracturing, search for the word fracking instead, since the latter is more likely to appear in non-technical writing. If you’re looking specifically for reports or other published material add filetype:pdf to your query and just retrieve PDF files.
• Trust the search engine’s internal thesaurus. Search engines are able to include synonyms of common nouns, so there’s no need to include every possible way an idea would be expressed. Looking for trends in dogs involved in scent detection work? Just search for detection dogs; no need to include “canine”, “K9” or the names of individual breeds in your query.
• Use your peripheral vision. When reviewing search results, watch for unexpected resources or an unusual way of phrasing the topic. Sometimes I run my search in Yippy, the privacy-oriented search engine that specializes in clustering results by concept, which gives me ideas on how to narrow or broaden my search query.

Deliver pretty: As Google is focusing on providing “zero-click” results that present the answer without the user needing to click a link, our clients are also expecting results that are easy to skim and understand. As much as we want to present our clients with all the great information we found and to describe the process of our research in exhaustive detail, we are battling TL;DR* (Too Long; Didn’t Read). We have to lighten up our deliverables—not by reducing the value of the information we are providing but by making it more approachable. Tips for making your deliverables prettier, and more valuable to your clients, include:

• Put the answer at the top. “Based on our research, it appears that the market for widgets is largest in the southwest, with demand growing in the pacific northwest.” Yes, you’ll go into more detail in the next few paragraphs, but give a one- or two-sentence summary of what you found first.
• Make it easy to navigate through the material you send your client. Use a hyperlinked table of contents, or provide extracts or summaries of each item, along with a link to the full text. In other words, provide a road map of the deliverable.
• Ask your clients what format they prefer… and be prepared to be surprised. They may want a 10-minute briefing where you review what you found and they can ask questions to better understand what your findings mean. They may want a slide deck with the highlights of your research. Your goal is to make your results as frictionless as possible.
• Be an information cartographer. As you were searching, you explored the information landscape—the peaks and valleys, the lush springs and the barren desert, the unexpectedly rich veins of information or the unanticipated gaps in knowledge. Tell a story about what your results mean and what you recommend for next steps.

*Much as the concept behind TL;DR depresses me, the correct use of a semicolon in an acronym fills my heart with joy.

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Their confusion makes sense; many public libraries are doing away with fines for overdue books altogether; as the Denver Public Library says, “No Shame, No Blame, No Fines.” (Of course, you can’t borrow any more books until you return your overdue material.)

Adding to the confusion is open-access content—often peer-reviewed articles appearing next to articles that incur a fee to access—and content shared with a Creative Content license permitting others to use, modify and build upon the work.

This got my friend and me thinking about a distinction that is clear to info pros but that eludes many library users. Librarians understand the difference between content that they own—a DVD or a physical book, for example—and the digital content they license but do not own, e-books being the current high-profile example but also including licensed databases, audiobooks and streaming content.

Many library users, on the other hand, live their lives in the sharing economy. They are accustomed to being able to use rather than own a product. Why sink all that money in a car when they can hop on an e-scooter to get across town, hail a Lyft or Uber if the weather’s bad, or get a ZipCar if they want to make a bigger commitment? They stream videos, paying for the one-time experience of watching a show rather than wanting to own a DVD. When they travel, they share someone else’s home through Airbnb or VRBO. In other words, they expect to have transactional access to what they need, when they need it.

While the distinction between owned and rented or licensed content is vitally important to information professionals in whatever our position, we must remember that most of our clients are much less focused on who “owns” an item or digital content they access through the library.

How can info pros best raise awareness of this distinction among their clientele? And how can we best advocate for the least restrictive access to information while respecting the value of that content?

The post The New Info-Rental Economy appeared first on Bates Information Services.

• How much is at stake with this project? Is this a “get me smart on this topic” or “I am making a strategic decision and need information” request? The more at risk, the more important it is to use sources I trust.
• What resources do I need to help me prepare for a good search? What background research do I need to conduct first?
• What do I need to do with the results of my search in order to add value? Do I need information in a particular format or medium?
• Who is likely to care about this topic — a government agency? a think tank? a trade publication? a professional association?
• What does this client consider “authoritative”? Where is that type of information found?
• How complex a topic is this? Search engines and other free finding tools may not support queries that involve multiple facets or require advanced filters.
• Where can I find clues or pointers to other resources? Where are experts likely to be quoted or resources shared?
• How dynamic is this subject? Should I be looking for information from 10 years ago in scholarly publications, or in this week’s social media posts?
• Will the material I pull together be shared with others? Are there copyright licensing concerns?

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“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”  -Eric Hoffer

How do you maintain an attitude of life-long learning in a world of non-stop news, the siren cry of social media, and more work than you have time for? Being mindful of the need to keep myself sharp and my perspective fresh, I use my workout time for exercising my brain as well. The podcasts I’m currently finding thought-provoking (and that can keep me engaged for an hour at a time) include:

Invisibilia When I heard that the 2017 SLA conference keynote speaker was Lulu Miller, the co-founder of Invisibilia along with Alix Spiegel, I went into full fangurl mode. Got a seat up front. Sat transfixed. Tried to tweet highlights while not taking my eyes off her. (See a great write-up of Miller’s talk at librarianhats.net/tag/invisibilia/) What’s Invisibilia about? Unseeable forces control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. Invisibilia—Latin for invisible things—fuses narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently.

Hidden Brain, like Invisibilia, looks at the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, and the biases that shape our choices. See, for example, the recent episode “Facts Aren’t Enough: The Psychology Of False Beliefs“. Host Shankar Vedantam tends to spend too much time for my taste repeating an interviewee’s key points, but the topics are thought-provoking.

Code Switch offers me a weekly reality check to see the world outside the white, well-off bubble of Boulder, Colorado. Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji provide thoughtful episodes looking at the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.

Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich take an aspect of science and investigate it deeply. Right now, they’re going through a series on “general intelligence” and how it’s been measured and understood. And one I still reflect on is “Mr. Bliss“, a man who believed that war was often caused by the misuse of language and believed it could be overcome if we could create a way to communicate the truth without the trickery of words.

Endless Thread lets me stay at least somewhat familiar with some of the zeitgeist of Reddit without having to get sucked down a rabbit hole. Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson delve into Reddit’s boundless communities with the help of Reddit and Redditors, exploring some of the most compelling stories the internet has to offer. This is a show for Reddit connoisseurs, skeptics, and the rest of us.

What podcasts get you thinking in new ways?

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The problem of finding grey literature is not new; research on and discussion about grey lit in the STM field has been going on for years (see, for example, the International Conference on Grey Literature, which has been meeting since 1993). More recently, business researchers are finding that sometimes non-traditional resources have the best — or only — information on a narrow topic or current issue. Following are some of the tricks I use for finding hidden or grey-lit business resources.

Think like a detective. Look for clues and pointers to the next resource rather than hoping to find the exact information you want. Keep your eyes open for unexpected sources and be prepared to spend more time than you’re probably accustomed to, wading through results to find the hidden nugget.

Start with a libguide. I have often been surprised to find well-sourced libguides on topics I thought too narrow for any library to have developed a finding tool for. A search approach that often works is simply to add inurl:libguides to your search query.

Look for more of the good stuff. Once you find one good source, search for other mentions of that source, on the assumption that other sources will be mentioned as well. For example, if you find that the United Nations’ FAOSTAT web site (www.fao.org/faostat/) is useful, try running a phrase search for “fao.org/faostat/” to find other food and agricultural resources.

Use Google Scholar as well as Google or your search engine of choice; there is very little overlap and Google Scholar contains more than scholarly articles.

Use words that are likely to be used to describe what you’re looking for, such as (“technical report” OR “conference proceedings” OR “white paper”) or (“institutional repository” OR “open access repository”). Limit your search to the most likely file formats with (filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc OR filetype:docx).

Consider using the Millionshort.com search engine, which allows you to eliminate the top million most popular web pages from your search results. This lets you find more obscure pages from small organizations that might never get surfaced in a general search engine query.

And remember that the professional online services often include selected grey literature. Find the appropriate filter in the service you subscribe to; it’s usually called something like Document Type or Source Category. As with the “look for more of the good stuff” approach above, try a search with broad keywords and limited to the document types that indicate grey literature, such as Think Tanks, Conference Papers, Working Papers and so on.

I recently wrote a column for Online Searcher on what I call “bonsai research” — research in narrowly focused markets in which there isn’t likely to be much information, with some additional thoughts on how to find that elusive grey business literature.

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