Databases, schmatabases

Wow...that was really lame. The title, I mean.

Anway, I read this post by Amy Kearns at Library Garden. Kearns wants us to stop referring to our online databases as "databases." She believes that the word "databases" doesn't have a lot of meaning to our users and that we should call them something else that is more meaningful to our users.

Kearns writes, "When I hear the word "database," and if I didn't know what it was, it conjures up for me some really complicated spreadsheet system or, well, database, that is way too complicated for me to figure out and use, and that is TOTALLY BORING - not exciting or attractive to me in anyway, doesn't sound useful to me and doesn't make me want to use it or care to find out how to use it at all!"

I suspect that she's right and it worries me. If given the choice between using a "database," with all of the baggage that comes with this word, and using "Google Scholar," which are they going to choose?

I seriously don't think that, until the moment that I read Kearns' post, I had ever given much thought to why, in some disciplines, my library's users prefer Google Scholar over our databases.

I wonder, though, if calling our databases something else is the solution to the "our users don't want to use our databases" problem. I mean, there are ways that we can make our library services more accessible to our users and I am sure that language is one of them. But does changing the language we use to describe our services and our collections also change the way our users feel about them? After all, the databases will still be hard to use, even if we call them something else.

I think that giving our resources new, more accessible names is a start. But I feel like there also has to be a fundamental change in how these resources work and, when that change isn't possible, we have to find new ways to relate these resources to our users.

These databases, for lack of a better word, have value to the users. And, in the academic library, it is one of our users' only links to peer reviewed articles. But if the users don't want to use them, why are our institutions, academic or otherwise, paying lots of money to have access to them?

Ultimately I agree with Kearns. We do have to call our databases something else. Because in the end, the word "scholar" in Google Scholar sounds way more accessible than "online database."