Nicholas Carr, blogger, journalist, and author, most recently of The Big Switch, wrote this short but thought- provoking piece in this month’s issue of the Atlantic called Is Google Making us Stupid?: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

It’s a succinct and readable discussion not only of some of the possible downside of living so much of our lives on the Net, but also a nice mini lecture on some of the positive and negative impacts of technology on culture, going all the way back to Socrates’ classic concerns that writing would reduce all of our abilities to remember, and to devalue oral communications.

I’ve been thinking of a related issue for a little bit of time too–what does the Google mindset do to the serious researcher? Is it making us lazy, more passive, more willing to define research as tapping a few words into a search engine and accepting the top 10 results as our result?

Librarians and information professionals, academics, grad students (I hope) and truly savvy searchers know that good research is much more that this of course. But I know I’m as guilty as anyone out there when I turn to lean back in my desk chair and call up my home page Google to find an answer, source, or piece of information to a research question I’m pursuing.

The key to me it seems is to remember to be mindful that good research is (or at least begins) as an inner directed process. That is: taking the time to figure out what you really want to discover, why you want it, what you’re going to do with it, what is the most likely place to find it/who would know (including sources off the Net), and taking the steps and process you need to do the work to find the best sources, most efficiently. It’s not tapping words out into a search engine, or even worse, relying on an automated or “intelligent” solution that sends you articles, blog postings, news etc. that the system thinks or assumes you want, based on some algorithm, past search behaviour, etc.

Even in the age of the Net and Google, to truly perform research still means making an effort and taking an ACTIVE not passive approach to the process. It still means thinking.

There’s been tons of good stuff written over the years on how libraries are/need to be evolving to meet the needs of the information age, but I’m really looking forward to reading the NY Review of Books review of The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton.  Not only to learn about this book, but because whenever I read a review in the NY Review of Books, I also typically receive an instant and compelling up to date education on the subject matter of the reviewed book by an intelligent and thoughtful reviewer.

The review begins as follows:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write….

It’s always fun to come upon a new research oriented blog that is truly fresh, fun AND provides intelligent insights and valuable information. And it’s been awhile since I stumbled upon something that fit that bill and wasn’t widely known–and that blog is infodoodads

The blog was started just a few months ago by a five female librarians, and they describe their mission here as follows:

infodoodads is a blog that reviews and discusses existing and new tools, services, and technology for finding information on the internet. What kind of information? Any kind. The women behind infodoodads love to learn and find information, and every day new tools are being created and unveiled that help people find, sort, and interact with information.

I already had great fun with two sites the blog just highlighted–one a great people information search tool called Pipl and another was NameVoyager a very cool site that provides “a visual representation of the 1000 most popular US first names back to the 1880s.”

Check these out and more at infodoodads.