Disruptive innovation and periodical articles

Gather round researchers and listen to a tale from back in the day. In pre-Internet times, it was really hard to find periodical literature (AKA newspapers, magazines, and journals). You used print indexes like the Reader's Guide below to find an article citation and then you hoped the library had a subscription to the title you needed in print, microform, or microfiche. There was time spent in the stacks, you had to often use a photocopier...can you imagine???

Computer technology and the Internet severely disrupted print indexes and today we have electronic databases for abstracting and indexing articles.   

 

In Christensen's "disruptive innovation" theory, companies end up producing products or services that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers. As a librarian, what came to mind for me was periodical databases (newspapers, magazines, and journals). A common database at college and university libraries is EBSCOhost. 

When our students are very familiar with simple and clean Google and Wikipedia search interfaces, I argue that the Advanced Search interface is intimidating and complicated with the boolean operators, multiple fields, and search limiters.  

 

Academic library customers are our main users: students and faculty. Electronic databases have expensive annual subscriptions with prices rising faster than inflation (see EBSCO, 2011). Database companies continue to design new interfaces with more bells and whistles. I often watch students using databases when I teach library research sessions - their information seeking process does not involve complicated search strings. I can see how students can be turned off from using library databases and use free tools such as Google Scholar. 

In addition to supporting the open access movement, librarians need to advocate for better products for our students and faculty. Sometimes we need to make hard decisions such as cancelling subscriptions to databases that are difficult to use instead of arguing that we can teach users to "get over the clunky interface." I'm excited to see another disruptive technology: library discovery platforms, that allow cross-searching across library databases and books.