Both A9 and Google now return results from inside books (something seen to some extent on Amazon too, of course).How useful this will become remains to be seen. Certainly it will help to return more results that might point towards authorities- even undiscovered commentators on subjects. With the recent firing of librarians at the University of Wales at Bangor on the basis that it was so easy to find stuff in the interweb a recent, stinging wound, the question of whether this functionality is another step in the direction of librarian-free libraries. I think not. People's reluctance to research is a frequently seen feature from the other side of the library desk, and even the most basic variation in search strings or imaginative searching is far from being par for the course. Whilst it's certainly helpful to have good tools like this - which, of course gets better and inclusive all the time as more material comes into the searchable set- the nous, the impetus, the modicum of insight that makes research tick has to come from the person doing the searching. And if not them, then one is left with the idea of some sort of professional archivist with a knowledge of how retrieval systems work and a good general knowledge of the major resources across many fields, whose job it would be to hold researchers' hands and get them asking the right questions.
Sound familiar?
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