Analysis and news
“Nomenclature matters, and there will always be some scepticism about around highly-touted technologies”
to better understand their research habits. We saw that while peer-reviewed journals are still essential for research and teaching, the mix of content used by faculty and students has expanded to include primary sources, e-books, video, and much more. Information-seekers not only have too much information to sort through, but now they must access it in an array of formats. As vendors and publishers, we continue
to be providers of information – but now that virtually anyone can access information, we need to step further into the roles of curators and evaluators. Researchers are overwhelmed and our job is to make them less so; to give them the tools to write a simple search query, find what they need, and access it quickly.
What’s next with AI Artificial intelligence has been cresting at the top of the hype curve lately. We’ve been hearing about AI computing advances in waves for decades and dreaming about it in science fiction for a few centuries. Now, we are seeing it come to reality much more tangibly, from auto-indexing and categorising text, to detecting the content of images, to optimising your commute home. This increasingly sophisticated
despite its relatively poor quality and lack of relevance in scholarly research, existed (before YouTube!); and e-book platforms were a novelty. ‘The Frankfurt Book Fair has pulled itself into the 21st century… with the announcement of the nominations for its inaugural e-book awards,’ wrote a reporter for The Guardian in October of 2000. Fast-forward to 2019 and our role has
shifted dramatically. Reliable information is no longer available only at the library. Or on the web. Information is everywhere, as omnipresent as Starbucks and free WiFi, from smart devices to Siri to Alexa to your car. It’s wonderful. It’s transforming. It’s terrifying. At ProQuest, we recently surveyed 1,300 faculty and students
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technology is already helping evolve the way we develop our platforms and curate our content. It’s allowed us to create interactive documents, translate video into multiple languages and digitise previously- unavailable primary sources – in formats that are searchable, easy to use, enriched with metadata and are compatible with various devices. The practicality and availability of these
tools has enabled us to be much more proactive. Instead of waiting for users to come to us, we’ve had to start going to them, and adapting to the ways they work. And with AI, we can be even more proactive in how we do so. Nomenclature matters, and there will always be some scepticism about around highly-touted technologies with impactful promise. It doesn’t help that we use the term ‘artificial’ intelligence, in the same way that the ‘extreme’ in extreme
programming probably wasn’t terribly helpful. Is ‘artificial’ useful in this context? I’ve never really liked the term. I just finished Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s book, Hit Refresh, and I love his perspective: ‘Today we don’t think of aviation as ‘artificial flight’ – it is simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.’ It’s a necessity to go beyond the
capability of the human brain to enable the storage of and access to information. At ProQuest, we’re building new tools into our platforms that help us discover more about our users, their needs and behaviours, so we can allow them to sort through billions of sources to find the few that they need. But behind the curtain, we’re still humans – developers, librarians, scholars – who are creating better paths to research. AI enables us to automate certain processes with remarkable accuracy, while retaining certain, more complex components of our curatorial processes for our biological brains. At least for now.
The more something changes, the more it stays the same It’s a cliché, but when we think about the companies who’ve survived the technological boom of the past two decades – Apple, Google, Microsoft – they all have one thing in common. Their technology has changed, but their mission hasn’t. Our mission remains the same as it did in 2002, and 1984, and years before that. In 1938, Eugene Power reimagined an industry by bringing microfilm technology to the researcher and dramatically simplifying scholars’ lives. Nearly a century later, we’re still here with the same mission: providing access to the information people need to make their own research breakthroughs – and we will continue on this mission with the support of ever- evolving technology. What an unartificially fantastic ride we are on.
Roger Valade is chief technology officer at ProQuest
February/March 2019 Research Information 15
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