Online NW 02222008 – Thinking Summarily

Today was the 25th annual conference originally called ‘Oregon Online’ – it is now well known as Online Northwest. Besides Corvallis, Portland and Eugene have also hosted it; today’s version was the 13th in Corvallis. (It seems that the Oregon attendees much prefer the central location of Corvallis.)  

From what I know the format of the conference has been the same – it opens with a keynote speaker; then follow two ‘breakout’ sessions each about an hour long; then lunch with some door prize drawings (the first one I attended I won one); and then two more breakout sessions. This makes for a comfortably long, informative, and entertaining day with many opportunities for networking with colleagues in the Northwest.  

If there were a theme to this year’s conference, it has to How do we help the user? From Jared Spool’s keynote through the four breakout sessions I attended (I would guess from the descriptions of the other sessions they too) the users were the focus. Spool’s keynote “Why Good Content Must Suck: Designing for the Scent of Information” highlighted his company’s research into good design for Web sites which discovered that one’s ability to use the Web does not predict one’s ability to find information on a particular site – design components are the predictors.  

“Building a Future for Remote Public Services” had as its primary assumption that public service is essential to every library’s mission. Caleb Tucker-Raymond explored his model for simplifying the librarians’ work in responding to the multiplicity of technologies now being used to communicate between and among people. And then he set technology aside to stress that the most important aspect of public service is that communication between user and the human being called ‘librarian’.  

Kyle Banerjee and Terry Reese presented what they foresee coming down the pike in their session, “Next Generation Catalogs: Issues and Opportunities” wherein they discussed  how we must not stop with changing the facade of our catalogs and their eye-catching displays; we must go beyond that to the true integration of all our especially electronic resources with the ILS in truly an interoperable context. 

Two UW librarians presented their two ways of introducing Web 2.0 to their colleagues – A Tale of 2.0 Workshops: Two Approaches to Introducing Emerging Technologies. Alyssa Deutscher presented the way her campus did it over a summer quarter as a series of loosely linked exercises with discussion. Laura Barrett presented how her campus had a one-day workshop that covered those topics of most interest to the attendees. These sessions came out of a larger picture whose purpose was to prepare librarians to be able to guide users in the applications of the new technologies.   

The concluding session was presented by three principals of the blog Infodoodads, who talked about how librarians can stay aware of the new Web gizmos out there. 

Online NW 02222008s2 – “Next Generation” Catalogs

This session was very informative vis-a-vis what seems to be the prevailing hopes for what the new ILS versions will be like. Terry Reese and Kyle Banerjee reminded us that the ILS is merely a specialized inventory control system and makes up a small segment of our electronic resources, especially in academic libraries.  

Both Terry and Kyle preferred an emendation to their topic’s title – instead of catalog, platform. This change allows us to talk about interoperability and standardization across vendors. For example, MARC format has been a standard in the library business for decades, yet even some ILS vendors still do not produce as if they understood the format. (I wonder how much of that is due to the vendors’ proprietary instincts.) One basic problem with most of the platforms is accessibility – can your Iphone give you access to your library’s catalog? 

Kyle did a dog and pony show of some of the attempts currently on the Web – most of them depend upon an underlying ILS for the data. Among those he showed us were Evergreen, AquaBrowser, VuFind, Endeca, Primo, WorldCat Local, and Encore. A side criticism of all of them he made is that rarely on their respective facades could you find any identifying marks of the host library.  

They concluded their presentation with about ten questions to ask of ourselves and our vendors, the necessity of identifying the details involved, and  acknowledging the limits. One very important thing to remember – continuing on the current route will lead many libraries into consortia that will become nothing more than server farms (not exactly what libraries are about).

Web – Cause of Western Culture’s Downfall?

A colleague of mine pointed our library’s staff to an LJ opinion piece by Carol Tenopir rehashing Andrew Keen’s 2007 polemic The Cult of the Amateur. That the almost immediate response came from our IT department raised my eyebrows – hmm, maybe if I read their comments I might understand why they seem so hesitant to bring our public systems up to Web 2.0 standards. But then I thought I aught to give Ms Tenopir a hearing – I remember her as one of the outspoken voices in the early adoption era of the Web in libraries.

Unfortunately, four paragraphs into her diatribe and I am ready to vomit. Some quotable phrases:

eroding the authority of expertise and threatening traditional journalists, authors, and other sources of quality information       

his arguments, which resonate with librarians’ continued challenge to help users find accurate, reliable information  

[quoting Keen] when advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred [and]

all that Web 2.0 really delivers is more dubious content from anonymous sources

 Already I am wondering where Ms Tenopir and Mr Keen have been since the early 1980s – the U.S. news media played major cover-up roles in that country’s terrorist activities south of the border; most news articles attributed to hard-working journalists were written by the companies and/or agencies they were covering rather than by the journalists themselves; or, what about the authority and expertise behind the big generalist encyclopedias – 70% or more of the articles were written not by the contributors, but by their respective graduate students.

While Mr Keen does use some phrases and catch-words that draw me into thinking he might have something useful to say, his overall message – buyer (or reader) beware – needs to be applied to what he says and writes. The dumbing down of the culture did not start with Web 2.0 as he would like us to believe – it started with the commercialization of the Internet with the advent of image transmission. Or, maybe we should place it a bit earlier with the advent of D-K books for children. Yes, the images are wonderfully attractive, but whoever is writing and editing the text ignore accuracy.

 More than once I have picked up a D-K style anatomy book, shown it to my medically-trained wife, and been quickly informed of several egregious errors. These books came out before Web 2.0. I would suggest that Web 2.0 threatens traditional authorities and publishers not by its dumbing down potential but by its rectifying potential. Nature, last summer conducted a test of correctness within several articles of Wikipedia (one Web 2.0 device that Mr Keen seems to hate) as measured against Encyclopedia Britannica, and discovered that the error rates not only were similar but also that Wikipedia was able to correct their errors within days of discovery whereas EB’s editors called the test unfair.


I am sorry Ms Tenopir’s name attached to the Keen bandwagon – but then she is writing in a traditionalist publication.

Time to bring back the library

Recently one of the blogs I watch pointed to this article Creating the 21st Century Library and so I read about the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. The article is fascinating not only for the depiction of what appears to be the return of an old-fashioned library but also for the library’s swashbuckling eschewing of what we often consider to be modern library practice.

The Prelingers have no computers, at least in the running of their library – no upfront catalogue on a computer that greets you when you enter the small building. While Megan Prelinger states that the organizing principle is a map of her brain, I sense from the interview that a fairly logical serendipity rules, and that what on the surface or at first glance might appear as chaos is much more organization along the likes most of us function.

(I wonder if David Weinberger of “Everything Is Miscellaneous” has yet visited the library? What she describes in the article cited above certainly strikes me as a ‘Miscellaneous’ style of operating, albeit without noticeable reworking or tagging by the using public.)

What is surpising about this private library is what seems to be its mission to preserve our culture, especially the North American culture. Finding that attitude is a bit refreshing is this current age of only the new is real.

Some points about current library practice arise from this article:

1. In this computerized library age, rarely does a library worry about the classification and the resulting shelving of its materials – if, for example, two popular tax books do not sit side by side because the OCLC classifiers thought one emphasized economics and the other emphasized the law, most librarians today would say, ‘Not to worry – we have the computer and can find both them, no sweat.’

1a. How many of us really do our library research (for novels, taxing issues, car repair, et al) in the computer? My observation is that we first browse the shelves and only when we are unsuccessful do we consult the catalog (card or computer) – we have a basic sense of where things should be, yet we librarians adopt systems whole-hog that reflect at best an artificial sense of order.

2. This reliance upon technology goes so far as to eliminate finding lists. Oh yes, I know they can be printed out from the computer. But the majority of people I work with do not go to the computer like games-players do – they expect aids to their experience to be near the subjects they are interested in exploring.

3. Is your public library about the preservation of your immediate culture so that when you bring your grandchildren to the library ten, twenty years from now you can show them what your culture was like? Or, is your library into buy lots of the new and discard the old no matter how classic, locally significant, and/or locally specific in meaning?

Prelingers may have hit upon something by establishing their library their way – many of the rest of us think a lot like they do.