The Jurassic Librarian

2010-06-01T01:10:00.001-07:00

The Internet

Attention-Deficit Machine?

Maggie Jackson, in her October 2009 book Distracted, and Nicholas Carr (author of the 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"), in his forthcoming (June 7) book The Shallows, ask essentially the same question — that is, is the way the net structures the presentation of information giving us shorter attention spans and promoting shallower thinking?

The Jurassic Librarian wouldn't be Jurassic if he didn't call attention to these thought-provoking books. There may be something, after all, to the long-form reading we librarians have extolled and promoted these many years, if not centuries.

The library digerati will wave off consideration of the idea that the net is rotting our brains in just the same way that a well-known library technologist and blogger waved off Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur a few years back as beneath consideration or actual reading. In their world, expressing reservations about the net is, it seems, akin to a felony. In my world, they are the tragically hip.

Jackson delves into the history of attention science, and Carr cites contemporary brain-function studies in making his case. Jackson tackles the question more broadly, focusing on our gadget-driven "culture of interruption," whereas Carr specifically criticizes the net. Here are the citations:

Distracted — The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by Maggie Jackson, with a foreword by Bill McKibben. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2009, 327 pages.

The PW review, available on the book's Amazon page, is worth your time. And Professor Alan Lightman's blurb cuts right to the core of Jackson's thesis: "This is an important book . . . a harrowing documentation of our modern world's descent into fragmentation, self alienation, and emptiness brought on, to a large extent, by communication technologies that distract us, dislocate us, and destroy our inner lives."

Last year Wired Science ran an interview with Jackson, worth reading to test the waters before you take the plunge into the book. Here's an excerpt: "Right now, people hope they’ll be able to think or create or problem-solve in the midst of a noisy, cluttered environment. Quiet is a starting point."

Hmmm. Perhaps we librarians were on to something with the quiet thing, too.

The Shallows — What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, 276 pages.

From the Booklist review (available on the book's Amazon page): "Here [Carr] looks to neurological science to gauge the organic impact of computers, citing fascinating experiments that contrast the neural pathways built by reading books versus those forged by surfing the hypnotic Internet, where portals lead us on from one text, image, or video to another while we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds. This glimmering realm of interruption and distraction impedes the sort of comprehension and retention 'deep reading' engenders, Carr explains."

2010-03-22T12:04:00.010-07:00

Annals of Patron Behavior

I don't want to bother you by telling you
exactly what I need

A patron stands before your online catalog and types the following into the keyword search space: "Diagnosis of and treatments for knee pain and swelling on the left side of the kneecap," operating under the theory that the more keywords one provides, the more results one gets.

After his search produces nothing useful, his next stop is, of course, the reference desk, where his inquiry morphs into "Where are your books on health?"

It is a curious phenomenon: Faceless bots get told the need in exquisite detail, but human librarians receive only the most general of inquiries, often containing just the barest whiff of what the inquirer actually needs. What then follows is the "reference interview," in which the librarian attempts to extract the true need from the hesitant, if not resistant, patron.

Fans of the Fox show "House" know that Dr. Gregory House maintains that "all patients lie." Librarians have their own version of this: "Patrons may lie, and most would rather seize up and die in front of you than tell you what they need."

What the heck is going on here?

After a career at the reference desk, I can only postulate that it is psychologically difficult to appear before another human being as a supplicant. That human being may judge you, may be inwardly laughing at your question, or, worst of all, may think you are stupid for asking it. So best to keep the question as general and as innocuous as possible.

And quite a few also think that they, you know, don't want to bother us, having somehow missed the point that the sole purpose of a paid reference librarian is to be bothered.

So... much easier and less threatening to just type the inquiry into a faceless bot, which is incapable of forming any judgment about you.

Which is why reference is dead.

Google provides something we cannot: Anonymity. You can flail away in Google and no one will think you're perverted, laughable, or stupid. (Oh, I know that theoretically a transaction with Google can be traced back to an IP address, but for most all intents and purposes, Google offers anonymity. Besides, Google has promised us that they won't be evil.)

In addition to eliminating the need to appear before a fellow human being as a supplicant, Google offers the allure of do-it-yourself, the chance to thrash about in its universe on your own terms and on your own schedule. And most patrons think they are good searchers, just like most people think they are good drivers.

So reference is truly dead and will not be coming back.

One would think that Google, as it continually refines its search algorithms, could obtain something useful from the long, long experience of reference librarians. I have wondered if they have ever talked with a librarian, much less hired any to help in the effort. Or do they think that the methods and experience of librarians offer no insight into how people seek information?

I will ask them, and report back if I get an answer.

2009-08-21T01:04:00.004-07:00

Late night thoughts on retirement

On a Saturday in December I shall make the closing announcement one last time, lock the front door, perhaps smile briefly at the stacks, the new book display, and the computing commons, turn out the lights, and walk away from my library forever.

You may think the retirement decision was easy, and that retirement has been highly anticipated. Your mileage may vary, but it has been neither easy nor highly anticipated for me. I loved libraries and I loved the work, and taking leave of it has been hard -- a lot harder than I thought it would be. I'll simply say that it has been both an emotional and difficult time.

If a job, not so hard to leave. But if a calling, much harder.

I had planned on working longer, but when my city offered incentives to longtime employees to retire -- which coincided with my qualifying for full retirement under our state and municipal employees' pension system -- it made sense to take advantage of the opportunity.

In my library system, three of us are taking the incentive and departing. Since the point of the incentives is to trim city payroll, we will not be replaced with newhires nor with other staff moving up the ladder. Our positions are being eliminated permanently.

Even if times were good, however, I'm not sure my managers would necessarily replace me and my colleagues with degreed librarians. In my system, I think the future belongs to library assistants, who will do much of the work at lower pay.

I'm not being critical of my managers. Given how the nature of library work is changing, shifting work from master's degree holders to, say, holders of two-year community college degrees, makes sense. Reference is not yet dead, but its circumstances are much reduced: We need fewer reference librarians, but many more people who can demonstrate how the print-release station works, who can sign people up for study rooms, who can troubleshoot computer problems or answer questions about using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and IE, or who can proctor exams, and so on. These tasks do not require a master's degree nor even a bachelor's degree. There should probably still be one classic reference librarian in the building -- a know-it-all in the best possible sense of the expression -- but the need for a phalanx of reference librarians in the Age of Google is just not there.

If I were in my director's shoes, I'd carry out a reassessment of my patron's needs in light of the staff knowledge, skills, and abilities actually needed to meet them, and then hire and pay accordingly. There is no room for sentiment here, nor should there be.

I used to work long shifts at a busy reference desk where the intellectual challenge was daunting, because I had to shift constantly from one subject to another: It could be physics one moment, case law the next, pet care the one after that, and then finding a medical specialist, helping with a math problem, or looking up the bond rating for a corporation. I loved it. I had had a broad undergraduate education and was comfortable with math, science, technology, history, and the humanities, was fluent in two languages and had a grip on the basics of a couple more, knew all
the nooks and crannies into which our culture tucked information, and had a good memory.

Before the library, I had prepared for an entirely different career but two years into it decided it wasn't for me and had begun casting about for something better to do. The young lady I was dating at the time -- now my spouse and still the best librarian I've ever seen -- understood my strengths and personality and suggested librarianship. She was right on target. I was never as happy as when I was on an extraordinarily busy reference desk, pre-Google, pulling the information rabbit out of the resources hat time and time and time again. I couldn't believe I was being paid -- and paid decently -- to have fun.

It seemed the very work I was designed and destined to do.

If I may be permitted a very late career brag: I was awfully good at it. I and a certain desk partner who was a lot like me and whose strengths balanced my weaknesses and vice versa, felt there was nothing . . . nothing . . . we couldn't answer or resolve. Our head of reference once glanced at us at the beginning of an evening shift and said "reference is in good hands tonight."

What a great compliment that was, and it was true.

You can imagine I'm slightly miffed at Google. But I'm no Luddite. I taught myself BASIC and Fortran programming while in library school, had a personal computer very early on, loved the web when I got wind of it (seeing it as the very embodiment of Theodore Nelson's hypertext scheme, though Ted would no doubt not agree that the web is indeed that embodiment), and created my library's first website in 1993. (I think we were among the first 50 public libraries to have one.)

I still think a reference librarian with an education both deep and broad and with a terrific memory can blow Google away. More to the point, such a librarian who knows how to wring out of Google everything it can provide can blow UG (unassisted Google) away.

So I hate to see some libraries completely concede reference to the bots, as at least one here in metro Phoenix has (but not mine).

But Americans hate middlemen and intermediaries, and librarians sure look like middlemen and intermediaries to me.

So I get it.

It isn't that UG -- unassisted Google -- is "good enough" for most searches; it's that many former patrons are going to prefer UG over us whether we like it or not, and whether they know it isn't as good for them or not, simply because they no longer need to appear before us as supplicants.

And so, any smart director knows he or she isn't going to need as many reference librarians, or degreed people, in the building as before, especially if in addition to reductions in reference work, outsourcing of collection development and cataloguing is implemented.

In short, the future needs much less reference help and a whole lot more computer help. It needs sharp library assistants, not librarians.

My wife probably wouldn't advise me to seek librarianship today and she says as much. I can't in good conscience advise people to seek jobs in the field, unless they realize exactly what they are getting into:

- Much less reference work; much more computer support and handholding. Less demand for professionals; more demand for paraprofessionals.
- Less human contact; more reliance on bots, be they self-checks, unmanned book kiosks or something we haven't even thought of yet (see the August 2009 Library Journal cover story, "Self Service Library").
- Less focus on information, more on entertainment.
- Redefinition of the library as "community center," with all that implies.

In short, it will be much less about information, and information quality, and self-education, and much more about providing and supporting a computing commons, media for entertainment, and premises for community activities.

No doubt socially useful work lurks in this future. Some may find excitement in redefining the library's mission and executing the new plan.

But the new library landscape seems to disrespect knowledgeability and authority. (And though as Americans we all love to heap abuse on authority, think how useful the old library notion of authority could be in a world of crowdsourcing, of "information" produced by amateurs or by those with hidden agendas.)

My decision to retire makes personal and financial sense for me and dovetails with my city's needs right now. But beyond such considerations, the new public library has much less need for librarians like me, and therefore it is indeed a good time for me to move on.

There isn't a market for what I do best.

Traditional librarian jobs are going to be much scarcer. Budget cuts lurk in our future as far as any horizon I can see. We will never see the funding levels again that we once had. Librarians will indeed retire, but their positions will be eliminated or converted into paraprofessional ones. I would have liked to see our profession and our institutions take on the bots. But that isn't going to happen, because the people who pay our salaries don't want us to take on the bots.

I would respectfully beg anyone thinking of seeking a professional degree in LIS to reconsider. There aren't going to be jobs for most of you, and even the few of you who do get jobs may find they are nothing like what you expected.

At the least, go in with your eyes open. It's going to be a rough ride for libraries and librarians. Immense piles of taxpayer money are going to be needed for health care and to service our debt to the central banks of China; much less will be available for things like libraries.

. . .

I am planning on a second act, but it won't involve libraries (or, since nothing is certain, I'll say I would be highly surprised if it did).

Once, a day at "work" was something I looked forward to and couldn't wait to get to. (Even today, post Google, it can still be.) It was an institution in which I was proud to work and a title I was proud to bear. It wasn't a job but a calling. I am lucky to have done it for so long with such good colleagues and such good patrons.

All that is good ends, and, as Robert Frost said, "Nothing gold can stay."

I shall miss it.

2009-06-28T19:54:00.018-07:00

The Laws of Public Librarianship
I have seventeen; Ranganathan had only five

Each law, principle, or rule appears with its name, its formulation, and a brief example – or expansion – of the concept:

1. The Law of Managerial Visitation

The likelihood that a library manager will visit your branch is inversely proportional to your traffic.

No matter how busy your branch normally is, your director will appear during the least busiest hour, of the least busiest afternoon, of the least busiest day, of the least busiest week, of the least busiest month, of the year. When your director does finally appear, she will find you engaged in a decidedly non-MLS activity such as cutting out turtle-shaped nametags for storytime.

2. The Law of Inverse Appreciation

Gratitude is inversely proportional to effort.

The patrons for whom you do the least are the most grateful; the patrons for whom you do the most are the least appreciative. You will be profusely thanked for looking up the location of a book; you will be only grudgingly acknowledged, if at all, for identifying the birth mother and birthdate of the patron’s great-great-grandmother, in Reykjavik, in 1839, after having located the pertinent records, arranged for their transmittal, and translated them from Icelandic.

3. The Law of Reaction

For every action, there is an equal and opposite complaint.

The law can be alternatively stated as “no good deed goes unpunished.” The first person who arrives at your long-demanded, highly anticipated drive-up bookdrop will berate you because the slot is too low for her immense SUV. If you planned carefully beforehand and built both high and low slots, you will be berated for not having a middle slot.

4. The Principle of Aggregated Disaster

One disaster provokes additional disasters.

The toilet in the public restroom will overflow, a child will be lost, the OPAC will crash, a drunk will throw up on the Sunday New York Times, and the fire alarm will go off, in that order, all within 30 seconds of one another. As soon as you deal with and resolve these, the power will go off and a ceiling panel will come loose and fall on the head of your most difficult patron.

5. The Rule of Universal Dysfunction

All libraries are dysfunctional, but in different ways.

Your colleagues are insufferable idiots but your building and systems work pretty good. Your best friend in another system works among princes and princesses whose intelligence, wit, and graciousness are your envy. His library’s roof, however, leaks like a sieve and his ILS is user-hostile, balky, and unreliable.

6. The Law of Attraction

The age of library furnishings is inversely proportional to their attractiveness as targets.

New carpet attracts sick children.

7. The Law of Mission Inflation

Library programs expand to fill whatever space, time, and money are available.

One day it will hit you that you don’t know exactly why you are providing free automotive lube, oil, and filter service at the library, though certainly there must have been a good reason, somewhere, sometime.

8. The Law of Expectation

The size of a library is inversely proportional to what is
expected of it.

The patron is shocked . . . shocked . . . that your 8000-square-foot neighborhood branch doesn’t carry the complete run, in paper, of the Annals of the Canadian Society for Feline Ophthalmology.

9. The Principle of Staff Fungibility

Everyone who works in a library is a librarian.

Just like everyone who works in a hospital is a surgeon.

10. The Law of Perverse Funding

Funding is inversely proportional to need.

You have the greatest demand for service at precisely the moment your funding authority has the least money to give you.

11. The Principle of Remote Policy Implementation

The closer you are to the action, the smaller the amount of control you have over it.

You will be lectured on how to render customer service by people who last rendered customer service in the Pleistocene Epoch.

12. The Principle of the Titanic Deck Chairs

The greater your dysfunction, the greater your focus on design.

Your collection is as deep as a rain puddle and as broad as a rivulet, and your staff is snoozing, sour, and surly. Your color scheme, signage, and furniture, however, are state of the art.

13. The Rule of Selective Volunteerism

The work you need done the most has the least appeal.

Volunteers want to read stories to rapt, adorable children. Volunteers do not want to dust shelves.

14. The Law of Equipment Failure

The probability of equipment failure is directly proportional to the desperation of its user.

On the evening of April 15, the motherboard goes up in smoke precisely one minute before closing and exactly one second before the patron decides to click “submit” on the H&R Block website.

15. The Principle of Obfuscation of Metadata

Library labels and barcodes cover the most useful information on the book jacket.

A variation of this principle states that the smaller the item, the more library labels, barcodes, branch identifiers, cautions, and warnings-off it will require.

16. The Principle of Selective Credibility, or Cassandra's Rule

If it comes from staff, it isn't believed.

When staff reports that the public printer is on its last legs, nothing happens. When a citizen tells a council member that the printer over at the library is on its last legs, it gets promptly replaced.

17. The Law of Contrary Workloads

Traffic is directly proportional to workload.

The more projects you need to bring to the desk to work on, the busier you are with patrons. Alternatively: The one day you could use some time to work on a pressing deadline is the one day that 90 percent of the population of your service area decides it needs the library.

2009-03-13T00:26:00.008-07:00

Rearranging the deck chairs

A longtime friend -- not a librarian but a person who uses the library regularly -- asked me this yesterday:

"I have always wondered why, at my library, they are constantly rearranging things. Just when I get used to the checkout desk being in one place, they move it to another. Ditto the New Books Display. What's the deal with this? It's damn annoying. I always end up having to ask where the heck something is now."

My answer was that in library school we were specifically trained to be on the lookout for when patrons are getting too comfortable with things. When we detect that, we spring into action and institute a rearrangement. Complacency is not a good thing.

Recent research shows that having to learn new patterns preserves brain cells (Tracey J. Shors, "Saving New Brain Cells," Scientific American, Vol. 300, No. 3, March 2009, pp. 47-54).

If librarians determine that a community is afflicted with high comfort levels and a lack of challenge, we respond accordingly.

But I told my friend he wouldn’t just have to take my word for it. Therefore, I enlisted the help of the folks at SurveyArmadillo.com and polled library directors across the nation. And now, I can tell you that we rearrange things just when our patrons have gotten comfortable with an existing arrangement because:

1. Paco Underhill said to do it.

2. Rearranging the furniture beats real work every time.

3. Library directors, in addition to being leaders and mentors, are interior-design geniuses.

4. The previous director had it that way, and it was wrong.

5. It's part of "excellent customer service," and, by God, the customers are going to get it whether they like it or not.

6. The old arrangement wasn’t consistent with the library’s brand. They should stop whining and just be grateful the library’s brand still includes books. For now.

2008-10-24T23:42:00.006-07:00

The Internet never forgets
The Law of Selective Net Immortality

“The Internet never forgets” exclaims a sidebar to Daniel J. Solove’s article, “Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?” in the September 2008 issue of Scientific American.

Sometimes it does seem that way, doesn’t it? And yet, any veteran net writer who has posted to forums, blogged, or written articles for websites knows that this isn’t quite so.

The Internet does forget, and in the most perverse way possible.

That is, a Google search will ruthlessly reveal the intemperate posting you made, while drunk, one Saturday evening ten years ago. Your rant is still there, in all its ingloriousness, and does truly seem to be immortal, a spectre raised from a dank, fetid, unwholesome corner of your personality and freely available to any employer, colleague, or family member who cares to look for it.

We can be thankful that most don’t care to look for it.

And we can hope that we have now learned — unlike Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways, who drank and dialed — to never tipple and type.

But what about that carefully researched and cogently written essay that you contributed to a certain professional website? The one that did you proud, that declared to all both your high intelligence and your perspicacity, as well as your world-class vocabulary?

It has, of course, vanished into thin air when aforementioned professional website moved everything (but not quite everything) to a new server, and now it cannot be found anywhere, anyhow. Google knoweth it not, and therefore it existeth not. Even Google’s cache and the Wayback Machine have missed it.

You saved a copy on your hard drive, but that vanished long ago when you dropped your MacBook in the bath water. And you never did quite get around to that backup. But no problem, you thought, because the Internet never forgets.

Except that it does.

All the time.

I know what I’m talking about, for my best work has vanished, leaving only the stuff launched late at night after three glasses of cheap merlot.

Some years ago, I posted a fabulous piece to Publib, the online discussion group for public librarians. I dealt masterfully with a problem that has bedeviled our profession since we opened the first public library in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833 — namely, how to keep library patrons from sneaking behind the reference desk to filch the hold-ID items such as the Value Line and Consumer Reports. (Not that they had IDs and the Value Line in 1833 but they no doubt had patrons trying to filch important 1833-type stuff from behind the desk.)

I explored, in depth, the three most practicable methods — poison gas, mines, and small-arms fire — examining the advantages and drawbacks of each approach, and richly supporting my contentions with references to the pertinent professional and scientific literature. My examination was both exhaustive yet succinctly written, a small masterpiece and — I have been told by those who read it when it still existed — one of the finest contributions to the professional literature in many a year.

But when Publib changed hosts, poof! — it was gone. You can search for it yourself in the Publib Archive — try “poison gas” as your search string — but you will find it not.

Thus, the Law of Selective Internet Immortality:

The likelihood of your work surviving forever on the net is inversely proportional to its significance.

The photo of you blowing milk out your nose will last forever; your brilliant multivariate analysis of revenue inputs and service outputs in public-sector institutions will vanish into thin air.

2008-10-07T14:56:00.009-07:00

Main Branch

Once a city approaches 100,000 or so residents, its public library may sprout branches. This offers convenience to the citizens of larger cities – which in America usually also mean sprawlier cities – but it changes the nature of the library’s organizational culture.

Staff in the branches may feel like stepchildren, since management and budget control usually stay downtown at the main library. At best, managers will foster good communication with staff in branches; at worst, they will ignore branches, paying attention only when, for example, they need to relocate a problem employee to the system’s equivalent of Siberia.

There is, however, a small, happy secret in branch work: You will have a piece of the library system’s budget, but you won’t have a piece of the library director's close attention. It is easier in a branch to ride out management fads, whose toxicity is reduced by distance, and to gently subvert the schemes that serve only to obstruct the service you are attempting to provide your patrons.

“Out of sight, out of mind” has real advantages in public library land, especially so if you and your branch colleagues find yourselves referring to the big building downtown as the Heart of Darkness, the Death Star, the Vatican, the Kremlin, the Forbidden City or any other such term redolent of fondness and appreciation.

But there is one aspect of the main/branch relationship that has never ceased to annoy the heck out of me, and it is a semantic one. Less kind readers may substitute “nitpicky” for “semantic,” but such criticism will gain little traction with me, for whom language and symbols are laden with meaning and are, always, important stuff. I still cringe when I see “comprised of”; I take pains to differentiate between singular datum and plural data.

What makes me nuts is, of course, the term “main branch,” meaning the place from which your Big Kahuna oversees the library system, and which usually is also easily the largest of your facilities, in both square feet and collection size. You see “main branch” all over library land, even in the pages of Library Journal and American Libraries, but, like the “like” with which your youngish colleagues pepper their conversations, widespread use neither endears nor takes the edge off what is verbal poison ivy.

A tree has a trunk, from which issue branches. It does not have a main branch from which issue branches. “Main branch” is oxymoronic and moronic. I beg you, let us have, from now on, a main library and its branches.

2008-09-30T13:46:00.008-07:00

Annals of Patron Behavior
The Last, Immortal Freebie

At my branch, I’m in charge of keeping the displays of free literature up to date and in good order, a more complicated task than you may think. It is true that a single patron can completely trash the freebies area in about 60 seconds, taking one copy of each item off its stack and then flinging the heap back into the display area or, worse yet, leaving the items strewn about the stacks. Patrons will use your freebie area as a trash receptacle, recycling center, or diaper-changing station. Some patrons seem incapable of taking one copy off the top of its stack without knocking the rest of the stack over and onto all the other items. All these infelicities come with the territory of distributing free literature – in our place, items such as city bus schedules, bike-route maps, guides to water-saving landscaping with desert plants, guides to senior housing, voter registration forms, parks & recreation schedules, arts center schedules, local community college class schedules and, in season, tax forms.

You have to make sure that out-of-date stuff gets pulled, and you need to restack messed up items in order to keep the area from looking like the immediate aftermath of a bomb blast. And you need to be sharp and quickly remove all the extraneous crap . . . er, I mean items . . . that show up uninvited, such as 10-percent-off offers on tantric massage at the local spa, offers of surefire get-rich schemes involving foreclosed-upon properties, deals on psychic readings, discounts on wholistic dog grooming, and so on and so forth.

Someone -- both patient and reasonably anal-retentive -- has to keep on top of this stuff, and we librarians (ahem!) are just the guys to do it.

I have observed some curiously consistent behavior by patrons relating to free literature. You can put out a big stack of high-demand items (such as the local community college class schedule a week prior to registration), and the copies will positively fly off the stack until . . . you get to the last one, which will sit there and sit there with nary a patron to take it. It is in fact more likely that this last copy will self-destruct from the slow acidic decomposition of the cellulose in its paper than be taken by a patron.

What the heck is going on here?

I have resorted to placing a Post-It on such an item that states “Yes, this is the last copy. Someone should take it. If not you, then who?” This has occasionally worked.

Some of our patrons -- not all, mind you, since I am not generalizing nor stereotyping here -- would relieve us of every one of our movie DVDs (even the art films that get checked out every leap year or so) if they could get away with them, or would take the urinal off the men’s room wall if it weren’t bolted there and if they had a pocket big enough, or would line their shorts with Ziploc bags to steal coffee from our onsite Starbuck's clone.

And yet they will not take the last copy remaining from what began as a big stack of very popular freebies.

They would, I must say, rather choke and die right in front of the freebie display than take the last copy of one of these items.

Very strange.

Is some vestigial sense of community and unselfishness kicking in here? “Oh, that’s the last one. I couldn’t possibly hog it for myself.” But if so, why doesn’t it kick in when they steal our last copy of “Raising Arizona”?

Maybe this behavior is related to the phenomenon of the used refrigerator. Couple gets a new Frigidaire. (OK, if it’s a boomiyup couple, they get a new Sub-Zero.) What to do with the perfectly functional, clean, old fridge? Who wants to haul the thing to Goodwill, especially if loading it up will put a scratch in the Lexus SUV? Solution? Stick it out front with a sign: “Fridge -- works great. Free. Haul yourself."

Three days -- and three nights -- later, the fridge is still out front.

Couple then replaces the sign with a new sign: “Fridge -- works great. $25. Knock on door.”

Ten minutes later the fridge is gone, and no one has knocked on the door to pay the $25.

Stuff you put a value on is worth stealing. Stuff you give away may linger forever.

Or something like that.

I shall never figure out library patrons.

2008-08-31T22:48:00.005-07:00

Consider this before you move
to Arizona

2008-08-24T00:07:00.004-07:00

Fear and Loathing at the
Reference Desk

What if Hunter S. Thompson had chosen librarianship instead of journalism . . .

We were on the reference desk in a branch on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should take the next phone call . . . . ” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the library was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the desk, which was lurching about five feet up and down. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Then it was quiet again. My colleague had taken his shirt off and was pouring coffee on his chest, to facilitate the thinking process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the flourescents with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to take the chat sessions.” I hit file-close and aimed the cursor toward the edge of the display. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than six hours to go. They would be tough hours. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out.

2008-08-22T15:26:00.008-07:00

Say it was a fire

The scene: A Monday morning early in the year 196 BC, in the collection development area of the Library of Alexandria. The department chief, PERSAEUS, is seated in his cubicle, where he is indexing the latest scrolls acquired from Pergamum. His assistant, a young scholar, ARISTARCHUS, is standing nearby, examining the contents of a cart.

ARISTARCHUS: Wow, I see you've put Aristophanes' "The Banqueters" and "The Babylonians" on the weeding cart here. Do we really want to get rid of those?

PERSAEUS: Have you seen how many scrolls we've got stuffed into the Drama Section? Besides, these aren't his best stuff, and they never check out anymore.

ARISTARCHUS: Sure, but, you know, this IS Aristophanes . . .

PERSAEUS: I've been given directions from the representative of King Ptolemy himself -- Money is tight and the royal treasury isn't going to support warehousing material that isn't used. We need to move in the direction of popular reading and higher use.

ARISTARCHUS: So it's numbers driven?

PERSAEUS: You got it, kid.

ARISTARCHUS (aside): Sorry, Aristophanes!

PERSAEUS: It looks like no one's asked for either of these plays in years. Besides, if we ever get someone here who really wants them, we can always get them on loan from Pergamum.

ARISTARCHUS: A buddy of mine works there. They weeded them last year.

PERSAEUS: Oh.

ARISTARCHUS: So what becomes of our copies?

PERSAEUS: We have a contract with the Public Baths. They buy our discards and use them to heat the water over there. Quite a bit of energy in a standard scroll, you know.

ARISTARCHUS: Not sure I would let our patrons know that.

PERSAEUS: That's why we send the wagon in the middle of the night.

ARISTARCHUS: What if someone asks about not having these plays anymore?

PERSAEUS (winking): We could say there had been a fire . . .

2006-10-25T12:49:00.003-07:00

Librarians to patrons: Drop dead

We librarians, ever insecure about our status as "real" professional workers, tend to be the first to leap on any technological bandwagon that gets rolling. In this regard, we have tended to be at the forefront of any mass intoxication with technology. Indeed, the lag time between development of the hypertext transfer protocol and the appearance of web-enabled computers in public libraries was notably short -- the HTTP and HTML specifications appeared only in 1991, and by 1993 computers with web connections were beginning to appear in public libraries.

We are to be commended (but grudgingly, for my part) for the eagerness and aplomb with which we embrace new information technology and plow right into the unbroken technical sod. (Not that it has done our public image one bit of good -- we could have invented the web and we would still be popularly seen as grumpy, uptight, persnickety old church ladies.)

(And why didn't we invent the web?)

We are also to be commended for our professional focus on serving library patrons in particularly "high touch" ways.

And yet we tend to deploy new technology in libraries without regard to patron wishes. We simply bull ahead. We don't ask permission. We assume we know what is best for our patrons. We don't learn from patrons' daily struggles with machines and interfaces.

It is a tremendous hole in our profession.

Nothing so precisely illustrates the point as our trashing of our card catalogs. When Nicholson Baker complained about it in his article in The New Yorker, librarians did indeed protest too much.

Card catalogs demanded just two things -- an ability to read and an ability to flip cards with fingers. You didn't have to understand graphical user interfaces or how to operate a mouse. You didn't have to stand there and wait on a slow network. At the worst, someone might have hogged the drawer you needed for a few minutes, as opposed to nowadays when you lose access for days when the library's server crashes.

Nobody asked our patrons about the change. And we made two assumptions -- that everyone understands how to operate a computer, and that everyone would welcome the change from card to online catalogs. As anyone who still works a public desk can attest, the first assumption is patently false. And the earful I get everyday from patrons about the user-hostility of our online catalog suggests that the second assumption is false, too.

Mostly, though, the card catalog was something constructed on a human scale. Somewhere in the library, human beings created it and maintained it, relying only on the cataloging rules instead of the jabberwocky of computer science. The card catalog was a triumphantly physical object and cultural artifact, existing on the paper and in the oak in front of you, reliable, permanent (or so it seemed), and authoritative. It abided and it would not vanish into thin air the moment someone tripped over a power cord.

We have made second-class citizens of both those who cannot use information technology and those who refuse to use it. I'm reminded of a long-ago cartoon by Koren in The New Yorker, in which a poor fellow has been brought before the bench by bailiffs, one of which is informing the judge that the prisoner has been charged with "expressing contempt for data processing."

It may be cost-prohibitive to junk online catalogs at this point (though far greater resistance would come from librarians who long ago went over to the Dark Side than from city financial auditors), but a lesson we might take from the current sorry state of affairs is that we might ask our patrons about technology before we deploy it.

And would it be too much to ask that when the time comes to upgrade or change existing online systems, we first consider what we have been observing over the years as our patrons have struggled to use those systems? And redesign them in light of what we may learn?

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Notes:

In relation to the 1991 publication of the HTTP and HTML specifications, see Tim Berners-Lee's remarks on his vision for the web.

Nicholson Baker's article on the death of card catalogs, "Discards," may be found in The New Yorker, Volume 70, No. 7, April 4, 1994, p. 64 ff. No, the full text is not available online; you must find it on paper (or purchase The Complete New Yorker, $39.99 on nine DVD-ROMs).

Arresting comments:

"On the contrary, online catalogs have proved as resistant to innovation and evolution as the card catalogs they replaced, whether one considers the content they include (or, more to the point, exclude) or their equally limited discovery capabilities." -- Stanley Wilder, in "Baker's Smudges," in the September 1, 2006 issue of Library Journal.

"Most of us still think we know that online catalogs are superior and some of us continue to write books and articles on how to make them better yet. But ask a hundred active library users, and I'd guess at least 10 will tell you that we're missing a key question: Superior for whom?" -- Walt Crawford, in "The Card Catalog and Other Digital Controversies," American Libraries, Vol. 30, No. 1, Jan. 1999, p. 52 ff. However much I'd love to send you off in search of the paper copy for this one, honor and civility require me to tell you that it is, indeed, available online through Gale's General OneFile and EBSCO's MasterFile Premier services. (And well worth reading, even almost eight years down the line, for what Walt says about taking the desires of our patrons into account.)