Week 5 Already

Christine Pawley, Hegemony's Handmaid? The Library and Information Studies Curriculum from a Class Perspective

I've found myself expecting others, even my peers in SLIS, to think less of my studies when I mention that I'm interested in children's librarianship. I really do feel, as Pawley says, that there is a "low status of courses for those intending to work with children and young people.” Her comment that we sometimes tend to focus on already privileged groups (such as doctors and lawyers) reaffirmed my desire to work with children or non-native English speakers. It’s not that I think other kinds of information assistance isn’t valuable, but I came into the program hoping to end up in a job where I felt like I was helping people who need it and might otherwise not be helped. Pawley claims (and I think I agree) that librarians’ work ends up protecting current class structures. How do we shift our work to helping ensure equality in the spread of information without losing support (and funding) from those in power?

Christine's comments on corporate power the production and distribution of information reminded me of the uneasiness I felt when San Francisco's relatively new (I just looked it up—I suppose1996 doesn’t quite qualify as “new”) main public library branch opened with rooms such as the "Chevron Corporation Teen Center" and the "BankAmerica Jobs and Careers Center." Several of the rooms seem to have been sponsored by individuals or foundations, but many have corporate names, raising interesting questions about which names we choose to have in our public library areas.

What are some other possible homes for LIS departments if not in universities?

J.K. Elmborg, Teaching at the Desk: Toward a Reference Pedagogy

As a former college writing tutor and half-English major, I was intrigued by Elmborg’s proposal to use composition studies as a basis for re-shaping our view of reference. I hadn’t really drawn a connection between my English/writing background and my library studies education other than the obvious ones of research and dealing with texts. The general move toward student-guided learning and teaching independence seems to me a sound one, though I did have an internal moment of “there go our jobs!” when Elmborg suggested that we create self-sufficient patrons. The strongest part of his argument, in my mind, is that in finding materials for a user, we impose our values and ideas on their work—a reference librarian can’t help but weed out some of the results of a search, but what the user would weed out herself might be different. The greatest difficulty in moving toward a teaching-based reference desk would be, I think, overcoming the patron’s expectation of a fast and relevant answer. This becomes especially difficult when the reference is handled by telephone, email, a Web-based form, or online chatting. I also believe that there is a time and place even in a traditional setting for a librarian to hand a user a list of materials, especially when the user is already well-versed in information searching.

Ruth C.T. Morris, Toward a User-Centered Information Service

Even with all of the definitions of “information” we’ve come across in the past few weeks, one succinct statement that Morris made stuck with me throughout the article: “Information does not exist in the abstract—it needs to be interpreted.” We don’t call a table of random numbers “information” unless we want to use it in some way, or to make a point about it. Her argument really hinges on this. The “sense-making model” sees information as subjective and changeable, and I agree both that this is a more accurate representation of information and that we don’t normally think of information this way—we normally see information as something objective and concrete and found in print. It’s a hard process to change this, both for users and librarians. How do we go about it? Specifically, how do librarians go about handling a new way of reference without alienating users who are accustomed to the old method? I’m also curious: how much has already changed in the 14 years since publication? In closing, I love that “Ambiguous Information Needs” has an acronym.

Wayne Wiegand, Mom and Me: A Difference in Information Values

Who hasn’t had a similar experience with a parent? My mom recently bought a cordless phone for her parents and spent 3 evenings at their house trying to install it, only to discover eventually that a component of the phone was bad. She finally acknowledged that Grandma and Grandpa were perfectly right that their rotary phone is all they need. We’ve tried to get them to watch DVDs, to try out the Internet, and to use a video camera that takes something smaller than full-size VHS tapes… all with minimal success. Wiegand’s car-shopping tale was a great example of the information gap between generations. What was less obvious and needed to be pointed out was his call to see information as a social construct, and his explicit statement that we need to “respect the ability of people to determine for themselves the value of the information they seek or come in contact with.” I think many of us might roll our eyes or try to change a technologically-challenged older relative, and that we might extend the same reaction to people of different class systems, cultural heritage, or geographic location is a scary thought. It seems to me that the best approach to introducing something (a new way of researching, for example) is to do it in a neutral way, a way that says, here’s an idea: take it if it’s useful to you, but I’m not offended if you choose to use something else.

Readings for Week 4, Part II

Michael Buckland, Information as Thing

I found Buckland’s discussion of documents interesting. We talked about the difference between a document and a record in another of my classes recently, and concluded that “document” is the broader term, but we didn’t extend it so far as to include three-dimensional objects… or at least our discussion didn’t bring us that far. I’m a little uncomfortable with the quote from Otlet (the “founder of the documentation movement”) in which even people are included as documents. Buckland settles on the antelope as a better example, and I agree with him that it’s a tricky (and humorous) situation. In the end, I’m inclined to take a narrower view of information. I’d prefer not to classify lumber or stovewood as information (page 356). If the definition of information is somewhat blurry, and all seem to agree that it is, maybe it’s okay (and expected) that its contents are also ill-defined.

Hope Olson, The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs

I honestly hadn’t given any thought to controlled vocabulary and subject headings and how it influences the way we search for (or, more accurately, find) books. I agree with Olson that there are some things we should be doing, but I don’t know that I agree with just how strongly she states her position. It seems to me, in my very limited library knowledge, that controlled vocabulary is a useful tool and one that we shouldn’t dispense with (I don’t think she’s arguing with me yet) and that it’s an unfortunate, inherent side effect of using it that books are necessarily grouped and simplified. Not only books about black feminist theater, but any book that straddles several topics (a Wisconsin knitter’s cookbook, for example—I’m sure somebody’s writing one). A librarian has to choose whether to shelve the book with Wisconsin or with knitting or with cooking (or with books on black people or feminism or theater) and some sort of hierarchy has to be established. We all hope that the conscious librarian will choose to highlight the book some other way, if possible, maybe by including it on a reading list or in a special display in the library. In an ideal world without budget or space constraints, we’d put copies on all of the shelves whose topics the book covers.

The physical problem seems to me to be a necessary evil, but it seems to me that we could be doing more to make electronic catalogs more accurate and more searchable. I do agree that we need to be more liberal in adding new headings to the collection. There’s no reason why we can’t have a “Voice--Self-Expression” heading, or one for Representation. I particularly liked Olson’s idea of skipping the intervening instruction (USE ______) and allowing more than one authoritative heading for a subject.

Readings for Week 4, Part 1

Kevin Kelly, Scan this book!

Very engaging. I could write a paper on this article, so forgive the long, scattered entry.

I think Kelly is right that leaving books out of the scanning and digitization craze is detrimental to their value as a medium. With no books in the body of information that people go to first (or will go to first) to search, they will likely seem increasingly unimportant. I do wonder, though, if digitizing books wouldn't also promote their decline. I'm wondering how useful a book online is as a unit, in its entirety. It can be searched, yes, and linked to and linked from and all sorts of interesting connections can be made, and it can be discovered where it otherwise wouldn't have been. But none of that involves reading the book as a whole... it merely becomes part of, as Kelly says, "the world's only book." If one did want to read the whole book, I imagine it would still be nicer to find it in paper form. Even if you liked staring at a computer screen, I think the prevalence of hyperlinks (while useful at other times) would be very distracting. It seems to me that electronic text is inherently better for smaller chunks of text-- and what will that mean for the book?

I was struck by how expensive it is to scan a book. An average of $30 here in the U.S.? That's more than many books retail for, and multiply that by the 8 million books at Stanford alone.... I'm assuming the price will come down, but what sort of societal debt do we owe Google (and others) for footing the bill? What are the implications of having this work done privately?

Kelly claims that the "underbooked" will be the ones best served by digital libraries, but I think he unintentially pokes a hole in his own argument by naming "elderly people in Peru" as one of the groups who will be helped. The "underbooked" are sadly also those with less access to electronic resources. The elderly, those lower on the economic ladder, and those in developing countries are all likely to be left out of at least the initial glories of digital libraries.

I also have some quibbles about what all we're including in our universal library. Kelly suggests it should include "a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists." Note the "artists" part. I agree it's probably a necessary restriction. Why, then, are we including (in his words) a copy of all Web pages (including dead ones) and the "tens of millions of blog posts now gone"? Just curious.

Another thought that staggers me is the degree of inaccuracy possible when all of the hyperlinking and weaving is done by laypeople. The Internet is full of mis-linked information, or links to dead pages, or broken links. It's surprising (and heartening) to me what degree of accuracy things like Wikipedia manage to achieve, but it still concerns me that our global library could potentially be very untrustworthy. Imagining a reliable monitoring system, though, is more than a bit overwhelming.

People enter a search term into Google instead of a more powerful, specific database because it's fast and it's easy and the results are generally good enough (if not the best). In the same way, if and when the "universal library" is up and running, even if it's only as reliable as Wikipedia or a Google search, I think it'll be the research tool of choice for most (including myself). It seems to me that we might want to put more conscious thought into how we proceed, but that's a huge information ecology to try to have a say in.

Two posts in one day!

Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day, Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart

Though I might argue that this book could be condensed to half its length without losing much substance, I did enjoy reading it. I was alternately amused (by photos of Rotwang the inventor), alarmed (at the thought of the Internet restricted to a vehicle for commerce), and touched (by nervous older people finding acceptance from the younger members of Pueblo when they met in real life). The case studies were particularly interesting, as they gave more personal examples of communities working successfully and unsuccessfully with technology. As the authors put it, "The technological system is the water we swim in, and it has become life-sustaining and almost invisible to us" (43). We're all already part of several information "ecologies", and to think of them as communities that require group participation is helpful. The virtual word of Pueblo, connected to Longview Elementary, struck me as a particularly good example. All of the members of the community seem to be very conscious of the steps they are taking, and they're doing a good job evaluating and tweaking the program to make sure it's achieving the results they hoped for. I did find myself wondering about the parents, though, who I don't remember being mentioned. Were they also included in discussions and decisions about Pueblo? Are any of them members of the online community? I also found the example of the hospital particularly telling, as I suspect that not keeping everyone informed and not asking workers for input in decisions are both at the root of a lot of supposedly technology-related workplace issues. I also enjoyed that sometimes the "solution" was surprisingly un-technical: students in Patricia Lynch's digital photography class put a plastic cup on top of their computers when they were having trouble. Different solutions work in different places, and I think in the end that that's exactly what Nardi and O'Day are saying: communities need to work together to make technology workable for them.

Readings from September 11

Christine Pawley, Libraries

I thought Christine raised several interesting points in her brief but broad history of libraries, especially in her comments on how digital media have changed the traditional library. She points out that libraries face challenges in allocating (often decreased) financial resources between digital and print media, to the point where “the digital, virtual, or electronic library…. inevitably threatens the traditional library.” A bold statement that made me see the situation in a different light. She also acknowledges problems with digital media, including the problem of required hardware swiftly becoming obsolete. It seems to me that electronic media make current accessibility much better, but at the same time complicate future accessibility immensely. I was also pleased to learn when, where, and why the term “library science” came into being. I’m not a fan of it, but at least now I know where it came from.

D.D. Rusch-Feja, Libraries: Digital, Electronic, and Hybrid

Like Christine Pawley, Rusch-Feja raises some potential problems with digital media. He points out that electronic subscriptions to journals or literature do not guarantee archiving or permanent accessibility, which I see as a potentially large problem in the future. The situation seems analogous to a person who subscribes to an online music service which allows them to keep the music for only a set period of time, and while that seems like a fine choice for some individuals to make, for a library to have only electronic forms of literature which they don’t necessarily have lasting rights to seems to invite future complications. One of the other useful things I drew from this article were several clearer definitions of useful terms: metadata, interoperability, and virtual library.

Wayne A. Wiegand, Tunnel Vision and Blind Spots

I must say that Wiegand’s opening quotes (“There are more public libraries than McDonald’s”, etc.) were very heartening and inspiring. On the whole, this article engaged me the most of the four, and I enjoyed his writing style. I hadn’t given much thought to the canon represented in public libraries, possibly because the “canon” in my English undergraduate classes referred to a far narrower set of works and library collections seemed immeasurably large; but of course a collection can be large and still systematically leave out groups of works. I also didn’t realize the extent that published catalogs determined (and still do) the holdings of public libraries. I was pleased to see a shout-out to my own home library system (the Hennepin County public library system in Minnesota), and the discussion of suburban and urban library systems. Though the Minneapolis public library system (the urban branch) recently built a huge and wonderful new central downtown library, other libraries in the system are facing reduced hours or possible closure. Though his cry of “tunnel vision and blind spots” grew old, the points he raised struck me as thoughtful and valid. This is an article I can see myself returning to in the future.

Saracevic, Tefko, Information Science

I found this article a bit repetitive after the others, and it wasn’t always easy to follow the logic behind the words. Nevertheless, the section on “education” was very interesting. When I was researching library schools, I felt the divide between “information” schools and “library” schools, though I didn’t realize the split was as formal as it seems to be. I think the analysis of strengths and weaknesses was right on, and I found myself wishing that the divide could be bridged a little better. Saracevic did a good job showing that both camps need the other, and hopefully the future will bring better collaboration.