rochelle.mazar.ca

More ideas-swapping, this time from lbr:

I am a firm believer that text transcripts are one of the most revolutionary aspects of virtual reference. They open a whole new world of possibilities for resources that would be difficult if not impossible in traditional reference interactions:
– detailed self-review and peer-review for quality control and improvement
– ongoing modeling of good (and not-so-good) reference techniques for new and future librarians
– construction of knowledgebases of past interactions so that librarians can benefit from their colleagues’ knowledge and discoveries when answering the same questions later
– large-scale aggregated analysis of patron questions and needs to inform administrative decisions about staffing, training, collection development and resource acquisition.

I could not disagree more. I say this with a background in educational technology, virtual environments, and as a person active in a variety of online communities. Admittedly I have the default reaction of cringing every time I hear about someone collecting transcripts from IM conversations, but even aside from that, I don’t think transcripts are what make v-ref a good thing.

Let’s say we agree that recording the interaction between patrons and library staff is something we’re interested in doing. For all the reasons listed above, why wouldn’t we just install cameras and microphones at the reference desk? Why not at least record the audio of all reference interviews, and since voice-to-text transcription is reasonably accurate, why don’t we just keep a text transcript of all interactions that way?

Well, that’s easy to answer. What patron would possibly want to talk to you if they knew everything they said to you was being logged, for whatever reason?

Yeah. You see where I’m going. The fact that transcripts are kept and held by off-site vendors without explicit warning creeps me out as it is. On one hand people talk about wanting to implement v-ref in, say, public libraries in order to reach a different audience (read: teens and tech-savvy young adults), and on the other they’re talking about logging transcripts and storing them in databases. What teenager would ever use a service that had a big pop up window that said “Hey, we’re recording everything you say here, btw, and we share it with our friends”, an extra and unpopular step that ethically MUST be present if you want to collect transcripts? Honestly, I’m not sure I even would use such a service. I’d be tempted to claim copyright infringement and sue the pants of the library, but I’m not that sort of person. Usually.

I will attempt to keep my personal distaste of transcripts to one side as I break down some of the “possibilities” of transcript collection as described by lbr:

detailed self-review and peer-review for quality control and improvement.

Transcripts are hardly the greatest way to do self-review or peer-review. Pulling out the transcripts and going over them presumes that the staff member is somehow unaware of the kinds of conversations they have in v-ref. Ideally, reference managers have open lines of communication with their staff wherein there is a constant conversation about what’s going on with v-ref. I’d be happier if the request were instead to have staff post to a v-ref blog at the end of every shift, detailing the sorts of questions they had that day and the problems they encountered, sharing ideas for good answers to difficult questions and fielding comments from other staff members.

In you’re really interested in using v-ref transcripts in performance reviews, you can just have staff print off a few transcripts for personal staffing records rather than compiling a universal database. To me this feels like trying to grab a bull by the horns and reaching for his tail.

As for improvement and “quality control”; the best ways to move in both of those directions is to do regular and thoughtful staff training. In my experience (as a v-ref user and on the other side of the fence), most library staff come to v-ref as their first experience ever with IM; they are clumsy, awkward, and often come across as brusque and/or too busy to really investigate the patron’s query. They end conversations too early, are in my opinion overly concerned about “appearing professional”, scared of l33t (net speak), intimidated by the speed at which v-ref moves, and generally uncomfortable with the medium. If you’re interested in improving the quality of v-ref service, install an internal IM system and let staff get used to communicating using it. Bring in someone who knows how to IM and knows how to talk about using IM. Reading transcripts is not going to change anyone opinions or make frustrated, frightened staff better v-ref service providers. It may in fact only make them perform less well, given the pressure of being permanently recorded.

construction of knowledgebases of past interactions so that librarians can benefit from their colleagues’ knowledge and discoveries when answering the same questions later

I’m profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of a database of “good” reference answers. If someone comes to me at the reference desk looking for some really good articles on the American Civil War, I am not going to go first to a database of reference answers handed out over the last few years by other reference librarians. Any such database (after all the scrubbing of personal information and uploading from one institution to the main database) would be out of date. Sure, it might help me find something we may or may not have access to at my library, but it would be missing articles that were the most recent, and would direct me to listen more to the “popular” answer rather than the patron’s needs. I have been trained on the resources at my own library. Most library staff are extremely knowledgeable about the resources available, and if you fear your staff are not knowledgeable enough, this is another moment to look at staff development, not collecting transcripts. We have spent a lot of money making databases accessible and relatively easy to use. Why this sudden distrust of library staff? Two heads are better than one, I’ll agree, but I’m not sure 1500 are better than two. Instead of implementing a database, get your reference staff to rely on each other for help. Have a gov docs question and you feel out of your depth? Isn’t that why we hired a gov docs librarian?

And more to the point: your reference interactions should not be the means through which you staff communicate with each other. In my experience the reference interactions that really require mediation are specific class assignments; these are best dealt with through a staff meeting, wherein the subject librarian who is aware of the assignment details the question and gives some good directions for answers. Support in that case should really not be mediated by technology. Unless that technology is a blog where a subject librarian posts the details of assignments and the best databases or books where sources can be found. More direct communication between librarians, even from campus to campus or across the country, is a better method of knowledge-sharing than breaching patron confidentiality by storing v-ref transcripts.

large-scale aggregated analysis of patron questions and needs to inform administrative decisions about staffing, training, collection development and resource acquisition.

There are only two statistics administrators need to know for the purposes of understanding the importance of v-ref. How many patrons logged in to the service, and how much time was logged by staff. Libraries are staffed by knowledgeable, thoughtful people. We don’t need a database to tell us if patrons are pointing out that our collections are suffering. Having open lines of communication between front-line staff, acquisitions librarians, and administrators will render such a database obsolete. If staff are routinely encountering questions they feel ill-suited to answer, they need a venue to voice that concern. Is there a library staff member who would not report the lack of an important source once it was brought to their attention?

Personally, I would prefer to see no v-ref transcripts held by any library anywhere. Offer the transcript to the patron if they want it, and to the individual librarian if they want to keep it, but the institution should not be holding transcripts of reference interviews. We still have issues around holding borrowing records, why on earth are we so flippant about storing actual conversations between library staff and patrons?

I am all for using technology to make library services better, but just because you can record something doesn’t mean you should. Refocus on the problems you think transcripts will solve and work out better ways to do so. Nine times out of ten, the problems can be solved by improving internal communication, staff development, providing outlets for concerns, and encouraging staff to talk openly and honestly about any problem they are encountering in the workplace.

Recording everything that happens between reference staff and patrons is not only a turn-off for patrons. It sends a rather unsavory message to library staff as well. In recording everything library staff say, are you making their workplace uncomfortable? Sure, we expect all interactions to be upstanding and ideal, but what does recording actually accomplish? We expect teachers to do their jobs well, but we don’t record everything that goes on in the classroom. That would be a breach of privacy and a mark of pretty profound distrust between teachers and administrators. In recording everything reference staff say, are you preventing them from uttering those painful words, “I don’t know, but let me find out who does”? They are typing words directly into their performance review, after all.

I don’t like transcripts. I’ll be honest. I’ve experienced that sick feeling when you realize that a delicate conversation you had with a friend has been helpfully emailed out to a few others for the sake of keeping everyone in the loop. IM has as relationship with speech, with a face-to-face interaction, and I believe we should grant it the same respect we grant voice-delivered reference questions. When you start up an IM session, you are speaking to one person, not a whole host of librarians across the globe.

The history of IM is a far more personal one than email; email was always more professional in purpose, a tool for exchanging ideas and documents rather than sensitive information. From the beginning IM has been a way to connect with one person in a largely undocumented and undocumentable way. It is more personal and off the record. We should be honest and upfront about what’s going on in that interaction and not bait and switch our patrons, who are not used to the idea that IM leads directly to recording and database population. V-ref is not an opportunity to milk patrons or library staff for information to help us improve our services globally. V-ref is an extension of traditional reference, and is a service libraries should provide to patrons who need alternative means to connect with library staff.

Once we’ve got a more complete and comprehensive archive, we can really start to leverage it as a knowledgebase with the ability to search previous transcripts for keywords and have them help us find resources for the session we’re in right now.

It all boils down to a simple information literacy rule: don’t let other people do your thinking for you. Reach out to your colleagues when in a bind. Don’t let staff do v-ref alone in their offices, or in a generally isolated place. There are so many skills in a library reference office; encourage staff to understand the skill set of their colleagues, and call on them when needed.

Let’s not outsource the expertise that’s already there.

I was reading through my feed reader just now and I stumbled upon this from technobiblio.com:

Just as you often have phone trees with recordings covering the basics, I wonder if there is a way to set up a centralized Jabber server that all libraries could use to do a similar service to the Major League Baseball (MLB) “IM bot”?

My idea is that libraries could have a “bot profile” that they could customize and then patrons could IM for the automated information they want, like phone numbers, branch locations, hours, events, etc. So, one library runs the server, but it handles multiple libraries each of whom is responsible for logging in and customizing the responses as the information changes (like if you shift from summer to winter hours, etc.) through their account. Then you could set up one IM address for the entire system for the automated info – or each branch could have it depending on the situation and preference of the library.

The example he’s working from is a baseball statistics bot:

Look up Carlos Beltran’s postseason stats, Barry Bonds’ regular season numbers, historical stats and every mathematical marvel that matters to a baseball fan. Let’s say you’re at the office or a sports bar and need a quick answer for a statistical debate. Just IM “MLB” and choose 9 from the main menu and let your digits find the digits.

Now, communicating with cell phones is an interesting idea and certainly one to explore, and admittedly I’ve not spent a whole lot of time considering that potential route. (I expect to do so as soon as I make better use of that technology myself.) But my gut reaction to IM bots answering reference questions, no matter how basic, is please please don’t do it.

I should preface this by saying that I have spent many many months of my life tinkering with virtual bots. I am a keyword bot specialist, in fact. I have built bots for the sole purpose of responding to other bots to underscore a particular piece of information. I have built dramatic historical recreations using only bots. I have built bots that people sometimes mistake as real people, who never repeat themselves in the course of a conversation. I love programming keywords. I love bots.

If v-ref experiments across the continent are determining that people always ask the same kinds of questions (“What are your hours?” “What’s your phone number?” etc.), I’d say the key here isn’t to develop a bot to answer those questions. Take that knowledge and display that information more prominently on the library’s website instead. Make the information easier to find, or include it on the same page as the IM service in addition to its regular place. Add a FAQ if you can’t work out better ways to answer obvious questions on the front page. I think limiting v-ref by creating databases of generic answers is a really good way to kill the service rather than promote it.

The baseball database is interesting and probably works well; but it works only on the assumption that no real person will ever respond. The user realizes they are sending queries to a database. This is a fancy way of scanning an index, and one I think has potential and is interesting, but telling a patron that their reference question is in some way generic and does not require a real person’s attention is not a good way to promote reference service in libraries. Yes, a person may ask the same question the last five patrons asked. But it’s the first time this patron has asked it, and since the one thing everyone loves about librarians is that their nice, replacing that nice person with a bot is probably not going to be popular.

In order to enable the bot on a standard v-ref service, you’d have to have the bot scan the questions as they are asked for keywords. In the baseball example, people are working from a “menu” and typing in specific, known, predicable queries on a very specific subject. How would we create a generic answer for the question “what are your hours?” Bots are keyword promoted, so what’s the keyword? “hours”? What happens when someone wants to know more about the film or the book The Hours? Or what if the patron says “I’ve been looking for this information for hours, I hope you can help me!” Is the keyword “what are your hours”? Then when do you do if the patron says “I can’t seem to find your hours listed on the website, when do you open on Saturdays?” I could go on, but you see what I mean. Patrons do not ask questions in a reliable, predictable way, so don’t try to use bots to spit out answers to ideally-worded questions. In the end, this offends more people than it helps.

There are two ways to think about technology and implementing it in a service context: either it’s a way to automate your universe and make everything faster, easier, and more slick, or it’s a way to connect flesh-and-blood human beings with flesh-and-blood human beings. The greatest value of IM is the way it connects two people; what is possible to translate over IM is exactly the qualities that people like in library workers. Joviality, friendliness, openness. In an IM conversation you can convey information quickly, but the real beauty of it is that you are talking to a real person. You can ask a couple of questions at once, the way most people are wont to do; you can get a name and feel that you have a ally in that big concrete building. Library staff can clarify a patron’s question on the spot, tell a person it’s really not a dumb question at all and make all the same reassuring noises we make in real life, and in the meantime learn a bit more about the search and the patron in order to provide a good answer. IM reference offers many of the same benefits that face-to-face reference offers, and this will become more and more obvious as library staff get more accustomed to the technology and more literate in the social sphere and culture of IM.

No one likes those phone trees. Everyone wants to talk to a real person, to get real assurance from someone who appears to know what they’re talking about. Automation in the library is a good thing, but there’s no need to go automating the reference librarians. The real blessing that web technology brings to a library is the capacity to connect library staff with their patrons more directly and more easily. Don’t hide them behind a bot.

I have spent the last week or so working for my brother-in-law at the bookstore he manages. I’m helping him do inventory, something he has to do every year with the help of a few extra hired hands, but this year he only has me to do his bookly bidding. Doing bookstore inventory, from the perspective of a hired minion like myself, involves taking a barcode reader to every book in a section. And then moving on to another section. Lather, rinse, repeat.

After spending a few days with the bar code reader and watching what’s going on around me in a bustling and successful bookstore, I’ve decided that all librarians should regularly spend some time in the profit sector of the book world. As soon as profit gets involved, the whole concept of good service clarifies itself into the stunningly obvious.

At library school alma mater, several faculty have spent years researching the level of service offered by reference desks at public libraries in the province. The process of gathering information for that study involves sending out fresh-faced first term library students to a public library and having them state one simple request, with no clarification: “I’m looking for a good book to read.” The research measures how far along the classic reference interview a patron actually gets. The results are not very stellar.

When I first learned about the reference interview it sounded ridiculously basic. I mean, yes yes, listen to the patron’s question, ask an open-ended question, ask a closed-ended question, make sure you mention that if they have any more questions they shouldn’t hesitate to come see you. It seemed like straight up common sense to me. I thought they might as well have called this thing “how to have a conversation 101”. But on the ground running I can see why the common sense is important to underscore.

We get so caught up in our jobs, in the minutae of this and that, how much time we have and how much we have to do, how intimately we understand our own service and expect it to be crystal clear to everyone else, we forget how much courage it takes to show up at a desk in the first place. How intimidating it can be to open your mouth and ask a dumb question. How embarrassed people are if their first question is misunderstood, and how unlikely they are to clarify. How people generally understand the education of a librarian; my favourite quote: “My mother tells me I have to go to trade school if I flunk out of university. Maybe I’ll become a librarian.” The patrons basic expectation is that the reference staff will give it a half-hearted try if they have the inclination or the time and that they will be reasonably nice about it; since that’s the basic expectation, that’s often all reference staff do.

In the bookstore, the ultimate goal is always obvious. Have a question? Looking for a book? Can’t remember the author or the title? At the bookstore where I’m doing inventory, the staff jump to show you around and smile the whole time. They will help you remember the title of that book, or will talk about the content of it with you, or will offer to order anything out of Books in Print if you want it. Of course they’re polite. Of course they walk you over to where the book should be and make sure it’s what you want. They want you to buy it. They want you to be so happy with your experience that when you want another book, you won’t even consider going anywhere else.

Profit motive aside, in the end we essentially have the same motive, booksellers and librarians. I want to lead you to the book/resource that fills your needs exactly, and I want you to be so thrilled with it that you want to take it home with you. My brother-in-law wants to end up making a profit out of it, and I guess the “profit” of the library just isn’t so tangible. There’s no fire under a reference librarian’s behind to get them off their chair, to really listen to the patron and find out exactly what they want, and get creative about finding resources and make sure that patron walks away with something of use in his or her hands. If it’s not part of the corporate culture to bend over backwards for a patron, the reference staff isn’t going to see the point. The patrons are getting more than they expected anyway, aren’t they? The books are already free, that should be enough, right? There’s no profit involved; why do more work?

My co-op supervisor Jennifer was always pushing the idea of looking at the business sector for hints and directions, and from this angle I can see her point. In the bookstore they really care if you can read the signs and if the place is attractive. They care about cultivating a sense of space, an atmosphere. There is a clear profit-driven reason to make the place somewhere people want to hang out, and so the interior decorator comes in, the place gets a makeover every few years. That equals bodies in the bookstore, more visibility, and that means profit. It makes me sad that people so often need that golden dollar sign hanging over a thing in order to bother trying to make it worthwhile.

And then there are the things that happened at the bookstore that reminded me I was very much not in a library. At one point a woman came by looking for a book about blogs. She bought a book eventually, but not before telling me all about her blog and the issues she’s having, and getting some suggestions from me that were completely outside of the content of the books that were in stock. It would have been a very successful reference interview, but in the bookstore I felt guilty for the time it took. I’m not there to “chat” with customers, no matter how helpful I am. There was no more profit involved because of my detailed explanation about social networks and RSS readers; the book was bought in any case.

And then yesterday there was a fellow in the café having trouble with the wireless, and they sent for my brother-in-law, the local fix-it guy knows-what-to-do person. He told me to get my ibook and go see if the wireless signal was working from there or if the guy was sitting in a dead spot. The wireless was working fine; it turned out that the guy had never used wireless with that computer before, so he probably didn’t have it enabled, if he in fact had a wireless card at all. It was a windows machine.

“I’ll see who can help you with enabling wireless on windows,” I said, and scampered off. And then I realized; no one can help him enable his wireless. This is a bookstore. Not a library. They provide wireless, not technical assistance. Wireless does not equal sales; bums in seats, while a great thing at the library no matter what, does not equal sales in the bookstore. If the guy sits in the café taking up a valuable seat and just orders coffee after coffee, that’s a net loss. Someone could have sat there and ordered a more profitable lunch. Making a place attractive enough to want to linger in is a good thing, but giving them something other than buying books to wile away their time doing is not a good thing.

So in some ways I’m sorry that we don’t have a profit motive in the library; if we could pin a dollar value to ourselves, perhaps we would be clearer about why our services are so important, and why we need to keep our level of service and enthusiasm consistently high. Why we should be offering more than the patron expects and letting expectations (and levels of trust and usage statistics) rise. But on the flip side, our non-profit status means we are freed from picking a good information need from a bad one; one that will lead us to more profit versus one that’s just a drain on the system.

A couple of weeks every few years in a bookstore for every librarian; I think that would be revealing and inspiring. One of our goals should be to become everything an excellent bookstore is, with just as much excitement, enthusiasm, friendliness, helpfulness, and customer support. Librarians are lucky enough to have the option of going one step further and letting people leave their wallets at home.

To jump back on an old hobby horse: I read an interesting post at digitallibrarian.org this morning on federated searching versus Google Scholar:

So, why is Google able to do this, and do it in a relatively short time span, while libraries haven’t? An arguement could be made that Google has a greater amount of resources at its disposal, and because it is Google, can work out agreements with database providers which allow for the harvesting of their metadata (and full text) for the purpose of providing search results (but at this time, not the full-text directly). Most likely, there is at least some truth to this arguement. But I don’t believe all of the credit goes to Google; a lot of the credit also goes to the Library community for being passive in its approach towards information providers. We now rent our information instead of buying it; we subscribe to journals and databases without assurance that, if we eventually cancel a subscription, we will retain access to the information for the years to which we duly paid. We accept these terms, and because we do, our technology and our services are limited by them.

This is an interesting question, and one that makes librarians very uncomfortable; why was Google able to come up with a search engine that worked, being completely (as far as I know) devoid of any librarians on their team? Why are the efforts of librarians largely ignored by the technorati while a group of young guys in California were able to change the world? There’s a seething whisper coming out of librarianship when it comes to Google and Google Scholar and the grand digitization project: it should have been us. Those interlopers, they were just kids and they turned our world upside down. Why could they do this when we could not?

I think I have at least a short answer for this. And this circles back to the Gorman affair, of course. Librarians as a group have not attracted enough of the paradigm-shifters of the technological world. When someone, like that 19 year old guy who started Google, thinks about building something to harness the power of the internet, they don’t come out of a library science background, nor do they (generally) consider librarianship as a career path. (What tech-savvy person would read the recent words of the ALA’s president-elect and think that Librarianship was the right fit?) People with the ideas and the knowledge to do the things we wish we were doing are coming out of other, more profitable and more technically-focused fields. At this point, it isn’t enough to understand the life of information, or to know the difference between the universe of knowledge and the bibliographic universe or the intricacies of AACR2. You need to understand the technology and what it’s capable of.

There is nothing as inspiring as really understanding how something works. An architect who understands the principles of construction will be more adept at twisting and bending those principles to create something new and interesting. Knowing what’s possible is a springboard to creating meaningful and useful change. Google Scholar was surely created because one of the Google staff saw that the metadata allowed for searches to be modified by type in just such a way to produce results useful for academics; did we know that was possible? Did it even occur to us? Why should it have; we’re not experts on the internet. We like to pride ourselves on being experts on organizing and ranking information sources, but we (for the most part) wouldn’t know an algorithm if it zipped to our homes and organized our underwear drawers for us. In order to deconstruct, we need to at least understand the construction.

Librarians did a very brave thing at one time. Librarians sought to organize information with the understanding that Google was impossible and would never exist. Librarians tried to create order and reason where there was only a morass of paper and ink. Without their efforts we would have been stuck looking at an idiosyncratic pile of looseleaf. If there is no order, there can be no searching or finding. But that’s no longer the case.

Librarians are like communists; they assume the best in people, they presume that any thinking person would rather learn the controlled vocabulary than get 20 extra (useless) hits. Google came in and did the opposite. Google presumes that most people are stupid and allows them to be.

“rogers high speed internet is a piece of shit”

“search the web for erotic stories”

“need ideas visual presentation film monster”

“Alice Walker feminist view on By the light of my father’s smile”

Would Melvil Dewey have ever considered building a classification and retrieval system that allowed users to plug in searches like these?

Not to say that Dewey’s ideas were wrong. Organizing information by subject is a good idea, and if anyone doubts that they should talk to someone who runs a bookstore. As soon as there’s a profit motive, you get to see what really works and what doesn’t when it hits the floor running. Putting things with like things means that users can find more of what they’re looking for (and buy more). Browsability is important. Librarians are good at organizing physical information (ie, books). It appears that we’ve struggled to move out of the card catalogue.

I spent a lot of time in cataloguing class talking about how digital information is actually no different from non-digital information. Whenever something new comes along everyone wants to separate it out; I have written several papers on the topic of digital exceptionalism and how it’s the plague of librarianship. But now I must offer a somewhat altered thesis. A change has happened; the world is not made up of information we can line up on a shelf. A card catalogue is not a search engine, and neither is a library OPAC.

From the digitallibrarian.org:

So, what should we do? We should seek to emulate what Google is doing; not necessarily try to emulate Google Scholar (though we could and have done worse), but seek to work out agreements where we are allowed a copy of the data to which we are providing access. If the folks at Google can work out terms which were acceptable to content providers, I’m sure libraries can as well. Maybe, just maybe, if librarians, who are quite good at organizing and working with indexed information, could start to play with the databases, indexes, and metadata provided by our major information vendors, then perhaps we can start to explore new access tools which are users actually want to adopt and use. Otherwise, instead of being second (after google) in the information search food chain our users consume, we may start to drop to third (after Google Scholar), or worse…

Librarians feel threatened by Google. As a new librarian, I’m not as invested in the way things were, so it’s easy for me to point fingers. But I don’t think emulating Google is the right move. After all, Google already exists. Being a cheap knock-off isn’t going to help anyone. I think we need to reconsider our role.

We missed the digital information organization boat. We are not going to be the kings of catagorization in this universe. But what we can do is get to know the technology, and see where we can contribute in ways that Google can’t. We can work with Google to get the end result that we want.

Mistake #1: when we started creating metadata, we stopped at the monograph level. This is exactly the problem that the Google digitization project is trying to fix, and exactly the reason why we have to rent information. If we had entered every journal article, every essay in a collection, every segment of every book into our catalogue, we wouldn’t need to buy some for-profit publisher’s wares. We should have added journal titles to our catalogue. You should have been able to do an author search and get a citation for every damn piece of writing that person has created, be it a book, a book chapter, a conference paper, a book review, a letter to the editor, or a journal article. But our catalogues don’t work that way, so Google Scholar will always be better.

Unless we offer to do something Google can’t do. And when we do it, we do it for free. We do it for the good of our patrons and of patrons world wide. We do it because everyone should have access to information. Don’t compete with Google; you’ll never win. Technology is not where our competence is.

Who created a bibliographic universe where salaried academics who write, edit, and peer review for free need to have their work bought back from for-profit publishers in order to assign it to their students? We did.

If we can fix that, we’d be an equal partner with Google, not a competitor. They come up with the interface and the algorithm, we make sure it has good content. A match made in heaven.

To-do list: start revolution.

If you accept, as I do, that the library is not merely a depository or a portal, not merely a collection of books and newspapers and microfilm, an repository of externally produced ideas, thoughts, information and argument, but also a set of in-house services and information tools to support not only the collection, but also the universe of knowledge in general, you run into the question: how can the library best order and present that information and those services? If you’re not just a repository, what are you? What’s your mission?

Many librarians and many individuals believe in the value of objectivity. We must not, after all, collect with an eye to a particular political agenda or opinion. We must not gear our libraries to a particular brand of person. We should not highlight one book over another (though displays certainly do this), recommend one opinion over another (though surely this is, in the end, the primary task of the reference librarian), or appear to take a particular side in a political debate (though the ALA is often guilty of this). A library, these objectivity lessons teach us, is a place of universal knowledge, where the ideas, opinions, and values of the patron lead them to the books of their choice. The library is a unique resource for each person, viewed through the prism of their goals and preferences, tailored to their requirements. The library itself should not impose anything upon the patron. In this way, the patron shapes himself; the library helps the library to create his own views. The librarian and her wooly opinions do not shape the patron.

The flip side: reading the paper every morning makes me angry. Watching people who’s opinion differs so painfully from my own get so much air time and column space is enough to do that, but what truly angers me is the ignorance that’s ruling the day. Ignorance played such a significant role in the last American election (with such a large proportion of Republican voters hoodwinked into believing that Saddam Hussein, along with Osama Bin Laden, was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001). Ignorance of history, the nature of our constitutional democracy, and the value multiculturalism and pluralism are currently leading to a lot of anxiety and fear mongering.

So I start thinking: what if the libraries addressed societal ignorance in a very upfront, in your face way? What if the libraries started putting together displays, speaker sessions, question and answer periods, countering the ignorance in the news with actual facts? Right now in Canada the history of marriage has become a hot topic. Most of the politicians don’t understand that history, but enjoy discussing it in colourful terms all the same. What if the libraries were to support counter-intelligence? Is that political? Is it political even if it’s just about correcting misinformation?

Of course this isn’t limited to the same-sex marriage issue. What about Islam? When suddenly “Islamic extremist” became the buzzword of the moment, isn’t it part of the role of the library to provide information on Islam, which is a peaceful faith with a vibrant intellectual history, right in the front of the library, as a display?

What if the reference question isn’t limited to the individual patron at all? What if the librarian were to listen to the community as a whole, and address the issues that are rising and attempt to meet them with real, supported, “unbiased” information? Should the librarian be listening to the radio, watching TV, reading the papers, and providing information where misinformation is clouding people’s judgment? In order to function, after all, a democracy needs an informed citizenry. Where the Muslims are being confuses with terrorists, provide displays, speakers, interactive tutorials, information for the community to help them sort out the difference. Put it in their face. Make it impossible to ignore. We will not let you become bigots, the signs will shout. We will provide you with the information you need to be good, caring, decent people. When the devout of a community are being rabble-roused by ambitious politicians with threats of a loss of church autonomy, a session explaining the nature of the proposed laws, how such threats are empty, would seem to be in order. While the classical sense of objectivity may be compromised, the goal of objectivity remains; the populace should have the whole picture, not just the propaganda. When the press, the politicians, and the preachers are spouting lies and misunderstandings, who must step up to add a modicum of truth to that mix?

Ah, righteous fury. How I enjoy getting riled up by it.

I’ve been helping to edit an article that my friend is writing that touches on these issues from a historical perspective. She writes about the goals of the librarian, and seen through her research, I’m lead to an uncomfortable place with my righteous ire. How is this different from the ancient idea of improving (or taming) the working class? They will read what we give them to read, we will mold and fashion these folks into something respectable. We accept the role of the librarian as an educator on some level; but how far should that teaching role go? We shouldn’t be aiming to “improve” the people, right? We turn our noses up at this sentiment. (Though, we accept that we are “improving” people by making them readers early on; we are “improving” the literacy of babies by providing picture books, aren’t we?) We’re supposed to give people want they want. We are resurrecting genre fiction, we will look down our noses at a librarian who avoids leading people to the Danielle Steeles or who hides the Sweet Valley High book truck from the tweens (we used to do this when I was a page at the public library). We shouldn’t judge people by what read. We shouldn’t presume to dictate “good” and “bad” fiction for them. And yet we still judge by filtering our collection with our respect for good scholarship and with our collection policies. Fiction is one thing. Non-fiction pushes us back out of postmodern sleepiness and into rock solid reality. Yes and no, truth and lies. There is still an element of “improving” involved, isn’t there? Is this a good thing?

And yet, and yet…there is a serious misinformation problem. People blame the internet, but I blame the people. It’s not just about misinformation; it’s about unchallenged misinformation. If we accept that each person has their unalienable right to be ignorant, does that prevent us from challenging the politician on his lies? We accept that a politician will lie; what about a preacher? If a preacher is rabble-rousing and fear-mongering, do we have a duty to provide information? If an activist is trying to draw some attention to an environmental issue in the area, and we have proof that his theories are grounded in local history and scientific research, do we have a role to play there as well? Are we leaving this sort of thing up to the content providers, because we claim not to be adjudicators of such matters? In that case, what sort of information providers are we, if we see an information need we know we can fill but opt not to fill it for political reasons?

Can information provision ever be non-political? Can it be objective? Can we ever avoid the spectre of “improving” our patrons?