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I was barely listening to the radio just now; I was mostly just putting away my laundry and thinking about what an amazing week it’s been and what’s going to happen tomorrow when my brother-in-law and my nephew come to pick me up for the holiday. But there is a fellow talking on the radio, and my ears picked up when I heard this:

“One day the books will all be arranged based on mathematics,” he said. “Another day, it will be based on current events.”

Not knowing what this show was actually about, I immediately thought of a library, about Dewey and the Library of Congress. Can you imagine if we could rearrange our collections with the snap of a finger, and did so regularly based on particular themes? No more objective classification scheme; a different order every week. Imagine what sources would start rubbing shoulders if you could do something like that! What a unique perspective you would get every week! Imagine the serendipity; toss the disciplines up in the air and let the subjects define themselves in different ways, multiple ways. Human feeling encoded into the stacks; the multiplicity of opinions and possiblities all made flesh before our eyes, shifting and changing as they always must.

Turns out he was talking about a bookstore in Montreal with a great front window. Well, that’s okay. I got my piece of a dream out of it anyway.

The (possible) future of reader’s advisory: Story Code.

“What am I going to read today?”

A familiar question to most readers, because it is a struggle choosing what to read next.

Well, StoryCode is here to help.

StoryCode.com is a unique source of inspiring book recommendations and a great way to find the next book to read. And its power comes from the collaborative passion of readers.

It was only a matter of time ebfore someone used social networking software and complex tagging to do something like this. I’m sorry the library world didn’t do it first. (Check it out: there isn’t a single librarian among them.)

The meme of the moment: how to lose your “techie” librarians, started by Michael Stephens. I read through the posts by my esteemed colleagues Sherri, Dorothea (my evil twin!), Jessamyn, Karen, and Sarah, among others. Fascinating reading. These lists are a combination of a variety of things; good experiences turned inside out, bad experiences (personal and merely observed) laid bare, intreprations of the attitude of the profession as a whole, through the professional literature, certain high profile kerfuffles in librarianship (and their fallout), and the culminative impression we get from reading the daily stories from tech librarians around the world though the librarian blogosphere. I am reminded of how very lucky I am to work where I work, with the people I’m surrounded by. Reading through all those posts, and by writing my own list of what would turn me away, it’s clear that it’s all in the attitude. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?

10 Attitudes That Would Make this “techie” Librarian High-Tail it Out of Your Library:

10. The rule is, if you get your hands dirty, it’s not a professional task. In spite of the fact that writing code doesn’t actually get your hands dirty, it does in a virtual sense, so it’s best to consider those librarians less than entirely professional.

9. Remember that as long as you have a librarian nearby who works with computers in some form, you don’t need to actually learn how to do anything with them yourself. Surely this person has been hired simply to alleviate that pressure from you. Just ask them to do whatever petty tasks you have hovering around you. It’s sort of like having your own secretary, really.

8. You can’t trust people who know more about technology than you do. Second guess them at every turn. Don’t trust their estimations of timelines; they always take more time than they need. If something is effortless to use, it was probably effortless to build as well. Don’t let a tech librarian bully you. You may have no idea how that application works, but you still know best.

7. Things that are “fun” are not educationally valuable. Keep that in mind at all times. Students shouldn’t read email from their friends at a public terminal, and they sure as heck shouldn’t be using IM to communicate with anyone. No one of any worth communicates in short bits like that. Libraries are places for silence, deep thinking, and serious learning. That is all.

6. This should be your mantra: traditional librarians are the “high-concept” people. The thinkers, the movers, the real planners. Traditional librarianship is where the direction for the profession is going to come from. Technology librarians are more “low-concept”, more how-to and technical; they’re your support staff. They basically act out the big plans of the others. It’s sometimes politically incorrect to say this outloud, but don’t imagine that anyone thinks otherwise.

5. Blogs are stupid. “Blog people” are even stupider. What’s a wiki? Why should I care? It’s best to approach all new applications not only with skepticism, but with active distrust and scorn.

4. Tech librarians cannot take on leadership roles. It’s like this: every person has a finite amount of ability. If you have someone at your workplace who’s pretty good with computers, that ability naturally reduces their ability in the “social skills” column. Tech librarians don’t know how to manage, inspire, or strategize. If your tech librarian also likes either a) Star Trek, b) Battlestar Gallactica, or c) Douglas Adams, what you’ve got on your hands is a geek. Geeks are not cool, no matter what pop culture tells you. Geeks are team players, they’re support people. They have their place, but that place is not leading committees, participating in high-level strategic planning, or out in public, representing the library.

3. The (physical) collection is our most important asset. Everything else is a frill. Remind tech librarians of this regularly. The moment this “computers” fad has passed, she will be out of a job.

2. Don’t be supportive of your tech librarian’s goals. When an opportunity comes up for them to apply for funding to help them do something they’ve spent years wanting to do, don’t support that. Don’t proof-read, discuss, pass on, or otherwise support that funding request. After all, we all have our goals; pie-in-the-sky dreams about an application that might possibly (if we’re lucky) be useful to the community at large isn’t really the business of the library. Focus on more concrete projects.

1. If something happens to go well, don’t congratulate your tech librarian. Don’t tell her that you’re glad she’s around. Geeks don’t have the same social needs as other people; just nod and move on to the next project.

I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by in the last few days. I’ve been meaning to thumb through this book ever since my last term in library school when I took a course in Information Visualization and my instructor recommended it to me. I picked it up then and leafed through it, but I had so many ideas in my head at the time that I could barely fit any more in there.

You know how you get those special goggles on whenever you’re reading something really good, something really ground-breaking, and suddenly everything you see relates to it? That’s where I am with metaphor right now, and it’s because of the Lakoff book.

The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we thinks what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

Since starting seriously working with faculty and students at the library, either in explaining how a piece of software might be useful to them or helping them to use the stuff they’re required to, I find myself dropping the term “metaphor” into almost every other conversation I have. And yes, people do indeed look at me funny when I do it, but I persist. I find it helpful.

My current motto is this: if you know what a piece of software thinks it is, you have a better sense of what you can probably use it for, and how to go about using it. You know where to look and what to expect from it. If an application thinks it’s a book, you know you can open it and find chapters inside it. There’s probably an index at the end and a table of contents at the beginning. A good metaphor lets the user understand what affordances an application has; it gives them the rules and a sense of a starting place. Since lots of software has the beginnings of a metaphor, or one that isn’t well expressed, sometimes most of the battle in getting faculty and students to feel at home with a given application is to introduce them to that metaphor more directly. I swear by this one; comparing mediawiki to genesis (name it and it appears!) is an actually helpful way of describing the fact that you need to name and link to a new page before it will appear. People can mock me all they want; talking about metaphors lets me see that dawning realization on people’s faces faster than anything else, so I’m sticking to it.

Last night I read an article for a meeting this morning, and while it was full of lots of interesting things, what kept popping out at me over and over was the fact that the author was saddled with a complete absence of metaphor when it came to digital collections. He talked about mainframes and electronically encoded data and access points and networks, all of which was 100% correct. But it failed entirely to convey any affordances to the user. It hit me once again; librarianship has failed to come up with useful metaphors for these things. We haven’t found a way to put the idea of what these things think they are into the users’ heads, and so the affordances available to them are clear as mud.

Sometimes I think we’re so keen to be seen as tech savvy that we forget our backgrounds; so many librarians come from a humanities background that I feel certain we can solve this one. Metaphor isn’t just for poetry. Metaphor is the user interface for our services, the verbal interface that helps build a scaffold in the heads of our users. “Database” doesn’t help; that’s a meaningless term. My blog is a database. Google is a database. Mainframes and access points are real and true, but how can we get across to users what they really have access to? The library without walls needs some structure. We need those metaphorical stacks!

Yesterday afternoon, the university library system through a party to introduce the new information professionals to the rest of the staff (there are some 250 librarians across the whole library system, so that’s saying something). It was a little overwhelming, but an amazing experience, and I had a great talk with a librarian who had been working in the same library for 31 years. She told me stories about the kind of changed she’d seen in libraries since she was a new librarian herself. It was completely fascinating, and I may have to take time out to go back downtown and seek her out to hear more.

That shift from card catalogues to where we are currently is really something; not just in terms of databases and OPACs, but in terms of the way we can serve users and how much more streamlined our processes have become. I heard a story about how smaller libraries in the system had a dedicated phone line to the main library reference desk in order to get information out of the single copy of the union catalogue, so they could tell a patron which library they needed to go to to get their book. Talk about librarian as interface!

I love stories about old library technology and service methods, but here’s something I don’t understand; why do people think those stories are funny? I really don’t find them funny at all. I find them fascinating. Librarians have always pushed the limits of the technology at hand in order to do their jobs as well as they could, no matter what that technology was. Card catalogues don’t strike me as funny; they were the absolute best method of organizing and sharing a morass of information without a keyword-searchable database. They were the only way to empower users to do their own searching. They were anticipating the database in ways no one else could have done. I certainly don’t take current technology for granted, but hearing about how librarians stepped into the breech between what patrons needed and the limits of data organization before databases and digital catalogues makes me very grateful to be a new librarian now rather than then; I can sense that there must have been a certain level of frustration when the only interface you can use to determine whether or not a book was at one college or the next, at the main library or at in department collection, was a telephone call to a another busy reference desk. But they really pulled out all the stops, and I can only applaud them for that.

So, tell me, why are stories about old technology funny? I feel like people laugh because of how low-tech it is (like ditto machines and monstrous computers that accept punch cards), and how silly it would look next to our current tiny laptops and cell phones and bar codes, but that doesn’t seem fair. You can’t really compare technology backwards like that; people did what they could with what they had, and to be perfectly honest I think they managed to come up with more creative and thorough public services based on the technology they had access to than we have. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, after all; both the technology and the librarians got us to where we are now. We don’t have to call up a larger library in order to determine the location of a book. With that extra energy, we should be providing a higher level of service than they did back in the early 70s. But are we? I guess it remains to be seen who gets the last laugh.

I’ve been following the Sony-BMG rootkit DRM issues with interest. There’s a series of themes to that scandal that reappear at regular intervals; one of the most compelling to me is the perceptions of the user that’s becoming increasingly obvious. The user as criminal, and as cash cow; the user as high-tech hacker, and then as dumb sheep who pay the ignorance premium.

Sony-BMG is clearly interested more in your wallet than your personal experience of their products. They seem to feel that they’re sitting on hot property and they want to make sure you pay for it, you dirty, dirty commoners. But even more than that, they want to mediate the user’s experience of their product. They want the user to pass through several levels of technology and difficulty (using a custom player, installing software on the your machine, etc.) in order to experience the product in the right way.

While there’s an argument to be made that the malware-inspired rootkit that Sony forced upon its paying users is a sign that technological evolution have had an impact on the way the music industry communicates with us (modelling themselves after crackers rather than the open source movement), on the whole, this whole mess is a testament to an industry that doesn’t want change, that distrusts technology and the people who know how to use it. Some homegrown folks worked out better ways to distribute information and got there first. The big guys are fighting back with traditional ways of thinking and the morality card rather than coming up with a better economic model. The conflict is a perfect description of an industry that is trying to stall technological evolution rather than allowing it to get under their skin and fundamentally change them.

Sony-BMG did not, I’m sure, mean to wreck their users computers and open up gaping security holes in the operating systems of the people who actually paid for their products. The fact that they did shows that they are (I would say) criminally negligent, and that the people making the decisions weren’t qualified to have an opinion about what constitutes fair DRM, and didn’t care enough about their users to ask the questions about the damaging installs. They will blame their tech guys for this. They will blame their own ignorance of things technical. But none of that is fair; the strategic directive behind this is to blame. What they wanted was a controlled product. They wanted to mediate the way we seek out and use their wares, and were not prepared to tolerate anything less.

Looking at all the discussion around the rootkit issue, I’m prompted to make an unlikely comparison to the way librarianship talks about controlled vocabularies. Bear with me on this one; a bit strange, but still revealing.

A controlled vocabulary is sort of like the rootkit of librarianship. In order to find the product (the information you want), you need to play by our predetermined, sometimes nonsensical rules. You can’t use your own language or your intuition, you can’t ask your question and get some answers. You can’t take the skills you’ve honed in your other forms of searching and apply them to the product we manage. No, you need to leave all that at the door and use our system. And in order to use it, you need to learn how we think, and find things by first framing them according to our values and perspective. You need to install the rootkit that we are offering you in order to get where you’re going.

Like the language around DRM, many librarians tut-tut at people who use search systems that don’t conform to the traditional values of librarianship, that reveal information in ways many librarians don’t approve of (see Michael Gorman on Google).

And this is not to say that I’m perfectly uncritical of keywords. I recognize the pros and cons of a controlled vocabulary and human ordering. I guess where this comes from is looking long and hard at what’s going on with Google, and being disappointed that it was them who came up with it. Sure, they have the money and the time and the skills, but still; it disappoints me that it’s Google that worked this one out, and that it’s still Google who’s on the forefront of information organization.

I’m frustrated by Michael Gorman, in his role as the president of the ALA, is telling the world that Google Print (now Google Book Search) is such a bad thing. I’m frustrated that it took someone other that librarians to stop and think that the scanning == indexing equation is a natural progression of subject headings; it’s what the first cataloguers would have done if they’d had the tools to do it. I know about the legal issues around Google’s project, and I’m hoping against hope that Google wins in the end. Because technology has presented us with a better means of getting at the content of books and articles, and it would be a crying shame to lose that. And no, it’s not just about bad keyword searching. (If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone complain that Google’s algorithm is based entirely on how many times a word appears on a page, I’d be a rich woman.) I’m frustrated that so many librarians are willing to stay ignorant about what Google is actually doing and cling to this old trope about how a dumb search engine works. With a combination of human categorizing (tagging/metadata), authority control, and full text searching, we can help users arrive at a better search result that goes deeper than the cover of the book. We can help people find what they’re looking for, which is supposed to be the point. I’m frustrated that Google Book Search seems to mean e-books to people (even to some librarians). Is an index an e-book? Are subject headings giving away too much of the book? Are summaries and abstracts just small, abridged e-books? I’m disappointed by how much of the truly innovative thinking about cataloguing, metadata and searching isn’t coming from the library community, and how much resistance I’ve seen to those non-librarians by some of us on the inside. We should be inspired by these technological advances, not wringing our hands like Sony BMG.

This isn’t about bowing down to the gods of Google. Likewise, I’m not suggesting that the music industry roll over and accept that we’re all going to snag free copies of whatever we want, whenever we want it. What I’m hoping for from all angles is the openness to accept change, to be challenged and changed by it, and to create a better information environment because of it. I’d like to see the music industry stop hating its user base and start catering to it instead; I’d like to see librarians stop hating/fearing Google and start working in partnership with them for the benefit of their patrons.

Since a dear friend of mine has recently been offered a job with Google, I’ve had time to think about what it might mean to consider Google a partner rather than an enemy. There’s so much synergy between us and them, so many interesting ways our worlds intersect. Do we want to be DRM pushers like Song BMG, or do we want to be open source and user-friendly? Be at the forefront of change or in the courts trying to preserve the information landscape of the 1950s?