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Education is not a routine activity which is divorced from national defense. It is, in the most fundamental and important sense, the first line of national defense.

A quote from the former mayor of Chicago, snapped inside a display at the Chicago Public Library. Jeremy recommended that I take a picture of it for Jason. It’s a bit disturbing to think about education being a branch of national defence, but I suppose a good education could be a defence against just about anything. Right?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8kd4fC1bwo]

Steven Bell suggests that we librarians are too nice for our own good.

As one explores and delves into the world of library blogs it soon becomes apparent that the rules of disengagement dominate the landscape. There one is likely to see a repetitious flood of posts exclaiming “What a great post by so-and-so” or “She’s got a must read post today”. Rarely does one see a post that starts with “I have to disagree” or “Boy, does he have it wrong.” Most commenting is no better. It’s mostly gratuitous back patting. But why bother anyway? Comments are secondary to actual posts and they reach a much smaller audience. One exception might be ACRLog, a blog for which I write. Geared specifically to academic librarians it still allows fairly unrestrictive commenting, and on occasion comments may offer brilliant opposing views. But these are few and far between; the overall dearth of comments, even for posts that make controversial statements, is shockingly surprising for this profession.

I’ve got two reactions to this; the sympathetic one, and the raised eyebrow one.

One one hand: yes, librarianship is not the world’s more ‘rigorous’ when it comes to scholarship. I would be very happy to be challenged a little more often, particularly as a relatively new librarian who still has a heck of a lot to learn. And when I find an article in the literature dealing with my precise struggles and challenges at work, it’s pretty disheartening to see trite, sophmoric and downright pathetic options listed as best practices in some of the supposedly sterling journals of the profession. I’ll be among the first to jump up and agree that we tend not to think deeply enough or research long enough. We’ve got a million other things to do, unfortunately, and I don’t know a single librarian who isn’t flailing a little under all the work. So yes; it would be nice to dig a little deeper.

But let’s move on to the raised eyebrow. (Steven, you know you asked for it!) The basic accusations here centre around us being “too nice”. We don’t stir up debate enough. We don’t disagree enough. We don’t show our selves off as true (aggressive) social scientists, clinging to the stats as ultimate truth and displaying our hard-won research to the world. We don’t fight amongst each other, in an academic kind of way. We are, as he says, “the nice guys of higher education.” But you know what? No we’re not. We’re the nice women of higher education. Librarianship is, for the most part, filled to the brim with women. Women, who were attracted to librarianship in the first place based on its positive, affirming and stress-reduced traits. It’s not generally acceptable in western cultures for a woman to be aggressive, and certainly not aggressive in the workplace; what’s considered confidence in a man would label a woman strident at best or a bitch at worst. Why would we go out of our way to do a bellyflop into someone’s work and say, “I completely disagree with this ridiculous argument” in blatant, argumentative terms? We have way more powerful tools in our arsenal. We have agreement to play with. And silence to lay on thick.

Rather than an absence of debate in the profession, I submit to you that we have lots of it, but you need to be more subtle in your interpretations to understand it. Librarians use a more cautious, conciliatory approach to debate. Let’s take Steven’s examples: he mentions contentious posts that recieve no comment. Well, isn’t “no comment” a comment as well? Sure, you could call it passive aggressive, but I prefer to think of it as using praise to reinforce the good, and silence to discourage the bad. The best thing you can do in a situation where someone has said something clearly offensive is ignore it, and spend your time instead of speaking only of the things you do agree with. That way, we take up more bandwidth with the things we think are worth it. This is otherwise known as “don’t feed the troll.” It’s generally good advice.

First: we don’t blog for pay (well, most of us don’t, at least), so why should we waste our time thinking and writing about things we don’t find useful? (It’s true that critical reactions to things are learning experiences too, but no less so than responding to things that are challenging in a more positive and reinforcing way.) Silence is powerful; librarianship has opted to eshew open hostility in favour of positive discussion and praise. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Librarians will certainly tell me when they disgree with me, but why must they be aggressive about it in order to be seen as rigorous or thoughtful? Most librarians would rather pick the one thing about my argument that they liked or that resonated with them, and ignore the rest. They are not just patting my head when they do this; they’re pointing out their disagreement in a most polite and subtle way. In a sophisticated way.

Why must we be aggressive in order to be seen as rigorous? There is no natural relationship between those things, unless the purpose is to denigrate cooperative and collaborative knowledge construction in favour of a more war-like, negative debating style of learning. It’s not really fair of me to suggest that one is the way of women and one is the way of men, but there are gender distinctions in western communications, and and this is one way to describe them. Roughly speaking. Why should librarianship model themselves after male-dominated, aggressively negative disciplines? Why is that seen as a better means to an end? Is their output really so much better?

We all work in the same tiny pools, and we need each other in many ways throughout the our (usually long) careers. I think it says a lot about us that we don’t want to make enemies of each other; a person who says something you disagree with today might be your best ally tomorrow, and I think we all know that. It is more functionally productive for us to try and see the positives in each other’s thought rather than focus on the negatives in a space where collaboration is the best way forward (and I believe quite strongly that it is).

Sure, it’s easy to read through the literature and roll your eyes (as I expressed quite clearly above that I have done). But I’m not going to name names. It would be more useful for me to instead take my criticisms, bolster them with bigger, better, more creative and sustainable ideas, and write a whole new article, citing the useless ones with grace. I am far more likely to enact positive change by rising above petty debate. Denigrating the ideas of others is far more likely to make it look like I’m feathering my own nest and trying to look super smrt in front of my peers than actively trying to make the world a better place. And maybe that’s the distinction here; librarians are not defined by their scholarship. Librarians are defined by their work, which is, writ large, an attempt to make the world a better place. We put our efforts toward that rather than toward showing off.

Let’s not stop the nice. Nice isn’t weak. Nice is a form of power.

Or, as Margaret Atwood wrote in her story “Gertrude Talks Back” in Good Bones and Simple Murders: “I’m not wringing my hands. I’m drying my nails.”

Yesterday morning, I listened to episode 5 of a 6 part series on CBC radio called Spin Cycles. It’s a documentary about spin, or “how those in power can manipulate facts in order to make their case for the rest of us.” I’ve been listening to it for a few weeks now, but episode 5 suddenly really hit me: it’s about citations. It struck me that a discussion about political spin is a perfect example of why it’s important to be critical about your sources.

In episode 5 (click here to hear the mp3 file), the documentary described how PR firms designed American reactions to WW1, the Gulf war, and the Iraq war. In WW1, the PR firms painted the Germans as baby-killers in order to rouse American sentiment against them; in the Gulf war, a PR firm created a fake witness to testify that Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubators in Kuwait and leaving them “on the cold floor to die”. (The witness was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and lived in Washington; she hadn’t been present during the invasion of Kuwait in the first place. But boy did she give a tearful testimony!) And it was a PR company, tasked by the CIA with the responsibility of creating the circumstances to unseat Saddam Hussein, who created the Iraqi National Congress. And it was the Iraqi National Congress’s president, Ahmed Chalabi, a de facto paid employee of the CIA, who testified to the American government and press that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. At the end of WW1, someone asked a journalist what caused the war, and he responded that the politicians lied to the journalists, and then believed the lies when they saw them in print. That seems to be exactly what happened with the current war (if you can accept that high level policy makers didn’t know who this guy was, and who was paying him).

I was thinking about how obvious this example is; we didn’t check to see who these people were, we heard what they were saying, it sounded good, it seemed to fit into our understanding of the world, so we just bought it. But we should have asked the same questions we ask students to ask when they are looking at a source; who produced this? Who paid for it? What are this person’s motivations? Who benefits from this perspective? Who am I hurting if I buy this perspective without carefully examining it first?

The difference between an academic (and by this I mean a person who completes a PhD and goes on to take a variety of sessional positions at a school of higher education and vies for, but does not always gain, a tenure-track position) and a librarian is something I’ve been pondering a great deal lately. Having spent time in both universes, and thus having passed from one paradigm to another, I’m regularly intrigued by the differences. All of it is in the training, I find.

One of the things I think is fairly universal with academics is a general disdain for tertiary sources. I thought this was mostly a bias coming from the particularly snobbish elements of the history and literature crowd, but I sense that it’s much more wide spread than that. Witness this recent college ban on Wikipedia, which is supported with statements like, “oh, it’s not just that we don’t trust wikipedia! Students shouldn’t be citing any kind of encyclopedia, they are silly sources, you know, for kids!” (My paraphrasal, of course.)

In my experience, there’s a hierarchy in the world of documents: primary sources are best. I have met more than one professor (at a certain Ivy League institution with which I have some familiarity) who have lectured on at length about the purity of luxuriating only in primary sources, letting them sink into your skin, swirl around in your mouth, run its fingers through your hair. Read the primary sources and ignore everything else. Original interpretions arrive in this way, from the very font of the river, not from any other direction. Primary is first, and first is always the winner.

Secondary sources are still up there in high esteem (unless, as I say, you’re a certain kind of Harvard professor), but on the whole only because they are the discussion board of academe. This is where the action is, this is where we fight over our intepretations of the real stuff (those Primary Sources!). Secondary sources are the speeches academics give to each other. They are excellent because we have excellent ideas about primary sources, and the rest of the (academic) world should hear all about them.

And then we have tertiary sources. Tertiary sources are full of what an academic might write as a lark one afternoon (post tenure) when a colleague is editing some title or other. Tertiary sources are what non-academics tend to write, with the education they gleaned from greater minds. They consist are short, bland, normative, reductionist descriptions written with junior high school students as an audience. This is knowledge for the unwashed. Fast food knowledge. Knowledge in bite-sized chunks. Knowledge for the ADHD generation. I suspect that it’s widely believed that they employ a particular, watered-down terminology so as not to intimidate their readers with big words. Encyclopedias have pictures. Therefore, they are a relative of picture books.

I’m very familiar with the bias against tertiary sources. I felt it myself well into library school. They are considered reduced information, and thus somehow suspect; they are designed (so it seems) for the housewife market, those people who take encyclopedia salesmen up on their offer to provide a wealth of information for little Johnny. Encyclopedias are for junior high, not for smarty pants grownups like us. If knowledge is gained by experiencing it first hand, a twice-removed paragraph on it is a far cry from sufficient.

It’s hard to explain the value of a reference collection when so many people have no regard whatsoever for tertiary sources.

The other day I woke up with this rather awful metaphor in my head that relates to this. Imagine that information is meat. Meat in all its forms; ribs, filet mignon, peameal bacon, smoked turkey sliced from the deli counter, a side of wild boar. An academic will tell you that the best way to find out anything about a new piece of random meat is to cook it up and taste it. That way you’ll understand what it is, you’ll savour it’s qualities, sense the care that went into feeding this animal, the preparation it went through, and this way you will glean the kind of cut you ended up with, the freshness of it, etc. etc. The only way to really know the meat is to be one with the meat; dive right in! It might take a lifetime to get through all the different kinds, but you will understand the meat if you persevere. Particularly if you stick to only one particular kind of meat. Say, beef brisket, in all it’s variety. For guidance, speak only to other beef brisket connoisseurs. Subscribe to beef brisket journals. Travel to see far-away butchers to learn from their ways. This is an academic take on understanding meat.

Now, on the other hand, a librarian seeking to find out what sort of meat we’re dealing with will look at the label on the package, check the date and the supplier, and tell you exactly what kind of meat you’re looking at. her report will not in the same loving detail, not by a long shot, but she will give you exactly what you’re looking for.

This is because librarians are one with tertiary literature. Librarians deal in metaknowledge. When I first discovered that information is organized like meat in a butcher shop, I was shocked. I’d always been told I had to eat my way through the store to find what I was looking for. Who knew someone had already slapped a useful tag on it, and I might even find it before it went off?

One of the pieces of the puzzle I wanted to sort out coming to this MLearn conference was the issues of tech toys; are we trying to integrate Treos and Blackberrys an ipods because they’re cool, or because there’s actually some pedagogical value to using them? I’m personally of the opinion that there are lots of cool things in the world, and lots of things that students enjoy, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that all cool things can or should be used for our purposes. There are some things I think maybe we should leave alone.

But if there’s a good reason to use something, I’m all ears. I’m here to be convinced. And I’m not even a hard sell, I just want to see the extra pedagogical value that we can’t get any other way. I want to see that extra piece that takes a technology beyond “that’s cool”.

One of the tech toys I was expecting to see here, and expecting to not be impressed about, is cell phones. Like many other educational “toys”, it often seems to me that we adopt these other media when the standard one is still the best. For instance, while it’s great that it’s possible to download a PDF file to your cell phone, it would be easier, faster, and cheaper to download it on a computer. Does anyone actually want to read a PDF on a cell phone?

But I did hear some interesting things about cell phones so far. First, there was talk about sending broadcast messages from instructors to students via text message. There are a few things that make this interesting; first, email is on the decline. Frankly I’m delighted to hear that, because email should be used for the thing it does best (exchanging lengthy messages in text over the internet that aren’t necessarily instantaneous) and not for everything (rapidfire email chat, file transfer, important alerts). There was one example, that came from student feedback, about helpful messages sent to students over the Easter holiday while they were working on reports; I like the idea of instructors being able to give last-minute help (“That book we talked about in class, the one that’s so critical to this assignment, went missing from the library, but there’s another source that’s just as good, there’s a copy of it available on the course website.”). Of course there’s a training piece there for instructors; text messages cost the student money, so they really need to not send many of these things, and make sure the messages they send are really awesomely important. But I don’t think it’s a horrible idea.

Immediately someone in the room said, come on, how are we going to get faculty to take care of get ANOTHER piece of this tech pie? They have a hard enough time just getting student emails, now you want them to get student phone numbers? I think there’s a simple answer to that, though. Faculty shouldn’t be information collectors. The LMS should handle that, the SIS (student Information System) could be (and should be) the repository for all student information. The LMS should draw that information out of SIS for use in classrooms. That way students could just toggle the SMS option on or off, and faculty could just make use of it if they want to or not.

Second, they showed us a project they were working on in the UK where students could send pictures from their phones to a sort of discussion board. On its own, this idea isn’t that exciting, but in a course that has assignments based on things that require images, I think it’s great to have students go out on field trips and share a record of what they see with the class. Of course, you don’t need a cell phone to do this. You could use a camera and just upload the photo. But I do like the idea. I spoke with a woman from Athabasca University over lunch about using GPS software in a cell phone to trigger a series of sound/audio files on a handheld, so that students could walk around a site, and, based on their precise location, hear details about it. We talked about the idea of having a variety of students do projects about a specific site, from the perspective of different disicplines. So you could get a perspective of the place as a site of religious ritual, or from an architectural perspective, a religious perspective, an anthropological or sociological perspective, and so forth. Environmental, even biological projects. And what an amazing final product it would be! Students could create content for an interpretive centre that could offer up a multi-disciplinary tour of a site, complete with audio recordings, images, and text. Very cool.

In another session, one about the Mobile Library (how could I help but attend?) the idea of making your library’s catalogue browseable via Treo or Blackberry arose. On one hand, I sat there aghast. Browsing with a cell phone in Canada is just way too expensive for students. It’s way too expensive for me and I have a full time job. I know it’s cheaper in other countries, but I just can’t see it as being feasible here. But on the other hand…the idea of a mobile device in the stacks intrigues me. It would be great to be up in the stacks, hanging out among the books, and be able to punch in a title and get a call number without having to go back downstairs to a computer. It would be additionally awesome to hook it up with GPS and have it map the route out for you; how to get from where you are now to the book you want. Can we provide that? Can we provide handheld devices so that students can wander the stacks and find what they’re looking for? I can’t imagine how you’d do that. But it’s a neat idea.

So my personal jury is still sort of out on the use of the gadgets. But I’m starting to see some interesting applications for some creative assignments.

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.