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Virtual Reference is one of those things that I think is a fantastic idea that’s not being turned into a fantastic service. A good idea taken not quite in the right direction. And the more I think about reference (I think about reference an awful lot, I must admit), the more I like the idea of virtual reference.

At the moment reference too often means “the reference desk”. One of the things I discover more and more is that reference itself has nothing to do with any desk; it’s an expert service that can be provided pretty much anywhere. We’re most used to providing that service through a desk, but in order to really bring reference service into the present, we need to think outside the box about what the service is and how many different ways we can be providing it. For me, this goes hand in hand with the idea of integrating librarians into the curriculum; why are we waiting for those boiling-point questions to reach the desk? How can we present in other ways on campus (and off it) to answer questions at the point of need?

Virtual reference is one answer to that question. Rather than be at the desk, we can be behind an “ask us” link, there in case anyone needs help. They don’t have to come into the library, they don’t have to even know where the library is. This is the first service that pushes outside of the desk to bring reference service to users in alternative ways.

But to date the idea of virtual reference has been very much akin to the way we think about the OPAC or databases or webpage resources generally; they’re best if they’re available all the time. That the best thing about these things is their ease of use and the fact that anyone can use them any time they feel like it. So we end up with these systems are designed to be useable any time, because apparently that’s what the web means. Constantly on.

What we’re missing in this rush to be available constantly is one of the key elements that make a library a good library; it belongs to a particular place. Librarians spend an awful lot of time and effort making sure their collections reflect their users needs; they conduct user needs assessments to make sure every element of their services reflects a demonstrated need in their communities. A library is a reflection of the community it serves; if you want detailed legal information, you’re going to find better sources in a law library than in an arts & social sciences library. If you need detailed scientific information, go to a science library, right? This is why there are so many different kinds of librarians and different kinds of libraries. If you were looking for detailed information about the history of Guelph, Ontario, you wouldn’t necessarily go to the public library in Victoria, BC. You would go to the Guelph Public Library, or the local archives in Guelph. Right?

So why is it when we moved into virtual reference services we thought these local services were no longer significant? Why is this something we feel we can just outsource? Where does this idea come from that reference questions are so generic they can be answered by any librarian anywhere in the world?

Once I had a specific question about a publication by a faculty member at a school Boston. I noticed they had a virtual reference service at their library, so I got in the queue and asked them. But I wasn’t talking to a librarian in Boston. I was talking to a librarian in California, because they were sharing their virtual reference service in order to keep it open 24/7. This librarian in California didn’t have any extra resources to help her answer my question. She was in the same boat I was.

Why are we so sure our services can be so easily transplanted? Maybe it’s time to start thinking about shorter hours and local service, rather than flashy open-all-the-time service that’s much less institution-specific. Taking stock of our own value, and respecting the value that our own staff and our own collections can bring to our local patrons, might be the first step to making virtual reference the kind of service I know it can be.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about faculty status and librarians. I learned that academic librarians sometimes had faculty status (and, of course, tenure) while I was in library school, when I took a course on academic libraries. Until that moment it never once occurred to me that this might be the case. While librarians are employed by universities much like instructors with doctorates are, as far as I understood it the similarity ended there.

I had mixed feelings about this at first, all entirely personal. I had left the academic life when I went to library school, having very painfully dropped out of a phd program. I thought I was leaving those issues behind me. I didn’t think I would ever have to come before the scrutiny of something like a tenure review committee, or be expected to do research and publish for my dinner. When I decided to go to library school I thought I was making a determined step away from including these elements in my professional life. (Whether they were part of my personal life was another story, of course.) So I had two somewhat contradictory feelings upon learning that academic librarians often have faculty status; the first was whooohoooo fast track, baby, I’m right back where I thought I would be! and the second was oh dear god the stress and pressure is following me everywhere. Now that I understand and accept the nature of faculty status for librarians, I’m more or less at peace with it. But I find myself constantly re-encountering the debate in my daily work.

Much as I had no real sense of what kind of education librarians had before I decided to become one, my experience is that most faculty (including friends of mine) are in much the same boat. Gloria Leckie and Anne Fullerton beautifully illustrate the stark differences between what librarians think they’re doing in their work and what faculty think they’re accomplishing in theirs in their co-written article The roles of academic librarians in fostering a pedagogy for Information Literacy. The teaching faculty are here for the pain/joy of their discipline; librarians are here with a strong service ethic and a big dose of 19th century information organizational principles. We’re all in the same big happy union. So what does that mean? Do we want to be more like the teaching faculty? Do we want them to see us on the same footing as they see their colleagues?

And that’s the crux of it, always. We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.

So how do we accomplish this?

I have no good answers for this question yet. I just got here, I’m still removing the packing material from my office. But what I have noticed is this: no faculty expect a librarian to be as well-educated as she is. Case in point: when a faculty member came to visit me for some help, she expected us to have one degree apiece. Of course, we have three piece. It was a friendly conversation with lots of personal curiosity and sharing of experiences, but we all felt it in that moment; librarians are extremely well-educated people, and people, even faculty, tend to not expect that. Not over-educated, I would say, but far more knowledgeable about subject-specific academic life than most people give us credit for. And I’m getting used to that look, too, the one that says, oh, wow, you’re a real academic too!

What I’ve noticed most of all is how my interactions with people at the university generally change once we get around to personal histories. Partly I think this is true in the same way it would be true with anyone you meet; the more detail you give about yourself in context, the better the conversation tends to go. You get to know each other. But when people find out that I am a Harvard graduate and a former PhD student at the self-same institution at which we find ourselves so happily employed, the conversation changes. I am at least nominally part of the pack. I know how it feels to be confronted with those long reading lists, gruelling seminars, the struggle of academic administration from the other side. I speak the language.

My friend Elizabeth saw it coming long before I did. She invited me to have coffee with her and a new faculty member one day last year, for a first time meet-and-greet with someone from the history department. She said she saw the moment the conversation turned; the language changed, the playing field became distinctly disciplinary, we had recognized each other as comrades. Comrades-in-arms, on the same side, coming from the same general place.

I’ve been conflicted about this, too. I have never been keen on flashing degrees around. I want to be respected for the way I present myself and what I have to say, not the pedigree of my degrees. And yet, this is the kind of connection and respect we’re looking for as librarians. Don’t we want to be seen as one of the pack with these people? Don’t we want them to understand that we get where they’re coming from, we know what sorts of obstacles tend to get in their way, and we understand that sometimes academic work gets really really boring? Who else can you admit that to but one of your own?

When I debrief myself on my meetings with faculty I find I have a lot to consider about what it is I’ve said. As I say, I’m still so new I still have that new-car smell floating around me, and to date all of my interactions with faculty have been unerringly positive. But I notice a pattern in the conversations. We’re never just talking about the matter at hand; it seems impossible to stay entirely on point. The conversations I’ve had with faculty range over the events of the day and their implications in theological, political, racial, feminist, or nationalist terms; the technology I’m recommending and its natural history in the earliest forms of education (generally lead by the faculty member him/herself), and so forth. Sometimes I feel like this might all seem like a waste of our time, just a happy chat, but something deep inside me insists that it’s not.

I’ve spoken before about the problems librarians face when they focus on the tools and only the tools; when people consider us only capable of parsing Boolean and giving instructions on how to use the library catalogue, we project a very surface level of our understanding. If we don’t talk concepts, we don’t get respected as people who get concepts. So when I’m talking to faculty, I get meta really fast. We talk about end goals and possibility; marginality and public notebooks; academia writ large and moving toward a lofty goal. The fact that I can get us to point A to point B in technical terms is the smallest part of the conversation. I don’t do this on purpose, with the express goal of gaining a particular kind of respect, but I do it all the same. I can only imagine it has something to do with the long hours I’ve spent contemplating not just the lot of librarians, but also what it is I want to spend my time doing and talking about. Since I’ve gained all my technological knowledge in a humanities environment, maybe I’ve just been trained to think about it concepts-first, pedantic details later. But I’m drawn to thinking about this approach within the profession as well. Does this serve me well? So far so good.

I realize I’m at a huge advantage, given my background and my position. A librarian interested in subject-specific metadata knows a lot, and I have nothing but respect for these people. But I can easily imagine how a sociology metadata expert would be seen by a sociologist; what, you think you know more about my field than I do? When I think about the relationship in these terms it seems impossibly antagonistic. But as an Instructional Technology librarian, I’m generally going in to these meetings as the person bringing knowledge on something sociologists don’t know anything about and know they’re not expected to be experts on; I bring them expertise they aren’t expected to have. My entry into the departments is possibly the least threatening around. The more threatened people feel by technology, the more pleased they are to see someone who can help them out with it.

So what’s most important in creating a good working relationship with departments and individual faculty members? The degrees on our business cards? Our attitudes toward them and their work? Our attitude toward our own work and its value? What we bring to the table in the most practical of terms? I suppose it’s got to be a combination of all of these things, but I’m still working on the fine-tuning.

I just finished listening to one of my favourite NPR programs, This American Life. I got hook on it when I was living in the states, and thankfully for me they’ve been available over the internet for years, so I still get my Sunday fill by tuning in digitally.

On tap today: Image Makers. This episode got me twice: first, it has a segment on how the Michigan public library was trying to change its image among teenagers…by bringing in rock bands.

Hey, if librarians could do this, making a library not very much a library, making it loud, then anyone can do anything.

Genius. Every single thing about that story is inspiring; doing something totally different, tapping into the interests of the patrons, and the idea of changing the general perception of what the library is, what words to use to describe it, by pairing two apparently contrasting ideas; the library (quiet) and rock bands (very loud). Two constrasting things in the same place at the same time. If anything can be a crucible for change, that’s probably it.

Then the second part of this episode tells the story of a mother trying to recreate the image of her extremely ill husband for her 10 year old son, and that part made me cry. Not that that’s a terribly difficult thing to do, but still. So, a success from start to finish.

So my recommendation if you have an hour of time you can fill with some interesting sound: Image Makers, from This American Life. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. If you’re a librarian, you’ll be inspired.

I’ve written previously about rethinking traditional reference in academic librarianship, and I suggested it was time for a complete radicalization of our notions of reference. We can’t stand behind the desk anymore; increasingly, no one is turning to us there. Reference stats at university libraries are universally down. This is one of the hardest things for reference librarians to swallow; there is so much knowledge and experience sitting there behind those desks, and no one is stopping to appreciate it. Reference librarians are like those last few literate monks watching the barbarians sack Rome and proceed to build up a culture that didn’t have a place about all those manuscripts, all that learning, the medicine, the theory, the literature. I imagine them in their little libraries, clutching the books and gazing over the hoards, all naked and dancing in the firelight, none of them literate, none of them encouraging their children to read. Nothing I can do will make you care about these things, they must have thought, with that sinking feeling that no one would care for a long, long time.

But it doesn’t need to be this way, of course. In fact, there hasn’t really been a golden age for librarians yet. Our stronghold as keepers of information has been built entirely on the complexity of the thing; we were the only ones who knew how to find anything, of course everyone was reliant on us. But we don’t live in a world where someone types your memos for you, answers your phone, does your photocopying. What we’re facing is an increasingly information literate world; or at least, one that believes itself more information literate. People have empowering tools at their disposal and our libraries are rarely closed-stack anymore. We are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge; the world may freely wander in and pick and choose from our wares.

So what are some alternatives? There is something very safe and important about the reference desk itself; when you walk into the Gap, you want to know that if you need something, you can go and find someone who will help you. You want to know not just that people are there, but where you’re likely to find them. Unless we’re going to start littering the stacks with staff wearing happy “I work here” buttons, we’re probably going to need one central place where people can go for help.

But that’s at the peak of frustration. Our system is set up so that you can get help after you’ve basically gone through dozens of research steps on your own and found nothing helpful. You need to completely frustrate yourself into a frenzy before you turn for help. We have set up a system where students need to reach a boiling point before we know the water’s on.

So how do we fix this? There are some practical and creative ideas floating around, not all of them tried and tested. But breaking out of the box of both reference and library instruction is difficult, so all new ideas add more fuel to this fire.

Wandering reference. Wireless, handheld devices are getting more and more ubiquitous; what if we send reference librarians out in the wilds (so to speak), equipped with digital equipment to connect them with the resources they need to properly answer questions. I’ve never been entirely sold on this idea. As I said, how are students going to find one of these people if they needed help? But let’s assume that we have limitless staff and someone is already camped out on the reference desk to take the triage. I’ve wandered around libraries enough to have seen that look in students’ eyes, that look that says, I think maybe you can help me, but I’m not sure I want to interrupt you right now and my question is probably too lowly and dumb for you to waste your time on. This kind of service takes a particular kind of personality; wander around and see who appears to need you, and make sure they understand that you’re approachable and no question is a stupid question. This method catches students who are trying to get work done, but are starting to move toward the boiling point. There’s a question there just lurking under the surface, not quite daring to pop out.

But I think this idea has potential not actually because of the mobility of the reference librarian, but because of the concept of connecting a single reference librarian digitally to her resources. What are the #1 top resources in an academic library? Why, the staff, of course. Ages ago, Ann Althouse hit the nail on the head about the possibilities of putting real life people in direct connection with things digital while out in public. If one person is asked a question, why shouldn’t the answer come from a chorus?

What’s wrong with students pooling their expertise on the fly? The student doing the speaking is not rendered passive. He or she will still have to read the messages quickly and integrate them with existing knowledge. It could be lively and energizing. The students who aren’t chosen to speak will have some way to express themselves, which might help them listen to the student who is speaking, and a spirit of community and collaboration might take hold.

Here Prof. Althouse is talking about allowing students to help each other when there is a single speaker asked to engage in Socratic dialogue; why shouldn’t we pool our resources for librarians the same way? Imagine the power of that reference librarian; wandering in the wilds of the stacks, the student lounges, the residences, various study spaces. Seeking out the information needy and providing for them in computer labs. Cafeterias. And all along a crack team of expert subject librarians is at her beck and call, prepared to find an answer, make a suggestion, point out new resources. Print out an article to the nearest network printer on campus to spread the joy around even outside the walls of the library.

Is that radical? Well, it’s mobile, at least.

Virtual Reference is both out there in a new location, but also very traditional. Have a question? Ask us. The problem with virtual reference (well, one of the problems) is that the idea that the reference desk is in the library is translated onto the web; virtual reference links are always sitting exclusively on the library website, and often buried a few links in. Why not offer virtual reference links as a service to other units in the university? Put them on course pages. Attach the link to assignments and tutorials. Fight for a link on residence web pages. Pick an IM client and install it on the lab computers. Sink the link within the catalogue itself; rather than just getting a “no records found” message, why not also link to v-ref as a life raft?

Course Management Software is sneaking into more and more classrooms at universities. These systems are all different and contain many different modules, but most of them contain something like message boards and live chats. Eventually they will doubtless also contain blogging systems and wikis. If students are discussing their essay topics or doing collaborative coursework online, why not provide immediate assistance where it’s needed, where it’s going on? Librarians are used to waltzing into the classroom to bring resources to students; why not start waltzing into the courseware? Answer those questions as they’re forming rather than as they’re exploding.

Since courseware is still in its infancy, lobby the big boys of CMS to write librarians into the system as administrators. Give us our own usernames, let us scan through the messageboards, wikis, blogs, and assignments and offer help where we can. Let us connect directly with students where they need us, not just when they hit the wall of despair. Let subject librarians provide the same level of assistance to undergrads as they do to grad students and faculty. Let librarians sit in the corner of the CMS, ready to speak up when someone needs something and doesn’t know where to find it, or that it exists at all. Where students express their concerns, their hopes, their topics, let the librarians in to comment and help. Link to databases, talk up print resources. Be a resource, a named face, another helpful hand in the great big faceless university.

Librarians have so much more to offer the academic community than most people seem to realize. The more we get out from behind the desk, the more radical reference service we provide, the more people will come to realize it.

If you distill it down to its essentials, what is it that an academic librarian does? The whole thing, wrapped up in one simple concept? It’s certainly a mission that plays out in all kinds of different ways, but essentially, academic librarians provide tools that allow rest of the academic community can get on with the business of learning, teaching, and creating knowledge. We stand at the ready to provide faculty with the journals they need to keep up with their discipline; we collect the books that are the backbone of scholarship. We assist in the day-to-day questions that come up when students and faculty engage in academic work. We allow them to have reliable access to proprietary databases; we also make sure everyone is aware of those databases and how to use them. That’s it: academic support. We provide the infrastructure so that the learning can happen, voices can be heard, paradigms can be shifted.

The future of reference service is not behind a desk. Truly radical reference is coming out from behind that desk and bringing that crucial resource of answers into real life, into that space between having a question and the topic shifting over to something else, into the space between half-way done and handed in. Radical reference is not about waiting for the question. It’s not about simply being as good as we are and being the only ones who know it. It’s about handing out those answers where they’re needed. It’s about being there with help at the point of need, not under the “info” sign. It’s about being a part of the process rather than an appendage that might be useful if it occurred to you to put it to use.

Librarians always do their best work when they have a chance to understand the information needs of the person they’re trying to help. You can’t very well give the best answer to someone who hasn’t figured out her questions yet. Entering a classroom to explain how best to use JSTOR isn’t giving anyone the best of anything; the librarian isn’t certain she’s giving the sort of instructions that are going to be useful, and the student never gets a chance to vocalize what it is he actually wants. We end up looking boring and they end up bored. This is not the best display of our skills.

So what is? What does radical reference look like? In an ideal world, every university instructor teaches with a librarian in the room. When a student proposes an essay topic, a librarian looks over the instructor’s shoulder and says, “Actually, we can support that topic. We’ve recently acquired a great new database that covers African history very well.” Or “Yes, we can get access to those sources, but only through interlibrary loan. Do you have that kind of time for this assignment?” When students hit a wall because they can’t find something they need, or they think something doesn’t exist at all and considers changing topics because of it, that’s where librarians need to be. Radical reference is providing answers well before the question arrives at the desk, being part and parcel of the learning process and providing real assistance, not just to the people with phds or the people who have learned how to walk up to the reference desk. To everyone. Radical reference is about answering questions as they emerge, where they emerge.

How can we accomplish this? Instructors are unlikely to want us sitting in on all of their classes, looking over the assignments and offering advice regularly. And what librarian has the time to do all this, not just for one class, but for all of the classes in her subject area(s)?

This is where technology can help us. So many of the tools we have to offer are becoming digital; there’s a sense that we are becoming increasingly cut off from each other and from the idea of a permanent, stable (paper) collection. But internet technology is not a thing unto itself. The idea of “web” technology is to connect us to information and to each other. We need to build ourselves into a system that allows us to physically enter a classroom to speak, and also to digitally enter a classroom through the learning management software, through virtual reference, through audio and video. To provide the kind of support we offer when someone they wander into our offices with a stack of questions to fire at us, we need alternative ways of entering into the discussion. We can’t keep replicating traditional reference service; we need to radicalize it.

And from the “You’ve got to be kidding me” file comes askgod.com:

To capture all the information off the Net, all you need is the one thing you already have – Your Cell Phone. Put your stylus down, stop searching the streets for Wi-Fi spots and call ASK GOD. ASK GOD saves you the one thing you need and can’t ever buy – Your time.
In June of 2005, our company will allow you to ASK GOD. As our name implies, ASK GOD will supply you with every answer imaginable, twenty-four hours a day. Furthermore, our service does not rest on the Sabbath.

To use ASK GOD’s Phoneternet, all you need to do is call our toll-free number and, within seconds, our live angels will be able to answer any questions you may have. Our ASK GOD angels are trained web experts, giving callers instant access to any web-based information.

I mean, I knew library services were hot, but I didn’t know they were so hot that random people on the interwebs would try and sell them back to people as if they don’t already exist.

[Via Metafilter]

Edited to add: Apparently the creators of askgod.com are also responsible for this. Down with the pacisfists and the libraries! It takes all kinds, I guess.

Congratulations to Caveat Lector on her (as yet unofficial) new job! It’s wonderful when the world makes sense…

Great news from Google Scholar: all libraries can now get their own results to show up in the Google search, with the right link resolving software. Fantastic! Of course, librarians in general are wary. Hey, if we had something better to offer the public, I’d be fighting for that, but we don’t.

Case in point: Lipstick on a Pig by Roy Tennant: library OPACs are one gigantic failure.

We are focused on making our own lives easier rather than the lives of our patrons. The user-focused enhancements that do make it through generally reflect incremental changes rather than deep, systemic improvements that will create the systems our users need.” I’m cheering madly from the crowd for him, until he says this: ” For that kind of leadership and courage, only the vendor can devote the required resources.”

Uh…what? Why are we relying on for-profit industry to create what we need? Why can’t LIS as a discipline pull itself together long enough to produce some open source product? Why can’t we, as a community of libraries, pitch together to create something that will work for all of us and for our patrons?

Gdrive: get rid of your user interface, your operating system and your folders; just search for things! Hm. No, i still like to put things in their rightful place. I don’t care what order my books or my cds are in, but dammit let me organize the files I create on my computer. There’s something to be said for keeping like near like, isn’t there, Mr. Dewey?

Meanwhile, yet another Canadian library school opts to remove the word “library” from it’s name:

Terri Tomchyshyn (Dalhousie class of ’81), Librarian/Manager at the Department of National Defense, says “The integration of the Master of Library and Information Studies programme into the Information Management model adds breadth and opportunities for those graduating from such a programme.” Stephen Abram, President of the Canadian Library Association adds that “around the world librarians are embracing and leading the change in their profession. Librarians are involved in all aspects of the Internet revolution, managing the transition of many enterprises and governments to address the strategic implications of new technologies. The name Dalhousie School of Information Management is wholly appropriate to reflect and represent the changes at the Dalhousie School and in our profession.”

Right, so the future is to get out of libraries altogether. Fantastic.

Bitch Ph.D reacts to the news that an adjunct professor was ousted because of her blog. I really wish this kind of topic got more attention from faculties in general. Universities are supposed to be a bastion of intellectual freedom, but apparently that’s just a lot of hot air. Yes, it’s just looking for more reasons to encourage my faculty friends to blog, I admit to some bias here.

And on that note, Teleread suggests that high-ranking managers and professionals tend not to keep blogs because it’s not a good way to hide lies and general BS . So maybe top execs (and anyone working for an ad agency in Quebec) should be required to blog.

Xanga infuriates edubloggers…again. Kids put too much personal information on their online journals, police say. This is always a tricky situation for people, kids or adults. Is there something we can do to help develop some sense of information literacy in this area?

While I can see a good educational purpose to the podcast, I am still not impressed with Duke and Drexel’s ipod giveaway. I’ll keep thinking about it, but what exactly is the pedagogical advantage of portability?

And here ends my hodgepodge. Onward and upward.

I’ve been thinking about pharmacists lately. They’ve been in the news lately, since Plan B (another drug in the line of “morning after” pills) was recently approved for use by women in Canada without a prescription. No prescription required, but the drug will be held behind the pharmacist’s counter, and women will need to ask for it. There’s been some controversy around the role of the pharmacist in that transaction. Why put a barrier in the way of women trying to control their own fertility? Who is this person who stands in place of a doctor, who guards the more dangerous drugs, even though we have a legal right to them?

Why exactly does one need a degree in pharmacy in order to guard drugs?

Pharmacists, it seems to me, are in very much the same position as reference librarians. Technological innovation and the commercial exploits of big business have altered their respective roles so severely that the intense, arduous education required of both fields seems to have been rendered nearly useless.

The medieval and early modern apothecary did not just to dispense the drugs prescribed by a doctor, he made them. Apothecaries harvested medicinal plants, dried and treated them, and prepared the concoctions as directed according to the instructions passed down from master to apprentice. The apothecary knew two languages; the Latin terms for medicinal plants, cited in the ancient texts of Hippocrates and Galen and in the prescriptions from physicians, but also the vernacular names, the local names for herbs and flowers that were often different from region to region. The local physician would pride himself on not knowing anything about the vernacular terms; that was lowly labour-related knowledge, not fit for the elite, university-trained physician. Erasmus tells a story about asking a table full of learned physicians to identify one of the greens in their salads; they all passed it around, and claimed it was some foreign vegetable they couldn’t name. A passing maid told them it was parsley.

So apothecaries were the interpreters, the ones who could understand what the doctor’s theoretical prescriptions meant in the real world. They matched theory with an actual physical plant or mineral. That interpretive role made them a threat to the medical establishment, who often felt that the apothecary could easily take advantage of the physician’s ignorance and feed the wrong medicine to a sick patron, making it look like the physician’s fault. They worried that those apprenticed apothecaries might start guessing about humours and their interaction and doling out medications on their own.

At one time, the pharmacist was a powerful person with a crucial role in local life.

Even in Norman Rockwell pictures, the pharmacist is mixing up cough syrups and pain medications tailored precisely to each patient. The profession clearly required a lot of training, and the community who appreciates his work certainly wouldn’t want him to be poorly-trained or under-paid.

Today Big Pharma makes the drugs. Pharmacists, highly trained all, are reduced to basic retail work. The act of actually counting out the drugs and pouring them into a plastic bottle isn’t even performed by a pharmacist these days.

There was a time (not long ago) when your local reference librarian was the only search engine you would have access to. If you needed information, you would go straight to her. She would go through the involved and complicated search procedure for you and make sure you leave with what you need. She was the interpreter, the map-maker into this world of information. With the internet, with Google, that work has been outsourced and made free for all. The reference librarian’s role, like it or not, has been vastly reduced (or, at least the stats show dwindling user questions asked per annum). Librarians have had to face the possibility that they are being phased out by an algorithm. Librarians are currently facing the challenge of accepting the new technologies that have largely made their skills obsolete and choosing a viable path into the future, one where the library will still have a crucial place in public life. Librarians need to find ways to make themselves relevant to their communities.

But the pharmacist is in a worse position; pharmacy as a real community service is possibly just a bit further along the road to annihilation than librarianship is. Here we have these well-trained, intelligent, knowledgeable professionals standing behind rows of antihistamines, overseeing paperwork and restocking Viagra bottles, and anxiously awaiting any question from customers milling around the drugstore. Is this the future of the reference librarian?

Perhaps all is not lost. At least reference librarians can (and have) become experts at finding information in whatever medium is best, fastest, and most robust. At least librarians can tackle big concepts like information literacy and computer core competencies, getting meta about what it means to need and get information. Academic librarians can become experts on database management, archiving digital documents, instructional technologies and undergraduate outreach. Public librarians can focus on services like toddler and teen programs, turning their facility into real community space rather than book storage, and refocusing on becoming excellent reader’s advisors. (A good reader’s advisor is, after all, worth her weight in ipods.) Fortunately there is space here to rescue and reinvent the profession.

It would be interesting to see the same kind of movement among pharmacists.

An interesting anti-technophile rant from Chuck, a systems librarian in Kansas City, titled Primitivist OR Luddite AND Librarian:

How about this innovation: libraries should be tools for social change, especially when it comes to fighting ignorance and illiteracy. Most people in this country (the USA) aren’t intellectually curious. More and more of them are becoming functionally illiterate. Making motherfucking RSS feeds and XML metedata available in your public library aren’t going to educate the majority of your neighbors who think that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. New techonology innovations are a fucking waste of time if your patrons can’t find Pakistan or Venezuela on a map.

I understand where he’s coming from. It must be extremely difficult for a socialist person to live in the heart of the United States right now; information literacy takes on all sorts of new dimensions when you think about it in light of the realities of citizenship. The statistics show us that someone has managed to bamboozle the majority of Americans into believing things that aren’t true. How can anyone consider things like podcasts and RSS newsfeeds when basic literacy and misinformation are becoming an increasing problem in middle America?

But are books going to save them? If you throw out the technology, go back to the card catalogue, bring the books forward into those spaces they once vacated in order to add more computers, how are you moving closer to literacy or information literacy? How is that priority, the printed page, more useful to the mission of targeting and eradicating misinformation? How are the stacks going to change the world?

This rant isn’t about technology at all, though it’s been billed as such. This isn’t even about books, strangely enough. This is about the idea of that librarians should be educators, a highly contested role that many librarians refuse to embrace. From Chuck’s Addendum:

I’m of the opinion that libraries exist to serve a diferent purpose, which include things such as literacy, teaching critical thinking skills, promoting big picture understanding through reading, and providing the printed resources necessary for the survival of a healthy society.

While I am on the side of that supports the idea of librarians as educators, I must ask the obvious question: what makes librarians think they’re qualified to teach?

In my experience, most librarians don’t know the first thing about pedagogical theory or practice. Librarians have not been to teacher’s college (generally). While instruction is an element of reference service, librarians are not teachers. If this is something we have decided is crucial to the enterprise, we need to re-evaluate how we educate librarians. We should be studying pedagogy. We should be practice teaching. We should be engaged in the global conversations about teaching and learning with the experts in the field. Which part of library school education tells us anything about critical thinking skills and how to impart them to others? I learned how to catalogue in DDC and LC, how to provide reference service, how to make sense of statistics, some basic computer skills. I learned a bit about management and strategic planning, legal issues, and so forth. Where was the class on even defining critical thinking let alone teaching it?

Classically, librarians help link up individuals with the information they are looking for; the job of library staff is to find and provide sources for people so that they can do their own thinking. We don’t interpret their questions for them, we don’t proofread their papers, we don’t even criticize the basic ideas they bring to their information search. If someone comes into a library wanting to write an article denying the holocaust, the job of the librarian is to help them do that with whatever sources they can find. The sources are supposed to do the educating, not us. The goal of the objective library, the objective catalogue, the objective librarian, is still very much current.

What is the relationship between the public library and instruction? When I finished up library school, I suggested that instructional method and pedagogical theory should be more prominently placed in the core curriculum, but one of the administrators told me it was unnecessary for public librarians. They have no instructional role. I tried to argue with her, but she was (and still is) an important member of the faculty. I mean, what do I know, it was my exit interview. Clearly my experience was pretty limited. Who am I to say she’s wrong?

The people who can and are making themselves useful in an instructional context are the academic librarians. The higher up you get on the educational ladder the less instructional training anyone has had, so librarians can burst into that sacred classroom with some legitimacy. At least if they’ve done a bit of reading on the subject. Since undergraduate students are largely hung out to dry on the subject how to interrogate the information they find themselves swimming in, academic librarians can offer a welcome and needed helping hand. They can become an integral support service for instructional faculty, introducing pedagogical ideas, taking care of instructional software, troubleshooting, training, and providing general assistance. They can be on the lookout for new and interesting innovations that might help improve the teaching/learning experience. Librarians can be the filter; we can do the legwork and offer up the solutions to the teaching faculty. We can help train TAs. We are already part of the institution as a service. Inching into instruction comes almost naturally.

Where exactly does this leave public librarians? Is there a place in the traditional classroom for a librarian, one who is not paid by the school board, one who has not had the training required of everyone else involved in the education of the community’s children? On the basis of insurance alone I suspect they are left out in the cold. Their role in formal education is restricted to helping students find books on frogs for their report.

But what if we think about pedagogy in a larger sense, in a lifelong learning sense. What if the library is in fact an educator, not necessarily for the ones officially being educated, but for the rest of the community? How can the library as an institution fight against misinformation?

And this is where Chuck both has and loses his argument. On one hand: librarians are (according to him) too dazzled by the shiny new toys that web applications are bringing us, and are spending too much time trying to play with them in a way that looks institutionally significant when they should be fighting the demons of misinformation. On the other hand: maybe those librarians are seeing something you aren’t, and are using those dazzling new toys in the fight against ignorance? Increasing the presence of librarians in the world in every way, including every digital way, can only help in that end goal. What if the public library takes its educational role as seriously as Chuck does and decides to become an alternative news outlet, using the technologies available to piece together something to shake up the status quo? What if technology (like those darn RSS feeds) are a way to bring together and present alternative opinions and perspectives, together with a space for members of the community to add content, ask questions, interact and question the information around them?

While in some ways I feel as though Chuck is pointing a finger precisely at people like me, I sympathize with him. But it’s not the webmasters and the programmers and the RSS-pushers that are the problem. If librarians need to have their core values and goals readjusted, then more power to him for trying to initiate that conversation. But blaming technology is not the answer. Possibly revisiting library curriculum is.

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?

Over a year ago I was sitting in class listening to a speaker talk to us about virtual reference. He was discussing the pros and cons of a very expensive v-ref package, something our university library system had experimented with but hadn’t chosen to use in the end. The cons included frequent crashing and blue screens, and the pros mostly highlighted a function the cheaper packages didn’t have.

“Co-browsing,” he said. “It means we can control a patron’s browser remotely, take them to web pages, type in logins, that sort of thing.”

I was shocked.

Another story: some years ago now I spent many an hour coding an extensive historical recreation in an interactive environment. Essentially, you could wander through this virtual world and meet and talk with historical figures in the midst of some important moment in their life. St. Francis preaching to the birds; Marie de l’Incarnation looking out the convent window as her son stands below, demanding the return of his mother; Martin Luther defending his position among the Roman Inquisitors. One of the first little programs I created was one where the user would contract plague. They would experience all the symptoms over about a 20 minutes period, and then be magically cured by the patron saint of plague-suffers. The entire cycle started only if the user opted to pet a rat that they found in one of the tavern rooms. In another spot, I wrote a program that would add early English phrases to everything a user said. For instance, a user typing “Hi there!” to another user in the room would instead have said “By God’s blood! Hi there!”

There was serious consternation among the administration about these programs as I was writing them. Was it ethical to have our environment act upon a user without their explicit consent, and without them having any ability to stop it? While users were entering a world of my creation, where should my programming tweaks stop and the user’s autonomy take precedence? At what point did my neat little tricks start to seriously edge in on the user’s sense of control and self of (online) self? Could that violation damage the learning experience?

One of the issues involved in internet life has long been called ‘netiquette’; what is polite and what is offensive in this environment of the internet? What are the rules? How shall we determine good behaviour? As it turns out, the rules are still very much contested and in flux.

As far as I’m concerned, the user’s own computer is an extension of his or her brain. Your desktop is your mental landscape, your workspace; in order to truly create you need to feel safe within those four borders that make up the edge of your screen. Isn’t there something inherently creepy about the idea that someone might have an eye in on what you’re doing on your own computer? While a public terminal or lab computer may be simply a tool in the public eye with no personal owner, a personal computer is, to me, sacrosanct. It is a person’s personal view on the wired world, an archive of everything you’ve done, a half-empty notebook waiting for more bad poetry and silent declarations of undying love. A personal computer is that old high school binder with all the traded notes and pictures still in it. The teacher may control what kind of mimeographed papers end up inside it, but the housing itself, the binder, the words scrawled on the pages: that’s mine.

This is how I feel about my own computer, and nothing quite riles me in quite the same way as someone peering over my shoulder to read my screen. To me this is a serious breach of privacy, the same as peering into my ears in the hopes of seeing what I’m thinking. This computer is mine; the organization of the desktop is my own; while the software may be “owned’ by some fancy corporation, this iteration of it is mine. Asking for help is not the same as turning over my brain. Asking for help is not an invitation into my high school binder.

I suspect a librarian at the reference desk would not grab a patron’s notebook and start writing directions and advice in it. I presume she would not write a phone number on a patron’s hand in a magic marker, useful as that may be. She would not, I gather, take a patron’s notes, reorder them, add new headings, and hand them back in a shiny plastic folder. Are we so certain that “co-browsing” is a good idea in the first place? To me, taking remote control over a browser of a patron is unethical and an invasion of privacy.

I understand the appeal. It’s always easier to take the keyboard away and “show them how to do it right”. But should that be our professional practice?

What business are we in? That’s what my friend Jennifer Robinson always asks. Are we in the business of doing a patron’s learning for them, stepping in and typing the keywords for them, or are we in the business of helping patrons to find what they need, providing some help and guidance in the ebbs and flows of the information world? Yes, it’s so much easier to do it for them. It’s easier to take over control of their hands browser and show them how its done. It’s harder to give clear, verbal or type-written help based on the needs and skill level of a patron. It’s harder to listen in over the phone as a patron does the typing with two fingers. It’s harder to start from scratch and explain where the search box is and what goes in it.

But isn’t that our job?

My friend Jen sent me this link about social software, groups of people online, and some general guidelines about creating and maintaining social space on the internet. I can’t decide which part of my life this article feeds more; the librarian side, where I’m looking at social software for academic purposes, or the true geek side, who is/was a part of several of the communities mentioned in this article. (I mean, how many people can say they know exactly what that Lambda reference meant to that community?) But for the moment, the part that jumps out to me most echoes my own comments about the v-ref article from a few days back:

Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I mean you have to accept them. Because if you don’t accept them upfront, they’ll happen to you anyway. And then you’ll end up writing one of those documents that says “Oh, we launched this and we tried it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things. And now we’re documenting it so future ages won’t make this mistake.” Even though you didn’t read the thing that was written in 1978.

Word, yo. I feel like this is just what the v-ref people are doing; not so much with getting upset about unruly users, but explaining away their failure by blaming it on users. There’s been a lot of research on this sort of thing; I could tell you right off that there were problems with v-ref implementation. But no one listens to me, do they. Noooooooo.

I’m going to have a go at this. I’ve been poring over this article most of the morning. The guy who wrote it is a very important v-ref guy; he works at LSSI, the people who brought us the most expensive virtual reference software package ever. It can do it all; multiple seats (i.e., multiple librarians on at once), pushing urls, co-browsing (which is a fancy way of saying that the librarian can remotely control the user’s computer), and other fancy things. I will even leave aside my ethical problems with some of these features for the moment.

This article is so negative and missing some key points. The argument is based on faulty logic and a desire to blame the user rather than looking at a) the technology, b) the developers, and c) the people behind the desk answering the questions.

You can’t pick at v-ref without looking at reference services in general. The numbers are going down everywhere. People are less willing than they used to be to ask a librarian a question, whether they’re coming in on foot, picking up the phone or using the v-ref service. Why is that? You can’t blame technology for half of a problem like that.

There are lots of possible reasons for the decline in reference stats. The one I like to harp on most is reputational; why would a member of a community come to a librarian when most people believe that librarianship is a trade? We laugh about the way people think we have no education, that girl who commented that she wasn’t doing so well in school, so maybe she would drop out of undergrad and go to library school. If that’s the level people think we’re at, why would they come to us in the first place? You can’t blame a service for not enticing users if your product is lacklustre. Are we lacklustre? No. But people don’t know who we are, what we are, and what we can do. Before reference services can get a boost, we need to explain ourselves.

In this article, Coffman and Arret claim that “More important, the underlying chat technology that powered many live commercial reference services has also failed to find broad acceptance on the Web.” This is really interesting. Please, tell that to the millions of users of AIM, MSN messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, Trillian, Jabber, and my personal favourite, ichat, are part of such a tiny niche market that they can be overlooked. Coffman and Arret are using the business world as their base of users to inpretret “broad acceptance”. This feels like the arguments around open source software; the fact is that chat services don’t produce income, so businesses find themselves less interested in them. Letting people talk to each other about whatever they want is not something that generates income. In fact, technical support doesn’t generate income either. Just because services aren’t interested in supporting customer questions in the way they probably should be doesn’t seem like a good argument for or against chat services to me.

And in the end, what is a library transaction? Coffman and Arret cliam that “the general public has yet to accept chat as a means of communications for business dealings and other more formal transactions.” Is reference a category of business dealings? Or a more formal transaction? Is it more like casual chat, or more like online banking? As Jennifer says, know what business you’re in. What business are we in? What model are we emulating here?

While Coffman and Arret make the grand claim that the corporate world isn’t into chat, even that’s not true. Every major free chat service provider (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) have profitable corporate arms that build business chat services solutions for interoffice communications. If chat is so unpopular in general, why do these services make so much money? Perhaps the problem isn’t the technology but its implementation when it comes to customer service. How much buy in do we have? How prepared are we to actually do this right?

V-ref isn’t difficult, but what librarians tend to not understand is that chatting online is not the same as writing an email. Chatting is chatting, and v-ref is more like verbal communication written down than it is like composing a dissertation on a question. Conversation is an easy back and forth, with frequent interjections. Chat communications should take the form of short sentences, not paragraphs. When librarians get trained on v-ref, they learn the software but not the tricks that make it really work. If we treated our phone questions the way we treat v-ref, I’m sure those numbers would go down too. Would we take 10 minutes to consider an answer on the phone, not saying anything, just holding the phone while flipping through a source, waiting come up with the perfect answer before opening our mouths? Probably not. Could this lack of understanding about how to conduct a v-ref interview have an impact on our numbers? I wouldn’t be surprised.

I think the problems are rife in this v-ref business, from attitudes to marketing and even the technology. Too much time has been spent on creating features like the (highly unethical) co-browsing and not enough on integrating the system into the real life of a librarian. If I had my way I’d re-write the whole thing from top to bottom. I would integrate an in-house messenger system with an external one, so that everyone is always on the v-ref software. It’s there when you log on, and if you have a quick question for, say, the music librarian, you can contact her directly that way. You can do that from your desk when you’re doing collecitons work, or you can do it from the reference desk when someone has a quick question. Virtual reference could have the effect of linking service points, opening up our points of contact both to the public and to ourselves. I would then have a point person who lets their IM go “live”, become visible on the internet at large instead of just the intranet, and let that person field the questions, with the ability to easily ask other librarians across the entire system, or transfer a patron to someone else. That way even if the v-ref is totally dead on a given day, the software is still fulfilling a need.

I could go on. And on and on. But this is probably enough for now.

The first mistake they made, back in the day, was deciding to stop cataloguing at the mongraph level. I understand why they decided to do this. It’s a lot of work. Tons of work. They’d never be able to cut tech services if they had them cataloguing individual journal articles, or individual chapters of books. If they had decided to catalogue the contents of compliations and conference proceedings, to list every contribution in any scholarly oeuvre as a separate record in the catalogue.

At one point the sheer size of such a database must have seemed too overwhelming for the poor systems. So big and sprawling it would be impossible to complete and too slow to sort through. But at this point you can probably store most of the sum of human knowledge on a laptop, so that concern has gone. Space is cheap these days, too. Google is giving gigs away.

But no. Someone must have seen the end coming when that decision was made. Maybe it was made before anyone even got their hands on it; maybe it was one person’s decision at the very beginning, back before one clear head could have prevailed.

If the libraries had at any point saw the error of their ways and thrown some support behind technical services, and done a proper cataloguing job on their collections, including journals most importantly, those leeches who make up the third party profiteering journal indexers/database vendors wouldn’t have had such an easy job getting a foothold. Think of the thousands that would have been saved. Millions! Wouldn’t it be better to employ more cataloguers in tech services than to line some third party’s pockets with university funds?

Eventually the necessity of full-text access would have reared its ugly head. But if we already had records and could search them, I think it would have been a fairly minor thing to get access to scanned versions. They probably wouldn’t have been cheap, but they would have to fit into our interface, no the other way around.

Liz and I were talking about the revolution, you see. That’s when we get all the scholars on the continent to say, okay, that’s it. We’re done. We’re not submitting articles to these bloodsuckers anymore. We’re not going to peer review anything. We don’t get paid to do this, we do it because it’s a service to our profession. Why are universities paying for access to scholarship they pay faculty to produce? So what if one day all the faculty say, that’s it. We’re going open source. Our research is going to be open to everyone. We’re founding our own journals. We’ll charge a bare minimum for pdfs or print versions. We’ll form our own publishing divisions. Instead of funnelling thousands to the third parties, we’ll fund a new department in our academic libraries to handle journal publications. We’ll submit to each other, peer review each other. And the sun will rise the next day on a better world.

Me and Liz are going to take over the world.