Where are we going?

That's a collective "we" - what's going to happen to academic libraries - and librarians - in the next five years?

I see us becoming archivists, as the physical book loses importance. We may be the caretakers for the copy of record. And I use "the" advisedly. Will we spend the money to have two copies in the library - or even in the state? Or will distributed copies suffice?

Maybe we'll be responsible for printing a physical copy of electronic books and theses. Why even do that? Because electronic documents have two prime characteristics - they are mutable and they are fugitive. You can change them when you want: something we don't want for official documents like laws and vital records. And while paper copies can and do burn or decay, they are longer lasting than bytes, which can be gone in nanoseconds.

Perhaps we'll be teachers and not caretakers or collection builders. As more information is out there, it takes more skills to locate it and evaluate it. We are good at that, and we have two options (or at least two obvious ones): we can do it as a pro-bono service subsidized by our school, or freelance in a just-in-time pay-as-you-go system. Either way, we are information brokers and not warehouse managers, labeling and stamping books. That's been a waste of our skills for a long time.

We may also be information creators. We've done that for a long time, too. We've indexed and cataloged, in ways that are outdated now, but what about new ways? Can we not build KM systems to synthesize the sources we manage? To build recommender systems? People say that IT folks can do all that, but they can't. They're really good at the software and the hardware, but don't care about the content. We do.

This is just step one in my trying to think ahead of the curve. This week maybe I'll think about how other fields have outrun us in our own field - or what we thought was our field, and synergy with other fields.

Or maybe I'll relax and enjoy the holiday. Naw....

Getting rid of originals?

I was reading the notes of the digitization meeting at RBMS, and thought - WHO thought of the "digitize, then dispose" comment? Some very young person? The first digitization project I worked on followed the LC standards of the time - 150 dpi. What were we thinking? Well, we weren't thinking ahead, we weren't thinking in economic terms that mass production means cheaper, we weren't thinking of the future.

What if we had thought of scan&toss then? What would we make the better scans from? Other than deteriorating nitrate and acetate negatives, which can spontaneously combust or can suddenly turn to dust, what would be good enough to scan but not good enough to keep?

I was shocked that this came from RBMS people - what books would we have left if we tossed the shabby used ones? I hope this isn't an offshoot of the googlescan mindset of administrators, or maybe I hope it is and isn't from the librarians and archivists!

I know that archivists are reputed to be packrats, but are RB librarians conspicuous consumers?

Out of the box software

I've been looking at open source software lately, and I like what I'm looking at. I haven't migrated to Linux yet, but I'm replacing many of the expensive brand names with better OS software. GIMP isn't instinctive, but neither is Photoshop.
Open Office is much better than the built-in boobytraps of MS Office, and I'm in love with Google Docs - not for all purposes, but great for collaboration and easy transfers while traveling.
So now I'm looking at content management systems and thinking of wikis as documents and teaching platforms as well as "wikipedia" clones. Maybe just starting as a supplement to Blackboard, since I get paid to use that, but also as an alternative for people who are having issues with firewalls. That seems to happen once a year, at least!
I'll let you know what the results are, let me know your favorites.

Shaking things up at MAC

I'm back from Lovely Louisville and the Midwest Archives Conference. It was a good conference, if a little shaky - yes, we felt the second midwest earthquake in the middle of a session. And no, it wasn't ours, on disaster recovery, and we had to spend Friday apologizing for mis-cuing the special effects.

We had a good response on our workshop on co-operative disaster recovery, and we hope to take it on the road and online, so feel free to give us feedback! And feel free to contact us if you're interested in a session where you are. Have powerpoint and manuals, will travel.

Thanks to all of you who gave us such a warm welcome back in the old stamping grounds - no, I haven't lost all my Kentuckisms yet!

Taxing our patience

As I work on my taxes and look at the piles and piles of forms, I had a thought.

There are boxes to donate a dollar to a political party - no big surprise. Why can't we have a box to donate a dollar to: a library? PBS? NEH? A national college scholarship fund?

These are all non-political non-sectarian good things, right? The public good? And ignored by the present administration.

So let's start a movement. Let's let people make a difference in a positive way!

Workshop at Midwest Archives Council in April

If you're going to be at MAC this spring, come to the "Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Disaster Planning" workshop on Saturday. I'll be presenting with long-time collaborator BettyLyn Parker, and we'll cover local and regional co-operatives, as well as larger options, such as state level and FEMA programs.

There will be tons of handouts, so don't worry about taking notes. Just open your mind and think about things that archivists don't usually think about - like cost effectiveness and return on investment. Believe me, you won't convince beancounters to rescue your collection if you don't know how to count beans, and where they are!

If you haven't been to MAC, it's the best archival conference in the country - not on a high-price coast, friendly, and with many useful sessions - and all at a bargain price.

If you don't come to the workshop, look at nametags and say hi!

The catalog isn't broken. Really.

The catalog isn't broken. Really. It finds just what you type in the search box.

And that's the problem.

Try searching for a book on typography. According to LCSH, it doesn't exist, even though designers and publishers use it every day. Who (except librarians) would search for Type and type-founding. or | Graphic design (Typography) ? And why would Hersey's Hiroshima show up in the results? I'm confused, and I'm a librarian.

The catalog works. What doesn't work is the search.

The thesauri are so outdated that they might as well be chiseled in stone. Who searches for a term that's 30 years outdated?

The thesauri assume too much. You go to the catalog to find out about something, you shouldn't have to know about it before you search. Why even go to the catalog when you have to Google it first?

Worldcat on Google make it easier to find, but not more accessible. You still have to know the secret code. Sure, breaking the facets makes it better, but still not good, or especially usable. Search for Princeton in the default search box, and the second result is The essential Jung.

Huh? I'm still confused.

So why don't we change the terms? It ain't easy. There's no simple way to update the terms, and when they do get updated, they're usually outdated again. It's not LC's fault, it's not OCLC's fault, it's the whole system. The whole 20th century we-use-one-letter-codes-because-it-saves-a-byte system.

So what's the answer? Tagging, which is fun and helps you find your stuff, but doesn't help anyone else find your stuff? Another thesaurus? Hierarchy? Or dumping it all out and unstructuring it, mixing in the tag clouds, and sorting it with a Page-rank type ranking?

I don't know, but if you do, email me and we'll look for capital, because the demand is out there, and if libraries don't fix it soon, people will get used to going elsewhere.

They could come back, texting is just the old IRC abbreviations resurrected, it could happen. And they could fall in love with telnet and Wordstar, too. But I'm not betting on it.

What's my wishlist? The new system should be flexible, capable of near-real-time (or at least within a year) updatable, allow uncontrolled terms as well as controlled vocabularies, and allow relationships (similar to, related term).

Like RDF.

Like the semantic web. Just a corner of it. Just for now.

Please?