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yee-autoinmolacion [05/05/2009 23:44]
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yee-autoinmolacion [06/05/2009 00:00]
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-====== Will the response of the library profession to the internet be self-immolation?​ ====== 
  
-**by Martha M. Yee, with a great deal of help from Michael Gorman** 
- 
-//Publicado en [[http://​listserv.syr.edu/​archives/​autocat.html|AUTOCAT]] el 24 de julio de 2007, por Marc Truitt (University of Alberta Libraries), en nombre de Martha Yee. Reproducido aquí sin autorización.//​ 
- 
-Disponible también en: http://​slc.bc.ca/​response.htm 
- 
-<​html>​ 
-<​p>&​nbsp;</​p>​ 
-</​html>​ 
- 
-There are two components of our profession that constitute the sole  
-basis for our standing as a profession. ​ The first is our expertise in  
-imparting literacy to new generations,​ something we share with the  
-teaching profession. ​ The other is specific to our profession – human  
-intervention for the organization of information,​ commonly known as  
-cataloging. ​ The greater goals of these kinds of expertise are an  
-educated citizenry, maintenance of the cultural record for future ​ 
-generations,​ and support of research and scholarship for the greater ​ 
-good of society. ​ If we cease to practice either of these kinds of  
-expertise, we will lose the right to call ourselves a profession. 
- 
-At the dawn of the modern age of our profession in the 19th century, ​ 
-heads of libraries were involved in cataloging (Antonio Panizzi and  
-Charles Ammi Cutter among them). ​ When the Library of Congress began to  
-distribute catalog cards to libraries in 1901, fewer and fewer  
-librarians learned to catalog. ​ Now most LIS  schools teach, at best, an  
-introduction to information organization course in which students talk  
-about such matters as how to organize supermarkets. That is the extent ​ 
-of the exposure of most new librarians to the principles of cataloging. ​ 
-Because so few librarians learn about or practice information ​ 
-organization any more, few librarians are aware of the danger that  
-currently looms over the profession as a whole because influential ​ 
-people at the Library of Congress and our great research libraries want  
-to do away with providing standard catalog records for trade  
-publications to the nation'​s libraries. ​ All librarians, not just  
-catalogers, should take a look at the Calhoun report (Calhoun, Karen. ​ 
-The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other  
-Discovery Tools (http://​www.loc.gov/​catdir/​calhoun-report-final.pdf) and  
-follow the progress of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic ​ 
-Control (www.loc.gov/​bibliographic-future/​). ​ There you will find the  
-argument that we should cede our information organization ​ 
-responsibilities to the publishing industry and other content providers. ​ 
-All this because some research studies show that undergraduates prefer ​ 
-to use Amazon.com and Google rather than libraries and their catalogs. 
- 
-These library leaders have forgotten, or never knew, the fact that  
-expertise in organization of information is at the core of the  
-profession of librarianship. ​ Because of their blindness to the nature ​ 
-of our profession, we are now in danger of losing not just standardized ​ 
-cataloging records and the Library of Congress Subject Headings, but the  
-profession itself. 
- 
-The excuse used, the preference on the part of undergraduates for quick  
-answers, is nothing new.  Undergraduates have always tended to over-use ​ 
-ready reference sources until they are taught by both librarians and  
-professors how to do effective research and critical thinking. ​ What has  
-changed, apparently, is the willingness of these library administrators ​ 
-to shoulder the responsibility of teaching information literacy, ​ 
-research skills and critical thinking skills. ​ I haven'​t heard anyone in  
-the teaching profession argue yet that we should let recalcitrant ​ 
-elementary school students decide for themselves not to learn to read or  
-do math, but perhaps that is next. 
- 
-The implication in the Calhoun report that Google and Amazon.com are  
-comparable to a library catalog and that libraries are in competition ​ 
-with Google and Amazon.com, are dangerous falsehoods. ​ Google and  
-Amazon.com are commercial entities. ​ Their goal is not an educated ​ 
-citizenry, or maintenance of the cultural record for future generations, ​ 
-or support of research and scholarship for the greater good of society. ​ 
-Their goal is instead to get as much money as possible out of our  
-pockets and into theirs, and to spend as little as possible on labor  
-while making as much as possible in profit. Someday it is conceivable ​ 
-that their goal could evolve into that of quelling social unrest by  
-limiting access to certain kinds of information. 
- 
-Google and Amazon.com limit human intervention for information ​ 
-organization as much as possible in order to maximize profits. ​ 
-Computers are dumb machines. ​ They cannot reason or make connections ​ 
-that a 2-year-old could make.  The only logic available to a computer is  
-based on either word counting or counting the number of times users gain  
-access to a particular URL, the bases for their allegedly sophisticated ​ 
-search and display algorithms. ​ A computer cannot discover broader and  
-narrower term relationships,​ part-whole relationships,​ work-edition ​ 
-relationships,​ variant term or name relationships (the synonym or  
-variant name or title problem), or the homonym problem in which the same  
-string of letters means different concepts or refers to different ​ 
-authors or different works. ​ In other words, a computer, by itself, ​ 
-cannot carry out the functions of a catalog. 
- 
-I used Amazon.com to check to find a novel by Fannie Hurst called ​ 
-Lummox. ​ They listed it as being in print and for sale for about $5.00. ​ 
-I ordered it, but when it arrived several weeks later it turned out to  
-be a play adapted from Hurst’s novel by someone else; none of this  
-appeared in the description. 
- 
-Thomas Mann, the great reference librarian, has written a wonderful book  
-published by Oxford University Press that introduces scholars and  
-researchers to LCSH and the LC classification so that they can do more  
-effective and efficient research in libraries. ​ He tells the story of  
-searching for his book in Amazon.com and being told “Readers interested ​ 
-in this book were also interested in Thus spake Zarathustra and Death in  
-Venice.” 
- 
-When you search Google using Twain and Sawyer you get completely ​ 
-different results from what you get from a search using Clemens and  
-adventures of Tom.  The displays do not differentiate among the work,  
-Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and works about it and works related to it. 
- 
-When you search Google for power, Google does not ask you if you are  
-interested in electrical power or in political power. ​ When you search ​ 
-Google for cancer, you get 224 million hits. Even Google seems to  
-realize that that is less than helpful; at the top of the screen it  
-suggests that you refine your results by choosing Treatment, Symptoms, ​ 
-Tests, diagnosis, etc.  When I investigated to see where this refinement ​ 
-of results came from, it turned out that Google had asked for unpaid ​ 
-volunteers to break down large result sets such as this one. 
- 
-It has become fashionable to criticize catalogs for not providing users  
-with the evaluative information they desire, a la Amazon.com. ​ Those who  
-criticize seem unaware that catalogs currently do provide evaluative ​ 
-information,​ in that the presence of a work in the collection of a major  
-research library implies (with some caveats) that that work was deemed ​ 
-of scholarly value. ​ Catalogs can also help users identify the major  
-authors in a field; if a user does a subject or classification search, ​ 
-and notices that half the books listed under a particular subject or in  
-a particular discipline are by the same author, that is a good clue that  
-that author may be a major author in that field. ​ All of this happens ​ 
-only when humans intervene in order to organize information;​ it doesn'​t ​ 
-happen in Amazon.com or Google. 
- 
-I once went to a talk by a colleague who was working in the business ​ 
-world on an information portal. ​ He indicated that the project had begun  
-as an automatic indexing project with relevance ranking, but that the  
-people paying for the work were so dissatisfied with the results that  
-the project had morphed into a thesaurus development project employing ​ 
-human indexers. ​ Is this a vision of the future? ​ Information ​ 
-organization only for those who pay for it and Google for the rest,  
-instead of information organization for all as a social good paid for  
-with tax dollars? 
- 
-It is a fact universally acknowledged that librarianship is a  
-woman-dominated profession. ​ As such, ours is a deferential culture that  
-avoids conflict and encourages humility, otherwise known as low  
-self-worth. ​ After all, what we do is perceived of by society at large  
-as women'​s work, that is, work that anyone can do and that does not  
-require any particular expertise (see Roma Harris. Librarianship:​ the  
-Erosion of a Woman'​s Profession. 1992). ​ The fact that Google and  
-Amazon.com expect unpaid volunteers to do the work we do is evidence of  
-this.  Jeffrey Toobin'​s article on Google in the New Yorker (Feb. 5,  
-2007)  casually and uncritically cedes to Google its claim to be the  
-world'​s expert in information organization and is striking evidence of  
-the ignorance of non-librarians about our work.  Is it too much to ask  
-for our colleagues in the profession, at least, to understand and  
-acknowledge the value of human intervention for information ​ 
-organization,​ expensive though it is?  Surely the richest country in the  
-world can afford to pay for the human labor required to keep its  
-cultural record in good order for future generations. ​ The cost is  
-peanuts compared to that of a missile defense system, and it would  
-provide a much more effective defense for our way of life. 
- 
-Many members of our profession, including catalogers, believe that  
-information seekers prefer keyword access and that, for that reason, ​ 
-Amazon.com and Google are better designed than library catalogs. ​ The  
-reason catalog users seem to prefer keyword access is that system ​ 
-designers make keyword access the default search on the initial screen ​ 
-of nearly every OPAC in existence. ​ It should be no surprise that  
-transaction log studies then show that users do more keyword searches. ​ 
-The entities users seek when doing a catalog search (works, authors, and  
-subjects) are actually much better represented by headings than by  
-keywords. ​ Keywords do not link synonyms (hypnosis vs. hypnotism) or  
-variant names (Mark Twain vs. Samuel Clemens); keywords do not  
-differentiate homonyms (electrical power vs. political power) or two  
-different people of the same name (Bush, George, 1924- vs. Bush, George ​ 
-W. (George Walker), 1946-); keywords do not precoordinate complex ​ 
-concepts to indicate their relationships (e.g., Women in television ​ 
-broadcasting),​ and keywords do not suggest broader, narrower or related ​ 
-terms. ​ However, “browse” searches with heading displays, which do all  
-these things, are buried by system designers on advanced search screens, ​ 
-and put into indexes in which users are required to know the order of  
-terms in a particular heading in order to find what they seek.  The  
-point I'm making here is that another major threat to our profession is  
-posed by system designers who don't understand catalog records or  
-catalog users. ​ For the first time this year, our Voyager software has  
-finally allowed us to provide users with a keyword in heading search of  
-subject headings and cross references which responds with a display of  
-matching headings and cross references, not an immediate display of  
-bibliographic records. ​ You can try it out at  
-http://​cinema.library.ucla.edu. ​ Try a topic/​genre/​form search on women  
-or a topic/​genre/​form search on Poland, to see how useful it can be to  
-let users see headings and cross references in response to a keyword ​ 
-search. ​ When the same keyword in heading searching is applied to  
-headings that identify works, users can search on both the author'​s name  
-and the title and retrieve a sought work even when using a variant of  
-the title  (an ability denied to them in most current systems). ​ Try a  
-preexisting works search on Shakespeare in our file to see what I am  
-talking about. 
- 
-Close reading of catalog use research shows that users' searches almost ​ 
-always match LCSH headings, as long as the system provides access to the  
-LCSH cross reference structure, as long as the system doesn'​t require ​ 
-users to know entry terms, and as long as the user knows how to type and  
-spell (see: Yee, Martha M. and Sara Shatford Layne. Improving Online ​ 
-Public Access Catalogs. Chicago: American Library Association,​ 1998. p.  
-133-134). ​ The many people who say otherwise in the literature ​ 
-participate in the wide-spread anti-intellectualism characteristic of  
-our society, since they don't read critically the research in their own  
-field. ​ Problems with typing and spelling are by far the most common ​ 
-cause of search failure; sadly, at a time when spelling is more  
-important than ever before for success in keyword searching over the  
-Internet, it seems to be becoming a lost art. Typing is a big problem ​ 
-for older library users who grew up when typing was taught only to those  
-intending to be secretaries. 
- 
-To sum up, the threats to our profession are not from the Internet per  
-se, which is just another tool we can use to do our jobs better, if we  
-use it sensibly. ​ The real threats are posed by the large number of our  
-fellow librarians, including prominent leaders in the profession, who do  
-not grasp the nature of our profession and the fact that human  
-intervention for information organization is at its core; the low  
-self-image those librarians have; and the failure of online catalog ​ 
-designers to learn about the nature of catalog records and the nature of  
-catalog users so as to design systems that allow users to search for the  
-entities they seek (works, authors, and subjects), which are represented ​ 
-in catalogs by headings, not by keywords. 
- 
-Even if you disagree with, do not understand, or are not convinced by  
-these arguments about the value of human intervention for information ​ 
-organization as currently practiced by the last of the catalogers in our  
-profession, think about the larger implications of leaving information ​ 
-organization in the hands of the commercial interests that control ​ 
-content in our society. ​ Up until now, libraries have played the role of  
-intermediary between commercial interests and society in the provision ​ 
-of information as a social good and as part of the intellectual commons; ​ 
-we have worked hard to ensure that people have access to the information ​ 
-they need regardless of their socio-economic level, because we recognize ​ 
-that democracy does not work when the electorate is unable to determine ​ 
-the facts or to hear the arguments on both sides of an issue, and  
-because we recognize that research and scholarship that advance our  
-society are not carried out only by the wealthy who can afford to  
-purchase all of the materials they need to do research. ​ Leaving ​ 
-information organization in the hands of commercial interests such as  
-Google and Amazon.com would be the first step in the process of removing ​ 
-the library and the library profession from the information provision ​ 
-chain altogether. ​ Publishers already have the ability to sell  
-information directly to the consumer on a pay-per-view basis. ​ If we  
-move toward a society in which that is the only way users can get  
-information,​ we will have a society that replicates in the information ​ 
-sphere our current huge economic gap between haves and have-nots, and  
-that places all the power to control the availability of information in  
-the hands of entities that are completely profit-driven and have no  
-incentive to serve the greater good of society as a whole. ​ Do we really ​ 
-want to follow our leaders down this path? 
- 
-{{tag>​miscelanea}} 
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