CatalisWiki

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
====== 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?
CatalisWiki

User Tools

Site Tools

Page Tools
