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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 AUTOCAT el 24 Jul 2007, por Marc Truitt (University of Alberta Libraries)// | ||
- | |||
- | 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? | ||