Eat-Your-Vegetables librarianship alive and well

I recently attended the NASIG annual conference.  As is often the case at library conferences, I attended a pleasing variety of moderately informative programs.  But this year, two rather unusual things happened:

1. I attended a lively informal discussion of scholarly communication
2. I attended a program that made me deeply, viscerally angry

#1 was entirely refreshing.  Everybody in the room participated, freely expressed their hopes and fears about libraries’ ability to provide relevant support for the scholarly enterprise, and altogether ignored the self-archiving/open access cant that sometimes comes to dominate such discussions.  I’m by no means against open access, but I don’t believe the ability to self-archive published materials is the most compelling basis for an institutional repository.  To my delight, we spent the hour discussing everything BUT preprints.

I have some doubts about Library 2.0 and don’t consider myself a blog person, but #2  made me want to leave the profession and slam the door behind me.  The program in question (“Column People”) addressed the future of traditional published columns now that there are over 80 million blogs.  The presentation was replete with the usual snide putdowns directed at blogs and bloggers (they’re trivial, the writing isn’t polished, etc.) and cited as evidence this post.  I was indignant on Jane’s behalf, and also miffed that the presenters were so fixated on the medium that they ignored the message: our communication customs force us to work hard instead of smart.  Speaking of working smarter, I suggested that neither a blog nor a column will retain an audience for long without a feed or other alerting service attached, whereupon the presenter accused me of passivity (I prefer “efficiency,” but whatever).  I don’t consider myself a passive reader – I’ll perform a thorough lit review when the situation requires it – but columns aren’t research articles.  A sufficient number of informed and informative opinions come equipped with feeds that I feel no pressing need to seek out those that don’t.

Personal indignation aside, the exchange betrayed some toxic beliefs about user complacency that have broader implications for the profession.  There is no inherent virtue in painstakingly seeking out information that could just as easily be delivered (isn’t this the whole point of serial publications?), but we reflexively characterize users’ desire to have good information delivered to them as laziness or passivity.  This emphasis of process over product is one reason we have been marginalized in the information marketplace.  Sure there are some lazy users, but the sooner this profession gets over its misguided contempt for efficient information gathering that capitalizes on available technology, the sooner we can provide tools and services that really reach our users.

Culture clash

I just had the opportunity to attend Open Repositories 2007 back to back with ALA Midwinter. This was a very interesting juxtaposition, but it illustrated with alarming clarity the fundamental problems facing the library profession in general and cataloging in particular.

Since I am now the Boss Lady of Cataloging, this trip to ALA involved more attention than usual to cataloging-related programs. Two that particularly stood out were the Electronic Resources Interest Group discussion forum on RDA (the set of content rules that will be the eventual successor to AACR2) and the ALCTS Forum on the Future of Cataloging.

The path to RDA certainly seems to be an arduous one. The framers are taking a lot of criticism from the core audience (catalogers) for altering long-standing content rules for no particularly compelling reason. The digital library community finds the new rules so print- and MARC-centric that they don’t have much utility beyond the traditional catalog. My principal complaint about RDA is that it is so mind-bogglingly complex [cough FRBR! cough] that by the time it is actually published it’ll be 10 years out of date. Altogether, this is a terrible outcome, because the existing cataloging rules create some big problems for modern catalogs that a new set of content rules could solve and the digital library environment desperately needs rules that could be adopted in a straightforward way. I wish RDA had been built as a crisp, pragmatic set of rules that anyone could follow, with modular additions of more complex rules by and for the specialized communities of practice that need them. This, I think, would have been more agile in the short term and more sustainable in the long term than the behemoth that is presently taking shape.

The ALCTS Forum on the Future of Cataloging was as sobering as I anticipated. This is not a group that gets excited about technology; in the packed ballroom I saw two laptops. Casey Bisson’s segment about making our catalogs compatible with users’ preferred tools was great, and kudos to the organizers for inviting him, but he followed another speaker whose message was “Don’t worry so much about digital stuff, because lots of users would rather use print. Which by the way we should keep around in case the power goes out” [mad strategerist rends garments in despair].

Open Repositories was sure a sight for sore eyes. It was exciting to see creative people solving the biggest problems with open source repository technologies, namely that they are clunky and demanding to configure and use. Both Fez (Fedora) and Manakin (dSpace) are nifty web interfaces that dramatically extend the power and versatility of these systems, and it’s great to see these tools evolve and mature.

This was a technology conference and yes, there were laptops aplenty in the audience, but the most striking difference between this conference and ALA was cultural, not technological. The open source community has a palpable aura of confidence and a problem-solving mentality. If you have something to add to the solution you can be part of the community, and ambition and creativity are noticed and admired. This is a pretty dramatic contrast with traditional library conferences, where technology is largely regarded with suspicion and a whole caste of volunteer bureaucrats seems to exist to enforce arcane procedures and haze newcomers. I’m on the fringe of that bureaucracy and I try to use my powers for good, but come this fall I’m going to see what’s being offered in the department of computer science.