Technology in the library

This is a huge topic which includes everything from electricity and internet access, to computers, OPACs, databases, and even reprography. I spoke at length in my video podcasts about the various topics, so I’ll write about how I feel about technology in the library.

When I was little, I’ve been around for a long time, libraries contained no computers, but they did have electric lights. (Just a little humor here.) The technology that I saw consisted of typewriters, card catalogs with lots of drawers,  and the various methods of recording what patrons checked out of the library. Some libraries had you write your name on the check out card and they filed them away until the books were due. That was probably my school library if I think about it. At the public library there was a camera that took a snapshot of your library card and the book card or the book pocket. Again they probably took the cards out and filed them until the book was returned. It seems like a primitive system today, but it worked and still works for very small libraries.

In library school, oh so long ago, I learned to search OCLC and RLIN, Dialog and BRS using typewriters that served as computer input devices called deckwriters (I have no idea how to spell this piece of equipment). You typed onto green and white bar paper that fed through the roller of the keyboard. The keyboard was attached to a computer, one of the databases above, though the phone lines and an acoustic coupler at a very slow rate. The answers or the catalog record information was received through the phone line and printed out through the keyboard. It was slow and cumbersome by today’s standards, but it worked.

Over the years, communication speeds increased and terminals and computers became more sophisticated. Searching techniques have changed and yet still follow the same basic, logical rules, because computers are, after all, computational machines. As librarians and archivists, we have to work with varieties of computers, electronic devices, and databases. They are all different. While I call myself an analogue librarian and love paper based resources, I use electronic and digital resources all the time. I take advantage of the speed of communication and the interconnectivity of information and reference resources. When it comes right down to it, books are technological devices just as much as clocks are, and they fit seamlessly into our computerized, digital world. I do know that technology continues to improve and it constantly changes the way we seek and retrieve information. I just try not to let it rule my life.

If you want to read about the development of computers, just one form of technology that changes libraries, archives, and museums every day, here are two classic books about the origins of computers and the internet.

• Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere, Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (NY: Copernicus, imprint of Springer-Verlag, 1998)
• Katie Hafner and Matthey Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet ( NY: Touchstone Book / Simon & Schuster, 1996)

Catalogs, databases, and search engines. What’s the difference?

Catalogs, databases, and search engines are great topics and you actively discussed them. I love the idea of professors using Amazon to find books for their students to read. My comps and dissertation advisor used Amazon all the time. He said it was faster than the catalog. Well, maybe. But remember Amazon serves a different purpose. It provides a list of what’s available on its website and through its vendors. Amazon is not a library catalog, it’s a giant searchable sales catalog.

The library’s catalog shows the user where the books are supposed to be located on the shelf and groups like books together. A library catalog (OPAC) is not a search engine. It only searches the materials in its universe, not the internet. Even the subject specific databases accessed through the library’s website are not the library catalog. The library provides a portal or pass-through to the databases which contain access points to their own small universes. Because of the complexity, and silo nature, of proprietary (fee-based) databases, many of our patrons don’t “bother” to use them. If we can reach the professors and the teachers, if we can reach the students, then we have a hope of getting them to use the proprietary databases. The Oxford Reference Shelf (www.oxfordreference.com )[1] is a great example of a database that accesses multiple resources through one search box, or you can search each reference book separately.[2]

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[1]According to the website, Oxford Reference Online will become, as of 12 April 2012 Oxford Quick Reference and Oxford Reference Library.

[2] Kent State students access the service through Reference (below the main search box), then Dictionaries and Thesauri; then Oxford Reference Online.

What’s on your minds this week

Between last week and this (weeks 6 & 7) there has been lots of discussion about reference, customer service, and library users. The most active discussions revolved around the catalog, classification, and how information or books are retrieved. You pose great questions and are definitely ruminating about the issues. The reflective journals echo these concerns as well as issues that jump out at you. I’d say Weigland’s article was the most popular and put reference, information seeking, and information needs into perspective. As I mentioned in my podcast, I didn’t see the benefit of the article originally, but after ruminating on the idea of how we make decisions, Weigland is right on target.

Some of you continue to write about reference interviews, giving information to patrons vs. teaching them to find it. It’s important to remember that although each reference encounter is a teachable moment, sometimes they just want that “factoid” and a quick, here’s the source. and the info may be good enough for the patron.

As the patron continues to return to the reference desk, you’ll get a sense that teaching them to find the information will be helpful and more rewarding. I’m thinking here of genealogy & local history, literary criticism, art history and school paper topics.

My favorite question used to be “Where can I find the Bible?” My response was, “What type and what language?” Sometimes that elicited a longer reference interview; sometimes I just took them to the 292’s and showed them how the Bibles and biblical commentaries were arranged. I always ended the discussion with “If you didn’t find what you want or need more, come back and I’ll help you find it.” Today I hear the refrain as “Did that answer your question completely?” If you remember that reference is a multi-step process, you’ll help the patron learn step-by-step.

Here’s another example of searching step by step, but not necessarily in a mediated manner. Look at what Ancestry is doing with their TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” http://www.nbc.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/  They make genealogy research look really easy, just log on and put in your name, and voila, there’s a leaf and your family tree is growing. What you don’t see, unless you work in a genealogy or local history department, is how difficult it really is to use the database. When we examine the searching mechanisms at Ancestry we discover that, while their search engine pulls from their huge database of documents, it also provides imprecise answers and the searches are difficult to replicate. It is almost impossible to get the database to retrieve a specific item unless you save it. The imprecision and the huge number of hits, frustrates patrons. It just looks easy but it’s not that easy. I love searching Ancestry, and they have raised the publics’ awareness of the importance of libraries, archives, and museums and the vast collections housed within their walls. If you watch their show carefully, individuals seek assistance in their research from librarians, archivists, and historians. When it comes to searching for information, librarians and archivists are an essential part of the equation and solution. We, the librarians, help our patrons make sense of databases and information, so their search is successful or at least somewhat fruitful. [1]

As librarians and archivists, as professional researchers, it is important to take the time to learn how databases and search engines retrieve data and citations. What elements do they actually query? How do they rank or select the elements for each data set? How is the located data displayed? All these factors are important to consider as we explore resources, search catalogs and websites, and teach these reference tools to our patrons.

By the way, if you are interested in reading more about teaching at the reference desk and / or collaborative teaching, check out James K. Elmborg and Sheril Hook, Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration, Publications in Librarianship No. 58 (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, ALA, 2005).

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[1] My comparison is a gross simplification of the differences between database search, retrieval, and output mechanisms.

Reviewing: books, articles, websites, exhibits, and presentations.

What’s the purpose of reviewing various media and presentations, physical and digital? For librarians and archivists, reviewing is a way to share our opinions about the content, authority, and importance of produced works. Those reviews are important for collection development, for making lists of “read-alikes” for readers’ advisory, or compiling subject bibliographies. We cannot read everything that comes into the library, nor can we even look at all the titles that are available for selection.  Even if we went to the bookstore every day, we would not be able to look through all the books that are published every month. It’s too big a job. On top of that, we are not all subject specialists. We must rely upon the expertise of subject specialists and scholars to review books for their content and their quality.  As librarians, we need to be able to write an abstract of a book or journal article, to review the same for their importance to the field, both librarianship and the academic field. To do that, we need to think about how each title fits within the field and helps shape the field.

One approach to reviewing is to put together a list of questions you would like to ask the author about what he or she wrote. I always imagine what the questions I would ask if we went for coffee and I wanted to get to know the author better through her book. Why did he approach the topic in this manner? What was missing or unclear? Did the conclusion make sense? There are so many excellent questions to ask. One thing to keep in mind while reviewing is that it’s the text the author wrote that you are considering, not what you wanted them to write. I always get stuck at this issue.

One thing to remember when you write review and analyze books and articles is to draw in other literature and authors to support your arguments. Don’t just comment based upon your own attitudes and feelings. Including other resources makes your arguments stronger and helps provide a context for the materials you review.

The hidden value of catalogs and indices

I’ve been doing more thinking about the value of catalogs and indices for librarians, archivists, and researchers. From a librarian’s perspective, these tools help us and researchers find what they are looking for. That sounds really simple and straight forward, except that it is easier said than done. I’ve written a little about how indices are put together, where journal articles and books covering the same subject areas are intellectually grouped into the same place, and, using call numbers, can be physically placed together on the shelf.

Books in series can be placed together or separated from one another, yet co-located in a catalog. Let me give you an example. There are books written in series called “monographic serials.” They are usually on a similar topic, say mapping, or urban studies. Now catalogers can select call numbers so they are shelved together one after the other allowing the researcher to just go to the shelf and find the topic of their choice within the series. Or they can be interspersed throughout the collection, depending upon their subject matter and only brought together by the “series” title. Every library varies in its treatment of these monographic serials, and LOC no longer provides guidance as to which way to catalog them. The cataloging and MARC record contains the information that allows us to find all the books in this series which could be scattered all over the library.

My favorite catalogs are the national union catalogs. The one for the United States is NUC pre-1956. It is a series of about 750 quarto (large) green volumes that are often hidden away in libraries and cataloging areas and are rarely used today. Examining the entries you can actually trace the history of cataloging and classification. Within the volumes are lists of an author’s works, major and minor, articles in journals that some library cataloged, and even pamphlets by ministers, scientists, and humanists alike. While the holdings information may be outdated, it is fifty-five years old after all, access to series and subject information is invaluable for historians, literary scholars, and historians of the book, to name a few.

When I was researching late nineteenth century archaeological reports from Near East excavations, all the preliminary research and findings were cataloged as separate items in the New York Public Library catalogs (pre-1972). Now I could have found some of the articles / pamphlets in journal indices, but many were not published in the US or were not included in standard indices. The catalog held the clues and opened up a world of research and exploration for me.

Many of these older book catalogs are still in use. The entries have never been converted to machine readable entries, and probably never will be. Some libraries have annotated their catalogs and cards with little notes that aid the researcher or are based on evidence found by researchers in the course of their studies. The same holds true of print indices, exhibition catalogs, and subject specific catalogs that provide access to older or specialized collections. These resources are invaluable to the researcher and scholar, to the librarian and archivist working in a special collection.

So how does this pertain to information scientists today? It is important to see where the idea of organizing our printed history comes from. And it is not just printed history. There are catalogs and organizational methods for photographs, sound recordings, and even objects. These items are often arranged in acquisition order that is, when they were acquired, or by type, with subject access through a catalog. The catalog is supposed to do all the work, through access points for title or descriptive phrase, author or creator or excavator, and by subject or classification.

I have been writing about tangible items. What about all the items, websites, and ideas on the Internet? Should we bother trying to create order out of all the chaos? That’s such a huge question, that it really belongs in a course by itself. My simple answer is that the search engines that go out to the web are our, societies’, feeble attempt to provide some order and control over a vast ocean of data and information. Some search engines to better jobs than others. None compare, yet, with the way print and online ‘card’ catalogs and indices provide access to books and journals.

Our job as librarians, archivists, and information scientists is to help retrieve materials for researchers using these catalogs, indices, and search engines. Our goal is to teach our patrons to navigate the disparate catalogs, indices, and databases to find what they seek. Knowing how they work and how to make they work is half the game, the other half is to understand what our researchers need and how they go about seeking that little bit of information, that little clue that completes their puzzle. 

TV and Google

One theme of this week's readings might be TV, Google, and Our Brains - how the media affects our understanding of the world around us. While there is lots of debate about what is an authoritative source of information, these authors mostly agree that books trump other forms of media. What do you think?

If you want to read more on the topic:

Citations for Neil Postman and other books on his topic of media, critical thinking, and authority.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death written in 1985. You might also check out his book Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Marie Winn The Plug-In Drug1967

Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” Atlantic Monthly (July/Aug 2008) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/which he expanded into a book length discussion The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains ..

Marchall McLuhan The Medium Is the Massage 1967

Walter Ong Orality and literacy: the Technologizing of the Word 1982

Organizing Information

There are three major themes for this week. There are classification schema, cataloging schema, and metadata and tagging for electronic and digital resources.  Since I got carried away with video podcasts you probably don’t want to read more about the topic this week.

Here are some different ways to think about the topic.

One is by pointing to the physical location of an item. Classification schema do this, and the location is called a call number or shelf mark number. These numbers aggregate items together by that particular, usually dominant subject.  Dewey Decimal Numbers, Cutter numbers, Library of Congress Call numbers, SuDoc (Superintendent of Documents) Call number (for gov docs) are just a few call number schema.

There are classification schema which provide access to subjects within books and journals. These subjects are designated using fixed or controlled vocabulary found in thesauri, in Sears Subject Headings, or Library of Congress Subject Headings. Tags are the natural language “equivalents” of subject headings where users use vocabulary that is not controlled and varies quite widely. The great thing about subject headings is that you can assign many to an item while it is located in just one location in the library.  See Dr. Rubin’s example about Darwin’s Origin of the Species in the chapter

Then there are the catalogs themselves. Books, archives, and some museum collections are catalogs using MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging). Each identifiable element of a book or object is typed into a specific field. The fields are then displayed by the catalog interface. There are more fields with data than are normally shown by the public access terminal or OPAC. Other catalog encoding systems include ARC and EAD. Dublin Core is a system that allows the use of natural language to identify the various objects cataloging or held within the database. Dublin Core usually, but not always, describes digital objects.

Metadata is compiled to describe the various features and attributes of digital objects and databases. It is actually data about data and is used for organizing and controlling or keeping track of digital resources, their methods of creation, and components.

Dr. Salaba referenced this link in her talk about metadata. It leads to a metadata standards map - http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/

There are ways to provide access points to books, journals, and other sources of data. One is an index arranged by author, title, and various subject headings. We are all familiar with this form of access method. There are indices to journals in a subject area, where subject headings and subheadings provide access to various articles written that month, year, or even decade. These have evolved into proprietary or ‘domain dependent’ databases such as Library Literature Index. Even JSTOR might be considered such an index.

Since I spoke at length about these various topics in my video podcasts, I’ll limit my explanation to those above. Let me know if you have questions, which will undoubtedly be answered more fully when you take “Organization of Information” and “Cataloging”.