http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail400.html

I’m not a librarian, and I didn’t attend Roy’s talk. I just stumbled here from the wider web. It’s probably not entirely kosher, therefore, for me to get up on a soapbox; but I’m going to anyway, with apologies in advance.

I would argue that there is a quantum mindshift that is occuring right now, and the biggest bottleneck is the paradigm inside of which we are operating. Paradigms have a very nasty habit of being invisible when viewed from the inside (kind of like dreams; in both cases, it takes a significant amount of mental labor to become aware of the boundaries). I would like to make a couple of observations that may bring the boundary of the current predominant paradigm into focus a bit.

People are outgrowing the need for librarians. Ironically, the job description is morphing into something like: obsolete yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then to reinvent what you do at a higher level. The growing demand for information will no longer make it tolerable to stand in line for information, or to explain my issue to a human being before getting an answer. Roy’s maxim above, that people like to find more than they like to search doens’t even quite go far enough. People like much more than to find. In the same way that searching is just the prerequisite to finding, finding is just the prerequisite to contributing. People ache to contribute, and they are doing so with folksonomies, and wikis, and applications for building applications that will soon do everything from indexing the worlds knowledge to solving unheard of problems (see ning.com).

Our linear solutions for solving large scale problems are no longer agile enough to accomplish the task before us. We are shedding the skin of the current paradigm. The best we can do is to let go of it, and embrace the omniarchy of multi-paradigmatic navigation.

The population is becoming empowered and situated to start making most conventional jobs obsolete. We are used to thinking of people as needing the help of an expert to do make real headway on any significant task. Most hierarchies are set up to concretize the expertise of individuals. These silos are to restrictive for the kind of collaboration that is striving to be born. Rather than looking at division of labor, we should start looking at multiplication of labor. Rather than thinking of ways in which you can more efficiently give people access to your expertise, learn how to hand them your expertise so that you aren’t part of the bottleneck between them and their contribution.

Comment: Open WorldCat and RedLightGreen *are* lipstick on pigs. Maybe all the great data we have in a pig like MARC we should keep maintaining, and let Google index it so the end users find it.

Andrew Pace: Slaughter the pig. We’re putting our data into tab-delimited form and indexing with multiple relevance algorithms from Endeca. Not even putting into XML

Comment: Need to know when to ignore the user. If we keep following our “Most Important” user, the squeaky wheel faculty member, then we leave behind all the undergrads. Roy: I don’t mean to imply we have only one audience. You probably need to build interfaces maximized to those two different activities. “User focused not user driven” — don’t just do what the user tells you to, craft a system better than what the user would have imagined

Comment: What about something like a social tagging capability? User vocabulary does not match the cataloger vocabulary. Roy: Not sure about that, the #1 keyword assigned on Flickr is “me”.
(HMM, THIS MAKES ME THINK, what about if we combine social/user tags with professional tags? Could we start using the user’s term to search user-supplied vocabulary — searching user-applied tags, or the fulltext of the documents, which in many fields is a better match for the user’s terms? Then pick up the subject headings of retrieved items, and use that to find the rest of the relevant items? How does this compare to semantic indexing? Would semantic ontologies work better than end-user social tagging or less well? What about the problem of the clueless user or the niche user in a social tagging system, who is going to have too much power to steer the rest of the audience to the subpar or the niche, rather than the best of the best? Who is studying this? Anyone?)

Santa Clara University: How about our other user group, the librarians? How do we take this back to our institutions and convey this to the reference and cataloging staff who actually drive what we systems people do? Roy (in frequent flyer mode): This is why I go to all these nontechnical librarian meetings and talk about this same stuff (”Gee, Mom, I’m evangelizing as fast as I can!”) For local practice, prototype, *then* try and get people to get it.

U Rochester: We actually have an anthropologist on staff. Their assignment isn’t to fix the web site, it’s about understanding the research process and the student’s work process. Our usability work is done almost entirely by the reference staff. They take initiative, creativity, ownership of the user interface. Roy: See Charleston Advisor piece by U Rochester. We don’t do very well with the finding task, other than finding a known item, e.g., we don’t address finding “a few good things for writing a paper”

Roy: Vendors need to abstract the interface layer from the functionality

Roy: We don’t have Google’s money. But we have people. Open source type collaborative effort needed, address these problems systemically rather than each at the level of our local libraries.

The mass evacuation was apparently caused by someone leaving popcorn in the microwave a leetle bit too long … as we returned to the room, the gently wafting odor of burnt popcorn met our noses.