[Sigia-l] integrated catalogues?

[Alexander Johannesen]

Alex wrote:
> > Libraries have a long tradition of designing things that are hard to
> > use, cryptic to understand and generally produce sub-par results.

<rant>

I'm in the middle of a project that faces a lot of the usual tripe in
terms of "this is the library, and this is the way we do things around
here", and since it is driving me up the wall, I fear this response
might turn a bit ranty. My appologies in advance.

On 10/26/05, Karl Fast <karl.fast at pobox.com> wrote:
> In their defense, libraries and library-related systems were often
> early adopters and on the leading edge. They got a few things wrong
> in the long run, and they have been slow to adapt and catch up. But
> for many years they were way ahead in quite a few things.

Both yes and no; some of the things they've done have definitly been
cutting-edge, where they've create something because something simply
didn't exsist. And all credits to that, but it's just that when they
first sat down and *designed* the darn thing they needed ... Hmm.
*aaargh*

> MARC and Z39.50 are good examples.

Yes, examples of good intentions and early technology gone horribly
wrong. No, let me rephrase that; way back when it was concucted it
propably seemed like a good idea to link the whole shebang into
LCSH/DeweyD (and librarians might say this is not true, that these are
outside specifications, but my answer is; can you prove it in
real-life?), and if these classification systems weren't so human and
disjointed in its nature, the whole thing might still be a wonderful
technology to use. But there were serious flaws in protecting the
underlying format from humans who thought "it seemed like a good idea
at the time", such as visual styling of MARC data, charater encodings
gone bad, an overly complex ontology model, and so forth.

They started out as good things, but have turned into rather
convoluted and blodged things over time that we're now stuck with,
despite all efforts to try and sort it out. Most of our time is spent
creating tools that sort out problems that are inherited through the
use of MARC and Z39.50. Anyways, I get your point, and I should be
grateful, I know, I know.

> Today, most of these systems look primitive and awkward. The user
> experience was usually atrocious. But the whole notion of user
> experience was unknown. Even the term 'user-centered design' wasn't
> common (Norman & Draper's book "User centered system design" wasn't
> published until 1986).

One thing is old legacy systems. I'm seriously more interested in what
libraries are doing right now to either take a step forward or fixing
past mistakes. And from what I can tell, it is a sad state indeed;
libraries are now slow adapters, low on innovation, poor planning, and
of course low on resources. Of course, low resources has a lot to do
with most of these, but also the library world is not an environment
anymore that promotes innovation and fun new things. And seriously,
without any fun, who wants to work here? How can you attract "the
right people" if you don't have "the right place"?

> But all that aside, I think the biggest challenges have been related
> to inertia and infrastructure. It's hard to make rapid changes when
> you've invested three decades to develop information systems based
> on certain technologies and philosophies.

Amen. :) I haven't worked at a library all my life, but I find myself
struggeling to do anything that is out of the ordinaire; if we want to
create a new search, for example, Z39.50 automatically become part of
the requirements, without regard for whether this is a good idea or
not! "We designed the thing, it's beautiful, and we'll use it for
everything!" It's driving me nuts! Just recently I was asked to put
Z39.50 support into a little dinky Wiki we've got running, just so
that some people in a different branch could search it (and trust me,
a] they don't need to, and b] there's better ways). It's beyond crazy.

> There are technical
> issues, to be sure. But there are also philosophical perspectives
> that produce difficult and deeply rooted cultural and political
> issues. These are probably even harder to overcome.

Maybe it is that libraries have struggled for so long that they
decided to rest a little on their laurels for a while, and the world
simply zipped past them? Tortoise and the hare, anyone? It seems a lot
of the library world stopped around 1999. Maybe a lot of Prince fans?
(A bad pun, indeed. And if you're into project methodologies, that
*that* is a baaaaaad pun!)

> And then there
> are things that go back to before we had computers; things like LCC
> and LCSH and AACR2.

These things are still good things, in my opinion, but their
translation into the computer realm has been poorly done. At least,
that's my take on it.

> Libraries are not starting from a blank slate. This has some
> advantages, like lots of highly structured content to work with,

Actually, the more I work with our "highly structured content"
(metadata, really) the more I come to the conclusion that it isn't
worth as much as we tend to praise it. But that's a full-length opera.
:)

> but
> it has some big drawbacks. I think one biggest of these is speed. It
> takes time to change infrastructure and philosophies. And, to make
> it worse, libraries have always moved slowly relative to the rest of
> the culture, which is a good thing (think Stewart Brand's pace
> layering, particularly the Long Now foundation).

And certainly, we must use this incredible advantage for what it is
worth! Libraries are knowledge brokers and seals of authority for
information more than a simple information finding tools, but a lot of
us are still locked in the "I have no opinions; here's what you asked
for" mode. We need to snap out of it.

> For example, Access is a library technology conference held in
> Canada every year. The last few years they have been talking a lot
> about blogging, open source, RSS, and so forth. This year our own
> Gene Smith talked about tagging and folksonomies, and someone else
> spoke on GreaseMonkey.

I've been talking about Wikis, Topic Maps, blogging, RSS, aggregation,
cluster indexing, distributed computing, different programming
languages and processes, XML/XSLT, usability, accessibility, and heaps
more. I've also seen the same with a few scattered burning individuals
around the library world. But not much is happening. Libraries *talk*
about all this new and fancy stuff, but because they don't *do* much,
that new and fancy stuff is already yesterdays diapers.

So much for innovation.

</rant>


Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
__ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________