A Modern Parable

A Modern Parable

Roy Tennant

Kaley, a university acquisitions librarian, pulls up the screen of recent
purchases and pulls down their records from the cloud. The books have
already been sent through the Artificial Intelligence Describer (AID). The
AID scans the full text and pulls data from the title page and title page
verso to uniquely identify the item, and selects Library of Congress
Subject Headings, a Library of Congress classification for location (both
physical and virtual), and another set of descriptive terms to flesh out
the finding options based on the history of book searches and the content
of the book. A reading level is also determined and becomes a finding
and/or filtering option.

A genre is determined based on previous scans that have been checked by
humans to train the algorithm. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the easiest
genres to pinpoint are romance and action novels. However, sometimes
romance and historical fiction blur, which is still an issue (reference
Diana Gabaldon). Action novels are pretty much always action novels, even
with a romantic interest tossed in for spice. Go figure.

A general color value for the book cover is determined and noted, since
library users often remember the color of a book cover even when they can’t
remember the title or author. Technology tends to change quickly, but
humans tend to change slowly. It is what it is, and we work with it.

Meanwhile, the predictions of the death of the print book have been shown
to be premature. It turns out that people still want choices. Print books
still have values that are appreciated, as do electronic books. For
different reasons.

The books Kaley has sent through the system are ready for review. She pages
through them one by one. Most are fine, but she pulls one out for editing
as she doesn’t agree with a choice the AID made. She makes the correction
and sends it back to the system. That feedback just makes the system
smarter.

Libraries have seen a tremendous amount of change since librarians
developed a “library hand” version of cursive writing that was easy to read
on catalog cards. Although that technology lasted for decades, what
followed it lasted only years, until we arrived here, at the age when
cataloging has been replaced with artificial intelligence and has allowed
us much more time helping people live their best lives, which librarians
have mostly always done, but now AI makes it even easier and more effective.

*Libraries have always and forever been about empowerment.* This is simply
the next chapter in a long, ongoing story.