Andy, Ross (and anybody on the list),
Did you pick up Mack's comment "...wouldn't it be good to try an
ILS/Amazon or ILS/Google mash-up?" Or words to that effect, I don't
want to put words in anyone's mouth. Is anybody doing this? Is it a
good or bad idea? Good idea: it gets away from ILS and OPAC-centric
thinking, and (this is important) gets the library and library resources
to a public place with traffic. More on why this is important
presently. Bad idea: hooking the library cart to the Amazon or Google
horse has brand, site focus and privacy implications, to name a few
things just off the top of my head.
- Brand: conflating a commercial brand with an institutional one, be
that institution a local governmental subdivision or an educational
institution. Seems to me that relationship would have to be worked out
in some legal and fiscal way.
- Focus: Amazon, for example, is a commercial site; libraries,
generally, are not. Is some distinction necessary here and can our
patrons make that distinction. Is the distinction important or
necessary.
- Privacy: commercial sites mine every mouse click for commercial
potential - that's business. Generally, libraries don't do that. That
doesn't necessarily mean libraries can't or libraries shouldn't.
Okay, back to associating the library with great, big, commercial sites
with heavy traffic: echoing my previous post about whether anybody
gives a rats fanny about libraries any more, and if our attitudes don't
reflect a certain professional "inferiority complex," Dan Lester replied
"no inferiority complex here," "here" meaning "on this list." Probably
not most other places in library land, too. I'm going to try to clarify
my thinking here and I'd appreciate your feed back.
We can't discuss what an ILS is supposed to do apart from what the
library is supposed to do in a given context. I keep asking myself "Are
libraries relevant?" "Are libraries necessary?" The Internet and
associated search engines have the world into "meatball searchers"
(remember the line from M.A.S.H. about "meatball surgery," which was
just barely good enough to keep body and soul together to get somebody
to a real hospital? That's what I mean). The democratization of of
publishing, searching, commerce, and software development the Internet
gave and gives us is a great thing. Libraries, like the vendors who
help us, are still trying to find their place in the new landscape.
I saw a web site recently, with a caricature of the librarians running
the site about their work. It was a Shiva-like image, with hands in
blogs, wikis, catalogs, Podcasting, FaceBook, and every other fad &
trend. There was lots of chatter on the site about Library 2.0. I
didn't have any sense there was a unifying principal behind any of this
furtive, technological activity. "We have to learn about this stuff."
Well, yeah, we have to learn about this stuff, but why are we learning
and where are we going?
I worked 5 years in a public library, 9 years for library automation
vendors, and 5 years for a mental health agency as the I.T. manager. I
can count on one hand, not even one hand, the people and organizations
I'd look to for examples of vision, leadership, organization and
managerial acumen, in or adjacent to libraries. The biggest problem
with the vendors was great ideas, but failure to execute them in a
timely manner in a changing market place - that and the utter fear and
dissociative behavior employees have about calling a BS on management
when Things Are Not Working. Now libraries provide a useful service, or
at least they have up to this point. We have capable "retail" folks,
technologists and project managers, certainly for building projects and
certain technology projects. But librarians are winsome when it comes
to sales, marketing and a kind of assertive, competitive, fearless,
shameless self-promotion that, combined with vision, leads people to
seek you out. Who in business, industry and government seeks out senior
library management for these skills, and hires them because they are
demonstrably best-of-breed - NOBODY.
I saw a comment earlier that "the vendors aren't giving us what we
want." Who's fault is that? Why on earth are we waiting for the
presidents of ILS vendors to tell us where we're going at the annual
user's group meeting or ALA annual or mid-winter? These folks work for
us, remember? We tell the vendors where we're going - they follow us,
not the other 'way 'round. Ironically, this requires that we libraries
and librarians need a clearer, crisper, measurable sense of where we're
going; what I perceive as the historically relaxed method and pace of
planning and change leaves us begging for crumbs year after year after
year in city, county, state, school and higher ed budgets.
The vendors have given us exactly what we asked for: software to manage
a big box of books, and so what? To paraphrase Shakespeare, the problem
is not with our systems but with ourselves. Where is the
entrepreneurial fire in libraries anymore? I find it at NCSU with their
Endeca-based catalog. I find it at Notre Dame with the MyLibrary portal
(which came from NCSU). I find it at the Seattle Public Library. I
find it at Bucknell University. Let's imitate these folks, not so much
in their technology as in the process that led up to realizing "We need
a tool that does this. Let's do a project." Information storage and
retrieval theory, and user interface optimization only begin to be
useful inside those projects.
The next-generation catalog is a solution in search of a problem. The
problem we're trying to solve is not entirely clear. If your library
closed today would anyone notice? If the library had to charge for its
services, would anyone pay? How much would they pay? What services do
we need to stop providing? What services do we need to start providing?
How do we make these services known? Building on past and present
success, how to we define success today and achieve more of it?
Mark
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Mark Andrews, MLS
Systems Librarian
DoIT Academic and eLearning Technologies
L 32 Reinert Memorial Alumni Library
402.280.3065
mja30807_at_creighton.edu
AIM: mja30807
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Received on Thu Jun 15 2006 - 10:56:27 EDT