Hi -
I'm a programmer/analyst, and I work as one in a university
library. I've desultorily read systems analysis literature on and off for
years. To put it bluntly, I don't think that any part of the design of
the next generation of catalogs should be handed over to commercial
concerns.
Commercial software is designed by people who are in, and inherit
from, a large tradition of top down management, where management's goals
are to make money, to control their organization, and to rationalize its
structure so that parts become replaceable. This is starkest early on, in
the 70s and 80s, and then becomes softened and blurred as firms try to
accomodate enterprises that have different values. And commercial software
firms are not motivated to rethink the bases of the software they are
offering. They do not have enough time to do that and make money.
For example, there exists a real problem with most software. It
tends to capture and hide institutional knowledge. If you produce a
software module that searches a catalog, using proximity, stemming and
other good things, all well and good, but if the people using it have no
idea how it is getting the results, they forget how to get the results
themselves. We want software that aids people searching, but doesn't
hide how the searching is done in code they will never see, and allows for
new methods of searching being added. I would say that you are not going
to find a piece of software on the market that values the creation of
knowledge in its users.
If we want a next generation catalog, I think we have to look at
the values and institutional structure of the library at its very core,
and carry that analysis into the heart of what it means to automate,
rather than requesting new features from software that does not reflect
those values.
Garey Mills
Library Systems Office
UC Berkeley
The brain is not where you think
Received on Fri Jun 16 2006 - 11:58:13 EDT