Owen wrote:
"I agree that librarians are sometimes guilty of undervaluing their own
expertise (and I've been guilty of this myself at times), but where I
disagree is that we should be 'protecting our boundaries'. Rather I
believe we should be breaking down those boundaries, and expanding our
expertise so that we can have sensible conversations with other
disciplines. I think we have some of that cross-over happening on this
list, but overall the profession still seems to be slightly 'inward'
looking to me."
Owen, I realize this idea of "protecting our boundaries" is problematic.
Librarians had to get involved in computers. Librarianship has probably
always been an interdisciplinary field, and clearly, by the early 80's,
computers were going to have a big role in information access. So our
"boundaries" had to get blurred somewhat as we learned to use those
systems.
I think another way to interpret White's idea of boundaries, and one I'm
more comfortable with than his "why would I tell you?" example, is in
terms of the uniqueness of subject vocabulary. I remember that several
years ago, someone said at ALA that "a user should not have to get help
in using subject access systems." Or something to that effect. It was in
a presentation showing how she and several others were working on
creating crosswalks from a number of different "ontologies" so that any
novice user could start with what he's familiar with and find
everything.
Now, there is the question, which White would not be embarrassed to
raise, about whether that's essentially a plan for working ourselves out
of our jobs. But that's not the primary point. We exist to be useful to
people, not get paid. Or better, our right to pay is based on our
usefulness. The deeper question is whether such a thing is even
feasible. Every ontology has a certain arbitrariness, because it's
attempting to cover a possibly infinite range of ideas and things with a
finite number of terms. That's true of languages in general. Notice how
bad most machine translating of foreign languages is. If you have any
doubts about that, find a page on Google in a foreign language and have
Google translate it. You will generally not get something that is very
coherent. The translation feature is useful for getting a vague idea of
what something is about, and that's about it.
There may be no way to automate translation very well, because our
relationship to words is different from computers' relationship to them.
Computers are good at scanning documents for character strings--can do
that a lot more efficiently than we can. But words mean more to us than
strings of characters, because we also visualize the things they refer
to and see similarities to other related things in the world. I think
expecting a computer to translate a text or assign subjects to it is
comparable to expecting it to write it.
Owen, I am glad that this list exists, as you said, to help "expand our
expertise." But I just hope we guard ourselves against unrealistic
expectations. And that's where "protecting our boundaries" comes in. If
we buy too quickly into the idea that computers and full texts will
solve all the problems, some of our jobs really might be lost. And that
will probably be a loss for the world as whole. Money may be saved, but
our culture will be the poorer for it.
--Ted Gemberling
Not an official statement of the UAB Lister Hill Library
Received on Thu May 24 2007 - 14:40:17 EDT