Re: Martha Yee paper

Wayne, for a good example of overconfidence in technology, I think I'll
reproduce a little from the statement I sent to the Future of
Bibliographic Control people:

Sometimes technology progresses faster than we expect—I’d say that was
the case in the 80’s for computer technology—and sometimes more
slowly. There was an interesting article in Popular mechanics a few
months ago about NASA. I remember how excited I was in the early 80’s
by the Space Shuttle. What a technological marvel! But now, after 25
years, NASA has figured out they have no way to make it safe and are
returning to the 1960’s vehicle for manned space flight, the capsule.
They are designing bigger and more powerful capsules than the 60’s
versions, but capsules nonetheless. Someone is quoted in the article:
“It took us 50 years from the Wright brothers to get to the Moon, and
it’ll take us another 50 to get back to it.” Few would have expected
that in 1969. Could we experience a “plateau” in the development of
computer technology, too, rather than the study upward trend Calhoun and
others seem to expect?

It’s hard to say. I am not claiming to have much concrete evidence of
it. Though it is interesting that e-books have not taken off (in fact
have been discontinued by retailers like Barnes and Nobles) and portable
e-book readers are still rather clunky. There’s no sign that people are
losing their interest in print monographs, though print journals really
do seem to be giving way to e-journals. Print books in the form of the
“codex” are a technology we’ve been using for about 1400 years ...

Ted Gemberling
UAB Lister Hill Library
(205)934-2461

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Wayne Jones
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 6:53 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Martha Yee paper

Fifty years from now, librarians and information professionals and even
library users won’t be looking back on Martha Yee, Michael Gorman, and
Thomas Mann and thanking them for saving the profession from being
devoured by the AmaGoogle monster. Instead, their brand of reactionary
hyperbole will be a curiosity in the history of a profession which will
have decided to embrace the habits of its users and adjust accordingly,
rather than denigrating keywords and other practical searching and
promoting an old-fashioned and unrealistic attitude toward information
and the people who organize and use it.
Yee’s testimony, which was posted in full on the Cataloging Futures
blog on July 25, is highly overstated and misleading, and the calm
Canadian reader doesn’t really know where to start. Well, in the
beginning, as one book put it …
1. Yee reduces the research that has been done on users’
information-seeking behaviour to a mere “All this because some research
studies show that undergraduates prefer to use Amazon.com and Google
rather than libraries and their catalogs.” The rationale is evidently
to continue to deny any validity in the way users actually search and to
insist on forcing them to do it the ways we have been doing it for
decades. Yes, those old ways have served the profession and users quite
well, and so did button shoes and the 8-track before we found superior
replacements, which I don’t mean completely flippantly. Things change:
the internet is a major enough shift in the information landscape to
make us reconsider the advisability and practicality of our former
organizing practices.
2. Yee writes: “A computer cannot discover broader and narrower term
relationships, part-whole relationships, work-edition relationships,
variant term or name relationships (the synonym or variant name or title
problem), or the homonym problem in which the same string of letters
means different concepts or refers to different authors or different
works.” That’s true, of course, computers can’t do that all by
themselves, but human beings can program them to achieve that or a
practical, semi-fabulous approximation.
3. Yee cites the example of ordering the Lummox by Fannie Hurst on
Amazon.com, but receiving a play adapted from the novel, because none of
those bibliographic details appeared in the Amazon description. I see
this as an error in searching and verification on the part of the buyer
rather than an indication of something profoundly wrong with the way
Amazon operates. Unless someone has the time and money to ensure that
the millions of web pages and the thousands of books produced every year
are fully catalogued, this kind of thing will happen. If I do the same
search (“lummox” as title) in the Library of Congress catalogue, for
example, I get four hits for books that do appear to be different
editions or printings of the novel. If one of them is actually the
adaptation, then LC has made the same mistake as Amazon in its
bibliographic description; if not, then LC’s collection development
policy has fallen short of that offered by a commercial outfit and its
affiliates. At least Amazon can be credited for making the user aware,
however clumsily, of the possibilities.
4. Yee writes: “The reason catalog users seem to prefer keyword access
is that system designers make keyword access the default search on the
initial screen of nearly every OPAC in existence.” I think she has got
it exactly wrong and reversed: users, especially today’s users who are
familiar with Google and Amazon, search by keyword, and so ILS vendors
and libraries have promoted the keyword search to the top. Many
libraries who have studied user behaviour have found that when title or
some other more structured search was made the default, users still
searched by keyword anyway.
5. Yee writes: “It has become fashionable to criticize catalogs for not
providing users with the evaluative information they desire, a la
Amazon.com. Those who criticize seem unaware that catalogs currently do
provide evaluative information, in that the presence of a work in the
collection of a major research library implies (with some caveats) that
that work was deemed of scholarly value.” This betrays the intellectual
snobbery which underlies much of Yee’s complaint about the demise of
cataloguing/librarianship/the social order. She writes later about the
“anti-intellectualism characteristic of our society,” which I take to
mean, perhaps ungenerously: "We librarians are smarter than you who are
searching for information by keyword, and we don’t care how you want to
get your information: do it our way." My point is that academic and
research libraries are indeed the cornerstone of organized information,
and the librarians who feed their catalogues (and know how to use them)
should be hugged and thanked. However, there are other sources and other
ways to record and access those sources, and the value of that social
web should be recognized as well, and not simply dismissed as an
anti-intellectual tidbit.
Wayne Jones
(from my posted comment on the Cataloging Futures blog)

----- Original Message -----
From: "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2_at_YAHOO.COM>
Date: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 7:03 pm
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Martha Yee paper
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU

>   I thought that the following paper had some relevance to
> NGC4LIB discussions. I ran across it the other day. (Note: the
> link takes you to an MS Word document).
>
>   Yee, Martha. Will the Response of the Library Profession
> to the Internet be Self-immolation? (written testimony to LC抯
> Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control).
>   http://tinyurl.com/2vcqvx
>
>
>   Bernie Sloan
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally,  mobile search that gives
> answers, not web links.
>


>

Wayne Jones
Head, Central Technical Services
Queen's University Library
Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room B100A
Kingston, ON
K7L 5C4
T (613) 533-2802
F (613) 533-6819
E wayne.jones_at_queensu.ca