On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 06:47, Janet Hill <Janet.Hill_at_colorado.edu> wrote:
> We don't expect people to know how to drive a car without some instruction.
The allegory breaks down, as we don't expect our users to *become*
librarians. We teach people to drive cars because they want to drive
cars. We don't teach them librarianship unless we want them to be
librarians.
> Using your phone, camera, DVD player, or IPod takes some learning. People
> don't instinctively know how to create a personal web page or make waffles.
> (Yes, I know I'm talking about in extremes, here).
Indeed, and as such you've got me even less convinced; for every
librarian there's a number of university level education year of
learning, so you tell me, how many percentages of that would you need
to teach the user in order for her to find the books she's after in a
library catalog? Seriously, how crappy can you actually make these
catalogs for you to require *any* librarian presupposed knowledge?
Again, I assert this is a massive fail on the library world's part.
(And yes, some catalogs are heaps better than others ...)
> There is at present no way to make everything about searching for
> information on the internet (or in library catalogs) completely transparent,
> totally intuitive and at the same time totally effective.
But that's a pretty big red herring; we're not asking people to search
the whole friggin' Internet for their books, we're talking about a
minimal fraction of *highly* controlled metadata. Is it even possible
*not* to make that easy? (Well, clearly)
> People must be
> willing to learn and apply SOMETHING to the process.
Learn and apply *something*, for sure, like new knowledge that's
actually valuable would be a good start. But to have them learn what a
title statement is as compared to just a title is *stupid*. When you
log on to your computer in the morning, do you type in your MAC
address number? Do you enter your own dedicated IP? Do you know how
TCP works? Configure the router before going online? Setting up your
DHCP server? Any clue about processor registers? Stack handling? Not
yet? How about hash control, or syslogs, or internal pipes, event
models, static vs. dynamic programming modes, imperative vs.
functional vs. objective programming, duck typing, SOA, SOAP, WS-*,
REST, REQUEST bind, and on and on and on. I doubt it (although I'm
happy to be corrected). The point here is that you're sitting on a
computer which is intensely more complex than any library system and
has an underlying culture and language which is far more complex than
the whole library world put together. Yet, you can use your computer
for your work every day without knowing *any* of that stuff. You just
pop in your username and password (if even that), and browse away, or
catalog, or write a letter, or whatever. There's hundreds of layers of
this computer you know *nothing* about, and yet you can use that
computer.
All of the above is just again to point out that you *don't* need
people to know anything about the underlying specifics in order to
create a useful and usable system for all types of people. Yes you
can. Indeed you can. *Of course* you can!
> But, we still want
> them not to have to learn more than they have the tolerance for .....
> understanding that the tolerance of most people is pretty low.
Certainly when the new knowledge is completely worthless to them.
> But we aren't yet sufficiently Star Trekkian to be able just
> to say "Computer, what is the xxxxxx" and have the computer retrieve exactly
> what we wanted (even if we couldn't figure out how to say it).
We're working on it, and in some areas, getting pretty darn good. We
start with the simple and most wanted stuff first, like "Pizza in
Shellharbour, Australia." I dare you;
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=Pizza+in+Shellharbour%2C+Australia&btnG=Search&meta=
I mean, seriously, isn't that friggin' orgasmatologically amazingly
fantastic?!?! Sit down and think about it for two seconds, and just
take in the implication of that one simple search. Now think a bit
further as to where this is going. Add your profile, or give it some
context it can use from search to search, and we're already getting
pretty darn good results.Here's more;
"Libraries near Kiama, Australia"
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=libraries+near+Kiama%2C+Australia&btnG=Search&meta=
Just look at those results! You get the three nearest libraries to
Kiama, on a map, with more links and information. Are you friggin'
KIDDING me?! I just sit here and marvel and just where this is going.
Yeah, sure, brush it off with the usual "that's just simple stuff, but
it doesn't work for more complex stuff", and I'll explode into my
"what the friggin' hell did you have 5 years ago that could even come
close to this? What will you have in another 5 years?" spiel. What
I've been saying the last 5 years is that the libraries should be part
of this, should be experts at this, as to lead the way. But no,
libraries just don't get it.
> We're still
> in the "how quaint" stage of development (to quote Dr. Scott, as he gave up
> and typed a query into the computer)
That's what I'll say when they close the next library down, too.
Alex
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Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Mon Mar 16 2009 - 19:51:32 EDT