Shawne,
These are some thought-provoking comments. I think there is another consideration that must be included: general expectations.
People expect much more than ever before, and a lot of these expectations are simply unrealistic. In your example, an argument could be made that the populace expects and demands 100% security. Of course, this is an impossibility, but nevertheless, when something untoward happens, as it always will, people believe that "something has gone wrong." Many times, it isn't that something has gone wrong; it's not that anyone has made a mistake; it's that no one has ever achieved 100% security. This means that things happen sooner or later, and that wil always have things to learn. I think this is something that people outside of the US understand somewhat better. For example, just a couple of days ago there was a bombing at a police station in southern Italy, most probably by the Mafia (http://www.siciliainformazioni.com/giornale//76320/calabria-bomb-seen-general-warning-attack-ndrangheta-signature-investigators.htm), but while people are angry and concerned, there has been nothing!
about: who made the mistakes that allowed this to happen in the first place, and so on. There have been bombings in the UK, Spain and many other European countries, but their reactions are quite different from what seems to be going on in the US. I think we can also keep in mind the problem of relying on 100% economic security as well.
In these cases, I think there is a lot society can do, but there will still be a lot of risk left over.
Relating this to libraries, what are our patrons' expectations? I have not looked to see if there is any research in this area per se, but it is my professional experience that people's expectations for what they can get through information search and retrieval has changed a lot. For example, if a library doesn't have a book, the public can get a copy through ILL or through some sort of arrangement where your patrons can go to another library where they can get the book. 20 years ago, that was considered a success. Today, I think such an option is considered more as a failure in the eyes of our patrons, and are becoming more and more of a failure all the time. People want *everything* and they want it *now* so if they have to go somewhere else, or have to wait a few days or weeks to get the information they want, or as I have seen more and more, if something is not available in an electronic version where they can search the full-text, they see it as a failure of the inform!
ation search and retrieval system. I am not saying that this is a good thing that is happening, but happening it is and I don't have any idea how this can be stopped. Attached to this is the idea of Marcia Bates' "Principle of Least Effort" which I discussed on a list somewhere and I placed a copy on my blog at: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/2009/06/re-in-praise-of-lazy-catalogers-was.html.
"Probably the single most frequently discovered finding on information seeking behavior is that people use the principle of least effort in their information seeking. This may seem reasonable and obvious, but the full significance of this finding must be understood. People do not just use information that is easy to find; they even use information they know to be of poor quality and less reliable--so long as it requires little effort to find--rather than using information they know to be of high quality and reliable, though harder to find."
This has profound consequences for what we are doing, both in terms of systems development and perhaps more crucially, on user education.
This is why I keep harping on the FRBR user tasks, which necessarily are very closely related to user expectations: people want and expect something substantially different today from before. The FRBR user tasks are simply obsolete and the sooner we accept this, the better for our entire field. In fact, it is my experience that the rise of full-text searching has brought a consequent loss of the very concept of authority control (which was poorly understood to begin with), and as a result, even the *idea* of being able to find, for example "all of the works" of Mark Twain (within the traditional parameters of the rule of three etc.) no matter the form of the name on the item, is becoming less and less known among patrons and perhaps less and less appreciated. Once they understand the purpose and power of authority control, which is definitely not something that can be explained in sixty seconds, (for example, see the BBC article "Turning into digital goldfish" http://news.bb!
c.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1834682.stm) This goes equally for all the European, US and UK students I have worked with.
We need to make tools that will berelevant to our users' needs , but before that we need to find out what their needs are, otherwise we are making tools relevant to the world before the 1990s but not to the world of today, let alone the world 20 years from now.
James L. Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
________________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Miksa, Shawne [SMiksa_at_UNT.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 6:07 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] information organization, systems, and terrorists
It’s Sunday morning and I’m listening to CNN’s State of the Union while working on a chapter of my book. I’m hearing mostly about the thwarted December 25th terrorist attack on the plane from Amsterdam to Detroit and the breakdown in the intelligence community as it concerns making the connections between information they had concerning the individual terrorist, his connection to Yemen, how and why things were missed that may have prevented him from being able to get on the plane in the first place, etc. At the same time I’m trying to write a chapter on our library information systems, what they are, what are library catalogs today, objectives, FRBR, etc. All of this brings to mind the complexity of an information system and the effect of that complexity on making those connections, the reliance and over-reliance on the technology (i.e., on commentator asked why the computer technology didn’t make the connection), and on human ability to make the connections, and so on. !
If we shift that complexity to the kinds of information systems we in LIS create, populate, manipulate, maintain, and cross-connect to other systems---it begs the question of how much complexity can we expect to be able to maintain or work within?
Let’s pretend that every information resource we have in our system(s) represents one terrorist and we are the intelligence community. A terrorist attack is equivalent to a failure to meet an information need (e.g., someone presented what they thought was a thorough report with all the facts, but it turns out they missed a major piece of info and a major deal broke down or someone got an F on a paper because of lack of viable resources).
As the organizers of the information (the raw data), our tools are description, authority control of names and headings, inclusion and exclusion of shared vocabulary, both natural language and controlled, our interpretation of the intentions of the resource creator from both ourselves and outside resources (i.e., agents on the ground, snitches, etc.), our judgment based on the experience, or inexperience, we have accumulated during our life, and the ability of the system to make these same types of judgment (based on how it’s been programmed). On top of that we as the organizers also have to have a strong understanding of the system or variety of systems that we work within, as well as information needs and information seeking abilities (human information behavior) of the users of those systems. Furthermore, we realize that we have no control over how that information is used, misused, or not used by the user---which logically would push us to make even richer representati!
ons as a way of attracting the user so they might use the information correctly and make those connections.
Are we insane to think we can make all the appropriate connections in order to predict, and therefore prevent, a terrorist attack/info need not met? If someone dropped the ball and didn’t put the information they had into a system or “out there” in the info stream or simply made a poor representation of that information—all or part of which is apparently part of the problem as it concerns this Dec 25 attack—then the connection isn’t made and our defenses are weakened. We share in the loss in the great game of information organization because missed connections may result in “deaths” of innocent individuals (i.e., useless reports, fail grades, etc.)
What is predictable and what is not? For example, did the Dec 25th terrorist work into the equation the actions of the passengers on the plane, or the (thankfully) faulty bomb equipment? We could translate this into our users coming to us to point out mistakes and/or missed connections between resources in our systems based on their personal knowledge/expertise.
Just thinking out loud. All of the varying opinions on the talk shows have me thinking about what we can expect and what we shouldn’t, action vs. inaction, complexity, connections, etc. How do we account for all of this when working within current information systems?
**************************************************************
Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
College of Information
University of North Texas
email: Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu<mailto:Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu>
http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
**************************************************************
Received on Tue Jan 05 2010 - 12:03:29 EST