Hi,
Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> I, for one, hope you will reconsider.
I think a nice holiday for me is good for us all. And didn't we just
have another thread about the lack of diversity, how the loud
old-timers hog the pipeline? I'm sure one whining Norwegian less will
bring the conversation and the masses out of the woodwork for sure ...
> I have been the recipient of a few of your salvos but things have
> worked out. We really need voices that are sincere and informed.
My "salvos" are usually nothing more than being frank above the level
of a hushed notice. Maybe I throw in the odd "goddamn" to ram through
how important I think some point is, but I find it increasingly harder
to interact on this mailing-list in fear of being policed by people
who are more worried about tone than content. It's frankly astounding
for me to see the library world go down in flames while you're all
being very polite about it. Shouldn't you be more, hmm, angry, upset
and willing to bang your fist on the proverbial table and demand
properly resourced epistemology now?! By now you should be immune to
niceties, you should be standing outside in the streets with signs
reading "goddamn", shouting resource allocation strategies from the
rooftops ...
Whenever I get put in the naughty corner it's always because I've used
some word or two, usually in the rather mild category of things, and
that my "tone" is too harsh. And every time I feel really upset about
this, not because I'm being told I'm being harsh (I can deal with that
fine, especially given that I *mean* to be harsh!) but because my
harshness in the real world would be considered a big yawn. It's not
like I'm swearing and throwing profanity around either, it's all about
"tone", a mysterious quality that is highly subjective and to which
there is no real defense, some notion in my prose that annoys some
people to the point of telling me to shut up and be nicer, to stop
whining and rather come up with alternative solutions. And it's not
like I don't understand the message, but the problem isn't some box
with a solution in it, the problem is the box itself, the wrapper of
the goods. There is nothing I can do to fix that one; that solution
*has* to come from within, *has* to be thought up by librarians in a
library setting using library skills and logic.
Anyway, I hate to bang on about this topic, it just seems as the
resident foul-mouthed whiner I should explain that in the real world,
where I come from, I'm considered a mild footnote. I'm really not that
harsh, not that horrible, not that potty-mouthed. And it makes me
wonder what this "tone" is. I'm simply honest to the point of not
caring if that truth might hurt, however if you *do* get hurt by this
then a rude awakening is worth the torment of my semi-good name.
And with all that said, I won't say another word about it.
> Anyway, I think we more or less agree, except that you think selection is
> just too overwhelming a task, while I think that updating our current methods
> and changing our "Weltanschauung" (no equivalent in English for that)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view
> to include all related fields, would increase our total productivity in an
> exponential way. I would like to see what my colleagues and I are capable
> of.
I think the potentiality is huge, we know the librarians when given
the right resources do a friggin' amazing and - perhaps more important
- a thorough job, so that's not what the problem is. This is one of
volume, pure and simple. Even if we limit ourselves to books alone the
numbers are growing far beyond what humans can properly deal with. The
quality of your selection will only get worse and worse as the volume
increases, and no amount of "changing your methods" is going to fix
that unless computers are *heavily* involved in smart ways. They don't
need to do the final selections, but they must be employed to find,
classify, harvest meta data, create networks of recommendations,
social engineering, relevancy, subject maps, knowledge maps and so
forth, to a much larger degree as the pile of books / resources that
you *should* include reaches insurmountable heights. The best
super-librarian in the world still cannot do this task; we humans
haven't got the mental nor time capacity to handle the volume, but
who's making these computer systems? Not you, not the people that
*should* make them, the librarians who's got epistemology on their
sleeves and a categorized twinkle in their eye.
> As I said in a previous post somewhere, the traditional task of selection
> was one of *inclusion* i.e. I include this specific item into my collection
> because my users will find it worthwhile. In the new environment, I think
> selection will become one of *exclusion* i.e. saying that this stuff is not
> worthwhile to my users.
I don't think this need to change; with the right tools both domains
should be at your fingertip. And to be honest, I think selection
*always* have been both inclusion and exclusion to various degrees of
consciousness.
> The concept of "my users" also needs to be seen in another way, i.e.
> not only those in my own institution, but to grow and include constituencies
> literally all over the world.
At what point does even physical institutions lose its meaning as
knowledge and most information turns globally digital? I feel the
whole notion of librarianship is being pushed further and further into
special research, and the whole notion of "the public" is meaningless
for the library of the future. The library will turn into a museum of
artifacts, not knowledge.
...
> Still, it has always been my opinion that the main part of a library
> that determines its worth is its selection.
Then I think you're in bigger trouble than you think. The only
libraries that comes well out of this are those where researches and
historians hang out. Maybe that's a worthy consolation price, though.
But the library as a public service to the masses won't hold up to
selection; it is this *very* selection that makes people go straight
for Amazon.com instead of putting themselves on the 3 month waiting
queue for some popular and selected book.
> I would love to see my field put out its finest effort before it decides
> that it is better to ride out into the sunset. But I may agree with you here.
> I don't know if the field can change that much.
Just to clarify; I do *NOT* want you to give up. My whole
potty-mouthed harsh horrible anti-establishment presence here is built
on librarians picking up the rocks and build that castle properly, to
face the dangers of politics and changing societies to make yourselves
relevant beyond political cut-backs. I was once a "librarian", and
would love to be one again, but I as a technologist I fear for your
technological well-being as the foundation of knowledge management
(you know, the business the library world is or is entering) is built
on a different foundation from yours. Your need to bring your human
and librarian values to the technological foundations the future is
being built on, and that means that things like selection must be more
than just tweaked, they must be redone, rethought, rebuilt.
Oh, and build a goddamn search engine.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Tue Jul 06 2010 - 21:16:06 EDT