March 2009 Archives

I gave a workshop Tuesday on "emerging search technologies," by which I meant roughly searching for just about anything on or via the Internet using means that went past just the text-based websearching of Google or Yahoo. Thus I mentioned sites like Grokker and Hakia and a new (to me) tool, Chunkit. We spent a lot of time on so-called "social search," ranging from Wikia and Mahalo to Worio and Sidestripe (which work with Facebook Connect) to Aardvark, a tool so new and hip I'm not even allowed to use it yet.

It's enjoyable to see what some obviously very clever people are developing every day, and I had a great time researching the workshop, but I was also struck by how much wasted effort there is in any innovation. I'm not sure I have enough of a social network to take advantage of things like Sidestripe or Aardvark, though they look pretty nifty. But who really needs Stumpedia? "Human powered search"? What were they thinking? Is this going to be any improvement over the old but still useful concept of a web directory? I don't see how. Or Truevert, the "green" search engine? Is anyone really likely to find more informtion about composting toilet systems on this than on Google or Yahoo? Or Delver, with the dubious claim that "your friends know best." With all due respect to my friends who are reading this, I'm not sure you really know best about any topic I'm likely to be searching the Internet for, and I'm almost positive that I don't know best about whatever you're searching (unless you happen to be searching for stuff about me, in which case I probably do--but what are the chances?).

Even sites I kind of like pitch themselves as solving a problem I don't have. Consider Rollyo, which allows you to create customized search engines a lot more easily than Google Coop. Rollyo asks, "Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want?" To which I'd have to answer, nope. Google does a pretty good job of giving me relevant sites on the top page. Or, "ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust?" Almost never, to be honest. Those sites I just go to directly, usually using Google Bookmarks.

Obviously I'm not the target audience for search engines and sites that claim to solve the problem of too many irrelevant resources, but I do wonder how many people really are these days. If people can't get relevant search results on Google or Yahoo, how likely is it they're going to do much better asking their friends for help with Aardvark or Sidestripe? Chances are that my social network, such that it is, contains a lot of Internet savvy people, and if I actually had a question, someone might be able to point me to something I hadn't discovered. But it's at least possible that the people who are the least Internet savvy are going to have an entire network of unsavvy friends, none of whom can help them.

I'm not even sure how much the people using Rollyo can be trusted. I searched one specialized search engine for guitar tablature, and noticed that it doesn't have Chordie, which is far better at finding guitar tabs than the Rollyo engine and any of the websites it searches. 

I was thinking about the waste because I remember reading a few months ago about some controversy regarding libraries building innovative search tools to rival Google, and wondered how much of our effort we might waste doing things like that. It's not because I think that out of this waste good things won't emerge, because I believe they will. It's just that there are so many people out there wasting a lot of time and money and effort to come up with the next new thing that it seems hard enough for most of us just to keep up with what's already going on. There absolutely has to be wasted effort to produce useful innovations. I guess I'm just glad there are a lot of clever working on things like this so I don't have to.

Since this post is inspired partially by a brief mention of my ACRL Virtual Conference presentation, I want to begin by thanking those of you who responded with advice on that presentation when I asked for it. Some I ignored, some I took to heart, but I carefully considered it all. Especially useful was perhaps Steven's caution to remember that in a virtual presentation like this, the audience has nothing but the slides and my voice. That was a little strange for me, and helped me realize how much I depend upon immediate audience feedback both to guide my presentations and to end with a performance high. I thought the presentation went reasonably well, and people stayed until the end and asked questions, so at least they didn't fall asleep during my talk. (The slides are here, if anyone's curious; at some point I'm planning to write up and develop the notes.)

The Library Journal gave a short roundup of the virtual conference, and had this to say about my efforts: "'Cultivate Your Bottom,' had a clever title but, as even the speaker himself acknowledged, focused on what many people would consider obvious: it’s important to focus not on leaders but librarians and staffers at the bottom of the hierarchy, empowering them to act, and ensuring that they share their knowledge. Only near the end of the session were concrete examples—e.g, seminars, wikis —offered."

Though I'm not sure how much I said was really that obvious, my caveat with the description, which for the most part seems accurate, is the word only." "Only at the end of the session were concrete examples...offered." The assumption here seems completely unwarranted. Are conference presentations supposed to be only lists of practical and specific things to do in your library? Is abstraction bad? If so, then there were certainly worse "offenders" than me. Jim Neal's portion of the "Subject Liaison 2.0" presentation, for example, was very theoretical, his assumption I'm sure being that if we consider certain generalities about what to look for in a subject liaison, then the particulars of any given librarian will obviously fit or not fit the theory.

The "only" bothers me not because it implies a judgment on my presentation (it does, but it's not a severe judgment, and not one that would have changed it). Instead, it bothers me because it bespeaks an undercurrent I sense in the entire profession. We're all supposed to work within the dominant pragmatic ideology and make little effort to theorize or philosophize about our practice. Theorizing is supposed to be left to someone else, though I'm not sure who that is. LIS professors, i guess. This anti-theoretical stance that seems so practical is, however, highly impractical. It assumes that we can act responsibly without having reasons for why we act, or that we can act coherently without understanding the theoretical coherence behind our actions. I'm just not satisfied plunging ahead with every gimmick and trend without knowing how they fit into the larger scheme of goals to be achieved and problems to be solved.

Once the theoretical framework is in place, the practical implications seem easy enough to work out. If, for example, one believes an organizational problem is to figure out how to maximize and exploit the knowledge dispersed throughout an organization, then specific practices are rather easily judged in light of this theory. Administrative decisions that don't take into account the knowledge on the ground: bad. Training sessions that share knowledge among colleagues: good. Organizational structures that depend upon one person or a small group of persons to have the relevant knowledge and power to act: bad. Empowering knowledgeable and well trained frontline staff to act: good. The list could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the point.

What seems to be common throughout the profession is an overvaluation of practical tips and a resistance to abstraction. I'm not criticizing practical tips, but a bullet point approach to library  education isn't the best way to develop thoughtful and adaptable librarians. Specific daily practices or technical solutions become outdated. Adaptability requires us to evaluate the usefulness of practice within a broader theoretical framework, to focus less on the concrete details of library practice and more on the reasons why we do what we do. If we keep in mind the reasons we act in certain ways, then it's easier to change those actions when they're no longer relevant or appropriate. If we act without reasons, we'll never be able to adapt easily to new circumstances, nor justify our existence to ourselves or to anyone else.