Free Range Librarian

Cary, you’re starting with some iffy assumptions:

1) The user may know what s/he wants, but not what s/he needs. What the user wants and what the user needs are almost certainly two different things.

2) We librarians know more than users do in general.

3) We librarians specifically know more about what users need than the user him/herself does.

Why would you assume this? Why not instead assume (and maybe this should be added to the meme list) that a user knows best about what s/he needs, until proven otherwise?

Take your example: the student has to write an essay on assisted suicide and only asks the librarian for the chemical formula for cyanide. The only reason this is an example of what the student wants but not what the student needs is because you’ve decided that for the sake of your example it’s true. In real life, the chemical formula for cyanide might very well be all that the student needs–the student has the rest of the essay well in hand and only needs this one bit of info. Also, in real life, the student may need more information and not realize it initially. But let’s assume that the user does, in fact, know better than we do what s/he both wants and needs.

Because we’re starting with the assumption that the user is not broken. You’re starting with the assumption that the user is, indeed, broken, and its our job to fix the user.

Great stuff – I;ve already incorporated into a presentation I did today. It was recieved with lots of nods of thought provoking approval.

Give the “users” what they want, and then show them something they didn’t know they wanted. That’s our magic, yes? Does Google do that? That takes humans. jenn

Gracias, Alvaro! J.A., that’s another way to view this: almost a rock-paper-scissors concept.

To deploy a federated search engine in your library is to tell the information seekers in your library a lie, because it is not doing what they think it is doing, and it cannot do what they want it to do. There is nothing you can do about either problem. Lying to information seekers is the worst sin in librarianship.

I saw a sign yesterday for a library offering classes in how to use the catalog, and had exactly the same reaction, Rachel.

Lazygal, should a library catalog be so hard to use that it requires training? If so, why isn’t that true for Amazon?

Lovely. However, the user is Often broken and it is the compassionate librarian who helps the user become whole again by guiding them to information they most desperately need. Be that information a book on Shelties because their beloved Sheltie has just died, or the book “Babies with Down Syndrome” because their first grandchild has Downs, a librarian often mends cracks.
Also, re “Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face”: we may not meet face to face, but if we pass each other in another environment (a grocery store, a street fair, …), we recognise each other and speak volumes via a brief nod. And at some point, that nod may lead to a “face to face.”

“… should a library catalog be so hard to use that it requires training? If so, why isn’t that true for Amazon?”

[Et al.]

Apples and oranges, folks. How many people truly use Amazon other than to find a specific book, and then be led to others by its wicked “If you liked A, you’ll like B” AI? Besides, an Amazon search on “Mobie Dik” doesn’t generate a “Did you mean –?” (Although it might had it been an Amazon.nl.) It’s just as unforgiving as the OPAC.

Easy to use doesn’t mean useful. The OPAC needs to be geared to tracking down the books one needs for research, just as much as (I’d say more than) it needs to be able to fetch forth the shelf locations of the latest best sellers. It needs a more sophisticated approach by the OPAC — but also by the patron.

N.B.: I’m all for better OPACs — ideally an amalgam of Google, FRBR, and LCSH: fuzzy spelling resolution, recognition of both folksonomic and field-specific search terms, and a more manifestation-oriented approach, all built around a solid, authority controlled core. Powerful, useful, flexible, enabling.

That said, I must disagree with the title of this blog entry — the user is broken. Just as broken as the OPAC.

I don’t know about you all, but when I was in third grade our class was taught about the card catalogue and how to find and use subject headings. In junior high, the school librarian showed us how to consult the Red Books. (Well, I remember them as red; possibly the Dewey equivalent, though. Been a while.)

Library instruction is obviously no longer the norm.

Result: the broken products of an inadequate educational system can’t use the OPACs properly. Thus, obviously, the librarians and their OPACs are at fault …

Huh? Come again?

Yet, to judge by this blog entry and the responses to it, looks like a lot of librarians are buying into this idea.

Pfui, say I.

Steve Lawson’s comment that users are very often satisfied with X number of relevant hits (as opposed to ALL relevant hits) is quite true, and the fact that a federated search might meet this standard does mitigate somewhat the inherent flaws in the federated search paradigm. I’m sure many librarians do understand these flaws and believe the tool nevertheless offers benefits to users. For some reason – perhaps a reaction to the way federated search product marketers represent their wares – I have trouble adopting this practical perspective. Moreover, I wish I could believe our profession is prominent in some effort to develop real and effective advances in information search and retrieval, but I can’t.

“Der Benutzer ist nicht kaputt.” — Danke schon!

Weird Library Jargon:

Is that like: “add value and meaning to the information experience”?

These are important comments to make. I think many of us, regardess of age or time in the profession know that the user is the ‘sun’ and that we need to go to where the user is in order to serve her. Let’s move on to solutions. What are library schools doing to promote different solutions to the MARC record/OPAC user inadequacies ? How can we make it happen?

Thanks for this thought-provoking post. I’d be interested to see what people think about ease of use vs. power. I think sometimes there is criticism of library catalogs that does not take into account that sometimes powerful searching *can’t* be “easy” (another reason why you need a human, a librarian, to help out–and why user education, for those who are interested in learning more themselves, is not always inappropriate). I agree that OPACs should be MUCH more user-friendly and include spellcheck, better navigation, etc., but I think it’s a little glib to view speed and ease of use as always superior.

Karen,

I think the problem with the pilot analogy, of course, is that most of us are quite happy (well, not that happy), sitting in our seat on the way to grandma’s comfortable with the fact that the pilot has to take years and years of training to do his/her job right. If flying a plane was *really* user-friendly (as in you have a flight interface that let’s you enter “Cleveland” and there you are), we would have little use for pilots.

Librarians, out of a combination of self-sacrifice and emerging alternatives to traditional service, have higher expectations for our users. We are not happy until we are obsolete. I think this is because we would much rather be doing puppet shows. (This is JOKE! A joke!)

Frankly, I think the rise of social software and better searching would put information searching support back where it belongs: in communities of practise. Sure the librarian knows how to use ProQuest, but she/he probably doesn’t know who are the corner-stone authors in the field of Organizational Justice. For that question, I would still rather just ask my prof, who would be more than willing to tell me, and all the better if he listed this information in his course blog so I could go back to it for later reference. And would I search a link farm on a librarian’s site to find the blog? No way! Not when I can just Google my prof’s name. Then bookmark it. On an RSS feed/live bookmark. Alongside all my other profs blogs/sites.

I wonder if OPACs are tailored to librarian needs only to protect our professional status and wages? If so, I think we ought to be careful that we are building huge mansions on a sand foundation. Wouldn’t it be much better for everyone (users, librarians, taxpayers and everything else) if we just built a slightly smaller mansion and put it on a rock (ie. a strong, user-friendly OPAC)?

I agree with being taken aback by the haughty tone “you” creates. I don’t need to hang this on my wall. I live it. Here’s a new one: If you need to be instructed on being service minded at all costs to make your users as successful as possible, you’re a sad sack that doesn’t need a meme, you need a new career. (sarcasm off)

_If you are reading about it in Time and Newsweek and your library isn’t adapted for it or offering it, you’re behind._ What a dis. Some of us are serving thousands of people (that’s right- to a ratio of ONE librarian) and keep up as best we can. Technology is always evolving and so you are always behind. I’d change this statement to something like- “You are responsible for adapting your library to evolving technology constantly.” I loved the last ignorance does not mean you’re safe quote. I’m learning about these new ideas in the summer, and furling them, and developing staff workshops on them… because of an article i read in Time (and SLJ)! My students watch storynory, my faculty know about blogs like mediashift & mycrimespace… To provide every service of Information Power would require wonder woman and all we can do is try (to keep up). Mainstream media is a perfectly valid information source- it’s just not enough to read about it, we have to discover it.

I’m not sure I can relate – half sounds more like b**ching about adapting to reality by complaining about those who are held fast by past reality.

Is this spin on the “…revolution will not be televised…”

I do not know very much about Library policies or procedures,but I can provide you with some actual experiences that I have run into.
I happen to write my memoir titled “I Wouldn’t Die” a memoir by Franco Antonetti.
I wrote it as a very good friend of mine who happens to be an author nearly forced me to do it, as he felt that my life experiences were so unusual and interesting enough that many would be interested in reading about it.At first I thought it was a lot of nonsense, but I figured that if nothing else, it would be a nice gift to leave the family and future family members.
I worked very hard on it and by luck or whatever, it turned out that reviews were very positive.Reviews came from the LA Times,and many others.My point is that I was invited to attend as the key speaker an event for The Italian Cultural society of washington DC.
The event was great and the people just loved to listen to what they referred as a “Remarkable uplifting story that needed to be read by many”
An older lady who worked for a large Library suggested that I contact Librarians as they would love to know about this memoir.I decided that since I was retired that I should attempt to do that, and since I spent most of my life in sales, rejection if it did come would not bother me.
My amazement is that you get responses from Librarians that range from”Thank you for bringing this to our attention,”,to “You must follow these procedures and forms” to”You are not allowed to contact us ,and please do not email here again”.
I was invited and attended 21 Library Events all over the North East and it was amazing to me to learn that the polite Librarians had the nicest Libraries and a number of Libraries that were very rude had little to encourage readers to enter.
Anyway my experience may not fit in with your interesting site, but hopefully you may get something out of it.
Thank you for allowing me to post.
Ciao’
Franco

I am definitely the oldest living student studying for my MLS and hope other “older” students just beginning a MLS degree will contact me; I would like to blog with you or something like that. I just learned what a blog was couple of weeks ago. The statements and comments are enlightening (note the word enlightening, tells you my age); I am impressed with the many different approaches, comments, insights to what I think of as the future of libraries. We are living the future right now. I am grateful to be conscious and experiencing it! Because of my ancientness I do have perspective about changes in the communities in which I have lived and worked. Although not in the library business, I have always worked, been in touch with the world through work, have a huge desire to make it all work better, don’t always know what to do, delighted with those who do, delighted with those who don’t but who comment on it. The library scene is a huge big stage, a political forum, a poetic place to read the newspaper and get in out of the cold and jeering city streets, not silent but restful, full of people of different stripes, zebras and tigers and giraffs, lady bugs, sow beetles, plant like creating this huge mass of moving ecoculture shifting through the books, the feeling of knowledge, sometimes hopeful, sometimes mute and dumb, and all ages allowed in and out the doors and all stripes and patterns, both introverts and thinking mixing sensing judging perceiving or wordless systems identifying us as somewhere on the planet earth. Thanks every single person for all your words and spaces between them.
Norma Leistiko
Read A Book This Week
normaleistiko@mac.com

Visit my web page:
http://web.mac.com/normaleistiko/iWeb

Visit my blog – a work in progress
http://ngc6992-leistiko.blogpsot.com

I am a bit surprised (but only a bit) at all of the fawning responses that follow down the screen for this person’s blog post, with a few exceptions that are folks that do take a more critical look. Like so many lists of cute or humorous lists that have traveled the Internet for a decade, this one cloys by its very nature as a list. There is a measure of validity to a lot of Schneider’s short prodding gesticulations—-no doubt it’s a successful format for the blogosphere where attention spans are short—-but in the end this is mostly a self-congratulating sort of rant that doesn’t clarify things. The truth is that so many of those short remarks are so short and cute that they are as much wrong as right.

How about the first one? “All technologies and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.” No, in fact most technologies evolve but very few of them die. The telephone, a comparatively unevolved technology of recent time, is still better for some kinds of communication than e-mail or IM/chat. It is falteringly evolving via VOIP; it certainly is not dead since I was in library school. Nor are such technologies as radio, the book, the bicycle that I often ride to work, a typing keyboard, indexing systems, and on and on.

And in fact it is that “on and on” part that is the point here. Short, sharp statements don’t tell much of the story, but Schneider is more interested in complaining than in explaining.

One of the respondents to Schneider, another blogger with the handle of “panlibus” said, “The post takes the form of a list of statements, the vast majority of which it must surely be almost impossible to disagree with.
So what do we do about it?”

Well, in fact I can both agree and disagree with nearly every one of the statements, and I believe that critical thinkers should be able to find the important disagreements there too. “The system is broken.” Well yes, in some ways it is; but no, it (the library, the OPAC, the librarian) definitely is not broken with the implication being that we should just walk away from it and quit using it all right now. We, thousands of people collaborating in the profession, have been aware of, for example, the varied inadequacies of the OPAC and the Integrated Library System for some years and are trying to find ways of fixing it.

The user? There is no one lump that can be called the user. Involved librarians, who did in fact learn about the complexity of users in library school, really do find ways of responding to “the user”. The user can be a sophisticated faculty person or seasoned public library patron both of whom still learn new approaches from us; the user may be coming to advanced academic work for the first time, or may be advancing from step to step in the ways of academic work and information use; the user may be an inveterate reader or a reluctant reader; the user can be generalized sometimes as a whole community; the user knows what he or she wants and does not know what he or she wants, knows what he or she needs and very often does not. To say otherwise is to be dismissive of the rich history of reference work, of cataloging, and of community dialog.

To chide us, the profession, with little scraps of rhetoric is, as I said, mostly a rant that is self-congratulatory and asks others to join in being self-congratulatory. There is nothing new in these remarks. Other critics have already presented these challenges and done it better. There are some pseudo poeticisms here (the OPAC as “distant planet”; “the user is the magic element”; the tired biblical tag: “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”…) But then, oh, get this: “The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way.”

What is the message here? How do you add value and meaning to the information experience (which in fact so many of us do when we teach students and public patrons, when we do reference work, when we think through the selection decisions, when we come up with some subject headings for a complex book, when we do try to see what Google and Amazon and Starbucks are up to) and at the same time “get out of the way”? What a silly piece of rhetoric.

Do we need some self-satisfied oracle giving out a list of retreads of other people’s thinking and then telling us: “Your ignorance will not protect you.”? Do the responders to this list think that our profession is peopled by a bunch of frauds, prigs, and idiots? Does it take a simple-minded list of contradictions to make people want to think and speak up?

Karen,

I believe I have solved the bibliographic koans with which you have presented us and provide the following tongue-in-cheek answers below:

“All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.”

…as will we all, but rock and roll is here to stay!

*****
“You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.”

Insert “Hawaii-Five-O” music here and try to giggle like the goofball at the beginning of the song, “Wipeout”.

*****
“You are not a format. You are a service.”

Your are not a format but you are expected to be a doormat.

*****
“The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.”

That’s just great…hardware maintenance will take forever now!

*****
“The user is the sun.”

The user is the sun…but “We are the world”.

*****
“The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.”

Curse my LIS advisor for telling me it was pixie dust and unicorns!!

*****
“The user is not broken.”

…but soon will be if you tell them that your OPAC is really a distant planet and they’re the magic element that can transform you.

*****
“Your system is broken until proven otherwise.”

First, prove it’s broken; otherwise it works just fine.

*****
“That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because “librarians need to help people” doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and his system is broken, too.”

If his system was broken to begin with, why purchase it in the first place?…..because libraries are always trying to “ride the wave”. Maybe one day, they’ll realize that a popsicle stick is not a surfboard!

*****
“Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face.”

…that’s because they’re out trying to satiate their passions.

*****
“Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.”

…that’s because we scared them off when we said they were a magical transforming element.

*****
“The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way.”

…or simply write their term papers for them…that’s what they really want!

*****
“Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow’s taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people.”

Your website is kind of like an online dating service…make sure you include pictures.

*****
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon.”

Once the camel realizes that the needle is an illusion his cosmic awareness will expand until camel, needle and universe become merely fading reflections on a falling raindrop.

*****
“Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it.”

Once, I tried to mail my letters and buy groceries at the bank but they didn’t offer that service so I went to the post office and supermarket instead.

*****
“You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user.”

I thought the user was supposed to be the magical element that would transform librarianship.

*****
“Meet people where they are–not where you want them to be.”

Meet me halfway and we’ll go from there.

*****
“The user is not “remote.” You, the librarian, are remote, and it is your job to close that gap.”

If librarians are remote then we are subsequently controlled remotely and yet; loss of control has already happened, so Dear User, Miss Manners says to “Ride the wave!”

*****
“The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies.”

That’s OK because “all technologies eventually evolve and die” and the system is already broken. The next technobauble whirlygig is just around the corner. A good surfer knows how to wait for the killer wave.

*****
“If you are reading about it in Time and Newsweek and your library isn’t adapted for it or offering it, you’re behind.”

So the question must be posed, do back issues of “Time” make a librarian’s “behind” look too big?

*****
“Stop moaning about the good old days. The card catalog sucked, and you thought so at the time, too.”

But they were made of burnished oak for crying out loud…..who wouldn’t want that compared to injection molded plastic computer casing!!

*****
“If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow’s cobblers.”

Can I be peach cobbler?

*****
“We have wonderful third spaces that offer our users a place where they can think and dream and experience information. Is your library a place where people can dream?”

It will be as soon as we install the sensory deprivation chambers.

*****
“Your ignorance will not protect you.”

That’s what rabid attack poodles with laser cannons mounted on their foreheads are for.

When I was about 18 years old and thinking about being a librarian I had an older librarian explain the service process to me. “First,” he said, the customer is always right.” “Second,” he said, the customer is always wrong.” He used some more words to explain it, but after learning some other zen koans this is what I distilled his comments into over the last 30 years. I think you should trust your user, but you should also trust yourself.

These comments are timeless. As relevant today in 2011 as when posted in 2006!