[WEB4LIB] Coughing up Coffman

[Roy Tennant]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Karen G. Schneider wrote:

> Apathetic? O.k., I'll bite.  Some of the ideas were fun.  But some of 
[more at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/9908/0201.html ]

For those Web4Lib readers wondering who called anyone apathetic, please
see the PubLib posting at:

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/PubLib/archive/9908/0291.html

Karen is on Web4Lib and also co-moderates PubLib, and since Steve Coffman
posted his message on both lists, Karen replied to both lists.

Now on to the message. There's no question that Coffman's proposals are
controversial, and that's great. No, that's *really* great. It's about
darn time we had a good professional food fight over something important
other than filtering. So, let if fly. But I have a request before the
debate (hopefully) gets going. Let's not toss out the baby with the bath
water. That is, there are aspects of Coffman's proposal that I disagree
with, but there are other aspects that I think have a great deal of
potential. It is the latter that I hope we can tease out of the discussion
so that we have a chance to move forward. Sure, forget about selling your
weeded books over the Internet if you think that's hairbrained. But don't
try to tell me that the idea of one place to go to find the books you need
isn't compelling, and that our users wouldn't trample over us in their
haste to get there.

One last thing. Coffman is right, and Karen is even more right -- our
catalogs stink. No, they really, really stink. We seem to have done a
decent job at creating an interface for librarians, while completely
ignoring what our users really want: one search box into which they can
type whatever comes into their head, and enough intelligence on the back
end to do what needs to be done to come up with a reasonable result and
with easy ways for the user to filter, sort, and select what they want. I
work for an institution with a library catalog that has 51 (yes, count
'em) separate indexes from which to choose in "full feature" mode, since
each must be available in both keyword and phrase mode (28 indexes
otherwise). Our "quick search" mode offers six different indexes. And god
forbid you should ever try to search on author "Shakespeare, William" and
title "Hamlet". You don't find an actual copy of the book in English until
record 60 or so -- three screens back. Good luck. Then, try the search
"hamlet" at Amazon.com. We have made the easy thing difficult in an
attempt to make the difficult thing easy. We have, in other words, stood
things exactly on their head.

Now, someone tell me again why we shouldn't consider very, very carefully
what Steve Coffman proposes. Sure, there are parts that may not be what
library patrons want or need, but I can guarantee you that a lot of it is
*exactly* what they want or need. And if that is so, if we throw it all
out in our disgust with parts of it, we will do so at our peril.
Roy