Amazon vs. Google as our corporate role model (was:

[Peter Murray]

On 5/10/05 8:55 PM, Steve Oberg wrote:
> I find something very ironic about this statement ("...intelligence 
> needs to be build [sic] into the back end...") because this flies 
> completely in the face of a decade-long (or longer) trend to cut back on 
> staffing levels on the "back end," particularly in technical services.  
> We have administrators or directors who are reassigning their staff to 
> public services (e.g. reference) to help users find what they need.  
> Users, they say, want service.  Another aspect of this, relating to 
> library OPACs, is the heavy emphasis on a "pretty" front end that can do 
> lots of neat user-oriented things.  This, at the same time that the back 
> end stuff was being cut and that resulted in an increasingly shoddy catalog.

With apologies for the spelling error, to a certain extent I agree with 
both concepts -- building intelligence into the systems rather than 
trying to change user expectations /and/ reassigning technical services 
staff to do things other than traditional monograph processing.  My 
initial comments were geared towards library systems as a whole (OPACs 
plus everything else we're doing), but there are some OPAC-specific 
elements.

Although I usually take what Jakob Nielsen says with a grain of salt, 
this week he hit it right on the money:

  Search is such a prominent part of the Web user experience that users
  have developed a firm mental model for how it's supposed to work. Users
  expect search to have three components:  a box where they can type
  words; a button labeled "search" that they click to run the search; and
  a list of top results that's linear, prioritized, and appears on a new
  page. ... Luckily, all three of the major engines (Google, Yahoo, and
  MSN) work the same: exactly as stated in the list above.
  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050509.html

Nielsen's essay is not specifically a commentary on library catalog 
searches (although I'd love to see him do an exposé on those -- how many 
libraries still promote "title" and "subject heading" search above 
"keyword" search?), but it does go to the heart of the concept to "meet 
the user where we expect them to be."

The world inside the library is now much bigger than the 
OPAC/catalog/shelflist/whatever.  While what is done to inventory and 
track the commercially produced holdings of a library (a.k.a. 1980's 
"cataloging") is very important (we are spending our dollars to buy it 
and have people use it, after all), this work has become increasingly 
more efficient.  As evidence, one can point to the rise of outsourced 
copy cataloging and shelf prep -- activities that 15 years ago were 
considered core to the mission of a library.  The standardization of 
practices and the flow of descriptive information from the publisher 
right into shared utilities such as OCLC boosts the productivity of the 
entire library community.  (That publishers do this as a byproduct of 
their efforts to give booksellers like Amazon more information to enable 
them to sell more books should be noted.)

With this increased efficiency in the activities of 1980's-based 
cataloging practices we can't be surprised that directors have started 
to reassign staff.  What could be argued if you would like, however, is 
that they were reassigned to the wrong places.  Given the rise of more 
efficient cataloging of commercial works and new, better models for 
accessing content for users when your library doesn't hold it (e.g. 
user-initiated ILL, etc.), today's technical services staff is best 
tuned to "catalog" those items which make a library's collection unique.

What makes a library unique?  To a certain extent it is the collection 
development practices to select commercially-produced content that meets 
the needs of a library's constituency.  What makes it /more/ unique, 
however, are the items that only it holds.  What is original, unique, 
primary source material in your library that can't be discovered now? 
Is it market studies (firm libraries), town/city reports (public 
libraries), audio/visual collections (school libraries), or manuscripts 
(academic libraries)?  Would your library be a better place if those 
items could be found?  (Or, for that matter, would the world be a better 
place if others could find those things at your library?)

Is it expensive?  Yeah -- perhaps even more expensive than the 
1980's-based cataloging practices, at least until we figure out how to 
create efficient practices and tools for creating the descriptive 
cataloging of locally-unique items.  The copy cataloging of two decades 
ago was also expensive (dedicated OCLC terminals, leased lines winding 
their way back to Dublin, OH), and we are just at the forefront of 
figuring out how to do it better.

We also can't let ourselves off the hook in our relationships with 
library automation vendors to add "pretty" front-end things into the 
OPAC.  It's been a long time since I've been involved with an ILS RFP, 
but based on what I've seen from the major automation vendors we're not 
asking them to produce the kinds of intelligent discovery systems 
(a.k.a. the "OPAC search") that are being pioneered in e-commerce.  How 
much of our OPAC user interface is still tied up in the notion of a card 
catalog for "Author" headings, a card catalog for "Subject" headings and 
a card catalog for "Title" entries?  Does that even make sense anymore 
in Nielson's world of the single search box?

I agree with you that the activities of technical services are a "public 
service."  (I intentionally used labels like 'commercial' and 
'inventory' above not to denigrate the work that technical service staff 
do but to point out that these are problems faced and solved by 
communities outside our profession.)  I also agree that tasks like 
authority work that we've been doing for a long time can inform and 
improve the commercial world as well.

If there is an overarching theme, perhaps I'm saying that we are resting 
on laurels.  Someone recently remarked that libraries were among the 
early innovators of information technology.  We did, after all, have 
thousands or millions of items in our inventories that were better 
discovered and tracked by library automation in the 1970's and 1980's -- 
well before the invention of The Internet.  It is, however, time to kick 
it back into gear and meet the users where their expectations are now.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.


Peter
-- 
Peter Murray                       http://www.pandc.org/peter/work/
Assistant Director, Multimedia Systems  tel:+1-614-728-3600;ext=338
OhioLINK: the Ohio Library and Information Network   Columbus, Ohio