The Lay of the Land: Libraries at the Crossroads Roy Tennant California Digital Library

Goals  Raise questions  Spark imaginations  Motivate  Encourage professional self-criticism

More Specifically…  I will focus on our primary and most shameful failure: our inability to provide an easy and effective information locating tool  Remember: only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find  However, we are failing even to do things we have explicitly tried to do  Let’s take a look at the evidence…

260 Berkley, CA : Library Solutions Press, [c] [vii,]134 p. : ill., maps ; 28 cm 500 Includes bibliographic references (p ) and index Internet 250 1st ed 260 Berkley, CA : Library Solutions Press, c viii, 134 p. : ill., maps ; 29 cm 500 Includes bibliographic references (p ) and index 500 "An earlier version of this book was published as a workbook in support of hands-on Internet training workshops." Internet 250 1st ed 260 Berkeley, CA : Library Solutions Press, c viii, 134 p. : ill. [,maps]; 28 cm 504 Includes bibliographical references (p ) and index Internet -- Handbooks, manuals, etc Computer User Training Computer Communication Networks 4 3 9

Typical Searches  Known Item  “A Few Good Things”  Comprehensive

Typical Searches: Known Item  The good: searches can be limited to a particular field: author, title, etc.  The bad: limiting to a particular field doesn’t always act the way you expect  The ugly:

The Really Ugly

Typical Searches: “A Few Good Things”  The one type of search we have so far ignored in library system design  A type of search that we can do something about today  Bring Google-style relevance to library catalogs

Typical Searches: Comprehensive  Most library catalogs hide many things available via regional cooperative or ILL  It is difficult, if not impossible, to search all appropriate journal databases  Most libraries do not provide good access to gray literature and web sites  Subject headings are often unintuitive, and catalogs give no guidance  Catalogs give no chapter-level access to book content

Some of the Things Most Users Care About  What information resources are accessible to them  What they have to offer, in more detail (contents, index, cover copy, etc.)  What others think about them  How much pain they must endure to get them  What they can expect when they show up  What they must do with them when they’re done

Some of the Things Most Users Do Not Care About  Many of the things we care about  Where the information comes from  Who is responsible for providing it  Quality, if it means spending a lot of time and effort to get it  Differences between printings of the exact same book  The height of a book (in centimeters!)

What Many Users Expect  A simple search box  Automatic filters, sorts, and groupings, and/or some that they can apply  Fault-tolerant search systems (“If you can’t give me exactly what I asked for, do your best to give me what I want”)  Let’s see how fault-tolerant we are…

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome -- Africa Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome -- epidemiology -- Africa Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome -- transmission AIDS (Disease) -- Africa AIDS (Disease) -- Etiology AIDS (Disease) -- Public opinion AIDS (Disease) -- Social aspects AIDS (Disease) in mass media Arts and society -- History -- 20th century Culture -- Philosophy Ethnic arts Marginality, Social -- History -- 20th century Mass Media Minorities in art Prejudice Public Opinion Race Relations Racism

Recap on Library Catalogs  We cannot claim to support any of the top three main types of searches well  Our systems work inconsistently and demonstrably incoherently  Other bibliographic search systems (e.g., Amazon) demonstrate how pitiful our systems are to our users  We have taken very few steps toward fixing our broken systems

What We Have  A computerized card catalog focused on inventory control  Non-standard database records  Systems that don’t interoperate  In union catalogs, multiple catalog records for the same book  An A&I database Tower of Babel  Haphazard attempts to provide access to web sites  Limited experiments providing access to gray literature

What We Must Do  We should design our systems for 80% of our user needs, not 20%  We must design the public view of our catalogs for searching, not inventory control  We should stop worrying about things that don’t matter (e.g., book measurements) and start worrying about things that do (e.g., our inability to use one record per book)  We must think imaginatively and critically about how to design useful search systems  We need to design systems to integrate access, not fracture it

The Road Not (Yet) Taken  Create effective methods to put users in touch with what they need, wherever it can be found  Design fault-tolerant, multi-purpose systems  Build for interoperability  Strive for the Holy Grail of Librarianship: one-stop searching for everything

What Most Users Want

How We Can Give it To Them OAI- Compliant Archives Google WorldCat on Steroids Serial Databases Digital Library Collections The Integration Engine The User Interface Online Reference Local Circulation Systems

Source: ARL Statistics

The Integration Engine  Requirements:  Parse the query for each database  Sort, organize, and de-dup the results  Rank according to perceived relevance  Be fault-tolerant (do the best it can with what it’s given)  Targeted search engines may be better:  Specific topic areas  “A few good things” vs. Comprehensive

Concluding Thoughts  We’re failing at our own goals  We need to think imaginatively about our challenges  No library can do this alone  Regional cooperatives are the smallest unit for tackling this problem  A regional cooperative with vision and guts could lead the way for the rest of us