TLA impressions

I started this next bit as a reply to a posting on AUTOCAT, but realized I was descending into a rant better suited for the Blogosphere. I did respond on AUTOCAT, but changed the direction of my public reply in that professional community.

Anyway, below is the text of my original thoughts, and the original line of thought I wanted to talk about but saved for this setting instead.

Brief quotation then comment on the original thread:

an AUTOCATTER opined recently that:

> I think cataloguing is both complicated and difficult. But it

> _seems_ simple and easy. This is the curse of the cataloguer. Like

> Cassandra, we are cursed to be forever explaining to other people how

> difficult our work is but never really being believed.

To which I began my reply...

One thing to remember about the mythic Cassandra was that she was RIGHT, in the end.

Patrons maybe don't appreciate good cataloging, but they will sure miss it quickly if it ever goes away.

(sort of the point of the Cassandra myth, too)

Try doing typical academic research on Amazon.com (looking for relevant works on a specific topic) versus a typical library catalog, or LC's main OPAC. Yes, for very general topics, Amazon works just fine, at a superficial level.

And for the majority of Library users, general, superficial searching is all they ever do...or much care about.

But if you really want to chase down specific topic areas, "researching" a la Amazon becomes eventually a hit-or-miss exercise in utter frustration fairly rapidly, especially in obscure areas not a lot of people make purchases in, so that even the "people who bought this also bought this" engine breaks down and becomes useless. The typical Library OPAC using LCSH and LC Classification well gives a level of specificity that Amazon will never match. Nor does Amazon need to, as their database serves the ultimate mission of selling lots of books, and it does that very well already. But the Library's mission is to promote scholarship, and with effective, quality cataloging, it does that very well, too. I think what Thomas Mann, Michael Gorman, et. al. are saying is let's try not to unintentionally punish expert users in our efforts to make OPACs more easy to use and accessible to the "average" patron. What I see Michael Gorman saying is that the "Good enough for gov't work" mentality, where some library managers prize through-put speed above all other considerations, does exactly that.

Slightly off topic but not wholly unrelated, I say give the "average" user their single, simple "Meta" search box as the default display if that's truly what they want, but don't disable those "scary" advanced search features for people who actually know what they're doing, or Reference Librarians who can better guide users with these sophisticated tools!

Last week I attended Roy Tennant's recent talk/presentation to the Texas Library Association, and I hated it, or at least the first half of it, just as I expected I would. But I've come to understand that "shock value" is just one of the language games of academic discourse (another is the "old wine in new bottles" game, while another is "exposing the 'old wine in new bottles' language game."), and that saying things like "the Catalog has No Future" is just another example of this feint. He doesn't *really* mean that, or at least not without lots of caveats and verbal somersaults--I got it that he's mostly just yanking chains to stir things up, encourage librarians to "think outside the box", put ourselves in the shoes of Mr. & Ms. Average User, etc.

Aside from a basic disagreement on what Libraries are for...Walt Crawford, for one, challenges Library 2.0 gurus like Tennant when they assert that Libraries are "about Information", which as both Crawford and Gorman recognize, is an almost meaningless, overbroad generalization that rapidly gets us into trouble because it obfuscates rather than clarifies...aside from that there's a basic undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in Roy Tennant's basic line of argument that really really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. He seems to dismiss out of hand any notion of the efficacy of bibliographic instruction efforts, leaving the impression he considers it a waste of time and not worth the effort. Tennant himself referred to the average library user as "brain dead" several times during his talk.

When pressed, Roy did concede that "advanced" search features, which he all but put the kibbosh on in his opening remarks, should be left intact for skilled Reference librarians to make use of when they need to.

Roy was even intimated local SLIS professor who challenged him as basically having just advocated a dumbing down of library search tools and methodology. He hotly contested this, of course, claiming he was advocating that we "smart up" our search technology. The SLIS professor brought up the issue of bibliographic instruction, but Tennant declined to follow that tangent.

The 2nd half of Roy's talk discussed new ILS innovations like Koha and Evergreen that really are quite exciting, and I enjoyed that a lot. I had already attended the Evergreen talk put on by Georgia Public Libraries earlier in the conference, and had sat through several live Koha demonstrations on the exhibition floor, which were impressive. Most impressive to me were a Koha feature where you could right-click on a call number and pull up a shelf-map of the library and show a patron where exactly in the stacks to look for a particular book. That was wicked cool.

When I got back to work after the conference, as luck would have it our local Ex Libris Rep walked us through a demo of PRIMO, their latest "Discovery Tool", basically a meta-search interface that will overlay the traditional catalog (Voyager or Aleph)...this was the sort of thing Roy Tennant was pushing in his talk. And I piddled around with some libraries that had installed it, and yes, it was kind of neat. But I also know that in more advanced research, the question is not finding a little bit of everything about a given topic, but winnowing away vast amounts of things you decide you don't need and focusing on the one or two gold nuggets of research material you really do need. In advanced research, knowing what you can safely ignore becomes nearly as important as knowing what to read. One thing I strongly disliked was that in one library, call number browsing was no longer possible. This was an outrage. It is a powerful way to browse a collection virtually, by subject matter. Do patrons know how to use it? No. Would they miss it? No. But librarians DO know, and I DID notice. And I exclaimed out loud WHY!? Why would you do that, disabling call number browsing...what a stupid thing to do. But then again, Roy's dictum is, "Librarians like to search, everyone else prefers to find". Nevermind that Librarians know better how to search than even some expert users, and can find things faster than unaided patrons flailing about, even in a user-friendlier, google-ized Discovery Interface. A colleague of mine who is of a similar mindset also says "is it wrong to demand a minimum of search competence in our patrons? They are college students, after all--some of them graduate students"; and if they lack that competence at first, is it so unreasonable to teach them, via bibliographic instruction? I'm just not convinced that ALWAYS catering to the lowest common denominator is necessarily wise, especially in relation to the ILS and associated discovery tools. Elitist? I don't care. It works, librarians know how to do it, and it's a powerful search strategy. Quit tying our hands and dumbing down our tools and getting in our way. Tennant spent a good chunk of his talk ridiculing an interface put together for librarians by librarians out in California, bemoaning how user-unfriendly it is, etc. And while you can maybe make the case for a simpler interface for the general public, the one designed by librarians for librarians probably works very well at highly discrete searching that keeps the librarian expert user from having to plow through a long google-like results list or give up if what they're looking for isn't in the first page of results. We use those complicated tools so there ISN'T even a full page to wade through. Tennant should know that, but he pretends not to care.

The other major talk of note that I attended was Walt Crawford's talk on "Balanced Libraries", the same title as a book he wrote last year and that I purchased a couple of weeks before the TLA conference but didn't have a chance to read beyond a few brief paragraphs. I love Crawford's general outlook and body of work, and I'm sure I'll enjoy Balanced Libraries as well. The talk was pretty good, mostly good common sense. I wish it had been *after* Tennant's talk, so that everyone could get a healthy dose of reality. I did try to see if I could get Walt to comment on the recent management decisions at LC regarding no longer doing serials authority work and giving as their rationale a desire to spend more energy and focus on making available to the public their digital resources instead, and if he felt these decisions were "balanced" or "unbalanced". But Walt, to my disappointment, declined to comment on it, claiming not to have
kept up enough with the issue to comment intelligently. Others in the audience did say privately it was a good question, though.

The other major talks I attended were the Evergreen seminar hosted by Georgia Public Libraries, and a discussion of Library building plan do's and don't's, whether for a brand new library or a renovation plan. The speakers were Library directors from Austin Community College and the University of Houston, and the talks were great. The UH story was one of remarkable heroism in fund-raising, and no one can deny that the results are visually impressive--I've seen it with my own eyes, and the UH main campus library today is very beautiful and much more open and less dark/depressing than the way the library used to be. It does make better use of natural light, though I personally worry about wasted space in the new layout. Also, it was hard to tell from some of the photos provided, but some of the study spaces looked not very inviting, not a place I'd like to go study...something about being surrounded by the stacks is something I would definitely miss in the study area depicted. I don't want to criticize the new layout too much, but there is something that makes me a little uneasy about it as a library space. Of course, it's hard to be humble when you work in a classically designed Library as beautiful as my own. Our collection is not as robust as over at our cross town academic neighbor, UNT, but then again we are a MUCH smaller campus with a correspondingly smaller student body, and also, we have satellite library locations--more than they do, in fact.

Anyway, all in all it was a very good TLA conference. I was struck how much the spaces in between conference rooms at the Dallas Convention Center resembles nothing so much as it does an airport concourse. I half expected to see metal detectors and passport control stations and money exchange windows and arrival/departure displays as I walked through this space. Next year the Texas Library Association will hold its conference at the George R. Brown convention center in Houston, Texas. I plan to attend that conference as well, since I have free lodging in Sugar Land. I would plan to drive up each day to the free stadium lot at Rice University, and then walk over to the Dryden-TMC rail station, ride up to Bell Station, then walk over to the G.R.B. That's much easier than spending $10 trying to park close and having to fight downtown Houston's traffic. I will probably skip it when TLA goes to San Antonio and Austin, though (the usual rotation for TLA).

Although I was grateful for DART, it was less convenient than I'd hoped it would be, vis a vis the convention center. You had to walk nearly two blocks underneath the massive concrete structure in a very poorly lit, pedestrian-unfriendly setting to get to the actual convention center DART station. It was doable, but very badly designed. You can reach West End via DART from the convention center, though by the time you're finished walking to the station, able to buy a ticket, then ride the train up to the West End station, you could almost have covered the distance yourself on foot, walking up a few more city blocks--it's really not hardly worth it. What is worth it is going a bit further to St. Paul's station, near the Dallas Museum of Art, which I did on the last day of the conference, after all the sessions were over. I spent an hour there at the Museum, viewing the exhibits (focusing on 20th century and contemporary pieces), then took the DART back over to West End, had lunch at Landry's, then wandered over to Dealey Plaza and into the Sixth Floor Museum. I took the guided audio-tour, and checked out the home movie exhibit (including the Zapruder film) up on the 7th floor above, then browsed the Museum bookstore. I made a lucky find in locating a director's cut edition of Oliver Stone's JFK on DVD, which contains a second DVD of special features and a short documentary film. The dual DVDs were moreover packaged for sale with the companion book, JFK: The book of the film, which has the complete annotated script and review articles pro and con in the major media, often with a critical review followed by a response from Oliver Stone or Zachary Sklar, or one of the film's expert advisers, like Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, USAF (ret.), upon whom the Donald Sutherland character Mr. X was partly based. Of the Museum's bookstore offerings, this was one of the few materials for sale actually questioning the official story of the Warren Commission. Not present were any of the early critics' works...authors like Mark Lane, David Lifton, Josiah Thompson, Jim Marrs, Jim Garrison (though some of these books are, admittedly, probably out of print). Vincent Bugliosi's newest tome was there of course, as well as the newest "Mafia did it" book by David Kaiser, and Posner of course. All to be expected, I guess, though Stone's JFK in DVD and the JFK : Book of the Film do a lot of heavy lifting all by themselves. I passed on the other DVD with Kevin Costner, Thirteen Days in October, a drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but may pick it up the next time I'm in town. When I got back to Denton (having to drive back on that fateful stretch of Elm Street each day from TLA), I went over to our local used book store, Recycled Books, and picked up a used paperback copy of Jim Garrison's 1988 book On the Trail of Assassins. I managed to finish the book just this past weekend, in the middle of the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival. It makes for very gripping reading and is very hard to put down. Already being a First 48 A&E television fanboy, Garrison's work read like any good true crime book ought to. I'm trying next to tackle Jim Marrs' Crossfire, which is the other major work that Oliver Stone used to make his film. It was especially unfortunate that the Sixth Floor Museum did not have a copy of Crossfire for sale, since Jim Marrs is a local author, native to the DFW area and still living here, who also lived through the time of the assassination in 1963. But that's just the way things are at the Sixth Floor Museum. What was funny was listening to Warren Commission defenders 'debunking' critics of the Warren Commission in the audio tour, only to later read on my own the debunkers debunked themselves. I'm just dabbling in this material, don't intend to get sucked in or become obsessed by it, but it is fascinating and disturbing.

Anyway, to sum up, the Texas Library Association Annual 2008 Conference was a worthwhile experience. I am looking forward to the ELUNA Conference this summer in Long Beach, California, and hoping to have time to have dinner, or at least coffee, with a Flickr friend who is a grad student in Art attending USC and living in Los Angeles, which is relatively close to Long Beach; I may well be flying into LAX for all I know. It would not be my first time in Southern California, having visited San Diego Naval Station as a NJROTC cadet in the late 1980s, but it would be my first time to visit the greater LA area. I will miss going back to Chicago where I attended the penultimate EndUser conference not long before Endeavor Information Systems was ultimately bought out by Ex Libris, who will be hosting the ELUNA Conference in their home town of Long Beach, California. Endeavor Information Systems, which is no more, was based in Chicago. ALA is based there also, come to think of it. I had a great time in Chicago and would welcome any library business related reason to go back there. I'm not crazy about their crappy local gun ordinances, so actually living there is less appealing than it once was, but that too may change in the next decade in the wake of the final forthcoming SCOTUS decision in DC v. Heller. I'm told I would like NYC, too, and I probably would, but I would have to be pretty tough minded to hack it in NYC, I think. Probably I could do it, but it would be quite a challenge. And their local firearms regulations would have to change, too, for me to actually consider a move there for full-time work. And Washington DC too, for that matter--though that should happen sooner than in NYC or Chicago. Well before I land that dream job at Library of Congress or Georgetown Univ. someday *wink*.