Discovery Tool product pitch, thoughts on.

I attended a product pitch by a Serials Solution rep, touting their new “Discovery Tool” interface, which promises to take our basic catalog into Library 3.0 territory and giving users the web experience they truly expect nowadays. As Montgomery Burns once said about Marge Simpson’s portrait of him, “I know what I hate, and I don’t hate this.”

Not to say I don’t have complaints, but let me sing the praises first. One feature I positively loved is the Call number box that sorts a keyword string’s results into how the search breaks down by call number of books in the library. That is truly breaking new ground and I really like it. If we adopt this product, I would definitely want that feature activated. I also like the book jacket images, iconographic identification of format (book, sound recording, etc), links to Google Books where full text is available for older, out-of-copyright public domain items, regular links to ebook vendors’s Full Text Content for the E-resources held by the library, etc. It also has a tag cloud feature. I’m not very good at interpreting or using tag clouds, but one of my colleagues in ILL swears by them, so I’ll take her word for it that it’s a good thing and move on.

Grumpy cataloger that I am, I did have to ask if it allowed for call number browsing? No, it doesn’t. Ok, does it allow browsing by subject heading? Again, no. It doesn’t allow browsing by subject heading because it doesn’t *really* make use of controlled vocabulary per se, but rather, breaks down the subject heading into its component parts and uses them as a keyword string. The average user probably won’t notice or care, but this irks me to no end. Functionally, it does seem to still pull up items that share that subject heading, as it would if it really operated on a controlled vocabulary basis. But what this prevents you from doing is getting a bird’s eye view of the library’s holdings by subject, which is what you can get from a traditional OPAC display, and which has valuable uses to the research scholar. Likewise, I find call number browsing to be a very powerful tool, and indeed necessary for original cataloging since you have to be sure, when assigning a new call number, that it will actually fit in your current shelflist. You have to be able to call-number browse to be able to tell. It also is another way of accessing the information, allows you to investigate fine shades of meaning and difference just as if you were physically browsing the shelf, only remotely. But the Serials Solution Discovery tool doesn’t let you do this either. Why? According to the representative, “well, our user surveys showed that nobody really searches that way”. Resisting the urge to pound my fist on the table and say “I don’t give a sh*t if the ‘average’ (often clueless) user doesn’t do that”, what I did say was “look, I love all the new bells and whistles…you’ve got a lot of great new things here; but I don’t want to see you bend over backwards to cater to the most common denominator SO MUCH that you DUMB IT DOWN and really unintentionally hurt EXPERT users who actually know what they’re doing!!”. I did have to say the latter aloud, because I felt it had to be said (the former I said under my breath, but within earshot of a few colleagues). I did have the temerity to ask if many institutions keep their old OPAC display available as an option, if it’s possible to switch off all the bells and whistles and go back to bare bones bibliographic basics, i.e. just the books on the shelves and nothing else please. She allowed that yes, the majority of institutions still kept their old OPAC public displays available as a search option, “for recalcitrant older faculty, people still wanting to hold onto a security blanket.”; Or grumpy catalogers who think there are some redeeming features of OPACs worth preserving in the Discovery Tool that may not be supported by “user surveys” but remain important to Reference Librarians and Catalogers who know what they are doing. While Roy Tennant may cluck that only librarians like to search while everyone else likes to find, the better one is at searching in different ways, usually the better a librarian is at finding things faster than the untrained user, which is where we keep our edge and relevance, by knowing even obscure, seldom used methods that still yield results. My point is, user surveys can only do so much, and vendors who employ librarians (I hope) should fall back on their professional librarian know-how and preserve methods even if every user survey says “nobody does that”, if the librarian knows that there are expert researchers who DO, even if they are, in the words of the number-crunchers, “statistically insignificant”. While the Serials Solutions “Discovery Tool” is probably “good enough” for most users, it could still potentially fail or at least frustrate an expert user because of its total dependence on keywords underneath the hood. The main difference between this system and, say, Amazon, is mainly richer metadata, cannibalizing LCSH to use as raw keyword metadata rather than as true controlled vocabulary in a classic IR sense.

Extensive research would be needed to isolate and identify these stress points and weaknesses in the Serials Solutions Discovery Tool system. I know that I am always frustrated to find libraries that have pitched the OPAC altogether in favor of one of these “Discovery Tools”. Sometimes you just want to shut off the “bells and whistles” and enjoy the sound of silence, metaphorically speaking, and confine your search just to the books on the shelves in the building and nothing more. Libraries that disallow one to do this are NOT always saving the time of the reader. Controlled vocabulary serves to tune out excess noise and focus searching; Controlled vocabulary with copious “see” references are a godsend. Though sometimes the LC and OCLC gods fail, and it puts the onus on the conscientious cataloger to supply the “see” references that should be in the authority record but just aren’t.

I’m sure that Thomas Mann could offer a more cogent critique than I can; I’m still just a novice cataloger myself. I got into cataloging accidentally, sort of with the realization that nobody around me was interested and moreover that “f*ck, somebody’s got to do it!” and so at the last minute I did my student practicum in Tech Services rather than Reference work, and that decision has shaped my career down to this point.

I’m all for change that improves, that makes sense, that isn’t stupid. I’m against change that stultifies, dumbs down, downsizes, problematizes, and sacrifices quality for throughput speed, etc. I’m currently reading RADICAL CATALOGING, edited by K.R. Roberto, listowner of the RADCAT email list, which exists as an alternative forum to the stuffier, more formal AUTOCAT, to which I also belong as a professional necessity. There are a lot of great essays there, and I hope, someday, to make future contributions to a tome like this after I’ve got more work experience under my belt. I’m closing in on one year of full employment with my current library, and my performance evaluation went very well. I was very nervous going in, but pleasantly surprised at my good marks. I needed that after the ungraceful debacle and my first library employer’s. Ironically, with the latest upgrade to Voyager, it does actually have a “dumb down” feature I approve of, namely that you can force a record to overlay another by command, without relying on tripping the duplicate detection profile. If I’d been able to do that (and if I’d been able to print my own labels at my workstation like I can today), I would’ve been able to save/keep my last library job by freeing myself from utter dependency on my copy-cataloger and her lazy student worker; which I think she was afraid of. If I had become completely autonomous, I think my former copy cataloger was afraid my hyper-productivity would make her look bad in comparison, and to be fair it probably would have. Heck, last weekend I still came in on a Saturday to knock out some re-cataloging, mainly because I was bored. I listened to music videos on YouTube on my headphones while humming along doing the re-cataloging. It’s mostly pretty easy, straight-up copy cataloging, though sometimes I do hit some bibliographic snarls that make me glad I’m a professional librarian doing this and not a clerk. I have both the know-how and the authority to make judgment calls that a clerk wouldn’t be able to make. Still, this is a big project, and I’m looking forward to training one of our electronic resources clerks how to do basic copy cataloging, using the re-cataloging stuff as a good starting point before she tackles any new acquisitions. Even though it’s now possible to force a record to overlay by command, I still want this person to learn how to trip the duplicate detection, since there’s no way to know if other OPACs don’t still rely on duplicate detection profiles to overlay records. I’ve done the overlay by command myself, but I’m still not used to it, so I mostly still stick to tripping the duplicate detection, which is what I finally learned how to do here. It’s also possible to “merge” records now, so that you can keep the best of both (like a good 520 or 505 contents note, for example). I’ve also been more active at adding local 590 notes for things like bookplates and handwritten messages from the author, etc. Not the kind of thing you want to put on a universal OCLC record, but something that could be of interest locally, to your catalog users.

I guess I’m only really opposed to “dumbing down” when it hinders or eliminates a more sophisticated technique that was useful but obscure. Just because something is obscure, little known or little used, doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful way to do things that ought not be abandoned. I still believe in the old heresy of Bibliographic Instruction. I’d also like to see us get more vigorous in promoting the LC Classification System with the same vigor as public libraries promote the DDC. More posters, more bookmarks with the skeletal LC Classification scheme, etc. I’m embarrassed to admit how ignorant I was of the LC Classification system until I got to grad school the first time and learned that German lit was found under “PT” on the 2nd floor of Fondren Library. Oh, and as an undergrad, our professor told us the Russian History was “on the 6th floor” of Evans Library. It was under DK, but I don’t know if I clued in on that or not. Of course I knew how to write down a call number and go look for it in the stacks, and I guess I knew in the back of my head that the numbers probably also had to mean something, since by serendipity I always found such cool stuff in and near where I was looking that were on similar, but slightly different takes on the subject or subjects. I knew that I liked a lot of the books in the “H” and some in the “L”, too, but it wasn’t until library school that I figured out what these meant. I think people would be interested in this, if we would only take the time and effort to tell them. It’s too cool to leave hidden as a secret librarian code.

In my next post, I plan to ruminate on the ill effects of the business model on the way libraries are run, and how funding cuts and speed-ups that sacrifice quality can lead to a vicious circle…or rather a downward spiral of increasing “good enough” mediocrity. Unless I change my mind and decide to blog about something else.