explodedlibrary.info

professional hunters & gatherers of information

"Well if you don't have what I'm looking for, what's the use of you?"

I've been dreading words like these for some time, and the other day, I heard them. I'm pleased to say that I was able to help the upset student who said these words, and afterwards, he was very appreciative. Some people are just more effusive, whether they're expressing gratitude or irritation. I am grateful for what happened because it made these things that I've been thinking about for the past few years seem that much more real.

People (and I guess here I'm talking about people in their late 20s and early 30s who seem to be the bulk of my business school students) have gotten out of the habit of using the library as the first place to go to find information. Many users have a strong perception that most of time, they'll be able to find what they need without using the library - whether as a place or as a collection of electronic resources. I'm not going to address the accuracy of that perception because that will get me side-tracked and is best left for a different post, but today I'm just accepting the existence of this perception as a fact.

The consequence of this perception is that most of my users use the library as a last resort, when they have tried searching for something and have failed.

This is a huge change from the pre-internet days, which I can just vaguely remember from my first years as an undergraduate, where research meant using a library in some shape or form, most often going into the library.

Searching often contains plenty of traps and deadends, which can make it quite frustrating at times. I think that this is a constant - the specific sorts of research frustrations might be different today than they were in 1990 - but the effect of the pitfalls is the same, to cause irritation.

The difference is that in 1990, the searcher was most often inside the library when encountering these difficulties, and from there, it was not such a leap to walk up to the reference desk and ask for help. Once as a student I remember feeling a little embarrassed because a diligent librarian noticed that I looked confunded (and I use this Harry Potter word deliberately, I think that all searchers are vulnerable to this) and asked if I needed any help. I said, "No, I'm fine thanks" and pretended to look at a journal for a few minutes longer and then walked out of the library. Later on I learned that I could have handled that better :) No, it wasn't a perfect system, and I certainly don't wish to return to it, but the library was optimized for this way of searching and supported it quite well.

Compare that with today. Our users are pretty much on their own at the beginning. Maybe they're lucky and they found something kinda ok early on, because if they didn't they're in trouble. The search techniques of amateurs (I use this word without being condescending - I am a proud to be an amateur blogger/writer and think that professionals ignore or look down upon the amateur at their peril, particularly in the area of search) seem particularly subject to diminishing returns. In this context, I think that professional searching can have three strengths -
1. A better understanding of how effective searches work, leading to better decisions about when a strategy should be persevered with, modified or abandoned.
2. A bigger bag of tricks - greater knowledge of the different search engines, proprietary databases, web resources, being familiar with the complexity and power (sometimes) of advanced search interfaces, chasing the target from sideways etc. 
3. Respect for the quarry - sometimes the hunt may not be easy, sometimes the hunt may even fail. If it were always easy, there definitely would never be any need for professional hunters & gatherers of information.
(Before I end this digression, I just want to emphasize that wasn't an exhaustive list, but the other things wouldn't be relevant to this post)

Anyway, as I was mentioning, most potential library users search on their own, without going through the library or dealing with librarians until it's too late. It's very easy for somebody to waste an hour or two on an unproductive search on Google. Then out of desperation, that same person might try the library's electronic collection and will get even worse results - because a) it's so easy to muck up that crucial step of which particular database you try first and b) the search techniques which will work ok in Google generally don't work well in the proprietary databases provided by the library.

If such a person does approach the library reference desk after this ordeal, they deserve better than to be subjected to a reference interview which assumes that they've hardly thought about their subject at all. I'm not against the reference interview per se, but the sort of interview which worked in 1990 is not what we need in the twenty-first century. The whole interview-research transaction is stilted and obsolete (unless you're a special librarian and your job is to do research for somebody else, with no pretensions that you're teaching research skills). I think it better to sit with somebody, listen to them, see how they search, gauge their technique and then suggest an alternative which will point them towards what they're looking for as well as demonstrate a better way of searching which they can use in future searches.

I'll end this by restating the situation. In the past 20 years, the way that people look for information has been turned on its head. How have libraries responded to this? For the most part, it's all been by improving the library resources - we've worked hard to improve online catalogues (yes, they're not great, but they used to be much worse), create websites, provide access to electronic resources such as journals, directories and databases, and more recently, things like federated search. But improved resources alone are not enough to stop people from wondering what we're useful for. While paying attention to improving resources, we've neglected services. Before, a well-maintained collection was the service. It's different now because people have access to tremendous information resources, what they're lacking is someone to help them use these resources effectively to find what they're looking. What is needed a fundamental repositioning of what librarians are about, we provide services to help people find, evaluate and use information effectively. Maintaining a collection and providing resources are still relevant, but only in so far as they support the main purpose.

the writing games

This may have happened when I was in my high school’s badminton team. We were a bunch of friends playing together and badminton was a good excuse to hang out, but we weren’t exactly a great team. I think the only times we ever received any points was when the other side forfeited. One day we booked the gym for some badly needed practice. We showed up and found that there'd been a mixup with the booking and our court had been double-booked with the volleyball team. My badminton team wasn’t exactly super-dedicated, we may have walked away if it wasn’t for the volleyball team’s superior attitude, just assuming we’d defer to them. We ended up both stubbornly playing in the space. The two games shared a similar net and similar sized court - the different sets of lines were already drawn into floor. Having two different games being played on the same court was not an ideal situation. One of my friends had a volleyball pelted into his shoulder. But I guess that it's not nice to be hit on the face with a badminton shuttle or hit on the elbow with a badminton racquet. The joint practice was not a success. After that the two teams generally loathed each other.

This is not a real allegory where every little detail has meaning. The chaotic image of two different games happening in the same space recently came to mind when I was thinking about the relationship between blogging and other writing forms – particularly academic writing and journalism.

No analogy is ideal. This writing as a game analogy may suggest that writing is a trivial activity, that it's just a game. But I think games are important microcosms of reality. Each game has its own distinct ways of winning and losing and participation. The different games require different skills and attract different sorts of players. Some people play to win, others do it for the money, some just like to show off their skills. Some people play simply to have fun or because the game is a group activity and they like the camaraderie with the other players.

Each game regards itself as more important and interesting than the other games. Often the players of one game may have a negative view of the other games. For example, a blogger may view academic writing as anachronistic and elitist. An academic writer may view blogging as a meaningless low-brow game or a hideously bastardized version of their own game.

One way of looking at these different forms of writing is to be relativistic – each of these games serves different functions and attracts different sorts of people. Actually I’d better stop right now. In the next part of this post ["why I choose blogging", written on 15 August 2007], I’ll explore the non-relativistic path.

dealing with clutter in the blog reader

I used to stress out about information overload - it was one of the early themes of this blog in 2002 and 2003. Even when I stopped writing about it, it would still bother me when after a break from blog reading, I'd see over 1000 unread blog posts in my reader. I would struggle to read/skim through that huge pile and afterwards would feel totally drained.

I'm sure somebody would tell me that I'm subscribing to too many blogs. That if I removed some of this clutter, this problem wouldn't be so bad. I've tried that and it didn't solve all of my problems. I found it even more draining to go through all the blogs I've subscribed to with a critical eye, evaluating whether this blog was worthy to be on my radar at all. The more I thought about each blog, the more complicated the decision would become. I would end up reducing the number of blogs I subscribed to, but I wonder whether it was worth all of the effort that it took. And then after I did that, of course the number would only increase again as I discovered more interesting blogs and added them to my reader. Some people deal with that problem by setting a number which will be the definite number of blogs they subscribe to - so that if you add a new blog, you have to remove another. That didn't work for me either - it just made me not want to add any new blogs because it was such a hassle to get rid of one, and so my reading list atrophied for a while until I just gave up and started adding without removing. The other problem with that is that not all blogs publish with the same frequency, so that number of blogs subscribed to is not going to determine how many blog posts you'll be reading.

I've found that over the past few months, I've developed a different way of dealing with clutter in the blog reader. It's messy but it works for me. I'm offering this not as a prescription which everyone should follow, but just as an alternative.

Here's the key thing. The number of blogs you subscribe to does not equal the number of blogs that you pay close attention to. There needn't be this dichotomy between subscribe and dump. That dichotomy is an anachronism from print. There can be all sorts of degrees to which you pay attention to a blog. There are some blogs which I read every day, more than every day if they update more frequently. Other ones, every few days, or every week or so, or every month - basically whenever I'm in the mood.

This leads onto another important point. It's not important to know everything that's happening as soon as it happens. That's why it's ok for a blog in your reader to languish unread for a month. It's not as if we're journalists working for rival newspapers who all want the big scoop and that being first to press is so important. I think there's value in unearthing the recent and not so recent past. It's probably true that most blog posts get buried without making much of an impact. This could be for all sorts of reasons - maybe it wasn't a good post or maybe it was a good post, but it was published on a big news day when everybody else was distracted by something else.

Deal with the volume not by unsubscribing, but by promoting and demoting. If I find that a blog has been posting too much, or what it has been posting hasn't been all that interesting, I'll demote it. This means I'll read it less often. But if I take another look at it in a few weeks and it's got some good stuff, I'll promote it back to where it was. I use a tag in the Google Reader called "key blogs", this is the one that I check several times a day. I also have more descriptive tags, e.g. "Australian librarians", if I demote a blog from this group, I tag it "Australian librarians01" and so on, 02, 03 etc. That's how I organize it - the hope is that the good rises to the top and the mediocre sinks into obscurity, but being flexible to cope with constant changes in the blogosphere and my own preferences.

I'm not saying that I never unsubscribe to blogs. If a blog really annoys or offends me, I will unsubscribe to it, that's if I don't give it the idiots or z-list tag.

I don't think it's an accident that I developed this method after switching to the Google reader. There's no reason why these ideas couldn't be adapted to work with other readers. Sometimes I still use NetNewsWire. This method could work there, but I'd have to change its preferences to turn off its feature of showing number of unread posts in its dock icon. I've decided that that is not a helpful number. I used to stress about getting it to zero and think I wasted a lot of time and energy doing that. I'd much rather ignore that number and focus on enjoying what I like reading.

return of the comment spammers

It's been odd - in the last 2 weeks there's been an exponential increase in the number of comment spam attempts on this blog. It's all been unsuccessful because of the comment moderation, but it's still inconvenient if only because I get the email notification of each attempt. Some of these are quite vile. Are any other bloggers experiencing the same thing right now? Legitimate comments are welcome :)