Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for May 2001
With all the wonderful Internet services libraries are offering these days, I tend to agree with Alice in Wonderland, who concluded at the end of a race, “Everyone has won, and all must have prizes.” Nevertheless, I have established the annual Internet Librarian Pied Piper awards to emphasize lesser-known gems of Internet librarianship. This year, I’ve identified a person, place, and thing that each deserves special recognition for unusual contributions to Internet librarianship.
For years, I’ve admired the varied projects initiated by Eric Lease Morgan, network technologies development librarian at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Eric has been dancing ahead of us for over a decade, teasing us forward into the future with projects and experiments that never fail to intrigue and enlighten.
Eric is as prescient as he is prolific: In 1991, when most librarians were unaware of the Internet, Eric was developing library-based services with Hypercard, an early Weblike tool. In 1995, when most libraries were offering at best text-based Web access over 56k lines, Eric was exhorting librarians to embrace graphical Web browsers. Eric was developing tools for identifying and organizing electronic serials and e-texts while many librarians were still debating the value of the Internet.
Eric’s hallmark project, in my opinion, was See You See a Librarian, a videoconferencing project in the summer of 1996. What was your library doing with the Internet in 1996? You probably weren’t offering two-way video teleconferencing designed “for librarians to share common problems and solutions with an audience of their peers.”
Eric hit a wall in deploying See You throughout the profession: “Too few people [librarians] had access to the hardware and software necessary to do videoconferencing,” he lamented. He just couldn’t drum up participation, even at the low overhead of $200 per computer. Eric’s final report on See You See a Librarian concluded that his project did not “improve library/information services to any great degree.” I respectfully object to this comment. The current wellspring of live, online, real-time reference services—where librarians interact with the patron’s desktop—is a direct descendant of Eric’s effort. Eric seeded our profession with brilliant possibilities; when the time was right, others watered the concepts and made them grow.
Leave it to the library that opened New York State’s first drive-up library window in 1993 to publish online newsletters, proselytize cheerfully and relentlessly for public computer access, and be one of the first libraries to circulate Rocketbook electronic readers.
Despite serving just 30,000 residents in a perennial rust-belt area with a library budget under $1 million, the Gates Public Library (no relation to Bill or Melinda) has made its presence known in the digital library world of upstate New York, an area not exactly known for its cutting-edge technology. I first discovered the Gates Library when I was researching electronic books. The library didn’t stroll into this new format—it leapt gladly. In a profession that has a tendency to get stuck in the pencil-sharpening stage, the Gates Public Library is truly a Pied Piper.
Dot-coms come and dot-coms go, but the Gates Library demonstrates the timelessness of Ranganathan’s principles, applied directly to Internet services. Director Susan Swanton provides a weekly online bulletin called Library Links, which for several years has regaled her community with insights into new services, reflections on librarianship, and apologies for bad weather. A recently added service to the library’s Web site is the Gates Community Services Directory, a unique resource in the area, guaranteed to make Swanton’s Web site “sticky” (meaning, in dot-com parlance, one that attracts visitors and keeps them there).
The Gates Library doesn’t have the most beautiful Web site, the most cutting-edge services, or a glittering cybermobile. Its theme song could easily be “My Funny Valentine.” But what this library has is what Morgan has: a certain insouciant optimism about the Internet and libraries, and an inexhaustible ability to experiment, lead, and proselytize that makes the Gates Library far more than the sum of its parts, and well deserving of the Pied Piper Award.
The Regional Institutes held by ALA’s Library and Information Technology Association are “one-day workshops on technology-related topics.” I single out these institutes for a Pied Piper Award in part out of enlightened self-interest. Continuing education for information technology can be very difficult or expensive to acquire. When a library has very few IT staff members, learning a new technology can be a teeth-grinding experience of trial and error (and error, and error).
LITA has identified a real need—continuing education for information technology staff—and addressed it with a very targeted service. LITA also bends over backward to bring these institutes to the masses, offering three models for hosting these programs in an area. In addition to great topics and instructors—currently Peter Murray on proxy servers and Kristin Antelman on database-driven Web sites—these institutes provide settings where librarians can mingle and share ideas. And someday some of these librarians may hear the call of the Pied Piper and host their own institutes.