The Librarianship of Connections
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for May 2005
I have my little morning ritual—don’t we all? Mine involves getting coffee (this is Seattle, after all), stumbling my way to my office to see what horrors await me in my e-mail, deleting what I can, dealing with the rest or at least the ones I can face, and then taking a few moments to check what’s new on My Yahoo. I get a few news headlines, some sports scores, weather forecasts for cities I care about, and the feeds from several blogs. (Try librarian.net for a start.)
At first, blogs (an elision of “web logs”) looked a little like diaries, where people would post their daily goings-on, thoughts, ideas, random musings, and so on. In the internet realm, they’re descendents of the Usenet, online discussion groups, bulletin board systems, online communities such as The Well, and the like.
More recently though, blogs have become vehicles by which people post not only their own thoughts but links to those of others, as well as news items and pieces of other content, adding their own commentary. I’m not sure there is a good analogue in the analog world; they look less like a diary and more like a scrapbook, or perhaps a highly personalized version of the Reader’s Digest, without “Life in These United States.”
Blogs have also become increasingly powerful and important. A few months ago, bloggers were responsible in no small part for the resignation of a CNN executive for allegedly saying he believed U.S. military personnel were intentionally targeting reporters in Iraq. Bloggers also were among those to point out flaws in a CBS news report on President Bush’s military record; that eventually led to Dan Rather’s embarrassment.
Bite-sized views
So whatever the blog is or is becoming, it can’t be easily or summarily ignored or dismissed. It’s a largely bite-sized way of viewing the world and expressing oneself, which can come as a bit of a shock to those of us who are used to longer, more elaborate modes of discussion. It is an increasingly bite-sized world; yet magazines continue to thrive, books are published, and plays are produced; so I’m not panicked yet about the death of long-form genres.
The Internet Public Library (which just celebrated its 10th birthday, yay) has a very nice collection of and about blogs—in its special collections area, intriguingly enough. In typical IPL fashion, the collection melds the library world with the web world, and is organized by Sears subject headings. It also points to the fine entry on blogs in the Wikipedia, which is full of history, terminology, categories, and so on.
Speaking of the Wikipedia, blogs are just the tip of an iceberg of an emerging class of web-based mechanisms for creating and sharing content, including wikis, RSS, and content management systems, all of which bear watching.
An important series of questions for us is whether this genre will survive, and in what form, and then what we are going to about it. Many blog entries have substantial content, to be sure, but many also provide commentary on external content or other blog entries, or in some cases offer little more than pointers to interesting things elsewhere. As such, the blogosphere is an intriguing combination of stuff and connections.
Stuff we know what to do with. We can organize it, describe it, help people to find it, and so on. In the past, when a new information format arose, search aids followed. It took over 150 years of printing using moveable type in Europe before the first meaningful library catalogs were built. Subject indexes followed the rise of journals and periodicals by several decades. Search engines and directories were built after large numbers of websites were built. And librarians were there each time.
Connections would at first blush appear to be another kind of animal altogether: harder to hold still, more problematic to get a handle on. But we’ve been there too. Citation analysis, bibliometrics, review articles—these are all familiar means of adding value via connection and commentary. It seems likely that the internet will continue to engender highly connective systems in additions to repositories.
Increasing volume implies that people will want and need tools and strategies for finding, evaluating, organizing, and managing connections as well. And librarians could adapt their skills to this environment to be there too. This librarianship of connections would most assuredly look quite different from the one many of us learned . . . but that’s another story.
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