Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for September 2006
New Orleans was great. Yes, beastly hot. Yes, a long way to the outer reaches of the convention center. (Good news about Midwinter here in Seattle: Our center is much more vertical than horizontal.) Yes, everything seemed to move just a little slower than usual. But the people were overjoyed to see us, and everybody I talked to felt good about being there and doing what they could to help out. I was really proud of ALA’s leadership and all of us for making the hard decision to go.
I particularly remember walking after dinner through Jackson Square on another typically muggy evening. The square was dimly lit but nonetheless full of life with artists, fortune-tellers, tourists, and an amplified acoustic guitar sounding through the heavy air of a city still broken but struggling on.
It was a very interesting conference in many ways. Beyond trying to figure out how many people were there and comparing experiences (and early-morning cafés au lait with beignets at Café Du Monde), I felt a heightened sense of urgency in many of the people I talked to; a sense that something had to be done, and quickly, to respond to increasingly obvious and important trends about users, publishing, the internet, Web 2.0, the popular mindset—you name it.
This wasn’t just mindless flailing or rending of garments, either. Lots of good ideas are getting bounced around and implemented, which is all to the good. The LITA blog (litablog.org) is doing its usual stand-up job of reportage, and other individuals and groups are out there too.
My background is largely in searching, so naturally that’s what I focus on. I can easily have four search boxes available to me in my browser: Google, as my home page; the Google Desktop box; and two toolbars within Firefox: the Google search bar and Firefox’s own search toolbar. So at any given moment, I have several different opportunities to search something, and this doesn’t even include the increasingly commonplace search tools within websites.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s getting harder and harder to avoid search opportunities. Search used to be hard; it meant having to go somewhere, do something, exert some effort, think about what to search on, and so on. No more. Search is now nearly ubiquitous and nearly brain dead; a mixed blessing if ever there was one. The little box is everywhere, always there, always ready and waiting, beckoning.
It’s pretty apparent that the box is here to stay, so I say it’s high time librarians reclaim it for ourselves.
Taking in stride the box
OK, you may, say, how can we reclaim that little box? Did we ever have it? Of course we did—for several decades we were the little box, long before “I’m feeling lucky.” Libraries and their information services were a major conduit for information on topics grand and mundane, easy to use, efficient, trusted, and right for their time and community.
Now the times and communities are a-changing, and the little boxes have arrived, right for their time. That’s not to say that library services aren’t still useful, but when in Rome . . . build a Firefox plug-in.
My favorite little box is the pulldown menu of search engines in my Firefox toolbar. I’ve got Google in there, as well as eBay, imdb.com, Technorati, Flickr, ESPN, the BBC, and more. Pick a tool, type the search, and away you go, all right in one place—and now, happily, joined by the Seattle Public Library catalog, which I discovered at mycroft.mozdev.org, which collects search-engine plug-ins. It saves me having to load the website to search the catalog, a small but important thing. And moreover, it’s right there every time I use that menu.
There are several dozen library-based plug-ins on Mycroft listed so far; there should be thousands (and, I hope, for the new worldcat.org). If your library doesn’t have one yet, find the person on your staff who can build it, and then publicize the heck out of it. That little box is the 21st-century equivalent of the bookmobile or the outreach program—a way for libraries to be where their users are.
Plug-ins are one step of many we need to take to embrace and thrive in the emerging information environment. These steps don’t come easily; for example, we know how involved searching can often be. Little boxes make it all look so seductively simple, and with ranking algorithms it sometimes really is. With highly structured objects such as catalogs and serial databases, though, simple isn’t so simple . . . but that’s another story.