Options for Adoption
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for April 2006
Online catalogs. Not what I expected to be chatting about in a hip and trendy funeral-parlor-turned-lounge-bar here in Seattle a few weeks ago at the opening reception of the latest version of Microsoft’s Search Champs program. (Readers with long memories may recall my prior visit to this MSN Search invitational.)
I regret I don’t recall who I was talking with about this—what can I say, the drinks were good—but it was the sort of animated conversation you can only have with someone who’s a dedicated and passionate information person, but not a librarian—a civilian, in other words, who among other things expressed his shock that archivists spent much of their time throwing things away.
Anyway, somehow we got from that outrage to online catalogs, and he unloaded this little stunner on me: If we were to convert our card catalogs to automated systems today, we’d have an entirely different range of technological options open now than we had back in the mid-1960s.
Rather than the green-screen dumb-terminal starting point (there are some of us who remember early efforts with dots at the bottom of the screen simulating the hole for the drawer rod), we could, for example, use high-speed, high-resolution scanners to capture images of the cards.
Boom. Other than making Nicholson Baker deliriously happy, this would have been fascinating. We would have been able to preserve the look and feel of a catalog system that everybody had been comfortable with for generations, easing the transition. Although bandwidth might be problematic, the marginalia and character of those catalogs would have been saved.
Mind you, we also probably would have been out of business by now. Had we waited that long, the world would have long since passed us by. And we were among the first professions to explore the use of computing technology; among the earliest experiments was one using “expendable IBM paper” at the King County (Wash.) Library System in 1951.
When to pounce?
So, tempting and alluring as the prospect of a de novo online library catalog circa 2006 may be, it didn’t happen. It does, however, raise the larger and much more important question of when to pounce. When is the right time to adopt or embrace a new technology or format? How long do we wait, and what’s the right balance of benefit and opportunity cost in making that decision?
The hard reality is that we have to pull the trigger at some point and make the decision. For example, what should we do with emergent forms: blogs, podcasts, wikis? These are all currently very popular, and their impact is growing in the broader worlds of journalism, popular culture, and even government.
We’d have to ask some hard questions, though: How “big” would these forms have to be for us to decide to take them on in some meaningful, professional way? How many podcasts? What importance would blogs need to have? How long do wikis need to be around? We’d have to address questions of endurance, longevity, durability, and value.
Then, what would we do to add value to those forms? Preservation? Access? Organization? Hosting? Fighting for intellectual freedom and equity of access? Those are among the kinds of things we do for formats we’ve embraced in the past, and represent serious commitments.
It’s all too easy, and facile, to say that new Internet-based forms are “just like” older things. There are lots of blogs that are pretty crappy and thus easily dismissed as ephemeral and unimportant. For that matter, there are lots of diaries that are yawners.
Yet they are also windows into individual worlds, many of which might now seem drab and ordinary; with a remove of a few decades or centuries, however, they can become exotic and enthralling. Podcasts might someday be seen as akin to the troubadours and trouvères of medieval France, spreading the news of the day in a format that was easily understood.
The other side of the coin is that with limited resources we can’t do everything. Deciding when to jump in is one thing; deciding when to jump out is another. Once we commit to a form, we’re loathe to abandon it. I often say about the only format we managed to avoid was 8-track tape.
If push came to shove, the day might come when we’d have to make the painful decision to give up or deemphasize something (microfilm?) to free up time or resources for new and more important things . . . but that’s another story.
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