Monthly Archives: December 2008

Anti-Choice (or Pro-Simplicity) is Nice When You Can Get It

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We’re knee-deep in our MetaLib implementation project, and as we do our best to make decisions about our interface, we keep removing all the extra links and options and tabs that clutter up the default interface. Do we really need two different ways to get to the database list? Do we really need both Simple and Advanced Search options when the Advanced search only adds one search box to the already existing search box? Do we really need a button to switch languages when we only have an English interface? Little by little we try to strike a balance between simplicity and function. One by one, buttons and options and tabs disappear and the interface starts to make a little more sense.

Then, today, I watched a TED talk in which Barry Schwartz talks about his theories about how increased choice does not, in fact, make for better decision-making outcomes. Apparently greater choice means (unsurprisingly) more brain time spent making decisions, but even beyond that it raises our expectations that the outcomes will be wonderful. When the outcome is just good and not absolutely amazing, we’re more easily disappointed now that our expectations have been raised. So while our decisions may actually be better, we’re less happy. If you want the long version of these theories, he has a whole book out: The Paradox of Choice. (Also, if you watch the TED talk you’ll notice at about minute 6:10 that even TED people don’t get wifi at their conference hotel. This makes me feel just a teensy bit better about every conference I’ve ever been to. But I digress.)

Being a librarian with search interfaces on the brain, I couldn’t help but think about all those calls for beautiful, simple, Google-like, single search boxes. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in both cases people hope that by reducing options, the experience will be improved. With the single search box, there’s never any doubt what you’re supposed to do or how to do it at least minimally effectively. It’s such a wonderful goal.

But there’s a catch. The simpler the interface is, the more powerful the behind-the-scenes mechanisms have to be. They have to do more interpretation of search terms, smarter retrieval, more robust relevance ranking. If I can’t specify how things should look when I’m done searching, then things had better be done in a way I would have anticipated to begin with or I’ll get frustrated with the lack of options to “fix” my results. Google didn’t get famous because it had a single search box. It got famous because that single search box yields consistent results based on an algorithm that’s incredibly complex and equally secret.

So while I’d love to be able to reduce our interface down to just a couple of well-chosen elements, we still have to compensate for the fact that the behind-the-scenes mechanisms just aren’t up to that kind of challenge. And so we’re left doing our balancing act: how much can we strip away in the interests of removing excess choice, and how much do we have to leave so that people can manipulate the system enough to get it to spit back results they can use.

Sometimes Passive is Isn’t So Bad

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I just spent some time paging through Facebook for the first time in a while and realized that there are all sorts of people there that I like a lot but no longer know very well. I’m not very good at keeping up with friends, actually. I’m bad at maintaining email correspondence (though I’m far far better at email than paper correspondence), and I’m not a phone person, so I almost never pick up the phone to call my friends unless there’s business to accomplish. All of this means that if you don’t live near enough to hang out with me in person, your blog posts don’t appear in my aggregator, or your Twitter posts in my Twitter timeline, I’ll have a hard time keeping up with your life. And it’s only my own fault, I know, but it’s true.

But before I beat myself up too much over being such a passive consumer of my friends’ lives, I think there’s something about keeping up with things like Twitter or Facebook (I really must make that part of my habit!) that mimics a face-to-face relationship in a way that email and phone conversations can’t. These things allow for a constant peripheral awareness of friends’ lives, piece by piece, moment by moment, which neither requires nor benefits from coherent summary. Each post reminds you of your friend’s existence. Like water dripping into a bucket, each new post replaces whatever measure of acquaintance had evaporated since the previous post.

The more I see my friends’ status updates, the more likely I am to write them an email or call them on the phone, too. So I guess passive consumption isn’t so bad as a starting place.

I’ve Been Netflixed

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You’d think that in a small town with two four-year colleges the last thing you’d have to worry about is your movie-watching options shrinking. Not so, apparently. This fall our (admittedly dingy and icky) movie theater closed. This month our movie rental place closed. I assume Netflix and things like bittorrent are to blame, and I blame them heartily. This seriously cramps my entertainment style.

Sure, I could subscribe to Netflix, and I probably will, now. The problem is that I go for weeks and weeks without watching a single movie, and then I hit one of those weekends where all I want is to achieve a state in which my brain doesn’t have to function at all for an extended period of time. On these weekends,I rent a huge pile of movies and watch them all, regardless of quality. Netflix doesn’t seem to accommodate such binge watching very well (at least, not until faster DSL connection speeds are available in my area), and the public library isn’t open late enough on Fridays for me to realize that this will be one of those weekends and get myself over there after work. Also, I’ve seen most of their holdings.

So here I sit, Netflixed out of my passive entertainment habits. I guess that means it’s time to develop new habits.

The problems of communication… or some of them, at least

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Today, a few of us were kicking around ideas for better communicating our individual stores of professional knowledge with each other and with others in the library, and I realized that this is something I’m terrible at doing. It’s not for lack of knowing things that are happening in the wider world of librarianship, or library technology, or social tools online, or any number of other things I keep half an eye on every day. If anything, my communication problem has its cause rather than its solution in the fact that I keep half an eye on these things every day.

Day in and day out, I hear people talking about librarianship, social web tools, and library technology. Last night I was chatting with somebody while he coded modules for Evergreen. Today people discussed whether all LIS students should learn at least a little programming. In the past couple of weeks we’ve debated the merits and characteristics of unconferences, teased apart copyright issues as they apply to emerging formats, shared ideas about discovery platforms for libraries, matched people up with the bibliographic software that best suits their needs, discussed centralized virtual reference, and talked about what options exist that could help us make our catalogs more usable. That’s a lot of conversations, and many of them don’t arrive at clear conclusions or “ah HA” moments. And yet, drop by drop, they add to my knowledge of what’s going on out in the world of librarianship, and they become the back story that informs my reaction to more formal library-related “news.”

So at what point does this kind of thing become “news” that I should spread around amongst my colleagues? I’d never think to get to work the morning after such conversations and write up the equivalent of a conference report for my colleagues. Not only would this normally mean a daily email from me, but even if that were requested, I’d have the hardest time figuring out just what to include.

Here’s what I mean. Have you ever fallen out of touch with a good friend and then found that when you finally manage to contact them again, you have very little to say? And it’s not for lack of news to convey. It’s because any piece of news you convey will require too much explanation, too much back story. And really, it’s the back story that would be interesting to your long-lost friend, but you’d have to figure out how much of it to tell, and how to explain all the tangents, and… and suddenly it all seems like too much. Nobody has that kind of time. And so the conversation lags and only the vaguest information or the highlights pass back and forth, revealing nothing about the interesting and complex issues that lurk beneath those highlights.

So here I am, stuck in an odd space where it feels like I never really learn anything news-worthy because of the paucity of epiphany moments, but where I’m inundated with information all day long, and where communicating anything coherent about this information would take more time and effort than seems warranted (especially since I can never be sure which information will be useful to my colleagues).

Seems like I need a blog or something…

Referrals: a Pledge

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I do a lot of referring. People stop into my office and I tell them to stop into another librarian’s office for better help. People come up to the reference desk and I do what I can to get them started and then refer them off to the liaison that’ll be able to go deeper. People ask me about renewing books, or getting a job in the library, or ordering books, or fixing computers, or registering for classes, or getting access to materials that we don’t have here, or any number of other questions that I can’t answer well by myself.

Sometimes these referrals are specific: “You need to talk to so-and-so, and here’s her contact information and what you can expect from her.” Sometimes they’re more vague: “You need to go talk to somebody in this special collection at the University of Minnesota.” And up until recently, I didn’t stop to think about the differences between those two types of referrals. Both get the people with a questions to somebody who can hopefully answer their questions, right?

Maybe.

I was recently on the receiving end of a non-library-related referral that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It left me wishing that there had been somebody I could have turned to for a more personal, specific referral, a referral to somebody that they knew would take me seriously and work through my questions carefully. But I was out of my element and didn’t have a nice network of people who know people who know people, so I just went where I was told and hoped for the best. What a waste of time.

I think I’ll work at making my own referrals as specific as possible from now on. If I don’t know the name of the librarian at another institution that can answer this question, I’ll find that out. I’ll call ahead. I’ll pave the way. I won’t just send lost but optimistic students into unknown territory without any assurance that the person on the other end will at least take their questions seriously.