Category: Random Thoughts

If you’ve been following the work and discussion that’s come out of Project Bamboo, you will have noticed a few sticking points: there are the IT folks, there are the humanities faculty, and there is the original proposal, and so far there is not a whole lot of fundamental consensus between the three about an ideal path for this project.

You’ll notice I didn’t include librarians in that list, because for the most part they’ve been marginalized or absent from the discussions I’ve heard. When librarianship does make an appearance, it has mostly been in the context of finding stuff or of bridging the gap between the IT folks and the faculty. (There could be another whole blog post about why I think librarians could play a much larger role and how we do more than find things, but I don’t think that’s actually the fundamental sticking point. At least not yet.) But I digress. As I was saying, I hear one of three distinct voices whenever I hear about Project Bamboo, and this was never more clear to me than yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon one of our three representatives to Project Bamboo, an art historian, explained to a small group of humanities faculty that she wanted to collect their research stories so that she could report back to her subgroup in the Project. She said the IT folks kept talking about building things, but her subgroup was sure that the people who wanted to build things didn’t understand the research practices of humanities faculty well enough to build anything that would suit these practices well. She pointed out that each humanities professor’s practice is quite different because each person’s area of research requires different kinds of evidence, and that she wasn’t sure that “a tool” would help a wide enough group of people to be worth it.

I agree, for the most part. I also agree with Dorothea who has pointed out that there are already good tools out there just waiting to be used. Several times in this meeting yesterday, faculty members would say that they wished for a tool that would do x or y, and I’d think “oh, you need del.icio.us” or “oh, you need a wiki.”

What I hadn’t anticipated, though, and what seemed to surprise most of the people in the room, was the amount of commonality between the research practices of every single faculty member in the room. To a person, they all talked about going somewhere to look at a bunch of related stuff and use this exploration to find connections and draw conclusions. One will go to archives in Italy, another to an art library in the Hague, another to TV broadcast stations in Lebanon, another to a specific library in France… and the list goes on. Each one talked about travel and working within the constraints of the place they visited as their major hurdles. But each and every one of them said that there was no way to know exactly what was there before they got there, no way to predict in advance what insights they would draw, and no way to conduct their better research without this process of going and looking at heaps and heaps of stuff. Each one said that it wouldn’t solve all their problems, but what they really wanted were digital collections from which to work, or comprehensive highly detailed finding aides at the very least.

When I first heard hints, way back before the first workshop last year, that this would be the direction of the project, I was kind of disappointed. “You have all the power and money of the Mellon foundation and these massive groups of skilled people, and you want digital collections?” I screamed silently to myself. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that building the perfect marriage between digital collections of this scope and intuitive interfaces could be a very good goal for this group. If these interfaces could be built on careful metadata and powerful yet flexible indexing, and if they could mimic the best parts of spreading a box of photographs out on a desk while stripping away the clumsiness… that would be a thing of wonder. Just because it’s a thing that people have been trying to build for years doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be a “new” project for by this amalgam of participants. And in fact, this amalgam could possibly move farther toward accomplishing such a goal than any other group I’ve seen.

Steve’s post made me realize that it’s been a little while since I’ve seen new comments about the OCLC terms of service change. Paging through my collected list of links, I’m seeing a lot of non-OCLC people complaining about it, and some OCLC people defending it. But I’m curious, has anyone seen a post by a non-OCLC employee that agrees with the OCLC view-point? If so, please leave a link in the comments below so that I can round out my link collection. Thanks!

The internet is a weird place. It seems like nothing that you’d prefer to forget ever dies while whole chunks of your life can disappear into the cloud with very little warning. People worry about preserving all the digital ephemera that we produce, or about deciding which categories of ephemera are worthy of these efforts. And while actually losing content is the stuff of librarianish nightmares, it seems to me that there’s another aspect of internet life that we are continually losing without even realizing that we had it, and that’s the thread public conversation that holds all the individual streams of blog posts and news feeds together.

In other words, even though my blog and my friends’ blogs haven’t disappeared off the face of the internet, it would take a lot of work to recreate the moment in time in which any given post was written and see the broader environment of posts and discussions that make up any given posts’ context. Even this post is part of a conversational environment that includes the post I linked to above (and the posts to which it links), one other blog post that I can’t find any more, a couple of conversations on FriendFeed, the simple fact that an issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights came out recently, Greg Schwartz’s weekly requests for “newsworthy” content to talk about on Uncontrolled Vocabulary, and an IM conversation with Steve Lawson. That’s a lot of conversational context, each piece of which will be preserved in its own space (each blog’s archives, the Cites & Insights archives, the Uncontrolled Vocabulary audio, blog, and wiki archives, FriendFeed, and chat logs). But the moment that brought them all together, that asynchronous conversation, that zeitgeist, will probably melt into the cloud and render each piece of the conversation less rich for those coming back to them later. In fact, this post’s context is already melting since there’s one piece of if that I can no longer remember well enough to find.

There are a few vehicles that I know of that preserve these conversational contexts to varying degrees. Cites & Insights is one of them (and the one that I think defines the genre I’m imagining), Uncontrolled Vocabulary is another, This Week In LibraryBlogLand will be a third if it ever resurrects, and the now-defunct Carnival of the InfoSciences was often a fourth. Each of these gathers together the posts of others and strings them into some sort of narrative about contemporary issues in librarianship. But each also has its weakness as a Preserver of Zeitgeist. Cites & Insights preserves the issues that interested Walt, for example, and Uncontrolled Vocabulary preserves issues that Greg deems newsworthy. These foci are necessary and by no means a fault, but it leaves me wishing that more people had the time, energy, inclination, and ability to take on the task of this kind of preservation so that more pieces of the intenet conversation would get named, recorded, and preserved.