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Category: Tools and Technology

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

Published by Iris on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

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.

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The OCLC Kerfuffle: In which I write much but come to few conclusions

Published by Iris on Thursday, November 20th, 2008

I’ve been watching the OCLC policy change discussion unfold slowly over the last few weeks, and I’ve got to say, I’m flummoxed. On the one hand, I don’t like the new license. I agree with most of what’s been written about the potential dangers it poses to innovation and the odd irony that member institutions will pay large sums of money to hand over their data to OCLC so that OCLC can lock it down for them. (I’ve included links to key posts and documents down at the bottom of this post, for those who’d like to catch up.) On the other hand, who am I to claim that OCLC has no right to try to sustain itself financially?

For me, the topic hinges on three main questions:

  • Is this really a change, and if so, how significant of a change is it?
  • What do they really mean by “Reasonable Use”?
  • And what does this mean for those of us that aren’t in the business of creating and maintaining bibliographic systems?

So first of all, is this really a change?

Karen Calhoun of OCLC has written more than once that the new license is just a clarification of the old license and that it serves to protect the community’s investment in the WorldCat records. She commented on Aaron Swartz’s blog post that “the policy carries forward the principles, if not the wording of the current Guidelines, which have been in place since 1987.” Later she wrote on her own blog at length and again asserted:

The difference is not in the principles, then, but the environment in which the principles are applied. The Guidelines [meaning the old policy] came from the limited data sharing environment of the 1980s. The updated policy’s landscape is the Web and the incredibly dynamic data sharing environment it represents. (cite)

In other words, the old policy protected community investment in the cooperative at a time when mass data sharing was not the norm, and the new policy protects that same community investment in the current environment where the default assumption on the web is that if there’s a big pile of data out there, anyone who wants to can play with it and make it work for them.

I have no idea whether the old policy felt restrictive 21 years ago, but I know that the new one feels restrictive now. It seems to me that the paradigm shifted right out from under OCLC and that reinforcing the principles of information sharing from 21 years ago is akin to re-inventing the information searching environment of 10-20 years ago.

It also seems to me that if libraries invest time, effort, and money into building a massive dataset, the best return on that investment would be to have people (OCLC or anyone else) take that data and make it work for us and for our patrons. This is what we do when we invest in the stock market, or even put money into savings accounts. We effectively sign it over to whomever can take it and make it work for us. The way this new policy reads, it feels more like protecting our treasures by tucking them into a safe deposit box. We rent the space and gain no interest, causing our “investment” to depreciate over time.

So maybe we’re just protecting OCLC’s investment in our data. Personally, I’d feel better about the whole thing if they just came out and said that.

What about this “Reasonable Use“ clause?

There’s also one clause in the policy that I find disturbingly vague. It’s the clause that defines “reasonable use,” and serves a very similar function in this license as the Fair Use clause serves in copyright law. Here it is:

13. “Reasonable Use” means Use of WorldCat Records that is reasonable for the intended Non-Commercial Use and consistent with the intent of this Policy. Without limiting the foregoing, the term “Reasonable Use” does not include any Use of WorldCat Records that:

a. discourages the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat, thus damaging OCLC Members’ investment in WorldCat, and/or
b. substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat. Please see the FAQ for a discussion of Z39.50 for cataloging using WorldCat-derived bibliographic records.

As Greg Schwartz noted on this week’s Uncontrolled Vocabulary, there are a lot of weasel words here. How big, how related in function, and how related in purpose does a system have to be before it violates this clause? And then there are the conspicuous “and/or” weasel words that leave OCLC room to claim license violation if any part of this clause begins to make them uneasy.

Seems to me that the biggest violator of section 13.b in existence right now is the Library of Congress, and that makes no sense at all. But if you think about it, its catalog is massive and exactly duplicates most of the functions of WorldCat. LibraryThing is also massive, but serves such a completely different purpose that I can’t see how it harms the “investment” of the cooperative. If anything, its giving the cooperative ideas about what might be possible in our own catalogs given the data they produce.

Just as a side note, I wonder if they have to grant Google and other search engines the right to crawl WorldCat.org.

Implications for those us in the public services world?

So what. Why do I care? In my day-to-day work, I search WorldCat when I need it, and I’ll continue to do so. I don’t do cataloging work. I won’t be the one deciding whether or not to put the new field that links to OCLC’s license in our records. And I certainly don’t build discovery systems that would make use of WorldCat records.

Well, I worry about two things. First, that this will stall efforts to invent a discovery system that actually works, and works well — one that patrons are happy to use, and one that puts to good use all of the metadata that catalogers put so much time and effort into creating.

I also worry that this move might implode OCLC. It has the chance to take a hard look at its “principles” and come up with creative ways to position itself as the nexis of all bibliographic data on the web, or it could spark its potential user community to rebell and rebuild elsewhere. My favorite analogy for this comes from Steve Lawson’s blog where he writes:

Coincidentally, I was reading Matthew Battles’ Library: An Unquiet History today and came across this interesting tidbit on page 29 about the Library of Alexandria:

In an effort to stop the growth of the libraries at Rhodes and Pergamum, both of which threatened Alexandria’s preeminence, the city’s rulers banned the export of papyrus. The move backfired, however, spurring the Pergamenes to invent parchment (charta pergamenum), which for its strength and reusability would prove to be the preferred writing medium in Europe for more than a thousand years.

WorldCat has been making great strides forward recently, and I would hate to see it shoot itself in the foot over a piece of papyrus. It also has an incredible treasure trove of information, one that would be a shame to have to duplicate, and one that could yield huge dividends if invested wisely rather than stuffed into a safe deposit box.

Or is this the push we all needed?

For further reading:

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Whatever Happened to Library Blogs?

Published by Iris on Monday, November 17th, 2008

Something’s shifted. Maybe it’s just that I’ve shifted. My life has become almost unrecognizable compared to a year ago, so I wouldn’t rule this possibility out just yet. But even so, I’m inclined to think that the landscape and function of librarians’ blogs is in the process of a transformation.

Two years ago, I mentioned that participating in the biblioblogosphere was like attending a conference every day. A year ago, a good portion of my evenings were spent reading, thinking about, and responding to other librarians’ blogs. This was what kept me feeling connected to the larger world of librarianship. This was what made me feel useful beyond my own patron community. And this was a major source of contact with librarians whom I had come to regard as friends.

But lately, I wake up to find that my RSS aggregator has very few new posts from this once-prolific core of librarian bloggers, and I certainly haven’t been contributing to anyone’s aggregator overload recently. Not by a long stretch.

In my darker moments, I worry that we’re a little bit burned out, or that we’ve given up trying to change the world by weighing in on issues large and small. But while there may be some of this at work, I think it has more to do with a shift in communication patterns. Two years ago, blogs provided a venue for people’s carefully thought-out ideas as well as for their off-the-cuff thoughts, gut reactions, and general banter. In this way, they were like the sessions and the between- and after-session banter at a conference. Today I think that blogs have begun to take on the more focused character of the actual sessions at a conference while places like Twitter and FriendFeed have become the venue for the between-and after-session banter. We pass each other in the micro-blogging hallway, have conversations about everything from OCLC’s latest craziness to weekend entertainment plans, shout hello to other passers-by, and show each other our pictures or the latest new gaget we’re playing with. Then, when we have something more formal to say, we take the time to sit down and compose a blog post to present to our peers.

Then again, maybe this is just a very long justification for the decline and fall of a small portion of the librarian blogosphere.

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eJournals, Blessing and Curse

Published by Iris on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

I love electronic access to journal articles. I admit to being a teensy bit annoyed if I have traipse downstairs (one floor down and all of 100 feet over from my desk) to get the hard copy of an article. I’m even more reluctant to ILL articles, though I know how easy it is and how incredibly speedy compared to my past ILL experiences. Point and click is the way to go (as long as it’s not one of those nasty “HTML full text” articles, by which they mean “we’ll give you the text but none of the foreign characters or charts or images that you’ll need to understand the text… oh, and we won’t give you the original pagination either… mwa-ha-ha-ha…”).

And I’m certainly not alone in this. Students seem to have an even more marked preference than I do, and the faculty helped us move to being much more of an e-only library during the biennial serial review we completed last spring. More than half of our budget was spent on a electronic resources last year, and our stats show downloads are up by over 60%. We’ve tipped over that point, folks. And for the most part, there is great rejoicing in the land.

I say “for the most part” because all of a sudden, people are having to deal with an overly complex system of getting to our stuff from off campus. The new faculty were, understandably, confused and rather frustrated. Most of the systems we have in place (LibX, a proxy server, telling Google Scholar about our holdings, etc) work for most of our resources. But that doesn’t mean that things are any easier because these new faculty use Google, we don’t always subscribe through the publisher web site, and yet publishers put tantalizing web sites up for Google to find. The professor finds a great article via Google, clicks on it, and is told to log in or subscribe when, in fact, the library does subscribe, just through another source.

Sure, there are browser extensions that can help with that. We could OpenURL-ify everything under the sun if people would download extensions and remember to log into the proxy server whenever they sit at their computers. But that’s a pain. We mentioned this kind of thing at new faculty orientation and were met with weary stares.

There’s got to be a better way.

p.s. I’ve also talked before about the problem of eJournals when it comes to copyright and ILL (here).

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