Reader response: "Research"

The chapter "Research," by Ron Powell, summarizes the state of research in library and information sciences and briefly describes different methods researchers employ. This was a short chapter, and I found myself wishing that Powell had sacrificed a little brevity for the sake of exploring these methods in more depth and giving the reader examples of studies using each method.

It did pick up for me a little when Powell began to describe methods "more unique to the study of library resources and services" (173): content analysis, bibliometrics, and comparative librarianship. The first two methods in particular appeal to me for two reasons: first, they are more oriented toward texts than human subjects (there's a reason I wasn't a psych major), and second, they are by nature interdisciplinary; Powell doesn't give examples, but I imagine content analysis and bibliometric studies tend to focus on particular areas of knowledge, so the researcher will be able to investigate her field of expertise.

There are qualitative methods I wish Powell had described in more detail and, again, given concrete examples, because the terms sound familiar to me from my studies in religion: phenomenology, hermeneutics, reflexivity. I'm familiar with hermeneutics from my studies in biblical interpretation, but what does it mean to do a hermeneutic study in library science? I suppose that's why further reading is suggested at the end of the chapter.

I have to be honest and mention that "true" research is the reason I haven't yet finished my dissertation and why I'm not sure I want to be a professor; I love teaching, but I'm not sure I want to do scholarship. In my limited reading of library scholarship thus far, however, I think it's possible I'd be more interested in library research than humanities research, because it seems more pragmatic and concrete than the sort of scholarship I was doing as a religious studies student. Part of my journey over the next two years will be discovering whether this avenue of librarianship is one I want to explore.

Powell, Ron. "Research." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 168-178.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 14: "Readers Advisory Serives: How to Help Users Find a 'Good Book'"

When I go to the New Haven Free Public Library, I'm usually headed to the children's section on the second floor with my daughter. But every few visits I linger to look at the new books, which are on a row of shelves to the right of the central aisle to the elevators and the rest of the first floor, across from the circulation desk. New books are arranged by subject, and usually I check out history and politics, occasionally fiction and other sections. Unless I'm looking for something in particular, it's where I do all my browsing, and 90% of the books I check out are new books, most of which are impulse...not purchases, but checkouts. So from a merchandising standpoint, as Mary K. Chelton explores in her essay on RA services, my local library is doing a great job. (They use the ends of stacks, too!)

I don't think I've asked a librarian to recommend me a book based on my reading preferences since junior high or high school, and this is partly because I prefer to do my own research, partly because I have plenty of unread books to keep me occupied, partly because the process has become so automated and convenient in its automation that I find it a lot easier to play with Amazon's rating and recommendation system than to ask someone in person for a book recommendation. When I originally started purchasing from Amazon, its recommendations were (I believe) based merely on a keyword search of what other items were similar, so if I had enjoyed one edition of Hamlet, it recommended the Signet edition, the Arden edition, the Folger edition, and so on...rather frustrating and not particularly useful from my perspective, or, I suppose, Amazon's. As years have gone by, the recommendation system has become much more sophisticated, based on other customers' preferences and purchases as well as my own browsing and buying history.

It's hard to imagine one human being taking the place of all this, but as Chelton describes the role of the RA librarian, the librarian has resources Amazon doesn't, including tools like NoveList and the ability to provide in-person reading groups and book talks. And there is nothing like the sort of conversation all book lovers enjoy: "I just read The Sparrow and loved it! Jesuits and space aliens--how can you go wrong? Do you have any ideas for what I should read next?"

There are, as Chelton notes, online sources such as listservs and blogs that offer a similar experience remotely and asynchronously. It occurred to me while reading that the opportunities Chelton describes--listservs, blogs, wikis--are not really ideal for this sort of discussion. I've posted on various online special-interest forums (e.g. photography, wedding planning, parenting), and I think threaded discussions on open forums would be much preferable to all of the above--easier to read than a listserv (which even in the old days when there were few alternatives, I couldn't tolerate long because so much chat, much of it irrelevant to my interests, clogged up my inbox), more democratic than blogs, where discussion topics originate with one person or a small group of people, and more personal than wikis, which are not really discussions anyway. And, of course, they exist--I've never participated in an online book forum, but a quick Google search turned up a bunch.

Readers advisory is not an area of librarianship I've considered, and since I am probably headed the academic route, I'm not sure I would have the opportunity to do it anyway, but it does sound like fun and a great way to keep up with new books being published, as well as to revisit old favorites. So if I were to go into public librarianship instead--and who knows where I'll end up, anyway?--it's an option to consider.

Chelton, Mary K. "Readers Advisory Services: How to Help Users Find a 'Good Book.'" The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 157-167.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 11: "Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying, and Evaluating Information Systems"

The topic of information retrieval is an odd combination of something I find quite interesting and yet also something I know little about (at least from the design end). This response will probably be less cohesive than previous responses, because I will just comment on a few individual topics that brought other things to my mind.

1. Considering the question "How do you organize your closet?" (113) made me realize that most of the organization I do is entirely for myself. I am the sort of person who has a lot of clutter but knows roughly where everything is, but when I have to explain to someone else how I organize something--say, when I am trying to help my husband navigate the kitchen--I realize that my organizational strengths, if they exist, do not lie in creating a system so transparent that after five years of marriage my husband can figure out where I put the colander. So if it began with closets (again, loosely but for my purposes functionally organized), I would be fine, but creating information retrieval systems for other people is going to be more of a challenge.

2. "In design, there is rarely one perfect solution...design requires multiple decisions and compromises, and you can never be sure that you couldn't have designed the system better if you had worked on it longer." (114) So here I am planted squarely in the realm of the humanities: There Are No Right Answers! You Can Never Be Wrong! But Also, You Can't Know If You're Right! I love this sort of uncertainty, and yet it drives me batty. There is some comfort, though, in the problem-solving aspect: information retrieval begins with problem definition. This is how I think about more abstract philosophical thought processes: when I was teaching introductory religion, I pointed out to my students that each major religion poses one great human problem that needs to be solved, and then provides a solution. So much of life--information retrieval, philosophical meditation, plumbing--lies in figuring out what the problem is.

3. Metadata. I am intrigued by cloud tags, which I use on SmugMug, my photo hosting site. If you want to see what my tag cloud looks like, you can go here. If you want to see about 800 pictures of my daughter, you can click on "auletta." This is not only a shameless plug for my cute kid (it's that too), but also a good example of tagging on SmugMug in general. I use tags mainly for my own reference and for my family's, so any relative can click on his or her name and find any pictures he's in, or so I can click on "maine" and find all the pictures I've taken in Maine. If you search all of SmugMug for photos tagged Auletta, the overwhelming majority of results are pictures of my daughter, who has a conveniently (in this case) unusual name. Three of the other four are pictures of Ken Auletta. But if you search "tupelo," which is both a kind of tree (and what's tagged in my photos) and the name of a town in Mississippi, you will get pictures of water tupelos as well as pictures of Tupelo, Mississippi, and other pictures tagged or captioned with the word "tupelo" for whatever reason. If you search "tupelo mississippi," my tupelo tree pictures come up because they were taken in Mississippi (but not in Tupelo), so I have them tagged with "mississippi" too. There I go, throwing off your search. There is probably some inevitability in spurious results, even if "all and only the relevant information" is the ideal.

Tupelos in Mississippi, but not Tupelo, Mississippi.

The other thing I think is cool yet troubling about metadata is the idea that "the way that we group things affects what we know and think about them" (116). The first thing that popped into my mind was the classification of ancient Christian beliefs into "orthodox" and "heretical." We treat heretical Christian sects differently than what eventually became orthodox Christianity, even though who the winners-who-write-history would be was not clear when the heretics and proto-orthodox Christians were tussling it out. So we assign the descriptor "heretical," which is a pejorative, to sects that competed on equal ground with proto-orthodox Christianity at the time they flourished. Thus the person who designs information retrieval systems, and especially the person who assigns tags/descriptors/subjects/etc., must be conscious of the way that simply grouping things can reflect the designer's inherent biases.

Weedman, Judith. "Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying, and Evaluating Information Systems." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 112-126.

Updated July 9, 2009.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 9: "Reflections on Creating Information Service Collections"

G. Edward Evans offers seven pieces of advice to librarians specializing in collection development, which is an area of librarianship I think I'd really enjoy, so I'm glad it was assigned. I will just discuss a couple of them in this entry.

Remember our "product" is access to information regardless of format. Given my love for all things old and especially for books, new and old, I am probably a little prone to the view that "libraries equal books," although I am trying to disabuse myself of that notion, and I'm sure I will have shed it once I've completed my MSLIS. I remember being somewhat scandalized back in 1997 when I was working as a circulation clerk at the undergraduate library at the UW and the new library administrator was busily weeding (hemorrhaging?) books to make space for a computer lab on the second floor (the first floor was reference and periodicals and the third was and remained stacks). In retrospect it makes sense to provide all those terminals for students to access increasingly digitized information, but at the time I thought it was wasteful and contrary to the mission of the library to make it contain fewer books. I think it is possible the "e-book bandwagon" Evans dismisses (p. 91) will still happen, although it is unlikely to replace physical books: Amazon's Kindle has been reasonably successful, and CEO Jeff Bezos has said he's open to the idea of facilitating library lending of Kindle editions (Levy, p. 4). Of course, since any e-book limits its readership to a reasonably affluent economic class due to the initial cost of the devices, e-books will not likely replace physical books for library users anytime soon (although some libraries might consider circulating Kindles too--due to the expense and risk, this might be more appropriate for academic libraries, for example).

Just one more little thought on this section: was anyone else a little put off by the statement, "We had to rework any order for nonprint items into a form that looked like a book or journal order" (90-91)? I can understand the motivation, and perhaps the ends justify the means, but it seems rather...deceptive.

Embrace change and be flexible. I feel fortunate in that I'm old enough to have experienced a lot of technological developments in my adult life, so I appreciate them and could recognize their significance, and also young enough that adopting them has not been too traumatic. When I began college in 1993, students were just beginning to use email; in 1996 I created my first website using my allocated space on the UW server; in 1998 I was able to take a writing course that integrated Internet technologies and reinforced basic HTML. I regret that I haven't always kept up with technological developments as quickly as they come up and have been reactive rather than proactive, but I hope to reverse that trend at the iSchool, taking to heart Evans' advice that "Being able to help your colleagues get through what may be viewed as traumatic change by some people will be a great career asset" (92).

Build relationships. This piece of advice is not about building relationships with patrons (although that's important too and is covered earlier), but with vendors. Evans encourages librarians to have a friendly and cooperative relationship with outside entities (jobbers, parent organizations, etc.), rather than the adversarial attitude that a lot of librarians seem to have, in his experience. This seems intuitive to me, although maybe it's not because librarians, who usually work for nonprofit organizations, don't have to worry about the bottom line, making profits, pleasing investors, and so on, the way that vendors have to do. My dad runs a small business and, since he's responsible for sales as well as making sure the day-to-day operations of the business function, he has to work with people in a wide variety of professions, which he does well and which I've always found an admirable quality. This certainly seems to me preferable to a de facto antagonistic attitude toward vendors displayed by the authors of Chapter 3, "Human Rights, Democracy, and Librarians," who say if we lose sight of "our main purpose" (with which, in itself, I don't disagree), "We will purchase the titles vendors tell us to (who are in turn told what to publish by their corporate HQs), accept only the Web sites our corporate controlled filters filter..." (33). I have a knee-jerk reaction to this view of corporations, which I think are in themselves neutral, noting that 1. corporations are motivated by profit, in part so they can continue to exist and serve their customers--I suppose a world full of tiny free presses motivated by ideals rather than profit would be nice, but ridiculously inefficient for whoever is doing collection development, and 2. corporations are made up of people, and you have to deal with them, and if you can have pleasant interactions with people you have to deal with, life is just a lot nicer.

Evans, G. Edward. "Reflections on Creating Information Service Collections." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 87-97.

Levy, Steven. "The Future of Reading." Newsweek, November 26, 2007. Page 4 of the online version, retrieved June 25, 2009. http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

Updated July 9, 2009.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 1: "Stepping Back and Looking Forward"

In "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship," Richard E. Rubin summarizes the missions of libraries throughout history, culminating in the modern mission of the American public library, and discusses four foundational values of libraries today:

1. Intellectual freedom


2. Service and the public good


3. Education


4. The value of the past: Preservation

In a future post I will return to the subject I promised to cover in my first post on this blog, the interplay of preservation and innovation. Here I will just say that we moderns tend to view periods such as fifth-century Athens and the Golden Age of Roman literature as ages of innovation, as opposed to our view of periods such as early medieval western Europe (from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Carolingians) as focused on preservation of the ideas of earlier, more intellectually fecund eras, or more pejoratively as periods of stagnation. There is some truth to this view, but it is overly simplistic to someone with an interest in late antiquity. So I have a quibble with Rubin's headline "Think Again" for the age of the great Muslim and Byzantine libraries of the Near East (p. 6): for one thing, it suggests there was no original thought happening in the monasteries of western Europe, which is not the case; for another, it suggests that preservation is not a thoughtful process, which, while it may not have been for your average sleepy, nearsighted monk desultorily copying manuscripts, certainly is so in a more schematic sense. Simply deciding what to preserve, for example: there is my old favorite Cassiodorus' Institutiones, an annotated bibliography of works to include in his ideal library; see also the medieval obsession with etymologies, bestiaries, and other encyclopedic accumulations of knowledge. (End rant by inveterate history geek.)

And indeed, in the section "Belief in the Value of the Past: Preservation," Rubin acknowledges that preservation is an active, thoughtful process in which librarians "[n]ot merely...store contents, but...represent, organize, and maintain those contents in such a way that people have access to the materials of the past" (12). Representation entails not merely the material book or other source, but the creation of "digital repositories that make information and artifacts available to those who would never be able to consult them in the past" (13). (See my earlier post about the new connections between texts made possible by digital media; not to mention that even the most educated ancient reader with the most prodigious memory would have had much more finite access to texts and might not even have been aware of texts that existed in his or her time that are now part of our modern canon, because the transmission of texts was so cumbersome.) Likewise, the creators of catalogs and digital repositories organize information in as intuitive and user-friendly a way as possible, which involves no small amount of thought and consideration of user needs and thought processes. Maintenance of resources might not be as laborious as it was in the days when texts had to be copied so they would not be lost, but the technology in which those texts subsist is ever-evolving, so that digital technologies which we imagine to impute some sort of permanence may be obsolete in much less time than it takes paper to disintegrate, and even books that pass through dozens of hands each year require constant repair and replacement (to which I can attest from the humble beginnings of my library career in book repair).

One way in which the mission of preservation of today's libraries differs from that of earlier eras is that today we consider it worthwhile to preserve as much information as possible, and have the resources to do so. Due to the finite availability of materials and scribes, as well as the time-consuming process of copying books, librarians before the advent of printing could only preserve so many texts, and countless others were lost to fire, pillage, and other accidents of time (much to the chagrin of classicists who would love to have all the plays of Euripides, or all the books of Livy). So there was inherent to the system the sort of prioritization that is not necessary today, a process informed by value systems of librarians (i.e. for the period that interests me, a religious system, not that all texts preserved were religious). Not that every library preserves every piece of information in existence today, but the combined capacity of libraries more nearly approaches the ability to do so, and librarians themselves think it is a worthy goal to do so. In this manner libraries provide users as much as possible with "unimpeded access" to as much information and as many viewpoints as possible, leaving it up to the user rather than the librarian to select which expressions and viewpoints to consider (10). So the function of the library to preserve, as it has always done, now more than ever underlies the value of intellectual freedom (and certainly the other core values as well).

I should not make this entry much longer; however, while I haven't engaged all the content of this chapter, I do wish to note that as a parent of a toddler, I'm sure I will become increasingly interested in intellectual freedom as it relates to minors, particularly the question, "Who is ultimately responsible for what a young person is reading or seeing--the librarian or the parent?" (11). To what degree do we entrust to librarians the duty of acting in loco parentis? And does this depend on whether the librarian is at a school or public library? I am inclined to think, as a parent, that librarians have a responsibility in this regard similar to that of teachers, which might lead them to inhibit my daughter's (and other children's) intellectual freedom more than Rubin would like (and perhaps if there were a paragraph break before "The struggles to protect Intellectual Freedom" on p. 11 I would be assuaged). No doubt I have another sixteen years as a parent and my entire career as a librarian to puzzle this one out.

Rubin, Richard E. "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 3-14.