OPAC Glory Days

Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days

Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days" - from Lyrics Depot

Now, use your library WebOPAC and try to locate a resource with that exact same quote.
It took me about 1 second on Google.  How did you do?

In this month's D-Lib Magazine, Karen Markey has a "think piece" on The Online Library Catalogue.
If it had been the April 1 issue of D-Lib, I might have found it more understandable.

sidebar - my definitions:

catalogue - the electronic version of the card catalogue, with perhaps the added functionality of tracking loans - a book inventory system

ILS financial functions - the part of the Integrated Library System that provides "QuickBooks for libraries" - tracking purchases, serials subscription costs and deadlines, etc.

WebOPAC - an interface for librarians to the book inventory system

end sidebar

Markey has subtitled her opinion piece "Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?"

Now this is an odd beginning.  Eve had humankind expelled from the Garden because she ate of the tree of KNOWLEDGE of Good and Evil.  You can interpret this either as mankind gaining self-awareness (sentience), or as mankind gaining a sense of comparison, learning that some things are good and some are bad.

Returning to Paradise would therefore imply either a loss of ability to distinguish between useful and useless, or losing the ability to think reflectively entirely.

Let us visit that paradisical past, in Markey's words

online catalog's lofty status

revisit the glorious past of the online library catalog

online library catalog was the jewel in the crown

golden age of the online catalog

This way lies madness.

For a decade and a half beginning in the early 1980s, the online library catalog was the jewel in the crown when people eagerly queued at its terminals to find information written by the world's experts.

Ok, let me rephrase that.  "For a decade and a half beginning in the early 1980s, ending thankfully with the availability of the web in 1995, the only source of information was the mysterious Oracle at the Library Temple.  Students would wait in long queues before the Oracle (who was named Public Access Terminal), not because the system was particularly slow, but because its interface was incomprehensible, requiring some mysterious combination of (TI= AND AU= ) in order to uncover books that were already known.  Almost no one tried to use the terminals to actually discover information, because such would have been impossible.  Books were listed without priority, without difficulty level, without explanation or commentary."

I have explored this territory in depth.  It took me a long time to understand the WebOPAC.  I thought it was Library Google.  It turned out to be an interface to a book warehouse system, designed for locating inventory items on shelves.  I initially called my category for this exploration ILS, but then I figured out that the catalogue itself is fine, because warehouse managers do need to know what their facility holds, and the financial functions are fine, but the OPAC was, well, wrongly provided.

I proclaimed a message of freedom: "Let go of it.  You Are Not the Technology That You Use."

I talked about this ridiculous mythology that Google provides too many hits, of the wrong kinds.

The temple of books has fallen and we are better off for it.

The counter-arguments appear to me to be perniciously anti-civilization.  You know when the library shines out in the darkness?  IN THE DARK AGES.  Apparently the librarian view of mushroom clouds or planetary-scale storm clouds on the horizon is a sigh of relief: "ah, finally they will have a reason to return to the library".

I'd rather not walk that path back to paradise, thanks.

Markey identifies the whole problem with Google searching: users are dumb ("domain novices"), fickle, and lazy.  Insufficiently qualified to search.  Google presents them with easy, untrustworthy answers (that are simultaneously overwhelming, due to too many hits).

Belkin (1980, 137) tells why so few words make up their queries, "Precisely because of the inquirer's lack of knowledge about a problem area, it is impossible to specify what would resolve it."

...

Searching for Something One Does Not Know Is Frenetic, Aimless, and Random...

Debowski (2001, 378) makes similar observations, "It was evident that [people] spent more time inputting, rather than planning a suitable search process. There was little evidence of search quality assessment ... with most entering the next search statement very rapidly ... [People] who search without a solid foundation fail to gain a stronger understanding of the search process. Instead, they appear to develop further erroneous habits as they continue."

I have an alternative hypothesis: People type short queries because they are smart.  People use Google because it uses an advanced algorithm based on what people rate highly, in order to provide them with an immediate choice of probably-good results plus thousands of alternatives to explore.

Her underlying concern: books are being digitized.  Boon for mankind?  Worldwide access to our previously limited information?  Paradise?  No.  Books being digitized, we are informed, will be terrible, because

Each search will result in millions of hits with no guarantee that the top-ranked ones will address your desired topic in depth or at your level of understanding.

Ah, so we come to the heart of it.  Better not to have the chance to know, than to aimlessly wander the entire collected knowledge of mankind.  Thank goodness Alexandria burned, saving us from millions more misleading hits!

Apparently the solution to this problem is... wait for it... the full text of all knowledge should be ingested into the library catalogue, for proper control.  Perhaps we could call it the Landru system.

I have an alternative proposal: don't do that.

Your library website doesn't have to be the starting place for all information seeking.  It only has to be one of many well-respected information destinations.  It has a huge challenge in playing this role, because it has almost entirely only online data about information containers, rather than the online contents of those containers.  Deal with that.  Get Google to digitize everything.

Open up your library data and whatever online content you have so that Google can actually rank you as high as you deserve.  Instead of trying to reinvent Google and Amazon, find areas where you can add value based on the unique expertise and insights of the library field.