Caveat Lector

Yesterday’s ACRL keynote by the engaging William J. Mitchell was a look at urban development through the lens of critical networks, from roads to water systems to telecommunications to the (wired and wireless) Internet. I can’t do justice to the argument, but I found it compelling, and I’ve got City of Bits on reserve at the library.

Baldly: When we build an urban network that we come to depend on, our living patterns change to suit it. As the network becomes ubiquitous, however, the necessity for geographical proximity to it decreases, and living patterns can take other needs into account. (As I said, I can’t do justice to the argument.)

The application to libraries is fairly obvious, I should think, though Dr. Mitchell did not say much explicitly about it (probably wisely, as he would have pushed some librarians’ hot buttons). Libraries were the information network; if you wanted information, you had to be in a library to get it. Information seekers used to have to go where the information was, even if that meant the deep, dark, dusty sub-basements of an academic library. (Yes, I am still the proto-librarian who hates stacks.)

Day by day, the information is migrating to the wires and the airwaves; information-seekers no longer feel dependent on physical proximity to information sources. Whether they should feel that dependency is one of the aforementioned hot buttons, of course. I’m happy if folks just recognize that the tide is turning toward lack of physical proximity.

Mitchell pointed out the new patterns of student work on campus: lone-wolfing in dorm rooms, hanging out anywhere and everywhere with a laptop, working in social groups. My burning question watching it all was, “Where’s the librarian?” Mitchell didn’t show a single one, though he mentioned MIT librarians carving out a space for themselves in otherwise-unallocated student social areas. The writing is on the wall: if we hide out in our buildings (even our flashy new buildings), we’re not where the work is happening any more.

One slide showed a class of students with laptops; Mitchell remarked that such a configuration necessarily changed lecturing styles, as it’s difficult to be The Omniscient Authority “in a room with twenty smart graduate students and Google.”

That observation dovetailed neatly with a style of information-seeking that has been on my mind lately. We librarians, we’re very good at the one-obscure-fact and the give-me-everything-on-Topic-X style of information need.

The students in that room, though, are after something different. They want a quick sense of the zeitgeist around a particular issue or a particular person. What’s new? What’s cool? What are people saying? What’ll serendipity hand me if I try to find out more about this?

And our systems and services? Are terrible at this. Awful. Wretched. They don’t change fast enough, they’re too hard to search, and they’re too focused on details of information-packages rather than directly handing over the information. (In such a search as this, our beloved bibliographic detail is arguably irrelevant. So are peer-review indicators. So is the controlled vocabulary, as often as not.)

It’d be interesting to grab a federated-search tool by the ears and try to turn it into a zeitgeist-checker. I’m not even sure it’d be possible, but it’s the tool we’ve got that comes closest to being able to do what those students in that classroom are doing when they fact-check their professors.

Hate to say it, but I think Google Scholar’s scooped us on this one. Pity, that.