WHAT IF WE COULD BUILD A PORTABLE 'PERSONAL CATALOG' FOR EACH PERSON?
The difference that I want to highlight here is the extremes to which the Google administration takes the goal of providing whatever its people need most often right where they are, right when they need it. In one library I used to work in, it was an exciting moment back when we first added Ethernet plugs. Why didn't we also add wires and power cables? You might just as easily ask: When you find a book using several of the most popular OPAC products, why can't you bookmark it? When you're searching a database interface for something you've seen before but can't remember what it was, why doesn't the system already know what you've seen before?I understand that this tension between protecting privacy and improving access is complex and doesn't have a clear answer in terms of law, policy, or technology. But if you don't think it's possible or worthwhile to budge from our traditional professional stance, ask yourself this: If you can improve access to information by recording and using more information about who goes where, shouldn't you? Shouldn't our patrons be able to use our systems and have the systems clearly indicate when something they've seen before comes back as a hit in a search result? Shouldn't individuals be their own best access points in our systems too? If we're serious about saving the time of the reader, we have to find ways to answer these questions with Yes.The first thing that struck me upon attending my first session in a Google meeting room was the ready access to a plurality of computer cables from every seat. Though this might sound trivial, it's anything but. What's the first thing you do when you sit down at a conference session and open your laptop? You reach for and unwind its power cable, then spin your head around like an owl, looking for an open power outlet. (You do, don't you? I do too.) But I didn't have to do that once while I was at Google, because everywhere I sat there were power cables within reach. Cables for Dell laptops, cables for Apple laptops-even cables for old Apple laptops (the nonmagnetic plug type, like mine). They were all plugged in, ready and waiting to go, just in case somebody needed them. And it wasn't just power cables, either-video adapters of all shapes and sizes were readily available too.Since this is Google, the efficiency didn't stop there. They didn't have just one set of video adapters for one video projector in every room-they had two of each. The benefits of having two projectors in every room might seem small, but, again, they're not. How many times have you had to fumble with cables, or beg for an audience member to lend you the right kind of video adapter, or plug in to a projector only to find that it isn't working, or awkwardly switch laptops between presentations while introducing somebody or starting your own slides? With two projectors in every room, all of these problems go away. You can even use both at once, projecting with two laptops side-by-side, which is a useful benefit for staff at a company where comparing Web interfaces is a regular activity. Google even has a solution to the wire problem when its staffers commute. On the buses it sends around the Bay Area daily to shuttle Googlers between work and home, rolling Wi-Fi is available.My Own Private CatalogThe problem with this paradigm is that it cuts against the grain of a key practice of librarians-protecting the privacy of our users by purging records of who's done what with which materials, when, and how. By doing this, we hold high moral ground, to be sure. But to meet and exceed our users' expectations of how modern networked information systems should work, we have to be able to keep track of where individuals have been and what they've done more explicitly in our own systems. Without doing this, we cannot provide features that users have long since grown used to from commercial services.It shouldn't surprise us that Google, a company built around a pragmatic application of bibliometric analysis, takes Ranganathan's fourth law ("Save the time of the reader") very seriously, and applies it strenuously to the working lives of its staffers. And to speak highly of these particular timesavers isn't to deny that libraries have long taken Ranganathan's fourth law seriously. Years and years ago we had little slide-out surfaces built inside the card catalog for note-taking and drawer-placing, ready reference sections conveniently located and kept up-to-date, and recently we've added tools like link resolvers to help people go from reference to resource in just a few clicks (though we'd do well to reduce the number of clicks, but that's another story).Seeing the User as an Access Point, Part TwoThis past August I attended a meeting at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. You know why Google is so successful already, and you're probably tired of hearing about some of the perks Google employees get-free food, laundry on-site, "20 percent time," and so on-so I won't bore you with a rehash of those and other features of their services or of the Google offices themselves. But a few specific techniques Google uses to make life easier for its employees that you might not have heard about before stood out for me. And having seen how they look and how they work in person, I hope our community can learn something from these techniques about how to make things easier for people visiting our libraries.In this month's issue you'll be reading a lot about new OPACs and other library systems, and not a minute too soon. There's no denying that our current systems have much room for improvement. While looking for inspiration for new features and ideas for new library systems, I recently found myself at today's epicenter of Web innovation.Applications like LibraryThing and del.icio.us do a great job of remembering this exact information-where you've been online, what you've read, and what you have to say about it all. Though each provides ways (like easy-to-use feeds) to push or pull some of this information into other pages, you mostly still visit those sites to find out about what you've found out before. As we build similar features into one or more of our systems, like a new OPAC, history tells us that we'll gladly settle for just that single isolated new feature working in our one new system. Something that might be better than these separate systems would be an effective way of building up a personal catalog of sorts, comprising both the "where you've been and what you've read" and "what you thought about it all" in a way that enables simple, dynamic integration with any other system you might ever use.In the early days of the Web, it was easy to know if you'd been to a particular Web site or page before. Links you'd seen before were purple, and links you hadn't yet seen were blue. Sometime around 10 years ago somebody started changing the colors of links to match the rest of his or her site, and ever since then, it's been a free-for-all. Like I said above, I think that we should be able to make it clear to users when they've seen something before, and I also think our users would be grateful for this feature and would be willing to sacrifice some measure of privacy-provided we weren't idiots about securing our systems at the same time we added this capability-in exchange for better systems. But there's still a problem with turning on this feature for just one system under our own control, or even just a few.What does all this add up to?There's an obvious corollary to this, though most people talking about tagging and social networks don't say it quite this way: You are your own best access point. Whether you choose "good" tags or not, or tag consistently, or even tag at all, you leave some sort of trail on every site you visit on the Web and every system you use. On shopping sites like Amazon.com, it's a record of things you've bought and looked at; on Facebook, it's your Friends and your Groups; on Last.fm it's the music you listen to, and your friends, and your groups. Add tagging to any one of these and you gain even more ways to remember where you've been or to rediscover something you can't quite remember.Wires When You Need 'Em, Wireless When You Don'tSave the Googler's Time
Applications like LibraryThing and del.icio.us do a great job of remembering this exact information-where you've been online, what you've read, and what you have to say about it all. Though each provides ways (like easy-to-use feeds) to push or pull some of this information into other pages, you mostly still visit those sites to find out about what you've found out before. As we build similar features into one or more of our systems, like a new OPAC, history tells us that we'll gladly settle for just that single isolated new feature working in our one new system. Something that might be better than these separate systems would be an effective way of building up a personal catalog of sorts, comprising both the "where you've been and what you've read" and "what you thought about it all" in a way that enables simple, dynamic integration with any other system you might ever use.
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