You know we’ve all done it. We don’t really want to pay attention to something, so we don’t. We have other, more pressing obligations, we say to yourselves. If it’s really that important, it will be there tomorrow, we rationalize. And we may even be right. But where the problem comes in is when we look the other way too long. And I’ve seen it happen.
In what seems like the distant past I worked for a large research library. When it came to databases we had, well, opinions. Since we were familiar with indexes like the Engineering Index and ChemAbstracts, INFOTRAC on CD-ROM looked shoddy. And it was. But really all we were doing was justifying our inclination to look the other way. And we kept doing it until we couldn’t rationally do it any more. But by then it was virtually too late.
By the time we implemented CD-ROM databases in any significant way they were only a few years from being overtaken by the Web. This was also years after community college libraries had been using them to good effect.
Given this story, and likely some others you can think of, we should all cultivate a sense of when we are avoiding something simply to be avoiding it.
Signs you may be looking the other way and what to do about it:
- “That technology is fine for them, but not for us.” Now why would that be? Are your reasons substantial and valid? What makes you so special?
- “It will never amount to anything.” Oh? What makes you think so? What evidence do you have?
- “We already have this other thing which is just as good or better.” Maybe you do, but how sure are you of your assessment? And “better” in whose eyes? Back when INFOTRAC was first out, and was much worse than Reader’s Guide on paper, we still had students lining up to use INFOTRAC while the paper Reader’s Guide went unmolested. Sure, Reader’s Guide was better all right, but what does it matter if they aren’t going to use it?
- “We don’t have the time to deal with it.” Everyone can make this claim, and it would be credible. But there comes a time when you need to make time.
About Roy Tennant
Yesterday I had a brief interview about the history and guts and blood about building our institutional Digital Library (for a big university).. through CD-ROMs, then Internet-based.
I was surprised to find myself talking a *lot* about how, even though we had put together something impressive, one of the biggest problems was trying to make users see/understand why and how it was good for *them*. For instance, we sometimes made the argument that “not all information on the Internet is trustworthy”… and that (I still believe) is true, but there is undeniably too much good stuff (and perhaps way more than we could ever stuff into a Digital Library) to make it seem like the DL was “better than the Internet” (which of course it isn’t, it’s “different”).
But, I could say the “Signs you may be looking the other way” you mention also apply to our patrons. Sometimes they just want a quick way out to deliver their papers and do homework, even though it’s not using (we think) the most complete, most authoritative, most up-to-date sources. And I bet most just look the other way and don’t give libraries the chance to give them some great information and advice.
One I’ve been told as long as I’ve been a librarian is “Librarians shouldn’t be doing that.”
I’ve been told it so many times in so many contexts that either I’m a very bad librarian, or… quite a few librarians actively oppose the expansion of the profession into novel areas.
Many days I’m honestly not sure which; I don’t want to believe either alternative!
The aspect I think about most often is how little modeling of research is done nowadays. I don’t see faculty directing their students in how to truly evaluate and absorb each source. Often, students pick the first 5 hits of their shoddy search and split. Technology making more things so rapidly accessible isn’t deepening true scholarship. Remember when you’d look up the same term in 6 Reader’s Guides, then go to the catalog to seek an author of one of the pieces, then use the bibliography of that book to locate a journal…all the while accumulating context as well as information.