Full of anger and disapointment

The ACT government is closing my childrens primary school - Cook Primary School - amongst 38 others on terribly dodgy terms. I've started "Backwards 2020", a blog about the "Forwards 2020" proposal by the ACT government, a disaster not only for our local school but for government education in our state. Please spread the word.

I'm too angry to write well about this now, but you know, we came to Canberra and specifically moved to Cook based on the reputation of the education at this school. The proposals are not about quality of education, but about knee-jerk reactions to political budgets. What a way to ruin what so many has worked hard to achieve. More later.

Hey, that's me!

Donna has written a post on what people should expect when working with her, and let me tell you right now that that is exactly what you should expect working with me, too. I wish I had written that piece first though; now I just feel like a "me, too", but no wonder I struggle in public service, eh? :)

Library stew : Have you checked your library values lately?

Why are librarians and their supporters (and I count myself as one of those) closing their eyes to the impending doom which is the shift in our modern cultures from physical to virtual knowledge?

Well, I don't know about you, but here's my story. First of all, I was attracted to the library as a moth to light a few years ago due to the vast amount of metadata and hidden knowledge within. My big passion back then was Topic Maps which is a standard for better navigation through vast amounts of metadata. A few of my personal interests also drove that metadata passion, like my obsession with Claudio Monteverdi; I wanted to create a portal for all things Monteverdi, his life, contemporaries and otherwise.

So what does a moth like me think about that shining light that draws me? You would think that by watching my fellow moths flying about that I would get the hint, but I'm not smart enough to admit that the light can be rather deadly; I'd rather just go there, never to distract my furious flapping of wings with silly things like contemplation.

Contemplation

A lot of talk has gone down on the recently created Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries mailing-list, most of it deals with how we should deal with the OPAC issues such as what it should do, how it should do it, who's it for, how do we promote it, et cetera. A lot of the discussion has revolved around "here's what others are doing, we should do it too!" Which is wrong.

I keep pestering people about this stuff, but please at least consider what I'm proposing; test your users! I know this may sound a bit stupid, but how can you be so sure that the systems we give to our users are the systems they want? Have you tested to make sure that what others are doing is what our users want us to be? I know it says in various mission statements what we and our patrons are all about, but I fear that they have not been updated for a while, resting in isolation on some very old and conservative ground rules for what a library is all about. Usually they look a bit like this ;

The library actively supports learning, creative and intellectual endeavour and the dissemination of knowledge, ideas and information.

This is a fantastic statement which you can fill to the brim with all sorts of activities, systems, culture, people and organisations. it is one of those statements which makes me proud to be working for a library! Seriously!

But let's get to the meat of the matter, and look at a typical set of library mission statements (picked at random from around the world [kinda] and anonymized [certainly]) ;

1. We are to ensure that a significant record of our country and our countrymen is collected and safeguarded


2. We shall meet the needs of our users for rapid and easy access to our collections and other resources


3. We shall demonstrate our prominence in our nation's cultural, intellectual and social life and to foster an understanding and enjoyment of the library and its collections


4. We are to ensure that our nation's people have access to vibrant and relevant information services


5. We are to ensure our relevance in a rapidly changing world, participate in new online communities and enhance our visibility

By the numbers

1. is fine and dandy; it is an important part of the library's undertaking to preserve stuff, a lot of it probably useless to 80% of the people, but that's not the point here. Far too often though, the library is given tasks of archiving the type of stuff that nobody else cares about, which in fact goes against the common notion that libraries should provide access to stuff of popularity; how can we when we're to spend 80% of our time dealing with obscurities? Anyways, point 1 is fine.

2. Did you notice the words "needs" in there? It did not say "functionality", "what we think they want" or even "library values." Think about it for two seconds, and then tell me wheter you've tested your users needs lately. Oh, and this one also mentions "rapid" and "easy access", two things library systems has along track-record in not doing.

3. This is the one I call the "snob directive", and I shan't dive too much into it, but it does promote the idea that we're to "foster an understanding" of what the library is all about to all of society. But do we truly know that ourselves?

4. is really just an IT version of point 4, and probably where libraries currently are the most stuck; we offer them bucketloads of crappy information services, and I'm suspecting that this is because it's too hard to do point 2 properly. In reality, why are these two even separate? They are essentially the same thing! The only reason they probably are separated is because 20 years ago IT and real-life merged pretty poorly; it's time to perhaps update and remove this point alltogether.

5. is a bit of rehashing what the other directives have said with an ephasis on "online" and "new" and "up to date" and that sort of thing. The keyowrd here is "relevance" though, and let's think about it for a second; how are we to be relevant to people? Doesn't that somewhat imply we - golly gosh! - test our users needs?

Too much

There's too much second-guessing our patrons needs, too much focus on "library values" (which usually means a good session of commitee charades!), and way, way, way too little testing to see if our assumptions are right, our foundation is solid and that we truly are relevant to our users. Why is that?

Are we too afraid the answer might be something that alters the purpose of the library? Is that what it all amounts to? Because, frankly, I'm getting to a point where "library values" are nothing more than conservatism for the sake of being conservative thrown around by librarians who can't seem to deal with huge change. We claim to be into blogging, wiki's and all that fadangled new whizmo-zing-tech stuff that goes on these days, and, you know, as far as I can tell we're into a lot of that and not into perhaps, you know, what we should be into? Have you tested to see if our users wants us to blog? Have you tested to see if they want a wiki? Have you tested to see if they want us to be Google? Have you tested a user lately?

Just a thought. Now go and test, and let us know what you came up with. I'm dying to know.

Me, a librarian?

Hi, my name is Alex, and I'm a sort-of librarian-ish kinda person, grounded on the fact that I work for a library. I won't actually say I'm a librarian (nor should I, given my lack of librarian education), because people would get all sorts of wrong ideas about me (well, more wrong ideas about me), but there's all sorts of fun stereotypical traits curled up in the librarian notion, so why not poke a stick in it to see if it rustles?

A librarian is someone who has great knowledge about books, wears glasses, is probably an older lady, and classifies their breakfast by the Dewey Decimal System. Oh, and she reads a lot! So, in the spirit on self-inflicted pain and memes, here's my "Me, a librarian?" meme, where I explain how I'm not a librarian at all ;

Physique

• Have glasses? Yes, but they are too cool to be regarded as 'librarians' glasses. They're also broken, and I wear padding and / or bits of tape on my nose so I won't get headaches. Yes, I should get them fixed.


• Gray hair? A couple here and there, but not as worrisome as the beginning lack of hair.


• Old? Ouch! Probably not?


• A lady? Only when provoked.

Right, so I don't look much like one. let's move on to the next stereotype.

Reading

• The last book I read : Mastering SQL, 4th edition


• No, I mean like real litterature : Terry Pratchet's "Lords and Ladies"


• Oh c'mon, like real serious litterature : Monteverdi : biography


• Ok nerd, that was just a bit too serious. How about a good novel? Nothing comes to mind.

Uh, ok, so I read stuff that's mostly uninteresting to the general public. Surely there must be some librarian stereotype I can squeeze into?

Work

• Lift books around? No, but I occasional lift a laptop with eBooks on it.


• Answer questions about information? Not in the "Hi, how can I help you?" way. I'm more in the "Over there's the reference desk" category.


• Can think of nothing better than throwing Dewey Decimals into normal social conversations : I couldn't tell you a Dewey code to save myself.


• Knows the MARC field number for subtitle : Hmm, possibly 245 subfield b?

I don't do much typical librarians work either, it seems. What about philosophy, then? Eh? Eh?

Philosophy

• Know what 'epistemology' is? Yes, and I do throw that word into normal social conversation as often as I can.


• Does the library contain books? Only as items part of collections, but there is all sorts of objects in our collections.


• The library is all about lending books to people? Hell no; it's all about preserving and giving access to culture.


• The future of the library is? Worrisome; there's so much the libraries do that nobody else cares about, stuff where there is no commercial nor general interest. We do things because we understand the cultural knowledge that comes through preservations of all sorts of things, not just books. We also recognise that the market-driven capitalist governments would pull the plug on our funding if they knew we existed.

Saved by the last section, I reckon.

So, how much of a librarian are you?

Designed by stupidity, built by ignorance, approved by incompetence

Note: I wrote this piece back in 2006, and just scrubbed it up. Enjoy.

"Stupidity" from Wordnet:

- a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience
- a stupid mistake

Design is the process of taking a set of constraints, and make something out of it. These constraints can be a number of things, from trivial wishes to strict rules. Sometimes it's about a color, other times about functionality, and then again about its basic concept, maybe a marketing angle or perhaps changing some stuck process. It could be anything.

However, a lot of the time you're left with that compelling feeling of "Qua?" while reading through your constraints; he wants me to do what!? They think we should put in that!? She likes what color!? marketing wants to sell this to whom!?

One definition of something stupid is when you can't see what is obvious to others. Sometimes this can have as much to do with your definition of a problem as a personal viewpoint, but quite often this "stupidity" certainly points to things we overlook or just plainly can't see but what we certainly should address.

Good design is about seeing things from as many angles as possible, and find the best possible compromise between them.

"Ignorance" from Wikipedia:

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, or a willful lack of desire to improve the efficiency, merit, effectiveness or usefulness of one's actions. Ignorance is also a "state of being ignorant" or unaware (not knowing).

Building systems (applications, processes, buildings, societies, anything) is a complicated thing, relying as much on the goodness of the designers as the intelligence and skill of the builders.

Some people willfully ignore things. Maybe they feel they know enough, or maybe there are fears involved. Whatever the case, you see it all the time; people walking on a red light, smoking where not allowed, slightly speeding while driving, daydreaming while in meetings, outsourcing for the sake of instant capital gains, eating unhealthy food, not practicing what you preach, ignoring global warming signs, keep investing in oil consumerates, draw red buttons for safe functionality, never test your assertions and so on. The list is endless. People ignore things because of the normally low frequencies of events.

When builders ignore the time effects on setting concrete and make a too thin layer for your foundation, a layer without skeleton, and a few years down the track the building may simply collapse. If you don't fully understand the difference between alcohol and methanol it just might be the difference between life and death. If you ignore warning signs, whole cities might be flooded, or buildings blown up, or kids will use guns on other kids.

Good design is to preempt what warning signals has taught us.

"Incompetence" from Wikipedia:

Incompetence is the condition of a person who is unable to properly perform his assigned duty. Incompetence is the essential ingredient of the Peter Principle, which states that in a hierarchical organization, every employee tends to evolve through promotions towards a position in which he is incompetent.

Approving systems tends to happen after it has been built as opposed to something that happens in parallel. That being a flawed strategy from the beginning I guess is hard to overlook, but let's focus more on the common way we approve the systems we design and build.

First, approval is mostly a binary thing, no matter how much history teaches us otherwise. If it still is running and does what it says on the tin, that's considered a success, even if you don't fully understand why it was written on the tin, nor what the tin was supposed to contain or should contain.

Then there's approving things because your job is to approve things instead of guiding things or cancelling crap things. If you and your team spent months on a project you're not going to be self-reflective enough to call yourself out in public.

Good design is to allow for failure.

To shift things around

In order for us to shift things around when they are going pear-shaped (hang on, what's wrong with pear-shaped? I love pears, and I love pear-shaped women, what gives?) we must focus a bit harder on design from the middle principle. I'm a bit tired of both top-down (we know upfront all there is to know) and bottom-up (we know only know so little) approaches. Could we please start somewhere in the middle, and work ourselves out from there? Thanks.

What is a library project success?

The hot library topic of the week have been the creation of the NGC4Lib -- Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries mailing-list. It's already had a flurry of emails, almost all of the really good. But.

Before we go out and define what such future systems should do and be like, we need to give careful consideration to how these systems are measured in terms of success and failure. Make no mistake about it; we're in the library world now, and there are no normal rules here like "project success is determined by resources and time spent creating it, budget for maintainence, and return on investment." Currently libraries fake these factors more than anything; if something isn't delivered on time, no one gets fired. If a project doesn't satisfies a given set of requirements, no one gets shafted. If a project is functional but completely useless, no one gets kicked up the backside. That's just the way of the library world, mostly funded through academic and / or goverment channels. And of course, there is no return on investment, as it is measured in patron-positivism, a magical force that comes and goes with the feelings of the librarians that run the project.

Now, I'm not writing this to give librarians the blame for anything here; it is of course hard to claim return on investment when the return is measured in something as flakey as "patron feelings." It's just not doable. In fact it is symptomatic for rules and measures brought upon the library world by government systems that has no clue to what it is that we're really doing; it is terribly frustrating! And it's an important point in so much that even when we would love to do X, we can only do Y, because Y fits the balanced scorecard and X doesn't. Needless to say, I don't like Balanced Scorecard, not because that system can't help when implemented right, but because it is hard to implement right (which is why there's bucketloads of friendly consultancy companies that specialises in helping organisations out with it all; if it's a consultancy business, it's the wrong model to use in my eyes ... and I used to be a consultant, I should know!). Other libraries have other measurement and management systems in place, and I don't think they're all that different.

It comes back to government funding models; "we give you X if you can prove yourself in Y and Z, with a return of G, a deficit of H and turn-over of J." The trouble is of course that libraries are not easy to classify; we land in the shady areas of most government models, as we're collectors, preservists, archivists, public access granter, lender, national institution with constitutional tasks (collecting, archiving for example), academia, special interest research, broad interest supplier, service provider, intellectual property aggregator, funds granter, practicioners of copyright and rights, educationalists, conference and concert and presentation organisers and holders, and even more stuff! We do so many things that we're stuck in a political minefield!

So how can we measure the success of the OPAC, for example, not to us internally (where success is measured by librarians, and success is rewarded by being given more projects. Hmm.), but to the outside world? How can we create systems that gives us success in raising awareness of the need of libraries? That's my important question of the week.

Some confusion : lack of blogging? No!

Hi all; it seems that I've screwed up (by not knowing all the nooks and corners of Blogger.com), so I suspect a lot of you have subscribed to my feed looking like this ;

http://shelterit.blogspot.com/atom.xml

And the reason there's been so quiet from me is that I've been rambling off at ;

http://shelter.nu/shelter.rss

The auto-detect links were screwy, but the link above should always redirect you to the right place. I'm hosting my blog on my own site but using blogger.com as a manager, so the shelterit.blogspot.com address was only there from when I was setting the system up. Sorry for all this, guys.

Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken

Official Google Research Blog: Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken, just a little note of importance to developers and scare for the rest of you: even the smallest piece of code can have bugs that go unnoticed for 20 years.