One of my (many) great coworkers in the library technology department this afternoon made a hilarious comment that got me thinking. He said that as a student who worked for our department many years ago he never ceased to be amazed by how messy librarians can be. One of the jobs of the student workers, a class of employee I also participated in, is to troubleshoot staff computers in-person. It actually can be a rather intimate experience since you need to go into a person’s office and quite literally “get all up in their junk.”
For a profession based in large part on its ability to organize information many of us would not pass an elementary cataloging class if our MARC records looked like our desks. Is the ability to organize millions of bibliographic records and coordinate all sorts of different electronic resources and reference services based in an organizational mind? I am not so sure that a passion for the information profession necessarily equates to an organizational discipline that it would seem to imply.
What do you other circulators think? How much organization exists in your personal sphere and how does it relate to what you do? I, for one, go through an ebb and flow (accumulate and purge?) based on the gravitation pull of the moon on sticky notes and random meeting notes I rarely look at again.
1 Comment for Got organization?
Author comment by Barry | September 19, 2006 at 6:08 pm
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Steve –
Great question, and one that reminded me of a New Yorker article I read shortly before entering the seminary, er, library school. Malcolm Gladwell’s 3/25/2002 article “The Social Life of Paper: Looking for method in the mess,†makes a distinction between the piles upon a persons desk and the files (physical or digital) that comprise an archive or database.
The article reviews several books in which researchers tried to answer the question of why, with increased storage capacity, ease of creation and accessing of digital documents, is the office world still consumed by paper? The short answer is that the items upon one’s desk are living documents; they represent the questions a knowledge worker has yet to answer. The closer the scrutiny researchers applied to the piles of paper (and compact discs and videos, etc.) the more they realized that the closer the document to the center of the desk, the higher it was on the pile, the more relevant it was to that worker’s immediate tasks.
This might seem like an obvious statement, but, as the article notes, this is not the case. Companies such as Xerox and Microsoft represent a billion dollar industry dedicated in large part to cleaning off people’s desks and clearing out their in-boxes.
Unfortunately for these companies, knowledge work in not entirely cerebral and a tactile experience remains necessary. Paper allows its user a sense of ownership lacking in the digital world. It can be written on, folder, crossed out and scribbled over, and after all of these alterations, its owner can look at it and say, “I did this.†An electronic document is obviously malleable, but ownership is lost once it passes through different hands, or even the hands of its author over periods of time. Sometimes ideas get lost in the shuffle.
Gladwell goes on to note “documents cannot speak for themselves.†What he means by is any document, not matter how intricate or amazing, is merely a tickler awaiting its reader. A document is inert, the ideas it contains are not, but the document itself cannot act upon the information it contains. All of this leads Gladwell to conclude “In the tasks that face modern knowledge workers, paper is most useful out in the open, where it can be shuffled and sorted and annotated and spread out. The mark of the contemporary office is not the file. It’s the pile.â€
But why file at all? Obviously to retrieve the critical but little used bits of information. In fact, isn’t that what the traditional card catalog or modern library catalog is, a repository for critical but little used bits of information?