I have been offline as far as RSS feeds are concerned and have just gone back to my Bloglines account to find 717 posts waiting for me to read. Yeah, right. I missed Dave’s glorious return to Circulatable with another piece of first rate commentary and musings. Since I have been wandering in the same mental realm I am going to post on the same topic rather than just comment.
My library has a lecture series called “Evolving Directions in Academic Research and Resources” where we invite a faculty member to talk about his/her research and comment on the role of the library: its strengths and challenges in the world of a researcher or scholar. The last speaker was a historian who in an offhand comment mentioned that the one thing that is missing from the online environment was an experience comparable to browsing the stacks.
I brought this up with a number of colleagues when talking about the state of the library catalog and of course everyone immediately said that we do have such an experience: our online catalog’s browse by call number feature. But there is a significant disconnect between what librarians know about resource discovery processes and how much our patrons know about those processes. This is where one of Dave’s comments was particularly poignant: “One thing I think libraries need to think harder about: the actual production and presentation of, and not just the collecting of, cultural materials.”
This is a problem that boggles my mind: we have got the goods but we don’t know how to tell people. However, I am convinced that we are on the brink of breaking through this barrier. For example, I have recently seen Jeremy Frumkin’s great work with LibraryFind. This is an example of applying the slickness and sheen to library world a la Google, iTunes, Flickr.
I get inspired by these things, too. I took some time to mock up what might be a better virtual browse the stacks display so that we can start thinking about how to bridge the gap between how a faculty member thinks about the online research experience and how librarians think about it. Dave, I think we are undergoing a change, but it is a change in process more than anything else…
2 Comments for Change
Author comment by Dave | December 27, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Author comment by Dave | December 27, 2006 at 6:25 pm
Oh, and I remember the series you mention, Evolving Directions in Academic Research and Resources. Looking back at it, I think it’s a wonderful idea. I think librarians would be really surprised at how faculty might be using resources like Grove Art, or RefWorks, or blogs in teaching their classes.
If only we heard about it more often!
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This past summer, our school’s Dean of Humanities gave a talk to an assembly of librarians and mentioned the same thing Steve mentions here – the failure of the catalog to create “an experience comparable to browsing the stacks.”
She pointed out that her last book was literally inspired by a chance discovery in the stacks – a book by a member of the Arkansas NAACP about the 1957 Little Rock desegregation wars.
Even if our catalogs can show you a list of entries that mimic the shelf (the titles, call numbers, the author), what they can’t do is mimic the experience of removing the book from the shelf, paging through it, and reading, leaning against the shelving.
I think you’re right that we’re mid-process, and I’m looking for my own way to steer the process, like a Canadian curler sweeping the ice.
(Steve, I looked at LibraryFind and was a little stumped; when I searched “Gauguin” it recommended the following databases: Biological Abstracts, Web of Science, and Zoological Record!)