Tom Wilson, LITA past president and all-around insightful LITA Top Technology Trendster, posted a commentary to the “Where have all the programmers gone?” post that deserves top billing 1. Please read and digest it before coming back here. And it’s not late to the party at all, Tom — I believe it is only now just getting interesting.
As you pointed out, my observations were not intended to denigrate the choices made by our elders. They stepped up and built complex systems that needed to be specialized to library data management tasks because there was nothing else around for them to use. And the complexity of those systems meant countless hours of library staff engaged with patrons to mediate their search requests (at first) and then to teach them how to use the interfaces (as the users became more sophisticated and the interfaces simpler). Now I would argue that at this point, roughly the late 80s and early 90s, the profession as a whole got locked into this “mediated-or-instruction-needed” mindset from which we have yet to recover. I am also drawing the correlation, perhaps incorrectly so, of the technology transfer that occurred during this time of talent from large research libraries to corporate entities that supply us with the automation systems we now rely on. Or, as you put it more eloquently at the start of this quotation:
It is not productive to fault our fore fathers/mothers in libraryland for what happened in this regard. BUT it laid a foundation of thinking that remains a huge burden today. That is: that all library applications are specialized.
It is in the second and third sentence that I think we agree: the mindset at the core of the profession right now that library applications are specialized applications is a huge burden impeding our progress. And while I’ll agree that there is a mindset in the profession that needs to change, I am not convinced that a) libraries (big and small) as organizations have the creative programming talent capacity now as individual entities to capitalize on any sea-change of foundational thinking of the profession; and b) libraries (big and small) as organizations cannot look to the existing “library automation” vendors as the primary providers of solutions in a newly reconstituted vision of “what is the library.”
Addressing the first point, with rare exceptions I don’t see institutions as organizations scaling up their technical staff to handle the raw building tasks of the kinds of services we’d like to see in a reconstituted vision of the library. I do see some evidence that progress is being made here and there, but there are no large programming shops being built to create the next ILS-equivalent. (Side note: I hereby apologize for the connotations created by the phrase “next ILS-equivalent” — that phrase makes sense to me on the surface but it causes deep shudderings in my bones.) I have come to believe, though, that tools and techniques from the open source world can be used to aggregate the capabilities resident in the distributed “libraryland” to share the risk and reward of the next ILS-equivalent (damn — I used it again). I wrote about that earlier in an open letter to adherents to Christensen’s philosophies called Aggregation of Risk in Pursuit of Disruptive Technologies (comments on that post are still welcome to as we move forward in Ohio with the concepts outline there). Also, a colleague from Ohio State and I co-authored an article for the SmartClassroom newsletter of Campus Technology about “betting your career” on open source that I think will have relevance here. The article is to be published on the 19th and I’ll post a copy on DLTJ after a seven-day embargo.
Addressing the second point, it is my assertion, under Christensen’s theories, that “library automation vendors” are not going to be the source of the disruptive innovation that we need. Like the library organizations themselves, they are caught up in the sustaining technology cycle that has lead us to the position we are in today. I would also assert that it is the libraries, not the vendors, that are on firmer footing to break the cycle for the the exact “ideal driven” reasons you cite. Or, to apply Christensen’s model, the vendor’s values/resources/processes triad will drive them harder to continue the sustaining technology cycle — more so than a library organization’s values/resources/processes triad that includes “ideal driven” components.
All-in-all, though, this is going to be an exciting thing to watch over the next couple of years. Hope to continue the conversation and the mutual education….
Footnotes
- For those that have not yet encountered this idiom, “top billing” is a motion picture industry term that refers to actors whose names appear first in credits. They are usually in the principle performers and typically have the most screen time in the film. Read more in Wikipedia [↩]
2 Comments
As one of your elders, I would like to question your disruptive position. My mother got her library degree in 1942 and I have been a librarian for 30 years. I started when the University of Wisconsin boasted 7 million bibliographic items. Guessing 5 cards per card set that would be 35 million cards. We had to look up articles in paper indexes, write them down on 3 x 5 cards, and dive into the bowels of the library for bound volumes of journals. No one figured to put the copiers there so we schlepped them up to the copier area. Kaypro and Wordstar were 5 years away so we had to type our papers on a machine that had no spell check or correction. And those 35 million cards were hand typed as well.
But, what I learned then is what I use now. I was taught by 3 of the best, my mother, Dr. Roman Draznowski, and Dr. Martin Sable. Dr. D was the librarian of maps for the American Geological Society. Dr. Sable was the foremost authority in the bibliography of the Spanish version of Yiddish. These were two old school guys. What they taught me has lasted through OCLC, Dialog, Lexis/Nexis, FirstSearch, OPAC’s, eJournals and eBooks.
None of this is new. For 3000 years librarians have been information specialists. We invented the first two SQL’s, the first of many controlled languages, everything in IT was in a library 200 years earlier. It is not disruption that is needed but an appreciation of fundamental ideas. There is actually a profession here. Those who practice it need no disruption. Some in the structure, who will remain nameless but whose initials are ALA, may need disruption, but those who practice this craft well need none.
Steven —
You bring up some very good points and numerous places that I could use to launch a discussion of how I see Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovations applying to libraries. At the very least, a hearty review of “disruptive” and “sustaining” as terms-of-art from Christensen’s perspective would be in order.
Unfortunately, I’m traveling at the moment and don’t have ready access to some important reference material. With your permission, I would like to spend some time constructing a proper response with the promise that it will be one of the first (if not the first) posted in the new year.
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