On 6/5/2015 8:53 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> there is no other institution that I know of that does not look to
> its activities with some kind of value assessment. Museums, schools,
> hospitals.... none of them gets to say: we don't have to justify why
> we do what we do. It will be very hard to be taken seriously by
> funders and by the public with that kind of approach. Yes, you can
> measure effectiveness, and you must measure effectiveness. Libraries
> do it all the time with their stats on users and circulation and
> other services. Research libraries measure their collections in
> various ways. This is the data we take to the university
> administration or city government to justify our existence -- and if
> we didn't have these figures, we'd be hard-pressed to convince
> anyone of our value.
...
>
> The concern about the lack of a connection between cataloging and
> actual use is at least a century old. (Actually, it goes back at
> least to the battles of Panizzi with his board.) Although it arose
> out of the Stockholm Seminar mentioned above, I don't think that FRBR
> answered the question adequately (see my forthcoming book from ALA --
> I'll announce it here). The problem remains.
This is absolutely correct and although I did not understand the problem
when FRBR first came out--I was much more concerned about actually
understanding the abstruseness of FRBR--once I gained experience outside
of strictly tech services, plus studying the history of cataloging and
libraries, I began to see the real problems of the catalog. People were
complaining to me about the catalog, and I learned they have always
complained. There was a reason why nothing less than a Royal Commission
investigated Panizzi's catalog.
It was only later that I began to see that FRBR only tended to continue
the same old library methods but used new terminology. Thus it only
continued the same old problems.
For instance, my experience in reference showed me that although many
people want "items" (that is, entire books), much more often people want
bits and pieces of books. Sure, if you want a mystery novel, you don't
want only a single chapter (although lots of people read the first
chapter or two and flip to the end!). But, if someone wants to find out
about the technique of Bernini, they *do not want* to read 30 or 40
entire books about Bernini, about sculpture, and about art in Italy.
Tables of contents and back-of-the-book indexes were created for very
good reasons.
So, when I reconsidered the FRBR user tasks that people want to
"find-identify-select-obtain --> works-expressions-manifestations-items
by their authors-titles-subjects" I thought: At least concerning items,
most of the time they don't want entire items. They want something else.
Perhaps when everything was locked in physical books (and other physical
resources), people had no choice, but today they have lots and lots of
very attractive choices.
The FRBR user tasks do not describe what users want to do. They describe
how people have always supposed to use our catalogs. That is a big
difference. As I mentioned, it only continued the same old problems. The
result: I think the public will continue to view our catalogs much as we
view hand-cranking a car today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDqPuzC1SJE
Library catalogs (since the time of Panizzi anyway) have been designed
to give the public the kind of answer they do because there have been
different types of limitations (technological, staffing, organizational
and so on) and people accepted what catalogs gave them because they had
no other choice. When they did begin to have other choices, they opted
for them in a very big way.
The cataloging profession never reconsidered its fundamental premises;
instead of finding out how people search and what they want, they
focused on fitting our traditional methods into more modern tools.
It was only in retrospect that I began to see that FRBR missed a great
opportunity to discover (re-discover) what people want from information.
Perhaps when FRBR came out in the 1990s (pre-Google) it was still too
early to understand what was happening and to see the huge changes in
store, but we can today.
I remain very positive that libraries *can* provide the public with
highly valuable tools because (I think) the library community provides
people with things they can find nowhere else, especially not on the
web. But the focus should be on finding out what the different user
communities want and then trying to give it to them. This is not easy to
do of course, but our tools are very powerful so it should be possible.
The real hurdles, as I see them, are to discover the problems people
have with using libraries and their catalogs, and then actually to
acknowledge those problems generally. If this were done, I think that
all kinds of solutions would be forthcoming.
James Weinheimer [log in to unmask]
First Thus http://blog.jweinheimer.net
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