« New Resource available from UM | Main | You'll see a familiar face in this article's photograph »

May 05, 2007

Blog from "The Journal of Dissident Librarianship"

On Competition, Creativity & Credibility

In the good olde days of the Internet (say 1995 - 2000) the library profession used to teach courses on how to evaluate a good website - things like clear statements of responsibility, the "authority" of the producer of the information, how often things were updated, etc. It made sense because it used to be fairly hard to publish content on the Web, and harder still to have much of it and keep it up to date. Doing so at all was a pretty good sign you were earnest and cared, and if people could get ahold of you with suggestions or corrections you were golden. (While ideas like HONcode were good ones I'm not so sure I really believe they ever did much to make or break a health website - good design and updated content seemed far more important).

Fast forward a few years and suddenly the ability to create and maintain a website becomes much easier, esp. with the advent of blogs. Even building a database-driven site (usually necessary for large amounts of content) became more trivial with the availability of open source scripting and database tools (i.e. PHP and MySQL). Then several years later some clever people started adding more interactivity and dynamism to websites with things like AJAX and Flash, which made websites start to act and look more like desktop applications. Suddenly what people had been saying years ago about websites supplanting their competitors, even desktop application competitors, started to come true. Upstart companies came out of nowhere and wound up changing entire businesses (witness the decimation of the travel agent when sites like Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline really caught on).

Libraries and other information providers haven't been used to competition, and are finding it hard to adjust. Some clever programmers have come up with websites which provide the sorts of information tools libraries or library vendors used to provide exclusively. Often these new tools work "better" than traditional ones in the sense of being more intuitive, up to date, etc etc. Some tools provide reference-type information (i.e. Google Maps) while others provide library-like services for individuals rather than libraries (i.e. LibraryThing). These newer tools may not be as robust and authoritative as the older tools but they work, they work fast and they work painlessly - in short they provide a good user experience.

The future of library applications is, hopefully, going to be in a sweet spot between all the fun and easy to use interface things you see in "Library 2.0" and the more structured, robust, authoritative tools we've known and loved as a profession for years. I find it ironic that in the years prior to fast, cheap computing power and unlimited storage space librarians did an excellent job structuring data and providing some level of control, or at least good ideas for where large data sets could get unwieldy. In short we thought like computers before computers were ready for us - making data clean and interoperable and thinking ahead to prevent problems with systems that wouldn't scale. Now that cheap ubiquitous computing is here we're sort of asleep at the wheel, letting our lunch get eaten by people who do good programming and sometimes good interfaces but haven't thought ahead to what happens when their neat mashup becomes the next big thing. Looks like a perfect opportunity to me - combine the energy and new ideas with some way of making the thing scale and work together with other tools and systems (and making sure we bring our vendors along for the ride) so we can "leapfrog each other" and come up with easy to use, fun but useful and robust systems. What the Michigan Public Library system did by building a new interface on top of their ratty old OPAC's core system (same thing at NC State) is a good paradigm shift in my book - and eventually we can get rid of the old legacy systems underneath when they're no longer needed. An OPAC makes a great back end but a terrible front end in my experience - let's use the best of both worlds so we can have friendly competition, creativity and credibility.
posted by abarclay @ 10/21/06 1:35 PM 0 comments

Posted by schnitzr at May 5, 2007 06:31 PM

Comments

Posted by: pfa at May 24, 2007 07:22 PM

Login to leave a comment. Create a new account.