Reclaiming the Heartland“Age of Discovery” Conference

Association of Southeastern Research Libraries July, 2007

K.G. Schneider

http://freerangelibrarian.com

Warning to Andrew*:

There will be a cat picture

* Pace, not Abbott

Obligatory Usability Observations

• LII subject radio-button test

• LII Usability study 2005 and help screens

• LII web log analysis and search behavior

• LII web log analysis and search success

• …results repeated and confirmed in other environments…

Yet…

• Users like to browse as well as search (our findings repeat Andrew’s findings)

• Users do benefit and enjoy value-added information

The System of Professions

Every profession aims for a heartland of work over which it

has complete, legally established control.

Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions

Jurisdiction

The “cultural machinery of jurisdiction”

• Diagnosis• Treatment• Inference• Academic work

Jurisdictional control

• Established by culture• Established by law• Protected by the

profession• Relies on a body of

knowledge that is abstract—but not too abstract

Jurisdictional control “should shape, indeed, the very public

idea of the tasks that the

profession does.”

Subordinate jurisdiction

Threats to Jurisdiction

• Technology• Extreme abstraction• Too little abstraction• Hostile takeovers• Internal organizational

change

A profession that defines itself by its tasks is a jurisdiction

highly vulnerable to dissolution through technological change.

A Cautionary Tale

Our Jurisdiction

A historical perspective through the Five Laws*

*chronologically remixed

Every reader his book

The library is a living organism

Every book his reader

Books are for use

Save the time of the reader

So where is our heartland?

Memory work

travail de memoire

“Memory work is a process of engaging with the past which has both an ethical and historical dimension.”

Library jurisdiction in Memory Work

• Defending the right to read• Fighting erosion of privacy• Preserving the written (recorded)

record• Defending and improving access

to information• Paying attention to the concept of

the public collection

Challenges to the heartland

External claims to expertise

Failure to make aggressive inroads in emerging jurisdictions

Task-based jurisdictional claims

Isolating ourselves from “the river”(Or, “nobody uses our data”)

UNimportant Jurisdiction Issues(As long as you’re in charge)

• Whether you or a machine modify a record

• Whether we have a bazillion separate catalogs or One True Database

• Whether we use Dewey, LC, SuDOC, BISAC, or Pick-up-sticks

• Whether you buy metadata or supervise its creation

• What formats we’re collecting

User-centric views

This is key…To reassert jurisdictional control, we

must let formal evidence-driven knowledge drive our decisions

Jurisdictional Heroes

• The “Endeca” libraries• The theorists fighting to build RDA so it puts

us back in the river• Danbury PL and Librarything for Libraries• Maricopa County and Phoenix Public• Various solo “embeds” extending our

jurisdictional claims• The anthropological studies being done of

faculty and IR use

Reinserting ourselves into the marketplace of ideas about

information organization

Maricopa

Things Badly Needed

• Librarian embeds across key professions• Redirecting efforts toward activities such as

automating classification and aggregating our silo-based efforts

• Bold theft of others’ ideas• Clear statements of jurisdiction (not task

knowledge)• Support for the think tanks and incubators

that will produce the next Dewey/Cutter/Sharp/Ranganathan/Lubetsky

More Unfinished Business

• Liberating ourselves from format autism

• Finding our way back to our users

• Reimbedding user-driven perspectives into our organizational theories

Our heritage, our future

This Space For Rent

Questions?

kgs@freerangelibrarian.com