I’ve been doing a bit of searching about non-conference activites and am particularly looking forward to Body Worlds at the Museum of Science followed by some tunes, ‘wiches, and PBR at The Walnut Room. Today, I’m downloading the Pod City Guide to Denver… it’s an interesting service. I was bummed to discover, though, that it requires yet another (argh!) username and password account. I tell ya’; it’s silly how many identities I have.

Pine pointing good local music is the first thing I do when visiting any city. It’s a tough search, unless you live in a place it’s hard to know which is the most complete source for live shows. Sometimes the best listings are in print only and you wouldn’t find them online at all. This is true both on NH’s seacoast, The Wire and in the White Mountains, the Conway Daily Sun. Both areas have great music scenes, but you wouldn’t know it from internet searching.

I found the Walnut Room by using the MySpace Show Search for all shows within a 10 mile radius of my hotel. This searches the location venues and then links to the band site where you can hear songs. In short, it’s the most complete local music search I’ve ever found AND it provides song samples = an audiophile’s dream. I’d *really* love to make it to Boulder to the Fox Theater to hear Whiskey Blanket of whom I’d never heard, but really like their sound. Yay for mid-west hip hop.

What does a scholar do the day after they complete their MLIS coursework? Why, sign up for Library Thing, of course. It wasn’t, afterall, purchased by WalMart but it inspired this kiddo to start forming even stronger opinions about library OPAC functionality. Why, for instance, do we differentiate the OPAC from the rest of the library’s website? Really, if I’m on a library website and click ‘search’ wouldn’t it make sense that I’m searching the web pages AND the catalog too? I’m smart, I can tell the difference between a book on a shelf and a web page… I’m just saying.

Registration steps:

1. Go to Library Thing.
2. Enter a username and password into the login boxes. (yeah, that’s right, registering is as easy as logging in.)
3. Start searching for books to add.

My favorite thing so far (which may not being saying much since it’s been about five minutes) is the search instructions (see screen shot):

Be sloppy, Do what you want. Amazon will probably catch it.

Be strict, Libraries have rules! Enter phrases separated by commas. The words in each phrase must occur together.

Good
• lord of the rings, tolkien
• mistress, robert heinlein
• 0596006365

Or add the book manually or import books.

Go ahead and use ISBNs, ISSNs or UPC/EAN numbers. US and UK ISBNs differ.

Yeah, that’s right… be sloppy (read: natural language searching) OR be strict (as in precision library searching)… you can do both! Hurrah!

Seriously, though… Until library catalogs make searching this easy, people are going to keep using Amazon. Hell, every librarian I know already does. This is a winning combination of meeting users expectations and community-building. They are not putting up unnecessary roadblocks (in this new information economony, playing hard to get is NOT cool) and they are empowering their users. Building community and serving users is what libraries do – all types of libraries – we do not emtomb books to not be used. We provide them. We need to translate that model into the online realm.

Today I was inspired to say, clearly, once and for all, how I see our profession changing. The simple fact is that we are not going to be able to train people to search more like librarians. They are going to use Google and other systems that act like it. Who can blame them really? Our searching skills are finely honed, cultivated assets of our profession – instead of imposing them on novice searchers, why not apply them to improve our library systems? Library catalogs were never meant to be searched by users, they were designed to be searched by trained professionals (that’s us) on a user’s behalf. In the world of DIY, we might better serve our users by applying our skills to changing our technolgies to meet their expectations rather than endeavor to change their expectations to meet our systems.

Here’s a kicker to me. Try searching for “Carrie Fisher’s mother” in your local catalog. See anything remotely useful in those results? Try searching for Libary. Do you even get a spelling correction prompt? I doubt it. If Google can anticipate want we really want by a single ill-formed search and our own databases can’t even correct an embarassing spelling error – how can we blame our users for asking Google instead of us? I’m one of us and even I’m not convinced of our credibility.

An aside, as taught by a true searching guru in search school, I would’ve used “Carrie Fisher’s mother is”. And been awarded with the correct answer, but not the alternate search suggestion. Does this mean my two-year old education is out of date? Perish the thought.

When they do want to learn, their percieved learning curve seems insurmountable to them. (I say percieved because like most things, this stuff is much tougher from the outside looking in.) Yet, this particularly exemplary librarian listens to me patiently, through veritable dissertations on the importance of OPACs (yep, as opposed to having their automated catalogs only available in-house), blogging, flickr, wikis, IM… the list gets longer everyday. Tonight, during one of these enthusiastic monologues, she stopped me:

Lichen, I understand this is cool… but why is it the business of libraries? Why is it worth my staff’s attention and time?

It’s a vital question and one that’s easily lost in the shuffle. But if we don’t answer it in ways that are clear to our consituencies, both our users and our rural counterparts, well then, we’re part of the problem.