Point/Counterpoint Session from NETSL's Spring Conference
Technical Services in the New Millennium: Exploring the Electronic Frontier

Following Eric Lease Morgan's presentation, he and Clifford Lynch entertained questions from the NETSL audience of over 280 in "point/counterpoint" style. While the tape recording of the session did not capture the audience's questions, they were summarized by the speakers.

[Audience question]

Clifford Lynch: The observation was that one of the themes that seemed to be emerging was that we were moving from creating access to actually interweaving created content into the access mechanisms, and did we have reactions to that observation. Do you want to start?

Eric Lease Morgan: I do advocate us creating our own content in some way, shape or form. We've got our own content in our own institutions that we can provide access to. We can create content that's out there by creating things like Index Morganagus. I think it's a great idea. I think that we have control over it, and why wait for some vendor to come along and create the same sort of service, and then we end up paying for it? But it requires a learning curve, skills that we don't necessarily have to begin with, but I think it's an opportunity for us. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Don Waters, the Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation. Well, he sort of advocated this particular idea, but then also advocated, not that we sell the information so much, but we redefine what it means to share the information with different people. And that sharing of the information might be, "I'll give you my stuff if you give me your stuff," or we share the information for some sort of fee that covers our costs because grant moneys aren't going to continually cover these costs for the long haul.

CL: I also agree that we're seeing systems that interweave content with organization. I think that one of things we need to realize is that the imposition of organization is itself a kind of content that's being created, and one that only relatively recently has been recognized as having value in its own right. And we're seeing that translated into properties that have independent commerce in them all the time. That's what a lot of this discussion of metadata is about. I think that one of the things that we should be aware of is the diversity of kinds of organizational content that's available. I mean, it's not just about descriptions, it's about ratings, linking of reviews, links themselves among things are an increasingly important form of content. Also, refinement of behavior. One of the things I've been very intrigued by lately, and I think that Eric sort of hinted at in his comments about putting stars on things, is the whole evolution of collaborative filtering systems: the sort of thing where you use information about people's decisions, match profiles, and then tell them about what people with similar profiles are doing that they haven't. The classic one being the recommendations you see in a system like amazon.com: here are people who bought a lot of the same books you did, here are some you haven't bought yet you might be interested in. We can do a lot of those things too, and they fit very naturally into the kind of personalized environments that I think Eric gave such a good demonstration of.

[Audience question]

CL: The question was about privacy and the balance between providing enough information for something to really personalize effectively, and your comfort level to relay that much information. I think there are two central issues. One is whether you get enough value back for giving up that information, and a lot of people clearly find that they get enough value back that they're willing to divulge that kind of information. But I think perhaps the more central one is, how much do you trust the system involved? Do you believe that it will really only keep that information confidential, that it will only use it in statistical manipulations to allow you to learn about other behaviors and things like that? My take on it is that there's a growing public distrust of most of the commercial enterprises on the Internet and what they're doing with that information, and certainly we've seen a few nasty examples of that. I suspect that of all the agencies around that people might be willing to give up some of that information to, based on their perception of the integrity of the institution and their ability and determination to keep it private and use it only as appropriate, might be libraries. And that may be an important kind of competitive advantage, if you will, for libraries as institutions in this way.

ELM: I'd like to concur with Cliff. I do believe that privacy is one of our highest ethics, morals, about what we are. But at the same time I'd like to supplement what he said -- he's more articulate than I am. I think that we should try to build a relationship with our patrons, the same way that lawyers have a relationship with their clients. You expect the lawyer to keep your stuff secret. The same thing with your doctor. You have a doctor-patient relationship, you have a lawyer-client relationship, why can't you have a librarian-patron relationship? Where we just say, this is who we are. It will add integrity to the profession, so I think that's something that we ought to consider strongly. And so if I create a MyLibrary and a profile, the guy at the other end of the line's got to feel assured that, no I'm not going to give this information away, but I might share it with my fellow librarians and get an idea of how I might better help you. For example, the other day people were putting in profiles like [LC Classification ranges] A to K, and it would send a great big list! And I took it upon myself to say you know, you're probably getting a very large output. You might consider making some smaller profiles. I was thinking, is this guy going to get mad at me for coming out of the blue, saying "Hey, what are you looking at my profile for?" I just took a leap and did it. And actually, many people came back and said, "Thanks! That works great!" So I think we should be building on that, but only building a relationship like a librarian-patron relationship.

CL: If I could make a further comment on that, I think the lawyer analogy and the doctor analogy are very interesting ones. It's worth noting both of those relationships are, to a great extent, recognized in law and in custom as protected, whereas many of the other relationships are not. For example, to just make a point about the time of year, historically the relation with tax preparers, who might be accountants but not attorneys, is not protected under law, contrary to most people's belief. It's very interesting to speculate a little bit -- given the growing focus on privacy, particularly in the network environment, given some of the stuff emitting from places like the Federal Trade Commission about privacy, given some of the statements out of the Administration on privacy and the interest in that in some sectors of the Congress -- it's not inconceivable to me that at some point in the next few years you might see some new legislative interest in privacy. And there would be something wonderfully appropriate about being able to somehow capture and honor that relationship between librarian and patron, or begin to, in law. I'd also note this is very tied into the prestige of professions.

[Audience question]

ELM: The question is, will other people have to reinvent MyLibrary if they want to implement it in their own particular institution? The answer is, probably not. It was designed from the ground up to be sharable. None of the components in MyLibrary have to be purchased [from us?]. They are all out there on the net, not necessarily for free but very, very inexpensively, and it does not require very large hardware. A number of people have expressed interest in using MyLibrary in their own particular setting, and this summer I think we are going to pick three institutions from a set of people who have already expressed their interest. We will be working with them to make the software more global, more customizable for a particular site, but we'll just say, "Here -- here's the code." And we'll all work together to improve it, and then the idea would be that some time in the fall maybe we'll even open it up to a wider audience for people to download and use. But at the same time, I think maybe a year from now we might see something like MyLibrary that comes in a box, "portal in a box." Here's a CD, make your own portal. So that might be something that other people could explore a little later on. But yes, we will be giving away the code. That's who we are!

[Audience question]

CL: The question was, what about print sources? There's a lot of things in print that aren't well covered on the net. How do we make what we have in print, some of which isn't really substituted for by anything on the net, equally visible? Let me take a first crack at this, because this is one of my pet hobbyhorses, and then I'm going to have to vanish to get a plane. I think actually there are two problems. One is print material that's not in electronic form. The other is print material that's not even described by electronic surrogates: consider the fact that most abstracting and indexing databases only go back to the '70s or '80s. So there are actually two sets of print. There's one that's just disadvantaged, and there's another one that's almost completely invisible at this point. I think that we need some fairly major, long-term answers. We need some big retrospective conversion programs. We need one for the A&I industry, which I'm very happy to say I think we're starting finally to see some signs of, and we need another for actual older printed materials. Having said that, we need to recognize that, particularly for the content itself, this is probably a 50-year undertaking, and even for the A&I industry it's big. So one of the sort of near-term challenges I think we face is trying to give people some guidance about the sorts of things that are poorly covered on the net. And it would be very useful, in fact, to have some analysis of what's particularly poorly covered on the net, so that you can set that off as kind of a red flag to users. I also think that libraries generally have done a very poor job of trying to get people to use the catalog at the same time as the various Web search engines. It's always seemed to me kind of a no-brainer to have libraries put up search engine interface pages that also toss the search through the local catalog. I can't think of any instance where that's been done, at least at a large university. And even some really basic things like that would help.

ELM: I think that's also a valid concern. With MyLibrary in particular, our initial charge to was to basically mimic the policies of our Web server. And so the policies of the Web server had absolutely nothing to do with the print stuff. Now that MyLibrary in this particular case is seen as something that's viable, and that we want to pursue, we'll probably try to integrate a [whispering] reference assistant or and expert system. I don't say those words too loud because it always get these sorts of [grimacing] reactions. But the idea is that this thing will supplement a human's interaction, not replace it. And the alternative would be, if I could carry an electronic device through the stacks, and say I had a magic wand, I wand the barcode, and now my CPU knows about this book, then I could say, "find me more like this one." Well, it does a little search against the OPAC, and it says, "Here's the author, here's the subjects, here's the keywords in the title. What about this particular book is good?" Well, the author -- so it does some kind of author search behind the scenes and it shows you a map of where the thing is, and then you can go find it. But the point is, I think we can integrate the massive print collections that we have with the power of a computing device to enhance the end product. We will probably try to do something similar with MyLibrary or other sorts of profiling to bring in the print things.

CL: I need to say farewell, but Eric will answer all of your hard questions now. Thanks. [Applause]

[Audience question]

ELM: I think the issue was that we're diffusing our efforts, that we're spending a lot of time maintaining and updating our OPACs, but at the same time we're spending a lot of time and effort updating these Web server sorts of things, and what do I think about this idea. I think there are two issues involved: one, a concrete definition of what the OPAC is, and two, once you make that decision, use the OPAC accordingly as if it was just any other database. Ask yourself -- this is a classical question -- what is the catalog? Is it a inventory list, is it a list of the stuff that I own or have paid for? Or is it a finding aid, is it a tool that I use to help find other sources and pieces of information? At my institution, it's more like an inventory list, as opposed to a finding aid. But once you come up with your definition of a catalog, then you communicate that. If we don't know what it is, then we're sure not going to be able to communicate that to our patrons! So we come up with some sort of definition.

Once you have your stuff in your OPAC, it's just a database. Now you individuals, and myself included, can't necessarily right now create a report against your OPAC. Maybe you can, but most of us can't. We don't really have access to the particular tools, or it's written in some sort of arcane language. But since it is a database, you could write a report against your database that says, "Find all the things where there is a value in the 856 field." It would extract all those things, and then make this Web page. Or we could get rid of all the Web page stuff, and make people search the OPAC all the time. So when they do a search there's a little button that says, "Find only the digital items." Then it brings those up, and then it'd be just like your static Web pages. They would find all the digital items. So I think that's a possible solution to the issue you've addressed.

[Audience question]

ELM: Would I address how we came up with the terms for the controlled vocabulary [in MyLibrary]? The controlled vocabulary of this particular system is the weak link in the chain. I make no bones about it. Everything in this particular system is based on the controlled vocabulary, and the first weak link is, it's flat. It's not hierarchical. It has to be a flat list, that's just the way the system is. Now we originally designed this to mirror or mimic our homepages, and our homepages were basically divided up into six colleges. So at first we only had six disciplines. We figured, that'd be easy for people to do. And that was from one department in the library. But since another department in the library was also going to be providing service, they said, "We don't think in those six disciplines. We think in departments." So they started adding all sorts of terms to the controlled vocabulary. What happened was, the people who were providing library services among themselves said, "I have this responsibility, I have that responsibility, I have this other responsibility. Therefore I'm going to add this term, the other term, the third term, and put them into the database like that." So it sort of grew, and it was organic. First we had one department, and their controlled vocabulary. Another department comes along, and they spoke a different language, so they added their controlled vocabulary there. I'm not saying this is a good solution. And then the catalogers, they had LC! There's another controlled vocabulary. And now there's a movement or a possibility of linking MyLibrary with the University catalog, the list of courses that we offer. And they have another vocabulary! So it was very organic, and it's going to be very difficult, if we change the underlying controlled vocabulary, because it'll mess up everybody's profiles, and then the information will be all askew. That's the weak link in the chain, and that's more or less how it got to be where it's at.

Well, I think we can all go home! [Applause]

Transcribed and edited by
David Miller
Curry College