Technical Services and the Library's Role in the Community

9/27/2004
NELA Annual Conference
Manchester, New Hampshire

Mary Ghikas, Senior Associate Director of the American Library Association, spoke from a personal perspective about the work of technical services librarians. She stated at the outset that this was one of the "more unusual and intriguing" speaking requests she has received, and it afforded both she and her listeners an opportunity to consider the work of technical services outside the usual conference contexts of "how-to's", updates, or trend-watching. Her focus was on the distinctive contributions that technical services make, not only to libraries themselves, but to the broader community - even the community beyond library users per se. There is a community connection at the heart of every library, regardless of its type. According to Michael Buckland, there are two bases for library service: the role of facilitating access to documents, and service to specific populations.

The community-related importance of technical services began with the explosive growth of the British Library's collection in the first half of the 19th century, as well as the significant growth in the number of registered readers. The BL's first catalog, published in1819, was essentially a simple finding tool. This changed crucially with the work of Antonio Panizzi, beginning in the late 1830s. Panizzi understood that the works represented in a collection exemplified a dense web of connections, particularly among authors and publishers. However, the information needed to navigate this web, such as authors' names and dates of publication, might be incomplete, incorrect, or missing on the items themselves. Panizzi's rules, highly controversial at the time, addressed this lack and began the transformation of the catalog into an instrument of discovery.

The transformation of book arrangement, from fixed shelving systems where each book-object was assigned a specific point in space, to relative shelving via classification which addressed the knowledge contained, was another important early development. Melville Dewey, who while a student at Amherst College was frustrated by the disorganization of the library collection, was of course a crucial figure in this transformation. Dewey married two systems: the numeric, used to indicate points in space, and the epistemological, establishing the grounds of knowledge. The location of books could thus lead the library's user community to routinely ask the question, "What else is here?" That is, classification provides context, just as cataloging rules provide connections.

Ms. Ghikas told a personal story from the early days of library automation. She was working with the Los Angeles County Public Library, to convert the book catalog to a microfilm catalog (there was no card catalog stage). The book catalog's many volumes were divided by author, title, and subject in different colors, with each type of volume in a different color. From the reference desk, she could see, in a general way, what people were searching. She observed that people often picked up the subject catalog often, starting with a particular heading and working through the volumes until they found something that seemed close to their needs. Typically, that meant finding a classification number, to begin shelf browsing. (The author and title catalogs were generally used for known-item searching.) She reminded the audience of Elaine Svenonius's observation that, while shelf browsing looks like a casual activity, it works because of the underpinnings provided by technical services librarians.

Observing the convergence of subject cataloging and shelf location, she noted how users were enabled to ask that question: "What else is here?" Taking this further, she extracted pairs of classification numbers and subject headings from the printed catalogs, and weighted them to provide the most likely correspondences. This resulted in a printed directory, distributed to the County Public Library branches. As she observed, this experience gave her a deep appreciation of how important "backroom work" is: through establishing context and connections, it shapes the way people know how to look for information.

The importance of providing context has recently been reinforced by an OCLC report, "2004 Information Trends: Content, not Containers" (available at http://www.oclc.org/reports/2004format.htm). The report emphasizes that contextual guides must be built in a distributed search/information environment, where content and the channels to distribute it are ubiquitous, and content exists unmoored from traditional packages. Librarians are right at home with the task of providing contexts, which crucially shape understanding and use. Ms. Ghikas also referred to John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information. Brown and Duguid discuss the importance of what is provided, physically and otherwise, to frame information. Context not only tells people what to read, but how to read, what the reading is worth and why it matters.

The first great contribution that technical services make to the community is the provision of context and connections. The second is the building of collections. From this perspective, the value of the catalog as an access mechanism, derived from quality control in the data creation process, is that it functions as a guide to a collection of resources professionally searched and selected, for a defined community of users. The OCLC report emphasizes that libraries, beyond being organizers of content, provide an imprimatur of quality. This is possible because librarians are both collaborators and participants within interest-based communities.

Collection-building means insight into not only the likely present needs, but also the possible future needs, of a defined community. The collection plays a central role, in terms of shaping the community's attitudes and conversations. The collection itself frames the question, "What is there for a community to ask questions about?" In this context, it is important to consider the great popularity of "One Book" programs. The ubiquity of these programs implies the recognition that there is something in the process of shared reading that is fundamental to the building of a community. There is a parallel here with the popular newspapers of the nineteenth century newspapers. As information media, they are today often held in contempt, as being mostly gossip surrounded by advertising. But, as Ms. Ghikas noted, "objective journalism" wasn't what gave these media their importance. Rather, it was the fact that their content was widely shared, and their power to thus help shape community. Today, the "collections" of material provided by contemporary media such as blogs and television sources have similar power. It is also true that what is missing also shapes what's available to the community. While this is often regarded as negative (and it is true that relevant and important materials are often not collected), library collections also gain value through what they exclude as well. An excess of information tends to swamp the development of meaningful context. This paradox stands in contrast to the longstanding dream of "collecting everything", a dream now revived by the ubiquity of digital resources.

Library collections are typically built, and shaped, over a long time span, centuries-long in some instances, spanning multiple generations of user communities. This points to the third major contribution of technical services: continuity. Ms. Ghikas referred to Stewart Brand's work, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, as providing an important corrective to "civilization's pathologically short attention span." Brand's "clock" is not proposed as a practical object, but as a focus of professional reflection. In this context, a library can be thought of as "all past content with future significance," as the accumulated recorded past is the best information resource for human life in general. There are very few other institutions which are built with the intention of spanning generations as a value influencing basic policy and daily practice. (This writer has long believed that technical services work operates in several timeframes simultaneously, as a normal matter.) She reminded the attendees of Michael Gorman's contention that, while "whether or not to catalog electronic resources" is not an important question, "which resources to catalog and preserve" is an important question.

To sum up, the outstanding contributions that technical services make to the many communities of library users are the provision of context and connection, the shaping of collections, and the maintenance of continuity. Through these contributions, technical services additionally provide coherence among the manifold manifestations of countlessly diverse works, in a burgeoning array of media. Again, according to Brown and Duguid, a focus on information per se is misplaced, as it excludes the "fuzzy stuff" around the edges, the connections and continuities which provide balance, perspective, and alternatives. With the help of what lies beyond the information itself, we are better able to understand information, what it means and why that matters. The work of technical services has helped shaped the way we think about information and the process of inquiry.

For the second part of her talk, Ms. Ghikas shifted focus to the possibilities, beyond the library, for community discourse and decision making. What could, or should, technical services librarians be doing in the community at large, to make best use of our particular skills? Our "back room work" crucially underlies the public process of knowledge development: where else might the predispositions that we possess be valuable?

One possibility is represented by the community forums process, as developed by the organization National Issues Forums. A Forum is a structured discussion concerning specific community conflicts. Participants enter the discussion from a variety of values-based positions. The presumption is that participants in a Forum will not be asked to change their values positions, and that the discussions are fundamentally about diversity and respect (values at the heart of what libraries and librarians do and are about). The end goal is not to reach consensus or compromise, but to find common ground, the space between agreement and disagreement. Participants in this practice of "deliberative discourse" are asked to change their opinions about other people's opinions. Ms. Ghikas discussed the process of "issues framing," which provides the common foundation of information for a discussion. A completed framework has consistent characteristics: it reveals the values underlying different points of view, makes a strong case for each of the choices, and describes "tradeoffs and consequences" rather than "pros and cons." The process emphasizes connections between pieces of information, existing research, and the diverse concerns of participants. It relies on the ability to establish continuities, or the threads running between and among Forum participants.

Why might such community involvement be relevant to librarians, and in particular to those in technical services? We have experience in building a rich basis for contextual deliberations. We build collections that serve as bases for future actions not yet discernible by those doing the collection. We build capacity, creating learning spaces which enable people to develop their powers of interpretation and judgment. In the end, it is not shared stories or information, but rather shared interpretations which bind people together.

Information about National Issues Forums is available at http://www.nifi.org. The resources cited by Mary Ghikas are available here.

Reported by
David Miller
Curry College
Milton, Massachusetts
NETSL Writer/Editor