Smith

Notess

Welcome to Pocatello.

Thanks. Thanks.

I was looking at your CV over the last couple of days, and I noticed that you started with music as your BA. How did you go from that to Internet librarian and reference librarian?

Well, basically I was looking for a job in Montana, and I think there was one horn position, and that was taken. So it seemed like libraries had more options than music did for me getting out to Montana and the Rocky Mountain West. I also had a good friend who had gone to library school and had been working for public libraries and ended up in a special library after that. So, that got me interested. I had always been interested in libraries. It also wouldn't take too much additional education, after my two music degrees, to come back to school and to get a library degree. So a number of things worked out together to sort of lead me into librarianship. And from there, the Internet became ... you know, it was just a lot of it, I think, was timing for me. You know, I was a new librarian starting off at about a time when the Internet was becoming more broadly of interest for its information resources. So I started looking into it. I was curious. It was a new area for me. I was a new librarian. And it sort of clicked

I hear that a lot from people who go into library science from other places. What do you think is the Internet's greatest contribution to librarianship? If you can narrow it down to one?

Interesting. Interesting question. Let's see ... what was that again? The Internet's greatest contribution to librarianship? Well, maybe that remains to be seen. But I think in overall approach what's always attracted me to it beyond the communication value, the e-mail, and Internet communication have offered is really the information resources. Early on in the late '80s and into the '90s, the Internet was connecting people with new levels of information resources. Some of the earliest were library catalogs that people could get into remotely and then software, and it just started broadening out from there. So that now we have this incredible amount of information published by all kinds of new publishers, old publishers, individuals, groups, associations, government bodies, that is available online; so that our overall information resources I think have really expanded beyond the more limited print world, which was huge even before the Internet became big in the '90s. But it's just all kinds of new types of information and new ways in which information can be disseminated. It's just that information availability.

I've noticed from my own reading in library literature that librarians are becoming concerned that the Internet and the technology may be taking, may take over what we do, sort of taking our jobs from us. Do you think there's any validity to that? Do you think that librarians and the Internet can be simpatico?

I think it's great the way in which librarians, you know, want to have, in a sense, want to have ownership of information and information distribution, and yet we've never been the only gatekeeper. There've been many other information channels throughout history. And we've been one, and I think we all want to think an important one.

And I think it's more often when we start thinking that we're the sole owners and gatekeepers of information that the Internet becomes more of a threat. But no, I think certainly the way in which, say, public libraries have become one of the major locations for access to the Internet for the less well off or those temporarily without other access ... and so we have, I think, in that way, in the public library sphere, found a sort of an additional mission in terms of information. And certainly I think we can continue to be guides and are continuing to be guides to some of the information resources that are out there.

And the bigger concern I suppose would be, When do the print materials and the other basic information units of our trade get replaced by everything that's online? And I really don't see that happening any time soon. I keep meaning to look at the numbers of print books being sold in the last fifteen years and see what kind of trends ... Certainly there are more computer books sold now than there were fifteen years ago. But in many ways and places, I still see a huge use of the print media that libraries so often supply. And we've expanded on to electronic media. We use the Internet to disseminate our information, our databases, for example, often. The few people that want to read e-books, we use that mechanism as well. So it's certainly, I think, having an impact on our profession and on our careers.

And in some, I'm sure, situations, it becomes competitive. But I think in far more situations it really is almost collaborative the ways in which many librarians have helped shape the Web and our ideals that have, you know, made their way into Internet searching and Internet archiving. I was mentioning this morning how the idea for Google ranking was something that Larry Paige and Sergei Brin got from looking at citation patterns and citation indexes, Social Science Citation Index, for example, which in a sense are standard information-professional ways of looking at information. And so I think we've had impacts on the Web and we continue to be involved in a lot of different ways. Things will never be, I suppose, as they always were in the past, because they've always been changing. They'll never be always the same, they'll always be changing on us.

So, no I really don't see it so much as a competition, because we provide different types of information. Like you, I see sometimes where people are saying, "Well, why are people going to," say, "Google Answers, or why are they going to the Web for this information when they could just come to the library?" Well, we do ... we really excel at often different types of information than the answer sources online, especially technical information, computer troubleshooting. Libraries have not usually been the place people come for computer troubleshooting, and yet there's a lot of communities online where that, on the Web and on the Internet and other communication ways, where that's a great place to go for that. So, so far no, I don't think they're providing any kind of negative competition. They're maybe spurring us to new and innovative ways of delivering our services.

Such as? Can you think of any examples?

Well, certainly the one I mentioned: providing access. You know, we've traditionally provided access to books and to that information. But as a computer lab, almost, for the public to come to. Even in my academic library, in the summer, we have people traveling through Bozeman and they'll stop in, you know, be able to check their e-mail, check on their flight reservations. And they're people that would be very unlikely to have come in through our doors before. But they're coming in to use the Internet access that we have available. When I travel, you know, I sometimes stop in a library somewhere to connect in as well. And so, I think that's a great kind out outreach that is fairly simple; it's not that fancy technically, but it really reaches out to the community and to travelers in this much more mobile society now that I think can help be excellent PR for libraries.

I know one of the things we do at ISU at Reference is help people use the Internet. And you mentioned earlier being a guide to the Internet. How do you do that? Do you, like, help people evaluate information? Do you just show them the tools that are out there?

It can be all over the board. And I think librarians see this in a wide variety of ways. I've looked at a lot of the classes, say, that libraries offer, and it's everything from basic computer use, to how to use our particular databases, to Web searching, which is what I often focus on, to evaluation, as you mention. Although I always wonder why we never had evaluation courses for our print resources. Probably should have done that, too.

Hindsight.

But, and I still see newcomers coming in. I was helping a student recently who was still trying to figure out the double-clicking and how to click a mouse without moving it, or another user just trying to do very basic computer functions. We can be a place where we help people get started on that. Along with the people that are looking for very in-depth, highly scholarly material that aren't finding what they need, they can come to us, and we can do more advanced tricks to help them find things, either on the Web or in our collections or in our electronic resources. So I think that it's a real wide variety of ways in which we offer assistance and instruction.

Just kind of returning to an earlier question, you don't think the Web will ever get sophisticated enough to kind of cut us out? To be able to respond to natural language questions or to provide better evaluated stuff? Do you think it's always going to be kind of a disorganized, free-speech arena?

Yeah, the future is always tough to predict. And I'm not very good at it. Otherwise I would have known when to invest in all these companies and when to not invest and sell off the shares. But it's as if it's a different kind of beast than the services we offer. I mean, we don't offer perfect answers for everybody's questions. You know, we, I think, in Reference excel at helping people use our resources or resources we have access to or resources in the community. We're often good places to turn for that.

So would the Internet in general handle that? I've heard predictions about these natural language and artificial intelligence systems for well over a decade that are supposed to replace what humans can do, and I've seen very little real progress in that way. There's that artificial intelligence is very artificial, and it doesn't handle the full range of complexity that human life is and human questions can be. So in terms of the questioning, there are some questions that the Internet just by itself, that any search engine or portal, answers very easily, very well: "What's this movie about?" I didn't get those questions at the reference desk before the Web was so good at that. So it's not a great loss that I see that people aren't coming up to me and asking what a movie's about. If they do, I can show them how to find it on the Web.

So again, it's another tool that we use. We all have, most of us have, Web sites now. So we use them to communicate with our users, even as simple as offering hours information. You know, maybe that's sometimes ... or the catalog, certainly, and maybe that's sometimes a better service than the fancier things we might try, say like virtual reference or some of the other initiatives we try, which are well worth exploring. But I think it's just the basic ... the Internet's the basic delivery mechanism for information, and we can use it to deliver, as well as for communication with our users.

So I'm not quite sure how it really would replace much of what libraries do. Perhaps the bigger question is, will it replace book-length reading? And I constantly ask audiences for how many people have read an entire book online, and it's just always a very small number, if any. And they rarely seem to have thoroughly enjoyed that experience compared to reading a print book. So until the Internet, the Web, some level of technology is discovered that really replaces books, I think there's always going to be the sense of a library as a collector of books and somebody who is willing to share those books. And, you know, that's maybe not always the highest tech or greatest thing that libraries push, but it's a very basic and yet I think an excellent function. I love it, as a user and a librarian, both.

Just to go in a different tack, apart from that artificial intelligence and natural language development, which is slow, it seems like there's a lot of new technologies that are coming out in the Internet, new tools which we have to learn how to use, you know, find out what blogging and RSS are, those sort of things are. What's the best way that you've found for librarians to keep up with that kind of stuff? Like, what's the best way we can keep ourselves informed about changes in the Internet?

That's a good question. It's ... I've actually been asking myself recently how important is it that librarians keep up with all these levels of technology. Certainly some of my colleagues don't, and I don't think they're any worse a librarian for that. I'm fascinated with new technologies often, and so I'll look at most things at least briefly, because I never know where I might find something that I can use as a tool in the work that I'm doing.

And it's, I think, sometimes easy to get lost in the new technology, and so you're constantly staying up-to-date with that, and perhaps you might need a little help with the older technology, getting up-to-date with the older technology. Conferences are a great place to go, you know; I see you're doing a blogging session tomorrow?

Yeah.

And, you know, I had a question today, what is blogging again? You know, and so I was actually saying it seems like the blogging community knows nothing but blogging sometimes, to listen to some of the bloggers write about this. And there's a large community in our profession and just in the world in general that know little about it and don't yet see what potential it may or may not have in their situation. And we may well find that some of these technologies are really great things to use in certain aspects of librarianship, and then again in others, maybe there is no particular great use for it. Because, with all the new things I look at, I see a lot of things come and go. And so, the latest buzzwords ... I find it's always useful as a reference librarian to know what they are so that I can at least sound intelligent to users that come in and ask about it and have some idea where there is information on it.

But I fully expect to see many of these things sort of, you know, fall out of favor and go away. RSS, in particular, I think, has some great capabilities, as does the blog software in general. But I think we're only beginning to explore how some of that technology can really be incorporated effectively.

I actually think that many times the so-called "killer technologies" of the past have been fairly simple technologies, you see, not the really the overly complex ones. But they provide a new way of doing things that makes our lives or our users' lives easier, or gives the impression that they're easier, and those are the things that really have an influence. But it's really hard to predict what those are going to be.

So, just a general curiosity will help you out and maybe learning how to use good judgment about what you need to know or ...?

Well, for keeping up to date with it, I do think conferences are helpful for that. And in our professional ... I was going to say print literature, but a lot of that's available online as well. I think a fair amount of that gets covered in the columns I do for Online. I know that I'm often looking for, you know, what haven't ... what we haven't been talking about in the profession, because it's a chance to introduce something new.

But for those that really like to stay on the cutting edge, do that online. You can go to various sites. And they change every year as to what's really capturing the buzz of that year. And just sort of, I think, it's broad ... reading broadly and when you come across something new actually taking the time to do a quick search and see what this is. Look it up in, whether it be a search engine or, you know, various Web sites that track new technologies or even, you know, taking a look at some of the tech magazines and seeing what they're saying about it. And again, the Internet provides multiple views into a new or old topic that weren't as easily available in the past.

That's about all I have ... Yeah, about half an hour ...

Hey, yeah, very good.

Spares your voice. I know you've done a couple of presentations already.

Three.

Three?

Three today. It wasn't actually until the end I noticed. And as long as I keep the fluids going, I usually do all right. I'm sorry I'll miss your presentation tomorrow.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Oh sure, sure.