I should have written this something like nine months ago, but given how cluttered life is, it has gotten lost under a pile of other pressing matters. Last spring, I was opining at a conference lunch table about my feelings toward the great robotic library system at my M.A. alma mater, UMKC. My beef with the robot was that it took a vast number of books off of the shelves and thus killed the joys of serendipitous discovery while browsing. I’m not usually a Luddite, but I can get in touch with those recessive genes when the situation is right.
Feeling knowledgeable and smugly superior, I gave both my synopsis and critique of the UMKC system only to be set right, gently, by one of JCCC’s intrepid reference librarians, Mark Swails.
“Actually,” he said. “The idea behind that sort of system is to preserve the value of browsing.” To be honest, since this is a memory of ten months ago, I’m making up his words, but the gist of them is intact. The goal at a large library–and by university standards, UMKC is not all that large–is to cull out enough of the rarely referenced works so that browsing effectively does not require putting 2,000 steps on one’s Fitbit. By judiciously pulling out the works that only those doing the most in-depth research are likely to require, the library makes itself not less but more browsable.
It occurred to me, in mulling over that addition to the conversation, that this same principle lies behind the value of curated website lists. When I just Googled “UMKC library robot,” I retrieved 14,900 hits. That’s not a huge number by Google standards–“robot” alone returns 376 million–but it is far more pages than I can usefully browse. In reality, just as I would not scan the spines of five thousand feet of bookshelves for something that might be interesting, I am not likely to get past the first few pages of search results in Google.
In our information-drenched world, where one can locate a lifetime’s worth of reading in just a few minutes, that judicious selection, such as what the UMKC library staff performed, has never been more important. By the same token, the use of the databases and other search tools in our libraries will keep us from wearing ourselves out wading through 14,900 possibilities in search of useful material.
Yes, I should have written this earlier. Sadly, my life, like typical Google search results, needs some curation and selection. I’ll jump onto that as soon as I finish with those thousands of search results.