On Subject Guides, Creativity and Professional Worth

Pre(r)amble

I've been a "real librarian" for 14 years now, and it seems as though during that entire time I've been involved with the Subject Guide Issue. Almost as soon as I started my first job I got involved in the HealthWeb project, which started with a well intentioned and triumphant bang but eventually ended with a quiet whimper in the face of the Two Point Oh onslought. I was briefly enticed by the OCLC CORC project during the HealthWeb days, but this was before the spirit of sharing and trust (that 2.0 stuff again) was in fashion, so that didn't go far. When I made the change from reference librarian to information architect or web developer I thought maybe I could make faster, stronger, better subject guides by supporting librarians who wanted to create the content for them - I still do that to some extent but let's just say that hasn't scaled very far. It seems that in all cases reference librarians want to be able to create these "subject guides" (or research guides, or pathfinders, or link lists, or link farms, or...) quickly and easily, find some magickal way to automate the maintenance (i.e. link checkers and such), and still do other things like answer reference questions. In some cases this has actually happened, but in others (most in my experience) it hasn't. Here's some reflections on why that may be:

The Voicemail Issue


The rise of telecommunications and information technology has led to the centralization or "place shifting" of services. Call centers could be located on the Moon with fast enough connections and access to the necessary information. But people are expensive and needy, so the next step in the march of progress is to automate things or take people as far out of the equasion as possible - hence its common for you to be literally unable to find a local telephone number or address for a company and can only speak to a live person after being triaged by a machine of some sort. In some ways I see the subject guide as the library response to this - on the one hand I think most reference librarians love to interact with patrons, but if they can't they want to lay out all the possibilities available in answering their questions on these guides for patrons.

This creates something of a conundrum - fresher, higher tech subject guides now provide tools like chat widgets for patrons to just ask a question directly, even if using a web browser rather than a telephone. But these subject guides are created by "subject specialists" - how often are they actually available to answer questions which come in from their guide? ("Please call back during business hours"). There is also the issue of a large amount of content on many of these pages - it seems to be a cue to the users that there's a lot of resources available to help them with their subject, perhaps they just haven't taken the time to explore them all before giving up and asking for help. So I guess my takeaway observation is "less is more". Just like I shouldn't need a paper and pen to write down all the options in Voicemail Hell because there are too many to remember, there shouldn't be so many options in a subject guide that I have trouble telling if I've checked enough of them to know I'm not going to find my answer myself.

The Personal Worth Issue

I don't want to get too snarky here, but I have a psychology background and have no personal life at the moment so its sort of unavoidable :-). I just can't shake the conviction that some of the more voluminous subject guides out there aren't really a tool to help people answer questions so much as an expression of one's personal worth or prowess as a librarian. The impulse is almost always to add one more resource rather than remove one. The rationale is "it might answer that one obscure question", and indeed it might, but the overall effect is to drown the signal in a sea of noise. If you can come up with some way to design for the Long Tail as websites like Amazon do then fine, but most guides are more like voicemail - more options, more confusing navigation, and ultimately more frustration. I say this as someone who's experienced this on the creative end as well as the user or patron end. If your guide has so many tabs it needs subtabs, and you need to add order to the subtabs to make it all clear, um, perhaps you just have too much content?

Its really an issue that affects web design in all areas, but I think it hits home particularly hard for librarians. We pride ourselves on our resourcefulness and tenacity in answering questions but there's one catch here - nobody has asked a question yet! So much like our legendary FAQs we wind up creating "inventories of all possible questions people might conceivably ask us" (we really do have OCD at a professional level, most of us). We are trying to answer as many different questions as we can before anyone has asked, just like a voicemail system. The idea of providing an actual list of top resources in a subject area for when there's nobody around to answer those questions does, of course, make sense. We're not always open, people do wait til the last minute to write papers and submit grants, and some people (yours truly included) often prefer to try to answer a question ourselves before asking for help. Its really a question of proportion. So, again, the takeaway is "less is more". I'd think more highly of you as a librarian if you only pointed me to the best of the best, but were there to gently let me know (even if only virtually) that maybe its time to let a professional find that answer.


How Buildings Learn, or If You Build More Will They Come More?

There's a great book by Stewart Brand which, while apparently about architecture, took the Information Architecture field by storm (enough to get him to give us the keynote at the IA Summit in 2003). Its called How Buildings Learn and while you should read it for yourself there's one idea in particular that keeps resonating for me, in librarianship or web development or really any service-oriented creative act (i.e. our entire profession). Its the idea that an architect builds a building for the future occupants and visitors, not for themselves. Often "real architects" and information architects (or librarians) fall into the same trap of building something based on how they think it should be rather than for the people they're building it for. That's exceptionally easy to do when creating web pages because unless you're doing it for hire (and I mean really for hire, like you're a professional designer/developer) you don't really have people giving you input throughout the process, let alone after its "done". And while, of course, you are the Professional and do have Great Experience you are still bulding something to be used by other people.

Which is why the Field of Dreams quote is perhaps my least favorite quote of all time (it was a movie, folks, and a fantasy movie at that ;-). I get the impression that people really do get swept up in the Subject Guide of Dreams idea and that if they just added one more thing, had one more link pointing to it, or tweaked their guide just a little more and then wished hard enough somehow they'd get more traffic. I guess the analogy I use is more the WalMart or Arena Rock one - if its so damned big and crowded that you need a shuttle bus to get to it is it really worth it? Well, maybe its not quite that bad but I really do get the feeling that people think the potential non-use of subject guides is an issue of "its not done yet" or "we need to market it more" or the dreaded "maybe we need more guides/subjects" and the like. It could be that there's just not much of an audience out there for it and never will be. Yes, it may be a useful tool - esp. if maintained and you accept feedback or input and (crucially here) you actually get feedback or input. No news isn't necessarily good news (we've all probably seen that classic customer service movie "Remember Me"). I hate to be a curmudgeon here but its quite possible you could spend your whole career building it and nobody would ever come. And passive expectations that people will let you know why they aren't finding your guides helpful are unlikely to bear much fruit.

The other part of the If You Build It idea that drives me crazy relates to a second idea from How Buildings Learn - that a building is a living entity. Once you build it that's the beginning, not the end. Its never "done". People focus so much on getting subject guides up that they forget that, like kittens, they're not "free" - each one requires ongoing care and feeding and love. Which is why the "link checker" idea strikes me badly - link checkers aren't terribly reliable, and only alert you to technical problems. Subject guide editors really should check the links in their guides regularly to see if the resources they link to are up to snuff content wise, not just still there. It depends on the resource of course, but the people who seem to want automation in the maintenance of their guides also seem to be the people who tend to the "more more more" approach. If you build a guide you can't possibly devote enough time to maintain is that a smart use of resources? Perhaps its better to have something smaller, more easily maintained and that gets regular use and input from real users, not a bloated corpse that just sits there "just in case" the right info scavenger should happen along.

Conclusion

Much like many journalists appear to be frustrated authors, many library subject guide editors appear to be frustrated reference librarians wondering why people aren't taking advantage of all the great things they know. And I share your pain, really I do! I guess I just think that a few things need to change. First off, lose the Field of Dreams quote :-) Secondly, do some research into the actual usage patterns of your users so you can get an idea of what your real primary audience wants or needs (the web expands your potential audience to the entire human species, which could make your subject guide way too long to be useful in any subject area). Lastly, do try take the "less is more" idea to heart - rather than trying to show how much you know or how resourceful or clever you are try being merciful and respectful of the user's time. "First, do no harm" as the doctors say. The ideal guide would have a reasonable number of resources, well designed and arranged and checked frequently, with the ability for users to give input easily and would then guide users to a real live reference librarian should those resources not do the trick. I'm starting to see signs of hope in the input and referral areas, but the trend toward creating more and longer guides still seems to be raging unabated. Research is starting to show quite clearly that most users don't find the comprehensive lists useful (or even usable) so don't put those up front, despite how creative and competent it may make you feel. "But wait, there's more" is far more compelling than "here's everything I know on this subject, in bone-crushing detail and meticulously organized".