Stephen Abram and Joe Janes, moderated by Roy Tennant

flipped a coin and Stephen won, so Joe went first

Roy: will search services offered by large commercial companies such as Google, Microsoft, & Yahoo replace the need for libraries?

Joe: more than anything else, that's a market
they will if libraries let that happen
if their services are sufficiently powerful & ubiquitous, then people will go there
if the millions of searches going to them came to us, we would be overwhelmed in 20 minutes; we can't do anything with most of those services
"we don't call it adult services anymore since the internet" - search that phrase and you *won't* find your local public library, although that might be a market we want to branch out into
he's not sure it's an altogether bad thing?

stephen: wrong question, who cares? no one comes to libraries to search
users come to us for learning, community, and services
the top 10 websites provide a good community experience
we should be more worried about MySpace and Facebook, not the search engines
40% of all internet traffic is in MySpace - what is the potential that those folks have to do?

joe: points are well taken, but can't just dismiss search
a shared notion that algorithmic search will only take those services part of the way, so they are scrambling to add more on top of it
they've also tried Q&A services, but none have had enormous amounts of use, although it is acknowledgment that human beings can answer questions
search was *one* of the reasons people came into libraries
search was never the point, it's a means to an end, but it was a big point

stephen: ask yourself who is paying and who is the customer?
people think the sponsored links in commercial search engines are better because they are sponsored
noted differences between commercial search engines and library search
are we going to let them win or are we going to start building community and search

joe: can win where popularity kind of relates to quality
haven't done a good job of educating people that quality information is worth it
3 years ago, Google couldn't get to certain things for search, but now that's not so true
if they can figure out the invisible web, what's left?

stephen: what does search do well and what does it do badly?
they can answer who, what, where, and when, but not how and why
have to be able to sense the context of the user to do that better
we're not a scalable solution, but we're probably pretty scalable on how and why
the reference question is dead
we're going to have a world within 5 years where there will be 75 million books converted for online and search
the problem of the future is winnowing, not searching and finding

roy: what qualities would Google Scholar, MS Live Academic, or similar free commercial search services need to have before libraries abandon the creation of their own metasearch services? Or has that point already been reached?

stephen: we tried to teach patrons boolean logic - didn't we learn that doesn't work?
at some point, we need to build more intelligence into the interface
millennials are moving into a world where facts don't matter (a half-life of 8 years)
the commercial services can create an immersive environment, but not one in which people come together in community and work as teams
they are about bringing things to the individual

joe: doesn't disagree, but the team thing comes back to the social connectivity idea
one of the things these guys are in the business of working out is the importance of the social network
Microsoft hammers on the social network piece, which Joe doesn't really use
it's not much of a reach to think about how you mash all of those social services together in an organizational team work environment, which hasn't quite happened yet
the world is ahead of all of us, the search services and libraries

stephen: with a bunch of North Americans on the panel, we're all just sharing our ignorance
teams are contextual
people work in teams on things they can't work on alone
Google, Yahoo, etc., are in the 20th century mass market model that TV was in
libraries create relationships with small groups of teens
libraries need to step up to the plate and stop trying to be about search and start trying to be about learning and community

joe: yeah

roy: the idea of communities has been bouncing back and forth in my head
Google and Yahoo have our users' eyeballs
libraries have the advantage of having their actual bodies/feet coming into our buildings - community

next question: should libraries cooperate with commercial companies by giving them our metadata and/or content?

stephen: if we're not about search, who cares?
our competitor is ignorance
I want their hearts, minds, souls, inspirations, not their eyeballs - libraries transform lives

joe: makes me think of the whole access versus ownership thing
I guess we're just going to keep fighting this with ourselves over and over again
used WorldCat as an example - the value the rest of the world could add to it could be a transformation of knowledge (or not)
- make WorldCat open source
"make things available and things will happen" - libraries have always said this, but we haven't been able to do this on a large scale until now
it's scary for librarians to think about making it *that* available, though

stephen: in the battle of the river and the rock, the river wins

joe: that's deep

stephen: it's all there already in Open WorldCat
they don't find things through metadata, but rather through algorithmic ranking
no boolean overlap between our value systems of our users and the value systems of librarians
our value system is actually getting in the way of us delivering what the users want
where is the middle ground?

joe: it would be terrific to be able to keep more patron data, but what happens when homeland security knocks on the door?
means we can't understand what people really want
there are legacies of a century of protecting patron privacy, even though users (especially younger users) are less concerned about this
one of the few places left that you don't assume will just "give you up" is the library and that comes at a cost

roy: will libraries incorporate some of the better dot-com search technologies into their own search products, such as tehir catalogs?

stephen: they already are
aquabrowser, endeca, etc.
it's an issue of how do we get people to understand what this does?
visual interfaces work best for most people, but not for librarians, who are the ones making decisions

joe: not adding these things soon enough
"what the hell gives?"
when you think about people who got into the library business are people who love to search - Dialog was like porno for us because it gave you incredible power and control (it was incredibly rewarding)
it bespoke a certain professional knowledge set
the way library catalogs have been designed bespeaks these same things, in part because information is hard
algorithmic ranked search makes it look easy, which fries our collective cheese because it takes away our power and control (or at least the illusion of it)
if we come up with easy-to-use search tools, they'll need us even less (some people think)

stephen: we haven't had an open debate in librarianship about how librarians killed Dialog
there is nothing wrong with the OPAC - it does what it needs to do as an inventory system for librarians
Karen Schneider is the only one asking the right question - it's the user, not the OPAC
can we frame the question for what is the right user experience?
I can assure you it's not the OPAC
we're going to fix the problem focusing on the user, not the OPAC
what do users need to learn, what experience do they want in their community?

joe: the OPAC isn't going to change because the MARC record isn't going to change
there just isn't that much you can do with them
can't just slap an algorithmic rhythm on top of MARC records because there's nothing for it to search

stephen: that's because we're trying to retrieve pointers (as librarians), not the objects themselves

joe: we get stuck in ideas and traditions
we have to be small-c conservative because we've got the human record at stake and you kind of have to be careful with that
anytime we try something new, it becomes about the problems
sometimes we don't have to think about 100 years

roy: what is your worst nightmare and your finest vision for the future of library search services, and what is your level of confidence in achieving either?

joe: was once asked what would perfect search look like?
it was no search at all, the lightest weight search at all
the web tool is always easier and lighter than the library one
my worst nightmare is that nothing changes, we stay the way we are, we're happy with it, and we wither and die
my level of confidence is higher than I'm comfortable with - a collective lack of initiative to make changes that are scary and uncertain
the finest vision - maybe we put Google out of business
what we do is "good enough" (and it's a good enough world) that people forget about free services and come back to us in the experiential way that stephen talks about
level of confidence in that... go ahead (to stephen)

stephen: worst nightmare is that everyone in the field keeps looking at the other and saying your side of the boat is sinking
we're perceiving millennials wrong
we're fighting internally (school libraries aren't teaching the kids properly) instead of banding together to fight the external problems (like politicans who cut funding)
we have to get better at advocacy and be willing to say cutting library funding is stupid
brought up Gwinnett County as an example of what we can't let happen
want to see transformations, not transactions
build community and learning, talking about the tipping point we're at (we've adapted to technology, move forward)
confidence in doing this? have to stop being so control-oriented, liberate the energy of the new librarians who are really good
create a passion and fire in them and let them create the world that needs to be
thinks we can do it

audience question: libraries are so tied to the publishing industry
so much more is being created now, beyond just publishing

stephen: we have to be prepared to allow tagging on every single catalog record, user reviews, post-it notes all over websites
need radical trust with our users - need to explore this more
there are conversations about web 2.0, library 2.0, and librarian 2.0 about how this new world will look like when the user becomes predominant
we're going to have to trust our users to lay paths for multidisciplinary work (no longer just silos)

joe: when you look at human history, it all boils down to individual people standing up and saying I was here and I mattered
that is our business - we are in the business of helping people matter and hear the stories of the people who went before and mattered
that creative process of telling our stories of what we mean and what our story means, is important
used to have to be published to do this
to be heard, you had to be there
now that equations has changed in the last few years
easier to speak and much easier to be heard now
we could only deal with publishing, other than "ephemera" - the vertical file, which we now call "the internet"
wrapping our collective professional mind around how we support those creative processes of our users and how we support telling those stories is the central issue of librarianship in the 21st Century
it's about books and it's not
it's about audio and it's not
it's about video and it's not
it's about all of it

audience question: what is a quality result for a typical library search and how do we program that?

stephen: who makes the judgment is what makes a quality result - it's the user

joe: what does relevance mean and who got to judge it?
in any kind of mediated service, the best you can hope for is to move them forward because a lot of things don't have answers
Wikipedia is good for how and why
so the ideal result is that the person that posed the question is further along in their quest for the answer, and only that person can decide that
it's a much more authentic way to say how we're helping people, transforming lives, experiences we created

stephen: we're not acknowledging that the reference questions have gotten harder
haven't adjusted how we evaluate harder reference questions; we need to get better at understanding our contribution to the person's question, not what we're getting out of it

joe: and being inserted at the proper moments of the question

audience question: we have an incredible consumer orientation
things are important to us because we bought them
how do we do more local stuff?
we're making media consolidation worse

stephen: people come in and don't talk about the tools (hammer, saw, etc.), but rather about what they want to do and feel (family room, comfortable, etc.)
we need to do more to tell stories about how people feel on our website
we need to create experiences

joe: and that experience has got to be personal
"understanding" - people, lives, communities, etc. - it's very difficult, if not impossible, to emulate

wrap-up

joe: we can't do everything
the information environment wasn't that competitive in the past, and we served that niche well
we can't do that anymore, we can't be one size fits all anymore
some groups/companies are going to do some things better than we do
we have to not be afraid of the idea that libraries occupy certain niches in the information economy and that's okay because we do them well and no one else does them
figuring out what librarianship is for in the 21st Century is the central question
what do we not do and how do we use freed up resources to do something else?
there's a lot of everybody we're not serving, but we can do some things incredibly well
we should focus on those and do them well

stephen: the why we know, but the how is harder because it centers around our capacity for change
build team-based approach (no one person can answer a question end-to-end)
build cross-generational respect and start to visibly see what the next generation of library workers bring to the table
don't need to repair them or dampen their enthusiasm
can't feel guilty about play - we learn more from networking, coffee breaks
put a list in 43Things.com and spend 15 minutes a day working on them (you AND all of your colleagues)
in 6 months, the capacity of the library profession will be through the roof to understand what is happening in the outside world
we expect to be trained, but that's not how you learn - PLAY
adapt to the changes that are overwhelming us

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