As I wrote about in this blog post on yet another site where I blog, last week I spoke at an event for catalogers. Having waited for you to pick yourself up off the floor (I am, after all, “Mr. MARC Must Die”), I can explain that I was partly channeling my colleague Karen Calhoun and partly throwing in my own 2 cents, despite the fact that I’ve never been employed as a cataloger.
However, as I began my talk last week and I will begin my talk tomorrow (the event is happening twice in California within the span of a week), I note how as a young reference librarian I would often pull up the MARC display to find out some useful information for the person I was helping. This ties in very well with a button someone was wearing at my table at this event — “Cataloging is Public Service”. Right on. It is.
But I also believe that many of our cataloging standards and procedures, although they have served us well for many years, were mainly devised in a time when our needs were very different. The world is clearly dramatically different now, and our existing ways of doing things are often not up to the task. I go over some of these in this talk, the slides for which will be on the web at some point.
Anyway, the real focus of this post is actually a single slide from that talk, which in typical style occurred to me the very morning I was to present it. I wanted to put across the point that our users really just care about getting their hands on what they want as quickly and easily as possible. They always have. It’s just that in the past, this was mostly impossible or at least difficult and time consuming. Now, in the age of Google and Amazon, they can’t understand why we can’t get them library materials as quickly and as easily as those services do. And frankly, I can’t fault them for that opinion even though I know the barriers that exist for doing so.
So here’s the thing — riffing off Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”, I am proposing a “Hierarchy of Desire” as it applies to libraries. The idea is simple. People want things online in full and openly accessible to them. However, we can only give it to them in this order of increasing desirability:
- Offline, but can be acquired through delivery (ILL)
- Offline but easily acquirable (e.g., in the building in which I am standing or is close by)
- Online in part
- Online in full, easily acquirable (e.g., purchase on demand)
- Online in full, licensed on my behalf
- Online in full, open access (who likes to login?!)
I then posit that this hierarchy can be divided in half equally by what I call “The Line of Damage”, with the top three cases being in the “Damage” category and the bottom three falling into the “Sweet” segment. Our mission should be to move as much content from the “damage” category to the “sweet” category as we possibly can. There are a number of ways we can do that, which I am hoping to explore in this blog or that over the coming weeks. Meanwhile, I welcome your thoughts in the comments below.
No related posts.
Shouldn’t items 1-3 be on the bottom of the pyramid and 4-6 at the top (i.e., flip the order of items as they are listed on the pyramid)?
I’m not sure I understand the “Line of Damage” and what you are trying to get across with the “damage” and “sweet” categories. Is it that those above the line are damaging to the mission of libraries? Or to the user? (Or to the publisher?)
That the options above the line are undesirable is certainly true. I think we can find more descriptive words, though.
Stephen: I’ve gone back and forth on what should be at the top. Currently I’ve settled on the best at the bottom, to indicate the widest possible interest, with the tip representing the least amount of interest in content of that type.
Peter, I mean “damage” in this (dictionary) sense: “injury or harm that reduces value or usefulness”. But I’m certainly open to tweaks that would make the concept more understandable.
I think there’s one component missing Roy: Offline but can *easily* be acquired through ILL/Document Delivery.” Libraries (including MPOW) removing their print holdings and relying upon shared print repositories in lieu are doing so with the expectation of fast turn-around times for scanning and online delivery of content once requested. We usually get this type of thing delivered within the day, and often within 2-4 hours. Of course, it’s limited to journal articles and book chapters. Full books are another story.
I’d place this category in the middle. It’s available online but only partially, since it’s as-requested. Come to think of it, books could be placed in this category if a library subsidized a print-on-demand service. That’s not out of the realm of possibility. We already subsidize more expensive article purchases.
I think this middle category is only mildly inconvenient. I don’t think a couple of hour wait is too much to bear, at least for the keen researcher.
It looks like you’re using “easily acquirable” in two different senses; in item 2, the “offline” item just requires you to go somewhere (maybe even somewhere in the same building); in item 4, the “online” item requires you to pay for it.
These seem to me rather different kinds of “acquirable” requirements, and it might be useful to distinguish them. The hierarchy also implies that paying for a near-instant e-copy is better than going to get a print copy for free; that may be true for some people, but certainly not true for many library patrons and uses.
Roy Tennant, in a nut shell, how is your current opinion a decade later on “MARC Must Die” and “MARC Exit Strategies”? Your short response will help my April 29 PowerPoint on “The Future of MARC.” Thank you jh
John, see http://roytennant.com/A_bibliographic.pdf . It’s not quite a nutshell, but the first couple pages or so might be all you need — that, plus scanning the rest.
I’m not sure offline is _neccesarily_ in the damage category.
What if a user at an academic library could, in one click, have it delivered straight to their office (NOT for pickup at a circ desk), and it would be there next business day?
I think that would move it much closer to and possibly over the ‘line of damage’, certainly at least the equal of ‘online in part’.
And that’s totally possible, at least for things in the local (or a local consortium) collection, although expensive. But maybe not as expensive as paying for digital access, or digitizing yourself, and you don’t need to worry about copyright.
[I also think it's true that at the moment there are some materials most users would RATHER have in hard-copy than immediate online. I am not sure that will still be true in 5 years though. ]
Jonathan,
Good points. I remember the “BAKER” service at UC Berkeley which was highly prized by faculty. Students would rush items to faculty offices, and that was virtually as good as online — certainly at that time it was as good as it got. Since I just came up with this “model” (it’s hubris to call it such, but I’m at a loss for words), I’m sure it will be tweaked going forward. Also, it’s meant more to depict the general situation rather than all the nuances and specifics, but it’s worthwhile having this conversation.
I also agree that there are times when the print is valued over the digital. We can’t lose sight of that, but we must also acknowledge it is usually (and perhaps increasingly) in the minority.
Hmm, do you think right now, March 2011, people would _usually_, as you say, rather have a digital copy of a 300+ page monograph or novel, than a print copy? Even if it’s the BEST kind of digital copy, that you can put on the ebook reader of your choice DRM free (note: the kind that libraries can SELDOM provide)… I’m not sure it’s true that most users most of the time would rather have the digital copy.
(I think that _may_ become true in 5 years; certainly now in march 2011, _more_ users _more of the time_ would prefer a digital copy of a 300+ page monograph than many including myself would have predicted 5 years ago).
That is, if they had to choose one. Best, would be to have both, easily available!
And the “assuming the perfect digital copy” part is a big assuming. With the digital copies of monographs we’re _actually_ able to provide people — hard to download, DRM encumbered, hard to load on an ebook reader, may or may not run on the ebook reader of your choice — the portion of people prefering THAT to a print copy for a given use will be even smaller.
However, certainly when it comes to journal articles or shorter pieces (say 50 pages or less), we are definitely way past the point where most people most of the time prefer a digital copy (which is almost always a DRM-free PDF). That happened a long time ago. The mix of short-form articles to long-form monographs a given academic library uses depends on their discipline. Public library users probably lean more to the long-form use in general.
[I also wonder if PART of the reason people prefer digital for short-form is because they can get it immediatley sure, but they then just print it out on their own printer! I am sure there has been a study or studies somewhere on how often article PDFs get printed out by academic users. Would be interesting. But I'd expect that to go down too with the rise of handheld devices that are good for reading]
[...] The Hierarchy of Desire [...]
I’m not sure the current distinction between 5 and 6 is the right one. Whether or not access has been licensed on my (the user’s) behalf isn’t the point – surely it’s the immediacy of access. Some “free” resources can require more keystrokes to access than those my Univ has paid for me to have access to. So I’d say it’s “ease of access” that’s the distinction here (which naturally means that “charged for” services which I personally don’t have authorisation to access are a big big problem – who cares if it’s online or not if they can’t actually access it?).
Hugh, good point. I was trying to get at ease of access, so yes, licensed or not is immaterial. So maybe 5 should be something like “Online in full, not easy to access” and 6 should be “Online in full, easy to access” or something along those lines. Thanks for helping to make the formulation better!