HOW DO SHARED PUBLIC RESOURCES COMPETE?
It occurred to me recently that our models of the ideal way to live, whether offered in TV commercials or programs or movies or magazines, all involve private ownership of more and more stuff -- private home theaters, swimming pools, gyms, recreation rooms, wet bars, even personal libraries. And of course personal transportation -- you virtually never see people on TV riding commuter trains or Amtrak.
It's not surprising, really, that people are working longer and longer hours so they can afford to buy all this stuff, or that new homes are now twice as large as they were in the 1950's, because they have to accommodate all our stuff. After all, if we don't buy the stuff for ourselves, how can we enjoy it?
The answer that came to us readily fifty years ago -- build and use shared public facilities -- does not come readily anymore. In part that's because people trying hard to buy all those things for themselves decided what was economically stressing them was paying taxes, and as people began resisting taxes, public facilities deteriorated. As directors of public libraries worked hard to keep basic services from declining with the declining tax revenues, is it a wonder that our increasingly shabby buildings looked less appealing compared to bright, colorful new chain bookstores?
But it's also because public shared facilities are simply not present in the media environment. There are ads for private swimming pools and spas, but no ads or news stories pointing out that public pools are safer because they have lifeguards, or that they offer the opportunity to meet and flirt with new people. There are ads for Borders, but no ads showing delighted children enthralled by a puppet show at the library or participating in our summer reading programs. You see ads and programs where people find the answers they want on the Internet, but I don't recall any movie since All the President's Men where people went to a library to track down their information.
Unfortunately, when shared public facilities DO make the news, it's rarely good news. We hear about parks when somebody is attacked in one, and about public schools when kids start shooting them up. We hear about libraries when Dr. Laura complains about kids accessing porn on our computers, or when a busboy uses library computers to steal money from the Forbes 400, or when Nicholson Baker writes another New Yorker article.
It seems to me that libraries and other public services are at the bottom of a deep, deep hole. We didn't dig it. In fact, maybe nobody dug it, maybe the land rose around us and we were stuck where we were. But now that we're in it, our choice is either to settle into it and try to get comfortable, or to start looking around for handholds or something to make a ladder out of.
Librarians are going to have to learn the art of self-promotion. If nobody else is going to talk about the benefits of sharing expensive goods -- art treasures, books, computers, beautiful scenery, recreation facilities -- we're going to have to do it ourselves, in every possible venue, and we're going to have to start NOW. Because if we don't, if we keep on settling for taxpayers' crumbs, we might not have anything left worth promoting.
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A TRUE TALE OF THE INVISIBLE WEB
The invisible web is kind of a hard concept for people to grasp, in part because it goes against the widely held belief that everything's on the net, and all you have to do is type a term into a search engine to find it. So when I talk to people about the invisible web, I always start by asking them what kinds of answers might be on the web but not accessible to spiders, and why. Somebody will mention private intranets, protected by firewalls. Someone else will mention the New York Times, or Ebscohost or FirstSearch, services protected by password. Somebody else will mention non-verbal content that ordinary spiders can't decipher.
Hardly anybody mentions the raw data inside of thousands of databases, that is available by way of the net, but is ONLY data, until somebody asks the question that extracts answers. Consider how this works in the public database that is the net. Remember the bit of light verse I printed a while back about sorting the library's junk mail (http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib44.html)? That was once accessed by somebody using the search query: Harvard and spanking. (I referred to "a spanking new edition of the Harvard classics.") Until that question was asked, nobody knew how many documents used both those terms; they only knew which documents used the word "Harvard" and which used the word "spanking."
Sometimes that data is not accessible directly through the public web. A while back I wrote a column for Fox on American inventiveness called "Better Mousetraps." While I was researching it I came up with the figure of 2,600,000 patents for mousetraps (by virtue, as I later found, of misinterpreting my search results).
When I was writing an article for Yahoo! Internet Life (it will be in the June issue), I thought that would be a fun search problem to use to illustrate search techniques, so I tried to recreate the original search. I went directly to the Patent Office's web site and searched there, but it gave me a far lower number. Where had I gotten that number? I went to my favorite search engines, and then to my less favorite search engines, and no matter how I phrased the search, I could not find where I got that figure. In fact, the only source that explicitly gave a number of mousetrap patents was -- are you ready for this? -- my own column.
Wunderbar. It made me think of the opening lines I once read about, for a novel that never got written: "She was going around the world trying to be circular. She had never been circular."
Well, I got tired of being circular, so I used different examples for my Yahoo! story. Then a couple of weeks ago, while I was preparing a presentation on business reference, I found another searchable patent server called Delphion. I tested it out with the word "mousetrap." THIS was where I had gotten the misbegotten 2,600,000 figure from -- it was the number of patents searched through, rather than the number of mousetrap patents. Nonetheless, searching under both mousetrap and mouse trap and eliminating the obvious false drops, I did get a better handle on how many mousetraps had gotten US patents (probably somewhere between 100 and 150).
And that, my friends, is a true fable of the invisible web. The moral is, it isn't always enough to just ask the right question; sometimes you have to be in the right place to ask the question (and, er, interpret your answers correctly). How do you find the right place to look? First of all, if asking a search engine doesn't work, try asking the search engine for a database you can search -- maybe ask it for a patent database. Or use Gary Price's Direct Search (http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/direct.htm), where he has thoughtfully directed us to the search pages of hundreds or possibly even thousands of databases.
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NOTE: If any of you might be interested in having me speak at conferences or present workshops or inservice training, you can see the outlines of many of my previous presentations at http://marylaine.com/handouts.html
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COOL QUOTE
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.
Donald Knuth. Wired, November, 1999.
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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.
