Friday 8 March 2019

Autobots

You might have already heard before that “librarians are the original search engine”. I certainly have, at least twice since beginning this degree. It got me thinking though about the trend of automating and digitising key functions.

Thinking of my own habits, I much prefer to look up a library's catalogue and database and placing a reservation for what I want, instead of asking for it at a librarian's desk. In archiving, I also preferred to work from a list collated from emails, instead of having a steady drip-feed of notes and phone calls through the day. To me, it's a perfect example of technology use making work more efficiently, or working “smarter, not harder”. It also reminds me of the words of Andy Warhol, that “the medium is the message”; start with how you want someone to react, based on how the message is received.

Technology has its limits though. Just this morning, one of the uni researchers got a voicemail, even though the original phone call hadn't gotten to his phone. How many times have you been caught in the automatic checkout of a supermarket, when the scales failed to register something in your baggage area? You still have to employ someone to stand around to help twelve customers, instead of twelve people serving one customer at a time. I do still like having someone available at the library desk for when things go wrong. Then there are simple questions about the technology, like which WiFi account to log on to, or how to use the printer. (You might not believe it, but the Magistrates Court, County Court, and Supreme Court of Victoria have very different systems for how to access cases and copy the files.)

You might think this is a Luddite rant about how machines will never be as good as people, because we would say that in this profession, wouldn't we? People have our limitations too, of course; the biggest being a failure of imagination.  Do you remember for example the Australian census of 2016, with the I. B. M. database and website crashing on the first day? Or when Foxtel was hyping the exclusive release of Game of Thrones season seven, but the system engineers didn't adequately test a massed rush, leading their own customers to download pirated copies of the first episode. People are fundamentally unpredictable, and digital systems don't cope with the unpredictable.

Those episodes to me teach a few lessons. While A. I. & “machine learning” are major buzzwords right now, they won't be programmed to predict consumer behaviour any time soon, because people are too random. I'm reminded of Tony Attwood's quip that autistic children prefer using computers to human teachers, “because computers don't get P. M. T. or hangovers”. People have their place alongside machines, because their exact purpose is to assist us. In terms of my own career, archiving is a good bet, because it is exactly that combination of thinking which files are useful, how it should be accessed, who will make use of it, and directing them to related useful material.

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