Everyone needs a librarian

 

We think about librarianship being primarily about cataloguing and inventory; knowing which books are in stock and exactly where they all are. The profession itself regards its work as being about precise service; matching what a customer wants exactly, down to the best storage medium (book, D. V. D., etc.). My argument is that the core of the profession is maintenance; ensuring that the information you have is accurate and accessible. This profession should be treated as mission-critical for any serious bureaucracy. My opinion comes from both study and experience.

My first post on this log mentioned how libraries are derived from the name for “a place of papers”, typically as part of a mediæval monastery or cathedral school. Imagine the hazardous conditions of that time and place: mould from European rain in a room without sealed windows; moths and other bugs; fire; theft; general entropy. A large part of a librarian's time would have been taken up by checking the condition of the 'papers', and ordering replacement productions as needed. Even in classical times, the full contents of a library were restricted, so controlling access has also been a core function. Discretion of records was also historically necessary; with all the effort and expense of producing new books, only knowledge judged to be historically significant was preserved at all.

We've talked about living and working in the information age for a long time (~30 I'd say). We've all surely heard talk about “working smarter, not harder”. I'd argue that attitude is especially relevant in hot, dry climates like Australia. This has taken an added impetus as the Chinese Communist Party last year amended its fundamental doctrine, to say that data is now a factor of economics, as important as land, labour, and capital. All this should mean that managing information – and information literacy – are just as important skills as managing people or machines. Even Australian defence planning now talks about having “decision superiority”.

About ten years ago, I worked in a business which had a revolutionary service offering of a paperless office. Another part of their revolution was doing away with a traditional I. T. department, in favour of simply 'information'. Unfortunately, the revolution was incomplete: the – now fully digital – mail room wasn't integrated with the 'information' department, and neither was freedom of information. Surely the change was made with the best intentions, but with tragic results: this was also the job in which I discovered bit rot.

A large part of my day was downloading clients' case files onto a U. S. B. and walking them to solicitors' offices. The only alternative – used by everyone else – was to have someone print every page of every file and carry them through the street. After pushing a trolley full of paper through central Melbourne, complete with its wind and rain, I realised that for all the talk about modernisation and “working smarter, not harder”, this specific job hadn't changed for at least 600 years. I jumped on board with the revolution of this new business, until the day when a lawyer complained that I'd sent them a corrupted file. After checking, I had to explain that there was nothing we could do; the only (digital) copy of this file was corrupted during upload. They shot the messenger soon afterwards.

The experience gave me understanding to build upon this topic in my Master's degree. Entropy is the enemy of librarianship and archiving; we seek to maintain knowledge forever, but the physical medium for storing information will constantly decay. Whether it be paper and leather, the metal of a hard drive, the human brain, celluloid film, or even tablets literally carved in stone, we are always in a race against time. The bits rot as surely as a log. We keep seeking technology which is more permanent in storage, easy to secure, easy to maintain, and doesn't corrode anything around it.

With knowledge, experience and understanding of bit rot, I've come around to a few realisations. I now understand why any organisation of sufficient size will periodically update/upgrade/refresh its storage media: One way to guard against bit rot is to always have the bits stored on factory-fresh hardware. I now also appreciate why professions heavy on media – like law, academia, or government – have the critical information in both 'hard' and 'soft' copies, if only in case of emergencies. I would also like to experiment more with printing on plastic or rubber. After all, at the rate of decomposition and difficulty of recycling, plastic will endure practically for ever.

Furthermore I maintain that librarians and archivists as information managers should be natural candidates for risk management. Keeping information resources safe and clean are essential elements of the profession. Maintaining information resources, including backup and recovery, are vital to any white-collar organisation operating at scale.

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.