What to do with Reference

Today Ros Devenish, Library Manager of the library at St Barnabas College in North Adelaide, posted this message to the ANZTLA-Forum, e-list of the Australian and New Zealand Theological Library Association:

Hi everyone

As most of you know, I am pulling together a library from a huge donation of books here in Adelaide.

Very recently, my thinking about the placement of the Reference Collection has needed to undergo a review. I would like to know if any of you shelve your ref books by interfiling them in your Main or General Collection.  It seems that this is happening in quite a few university libraries and it would work well for us here at St Barnabas and would solve quite a few of my immediate problems with shelving and lack of space. With the decreasing need for large hardcopy reference collections this could work well for us into the future.

I would love to hear people’s comments, experiences as you have time.

With thanks

Ros

My reply to her enquiry was then sent to the same list: 

It has become apparent over the past twenty years, increasingly, that the purpose of Reference has changed. We all know the main reason, you’re looking at it as I speak.

Do your users go to Reference for answers to their questions? Does Reference offer other services that require it to stand alone as a discrete collection? Is Reference in your library an outdated function, and why?

These and other questions have been asked by librarians ever since the onset of online circa 1995. We live in an age when the most famous encyclopedia in English, Britannica, ceased print publication in 2010 and remade itself as an authoritative source, in contrast to its unpredictable cousin Wikipedia.

Here at the Carmelite Library we reduced Reference from over thirty shelves to about ten. Biographical dictionaries, Bible dictionaries, and many subject encyclopedias were transferred to the General Collection. Everything that had dated of an ephemeral nature was culled. Specialist subject dictionaries with information likely not to be readily obtainable online were also sent to the General Collection. What stayed as Reference were the Catholic encyclopedias (Old and New), the great French ‘Dictionnaire de Spiritualité’, other irreplaceable sets in hagiography and monasticism, and the language dictionaries. These last are the works still most consulted by users, the other mostly consulted by the librarians. Indeed, nowadays Reference is more a librarian’s specialist collection of works with information we will not find online and that is of vital daily use in our work. .

The whole process of reducing and culling Reference has freed up space without in any way losing the essential contents of those works judged necessary for the future.

Other libraries will have different stories, but for us it was a way of dealing meaningfully with a part of the collection that was no longer serving its intended purpose.

Exactly how we do Reference today, in all its aspects, should be a session of a future ANZTLA Conference. Reference does not go away, even when our Reference collections do.

-         - Philip Harvey

Wikipedia: The Devil is in the Detail

A supervisor in Theology in Melbourne warns his students that if they cite Wikipedia in their essays, he will fail them. This warning returned to my thoughts this week after some of us librarians were sent on a wild goose chase, all due to a book request that, on the face of it, had the hallmarks of a perfectly credible and reasonable reference search.

‘Farewell to the devil : from the Christian dealing with evil’, by Herbert Haag. 1978: Reprint: Dusseldorf, 2000 ISBN 354570016X

After searches on Amazon, Book Depository, Abebooks, Trove (National Library of Australia), MCDcat (the online catalogue of the University of Divinity), and other likely avenues, as well as the odd google here and there, a message was sent to the library e-list asking “if you have this book in your collection, or know where a copy is obtainable, anywhere, please let me know.”

  

My searches yielded the German original (‘Abschied vom Teufel‘ von Herbert Haag) now available second-hand at exorbitant cost, and a French translation. The Germans publish English books, indeed with global publishing anyone anywhere can publish books in English, so why wasn’t the English translation showing up? That said, the first giveaway was the book’s ISBN with its 3 prefix, which tells a librarian it is a German book, so quite possibly one of the German versions. Googling 354570016X  proved this to be the case. 

 

The second clue required background knowledge not supplied in the request. Herbert Haag’s book had been subjected to a critical attack, on publication, by the Pope Emeritus, back when he was Joseph Ratzinger. That was a public dispute conducted in high standard High German. One colleague conjectured that when Ratzinger wrote against it his text was translated, at which stage the title of the book was also translated. Haag’s own book however was probably not translated. If this is true, it meant we were looking at a citation for a book in English that does not exist.

Not the enquirer, the librarians, or Wikipedia could know this with certainty, but given the evidence this probability is in the vicinity of the High Nineties. In all innocence our enquirer, it seems, has copy and pasted, or copied and pasted if you prefer, the details from Wikipedia in the understandable hope and belief that such a book exists. So once more the librarians step in to solve the riddle, undeceiving the researcher, and clarifying the pure reality of the book’s history. Where would we be without a librarian?

Our supervisor in Theology in Melbourne is right to warn his students about the pitfalls of Wikipedia, though what if the book does exist? And what if Wikipedia is the only place where the citation occurs? Is it cited with a disclaimer? Certainly, the researcher must fall back on the basic procedure of only citing books that he, or she, has actually sighted with their own two eyes. 

Meanwhile I had to break the bad news to the enquirer, who has Fair to Middling German but very good French. So do I , as is right practice, order a copy of the original German at an exorbitant price that may never be used? Or just the French translation, that will be used? When I pondered how so few copies of this book were available anywhere anyway, one colleague replied philosophically, “Probably not many around.  Maybe everyone binned it in disgust!” Whatever the merits of Herbert Haag’s book, such, it seems, are the occasional unforeseen outcomes of bygone theological debates.

Everything is on Google, not.

Philip Harvey

We goggle at Google, we garble what we google, we gobble Google and go. A lead article in The Guardian reports on the latest expansions of the mega-company, leaving us to wonder if Google is the gentle giant of our waking beliefs, or really a ravenous monster, ready to upend our preconceived notions of free knowledge.

Although I first read the article online, it is the print version in the berliner-style Guardian Weekly for 1^st February 2013 that I used to scribble my red biro underlinings and questions about basic assumptions of the present state of affairs.

The writer Tim Adams opens with a fair doozy: he describes Google as “the omnipotent engine.” Remember that this is good British journalism, where a dash of irony is likely to be somewhere in the dish, but Adams is also caught up in the buoyant enthusiasm of those for whom the internet is the answer to our every question and the challenge to our creative drives. Adams is not alone in liking to think that Google is more or less omnipotent, or has the potential to be. The fact that it neither is nor can be does not weaken this enthusiasm, it only increases it. That there are inherent dangers in being omnipotent is something else that is glided over.

Such is the zizziness of the zeitgeist, Adams soon says, “…it is almost inconceivable to imagine how we might have gone about finding the answer to some of these questions only 15 years ago without it – a visit to the library? To a doctor? To a shrink?” While Google delivers in real time (itself a computer term) it sounds almost pedestrian to reply that not only are questions still being answered by librarians, but that libraries remain the only place where many of the questions are going to be answered with any kind of thoroughness. Behind Adams’ wonderings lies a question in turn: is Everything on Google? Even though it is not, the tenor of the article would imply that it does have Everything. Well, no actually. But while librarians and others will comment that I state the obvious here, the assumption that everything is on Google goes on being generally unquestioned by many of its million of users. And therein lies the ghastly gorblimey Google issue.

Tim Adams introduces us to the head of Google Search in California, Amit Singhal. He and his colleagues are developing Knowledge Graph. If your view is that “searching is ever more intimately related to thinking” then it doesn’t take long to see that the web itself could possibly provide not just the data, but the answers themselves. Tim Berners-Lee called this “the semantic web” and Singhal & Co. work towards making “the computer understand the context of what was being asked.” Knowledge Graph is a California Dreaming, a mouse chasing its  tail, but its creators seem to ignore the simple fact that searching has always been intimately related to thinking. Humans will go on searching, even if Google went glop tomorrow.  I don’t say this to be unfair to the utopian possibilities of computer technology, but to remind ourselves that online is simply another way of finding what we need to know. Knowledge Graph may be a structure that can “mimic the way we think”, but that doesn’t mean it thinks the way we do. And when we consider the chances of it doing so, the artificial apparitions of Mary Shelley and Karel Capek loom in our imaginations.

There are curious side effects to visionary enthusiasm of this kind too. To be truly human, Google will have to start getting some of the answers wrong. Another assumption behind collecting Everything, which seems to be Google’s glorious goal, is that there is often more than one correct answer, the answer you have may be the wrong one, or it may be misleading or incomplete. Often it is the human mind, not a computer, that discerns which from which.

The Google people have yet to put a definite upper limit on their expectation of Everything. Librarians learn over a lifetime that information changes and knowledge expands. The very existence of new books is evidence that we will never achieve the optimum Everything. But Google is trying awfully hard with the devices at its disposal. Turnover in Reference is a fact of life.

Tim Adams himself is rightly inspired by Amit Singhal’s enthusiasm, still he cannot complete a Guardian article without some tough closing questions. “But what about the less measurable ways that the ease of search has changed our lives?” he asks. “What about the ways in which it has diminished the excitement of serendipity, the way that it has made the personal experience of a chance encounter with knowledge so much rarer?”  

Once more we find that the human mind of Singhal has thought of that. He seems to want Knowledge Graph to be able to provide serendipity and chance encounter as well, though it must be observed that this is serendipity on Google’s terms.

Is Search in Google’s sense the same as Reference in a librarians’ sense?  When I ponder this difference I hear in my mind a kind of Eliotian conundrum. I know I will be staring at this conundrum tomorrow and next week and next year. Between the random miasma of Google Search and the equally fallible systematic focus of Reference falls the shadow.

Online Dictionaries: 1 Essay

This essay by Philip Harvey first appeared in Eureka Street in March this year. A critical webography of online dictionaries follows this blog.

'Words, words between the lines of age,' sings Neil Young. His bittersweet song about relationships makes us dwell on how words that are meant to say everything are still just words. Sometimes they are all we have, and we try to say it the best way we can. We do not always succeed, and that is not just because of the words. But we will go on trying, we are all caught up in the daily traffic of words.

The lyric also reminds us that words themselves are born, alter, age, transmute, and even die. Their meaning shifts through time and may have a completely different — need I say awesomely different — meaning between age groups, regions, times and educations.

This has never been truer than in the case of 21st century English, the lingua franca of the planet. The sheer variety and vitality of usage across every continent by those for whom English is first, second, third, even 23rd language brings us rather too quickly to the whole matter of meaning. Meaning is a service of online dictionaries, but not always their forte. Meaning is what online dictionaries purport to supply, but how thoroughly and deeply depends on the purposes of their makers. Meaning is the aim of dictionaries, but whose meaning? And when were the definitions created?

Thoughts like this fizzed in my mind each time I visited Merriam-Webster, which was for a time the main internet dictionary through a process of availability, popularity, and algorithms. Samuel Johnson famously defined oats as 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'. Merriam-Webster was not so susceptible to prejudice and gave short, straightforward definitions that were simple fare indeed. Merriam-Webster now seems to have gone the way of all business, so we turn to The Free Dictionary (American Heritage and Collins) which gives four definitions for oats, no history, and unhelpful links to muesli websites.

Better in this regard is dictionary.com (Random House) with six definitions and history of origins, including 'sowing of wild oats', the kind reported frequently in James Boswell's journals and studiously overlooked by his friend Johnson. But in none of these are we given an idea of which usages are the most common, nor is a date placed on archaic uses of 'oats'. This site has a voice box to click for pronunciation, which is good if you wish to say 'oats' like someone from Massachusetts.

The poet W.H. Auden kept the 13-volume Oxford English Dictionary in his writing room: he once called the room 'the cave of making'. At an older age his set had become so over-used it was falling apart and he considered purchasing a new one. Today the OED is online, so Auden would have had to subscribe, then renew that subscription each year. He would have foregone the pleasure of paging through entries at leisure for the rigour of pointing at entries with a cursor.

This might be okay if he wanted both the latest and the least meanings of a word, or wished to identify earliest uses of that word in any of its usages, but it would have cramped a serendipitous reading style that presented Auden with variations of a word, and have prohibited him from mining the forgotten words he set into his lapidary late poems.

In many ways this has always been the choice, between the concision of the popular prescriptive dictionary and the expansiveness of the great descriptive dictionaries like the OED. When we want a quick definition, we want a dictionary that matches our word in short order. This can be a problem when assessing new words. When we are translating, we want all uses of the word, proceeding by common usage.

The quality of internet definitions can be woeful, or wonderful, which is due in part to its democratic range of choice. The free online internet still needs to be treated with caution as a final reference authority and it is sometimes a worry to know that globally people turn to this source for definitive meanings every day.

Despite appearances, the forgoing grump is not aimed at the internet, but at the lack of thoroughness in free online dictionaries. You say tomarto and I say tomayto. The free ones are too often bland and incomplete in their definitions, while those that are complex and exhaustive require a credit card. Quality, it seems, comes at a price. This divide between what is free and what has a price tag on the internet is an increasing educational issue. Rich institutions and individuals can pay for the words we all use, while others cannot, or just do not.

But then maybe it's the internet itself that has become one big dictionary and our task is learning how to read it as we would any other new reference work at home or in our libraries and offices. I first heard the word 'bogan' over 20 years ago. It seemed to describe very imprecisely certain kinds of young men who loitered on railway stations and plazas. They wore running shoes, black clothes, loose cardigans and never combed their hair. In my mind's eye they resembled Kurt Cobain, but Cobain probably wasn't a bogan. The free online dictionaries today maintain that a bogan is simply a tranquil stretch of water found in Canada.

But interestingly, Wikipedia itself has the best overall perspective on this term. Its entry includes links to dedicated bogan websites, leaving one to understand that while 'bogan' is a term of derision for some, for others it is a badge of honour.

The OED does not provide this kind of sweep, and if you can pay for the inestimably worthy Macquarie, one of our seriously undervalued literary creations, you will be told that bogan is a colloquial noun (mildly derogatory) for 'a person, generally from an outer suburb of a city or town and from a lower socio-economic background, viewed as uncultured. Compare barry, bennie, boonie, Charlene, Charmaine, cogger, feral; especially Qld bevan; Chiefly Qld bev-chick; WA bog; ACT booner; ACT charnie bum; Tasmania chigger; Riverina gullie; Melbourne Region mocca; Victoria scozzer; Chiefly NSW westie.' These last are baffling even to many of the locals, let alone the global villagers who read this terminology beyond the land girt by sea.

Neil Young's lyric plays with the expression 'reading between the lines', that process not just reserved for poetry and government documents where the actual meaning of the words is less important than the implied meaning.

Another positive of treating the internet as a dictionary is the stupendous number of uses we can find for any one word. Those with the time can be extracting examples of the word in every setting, whether in its plain use, its minor uses, or its subtle 'between the lines' uses. By comparison, Samuel Johnson only had his memory to draw on, a circle of friends, and a substantial library. Prizes go to the best Johnsonian pronouncement upon being shown the internet.

Keyword Mythology

Philip Harvey

In recent years literary criticism talks about everything “outside the text” or says that, in fact, there is nothing “outside the text”. This is a means to reading that has met with a mixed press. But I would say we have to start seriously thinking again in our study and in our library work about everything that is “outside the internet”.  Because, for too many years now we have permitted people to live under the delusion that there is nothing “outside the internet”.

I cannot count the number of times I have found what I am searching for online by resorting to a printed book. Not that I’m counting.

And I have lost count, not that I started, of the number of learned articles in recent years published online and in print on the weaknesses and pitfalls of keyword searching.

What started out as a reference librarian’s dream, one-stop online information from every imaginable source, has turned into a quagmire of endless return pages, unmediated and undifferentiated links, too much information and often none of it immediately helpful.

Over ten years ago a common view took hold that the only search strategy you needed for a database was the keyword search. This view, some would still say this opinion, was augmented by the internet search engines of the time, where keyword was your one option for getting at the zillions of word hits online. Even the concept of search limiting, a byword of library catalogues, was news to many in the world of IT. Keyword was not so much an option as gospel, fitted onto every imaginable computer object as the failsafe way to the data.

Simultaneously a second myth about the internet emerged: it’s all out there and this is the End of the Book. Even though educated and informed web travellers knew this was not the case, and I include librarians in that number by definition, nevertheless we saw the easy takeover of the keyword as search of choice (there was never a choice) and the relegation of the book to some secondary and curious extra when it came to searching. Either/Or won the day over Both/And. But only for now.

My colleague in the Library Susan Southall is completing her thesis on the Rich in the Gospel of Luke. This means rigorously verifying all citations in the text for the footnotes. One quote was proving a particular challenge to re-locate, the first use of the expression “The very wage they receive is the pledge of their slavery.” This quote concerns the idea in the Roman Empire that a free person is no better than a slave when he receives a wage. It is Cicero, in his De Officiis, but where in De Officiis? A Google search delivered plenty of hits, in fact too many hits and not one of them able to take Susan to the quote itself or the precise Book and Paragraph and Line in the Cicero. It may be down there on page 17 of the thousands of hits, but then it mayn’t. Her solution was to check the classical dictionaries and books of quotations lining the Reference Section of the Carmelite Library. She found the reference first time: De Officiis Book 1, Para. 159. Where was that information? The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3^rd edition. Thus armed, Susan returned to the screen to find a classical database that had the full text of the work. Thanks to Google (thankyou Google) Susan found the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. This is recommended. There she found lots of Cicero, and after careful self-tuition in how to search for author, title, and word, confirmed via Perseus the exact place where this wage slavery quote is employed in Cicero.

By mistake she also discovered that by putting an ess on ‘wage’ in Google she found a link to the phrase “Wages of Sin” in Cicero. Amazing, but that’s another story.

The idea that print books are one of the best tools for searching the internet is not news to a real reference librarian, or scholar. That standard reference tools continue to deliver ready information in-depth should not be a surprise, it’s why they were devised in the first place. But why doesn’t everybody appreciate this basic reality? The issue and the challenge is in educating our users in how to manage what looks like, to them, a stack of dated volumes that couldn’t possibly contain a jottle of what they’re on about. Some of our users only believe the answer exists if there is an app for it.  

All of this huge generation of research activity is premised on the governing power in our lives of the Keyword. In order to get what you want and to go where you want to go, you have to ‘make friends’ with the keyword search. Manoeuvre around it if you can, if that is possible, but the Keyword is the decisive mover in our study and reading. While it is the locus of our literary lives, the keyword to all mythologies, then we have to get creative with its centrifugal reality. Our relationship with the keyword search is not going away anytime soon.