Jason Griffey

Well, we’ve already seen what Gorman (the President-Elect of the American Library Association) thinks of blogs and the blog people. Now we get his comments on Google and the Google Digitization Project in the latest issue of American Libraries.

*sigh*

To the quotes!

Since scholarly books are, with few exceptions, intended to be read cumulatively and not consulted for snippets of information, making those that are out of copyright available by means of a notoriously fallible search engine seems to be, at best, a misallocation of resources.

At best a misallocation of resource? It appears that Gorman believes that people are interested in the Google Dig project in order to find primary materials for research. While that might be ONE reason for something like the GDP, it certainly doesn’t strike me as the way it will popularly be used. I see the GDP being used as a quick and easy way to find quotes, to locate books when all you have is a quote (how many times have reference librarians had to spend hours figuring out where famous quote from scholar X came from?), to do intertextual comparisons that are simply not possible with print resources (I see massive digitization projects like GDP as potentially the biggest innovation in linguistic/pattern related text study ever), and yes, sometimes, to serve as a quick and easy method for those that are not near a library that has access to these works to read them.

And I really want to know what his justification for the “notoriously fallible” line is. That’s just incredibly sloppy writing, to make a judgement like that and not back it up. Then again, it appears that’s what Gorman is really good at, given his last couple of publications.

Any user of Google knows that it is pathetic as an information-retrieval system — utterly lacking in both recall and precision, the essential criteria for efficiency in such systems.

Utterly lacking? Utterly lacking?

At this point I just want to know what planet Gorman has been on for the last 5-7 years.

Google is by far the best search engine on the Internet, indexing and making searchable over, at the time of this posting, 8,058,044,651 web pages. That’s EIGHT BILLION pages. Mr. Gorman…I would love to see your suggestions for a better way to index 8 Billion pieces of disparate information.

Statements like that only show how out of touch Gorman is with the reality of information seekers.

Also, no amount of “research on search engines” is going to overcome the fundamental fact that free-text searching is inherently inferior to controlled-vocabulary systems….Google is supposed to have complex algorithms but still produces piles of rubbish for almost all searches.

And speaking of out of touch with information seekers…Mr. Gorman, there is a reason that our patrons want our OPACs to be “google easy” to use. It’s because Google, as far as the only audience that matters (the patron) gets them the information they need without the need for them to become experts in a controlled vocabulary. Would it be great if everyone memorized LoC subject headings and used them to search for what they need? Possibly. But that will never happen, and in the meantime while we’re waiting on that, full-text searches are the way people find information.

I can only guess again that Gorman actually means something like “Google produces piles of rubbish for specific kinds of searches that I can’t bother to deliniate right now” because it is a demonstrable fact that Google does provide good results. Want to know what demonstrates that? The fact that everyone uses it. The fact that it’s a freaking verb at this point in time. Heck, I can produce excellent results for Google searches, and I don’t try very hard. I have not yet had Google let me down when I need a factual answer to some question (and contrary to Mr. Gorman’s unspoken assumptions, that is what most people are after…random facts).

I can’t describe how disappointed I am in the President-Elect of the ALA. He’s not only come across as petulant and out of touch in his writings, but has repeatedly denegrated technologies that are useful and, in Google’s case, necessary for information seeking at this point in history. For someone who is supposed to be leading the ALA, it appears that his leadership might be in directions that most newer librarians aren’t very happy with. We already have to swim against the current of the established order of things in Library Land. Gorman is simply adding fuel to the fire of the next generation of librarians to come along and revolutionize our understanding of information seeking and gathering.

EDIT: A bit of conversation going on re: this topic over at lisnews.com.

Well, the ALA President_Elect has certainly stuck his foot in an orifice with his recent comments on blogs and bloggers in Library Journal. He’s getting feedback from all over the ‘net, including Instapundit and Slashdot, arguable the two most read blogs in the world. LISNews has covered it, of course, and it’s all the rage on the various library listservs that I’m subscribed to. Other places of note: Jessamyn, Karen Schneider, and FrazzledDad. EDIT: More great stuff from Jessamyn. FURTHER EDIT: Here’s Metafilter’s take on it, with comments from all over.

Gorman’s response is that it was supposed to be satirical. Here are just a couple of noteworthy quotes from his “satirical” writing:

Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People…I had heard of the activities of the latter and of the absurd idea of giving them press credentials (though, since the credentials were issued for political conventions, they were just absurd icing on absurd cakes). I was not truly aware of them until shortly after I published an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times (“Google and God’s Mind,” December 17, 2004).

Yeah…press credentials. Absurd idea. Bloggers have had no real impact on news stories this year or anything. Much less bloggers covering political conventions. And don’t get me started about his comments on Google from the article that is mentioned above. He’s as profoundly mistaken about that as he is about blogging. I hope that he’s aware that Google and OCLC are working together, and that Google can point people to libraries in order to find the book they need.

It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

I’ll admit that his use of “Blog People” instead of the correct term, “blogger” might be support for his claim of satire. It just comes across sounding condescending. And I’ll be proud to count myself in the numbers of those that “have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.” Many, many people have shown that digitization changes everything about access to information. It democratizes information, it allows for nearly costless access to information that previously would be impossible to use, it allows for transformative uses that no one ever considered before…I’m again just befuddled at his lack of understanding of the power of this stuff. It comes across like the people who, upon the invention of the telephone, couldn’t begin to understand why people would ever use one (originally it was thought that telephones would be used for educational and entertainment..piping in lessons or music to the home).

Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

Clearly Mr. Gorman is not particularly familiar with Sturgeon’s Law, because if he was he would know that given the quality of writing of ANYTHING, 90% of it is terrible. As well, Jessamyn points out that this seems to imply that we’re all running to random places and soaking it all in as the One Truth. Yes, lots of blogs are terrible. But if you actually use some information literacy skills and seperate the wheat from the chafe, you end up with the ability to stay current on much, much more than was ever before possible. RSS and aggregators are intrinsically changing the way that information is presented, filtered, and absorbed. Failure to realize this fact will leave someone like Mr. Gorman happily fiddling while Rome burns around him.

Finally, my favorite comment from the Slashdot conversation on this debacle:

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

If the President of the ALA has such a low opinion of bloggers, perhaps his organization should stop giving so many major awards to them.

I think what he actually meant to say was something along the lines of:

“A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable — except for ALA literary award winners such as Orson Scott Card [ornery.org] or Neil Gaiman [neilgaiman.com] or Sherwood Smith [livejournal.com] or David Brin [blogspot.com] or Jane Yolen [janeyolen.com] or Dianne Duane [blogspot.com] or, oh, bugger, you know, all those other ALA award-winning authors who also blog, not that I want to imply that ALA award-winning librarians who blog, like Kathleen de la Peña McCook [blogspot.com], are bad either, and oh, yeah, I definitely don’t want to seem to be criticizing PLABlog [plablog.org], the brand new blog of the Public Library Association [pla.org], especially not when we put out a nifty little press release [ala.org] crowing about it, just last month, because that would look pretty stupid, now, wouldn’t it — er, um, what was I saying, again?”

EVEN FURTHER EDIT: So people are now digging up different quotes that Gorman has made in different publications about blogging/bloggers. Here’s one found by Rachel Singer Gordon on the NEXTGEN list:

“Unfortunately, if there are writers of genius, or talent, or even basic competence out there blogging, I have yet to find them. In the early heady days of the Internet, we were promised that, in the future, everyone could be published. Alas, that promise is being fulfilled, which should remind us all to be wary of what we wish for” (Our Own Selves: More Meditations for Librarians. Chicago: ALA, 2005:208).

And this guy is an example of a librarian that the rest of the world is going to use to judge our profession. *sigh*