On Barriers

Seems appropriate to start the new year with a few words about the reason for the name of this site.

I've just been reading a piece called "Lines in the Sand [1]" (N. Ouroussoff, New York Times, Jan 1 2006) about the architecture of the security barrier in Israel/Palestine. It speaks, among other things, of the logical/perceptual "six-dimensional space" arising from the intertwined roads, tunnels, corridors, and bifurcated villages its designers are creating, wherein members of each of the two sides in the disputes essentially live in two distinct three-dimensional spaces occupying the same geospatial boundaries.

I'm not going to write about what I think about that barrier here, or the one that so many of us remember that fell in the fall of 1989. It's interesting for me to remember how I learned about the fall of that older, long-broken barrier, though - I learned the news online.

In the fall of 1989 I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, busy with the silly thoughts umich freshmen have of midterms and dating and football (oy, so much football). Being at umich in 1989 also meant, for many of us, being online - using the hearty, decades-old MTS [2]. For me, this basically meant email and newsgroups, and the most active newsgroup I was in was for a comparative western religion course. The professors and students in this class were particularly interesting, and their discussion spilled outside of the enormous MLA building lecture hall into the newsgroup and continued on at all hours. It took steady work to just keep up, which I was no doubt doing the night of 11/9 when the Berlin Wall [3] fell. The previously fluid conversation was interrupted with several cheers and cries of hallelujah (literally) before anybody actually said what it was they were cheering about. I logged off and watched the news on tv with my hallmates the rest of the night.

So, with those two barriers in mind, along with the vivid metaphors describing them, of six-dimensional spaces and shared sky, you might ask: what does this have to do with One Big Library?

The answer was stated, if I'm not mistaken (sorry, I don't have an exact reference, does anyone know?), at the turn of the 19th century, which makes it an unfulfilled, three-century-spanning statement of user requirements more potent than FRBR [4]: that libraries must provide users with the ability to search and browse the whole bibliographic universe, and keep a locally-optimized subset of that universe close at hand. (For an interesting take on cache hierarchies, read from about one-third of the way down here [5].)

That premise, the access to the whole bibliographic universe piece, is utterly unfulfilled in every library I know well today. In its place we manage barriers in information-space which evoke the same kinds of metaphors.

To see the "shared sky", look at any decent web search interface. Look at Worldcat [6], or RedLightGreen [7].

To see six-dimensional spaces, see how a library visitor at one institution must navigate through an unreliable series of disconnected, unusable interfaces to get to an individual item, and compare it with the variegated path a peer from another institution must take to the same item. Consider how unreasonably difficult a third path to the same item might be to the next young file clerk with a mind like Einstein's who can only visit her local public library branch through its online presence during off-hours from her own job (seeing as how the branch itself probably keeps much shorter hours due to recent budget cuts).

The barriers are present in a local-collection-centric view of the catalog, which undermines everything we've known for centuries about user behavior.

The barriers are present in our standards and protocols, which remain overly complex, outside of the mainstream, and incompatibly implemented.

The barriers are present in the horrendous online resource licensing arrangements we have painted ourselves into, forsaking for years the optimized-local-access and content-preservation pillars of librarianship. When people bray about the need for Open Access, it's hard not to respond with "why the hell have you been paying those subscription fees and signing away rights in those licenses all along?" (Sure, in some notable cases, we haven't done that, but as a profession, we have.)

Again, I'm no historian, political pundit, or cultural scholar, and I'm not about to pontificate about whether the physical barriers in Germany and Israel are intrinsically good or bad. In libraries, though, these barriers -- invisible though they may be -- are driving us into the ground.

If anything, we might guess from the fall of the wall in Germany that barriers will fall. We might also guess the same from patterns of behavior on the internet... look at how quickly security schemes are cracked, and how quickly software flaws are exploited, and how quickly techniques are developed to unite online communities, and how quickly news travels.

The choice we librarians need to make about the fall of our own barriers -- and, I'll predict, 2006 is the year to make our choice -- is whether we wield the hammers ourselves, or whether we read about it online.