Search Tool of the Future? Librarians

In the 1957 movie “Desk Set,” Katharine Hepburn played a research librarian for a fictional television network and Spencer Tracy played a computer systems engineer who sets up a room-sized computer that the librarians fear will eliminate their jobs. A telephone call comes asking whether the King of the Watusis owns an automobile. The question is fed into the computer, and out comes a lengthy movie review of “King Solomon’s Mines.”

This sounds like what happens today using the search techniques available on the World Wide Web. “The state of information retrieval on the Internet is equivalent to what librarians were doing in the 1950s,” says Christine Borgman, chairwoman of the Department of Library and Information Science at UCLA. “The on-line world is chaotic.”

And librarians may yet play a big part in sorting it all out. Too often regarded as shy spinsters in boring, low-paying jobs, librarians are an untapped source of innovation and expertise in an age when everyone talks about information overload but nobody ever does anything about it.

Certainly, computer scientists don’t seem to be making a whole lot of progress in helping us find information needles in digital haystacks--and some say they never will. At a recent conference called “Society and the Future of Computing,” sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Phil Agre, a computer scientist at UC San Diego, provocatively announced that “computer science is dead.”

Agre went on to explain that while progress in operating systems and processor speeds can be expected to continue, these technologies are no longer the bottlenecks of the computer revolution. What’s needed today is a better understanding of how to organize and present information, and how people use that information once they have it.

The focus of research should shift, said Agre, to social scientists, psychologists and librarians--to people instead of machines. Computer scientists, he noted, tend to think of what’s in a computer as data rather than information. They need the help of librarians, who have been organizing information since the Egyptian dynasties.

“What bothers me most,” says Borgman, “is that computer people seem to think that if you have access to the Web, you don’t need libraries. But what’s on the Web now is just a fraction of what’s in an average-sized research library.” And what’s on the Web is a mess. There is nothing even approaching the information-organization systems librarians have developed, such as the Machine Readable Cataloguing system, called “Mark,” that allows libraries to share data and documents worldwide without confusion.

One key problem with the information available on the Internet is that standards of classification are almost always added to electronic documents after the fact, instead of being built in from the start. Librarians use standards that are universal, and the material they shelve, or put on-line, uses codes that are the same everywhere--the Dewey Decimal System, ISBN numbers and classifications from the Library of Congress.

The anarchic Internet contains no such standards, and thus search mechanisms are forced to look for keywords in unstructured data, typically producing the equivalent of the “King Solomon’s Mines” movie review.

As a solution, computer scientists are keen on developing “agents,” software sleuths that will search the Net for whatever a user is looking for and retrieve it: Apple Computer has dubbed its experimental Net searcher “Cyberdog.” But these agents, most of which are still quite primitive, will be far more effective if the information on the Net is rationally organized. Librarians are already working on how to link the Web’s standard coding language, HTML, to structured systems of information retrieval.

One reason librarians are largely neglected as a rich source of information expertise undoubtedly lies in our common stereotypes of librarians and our attitudes about libraries. While the Internet is widely touted as the greatest invention since fire and cyberspace is hyped as the next frontier, libraries are struggling. Society seems to have turned its attention away from public libraries, once admired by Andrew Carnegie as the foundation of democracy, and toward the technology of the Internet and the Web.

Librarians are thus seen as old-school people chained to declining institutions, in contrast to the go-go world of on-line services.

Borgman believes that librarians will nonetheless become increasingly important in the information economy. Right now, a Web user can’t tell the difference, looking at a search query result, between a “vanity page” and something truly valuable.

This is the role librarians have always served, says Borgman: identifying, selecting, cataloguing, and preserving a culture’s treasured ideas. The job is getting more complicated, but what librarians have accomplished in 5,000 years we often take for granted. Like the ditzy heroine in the new movie “Party Girl,” we may all have to discover the joys of the Dewey Decimal System.

In “Desk Set,” the happy ending is that Spencer Tracy’s big computer, Emerac, is saved from folly by the librarians. Let’s hope we have the same experience.

Gary Chapman can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].