This old profession
“I don’t think Senator Dole is too old to be president. It’s the age of his ideas that I question.”
—Bill Clinton (at the 1996–10–16 Presidential Debate)
There’s a point in every car’s lifespan, long before it becomes a priceless antique, when keeping it running simply isn’t worth the expense. Similarly, insurance companies won’t pay out on a claim to spend $4,000 repairing a vehicle with a market value of $2,500.
There’s no logical reason for technical debt to exist. As every system reaches its inevitable end-of-life, particularly as measured by its usefulness in comparison to other alternatives—irrational ties to historical methods and complimentary phobias of new things notwithstanding—it simply doesn’t make sense to maintain that legacy system any longer. The upstart costs of shifting gears and embracing novel ideas can be daunting, but they’ll only grow worse as time goes on.
Aside from being unduly entrenched in the ways that searching used to work, librarians often commit a fundamental error when making decisions about how to best design a user interface for non-librarians.
The thought process here is basically, “I have a graduate degree in library science, along with cultivated expertise in how library technology currently operates, plus an affinity for tinkering with all the ins and outs of the various tools used during the research process, by doing stuff such as reverse engineering ranking algorithms and painstakingly sifting through multiple pages of results from dozens of different platforms in order to track down sources of the highest quality, so surely I’m the person best in touch with the needs and wants of a typical library end user, not to mention their abilities, when it comes to determining exactly how a search interface should be developed. Better yet, it should be built to accommodate my own intransigent, long-established opinions and desires above those of others.”
Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen puts this conceit another way: “One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.”
“They don’t make them like they used to” isn’t always a baseless complaint. Newer doesn’t necessarily mean better, as any reader of McMansion Hell could tell you. However, substantial improvements to the procedures for finding and getting library materials, believe it or not, have and continue to take place. Whenever this happens, the older means of accomplishing those tasks must be allowed to make a graceful exit from our workflows.
Nothing lasts forever. As someone waking up to the fact that they inhabit a body which has by an increasing number of any practical definitions survived past the point of its expected evolutionary purpose, I’m not all that eager for such an inevitable shuffling off to occur, mind you, yet I’m also learning to accept how this manner of ending is an integral part of our existence.
It’s understandably terrifying to think about. That doesn’t make it any less true. Evolution on a generational scale is necessary for our collective survival. Maintaining the status quo carries the highest risk, because a failure to adapt causes extinction. That holds for the imperative malleability of library automation systems and accompanying service models just as certainly as it does with the value of dynamic biological traits in nature.
Further Reading
- Change Your Life — One Tiny Step at a Time
- Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
- Libraries and the Curse of Knowledge
- The Library is a Growing Organism: Ranganathan’s Fifth Law of Library Science and the Academic Library in the Digital Era
- Sam Harris — Death and the Present Moment
- Should you ever NOT listen to user feedback?
- Why Change Is Such A Challenge
