BBC PRESENTER [clip from Tomorrow's World]: Imagine a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted, and every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home via an information superhighway, a high capacity digital communications network. It sounds pretty grand, but it all comes down to computers communicating. And in fact, that's already happening on something called the internet. [MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. We are happening on the internet, in part. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with everybody, Alex, Marlee, Fred, Cody, myself. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme, and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called "The Future in the Past."
The future in the past is a grammatical construct that is used to express the idea of something that someone thought would happen in the future, speaking from the perspective of some point of time in the past.
What?
[LAUGHTER]
The present is the future of the past, but if we were talking about this present moment right now, a few minutes ago, at that time, it was the future.
What do you--
And now that moment has come and happens in the present. And now it's something that has happened in the past, but in the past, it was the future. So if we talk about what we thought would happen now, then it becomes future in the past. Got it?
I thought I had it when we started, and I thought that I would continue to have it, but now I'm wondering if I should have thought-- you know what, Fred? Got it. Carry on.
As a profession, librarians are always looking to the future and wondering how our jobs might change. And in the late '90s, early 2000s, a lot, I know, was written about how this thing called the internet was going to radically impact library resources, services, and employees.
So today, we'll be looking at just one example of what librarians 25 years ago thought about the future of our profession. We're going to read an article together, people.
It's another reading club episode.
That's right. Our songs today are about the future, also about the present, also about the past. Three different themes, three different perspectives on the timeline, three concepts, each one of which can't exist without the other two. To start our journey into the future, present from the past, let's begin with the track 3 is a Magic Number from Schoolhouse Rock, which just warms my Gen-X heart.
Fred, whatever you are on, I would like some later.
Right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK, "3 IS A MAGIC NUMBER"]
(SINGING) 3 is a magic number Yes, it is It's a magic number Somewhere-- That's a magic number 3 is a Magic Number from the Schoolhouse Rock series of my youth. A lot of us here--
Just say the past, Fred.
The past, I'll say it. Yeah, I'm starting to get nostalgic and reminiscing, but, OK.
Starting.
Yeah, our show today is called "The Future in the Past," and it's a reading club. So we have decided to read and discuss a particular article today, and that article is called "Yahoo! and the Abdication of Judgment." It has a subtitle, "Are We Digging Our Professional Graves by Embracing Our Patrons' Approach to Internet Searching," by Laura Cohen, who is a librarian at SUNY Albany. And this was from American Libraries Magazine, published in January 2001. So this is not a current reading club.
And that's the ALA Magazine.
That is. The American Library Association. Yep.
Some people listening don't know that.
So, to get our readers up to speed, I know that all of you did the homework and read the article. So I'm going to get our readers up to speed just by reading the very short first paragraph to get a sense of what this article is all about. "Imagine that a new encyclopedia has come onto the market. A great deal of its content consists of items for sale.
In the foreword to this set, the editors state that most entries were submitted by the general public and thereby comprise the bulk of its content. They expressly disavow any claims for reviewing their selections. "Next, imagine that word of mouth and vigorous name branding work together to make this the most popular encyclopedia in America. In response to this popularity, most libraries acquire it. Users flock to consult it.
Based on this prodigious use, librarians expend considerable effort teaching it as a valuable research tool. 'Impossible,' you say? But this is exactly what is happening with Yahoo." You might have thought I was going to say Wikipedia.
Isn't it? Yahoo! MARLEE GIVENS: (VOCALIZING) Yahoo! There you go. I knew it would happen.
There's an exclamation point and a jingle from the commercials. Right. Yeah.
OK. So bring that out a little bit more. You say we were expecting Wikipedia at the end there because all of those sort of metaphorical-- well, all those analogies, all those metaphors.
The description of that kind of service, that platform, that this author was talking to--
An encyclopedia, yeah.
Yeah, that's what Wikipedia became. And it has dominated. But she was talking about something called Yahoo!, which if you weren't alive in 2001 or exist-- or even young in school--
If you were blissfully ignorant of the internet in 2001, wouldn't that be? Fred, you gave us a piece of paper here that has the Yahoo! Homepage circa 2000, right? Marlee, can you say again the thing you said when you saw this?
Yes. So, around that same time, circa 2000, I was working in a library and two of my colleagues left that library to go work for America Online to create something similar to what we're all looking at on paper right now, which is really, it's a directory of websites.
It's an internet libguide.
It's an internet lib-- it is. Yeah, it's subject categories, and subcategories, and curated websites that--
Let me run through this real quick. So there's a big box, Yahoo! Shopping, where you can buy apparel, bath & beauty, computers, electronics, flowers, food and drink, music, video, DVD, Sports Authority, Gap, Eddie Bauer, Macy's, digital cameras, Pokemon, MP3 players, and DVD players.
But also there's a categories Arts and Humanities, Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News and Media, Recreation, Sports, Reference, Regional Science, Social Science, Society, and Culture, which I guess is not any of those other things I just said. And then a News bar and then more stuff up top, including Auctions, Messenger, Personals, Stock Quotes, My Yahoo!, and all other kinds of things.
To interject here, if you remember, also another tech giant that emerged around this time, Google. Their famous mission at the time was to organize all the world's information. This is how Yahoo! chose to tackle that mission of organizing the world's information.
Catalog it.
We're going to catalog it as web links on our site.
And if I may be so bold, even the language we're using right now is a reminder that we all went crazy and said, all the world's information is what we can find on the internet. As opposed to all the other stuff that wasn't on the internet.
It's like-- it's one of those things where librarians saw something in the future coming and fretted about the job displacement, the seismic shift in the job displacement that they thought was coming. Alex, what was the term that you used that I--
Oh, I said it was the boogeyman. Everyone has a boogeyman in their profession, right?
Yahoo! Was the boogeyman at the time. I think one of several. I think Google also was a boogeyman, at the time, in 2001. CHARLIE BENNETT: Probably Napster, too.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
For sure.
Livewire.
And not to call out the article, specifically. This article goes on to really denigrate Yahoo! And not to call out, I should say, the article author, specifically--
It denigrates Yahoo! as a research tool.
Yes. They, the author, Laura Cohen, and she's definitely representative of a large contingent of the librarian population at the time. So I'm not trying to call her out, specifically. But a large contingent at the time really thought that, well, what's on the internet should be recreational, and you should do that in your spare time, but if you really need to serve your information needs, you should go to a library or a librarian.
And the teaching of Yahoo! meant that we were abdicating our judgment.
Certainly in the view of Laura Cohen.
This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more about the future of libraries in the past after a music set.
File this set under Z731.C78.
[FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS, "FUTUREPHOBIC"]
Song for a Future Generation by The B-52's. And Future Phobia by Frankie and The Witch Fingers. Those are songs about wondering what the future holds.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is a reading club episode. We're reading the 2001 article "Yahoo! and the Abdication of Judgment." And I have to say, I got stuck on the word, abdication.
That's a serious--
That's very early on in the article to get stuck.
I mean, she doesn't really put it in this way, but I mean, abdication immediately makes me think of royalty, and the fact that we are giving up our crown by succumbing to our users' desire to use Yahoo! or something like that.
And that is the point. I mean, she does express that we have a responsibility, and this is all in the past, but that librarians have a responsibility to manage users' expectations and behaviors of information-seeking technologies, and that by, as she says, "teaching Yahoo! As a research tool," we are abdicating that responsibility, instead of-- I'm thinking-- telling everyone, "this is bad, don't use it." That seems to be the option that she's providing, right?
She does say in a little handy sidebar on this article, if the three pages of this article were just too long for you to read, she has a little "too long, didn't read" section at the side. It says very clearly, "librarians shouldn't endorse Yahoo! as a reference tool because," and gives some reasons that basically come down to, yeah, the library is important and the librarian is important, and handing that off to some technological tool is abdication.
Yeah, and if we let that in and say, this is a useful tool, if Yahoo! is a useful tool, then we are basically saying, we are not useful.
Right. And I mean, I doodled quite a bit in the margins of after-- first of all, I printed it out. I did not read it online.
Gen-X. All right.
I printed it out, too.
And I mean, at some point, I wrote, "why not both?"
Yeah, that was my reaction was. I was like, isn't the way forward, or the happy medium, is we teach folks how to question maybe these tools and recognize the gaps, right? But like, that's what I think about when we talk about Wikipedia and the archives. It's like, oftentimes, I'll tell folks, like, go look at the footnotes of a Wikipedia article. That's what I think is valuable is go see what the sources are that people are looking at that let's you know how deeply researched is it.
And then a lot of times, if it's a good one, hopefully they've linked to a nice text or an archival collection, who's to say? And then that's where you should go from there. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, Switzerland. Listen, neutrality is what got us in trouble. No, I'm sorry. I just wanted to tell that joke. But isn't that also part of the article is that compromise, or neutral, or nuanced take is a problem, to our article writer, and I have to assume more than just the article writer.
That at the time, there were some people who felt like this must be actively pushed against.
Yeah. Sounds familiar. Really.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, my way or the highway, or it's us or them, or zero sum.
I did feel reading this, like, nothing has changed.
There are assumptions that the author makes here about that primacy of the librarian role. Like, we select databases because they meet our standards. And so we should encourage users to use those. Whereas I think now, 24, 25 years later, my understanding at least of it is that there are tools out there, some of them which the library buys, some of them which we don't buy, and they're just available.
And it's, like you were saying, Alex, it's the librarian's job or the archivist's job to say, this is what that tool searches and this is what you can and can't find there. Whether it's something public or whether it's something that we subscribe to, because even the things that we subscribe to that are "curated," quote, unquote, they're still products put together by commercial companies.
They are. They are. Yeah. I mean, one of the comments in the article was Yahoo! Is a commercial property that seeks to generate traffic. I mean, don't scholarly sources also do that?
Doesn't TV?
Yeah.
I feel like there's a very easy way to make the joke about how the internet broke us. The internet ruined everything. And so I'm not making that joke so much when I say, this feels like another one of the ways that the internet completely overwhelmed people's cognitive map of the world. Just trying to say, imagine there's an encyclopedia. It's like, OK, first off, it's not an encyclopedia. What was that thing? It's not a dump truck that you put information on. It's a series of tubes.
Like, this kind of impossibility of understanding, even metaphorically, what it meant, the speed of the transmission of data and replicability of data at the time.
And by choosing this article, it's not my intention to go, ha-ha, look at these librarians that were writing back in 2001.
Not at all. No, no.
That's not my intention. It's really, I just wanted to provide the context that that's the perspective, because I think you put it very well. It overwhelmed all cognitive sense of the information landscape, the rise of the internet and search tools like Yahoo! and Google. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, just imagine if someone were to try to say, don't teach the card catalog. The way that that is curated by people, it's all based on personal experience and data pulled from other places.
Like, the metaphor starts to collapse in on itself, because Yahoo! was just the face of the revolution that took the nation by storm, as I read. I'm sorry, I know we're not supposed to talk about the actual writing, but revolutions that take the world by storm. It's like, what a mixed metaphor. You could drink that as a cocktail.
Well, speaking of metaphors, a couple of years after this article came out, I was at some sort of one day conference kind of thing. There was some library thought leader who gave a presentation. And she said, if you think about, in the old days, there was in a town there would be a well and everyone came to the well to get their water. And the library used to be the well where people came to get their information.
But then in other cases, there's a stream, and people go at different points in the stream to get their water. And now the library is just one of those points in the stream. And so, I mean, this was just-- I mean, yeah, a year or two after this article that seems to be sort of afraid of the internet, then we quickly had to embrace the internet because the internet just became so much bigger than us. We realized it was something we couldn't control.
And shout out to the author. I think, Charlie, you did some digging and found out that the author of this article, probably in subsequent years, changed her tune a little bit.
Straight up. I mean, anytime someone writes something that says, "this is a position that I believe we all should take," you got to read stuff that they write afterward. Because Laura Cohen then did write about how we should listen to users and how we should try and figure out what users want and how they want to use the library, which is, in opposition to, I will say, opposition to one of her points, that the librarians' goal and purpose was to modify and change behavior.
They were supposed to stand on the well and say, "don't drink from the stream. This water is mine and it's better." So gross.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, that's a good breaking point, I think. You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you break, Fred? We'll talk more about what our profession thought about the future 25 years ago on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) I know for sure There ain't no cure
Hi, I'm Jon Lindaman from the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Obsolete Library Science. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. More wattage in the cottage. Tune it in and tear the knob off. (SINGING) You betcha Only rock n' roll
Today's episode is called "The Future in the Past." And we're taking a look at one specific article from almost 25 years ago that talks about the future of librarianship. That article is "Yahoo! and the Abdication of Judgment," which is a catchy title, in more ways than one. In the '90s and the early 2000s, aw, there were a lot of articles written about the internet and the future of libraries.
Here are some of the real actual articles written in the past that we could have chosen for our discussion today.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
From Reference and User Services Quarterly in 2000, "Has the Internet Changed Anything in Reference?" From the American Libraries Magazine in 1999, "A Choice of Futures-- Is It Libraries Versus Information?" From the journal Science in 1998, "Assembling the World's Biggest Library on Your Desktop." OK, and that one really makes me crazy. From the journal Searcher, also in 1998, "The Internet-- The Beginning or The End of Information?"
[SHUDDERS]
From Information Outlook in 1997, "The Internet-- Threat or Asset?" Shouldn't DARPA be writing white papers? OK, we could go on, and there are so many more. And I could make fun of all of them, but I could also take them all seriously. And it's important to recognize that you could take all of these seriously. These are real things that people were thinking about. We'll do an episode on maybe one of these in the future, when now is the past in the future.
[SIGHS]
File this set presently under BQ9288.S57 in a punctual way.
[THE CALIPHS, "TODAY, TOMORROW"]
[SHANA FALANA, "RIGHT NOW IS ALL WE KNOW"] Right now is all we know
And indeed, Right Now is All We Know by Shana Falana. And before that, we heard, Today, Tomorrow by The caliphs. Songs about situating yourself in the present moment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "The Future in the Past." We read an article called "Yahoo! and the Abdication of Judgment." And it was a reminder, Fred, as you pointed out, that librarian predictions of the future, about that time when the internet was becoming a constant and accepted part of daily life and information seeking, that the predictions were often either skeptical or technophilic. There was not a lot of, let's talk about nuance.
There was not a lot of, hey, how can we operate within this new world? What has it changed about how information works? It was much more, "oh, no, everyone get away," or "dive in. There are so many opportunities. Come on in, fellas. The water is fine."
So this hits home for me because I started library school following year after this article was published. And that dichotomy, the technophobic versus technophilic, I really saw that happening. That was the time when the phrase "move fast and break things" was widely promoted--
Romanticized.
Romanticized.
Even fetishized for disrupting certain industries in order to-- what is it called? Release innovation.
And we heard that in the library environment as well. It trickled down into there.
I became a library person in this era. And reflecting back on my own career recently, because I'm coming up for a promotion soon, I've had to accept that my young librarian self was basically like, hey, nothing matters anymore, let's just do stuff. And that it came from this kind of attitude because I was not going to be a technophobe. I was not going to be a conservative. I was going to join in the optimistic, and disruptive, and free side of the debate. And so I was not really a librarian.
I've made the joke many times. I'm a bad librarian. At the time, it was just because I was moving-- I was counter to all of the standards at the time because of this argument, really. I don't know that I would have been like that in the '90s.
You kind of reacted to this view that Laura Cohen.
Yeah, I was given permission by the other side of the argument that Laura is making.
Right.
Because I-- this is so embarrassing, but I was more aligned with people that we would call tech bros. But at the time, because it was like, oh yeah, we could-- yeah, we can build a treehouse in the library. Oh yeah, we can make a Information Commons. It's like, oh yeah, we can do whatever we want. Have you noticed the internet is here and nothing is the same? That was kind of my naive approach to the profession.
So what do you-- oh, go ahead, Marlee.
No, go ahead.
What do you think about--
[LAUGHTER]
What do you think about Laura's perception that librarians, whether of their own accord or because of just the wave of movement that's coming, that librarians were being pushed aside, kind of, by technology? How true-- I know, Marlee, you were becoming a librarian around that time. How true did it feel to you then versus what do you think it became?
Um--
[LAUGHTER]
CHARLIE BENNETT: The only answer. Yeah, exactly.
I agree. And, Alex, I know you came up through library school much later.
I didn't go to library school.
Or into the library world. Yes, as an archivist, there are many other paths available to you, which you took advantage of. But now that you're-- when you first got into the library and archives world, was there a boogeyman, as you eloquently put it in the previous segment?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for us, it was Wikipedia. And I think that was the thing, especially like-- so I did a lot of stuff with, would I be a history professor? And that was the thing that they were always, like, students take the shortcut, they go to Wikipedia. And I think kind of what I was talking about earlier, for me at least, where I was at in the world, I saw it as an opportunity to talk about, OK, well, what is Wikipedia looking at? Let's talk about primary sources.
Let's talk about archival collections. I still go pull books off the shelf, and I like to go look at the footnotes or the endnotes, because that's-- I want to see what they were looking at for their research. And I think it's thinking about how do we use these tools, because we know-- when I was in school, it was, students are going to use it. Like, there's no stopping it. So we need to lean into it. We need to meet them where they're at.
Imagine if that was the argument that DARE used about drugs.
I know, right. We know they're going to do it. Meet them where they're at.
[LAUGHTER]
Yep, yep. Although, you say that, but I there are clinics where it's just like, let's provide a safe place for people to do drugs. Yeah.
That's what libraries are now, a safe place -
- to do the internet.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Marlee, now that you've had some time to digest it, do you have an answer to Fred's earlier query that ended with an "um" for you?
I mean, I-- I have to admit, like, when Fred was talking about that, I was really distracted by the article itself, about we feel threatened, if we give in, we might as well just go home. And, I mean, there are still shades of that. I think we're still-- I see a lot of library/librarian behavior that is still coming from a place of fear. I mean, there are other things that we're afraid of now, I think.
But at least in the academic library, the professors that we're working with are still telling us, our students don't know how to find good sources. But when we tell them, well, we can help them with that, they're like, no, I don't want you in my classroom.
I just want them to-- and I mean, I actually did hear-- I mean, it wasn't literally, "I don't want you in my classroom," but like, I don't have the time to let-- because, to be honest, if you let the librarian in, we're going to want to take our time and really-- we don't want just 10 minutes.
We want the whole class period to really teach-- to really teach this-- yeah, Exactly so that we can teach them things, like, hey, you should be questioning, even questioning the library sources that we're telling you about. You should be thinking critically about these things. And we can't just do that in a five minute orientation.
I think there was a time also on the technophilic side of the argument that librarians would be-- this internet would make librarians be integral to everything that academia was doing. The research process, the grants that they get, librarians are going to be integrated with every faculty member. And this--
Like a module on a website.
This internet is going to enable-- librarians are going to be more relevant than ever.
The embedded librarian? Yeah, I don't know where that went.
I was one of those once. Once.
Both of those paths kind of did not lead where the articulators of those thoughts thought they were going.
You're allowed to say "fizzled." That's not a bad word.
Well, this is Lost in the Stacks. And today we've been discussing the article "Yahoo! and the Abdication of Judgment," published in American Libraries Magazine in 2001. CHARLIE BENNETT: And you can file this set, this bittersweet set, under HC79.I555G744.
[SATURDAY LOOKS GOOD TO ME, "UNDERWATER HEARTBEAT"]
[THE TUTS, "LET GO OF THE PAST"]
That was Let Go of the Past by The Tuts, and before that, Underwater Heartbeat by Saturday Looks Good to Me. Songs about dealing with the past.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show was called "The Future in the Past." And last week, I really enjoyed hearing what everybody was doing back when I was launching Lost in the Stacks. So let's do that again this week. Our reading club article today was from January 2001, which, as Alex pointed out, off air, was when Wikipedia started. What were you all doing in January 2001? I was getting my behind kicked in Boston in my brief foray into the corporate world. I came screaming back by the end of 2001.
How about you, Fred?
Oh, well, I was-- and by the way, that sounds like a future show, we delve into that one. CHARLIE BENNETT: No, it does not. Well, in January 2001, I was almost 27-years-old, trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
I was working doing medical data entry, also working as a book delivery person for the University of Tennessee Library, playing in my band, still getting used to the idea of getting married, and wondering what I was going to do with a college degree in Creative Writing. I started library school the next year. Marlee?
Well, I was fresh out of library school with a shiny new MLS. M-L-S, not M-L-I-S. And I was ready for those gray-haired librarians to start retiring. Well, these days, I'm the one with the gray hair. So how about Alex to make us feel old?
Yeah. Yeah. I was in sixth grade. Fred said how old he was. I guess I'll say how old I was. I was 11 at the time. And thinking back January 2001, I recall convincing my mom to take me to go see Save the Last Dance, the Julia Stiles feature, if you recall.
Wow.
And that was very exciting for me. And now, Cody, to make us all feel really old, what about you?
Well, January 2001, I was in third grade and entering public school for the first time, realizing that I was way ahead in math and really behind in science and history.
And with that, let's roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: Lost in the Stacks is a long running old person's collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. Legal counsel and a safe place to use the internet are provided by the Burruss Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: Thank you, Phillip. Special thanks to Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Alta Vista, Lycos, Xcite, Infoseek, Even Gopher.
Am I forgetting any?
Metacrawler.
And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to the podcast feed, and a web forum, if you want to get in touch with us and tell us what you were doing in January of 2001.
Next week, more from the intersection of the past, present, and future when we do a guide book episode on retro tech at the Georgia Tech Library.
So it's time for our last song today. The future may not have led all librarians to Yahoo!. It came close to dominating all things online, until it didn't. So let's close with a song that shares a name with this not quite dead legacy website that we fondly remember. This is Yahoo!-- and it even has the exclamation point-- by Erasure, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[ERASURE, "YAHOO!"]