A Blog of Her Own

Today’s fun distraction courtesy of Userfriendly’s link of the day. Write a song and have sung to you by the stars.

Let them sing it for you

Boing Boing: Video game scenes recreated in legos

Really, it needs no comment. The direct photo link at flickr is here.

OK, it’s no secret that I became hooked on video games because of Katamari (thanks Marcus), so when BoingBoing mentioned this, I had to check it out. Of course, the lack of English is a little disconcerting to this anglophone. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Have fun.

Boing Boing: We Love Katamari Damacy minigame

OK, I’ve finally taken the time to write. But what to write about? Well, I’d like to comment (rant?) about a common idea/theme from The Alberta Library’s Federated Search Symposium last week. There have been postings about the symposium at the SuperNet blog and The Distant Librarian.

The issue–Buy-in by library faculty and staff. That is, observations by those who have implemented FSS systems show that end-users are likely to embrace the new technology, librarians are more likely to be resistant to it. Often this is because they have the philosophy that searchers should be taught how to search properly.

The SuperNet blog is my ‘work’ blog. This is my personal one and here comes a personal commentary on this ‘philosophy’ that means information consumers (end-users) have to learn how to properly search…

I’m not a librarian. I’m not an ‘information professional.’ I just want to find my stuff. I don’t really care about learning how to do it better, I actually want to be provided with the tools that do it better for me. There are other things I would rather do with my time.

As a system administrator, can you imagine if I had the philosophy that I should be teaching computer users how to configure their machines better, teaching them what DNS is and how to just create their own host files or change their DNS settings to go to the ‘best’ resolvers? How likely is it anyone would use my services again? End-users of computer systems want to be able to use their computers and networks as tools. They want these tools to make it easier to accomplish their tasks, be they creating documents or surfing the web or reading a book. They don’t care how. They don’t want to know how the Internet works, they just want it to work.

This is how most information consumers want to find stuff. Roy Tennant has said it repeatedly, “Librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find.” We don’t care how we find, as long as we find. Searching forever for the perfect source just isn’t worthwhile.

I’m a little grumpy about this elitist attitude. Not everyone needs to be information literate–just like not everyone needs to be technology literate–in order to use information (or technology). Maybe that’s why Google’s kicking everyone’s butt in the search wars–they realize that consumers of information don’t want to have to learn where the best stuff is (which database to search)–search everything!

OK, rant over. Librarians are good people.