Lettertray

I’ve been working lately on some pilot projects using library data in Web Services (big “W” and big “S”, mind you) repositories. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around REST, or rather what it means for the real-library world. I like it. A lot. The crazy thing is that libraries really haven’t even caught on to the Web Services bandwagon, much less gone through the whole RPC/SOAP/REST soul-searching to discover what we want our next generation technologies to look like. Instead we still get into debates about MARC fields and unfixed bugs in our dying ILSs and such. Sigh.

Thankfully there are a bunch of community-based projects that are exploring some of these issues. I’m think of Evergreen, which is building in some really nice features for supporting web-services calls against catalog data; OpenSearch, which is attempting to standardize some ways to share search process data; and more broad protocol-type projects like unAPI. My problem with this is not that these projects exist - they’re terrific. The problem is that the issues, & technologies that make these projects terrific have failed to become a part of librarians’ vocabularies. Many of the folks who are developing these systems do work in the library world, but many of them are programmers/techies first and library people second. For a profession that has always clung desperately to it’s own sense of relevance, why are librarians merely becoming consumers of information-management technologies and not designers, researchers, and zealots?

It isn’t that librarians should all become programmers - we shouldn’t (at least not all of us). Nor should librarians’ central concern be about bleeding-edge technologies. But the fact is that we already spend massive amounts of time, energy, and resources dealing with and learning about library-centric technologies that are either dead or might as well be. What is the catalyst that brings us, as a profession, back to a place where we’re not merely digesting interfaces & services that are served to us by vendors, but actually dictating the terms of how our collections should be made accessible long-term and across the web?

None of this discussion is new, and folks like Roy Tennant have been talking openly about these issues for years and years. I think that is what is so frustrating. Librarians, as a profession, are aware of these issues, but we have such poor leadership and we’re such a highly-stratified profession that we haven’t been able to gain a consensus about how our technological existence can evolve.