Pearl Growing

I know that this post is going to be a bit different than most other this week, because I'm not going to write directly about Henrietta Lacks. Instead, I'm going to write about an information-gathering technique that is much more broadly applied than it would seem in library literature, that of "pearl growing". Now, stick with me, because this actually does apply to Henrietta (or at least to the book). Pearl growing is a term using in reference services for the process of finding a paper applicable to the topic you're researching, looking at the keywords assigned to that paper, and conducting searches based on those new terms. You may only start with one or two words that explain your topic, but through pearl growing, you get a wide vocabulary and a broad base of searchable terms to help you find additional applicable resources.

Now, how does this relate to Henrietta Lacks? Well, I'm taking a bit of artistic license and expanding my definition of pearl growing. If Buckland can classify an antelope as a document (and no, he can't; a document is a VERY strictly prescribed in its sense, as far as this future librarian believes), then I can classify Rebecca Skloot's technique as pearl growing. Skloot goes about gathering information regarding HeLa in a method very similar to that of a reference librarian. A reference librarian may only have books and articles available to him or her to answer the question posed, whereas Skloot is mostly using people and interviews, but nonetheless Skloot uses each interview, telephone call, and medical record as a method for adding words and people to her search. From reading medical records, she gains the names of doctors involved in the medical procedures on Henrietta. From the doctors she finds there, she finds the names of other doctors and the identities of professional organizations concerned with HeLa. Skloot is almost explicit in her use of pearl growing when she talks to the owner of the convenience store in Virginia, who was the proprietor of the to-be HeLa museum and who took her to the cemetery where Henrietta was buried. I don't know that Skloot would describe her technique as pearl growing, but I don't know how we can deny the fact that she adds people and search terms to her repertoire every time she meets another person or reads another person.

So, one may ask the question of why we read the Henrietta Lacks book for LIS 450. Considering that one group in the class is exploring the topic of "One City, One Book", we can certainly argue that we read for similar purposes: reading is a social activity, we glean much experience out of everyone having read the same book. However, I believe that HeLa offers us further insight: the process of interview-based research is not terribly dissimilar [please excuse me, George Orwell, for such an anglophonic (yes, I coined that word) phrase] from that of library research, and we as librarians should keep in mind that the marriage of library and interview-based research can often be quite complementary to one another.

nacre (ˈneɪkə) -n
	the technical name for mother-of-pearl

I have to give a shout-out to Rex Parker, my favorite blogger. Rex Parker daily solves the New York Times crossword puzzle, giving explanations of many of the answers in the day's puzzle. I only comment on his blog today because nacre is an extremely common crossword puzzle, and is related to the growing of pearls. Click on the picture of the crossword to access Rex's blog.

Reference Services

First of all, I want to say that I was a bit surprised by the topics of the readings this week. I had originally thought that the week's focus would be on collection development for two reason: one, we were told in the first week of class that we would cover collection development the week after we did our collection development exercise, and two, with Cat Smith as the guest lecturer, I naturally assumed that she would talk about collection development, since she teaches that class. I could see the connection in that Cat also teaches 451, but I really don't feel like I have closure on my collection development exercise.

With that being said, I suppose I have to talk about reference services (user-centered services), as that's what the readings focused on. I'm mostly going to ignore the Enola Gay article, because it was largely disconnected from the other articles that we read this week. The one correlation I can draw between it and libraries is the desire for censorship by some of the public, and the long-standing tradition of librarians to preserve freedom of speech. Librarians would most certainly want to display the Enola Gay, because it's information, but I'm not sure how they would feel about the "speech" that was written to go along with the display.

Anyway, reference services. I mostly want to focus on Morris's article, because there was a section the "Reference Interview" that stood out to me. First of all, from 451 last year, I remember reading an article in one of the first weeks of class entitled "The Myth of the Reference Interview". I had no idea what a reference interview was at the time, but I quickly discovered that there is a long-standing tradition in libraries of trying to teach about the "reference interview", a scripted, often very long, interview that the reference librarian conducts before trying to find the information that the patron wanted. In short, the interview is highly inappropriate for most reference interactions and is rarely used in practice. At one point, there was some reasoning behind the reference interview, such as when you're trying to find high-level references, such as when someone is trying to write his or her dissertation (still a valid use of the reference interview today), or the fact that the cost of searching was exceedingly high. Reference librarians would narrow down the searcher's topic as much as possible, so that they were querying the database as few times as possible, thus saving the library's time and money. Nowadays, however, database searching is much cheaper, and is rarely limited by either amount downloaded or time spent using the database, effectively eliminating the argument of cost from the equation (ignoring the cost of employing the reference librarian). Second, the reference interview is really only useful for in-depth queries. Typically the patron is either going to ask a simple question ("ready-reference", as it was called once upon a time, such as a state capital or some other factoid-type question) or ask for general information on a topic. Most reference questions, from what I've been told, are for school projects or for medical topics, which generally means that these questions do not go nearly as in-depth as the reference interview would require the librarian to go.

So how does all of this tie into user-centered services? Quite simply: users don't want to spend an hour with the reference librarian, going through a formal reference interview, just to get information for a 500-word school paper or to find out the capital of Arizona. A user-centered service would only involve asking the patrons enough questions to find out what they want to know, and also guiding the choice of subsequent questions by the patron's responses, rather than following a scripted interview. User-centered: gauge what your patron wants. Most likely, it doesn't involve a long, drawn-out reference interview.

The Power To Name Miscellaneous Things as Information

I want to preface this week's readings with a bit of difficulty with the readings primarily this week, but also from previous weeks. The readings so far seem to be written more for people who are already familiar with the topics contained within, rather than serving as an introduction to the topic(s) of the week. Hope Olson's article this week assumes we're already familiar with the Dewey and Library of Congress systems; another article that stands out is the first week's article on archives that just seemed entirely out of context, probably because it tried to show a real-life application of archives, whereas most of the class (myself included) is probably still struggling just to identify what archives and archiving are. I like to think that I'm fortunate to have already taken a couple library classes last year and to be enrolled in such a course as 551 this semester, to provide me with the background knowledge to know where Olson is coming from in her article. However, there are quite a few students in the course who aren't library students, who are probably only marginally familiar with cataloging, and as such are probably having more trouble than even I am understanding some of these articles.

Now, with that out of the way, it's time to discuss this week's articles. I want to focus primarily on the Hope Olson article, because 1) it evoked the most response from me and 2) I think I'll be doing my book report on Everything Is Miscellaneous. So, before I get to Hope, I'm going to discuss those points about Miscellaneous that drove me absolutely nuts. First of all, the book doesn't read as an argument with supporting evidence; rather, it reads as if David Weinberger is trying to defend his position from any possible criticism that one might have of his ideas. This defensive position is only the first of many things that makes this book a difficult to get through. The text itself is really quite simple, but it is the presentation that caused me to take nearly three weeks to read the whole thing. My second complaint is that Weinberger frequently re-uses examples. I'm sorry, that's a bit unfair; he uses, re-uses, recycles, uses again, and then for good measure, he uses once more his examples. Just look at the index: Linnaeus shows up four times, the Linnean Society one additional time outside those four, species three additional times, and insects and invertebrates each shown up scattered throughout these same pages many other times. Photos and digital photos are listed ten times and Flickr is listed nine times. I could go on, but I think my point is made: the repetitive nature of the book made it an exceedingly dull read when I found myself reading the same examples for the third, fourth, or even eighth times. Lastly, Weinberger has a way of making huge leaps near the ends of his chapters in order to tie back in the "miscellaneousness" of everything. I cannot remember exactly which chapter it happened in (another unfortunate side-effect of over-repetition of examples: I cannot distinguish one chapter from another), but I remember reading an in-depth example of something that Weinberger considered miscellaneous, when suddenly I was reading the chapter's conclusion which was completely disparate from what he had been talking about just moments beforehand. Suffice to say, I was not a fan of the Miscellaneous, and the failings of the writing style made me probably miss some of the points that Weinberger was trying to make.

Now, to talk about Hope Olson. This article definitely evoked the most response from me of any article we've read so far this semester. In particular, I wanted to address the point that she made about not being able to represent a black Roman Catholic middle-class male youth in Dewey. First of all, I was surprised that Dewey limits the use of Table 1 (I'm not sure what all is contained in Table 1, but it appears that it's a problem if you're trying to classify someone who fits in several social groups. However, her point that "[p]eople of African descent are diasporized throughout DDC by more than just geographical factors" (p. 655) is a problem that simply lingers from the era and location in which Dewey made his initial cataloging scheme. He created the system at Amherst, essentially WASP central, which would indeed put favor on the white, upper/middle class people. However, at this point, to change this system would require a complete revamping of Dewey. Just imagine the man-hours required to completely re-classify, re-label, and re-shelve all the books affected by this change! At this point, I think a more reasonable approach would be for librarians to place "see also" signage on the shelves, and possibly in the catalog, indicating where other books on the topic might be found. That brings me to another point: while some patrons will take the approach of shelf-browsing for books on their desired topic, others will consult a librarian, all of whom (should) know the work-arounds for Dewey, and how to find similar topics, even if they're not adjacent on a shelf. I suppose this ties back into a point made by Weinberger: with the limitations of physical space, each book can only be put on the shelf in a single place, thus requiring that we choose a "main" entry, or subject, and shelve the book there. Web 2.0 certainly offers alternatives to Dewey-like single entries, but most libraries are still not digital, Dewey's most certainly was not, and as a result we are still subject to the laws of physics. As such, Dewey is a good start to classification and the Library of Congress is a little better, but we clearly still have some room to improve.

Privacy Concerns

Let me begin this week by saying that I once again feel like I read these articles in the wrong order (although this time I followed the syllabus's order, not just the order they were posted on Learn@UW). Even though I have a science background, I felt like the Streiffer article was both too complicated in its technical jargon, but also much more focused on the forms for gaining consent than on the ethical implications of omitting any of these data fields on said forms. I suppose the focus this week was on privacy (or "two facets of privacy", according to the syllabus), but honestly, what is the drive behind privacy? Fear, to put it simply, but fear about what? Personally, I have trouble rationalizing fears about my cells being used for scientific research, but I think that's because, as I've already said, I have a background in science, and I can see the potential value behind using these cells for research. Some may have religious convictions about having their cells used, so I can fully understand reservations coming from there. But what about the people who just have an all-out fear of all that is scientific progress, particularly that involves testing using human cells. I have often heard arguments about the possibility of being denied insurance coverage if the insurance company was able to find out that we were genetically more likely to get a certain disease, but those arguments hardly seem founded when we're talking about cells that are, for all intensive purposes, completely anonymous (yes, the DNA still exists in the cell, but how many people have been genetically mapped so that they could be matched to their cells' DNA?). With this level of anonymity, why not let science progress with our cells? As I've said, and I don't want to belabor the point, I honestly can't fathom the fear that most people have about allowing their cells to be used in scientific research. So with that, I look forward to hearing the class discussions about these points.

A large chunk of my reactions this week came from the Byrne article, possibly because he reached more personal levels of talking about identity theft and "Level 5" threats like revealing our social security or bank account number. Most of these reactions came because it was reminiscent of both some of the reading we did in This Book Is Overdue and also regarding some of my comments from last week's Pawley article, or at least made me think once again about patrons' library records. From the Pawley article, it was mostly the fact that historians are using postal records from the 19th century to track reading habits, something that I find similar to today's attempts by the FBI/CIA to track patrons' reading habits with their "security letters", and I always operated under the assumption that the postal service was both anonymous and private. As for TBIO, many of the librarians in TBIO stated that their library records are destroyed after X days, which ensures a level of anonymity for their patrons (I am thinking in particular about the computer sign-up sheets that the librarian couldn't provide to the FBI because they're shredded each night, but also about patron records in general). How identifiable do we become with our library records? What would someone be able to figure out about me if they looked at my history of book checkouts? Assuming no distinction between my public library account and my UW account; I go where the books are available, regardless of what location I get my books. In the past year or so, I have checked out a fictionalized account of the Vietnam War (Going after Cacciato); two classic teen books about the French Revolution (from the series by the Baroness Orczy); a nonfiction book about sex (Bonk! The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex); several books that were assigned for classes (mostly library-based, such as TBIO and Everything is Miscellaneous, as well as two for Collection Development); Dan Brown's latest book, The Lost Symbol; a new thriller, The Thirteenth Hour; The Disappearing Spoon, a book about fun facts about the elements; a book about Gilbert Lewis and Irving Langmuir, two pioneers of chemistry from the early-to-mid 20th century; an audio tape of the seventh Harry Potter book so that I could listen to it on a long car trip; and probably a few others that I can't even think of at this point. Could someone identify me from these books? If not, could they identify me if they knew what I was reading out of my own collection, assuming that I would have had to check those out of the library, too? Honestly, I clearly don't have much shame about reading a book about sex (hey, it was about science, too!), but would I want the government knowing that? With this strange of a combination of books, which seem rather heavy on the chemistry and library books front, could quite possibly pick me out of a crowd; how many people would really read about librarians and chemists both? Anyway, I return to the question at hand: what could people find out about us if our library records were made public? Thankfully there are people like the Connecticut Four who are fighting to preserve that privacy.