When I was a kid, I hated going to the library. Many people have told me they find the experience of being lost in the stacks to be a pleasant one, but for me my OCD would make me feel overwhelmed and paralyzed. I felt like it was impossible to navigate, and I would feel a sense of hopelessness that even if I could find my way around, I’d never be able to absorb the miles of books around me… so why bother? I realized that the key to navigating a public library is to ask the librarians for help, but you know what, I was an introverted kid and I wasn’t about to go anywhere near them.

I made it through the public school system almost never visiting a library, and in college I only ventured inside to meet classmates or admire the architecture, and I once went to explore the stacks with, uhm, a companion. Luckily for me, the web came about just in time to satisfy my intellectual curiosity and I haven’t left it since. This is not to say I don’t read books - I certainly do, I just don’t get them from the library.

So it was with a fair amount of trepidation that I went to visit the Science, Industry and Business Library, a branch of the NY Public Library. It was a dreary, rainy evening and upon entering a stand of plastic baggies for umbrellas reminded me of where I was. Yet glancing around I suddenly had some hope. This is a modern facility. A wall of plasma screens showing the evening news and library information line a wall. A beautiful irregular staircase in an open atrium space leads down to where I was to meet the rest of the group and begin what I was now hoping would be an enjoyable adventure. I know the libraries contain vasts swaths of data useful for our startup’s business planning and I was excited that something was kicking me in the butt to get back in there.

And then reality came crashing down around me.

Two hours later I found myself dazed and confused, wandering out of a room where we had been sequestered for a powerpoint and web surfing introduction to what must have been a hundred different databases and other library resources. Our librarian instructor was a sweetheart, but the session was terrible. In fact, I’m not going to bother to put my thoughts together eloquently, I’m just going to list them randomly:

• If librarians are trained in information management, shouldn’t the ones giving presentations at least be trained in that form of it? I know putting together a good presentation is extremely difficult, that’s why I picked up a copy (from Amazon) of Presentation Zen.
• When demoing how to do a search query on various library resources I was stunned by how bad the results were compared to anything I’d get just dumping the same terms into Google. This is not me being all lovey-dovey with Google. It actually saddens me to realize how “single-sourced” the nature of my information retrieval experience often is, but if this is the alternative…
• We were never given a tour of the facilities, so of course I would be just as physically lost if I returned there as I would have been without the session.
• At one point the librarian gave an anecdote of a young man who came in and sat down for three hours searching for information for his business and then, in frustration after having found nothing, approached her for assistance. She noted that in five minutes she had found something useful for him, so we should just ask for help. Something about this really bothers me. There is something to be said for fearing those with the keys to information. It makes me wonder if the entire system is set up to serve the librarians rather than the visitors. Either way, how is it possible that someone could come in, sit down for three hours, and not find anything useful!? This seems like an interaction design failure on a major scale to me.
• Although the facilities were modernly beautiful and well maintained, the web resources look and act like they haven’t been significantly refreshed since 1996. Even the flat panel monitors in the lab we were in were set at resolutions lower than their default.
• Although I signed up for a library card that would give me access to many of their databases from home, some of the most useful ones are only available if I show up in person. This is not to prevent duplication however. You are free to come in with a flash drive and copy anything from those resources that you like, or even email them to yourself. You just have to show up first to do it. I know this isn’t the libraries’ fault, it’s the sources providing them with the data, but still, this system needs to embrace abundance over scarcity and the public institutions need to set the appropriate precedents.

I think I realize why I still have a problem with libraries. They are designed with the expectation that any serious user of the system is willing to devote an inordinate amount of time to learning the intricacies of the system and, frankly, that information should not be easy to find. It should be a reward for hard work (either on the part of the visitor, or the librarian). We are working on tools for information consumption here at Eluciv Knowledge and the previous statements are exactly the opposite of our approach.