Are Library Degrees Becoming Computer Science 'Light'?

I'd like to thank Professor Lankes for introducing the term 'computer science light'. He brought up the term when a student in our class last year asked him basically, "We keep hearing about all these encoding languages, programming languages, schemes, systems, etc... should I be learning all of these?" His response argued that, no, we shouldn't treat the field of study like "Computer Science light", especially because: why wouldn't you just then take Computer Science? You would basically be setting yourself up to be not as good as a Computer Science major, let alone a C.S. graduate student. He then went on to explain how, yes, it is valuable to learn and get some degree of expertise in these technologies, but at the end of the day, this shouldn't be our primary focus.

After a year removed from that lecture, which I fully agreed with at the time, I'm not sure that holds true anymore. Sure, his argument is sound and that's what the ideal situtation would be, but I'm finding it doesn't really hold true in the library professional world. Budgets are tight. Libraries cannot afford a fully-staffed IT Services department anymore to handle the 'heavy-lifting'. Learning these technologies not only increases your worth to potential employers, but it immediately makes you qualified for job postings that ask for 3-5 years experience, because, guess what? In 3 to 5 years of digital librarianship, you can't help but learn many of these technologies. To be a digital librarian these days, you are expected to know an alphabet soup of metadata languages, XML, TEI, Web design, databases, and programming. That's the stark reality of the profession right now.

This goes back to the fundamental friction between librarianship as a professional practice, and librarianship as a scholarly pursuit. We still can't really figure out if the degree should work almost like a trade school; after all, librarianship, although varied, ultimately is a fairly homogeneous profession, and Professor Lankes himself argues that we shouldn't be splintering ourselves into over-specialized groups (unfortunately, though, positions such as 'Web services librarian', 'reference librarian' and 'metadata librarian' are the norm). SU's approach of having a 'core' program that you can then adapt to a certain specialization (which I think is a good approach) is turning out to not properly reflect the marketplace. These specializations, like Digital Libraries, School Media, and eScience, are all under attack, and in danger of being abandoned. They're at a crossroads where they either return to a broad umbrella of a program, or splinter even further into highly specialized sub-degrees.

The response may be to make Digital Libraries and eScience programs even more involved, with more mandatory technology courses in order to produce qualified grads. But then we truly are making a computer science light profession.I'm not sure what the solution is.

Video Games are Hard to Archive

Today I read an interesting article that took a critical look at the Smithsonian, who have an exhibit entitled "The Art of Video Games". The article argues that many 'classic' games have been omitted, because the poll conducted for what items to include resulted in only hugely popular, home console games.

I've dealt with how to go about archiving video games before. It's a fairly rich history, and from a certain viewpoint it seems simple, since it is so recent and many of the 'originals' are still in existence. But as I found out, it is very hard to get the history straight, organize the items, and above all else describe them. I attempted to do as much in my metadata schema that I adapted from Dublin Core and EAD (here), but I frequently ran into decisions that had to be made. Would I include arcade games? Ultimately I decided to, just because arcade games are vital in video game history, despite their insignificance today. I also included PC games, despite their relative obscurity.

Underlying all this is the issue of whether video games are art in the first place. I've argued they are in the past, but not in the same way others do. That is, many people want to compare video games to existing forms of art in order to find some legitimacy. I am of the opinion that people will only fail with this comparison. I think the way to do it is to recognize video games as a new form of art, instead of trying to awkwardly compare it to completely different media. Was it important to describe how a photograph was similar to a painting? Or was the real breakthrough to develop the photograph as a wholly different art medium? I would argue the latter, because initially all comparisons between a photograph and a painting resulted in the photograph coming up short.

I'm still skeptical that video games will see legitimacy in the world of archives and the arts, but there is hope, simply because of the popular growth of video games, with some grossing more in their first days than some movies make in an entire year. However, as the article points out, the legitimacy starts to evaporate if we judge the artistic merits of a game based on sales. There is significant overlap, of course, because the NES Super Mario Bros. is both an artistic high water mark and a commercial blockbuster. But much in the same way as independent and foreign films, whose commercial success is very small and yet receive critical acclaim, we must document the video games that had something to say, or presented something significant, despite being commercially insignificant.

Tablet Popularity and Libraries

The explosion of tablet devices is proving to be a bit more disruptive than I had inititally anticipated. A new article has an interesting infographic that focuses in this case on the tablet's impact on journalism. An unsurprising result is that while use of online news sites on tablet devices is incredibly strong, users tend to stick to the big news sites and they aren't willing to spend money for online news services.

It'd be beneficical for librarians to start thinking about how this will apply to libraries, given the unavoidable shiift from desktop/laptop computing to mobile devices. As many as 79% of tablet users (who now are a staggering 11% of the population) used to use their desktop or laptop in getting news. And they are much more satisfied with the tablet experience. Libraries need to take heed of the trend and use it to their advantage. The good news is that libraries can play on the popularity of online journalism and eBooks while delivering a "value-added" experience on a tablet, especially as eBook lending practices and open access resources become more common.

Libraries' main problem, however, is that many of the materials online cannot be reached via Google. It is imperative that initiatives like OAI-MH start to move their systems closer to public visability. Imagine the satisfaction an iPad user could have looking through digital collections on their device that they couldn't have found via Google. Perhaps they were fed the collection through RSS. Maybe this could all be done through an app that houses basically the OAIster union catalog (see OAIster. The potential here is great.

Realistically, though, the hurdles loom large. It's simply hard to break out of the Google mindset these days. Even so, optimizing collections and services for use on tablets and mobile devices will be a major first step. Users of tablets, referencing the infographic, are not young, tend to be well-educated, and thus they might have a demand for the kind of information online collections/catalogs can offer. The key will be persuading them to come to it versus just Googling it and finding, on average, fairly low-quality results.

Abstraction is a Powerful Method

By "abstraction," I am referring to it in the Internets world. The beauty of abstraction on the Internet is that, when executed properly, people don't even know they're being shielded from complexity. The classic example is when you are shopping online for let's say shoes. You see on the sidebar you can select a link to filter shoes to show only those that cost under $50. What you don't know is you're actually executing a query to a database and pulling data from it. This abstraction means that millions of people who have no idea what in God's name a database is or does don't have to. And that is a very good thing.

But with great power comes great responsibility. A central tenet learned early on in design or working with some technology is to not obscure meaning in the design. Not only will you confuse the end-user, but they will not even be able to see what they did wrong, since the actual back-end is not accessible for them. And even if they could see the back-end, that would eliminate the entire point of abstracting the complexity from them. In other words, abstracting complexity is incredibly difficult to do, and has to be nigh perfect.

A good example of a great program falling victim to the difficulties of abstraction is Google Sites. I actually enjoy Google Sites, but when it first launched, it was kind of a nightmare. I know some basic XHTML, so I thought it'd be fun to play around with. Understandably, Google Sites made the decision to not allow HTML on the user-end being input. This makes sense as a first principle. But, it introduces some interesting problems. Google Sites, while it has improved over time, started out with an almost incomprehensible user interface. Knowing HTML was a disadvantage, because certain terms were borrowed from HTML design but were used to do completely different things. And while it was feasible, I doubt many people with zero knowledge of HTML were able to spit out a web page in a half hour. This narrows the target audience considerably. I still like Google Sites in the way I like Google Docs, and that is, it is extremely convenient to get something accomplished in a day or so. It's quick and dirty, but sometimes you don't have a choice due to time constraints. But I am almost certain this was not the initial intention of Google Sites; I'm pretty sure it was intended to be a stepping stone from almost zero HTML knowledge to being able to work with stuff like Wordpress.