David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke at NDU's Government 2.0 symposium today. Happily, I was able to attend via streaming media, and what I heard (despite the appalling sound quality) got me thinking.
Weinberger redefines metadata as the "information we know" and data as the information we're seeking. Web 2.0, he argues, takes away the nasty old physical limitations of libraries and archives, where books and documents must be arranged in one and only one physical way. With the power of the Web, he says, we can all participate in the process of discovering and creating information.
There's usually a point during a Weinberger talk where I get annoyed because he tends to oversimplify and underestimate pretty much all of the information science world I know. It was never just about putting books on shelves in a logical physical order. Good thing he published his book (?!?), or we'd all still be sitting in the dark, trying to put those outdated bundles of paper bound between cardboard on shelves in alphanumeric order. Library science was never that simple, man. Not to the librarians who know their stuff. Weinberger is, however, right about the potential we have with today's tools to expand access, create new information, and go beyond what poor old Melvil Dewey was trying to do when he broke the world into that absurd set of categories.
Maybe I react badly at that point in Weinberger's talks because I'm really mad that much of what we have done as archivists and records managers seems to reinforce his negative view of our world. Many of us drag our feet when we could be promoting and digitizing our collections, so those who believe that all the stuff worth having is on the Internet will never find us. In the interest of control and simplification (for us, not for the user), we insist that records in an office be described by selecting one single records retention category from hundreds or even thousands of records series described in terms only we can understand. We figure that indexing and adding metadata to items in collections is somehow "extra" and describe collections only at the highest level. After all, we can look through the collections for you and tell you what we have - isn't mediated searching enough? That Internet stuff? Oh, we don't want to think about it. It's too hard. And how could the new stuff that's being created on the Internet be worth preserving? We'll think about it later or hope that someone in the future figures it out.
My great-great-grandfather was a harness maker. He fought in the Civil War, married a girl from a nearby farm, moved to a small town in Missouri, and lived out the rest of his life as the town's harness maker. The newspaper articles from the time toward the end of his life always describe him that way - "Maitland's harness maker" - but right next to those articles are stories about the new automobile garages opening up in the area. Almost 100 years after my great-great-grandfather retired, I'm watching my chosen profession decide what to do about all this newfangled technology. He retired as a harness maker. I doubt I'll have the luxury of doing the same things the same way they've always been done, and I doubt I would want to, even if I could.
Weinberger asserts that society now has a "connected nature" that surpasses the old, "fundamentally solitary and alone" world of books and archives (he says that like it's a bad thing). We sit, happily introverted in our temples of paper and relish the hush of history. Are we ready to open the doors and let others in? He speaks of crowdsourcing - the idea that "for some types of knowledge, we all know more than the individual." Are we ready to let go of micromanaged records series and metadata fields? Should we?
Are we ready to work together? I've had otherwise sane, professional, well-intentioned people tell me that the lines dividing information professions cannot and should not blur: Librarians, they say, can't be archivists or records managers, records managers can't be archivists, and archivists would never stoop to be records managers or librarians. The one thing that seems to unite people who hold this view is that they all agree we must not go near those incomprehensible information technology people. The smart harness makers in my great-great-grandfather's day recognized that they and the automobile mechanics were all in the transportation business together. The ones who didn't see that just faded away.
So is Weinberger right? Are we outdated? Are we choosing to stand on the sidelines while the automobile (or a bunch of bloggers and college kids on YouTube) replaces us? Are we going to snicker at this stuff and declare it's too new and difficult to think about, or are we going to take what we already know, turn it a few degrees counterclockwise, and figure out how to make this work for us and our customers?
The idea that we should all combine our respective skill sets to create new, effective, and downright amazing ways to manage and provide access to information should be a given in our profession, not a strange notion. We have the collections, skills, and knowledge to share. We have the intelligence, creativity, and discipline to help this new information world fulfill its potential. We can capture history in new ways and share it with audiences who would never have found us before. This is a records management and archives opportunity, not a threat. It doesn't have to be, that is. We just can't insist on making harnesses the way we've always done it and expect the world to ignore the automobile.
