Sign in Subscribe
4 min read 44

UofWinds 398, Week 44: Docs are the new something, The Department of Everything, Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?


Good morning. It is so strange to remember that two weekends ago (not last week!) I was in Montreal, visiting almost all of the places that kind readers recommended (the bakery was closed when we dropped by on Saturday). My favourite introduction was to the stationary store paperterie nota bene. The store clerk was a delight and I enjoyed how she gently goaded my husband into buying a pencil case for his new Blackwings. I am particularly fond of the store's motto: think with your hands.

I won't say much about next week's U.S. election but I will say this. This newsletter was created in the aftermath of the American election of 2016. It will change accordingly. As, perhaps, all of us will.

Today's soundtrack: Mother Cyborg @ Spot Lite Detroit 8.28.24.

Docs are the new something


It was never easy for a person to transform a personal computer sitting on their living room floor into an internet server to share emails or web pages with the world. But now that every connected computer has become an attack surface for potential bots and hackers, it makes sense why people use social media platforms or private servers on discord instead.

And also google docs? From Russel Davies:

Video is the new thing. Every social network is retreating from words. No one reads. I get that. But also, and, of course, words...

- The most sought after travel guide is a google doc
- The Ramen_Lord Book of Ramen
- Mochary Method Curriculum
- Justice in June
- The Unexpected Power of Google-Doc Activism
- A special message to the kids who gatekeep the Google Doc

The Department of Everything


I started my librarian career at Bloor and Yonge's Toronto Reference Library back in the late 90s when it was called The Toronto Metro Reference Library. I worked in the Systems Department and then the Periodicals desk. I never did any work at its telephone reference desk which is still called Answerline.

How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.

From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.

The above is from Stephen Akey's "The Department of Everything: Dispatches from the Telephone Reference Desk" [ht] from the Summer issue of The Hedgehog Review. Perhaps its just self-indulgence but I think it is worth remembering that there was and still is a publicly funded service that will help you confirm facts with sources.

“How do you people know all this stuff?” a caller once asked me. “What are you, some kind of scholars or wordsmiths or something?”

“No,” I replied. “Just us librarians.”

Actually, we didn’t know all that stuff; we just knew how to find it. I myself rarely remembered any of the facts I divulged to our callers, but I remembered the reference sources where I found the facts. Personal knowledge was inadmissible. I could reel off by heart the names of the four Dead Boys (Cheetah Chrome, Stiv Bators, Jimmy Zero, and Johnny Blitz—but didn’t everyone know that?), but unless I could track them down and—rule number one—cite the source (in this case, probably the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll), I had no information to impart and no answer to give to anyone who might need that information for whatever reason. But we almost always found the right source.

Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?


Using a library will always be slower than using an AI driven chatbot that will happily provide something incorrect with a made up source rather than nothing at all. But that doesn't mean that there is no role in our lives for less efficient services. They just need to be re-framed. That's the takeaway that I made after reading advertising exec Rory Sutherland's Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? [ht]

If you read Influence by Robert Cialdini, what you realize is that many things are successfully sold by opposites. Everybody has one of these, so it must be good. Or: not many people have one of these, so it must be good. You can achieve the same emotional effect with opposite messages. There are two great ways to check into a hotel. One of them is totally automated, where you walk straight to the room and use your phone to unlock the door. The other one is where someone takes you up to the room and makes you a cup of tea. They’re both great check-in experiences. They’re completely opposite.

We’ve got to understand that sometimes as an option, self-checkouts are great. As an obligation, they’re bad—because sometimes the time spent in the process is where the value comes from. You can see this because people on a Saturday love nothing better than to shop in the most inefficient way possible. That’s basically what a farmer’s market is—let’s take a Tesco and reverse everything. You’ve got to go to seven different places to buy anything. You’ve got to have a chat with everybody you buy something from. It’s the mirror image, but we enjoy them both depending on the context.

Member discussion