"A counterexample to established techno-utopian histories"
June 7, 2023 10:28 AM Subscribe
It would be interesting to compare/contrast SUPARS with a contemporary (and, eventually very widespread but now nearly defunct) competitor NOTIS (that wikipedia entry is sort of scanty; this history page is better).
posted by aramaic at 2:52 PM on June 7, 2023
posted by aramaic at 2:52 PM on June 7, 2023
Even 20 years after this, computers were still new enough that some of my school and work colleagues were afraid of "breaking things" by doing anything remotely unfamiliar.
This is still a fear people have now, and sometimes for good reason. It's still certainly possible to accidentally mess up settings on a computer or app in a way you don't have a clue how to fix and make it impossible for you to do what you actually need to do until someone comes and fixes it. In the worst case, it's a shared system, and multiple people are spinning their wheels until it's fixed. Or it's your personal machine, and you know you'll have to hire somebody to fix it, which is often part of why elderly people are hesitant with technology.
There's a tendency in some circles to talk about "technical" and "non-technical" users, which can be fraught with various biases, especially since sometimes "non-technical" users just means people without the clout to do anything unfamiliar without triple-checking. Or, to put it another way, technical users are the ones with the ability to accidentally break things and declare it a technical problem, then Google for an answer.
posted by smelendez at 3:01 PM on June 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
This is still a fear people have now, and sometimes for good reason. It's still certainly possible to accidentally mess up settings on a computer or app in a way you don't have a clue how to fix and make it impossible for you to do what you actually need to do until someone comes and fixes it. In the worst case, it's a shared system, and multiple people are spinning their wheels until it's fixed. Or it's your personal machine, and you know you'll have to hire somebody to fix it, which is often part of why elderly people are hesitant with technology.
There's a tendency in some circles to talk about "technical" and "non-technical" users, which can be fraught with various biases, especially since sometimes "non-technical" users just means people without the clout to do anything unfamiliar without triple-checking. Or, to put it another way, technical users are the ones with the ability to accidentally break things and declare it a technical problem, then Google for an answer.
posted by smelendez at 3:01 PM on June 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
I love this article especially because it's not just like "Cochrane was AMAZING" but contextualizes why librarians made some of the advanced they did (not why you'd think) and also points out that people love one particular story of "How we got the Web" and only really know parts of it.
posted by jessamyn at 3:31 PM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 3:31 PM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
Keyword searching is nice, but it’s ease and overwhelming adoption has pretty much killed subject searching, which requires more training and skill but gets substantially better results, especially with a robust “search within results” option.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:25 PM on June 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:25 PM on June 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
Yes, agree. I do think they downplayed the still-useful role for controlled vocabulary, especially as more people are going it alone without expert folks to help them.
posted by jessamyn at 4:48 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 4:48 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is only vaguely related to this, but a lifetime and a half ago, I went to a pre-first-internet-crash internet conference and ended up talking to the people who were working on Infoseek. We had a long enough conversation that they somehow decided that I would be helpful in their testing, and I got actual training in how their keyword search worked and how to optimize it as a user and I was given tasks and had to give feedback and generally really helped shape that tiny window of search between Yahoo! and Google. The skills they taught me kept me in Super User category for searching even on Google for a decade or more.
There really was an era, apparently going back a few decades earlier and up until my skills were deprecated because search engines changes, where you could sincerely learn how to game them and coax really obscure content out of them in a way that even as a trained user felt a bit mystical.
Search for online things has changed enough since then that basically none of my skills learned from then apply anymore. But for a tiny while there I felt like some kind of wizard. I'm sure all these librarians felt that way even much much earlier.
posted by hippybear at 6:11 PM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
There really was an era, apparently going back a few decades earlier and up until my skills were deprecated because search engines changes, where you could sincerely learn how to game them and coax really obscure content out of them in a way that even as a trained user felt a bit mystical.
Search for online things has changed enough since then that basically none of my skills learned from then apply anymore. But for a tiny while there I felt like some kind of wizard. I'm sure all these librarians felt that way even much much earlier.
posted by hippybear at 6:11 PM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
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posted by EvaDestruction at 12:19 PM on June 7, 2023 [7 favorites]