An Interview with Eric Lease Morgan

Director of the "See You See a Librarian" project at NCSU

See You See A Librarian is an experiment, directed by Eric Lease Morgan at North Carolina State University, to examine the use of CU-SeeMe technology in librarianship and information seeking. We conducted a brief interview with Eric to ask him about his project, what role he sees for videoconferencing in libraries, whether the library community is "ready" for videoconferencing. We also asked what advice he has for libraries considering adopting the technology.

Eric can be reached directly for more information at eric_morgan@ncsu.edu.

InterNIC: Can you provide a brief outline of your project? What gave you the idea for See You See A Librarian, and how did you go about implementing the project?

ELM: Around Memorial Day I started asking myself how effective would the CU-SeeMe technology be in enhancing library services. Now-a-days, more and more real library work can be done by patrons without every coming to the library. Yet, there are times when a librarian's help is still needed to truely satisfy a patron's information need. It is a well known fact that communication is accomplished in many ways. Telephone communications offer immediacy but lack essential non-verbal aspects. Email mandates concise descriptions of problems. Face-to-face communication, even at a distance, could reduce the limitations of the email and telephone mediums. I began wondering whether or not face-to-face communications using some thing like CU-SeeMe would improve the ways librarians and their patrons could solve this problem - namely the problem of assisting patrons from remote distances.

In an effort to learn more about CU-SeeMe, I used my desktop computer and started trying to connect to remote CU-SeeMe reflectors. To my dismay, most times, when connecting to these reflectors, I found nobody there. "How am I suppose to explore this technology, if I can't see anybody." Consequently, I decided to set up my own reflector(s) and formulate a plan. The plan, as described at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/see-a-librarian/, has three parts:

1. Feasibility - this part is/was intended to see how many librarians have the necessary hardware and software to use CU-SeeMe.

2. Librarians on Librarianship - this part intends to focus discussions, using CU-SeeMe technology, on the issues of librarianship.

3. Librarians Fostering Knowledge - this part was intended to explore the feasility of providing reference services to Internet patrons using CU-SeeMe.

Finally, I gave my project a cute name, "See You See A Librarian," and sent an announcement to library-related mailing lists describing the project.

ELM: The project has the support of both the administration at the NCSU Libraries where I am employed and people who administer the Sunsite computer at the University of California-Berkeley (Roy Tenent). Thus, there are only a small handful of people involved in the management of the project, maybe five.

The CU-SeeMe technology supports three types of communication: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. To facilitate one-to-many and many-to-many communication, there needs to be an intermediary piece of software called a "reflector." This program "reflects" CU-SeeMe connections to other people who are connected to the reflector(s). Furthermore, reflectors can be "connected" to each other, so that people connected to one reflector can see the people reflected to the other reflectors. There are two reflectors used in this project. One is located at the NCSU Libraries (vega.lib.ncsu.edu) and the other is at UC-Berkeley (sunsite.berkeley.edu).

Are any of the participants not libraries or librarians?

ELM: Once the project got started in July, anybody with the necessary hardware and software was encouraged to participate. During the first month of the project more than at least 300 connections were made, either to the reflector at sunsite.berkeley.edu or to the one at vega.lib.ncsu.edu. There were certainly more connections than this, but I was unable to consistently extract the number of users from the sunsite reflector.log file.

Of the connections made, everybody, with the exception of one person, made more than one connection to the reflectors. One person connected more than 115 times.

The most popular connection days were July 8th - 15th, and very few connections were made later in the month. Generally speaking, more connections were made in the afternoon (Eastern Time) than other times of the day.

Some of the people connecting were from the United Kingdom and Mexico, but the majority of people were from the United States.

Based on my observations all the participants were librarians, people who worked in libraries, or people who worked for the library community (consultants). Of the librarians, the mix was evenly divided between academic, special, and state-supported libraries.

The sizes of the insitutions represented by the participants is not known.

ELM: The advantages and disadvantages of interactive video conferencing (CU-SeeMe) in the library field are pretty much the same advantages and disadvantages when applied to other communication endeavours. For example, CU-SeeMe requires special hardware and software in order to work, specifically video technology (a video camera) and audio technology (a microphone) as well as a high-speed Internet connection. While the Internet connection is becoming less and less of a barrier, it seems that the video/audio is the major stumbling block. Many library administrations do not support librarians with this sort of hardware. At the same time, this is understandable since no real uses of this technology have been readily demonstrated.

There are a couple of other problems with the technology. For example, CU-SeeMe makes people conscious of their appearence to others. This sometimes makes people shy and not want to participate. In the other extreme, there exist on the Internet exhibitionists who intrude into CU-SeeMe reflectors and detract from the reflectors' intended use. Additionally, it is quite possible to impersonate somebody else using CU-SeeMe and commit slanderous acts.

On the other hand, if the necessary hardware were universally available, then video conferencing could be used in numerous ways in Library Land. The most obvious example from the patron's perspective is for reference queries. There are many times when it would be helpful to speak to a librarian. While telephone communications are useful, video conferencing would transmit the non-verbal aspects of the reference interview process and quite possibly improve the service. Since telephones are not available throughout libraries, video conferencing could extend reference services to the patrons in the "stacks" if a wireless network were available. Unfortunately, the few patrons I have talked to concering these sorts of ideas have not been impressed. The common response is, "I don't need CU-SeeMe to ask a reference question. I have a telephone for that." These people do not understand the subtleties of the reference interview.

From a library-only point of view, CU-SeeMe could be used to facilitate the training of library staff in places where travel is difficult. For example the state library system of Florida is trying the use of CU-SeeMe for just this purpose. Since the state is so extensively rural, the state librarians are finding the use of CU-SeeMe as a way to provide in-services to remote librarians.

Another alternative is to use CU-SeeMe as a medium for live debates. For example, about a month ago there was a raging debate on a popular library-related mailing list. The topic of the debate was whether or not to catalog Internet resources. Some advocated the idea and others did not. I invited four people to express their opinions concerning the topic in a formal debate. While the debate takes place, others can "lurk" to watch the debate. This concept would have worked for many, many people, even if they did not have a video camera. Unfortunately, again, the people I contacted to debate the issue did not have the necessary equipment to use CU-SeeMe.

ELM: I believe the library community is ready for this sort of technology. I believe all librarians would see the inherent possibilities of CU-SeeMe. At the same time, libraries are notoriously under-funded; libraries are not money-making organizations. Consequently, the budgets of libraries are limited and currently do not allow for very many experiments. Similarly, like everybody else, libraries feel under- staffed and to bring on new services, like the use of CU-SeeMe, will mean the elimination of other services. "What services do we stop doing in order to provide this new one?"

In order to make the use of CU-SeeMe a reality in any institution I believe a number of things need to happen. First, there must be a commitment on the part of the library administration to purchase the necessary hardware. Second, the administration of the institution the library must commit to making the necessary hardware available to their constituencies. For example, video cameras could be made standard equipment in college computing labs. Next, either more staff are needed to provide the newer services or other services have to be eliminated. Once this happens, libraries could regularly staff the "CU-SeeMe Stations," just as they staff the reference desk, and field remote reference queries.

ELM: In general, librarians have been positive regarding the use of this technology, but the vast majority of them do not have the necessary hardware to participate. Additionally, even when given the opportunity to borrow the necessary hardware they are sometimes reluctant to participate since they have little time for experimentation.

At this time, there is not enough experience from the project to know whether or not the "technology enhanced the collaboration process over, say, simple email exchanges."

ELM: While desktop video conferencing has the potential of enhancing library services quite a bit, I do not see desktop video significantly transforming library services. Libraries are about collecting, organizing, archiving, disseminating, and sometimes evaluating information. The use of CU-SeeMe or some other video conferencing technology only effects one aspect of those services (the dissemination process).

Furthermore, I would personally like to see the realm of library services move from information mediation to knowledge mediation. The computer has enabled more and more people to acquire their own information without the use of a library. The real skill librarians posses is the ability to evaluate information. This evaluation process facilitates knowledge and I would like to see librarianship move in a more aggressive manner towards these goals.

ELM: If I were to implement a full scale plan to incorporate something like CU-SeeMe into library services, I would:

1. Equip a goodly number of librarians with the necessary hardware and software.

2. Mandate the librarians experiment with the hardware and software for a limited period of time knowing that new services were going to be implemented on a specific date in the future.

3. Advertise, advertise, and then advertise the service to the intended beneficiaries of the service.

4. Get the University's administration or computing center to equip computing labs with the necessary hardware and software to use CU-SeeMe.

5. Bring up the service on the predefined date.

In summary, I believe video conferencing can be used effectively in library settings. Unfortunately, even though librarians work in learning/teaching/academic/exploration settings, it is difficult for librarians to act in learning/teaching/academic/exploration modes. It is difficult not because librarians don't have the necessary skills, but rather there seems too little time for these sorts of activities. It may seem oxymoronic, but change is the norm. All institutions must think about change and how to cope with it. Until this happens, innovations will not be explored with very much rigor unless they are thrust upon us by outside forces. Hopefully we, as well as other professions, can learn to adjust.