This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.
Martha Alcott, head of reference services at the Chappaqua Library in Westchester County, New York, called the information desk at the beginning of the migration, to see how things were going. What’s a migration, you might wonder? It’s an interesting word choice that summons up hordes of human refugees, or flocks of geese; but in this case it meant 4 million digital catalog entries were being transferred from one application to another, a move as fraught and risky in its own way as a dash across a six-lane highway. The Chappaqua Library was one of thirty-seven in the Westchester Library System, a consortium just north of New York City, all sharing the same software. It had been in use for eight years—an eternity in the world of computing. The consortium had been told that the catalog software was so old its vendor would no longer offer technical support. Ready or not, all thirty-seven of these networked libraries had to suffer this improvement.
The migration was happening even as I looked around the library, but such are the mysteries of progress that all seemed placid on a particularly sleepy Saturday in April 2007. A few people surfed the Internet, but the catalog-only computers sat blankly on desktops, corralled between the stacks and the sun-flooded reading room with its periodical displays, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books. Throughout the building, in patches of natural light, printed warning signs in stand-up Plexiglas frames declared: “Please be patient while we change our software! April 6th–April 16th. No more than five items checked out at a time! Patrons must have their library card to check out items—no exceptions!”
We were in the land of rules and exhortations. The rules weren’t odious, but still—“no exceptions!”
Carolyn Reznick and Maryanne Eaton had been on the job since the place opened at nine a.m. The signs had had an effect: the usual crush of Saturday-morning traffic in this literate community had slowed to a trickle. This was a town of mothers with law degrees stashed in drawers, of people whose foreheads throbbed during the three-second wait at the cash machine. The idea of limits and delays, the prospect of librarians writing down titles, product codes, and library-card numbers by hand, had dampened enthusiasm for free DVD rentals. The only question being asked at the information desk was: “What’s wrong with the catalog?” No matter how many times Reznick and Eaton repeated the sentence, “Our system is being upgraded,” the librarians never rolled their eyes or got irritable, but instead smiled in welcome. “Can I help you? Our system is being upgraded. Thank you for your patience. Yes, the catalog will be down until the sixteenth. Thank you for your patience.”
Reznick liked to call libraries “the new village green,” but not today. She was prepared to help with Internet searches, government documents, reading suggestions, term papers, résumés—any of their information needs—but few were asking. “It’s dead in here,” she told Alcott, one reference librarian to another. “It’s a tomb—which is good, because nothing is working.”
Somewhere, the digital catalog was chugging and churning through a server, perhaps in Huntsville, Alabama, where the SirsiDynix Corporation has its headquarters, its numerous software engineers, and its computer troubleshooters.
And until the upgraded catalog was ready, library patrons who needed to find an item in this 450-square-mile county—whether they lived in one of the affluent suburbs like Chappaqua, a mixed economic neighborhood along the Hudson River like Tarrytown, or a rural stretch to the north like Somers—had to rely on their reference librarians, who had access only to their old internal databases, which “unfortunately during this time period…may not be accurate,” according to the flyers. Westchester’s towns had grown increasingly interdependent by way of this solid and useful library system, but for ten days the county would have to drop back to the olden days of, say, the late 1980s, when every town was an island and you had to use the old-fashioned telephone to borrow another library’s book.
A Chappaqua mother, petite, fashionable, and grim, approached Reznick with her awkward teenage daughter. The daughter hung back while her mother explained that the girl had lost a book she borrowed from the library. The mother waved her hand at this annoyance—“That’s not a problem, we’ll pay for it”—but the girl needed another copy of the book for a paper due Monday. In fact, she needed the book right now. The mother would drive her daughter anywhere to get it. But where?
Reznick didn’t blink or judge, even when the mother said the lost book was “not a problem.” She looked up the title on the internal catalog, which indicated there was a copy on the shelf in Armonk, a few miles away. Then the system logged off. This logging-off business had been happening all morning and was driving her crazy; each time she had to reboot and use her password to get back in.
Reznick conducted the rest of the rescue mission by telephone. Yes, Armonk had the book and would hold it. Success! Volatile mother defused, daughter saved, and they didn’t even have to drive to some sketchy or faraway corner of the county; they could go to the nice Armonk library, with its quaint historic photos lining the entrance and lots of parking space. The woman did not quite twist her daughter’s ear and drag her out the glass door that slid open on their approach, but she left behind a trail of static.
The pleasant face that Reznick showed the public disappeared as she punched in the phone number for the information technology (IT) staff at the Westchester Library System headquarters in White Plains and got one of the computer guys on the line. “This isn’t right, Wilson. The application is timing out every five minutes! Every time I look something up, it freezes. How can we do our job?”
Four million items in the Westchester Library System, separated from their catalog. It was the first day of the migration, and the stress had just begun.
A book I ordered about digital archives had arrived from outside the Westchester system via interlibrary loan—thrill!—so I settled in with it at the information desk with Reznick and Eaton. I was reading about sophisticated digital cataloging in an old-fashioned book with so many primitive paper records attached that both a paper clip and a rubber band were needed to secure them. Still, it was worth all the trouble a bucket brigade of librarians had taken to get it to me, full of juicy observations about this curious transition period we’re living in and our rush to hit the delete button. I found a little perspective in one of the book’s quotes, this from an Oregon newspaper: “The videotape of the first Super Bowl game was erased and NBC wiped out a decade’s worth of Johnny Carson shows. Today, we wonder how TV executives could have been so stupid, even as we repeat the mistakes.”
Between chapters, I chatted with Reznick (faux-leopard-skin flats, wheat-colored jean jacket, gray-blond layered hair). She had gone to graduate school in history at the University of Wisconsin back in the sixties and taught in Montreal, where she frequented a library in a shopping mall that was open 365 days a year from ten a.m. to ten p.m. “It served me well,” she said fondly. When she couldn’t find a teaching job after moving back to the States, she got a library degree. This was in 1992, when there were few computers and library catalogs were still stored on cards. Reznick has no nostalgia for the old system. “I remember in grad school searching for a nineteenth-century book and trying to contact maybe Harvard or Indiana or Berlin to see if they had it.” Now there was WorldCat, which could tell you in a nanosecond that all three had it, and so did the college up the road. The digital catalog, lightweight, almost invisible, and searchable without leaving her seat was “infinitely better.” With the public librarian’s pragmatism, she and the rest of the Chappaqua staff recycled the thousands of loose cards from the old catalog as scratch paper.
Reznick rarely bought books once she became a librarian; she borrowed most of what she read—history, mainly. But she remembered accumulating books in grad school. “Maybe someone flunked out, but he tossed all his books into a Dumpster, and I crawled in and fished them out.” Dumpster-diving for books! Those were the days! She had since mastered the book chaos in her home, another benefit of becoming a librarian.
Almost every day one of her patrons tried to reverse the flow of books by donating a box of discards to the library. Officially, though, there were only two days a year the library accepted used books for the annual book sale. On those days, the parking lot was jammed with SUVs and station wagons, while volunteers unloaded grocery bags and liquor boxes full of Erma Bombeck, Arthur Hailey, James Michener, Herman Hesse, Carlos Castaneda. In this town, you were not doing the library a favor by donating books. It did you a favor taking them. But when an older man staggered in the first day of the migration with a box of moldering paperbacks, the librarians on duty took pity. Eaton carried the box in and picked through the spoils. “Here’s a book on the Easter uprising for you, Carolyn. And a whole bunch of Graham Greenes.”
I love Graham Greene, I admitted. Eaton wrinkled her nose. “But they smell!” We all laughed. Somehow the Graham Greenes ended up in the back of my car. They did smell, all the way home, but I couldn’t dump these great novels from the fifties, with retro graphics and yellowed pages. They were Graham Greenes, for crying out loud, work by a great writer whose world-weariness and seedy sentiment somehow suited the packaging. Besides, I could use a little trick an archivist taught me—a sheet of Bounce would absorb the musty odor.
It was a different sort of migration than the one taking place with our digital records; this was the timeless migration of books, those antique delivery systems, moving through the library and into my hands.
I ran into one of the reference librarians at a local coffee shop, or maybe it was at the movie house that plays artsy foreign films, the one where the sophisticated librarians hang out. I didn’t know her name, but she’d helped me more than once. I had to greet her. “There’s that famous librarian!” I said. She laughed. “There’s that famous patron!”
By now I know most of their names. I first met Gwen and Deb and Carolyn and Martha through my children. The librarians’ faces light up when I walk in; they’re my librarians. I visited them frequently in the weeks after the migration, and each time, they seemed a little more frazzled. “How’s it going?” I’d ask, and their pleasant masks would drop and they’d show me another face—hassled and frustrated. The day before the new software debuted, all hell broke loose. The winds and rain of the worst nor’easter in years blew through the eastern seaboard. It was one thing to be experiencing a maelstrom in cyberspace, but ridiculous to have a literal maelstrom on top of it. Seven and a half inches of rain—flooding in six of the Westchester libraries—electricity out, roads closed, National Guard out in force. Did I really need to ask how they were doing?
When the catalog finally went online—“the longest eleven days of my life,” according to Chappaqua’s director—it was “buggy.” The location of this library’s children’s collection, according to the new catalog, was “unknown.” Two days later, the whole thing crashed. Poor librarians! Weeks later, the system still didn’t work the way it should. One librarian confided: “There are no answers for us. There was a meeting, and the liaison person was saying robotically after every question, ‘We’re working on it. We’re working on it.’”
“Unfortunately, the move has been disastrous,” a memo from the Westchester Library System admitted to its member libraries. There was an underlying problem with the database. The system couldn’t generate overdue notices, leaving the libraries armless, without the capacity to recall their overdue books; and the catalog had to be “re-indexed,” whatever that meant. Title searches of the catalog came back full of junk. I entered the title of my last book, The Dead Beat, and the first hit on the search list was a CD from Psychopathic Records by the Insane Clown Posse. And the holds, those precious waiting lists that determined who would get the next copy of the new bestseller or DVD release, sometimes disappeared. When? Seemingly at random. Why? They had no idea. And librarians aren’t programmed to say, “We have no idea.” The words feel like chalk in their mouth.
Who was in charge of these computers, anyway?
This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them. You see it in offices, where a measure of power has shifted to the tech departments, to the people who can unfreeze your screen, unlock your files, link you to the world you have to be linked to; you see it in the Apple Store, where men and women sit humbly and gratefully on stools while boys and girls in “Genius” T-shirts show them how their computers work.
You can also see conflicted variations of this model playing out here, between the librarians on the ground, who worked the computers, and the IT department that serviced them. It didn’t matter how tech-savvy the librarians were; during the migration they were helpless to do anything but complain. And the IT staff trying to diagnose and fix the problems were being driven crazy by their complaints. It was a culture clash rooted in that imbalance of power, and it was being dramatized daily in Westchester in the spring and summer of 2007. The librarians were at the mercy of the IT department, and the IT department was at the mercy of the software. And all of it was landing on the desk of Wayne Hay, the head of IT.
Like most information professionals, Hay was a font of facts. He could figure out where to find the best of anything—gadgets, pepperoni pizza, schnitzel—and he had been at it a while; now in his late fifties, Hay was a teen computer programmer when he started working part-time in libraries. He looks like Santa Claus, complete with white beard and belly, though in his usual outfit of jeans and a sky-blue polo shirt, he’s more Santa-as-beachcomber. “I’m no spring chicken,” he admitted, “but I do my homework.” If his schmoozy style of talking, love of Brits and their television programming, and passion for miniature dachshunds (he has four) signal a certain style, this was complicated by his Columbus, Ohio, roots. Hay’s other passion, for Buckeye football, bordered on mania; the pen on his desk played the Ohio State fight song. Every hour or so, in his shirtsleeves, he left his office and ducked out to the loading dock to smoke a Carlton, whatever the weather.
Hay was the first person I knew to buy a Kindle, which he immediately began using to read the New York Times. He pushed downloadable audiobooks to the librarians and touted Playaways—preloaded single-book audio players. He described himself as being in “the bells-and-whistles department.” But he also believed that “Putting books into people’s hands is our number-one service. Don’t talk to me about reference,” and he quoted a 2002 study from OCLC that said people used their libraries mainly to check out books, not to get information. High-tech, low-tech, either, both—just get them the books and DVDs.
He was friendly with librarians across the country as well as in his consortium, and a librarian himself, but his assessment of them as a group was harsh. “They’re their own worst enemy,” he said. “They should have to work retail for a year! I don’t want to do things through technology for the benefit of the librarian. I want to benefit the patron. Library 2.0 is user-centric—it’s not about what makes the librarian’s life better. Just because librarians like to search for author, title, subject the way they used to in the old card catalog doesn’t mean the general public does that anymore. The card catalog is dead, people. Move on.” It’s a keyword world now.
He made no apologies for his bluntness. A decade ago, Hay had met a legislative aide while lobbying for the federal government’s E-rate program, which helped reimburse libraries and schools for their broadband access. On his way out the door, she told him, “Wayne, librarians have to be louder.” He’d taken the advice.
During the early part of the migration, Hay stayed in a hotel near his office to cut his two-hour-a-day commute and worked late into the night; one of the Sirsi engineers pulled an all-nighter to work around a problem. For a whole day, the nine people on the IT staff retyped records that had been incorrectly coded—by the librarians, Hay pointed out. But these efforts were slow to bring results. Meanwhile, the librarians on the ground were trying to accustom themselves to a Windows-based system after years of more ancient DOS-based computing, but the training they were getting from the vendor, Sirsi, was proving inadequate. “Banging your head on a wall would have gotten you further,” as one IT guy put it. Hay’s efforts to keep the branch libraries informed about the problems and delays seemed to backfire, often revealing his exasperation with the librarians. (“It would help if we do not get calls asking for status every few minutes.”) One librarian printed out copies of his e-mails and saved them in a binder she called “Adventures in Sirsi-land,” a bitter souvenir.
Behind closed doors, Hay admitted he would like to shoot all librarians over twenty-five. Or maybe just all librarians. (Their adjustment to the new system, he noticed, coincided with the summer influx of student employees.)
Besides the training shortcomings and the messy catalog entries some of the libraries had fed them, SirsiDynix and the consortium’s IT department had taken turns screwing up. “Big deal,” Hay said. “That’s what happens when you do this sort of thing, and everyone has to get over it. What—do you think this is magic?”
Their choices had been limited; library vendors were all consolidating, and only three of them could serve such a complex consortium. Everyone, librarians included, had agreed on the choice of Sirsi. But “library search engines are old, old tech, old architecture,” Hay explained. “We’re now at least twelve years past the revolution in the nineties that led us to Google and Amazon, and the vendors are still hitting us with structures that frankly date back to the seventies. Library automation needs new software big time.” Westchester was stuck for the moment with its vendor, but within months of the migration, Hay’s staff was researching alternatives—open-source software that the IT department would help write and adapt. In the next phase of library history, librarians won’t simply provide access to computers and use them to catalog, communicate, and network—they’ll write the programs as well.
But technostress continued to infect Westchester’s library system long after the spring migration had ended. “It was bad; it was so bad,” said Chappaqua’s director, Pam Thornton, “I thought about pulling my library out of the consortium.” The executive director gave Hay a withering performance review and referred to 2007 as “the year of hell.” And there was a lingering technical problem: random holds from the list of patrons waiting their turn for the hot books and DVDs were still disappearing, which baffled both the IT guys and the Sirsi technicians. None of them could target the problem.
Hay traveled all over to stay on top of technology and keep the Westchester libraries up to date. “It’s an investment. Why attend conferences in Europe? The last ten hot products came from Europe.” He first heard about RFID tags—radio frequency identification devices that can be implanted in books, or anything else—at a European conference, way back when, and was able to persuade one of the directors in his consortium, then building a state-of-the-art library, to invest. Now whole stacks of books and DVDs could be checked in or out in seconds, without opening the covers or searching for the bar codes, making self-checkout possible and misshelved books and DVDs a problem of the past.
The British Library was Hay’s touchstone. He admired its use of technology, its website, and its braggadocio: “10,000 pages on our website.” He appreciated the way the director was called the “chief executive officer.” I suspect he would have loved to work there. Hay had discovered a nifty feature on the British Library’s website, called Turning the Pages; this was an interactive digital program that let you flip through Mozart’s notebooks while listening to his music. “I want to fall asleep when people talk about digital content, but this is digitization in a fabulous, user-friendly manner. You can actually read his music in his handwriting.” He longed for one of these toys for Westchester, and imagined using it to animate an old history of the county.
Hay was at a library conference in Oslo, standing outside the convention center, smoking and chatting with a woman who was raving about her library: it had a machine she could visit at any hour of the day or night. “Oh, tell me more,” Hay said, whipping out his pad. “And then I walked inside and there was this machine. Now that’s a concept!”
Hay described it as “a small automated library branch—in a box. It’s robotic on the inside, uses RFID, the radio frequency tags, all robotic arms, and you can borrow books and DVDs from it.” Hay began talking with the two Swedish owners about the possibility of importing five of the machines, called Bokomaten (“book machine” in Swedish) for a test run in Westchester.
We were in a corporate park in White Plains, sitting in his little office, piled high with books, DVDs, manuals, and the remnants of a pepperoni pizza. He had a Dell computer behind his desk linked to a smaller monitor that faced me. “See?” Hay said, clicking on a YouTube video he posted from the Bokomaten’s marketers. The machine rumbled to life, operated by disembodied hands, as a narrator spoke in lilting, Swedish-accented English. Hay said: “I’ve been talking up the ATM for books ever since I got back. I keep saying, ‘Guys, this is your chance to go first. Think of the publicity!’ But they’d just as soon go second.”
Hay and his staff, frustrated by all the money the consortium allocates for databases that relatively few patrons use, and fleeting investments like public relations, were trying to shift expectations and priorities. They prepared a presentation for the consortium’s administrators and board members called “Rethinking the Library,” a video tour of cutting-edge libraries in Scandinavia, Europe, the U.K., and California. One of them, called Ideastore, had been cropping up in East London; it was the flip side of the British Library—a blend of community centers and circulating libraries that had room for continuing-education classes, media centers, and cafés. I visited one in London and found it to be a hive of activity in a tough neighborhood, the “village green” writ in concrete. Look at all you can do here! was the message patrons got when they walked into one of these places. Instead of putting up signs that read no cell phones, for instance, like most of the libraries I frequent, the DOK Library Concept Center in Delft, Netherlands, invited patrons to bring their cell phones, park them in their special docks, and load them up with free content: music, film trailers, college lectures. The librarians there bragged, “If there is a Library 2.0, then DOK will be 3.0.”
“They’re into it. And we don’t get it,” said Hay.
Almost a year after the migration, Hay reported to the library board that a number of the catalog issues that bedeviled the system, including the inexplicably vanishing holds, could not be blamed on technology. “In many cases, these issues were traced back to personnel/input problems and not direct system problems,” he said. There was a little explosive charge behind his carefully chosen words. The holds were not mysteriously disappearing because the Sirsi system screwed up and the IT department failed to diagnose the problem, and they didn’t stem from innocent user error or inadequate training. Rather, it seemed, a few librarians had been going into the computerized hold queues and deleting requests, moving their own names up the waiting list to claim the hot items for themselves.
The sweethearts of free culture, the helpmates of the mind, this selfless profession turned out to harbor individuals who couldn’t wait their turn to consume Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. Or was it the BBC version of Sense and Sensibility that drove them mad with longing, mad enough to forget their ethical principles and vows to serve the public? Whatever it was, the desire for it had thrown a low-tech wrench into the system’s $787,000 catalog.
My smart, conscientious, friendly librarians slammed the drawer on those grasping fingers that had uncharacteristically crept out from behind the circulation desk. The furious directors disciplined the perps and drew up a document articulating their ethical expectations for every library employee, including the high school pages, the book shelvers. I never did learn what constituted discipline for renegade librarians, though I didn’t spot anybody with brands or burns or dislocated thumbs. More than any group I can think of, librarians are identified with their profession, and the laughs and jeers don’t stop when some stickler tries to collect a dead person’s fine. So this transgression was dealt with quietly. It was all I could do to get one of the directors to confirm it. “Most of us are honest,” she began, before admitting that, “yes, a couple librarians were jumping their relatives ahead of other holds for new DVDs. And everyone thought we had a software bug, and was blaming the IT guys.”
Hay shrugged it off; he didn’t want to discuss it. His two deputies shook their heads. Their competence had been called into question, but what can you do? This migration had been a perfect storm of screwups.
For nearly a year, I had struggled whenever the librarians tried to explain their circulation challenges, or the IT people tried to explain the need for reindexing, the “junk” they said librarians had thrown in “the volume fields” that messed up the searches, beating my head against the language of libraries and computers. But here was a culprit I understood. I ran home and danced around the table, singing, “Guess what! You know the screwed-up catalog? The one driving everyone nuts? You know what caused the last bug? Greedy librarians!” Obviously, the stress had affected me, too.
Of course most librarians are honest; that’s one reason it took so long to figure out what was wrong. The point is, libraries that share an IT department share a nerve center, and few can afford to stand alone these days. A little action in one place radiates through the whole system.
And let’s put it in perspective. In 2009, the New York Public Library merged the separate catalogs of its research and circulating libraries—eight million records all together—into one. Harried librarians there were coping with irate patrons, lost holds, and checkout lines that snaked out the library doors. A librarian observing the disruption summed it up: “There is no such thing as a smooth conversion.”
But back in 2007, the Westchester librarian just trying to do her job pulled out her “Adventures in Sirsi-land” binder, full of memos from headquarters wishing her a “Happy Gloomy Morning” or exhorting her to “smile a lot and forgive fines.” She wanted the online catalog to work, that’s all. Why couldn’t the IT department make that happen? And what was with Hay? “Look,” she said, “he actually wrote, ‘I’m going to have a cigarette to calm down.’ Do you believe that?”
Was he taunting her? It was almost as if they were married, and divorce was in the air.
And in a sense they were married, the librarians and the IT department—for better or worse, for richer or poorer…in technological trauma or robust cyber health.