Making Connections

This post originally appeared on the Hyperlinked Library MOOC.

The content in this module that had me scribbling an outpouring of notes was the video on which David Weinberger gave his talk on Too Big To Know. I wasn't responding because I agreed with his remarks, but because I didn't. I enjoy disagreeing. I feel like I'm in a dialogue with this presentation. We have common ground. I understand that Weinberger's work is about making connections which is the theme of Module 2. We do have some radically different assumptions which I first noticed when he said "Books are no good at connecting you to other books." What did he mean? I've been riding the connecting paths between books all my life. How did he not see them?

For one thing, non-fiction books of the scholarly sort have bibliographies. If there are topics raised in the book that you want to pursue, you can find the author's sources and continue reading on those topics. (I have to admit that I eventually became dis-satisfied with bibliographies because they always led me backward to books that had been written before the ones that I had already read. If I wanted to travel forward in my reading, I would have to go online to search for the recent work in the field. That's why I use Google and Goodreads.) Non-fiction books also often mention influential books in the text itself. In fiction, there are connections to be found by reading the blurbs. The authors who have written those comments usually have some similarity to the author of the novel that you've been reading. It can be a similarity of theme, approach, characters or style. If I liked the original novel, I sometimes find that an author who wrote a blurb on the back cover is just as wonderful. There are also Author's Notes and Acknowledgements that help you find connections between books or their authors. It would be difficult for me to come up with a statement that is more untrue than the idea that books don't connect with each other.

 The most popular post on my review blog, The Unmasked Persona's Reviews, is "Living With Wolves in Fact and Fiction". This is a post that combines a review of Jodi Picoult's Lone Wolf with the book that inspired it, The Man Who Lives With Wolves by Shaun Ellis. I found out about this connection by reading the Author's Note. Jodi Picoult is a bestselling writer. There must be thousands of people who blog that read this author. Why was I the only one who noticed the connection between these books and acted on it? Maybe it's because I have never shared another Weinberger assumption that a book is "a stopping point". For me, it's a starting point. Once I become interested in a topic, I want to find different perspectives from the one that I encountered in the first book I read on the subject.

 I suppose it's that need to pursue those connections that makes a librarian. When I started the SJSU SLIS program with LIBR 200, my instructor told us that librarians are generalists. His name is Mark Stover and I am very grateful to him. For the first time, I knew what to call myself. I was not a specialist, but a generalist. I was interested in everything. Maybe others in my class didn't identify with the term "generalist" as I did. The power of a label is that some people will wear it proudly. The most appalling thing about a label is that it doesn't fit everyone. Perhaps some of those in my LIBR 200 class wondered whether they were meant to be librarians. I never did. I feel that the world needs generalists. As I listened to David Weinberger, my conviction was confirmed. Generalists make connections.

If someone can't find connections between books, it would be difficult to perceive connections on the internet. This is a teachable skill, not an inborn gift. It's a skill that is the foundation of research. Students who don't see connections will be unable to form a hypothesis or assemble the resources necessary for a literature review. Even linked data won't be a panacea for people who don't see why data connect. In our colleges and universities, librarians are the ones who teach this skill to new students. The internet should produce more generalists because the number of connections increase exponentially on the internet. It isn't called a "web" for nothing. Those who can't see that it really is a web shouldn't panic. A librarian will show them the way.