Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

I just finished Londonstani, the first novel by Gautam Malkani. It takes place in London as you can tell from the title and is the story of 4 rudeboys. They are part of London's Asian community and refer to themselves as desis which the glossary in the book describes as "self-referential term for the Indian disapora that refers to people and culture." The four rudeboys, one of them is more an aspiring rudeboy than actual rudeboy join with Sanjay, an entrepreneur and former student of their college in a business deal that has tragic consequences. It also serves the vehicle to reveal the final twist that concerns the identify of one of the rudeboys.

The book is written in the jargon of the rudeboys and required much flipping back and forth between the pages of the novel and the glossary. I would have been totally lost without the glossary and found the book slow-going at first because of the constant flipping. As I got further into the novel, I picked up both the terms and the rhythm of Malkani's writing.

This is not a book for people who are offended by profane language.

No one would have believed...

Lee Gomes in his column, Portals, in today's Wall Street Journal lists his top technology trends of 2007 and one is flash memory which allows people to download and view movies on their mobile phones. He mentions that this is something that young people in particular and doing and it echoes something that Chris Anderson observed in The Long Tail and that is that many young people are growing up listening to music on iPods, watching movies on iPods or phones and generally reading most of their content on computers. In other words, while they are still listening to music, reading and watching movies they are doing this on none of the same devices that many of us used when we were growing up. And, further, these are devices that no one would have believed would either be available or used in this way even 15 years ago.

I think that this change is an excellent example of the pitfalls of inside-out design which I have observed in many of the discussions with my classmates in library school. I mean inside-out design to refer to the approach to design which overweights how the individual feels about the product or service. Reactions to electronic books have been typical of this inside-out approach. Many people will say that they love books, love the feel of a physical book and therefore reading books on the computer or on an e-book will never catch on. But, of course, people do read on computers and will certainly embrace e-books if they have certain features such as the ability to search and annotate and eventually decouple the devices from proprietary formats. I must admit that I am looking forward to such a device because I currently carry around several books that I may be reading and notebooks to record my thoughts. The thought of carrying around one device is very appealing and given the positive reaction to the e-ink displays I imagine that it will appeal to other people as well. Of course, maybe this is just another example of inside-out design because it is what appeals to me.

We must be more open to the opportunities that new technology applications bring to our users and even if we do not yet see a role for a device or technology we must become familiar with it and think about how it can be used. Perhaps, we should spend some time interviewing or shadowing the youngest generation of library users and see how they do things.

The dramatic increase in storage capability has made the iPod, digital cameras, powerful laptops and phones that can act as music players and video devices. In 1983, I visited a computer graphics company that did some of the first computer animations. According to Wikipedia, they did 27 minutes of animation for The Last Starfighter and at the time this was considered to be an astonishing amount of animation and this was done on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. I had my photo taken in the midst of the Cray and it was in a single room, incredibly large and shaped like a horseshoe. No one would have believed then that computer animation could be so ubiquitous and that we would now have incredible computer power available from such small and portable devices as our current laptops.

The Long Tail and Libraries

I just finished reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. He writes about how business has been transformed by the Internet and the availability of choices in a business not bound by bricks-and-mortar.

The three main forces behind the Long Tail are:

1. "Democratize the tools of production"--digital cameras, video recorders enlarge the field of content producers beyond the specialist or professional to the passionate amateur.


2. "Democratize the tools of distribution"--this is the role played by aggregators such as Amazon or Netflix


3. "Connect supply and demand" --this is done by filters such as recommendations in Netflix, customer reviews and list on Amazon. Essentially, a filter orders information so a user can find items.

A library would seem to be both an aggregator and use filters via the catalogs. Most libraries allow searching for subjects as well as authors and titles and one could certainly argue that the filters used in libraries could be more robust and some libraries are attempting that by adding patron reviews or linking to patron lists or even allowing tagging by patrons to help identify items using labels that are most meaningful to them.

In my former career in publications, we found that categorizing was, no surprise, the most difficult part of determining how to organize information and we used to have to mediate disagreements between the professional developers who would tell us the proper way something should be organized versus our need to make sure the readers would be able to find the information and the two were often in conflict. We tended to go with an information organization that the readers could understand (which tended to be task-based) because if the they could not find what they were looking for our work was not very successful.

While reading the book, although fascinated by the 80/20 rule and was reminded that we discussed the 80/20 rule in our collection development class--20% of the items circulate 80% of the time. We talked about the importance of user needs surveys to improve our collection practices and our services in general. I have been thinking a lot about user needs surveys and it is clear that while they are very important they are also extremely difficult to do well and I wonder whether we can get better user needs information from examining the circulation data of our own libraries and other libraries using the library's ILS data. Do our library systems collect data about searches that patrons make that are not successful? We could use that data to determine what items they are searching for that they cannot find and determine whether they cannot find them because the items are not available in our collections or whether there is a problem with their search terms or our categorization? That would go a long way to helping us refine our choices.

Anderson argues for the importance of the filter. Businesses such as Netflix are successful because they are able to distribute older films and less-viewed items such as documentaries. In fact, it is a large part of their success because they are able to distribute many of the older and lower-priced DVD options. Most importantly, people are drawn to Netflix because of the older and more obscure films. They simply have titles not found elsewhere and they make it easy to find them via their recommendations and terrific search capabilities. Right now, many libraries do not have the appropriate terms to search for CDs or DVDs; they do not have fields particular to those media, a director, or an actor or performer might get listed as author since that was the closest field available. I can understand that this might be necessary for older systems and older entries but I was quite shocked in a recent class, that many classmates seemed to think that listing a director or performer as author was just fine. Our patrons are getting used to the search capabilities of a Netflix or iTunes and we owe it to them to produce the best search experience that we can.