Information Overload (An Essay, A Rant, A Stream of Consciousness Post)

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern recognition. -Marshall McLuhan


Today, I am not going to do any reading of books. At points, I run into information overload where I simply have been reading too much. My brain gets full and sometimes it gives me insomnia. Then I have to take a day off from reading.

This does not happen too often. One way which I deal with information overload is to do mnemonic exercises. Things like taking a few minutes everyday to sit and memorize the contents of a single room in detail. Or memorizing childrens rhymes. I have a fondness for Mother Goose. It helps when you are constantly bombarded by an endless stream of unfiltered information.

Plus, none of my holds came in yesterday for me to read. I have no stacks of books waiting for me. I am not particularly fond of reading magazines. In a way, I think reading magazines and newspapers is not the same as reading books. The information comes in little bites.

I spend a lot of time going through masses of information on my job. Skimming through masses of reviews of books to see which one I can then focus on and read in detail. Most things really are not worth reading. A good example of this is the old clipping file for newspapers. You end up throwing away the majority of the newspaper and putting in a very few articles which may be of importance to the community. The rest is filler. I think this is true of most newspapers and magazines.

I think really good concentration is important in my job as well as the ability to speed read. It helps if you are really strong willed, or do activities which require a lot of detailed focus like knitting, crossword puzzles, sewing, or collect very detailed things like stamps, coins, or comic books. Good concentration also helps you filter out the constant bombardment of useless information on the internet as well. Speed reading teaches you how to scan for relevance and choose those things which are important.

If you sit at a screen all day, you also need a certain amount of emotional detachment to the things which they are trying to sell you. The internet is based on getting attention. It is filled with all kinds of nastiness designed to catch your attention, pornography, hate spewing politics, and thinly veiled scatalogical advertisements. If you give too much credence to these things it can create a state of information overload.

A problem which I run into is that many people don't consider reading work. The first thing which comes into their minds is that person is reading, they must not be doing anything. We read to select what you will read. A lot of it is not pleasurable. We have to select a lot of things which we do not like personally, because it is what our patrons want.

Also some people consider looking up things not to be work. They want hard physical evidence of work. Papers, statistics, cleaned floors, and other concrete things. They have a hard time picturing the idea that your helping someone find a book is a job, or your looking up a specific piece of information for them is significant. Service is a very abstract concept. There are not a whole lot of physical results for librarians.

Information overload is further compounded by what I now call "Media Soup." We no longer need to just know books, we need to know all kinds of media. The library is a media center not a book depository. Some of the audiovisual formats which we have to handle are audiobooks, cd audiobooks, playaway audiobooks, vhs videos, DVC-- Descriptive Video Casettes, DVDs, computer game cartridges, cd-roms, and music cds. This is further compounded by the need to purchase literacy and foreign language materials.

In print we have magazines, newspapapers, annual reports, newsletters, government documents, pamphlets, fliers, books of all sizes (mass market paperback, trade paperbacks, clothbound, folio, quarto), graphic novels, music scores, maps, and various ephemera.

Added to this is online information in the traditional formats, the internet, periodical databases, and pay databases like Westlaw (we have this). Now this has expanded explosively in the last year. Now librarians have blogs, myspace pages, vlogs, and are attempting to understand social networking.

This creates an upside down topsy turvy, information saturated environment. The variety is such that it becomes quite difficult to manage even a small portion of the variety of formats. Some of the formats even have special internal formats, books are available as large print books. Add in subject specialties and age groups like business, job information center, law, young adult, adult, childrens, and senior and you get a big boiling soup pot of information.

It becomes very easy to get confused in a public library. Libraries have not reorganized to meet the needs of the different formats that well. Librarianship is a very traditional profession. Right now, there has been quite a bit of foment in the profession.

Some claim that the librarians are broken, others claim that the libraries are broken. It is a kind of jumble where people are listening to the librarians who have the best jargon to explain what is happening, not necessarily the steady even handed people who can plan a straight course. Being patient in a sea of information is hard.