Reliable Old Tech and the Failures of New Tech
So I was thinking earlier today about the long lost library card catalog, and how I never really had to think about it being there and just working. In those days, you would never find yourself approaching the card catalog only to find a big "Out of Order" sign on it.
These days when I walk into my local library (and others nearby), I pretty much have to assume I need to ask the librarian to look anything up for me. The public catalog terminals are almost always broken. Windows problems. Network errors. Won't connect to anything without someone logging in to something. Forget browsing the catalog. You can't even search the catalog.
This seems to be mainly due to a design shift. In the card catalog days, elementary school students were taken down to the school library and taught how to use the card catalog. It was expected that you would learn how to use the system. Once learned, it was easy to use.
Early electronic catalogs held to a similar principle. Somewhere near the terminals, there was a short guide to using the catalog, maybe only a page or two. It was expected that you would read these instructions to learn how to use the catalog. You could ask a librarian if you still had questions.
Most modern catalog systems seem to assume the user should not need to learn *anything* in order to use it, and that it should have an identical, simple interface wherever you are: library, laptop computer, phone, anything. So the interface is dumbed down to a Google-style search box and maybe a drop-down menu of a few limits that are more hints than requirements. The interface is painful for serious research/searching/browsing.
And the layers of dependencies create so much instability that the catalog can't even be relied upon to be accessible at all. Where earlier catalogs had dumb terminals connected to a mainframe running a dedicated library catalog program and database, modern catalogs are a web "app" dependent on many web libraries, a web sever, a web browser, the internet itself (but we have to prevent users from going anywhere besides the catalog app without permission), and inevitably Windows. Everything is a breaking point (usually it's Windows or the network connection).
The result: millions of dollars poured into new technology that makes the library less accessible that the old technology it replaces.