From Cybrarian to MyGuide 2002-2005
Opening Presentation given at the Cybrarian Stakeholders’ Conference 2005
Date: 14/04/2005
Venue: The Paddington Hilton, London, UK
Article
It is my job is to go right back to the beginning and try to describe why we wanted to do, and still want to do, the thing that was called Cybrarian and we are now learning to call MyGuide.
Essentially, human beings and technologies get on at varying rates of success. When you first see a piece of equipment it is sometimes obvious what it is for and how you use it. In some situations it is not so obvious what it is for, and even if it is obvious what it is for it is not obvious how to use it. This, in neutral terms, I call a functionality gap, which exists between people and things.
In terms of how that works with information systems, the success rate varies. It was not very difficult for people faced with two-channel television, when there was only BBC and ITV, to work out how these worked. In fact, if we did not like what was on one channel we used to say “’turn over’ and ‘we’ll watch the other side’ “ – because that was all there was. And so that was relatively easy. It is more difficult with an electronic programme guide. I looked at mine last night and I currently have 418 channels on the Sky PG. But it has proved to be even more difficult when it comes to the interaction of people with computing.
There is a very good reason for that. Computers were first developed to do a lot of crunchy major processing and, as you all know, it was famously once said that the world probably needed three. Computers came into their own through network systems when the Americans needed to work out in the early 1970s what they would do if their nuclear command headquarters was bombed by the Russians. The answer was that they wanted to distribute their command and control. So they invented a network to do that, and that was the beginning of what we now think of as the Internet today.
What came together in computers – the bit that you can see – was a keyboard which was designed to stop typewriter keys hitting each other. (For instance, one of the two most used letters in the English alphabet is the letter ‘A’, which you hit with the weakest finger on your left hand which is not very sensible); network systems and operating systems first designed for the military and then taken up by academics, which was probably their doom. By the time that Windows came along in the early 1990s, therefore, you had systems that were masquerading as office equipment and domestic electronics, which actually grew out of a totally different origin.
That is one side of it. On the other side of it you were being asked to address these systems with a kind of education skill set that people learned in schools and from their culture. Contrary to a lot of popular opinion, what we learn primarily in schools is not what is natural. To give a good example of that, we have a discipline in our schools called mathematics. The reason that people are not very good at mathematics is that it combines such odd and different skills in the one subject, namely the logic of algebra versus the spatial skills of geometry, so that it is pretty difficult for anybody to be good at all of it. It is the way we have grouped it as mathematics that has made it a problematic subject. So there is nothing natural about being good at working with computers and working with information systems.
What has happened over the time period of what we call the PC, during the 1990s, is that you have had on the one hand this strange hybrid system that was not developed for me and you, and on the other hand we have had me and you who were developed by a Victorian education system which was not very well adapted to computers. So by the mid-1990s we had what we will call a functional gap between people and the computer-driven information system. Remember, I said at the start that what we were looking at was a functional gap.
Because of human nature being what it is, an awful lot of people in public policy terms – and this is not, during a general election period, a partisan point; it applies to all politicians, at least that I have talked to – believe that the reason there is a functionality gap is that there is something wrong with people. In other words, if we could get all these scruffy people on sink housing estates to nail themselves to chairs and become word processors, the world would be a better place! Actually, it would not. But that is the starting point for our public policy, that it is people’s fault that they are not very good with computers. So what we have to give them is something called skills.
That is an interesting point in itself because none of you in this room, I imagine, have been on a mobile phone skills development course. I do not think you have a basic NVQ in video cassette recording and I do not think that you are going to Learn Direct centres to learn how to fathom your microwave cooker – or your washing machine, for that matter. In essence, one of the things that we have to bear in mind as a society is that when you need a lot of training to do something with a piece of technology it is actually a cost shift from the producer to the consumer. In other words, if the producer made it better the consumer would not have to buy so much skill to use it. But through the 1990s the public perception was still that the real problem with computing was people, not the design of the computer.
What is more, this was compounded by a problem: whereas computers were very worthy and serious, televisions and telephones were vulgar and frivolous. Therefore you could not base any information retrieval system of any seriousness on a telephone or a television; it had to be on the computer. That is also reflected in the fact that although television changed our lives as human beings, in every sphere of our life the sphere that changed least was the classroom. Educational television, compared with other kinds of television, was a relative failure.
That gives us some context for coming into what the gap was. In the mid-1990s when we arrived at this point people began to talk about something called digital inclusion or the digital divide, which went somewhere along with social exclusion. In fact, if you cut the numbers it does not matter much which way you cut them: they pretty well end up being the same. Cybrarian started out with the socio-economic analysis of the population, which said that if you added up all the disabled, ethnic minorities, the untapped mainstream and the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, it came to something like 40 per cent of the population. From the analysis that I did for humanITy looking from extreme disability through to people who just could not read Times New Roman 10-point on a computer screen – from severe disability to mild disability – the numbers ran to something between 35 and 40 per cent who could not use a standard computer as configured and dumped on an office desk. If you look at domestic computer usage as opposed to sales, although sales are about 60 per cent and therefore the people without computers are about 40 per cent, there is already some evidence of computers that cannot be used and are tucked into a little room below the stairs; so it is again between 35 and 40 per cent. So we have stubborn numbers.
However, this is not a simple digital divide, of course, because the growth of multi-channel satellite television grew from the bottom up. It grew from social class E through D to C2, to C1, and now even Lords and Ladies say that they have Sky Television. Whereas computing tended to come the other way, not from social class A so much but from B through C2 and then A. It has not penetrated really into D and E to any great extent.
What you are looking at is a computer digital divide, and this was very much mapped on to socio-economic conditions and it looked like being the same thing. So when we came to the preliminaries at Cybrarian what we were asking ourselves was whether there was anything that the industry could do about this: was this a fundamental failure of technology? Was it a market failure? Was it a public policy failure? What kind of a failure was it?
Fundamentally it is a market failure. The reason it is a market failure is that the people who have been involved in the rapid growth of technology do not behave in the same way as industries that are mature, like British Telecom, or supermarkets. In the big IT industries they only have two ways of working: you are either going for bust because you have a new product that everybody wants, or you are downsizing because there is suddenly too much of it. So room for the bottom 40 per cent of the market is not very great. If you think of a computer company that can upgrade your hardware every 18 months and upgrade your software every 18 months and make a pot of money out of it, there is not much point in trying to sell it to the poor. You are making quite enough money out of the rich, thank you very much. In fact, there was a fairly bleak scenario in the late 1990s when the big companies had even stopped trying to sell to people who were poor on the basis that they could red-line certain people through post codes. That has receded a little but it is important to bear it in mind.
What you have is a situation where it was not in the interests of the major industries to start looking at the socially or digitally excluded, the kind of people we are looking at. What we needed to do at the beginning was to try to look at how you could narrow that functional gap between people and the information systems they were likely to want to use, or that we wanted them to use because we saw the benefits of it.
I do not intend to go very much into the side of that which had to do with skills development, first, because you are all very familiar with the kind of skills development that people need to use computers, and secondly, because I tend to think that most skills development is a horrible waste of public and consumer money: it would be much better to get the design right. Having not been able to get the design right in the late 1990s into the 21st century through public procurement, we needed to develop a smaller project to try to get the design right for the kind of people we needed to work with and to work for. That is why Cybrarian was born.
It was born to try to take a lot of different technologies that were available such as customising the size and font of print, changing the foreground and background, getting computers to respond to voice-in and to do voice-out, getting computers to respond to search mechanisms based on a user requirement. All those things are possible but they had never actually been put into one box, because the market works with different manufacturers producing different bits of software and, as we all know, it is very difficult to make all those bits of software compatible. For instance, in the case of the kind of equipment that I use in my office, because I cannot see I use something called the Braille display, and every time I hook my Braille display into my PC it disables the tracker ball which my partially-sighted colleagues need to enlarge and contract what is going on on their screens. It is a small incompatibility but you will find that the more pieces of software you bring from different corners of the industry, the more likely you are to get complications and hang-ups. If you buy all your stuff from one supplier, as many people do now, it is not so difficult. But, of course, if you buy all your stuff from one supplier, the supplier may not supply you with the kinds of things that you need.
The birth of what was Cybrarian was an attempt to try to look at the various different kinds of people and the needs of different kinds of people in terms of their problems with conventional systems. What that turns out to mean we will look into in more detail this afternoon. However, I will try to give you some generic ideas, not specifically tied to Cybrarian, and the kind of imagining you can do that will allow you to be more effective with information, particularly if you are not familiar with complicated systems.
The first thing is that most of that 40 per cent of our population who do not like computers do not actually like QWERTY keyboards. You can understand why they don’t. They were designed, as I said, to avoid key clashes so they are not very intuitive. Secondly, the real problem in life – and here I am getting rather philosophical – is not getting what you want; it is knowing what you want before you go out to get it. If you know what you want it actually is not all that difficult to get it. What we found in the mid-1990s and coming into the 21st century was that one of the main problems people have with the society in which we live is that they cannot define a choice. As long as they only had two channels on television, if they did not like what was on BBC they ‘turned over’; if they did not like what was on ITV they turned back. That does not work with 418 television channels and it certainly does not work with the Internet. So defining searches was a problem for people.
Defining searches that were relevant to people is also a problem. If you go on to, let’s say Google, for the sake of argument – although it is not exclusive to this – and you type a fairly simple search message in Google, what you get is reports ranked in the order of popularity of the sites. In other words, it is a citation index in descending order of use. That frequently, unless we do it in a special way, means that United States sites rank high. It also means that the most popular sites, which may not be relevant to you, rank high. So the system is no respecter, unless you know how to do it in a very detailed way, of geography. It is no respecter of what you want the information for and it is no respecter of the kind of person that you are. So that is two lots of stuff.
The third lot of stuff relates to the fact that people, for various reasons, need simplification, or – like me – they cannot read text without some sort of adaptation or – like other people – they need assistance with additional material. Some people need simplification and others need amplification. Therefore, we needed to look at a system which took account of people, not only in their experience of computing at the QWERTY keyboard level, which is why we are not just thinking in the medium term of computing; we needed to think of the way you search for information and the way you find information, and it also needed to think about the way that human beings carry on in respect of the information that gets displayed in front of them. There is no point in your being able to master the technology, master the way you search for information, and then find that when you have the answer you cannot make head nor tail of it because it is in highly technical language that you cannot simplify and that you cannot manipulate the system to simplify.
So Cybrarian/My Guide was an attempt to look at the human/information system gap by assuming that the main onus of change had to be on the technological side and not on the human side. Therefore I have said over and over again – and I am sure we will hear it this afternoon – that if we have to train people very much to use Cybrarian/My Guide the system will not be good enough. The whole point of it is that it will operate in such a way that it reduces to an absolute minimum the kind of help that people need by perhaps setting it up so that it takes account of their user profile and with a little bit of a push and some background mentoring and support. Certainly I do not expect you to have to do three hours customisation and get the equivalent of an NVQ to know how to deal with it. If you have to do that you might as well go back to Google. There is no point having something like My Guide to start with.
A final word before I finish. There was a discussion in background about this, which is important for us all to bear in mind. There is always a necessary tension in public policy, and there always must be, between getting outputs for public sector inputs and giving people what they want. There has always been a tension in this project, and a very proper tension, between DfES, which was the original sponsor, in wanting people to continue throughout their life in lifelong learning on the one hand, and the general requirement of our stakeholder group, many of whom are present now; they had user groups who actually were much more interested in what the American constitution calls life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of all those three, I am most in favour of the pursuit of happiness, though I think life and liberty are very good and necessary conditions for that.
The system is necessarily in its promotion and discussion run with that underlying tension, and I believe that is a good underlying tension to have because the way that we will work is that while we will recognise the Government wanting formal learning and people wanting formal learning, we will also recognise that what we want hitherto excluded people from online systems. What we want them to do by joining us on the Internet is to live fuller, happier, more fulfilled lives as human beings, as citizens and as consumers, as well as people who want to enhance their educational skills.
We want, in other words, to use this new system to fit into the government’s general policy not just of education, which is central to the manifestos of all three parties, but also allowing people to open out and participate fully in all aspects of life.
Thank you.