Catalog and Context, Part IV

Part I, Part II, Part III

(I fully admit that this topic deserves a much more extensive treatment than I will give it here. My goal is to stimulate discussion that would lead to efforts to develop models of that catalog that support a better user experience.)

Recognizing that users need a way to make sense out of large result sets, some library catalogs have added features that attempt to provide context for the user. The main such effort that I am aware of is the presentation of facets derived from some data in the bibliographic records. Another model, although I haven't seen it integrated well into library catalogs, is data mining; doing an overall analysis combining different data in the records, and making this available for search. Lastly, we have the development of entities that are catalog elements in their own right; this generally means the treatment of authors, subjects, etc., as stand-alone topics to be retrieved and viewed, even apart from their role in the retrieval of a bibliographic item. Treating these as "first-class entities" is not the same as the heading layer over bibliographic records, but it may be exploitable to provide a kind of context for users.

Facets

Faceted classification was all the rage when I attended library school in the early 1970's, having been bolstered by the work of the UK-based Classification Research Group, although the prime mover of this type of classification was S R Ranganathan who thoroughly explicated the concept in the 1930s. Faceted classification was to 1970's knowledge organization what KWIC and KWOC were to text searching: facets potentially provided a way to create complex subject headings whose individual parts could be the subject of access on their own or in context.

In library systems "faceting" has exploited information from the bibliographic record can be discretely applied to a retrieved set. Facets are all "accidents" of the existing data, as catalog record creation is not based on faceted cataloging.

In general, facets are fixed data elements, or whole or part heading strings. Authors are used as facets, generally showing the top-occurring author names with counts.

Authors as facets

Date of publication is also a commonly used facet, not so much because it is inherently useful but mainly because "it exists."

Dates as facets

Subject Facets

Faceting is, to a degree, already incorporated into our subject access systems. Library of Congress subject headings are faceted to some extent, with topic facets, geographic facets, and time facets. The Library of Congress Classification and the Dewey Decimal Classification make some use of facets where they allow entries in the classification to be extended by place, time, or other re-usable subdivisions.

Some systems have taken a page from the FAST book. FAST is Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, and it creates facets by breaking apart the segments of a Library of Congress subject heading such that topics, geographical entries, and time periods become separate entries. FAST itself does more than this, including turning some inverted headings (Lake, Erie) back to their natural order, and other changes. One of the main criticisms of FAST, however, is that it loses the very context that is provided by the composite subject heading. Thus the headings on Moby Dick become Whales / Whaling / Mentally Ill / Fiction, and leaves it unclear who or what is mentally ill in this example. (I'm sure there are better examples - send them in!)

Summon system use of facets

The Open Library created subject facets from Library of Congress subject headings, and categorizes each by its facet "type":

Open Library subject facts

Although these are laudable attempts to give the user a way to both understand and further refine the retrieved set, there are a number of problems with these implementations, not the least of which is that many of these are not actually facets in the knowledge organization sense of that term. Facets need to be conceptual divisions of the landscape that help a user understand that landscape.
Online sales sites use something that they call faceted classification, although it varies considerably from the concept of faceted classification that originated with S. R. Ranganathan in the 1930's. On a sales site, facets divide the site's products into categories so that users can add those categories to their searches. A search for shoes in general is less useful than a search for shoes done under the categories "men's", "women's" or "children's". In the online sales sense, a facet is a context for the keyword search. For all that the overall universe that these facets govern is much simpler than the entire knowledge universe that libraries must try to handle, at least the concept of context is employed to help the user.

Amazon's facets

While it may be helpful to see who are the most numerous authors in a retrieved set, authorship does not provide a conceptual organization for the user. Next, not everything that can be exploited in a bibliographic record to narrow a result set is necessarily useful. The list of publication dates from the retrieved set is not only too granular to be a useful facet (think of how many different dates there could be) but the likelihood that a user's query can be fulfilled by a publication year datum is scant indeed.

The last problem is really the key here, which is that while isolated bits of data like date or place may help narrow a large result set they do not provide the kind of overall context for searches that a truly faceted system might. However, providing such a view requires that the entries in the library catalog have been classified using a faceted classification system, and that is simply not the case.

Data Mining

I include this because I think it is interesting, although the only real instances of it that I am aware of come from OCLC, which is uniquely positioned to do the kind of "big data" work that this implies. The WorldCat Identities project shows the kind of data that one can extract from a large bibliographic database. Data mining applies best to the bibliographic universe as a whole, rather than individual catalogs, since those latter are by definition incomplete. It would, however, be interesting to see what uses could be made of mined data like WorldCat Identities, for example giving users of individual catalogs information about sources that the library does not hold. It is also a shame that WorldCat Identities appears to have been a one-off and is not being kept up to date.

Emily Dickinson at WorldCat Identities

First Class Objects

A potential that linked data brings (but does not guarantee) is the development of some of the key bibliographic entities into "first class objects". By that I mean that some entities could be the focus of searches on their own, not just as index entries to bibliographic records. Having some entities be first class objects means that, for example, you can have  a page for a person that is truly about the person, not just a heading with the personal name in it. This allows you to present the user with additional information, either similar to WorldCat Identities, if you have that information available to you, or taking text from sources like Wikipedia, like Open Library did:

Open Library author page

This was also the model used in the linked data database Freebase (which has now been killed by Google), and is not entirely unlike Google's use of Wikipedia (and other sources) to create its "knowledge graph."

Google Knowledge Graph

The treatment of some things as first class objects is perhaps a step toward the catalog of headings, but the person as an object is not itself a replication of the heading system that is found in bibliographic records, which go beyond the person's name in their organizational function:

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Adaptations.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Adaptations--Comic books, strips, etc.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Adaptations--Congresses.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Aesthetics.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Anecdotes.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Anniversaries, etc.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Appreciation.
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Appreciation--Croatia.

For subject headings, a key aspect of the knowledge map is the inclusion of relationships from broader and narrower terms and related terms. I will not pretend that the existing headings are perfect, as we know they are not, but it is hard to imagine a knowledge organization system that will not make use of these taxonomic concepts in one way or another.

Lake Erie
 See: Erie, Lake
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813.
 BT:United States--History--War of 1812--Campaigns
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813--Bibliography.
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813--Commemoration.
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813--Fiction.
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813--Juvenile fiction.
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813--Juvenile literature.
Lake Erie Transportation Company≈
 See Also: Erie Railroad Company.

This information is now available through the Library of Congress linked data service, id.loc.gov and surely, with some effort, these aspects of the "first class entity" (person, place, topic, etc.) could be recovered and made available to the user. Unfortunately (how often have I said that in these posts?), the subject heading authorities were designed as a model for subject heading creation, not as a full list of all possible subject headings, and connecting the authority file, which contains the relationships between terms, mechanically to the headings in bibliographic records is not a snap. Again, what was modeled for the card catalog and worked well in that technology does not translate perfectly to the newer technologies.

Note that the emphasis on bibliographic entities in FRBR, RDA and BIBFRAME could facilitate such a solution. All three encourage an entity view of data that has traditionally included in bibliographic records and that is not entirely opposed to the concept of the separation of bibliographic data and authorities. In addition, FRBR provides a basis for conceptualizing works and editions (FRBR's expression) as separate entities. These latter exist already in many forms in the "real world" as objects of critical thinking, description, and point of sale. The other emphasis in FRBR is on bibliographic relationships. This has helped us understand that relationships are important, although these bibliographic relationships are the tip of the iceberg if we look at user service as a whole.

Next 

Next I want to talk about possibilities. But because I do not have the answers, I am going to present them in the form of questions - because we need first to have questions before we can posit any answers.

Catalog and Context Part III

This entire series is available a single file on my web site.

In the previous two parts, I explained that much of the knowledge context that could and should be provided by the library catalog has been lost as we moved from cards to databases as the technologies for the catalog. In this part, I want to talk about the effect of keyword searching on catalog context.

KWIC and KWOC

If you weren't at least a teenager in the 1960's you probably missed the era of KWIC and KWOC (neither a children's TV show nor a folk music duo). These meant, respectively, KeyWords In Context, and KeyWords Out of Context. These were concordance-like indexes to texts, but the first done using computers. A KWOC index would be simply a list of words and pointers (such as page numbers, since hyperlinks didn't exist yet). A KWIC index showed the keywords with a few words on either side, or rotated a phrase such that each term appeared once at the beginning of the string, and then were ordered alphabetically.

If you have the phrase "KWIC is an acronym for Key Word in Context", then your KWIC index display could look like:

 KWIC is an acronym for Key Word In Context
Key Word In Context
acronym for Key Word In Context
            KWIC is an acronym for 
acronym for Key Word In Context

To us today these are unattractive and not very useful, but to the first users of computers these were an exciting introduction to the possibility that one could search by any word in a text.

It wasn't until the 1980's, however, that keyword searching could be applied to library catalogs.

Before Keywords, Headings

Before keyword searching, when users were navigating a linear, alphabetical index, they were faced with the very difficult task of deciding where to begin their entry into the catalog. Imagine someone looking for information on Lake Erie. That seems simple enough, but entering the catalog at L-A-K-E E-R-I-E would not actually yield all of the entries that might be relevant. Here are some headings with LAKE ERIE:

Boats and boating--Erie, Lake--Maps. 
Books and reading--Lake Erie region.
Lake Erie, Battle of, 1813.
Erie, Lake--Navigation

Note that the lake is entered under Erie, the battle under Lake, and some instances are fairly far down in the heading string. All of these headings follow rules that ensure a kind of consistency, but because users do not know those rules, the consistency here may not be visible. In any case, the difficulty for users was knowing with what terms to begin the search, which was done on left-anchored headings.

One might assume that finding names of people would be simple, but that is not the case either. Names can be quite complex with multiple parts that are treated differently based on a number of factors having to do with usage in different cultures:

De la Cruz, Melissa
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de

Because it was hard to know where to begin a search, see and see also references existed to guide the user from one form of a name or phrase to another. However, it would inflate a catalog beyond utility to include every possible entry point that a person might choose, not to mention that this would make the cataloger's job onerous. Other than the help of a good reference librarian, searching in the card catalog was a kind of hit or miss affair.

When we brought up the University of California online catalog in 1982, you can image how happy users were to learn that they could type in LAKE ERIE and retrieve every record with those terms in it regardless of the order of the terms or where in the heading they appeared. Searching was, or seemed, much simpler. Because it feels simpler, we all have tended to ignore some of the down side of keyword searching. First, words are just strings, and in a search strings have to match (with some possible adjustment like combining singular and plural terms). So a search on "FRANCE" for all information about France would fail to retrieve other versions of that word unless the catalog did some expansion:

Cooking, French
France--Antiquities
Alps, French (France)
French--America--History
French American literature

The next problem is that retrieval with keywords, and especially the "keyword anywhere" search which is the most popular today, entirely misses any context that the library catalog could provide. A simple keyword search on the word "darwin" brings up a wide array of subjects, authors, and titles.

Subjects:

Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 – Influence
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 — Juvenile Literature
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 — Comic Books, Strips, Etc
Darwin Family
Java (Computer program language)
Rivers--Great Britain
Mystery Fiction
DNA Viruses — Fiction
Women Molecular Biologists — Fiction

Authors:

Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882
Darwin, Emma Wedgwood, 1808-1896
Darwin, Ian F.
Darwin, Andrew
Teilhet, Darwin L.
Bear, Greg
Byrne, Eugene

Titles:

Darwin
Darwin; A Graphic Biography : the Really Exciting and Dramatic 

    Story of A Man Who Mostly Stayed at Home and Wrote Some Books
Darwin; Business Evolving in the Information Age
Emma Darwin, A Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896
Java Cookbook
Canals and Rivers of Britain
The Crimson Hair Murders
Darwin's Radio

It wouldn't be reasonable for us to expect a user to make sense of this, because quite honestly it does not make sense.

 In the first version of the UC catalog, we required users to select a search heading type, such as AU, TI, SU. That may have lessened the "false drops" from keyword searches, but it did not eliminate them. In this example, using a title or subject search the user still would have retrieved items with the subjects DNA Viruses — Fiction, and Women Molecular Biologists — Fiction, and an author search would have brought up both Java Cookbook and Canals and Rivers of Britain. One could see an opportunity for serendipity here, but it's not clear that it would balance out the confusion and frustration. 

You may be right now thinking "But Google uses keyword searching and the results are good." Note that Google now relies heavily on Wikipedia and other online reference books to provide relevant results. Wikipedia is a knowledge organization system, organized by people, and it often has a default answer for search that is more likely to match the user's assumptions. A search on the single word "darwin" brings up:

In fact, Google has always relied on humans to organize the web by following the hyperlinks that they create. Although the initial mechanism of the search is a keyword search, Google's forte is in massaging the raw keyword result to bring potentially relevant pages to the top. 

Keywords, Concluded

The move from headings to databases to un-typed keyword searching has all but eliminated the visibility and utility of headings in the catalog. The single search box has become the norm for library catalogs and many users have never experienced the catalog as an organized system of headings. Default displays are short and show only a few essential fields, mainly author, title and date. This means that there may even be users who are unaware that there is a system of headings in the catalog.

Recent work in cataloging, from ISBD to FRBR to RDA and BIBFRAME focus on modifications to the bibliographic record, but do nothing to model the catalog as a whole. With these efforts, the organized knowledge system that was the catalog is slipping further into the background. And yet, we have no concerted effort taking place to remedy this. 

What is most astonishing to me, though, is that catalogers continue to create headings, painstakingly, sincerely, in spite of the fact that they are not used as intended in library systems, and have not been used in that way since the first library systems were developed over 30 years ago. The headings are fodder for the keyword search, but no more so than a simple set of tags would be. The headings never perform the organizing function for which they were intended. 

Next

Part IV will look at some attempts to create knowledge context from current catalog data, and will present some questions that need to be answered if we are to address the quality of the catalog as a knowledge system.

Catalog and Context, Part II

This entire series is available a single file on my web site.

In the previous post, I talked about book and card catalogs, and how they existed as a heading layer over the bibliographic description representing library holdings. In this post, I will talk about what changed when that same data was stored in database management systems and delivered to users on a computer screen.

Taking a very simple example, in the card catalog a single library holding with author, title and one subject becomes three separate entries, one for each heading. These are filed alphabetically in their respective places in the catalog.

In this sense, the catalog is composed of cards for headings that have attached to them the related bibliographic description. Most items in the library are represented more than once in the library catalog. The catalog is a catalog of headings.

In most computer-based catalogs, the relationship between headings and bibliographic data is reversed: the record with bibliographic and heading data, is stored once; access points, analogous to the headings of the card catalog, are extracted to indexes that all point to the single record.

This in itself could be just a minor change in the mechanism of the catalog, but in fact it turns out to be more than that.

First, the indexes of the database system are not visible to the user. This is the opposite of the card catalog where the entry points were what the user saw and navigated through. Those entry points, at their best, served as a knowledge organization system that gave the user a context for the headings. Those headings suggest topics to users once the user finds a starting point in the catalog.

When this system works well for the user, she has some understanding of where she was in the virtual library that the catalog created. This context could be a subject area or it could be a bibliographic context such as the editions of a work.

Most, if not all, online catalogs do not present the catalog as a linear, alphabetically ordered list of headings. Database management technology encourages the use of searching rather than linear browsing. Even if one searches in headings as a left-anchored string of characters a search results in a retrieved set of matching entries, not a point in an alphabetical list. There is no way to navigate to nearby entries. The bibliographic data is therefore not provided either in the context or the order of the catalog. After a search on "cat breeds" the user sees a screen-full of bibliographic records but lacking in context because most default displays do not show the user the headings or text that caused the item to be retrieved.

Although each of these items has a subject heading containing the words "Cat breeds" the order of the entries is not the subject order. The subject headings in the first few records read, in order:

1. Cat breed
2. Cat breeds
3. Cat breeds - History
4. Cat breeds - Handbooks, manuals, etc.
5. Cat breeds
6. Cat breeds - Thailand
7. Cat breeds

If if the catalog uses a visible and logical order, like alphabetical by author and title, or most recent by date, there is no way from the displayed list for the user to get the sense of "where am I?" that was provided by the catalog of headings.

In the early 1980's, when I was working on the University of California's first online catalog, the catalogers immediately noted this as a problem. They would have wanted the retrieved set to be displayed as:

(Note how much this resembles the book catalog shown in Part I.) At the time, and perhaps still today, there were technical barriers to such a display, mainly because of limitations on the sorting of large retrieved sets. (Large, at that time, was anything over a few hundred items.) Another issue was that any bibliographic record could be retrieved more than once in a single retrieved set, and presenting the records more than once in the display, given the database design, would be tricky. I don't know if starting afresh today some of these features would be easier to produce, but the pattern of search and display seems not to have progressed greatly from those first catalogs.

In addition, it is in any case questionable whether a set of bibliographic items retrieved from a database on some query would reproduce the presumably coherent context of the catalog. This is especially true because of the third major difference between the card catalog and the computer catalog: the ability to search on individual words in the bibliographic record rather than being limited to seeking on full left-anchored headings. The move to keyword searching was both a boon and a bane because it was a major factor in the loss of context in the library catalog.

Keyword searching will be the main topic of Part III of this series.

Catalog and Context, Part I

This multi-part post is based on a talk I gave in June, 2016 at ELAG in Copenhagen.
This entire series is available a single file on my web site.

Imagine that you do a search in your GPS system and are given the exact point of the address, but nothing more.

Without some context showing where on the planet the point exists, having the exact location, while accurate, is not useful.



In essence, this is what we provide to users of our catalogs. They do a search and we reply with bibliographic items that meet the letter of that search, but with no context about where those items fit into any knowledge map.

Because we present the catalog as a retrieval tool for unrelated items, users have come to see the library catalog as nothing more than a tool for known item searching. They do not see it as a place to explore topics or to find related works. The catalog wasn't always just a known item finding tool, however. To understand how it came to be one, we need a short visit to Catalogs Past.

Catalogs Past

We can't really compare the library catalog of today to the early book catalogs, since the problem that they had to solve was quite different to what we have today. However, those catalogs can show us what a library catalog was originally meant to be.

A book catalog was a compendium of entry points, mainly authors but in some cases also titles and subjects. The bibliographic data was kept quite brief as every character in the catalog was a cost in terms of type-setting and page real estate. The headings dominated the catalog, and it was only through headings that a user could approach the bibliographic holdings of the library. An alphabetical author list is not much "knowledge organization", but the headings provided an ordered layer over the library's holdings, and were also the only access mechanism to them.

Some of the early card catalogs had separate cards for headings and for bibliographic data. If entries in the catalog had to be hand-written (or later typed) onto cards, the easiest thing was to slot the cards into the catalog behind the appropriate heading without adding heading data to the card itself.

Often there was only one card with a full bibliographic description, and that was the "main entry" card. All other cards were references to a point in the catalog, for example the author's name, where more information could be found.

Again, all bibliographic data was subordinate to a layer of headings that made up the catalog. We can debate how intellectually accurate or useful that heading layer was, but there is no doubt that it was the only entry to the content of the library.

The Printed Card

In 1902 the Library of Congress began printing cards that could be purchased by libraries. The idea was genius. For each item cataloged by LC a card was printed in as many copies as needed. Libraries could buy the number of catalog card "blanks" they required to create all of the entries in their catalogs. The libraries would use as many as needed of the printed cards and type (or write) the desired headings onto the top of the card. Each of these would have the full bibliographic information - an advantage for users who then would not longer need to follow "see" references from headings to the one full entry card in the catalog.

These cards introduced something else that was new: the card would have at the bottom a tracing of the headings that LC was using in its own catalog. This was a savings for the libraries as they could copy LC's practice without incurring their own catalogers' time. This card, for the first time, combined both bibliographic information and heading tracings in a single "record", with the bibliographic information on the card being an entry point to the headings.

Machine-Readable Card Printing

The MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) project of the Library of Congress was a major upgrade to card printing technology. By including all of the information needed for card printing in a computer-processable record, LC could take advantage of new technology to stream-line its card production process, and even move into a kind of "print on demand" model. The MARC record was designed to have all of the information needed to print the set of cards for a book; author, title, subjects, and added entries were all included in the record, as well as some additional information that could be used to generate reports such as "new acquisitions" lists.

Here again the bibliographic information and the heading information were together in a single unit, and it even followed the card printing convention of the order of the entries, with the bibliographic description at top, followed by headings. With the MARC record, it was possible to not only print sets of cards, but to actually print the headers on the cards, so that when libraries received a set they were ready to do into the catalog at their respective places.

Next, we'll look at the conversion from printed cards to catalogs using database technology.

-> Part II

This is what sexism looks like, # 3

I spend a lot of time in technical meetings. This is no one's fault but my own since these activities are purely voluntary. At the end of many meetings, though, I vow to never attend one again. This story is about one.

There was no ill-preparedness or bad faith on the part of either the organizers or the participants at this meeting. There is, however, reality, and no amount of good will changes that.

This took place at a working meeting that was not a library meeting but at which some librarians were present. At lunch one day, three librarians, myself and two others, all female, were sitting together. I can say that we are all well-known and well seasoned in library systems and standards. You would recognize our names. As lunch was winding down, the person across from us opened a conversation with this (all below paraphrased):

P: Libraries should get involved with the Open Access movement; they are in a position to have an effect.

us: Libraries *are* heavily involved in the OA movement, and have been for at least a decade.

P: (Going on.) If you'd join together you could fight for OA against the big publishers.

us: Libraries *have* joined together and are fighting for OA. (Beginning to get annoyed at this point.)

P: What you need to do is... [various iterations here]

us: (Visibly annoyed now) We have done that. In some cases, we have started an effort that is going forward. We have organizations dedicated to that, we hold whole conferences on these topics. You are preaching to the choir here - these aren't new ideas for us, we know all of this. You don't need to tell us.

P: (Going on, no response to what we have said.) You should set a deadline, like 2017, after which you should drop all journals that are not OA.

us: [various statements about a) setting up university-wide rules for depositing articles; b) the difference in how publishing matters in different disciplines: c) the role of tenure, etc.]

P: (Insisting) If libraries would support OA, publishers like Elsevier could not survive.

us: [oof!]

me: You are sitting here with three professionals with a combined experience in this field of well over 50 years, but you won't listen to us or believe what we say. Why not?

P: (Ignoring the question.) I'm convinced that if libraries would join in, we could win this one. You should...

At this point, I lost it. I literally head-desked and groaned out "Please stop with the mansplaining!" That was a mistake, but it wasn't wrong. This was a classic case of mansplaining. P hopped up and stalked out of the room. Twenty minutes later I am told that I have violated the "civility code" of the conference. I have become the perpetrator of abuse because I "accused him" of being sexist.

I don't know what else we could have done to stop what was going on. In spite of a good ten minutes of us replying that libraries are "on it" not one of our statements was acknowledged. Not one of P's statements was in response to what we said. At no point did P acknowledge that we know more about what libraries are doing than he does, and perhaps he could learn by listening to us or asking us questions. And we actually told him, in so many words, he wasn't listening, and that we are knowledgeable. He still didn't get it.

This, too, is a classic: Catch-22. A person who is clueless will not get the "hints" but you cannot clue them or you are in the wrong.

Thanks to the men's rights movement, standing up against sexism has become abuse of men, who are then the victims of what is almost always characterized as "false accusations". Not only did this person tell me, in the "chat" we had at his request, "I know I am not sexist" he also said, "You know that false accusations destroy men's lives." It never occurred to him that deciding true or false wasn't de facto his decision. He didn't react when I said that all three of us had experienced the encounter in the same way. The various explanations P gave were ones most women have heard before: "If I didn't listen, that's just how I am with everybody." "Did I say I wasn't listening because you are women? so how could it be sexist?" And "I have listened to you in our meetings, so how can you say I am sexist?" (Again, his experience, his decision.) During all of this I was spoken to, but no interest was shown in my experience, and I said almost nothing. I didn't even try to explain it. I was drubbed.

The only positive thing that I can say about this is that in spite of heavy pressure over 20 minutes, one on one, I did not agree to deny my experience. He wanted me to tell him that he hadn't been sexist. I just could't do that. I said that we would have to agree to disagree, but apologized for my outburst.

When I look around meeting rooms, I often think that I shouldn't be there. I often vow that the next time I walk into a meeting room and it isn't at least 50% female, I'm walking out. Unfortunately, that meeting room does not exist in the projects that I find myself in.

Not all of the experience at the meeting was bad. Much of it was quite good. But the good doesn't remove the damage of the bad. I think about the fact that in Pakistan today men are arguing that it is their right to physically abuse the women in their home and I am utterly speechless. I don't face anything like that. But the wounds from these experiences take a long time to heal. Days afterward, I'm still anxious and depressed. I know that the next time I walk into a meeting room I will feel fear; fear of further damage. I really do seriously think about hanging it all up, never going to another meeting where I try to advocate for libraries.

I'm now off to join friends and hopefully put this behind me. I wish I could know that it would never happen again. But I get that gut punch just thinking about my next meeting.