File-sharing: not just for kids

I'm still wrapping my head around this; it's a report about a bunch of medical professionals setting up a file-sharing forum for articles from non-open access (NOA) journals. Techdirt reports that the site had 100,000 users and that 83% of requested articles were shared—over 5000 articles in a 6-month period. I went to look at the original report and saw a lot of talk about OA vs. NOA journals, but, interestingly, no discussion of institutional repositories. I would love to see an analysis of how many of those articles, despite being published in NOA journals, were freely available online, to begin with.

More broadly, though, this seems like some sort of failure, on some level, by someone. Does the blame fall on publishers for charging too much? (Unsurprisingly, I'm inclined to suggest that's a piece of the problem, yes. The study gives the average "value"—I'm going to use the term "cost," instead—of an article as $30. Seems a bit steep, to me, given that the writing and editing were done for free, from the publisher's standpoint.) Does the fault lie with libraries for failing to make interlibrary loan into a faster, better-used, better-marketed service? Maybe, but, then again, with this kind of volume, mightn't libraries be running into cost and copyright pitfalls, anyway? I'll show some ignorance, here: perhaps public libraries don't offer article-level ILLs; I admit, I've never tried. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many of these researchers already had access to academic or medical libraries that could get these articles for them and opted to go this route, anyway; I would assume a very small percentage, but what if I'm wrong? Do we blame institutions—and, yeah, academic libraries—for failing to build repositories of their scholars' works? Maybe, a little, but a fair portion of the publishers in the biomedical fields seem (by my unscientific sampling) to insist on pre-print only archiving, as well as 6-month to 1-year embargoes. That's a non-ideal scenario, even with 100% participation in institutional repositories, which is, itself, a pipe dream.

I thought this quote, from the original study, was pretty fascinating: "From the participants’ comments made in the forums, however, there does not appear to be any vindictiveness on the part of the participants against the journals or holders of copyright, but a mood of togetherness, of openness and sharing, and communal assistance." So, scientists acting like scientists are supposed to, sharing information freely? The devil, you say!

I don't have any new solutions to offer—that I think social networking tools could make some of this discussion moot is probably no secret [though it may be worth its own post, later in the week]—so perhaps I shouldn't go so far as to say this: journal publishers are now, more and more obviously, getting in the way of scientific progress. Perhaps not as directly as stupid intellectual property policies—companies owning genes and chemical formulas and the like—but, certainly, it's happening. Scientific discussion should be open and accessible, and as libraries struggle with decreasing budgets, while publishers increase the price of journals, that discussion is getting more and more closed, forcing researchers to, in this case, build their own file-sharing networks, to get the information they need. This is a pressing issue for the library, scientific, and academic communities—which, I realize, overlap significantly, though I would argue that sometimes scientists-as-scientists are open to different solutions than scientists-as-academics: the bulk of my favored options require some changes in the tenure system, for instance.

At any rate, have a look at that study, and tell me what you think in the comments. (Maybe one day I'll get Google Wave working with this blog, and we can chat about all of this in real-time.)

Please, Take a Moment to Write an E-mail

(I drafted an email for you, available here. Add or remove content as you see fit. Send it to Rep. Dwight Evans, devans@hacd.net, Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations by May 26, 2009.)

The House Committee on Appropriations is currently holding public hearings in Harrisburg, and they want written testimony from taxpayers. In addition to writing to Rep. Evans, please contact your other state representatives. If you don't know who else to contact, look here for that information, and if you feel there's more you should say, visit CLP's advocacy page for information and talking points.

Libraries have never been busier. During this recession demand for library services across the Commonwealth are continually rising as more people search for jobs, families tighten their budgets, and retirees grapple with shrinking savings. We need libraries, and in this particular instance, libraries need us.

Send an e-mail, please. Right now. I did.

Thank you!

(Much of this text was adapted from CLP's "First Floor - New and Featured." Copy at will, both this post and my previous post. I don't mind, and I'm sure CLP doesn't mind.)

Ebook readers - a primer, a rant, and a call for pertinent discussion

Getting the facts straight

Even now, a year and a half after the release of Kindle 1.0--not even the first or most innovative of ebook readers--I keep seeing bloggers and other Web folk (many of them librarians or engineers who should know better) spouting off opinions like "why not just buy a laptop and read on that?" or "screens hurt my eyes." And that bugs me. Clearly, there's a huge failure in marketing happening on Amazon's (and Sony's and iRex's) part. But I'm not sure what else they should be doing to educate consumers--nowadays, you can go a Target store and play with a Sony Reader in person; even some libraries have Kindles (link goes to my review of one of CMU's Libraries' two Kindle 1.0s), so trying one out isn't insurmountably difficult. Nearly every article about these readers points out that they use E Ink, though, yes, most reporters have started taking for granted that people know what that means. I just don't get how people who care enough to have an opinion on this don't also care enough to educate themselves a little bit. </rant>

In hopes of preventing my engineering and librarian colleagues from making similarly inane statements, I'd like to tell you something very important: ebook readers like the Kindle, Sony, iLliad, and upcoming Plastic Logic reader do not have bright backlit screens like monitors or iPhones. Instead, they have what looks like a printed page, pretty much. If you'd like a familiar comparison, it's a bit like reading a large scientific (or most any other) calculator, but with much better resolution and a far less shiny surface. It really looks like a printed page. E Ink is black-and-white, until probably 2010, when color devices should start coming out. And it has no backlight; you have to find a lamp if you want to read in the dark.

Other facts: the refresh rate on the newer devices is similar to the time lag of flipping a page--it was slower on Kindle 1.0. As you read, you can add bookmarks and annotations, stop at one page and start back at the same place, and in all other ways treat it like a book. On the Kindle, there's even a tiny status bar at the bottom of the screen that tells you how much of the way through the book you are. But it's a little bit better than a book, in that the font size can be changed, and you can run a search for a particular word or sentence you remember. I find it attractive that something the size of a large paperback or a magazine--depending whether you go Kindle 2.0 or Kindle DX, for instance--holds thousands of books.

In addition to books in various formats--and, no, the formats aren't currently all that interoperable between devices--Kindle DX and the upcoming Plastic Logic reader will both read PDFs natively. (For older Kindles, you first have to convert them to the Kindle file format, which may or may not cost $0.10, depending who you ask.) This alone makes me consider getting one, because I read an awful lot of academic articles, wasting an awful lot of paper (and carrying an awful lot of it around) in the process. Plastic Logic will also read Word docs, Excel files, and Powerpoints, and is said to have some touchscreen capabilities.

For most people, the really exciting thing about the Plastic Logic reader, due to come out in late 2009 or early 2010, is that it will be flexible. Holding it really will be just like holding a closed magazine, though I am not certain it will roll up as well as a magazine does. For 8.5x11" documents, you can hold it upright, and for books you can hold it sideways, just like the Kindle DX. It will have wireless capabilities, though perhaps not the same ones as the Kindle; both will allow for auto-downloading of the day's newspapers and blogs, for a fee.

For more information

For a comparison-and-contrast of several ereader technologies, circa December 2008 (so, before specs were released on Kindle 2.0), feel free to look at my LIS 2000 group's poster on the topic, here.

And to see what articles I'm reading (even weeks or months after I post this!) about ebook readers, feel free to check out my del.icio.us links on the topic: http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/ebooks - admittedly, a few of the links in there are about actual ebooks, rather than the readers, but it's pretty easy to tell the difference. If you want to follow the articles I read about just the Kindle or just the Plastic Logic reader, you can do that at these two links, respectively: http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/kindle and http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/plastic_logic.

The debate the library community, including users, should be having

I apologize for being all ranty, but I really think it's time we move on to the substantive part of the debate. "The aesthetic quality of reading a book" is not lost in any appreciable way with most of these devices--they feel like a book to hold and look like a book to read. You can spray them with book perfume if you miss "the smell of books." (I know I sound like I'm jeering here, but I just don't think this part of the debate is worth holding. I'm trying to lay it to rest.) And, inevitably, the prices will go down--they always do. The ebook is here; the ereader is coming; we will eventually stop printing books. Not now, but very possibly within our lifetimes. So, let's drop the sentimental arguments and move on to practical discussion.

Let's talk about how we will fight the restrictive DRM on ebooks (so that I can move my purchases from the Plastic Logic 1.0 to the Plastic Logic 5.0, given my rate of upgrading--or maybe to the Kindle 7.0, if I want to switch brands--and so, eventually, my library can buy one interoperable copy of a book, rather than four proprietary ones); let's decide whether it's worthwhile to lend out ebook readers in the near term; for the long term, let's figure out how to work with publishers to make the ebooks our patrons currently have to use monitors or printers to read accessible on their ereaders (perhaps for limited periods of time!); let's think about privacy and financial protection in the case of lost or stolen ereaders.

More broadly, let's decide on the library's role and what shape it will take when everything outside of archives is digital. Because that's where we're going, book-smell or no book-smell.

Pennsylvania libraries need our help!

The PA Senate is talking about cutting library budgets drastically. Really, really drastically. You can find more information (including extra talking points!) here. If you live in PA, you can find your Senators' names and e-mail addresses here.

To get you started--because I know I hate composing letters from scratch--here's the e-mail I sent. Please, I know this isn't the best-worded piece of literature ever, so reword it at will. But do take a couple of minutes and send something, because these cuts will completely cripple Pennsylvania's public libraries, if they're allowed to stand.

Dear Senator ----,

First, I want to thank you for your service to the state and for all of your past support to public libraries. I would also like to ask that you please continue to provide the funding levels needed to keep Pennsylvania's libraries running--a decrease in funds means a decrease in services, and our state simply cannot afford that right now. Libraries are busier than ever, continuing to provide services to long-time patrons, while also serving an increasing number of people, many of whom need help finding jobs. Here is an article from the Tribune-Review, describing this phenomenon: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_612876.html.

Not only is an investment in libraries a direct service to the citizens of the state, but it also tends to bring money into the state that would otherwise not be here. In better economic times, it was shown that every dollar invested by state and local governments in public libraries results in a higher return on investment--in the case of South Carolina, it was $2.86 (see http://www.libsci.sc.edu/SCEIS/final%20report%2026%20january.pdf, page 5). Nowadays, that ROI must be even higher, as more people utilize library services to find employment. A piece of that ROI is from federal funding; you should be aware that Pennsylvania will lose nearly $1 million in federal money if the cuts currently under consideration are allowed to stand.

Please, support Pennsylvania's public libraries by maintaining their FY 2008-2009 funding levels.

Thank you.

Happy National Library Week!

I know, I know, we're halfway through it already. It's a week half full or half empty, depending how you look at it. But I can still wish you a happy one, right?

Also, as reported on The CIT Library Blog (in strikingly similar writing style), I made a display for Carnegie Mellon's Engineering & Science Library, using facts about the two Science Libraries and the CMU Library system in general, in the style of Facebook updates, on a poster made to look like a Facebook page. It's not quite what we mean by "Library 2.0", but it was fun to do and has managed to get a little bit of attention from students walking by.

Synechdoche

I was going to write about The Darien Statements, but I find myself distracted by one point and unable to focus on the whole.

"As librarians we must:" one section begins (less than grammatically), and below it are bullet points. The one, in particular, that's got my attention? "Choose wisely what to stop doing."

Whoa.

It resonates on a personal level, certainly, but looking at it as advice for the profession at large, I can't help thinking of Steve Martin's "How to be a millionaire without paying taxes" joke. I mean, any advice that begins "choose wisely" is probably not specific enough to be helpful. How should we choose? How can we know? Should we leave Second Life because it is clearly not going to be the paradigm-changing phenomenon its creators might have hoped? Or do we keep doing it, as training for the next big technology? How can we know whether text-a-librarian will catch on, unless we try it? Are institutional repositories the big fix we need for scholarly communication and archiving of the scholarly record, or are they a flash in the pan? (Trust me on this: one can find papers that say both. ... And I should wrap up this post and get back to my paper.)

How do you determine what is the "wise" point to give up on any given initiative or technology?

For that matter, how funny is it that I immediately jumped to technology, as the context in which that question operates? I can think of several others, but I did not, immediately.

It's a question worth thinking about and discussing--good on them for bringing it up!

Retreading old ground

The argument over whether the MLIS is useful/relevant/necessary to library work, particularly in academic libraries, has raged on for years. I admit, having been through roughly 2/3 of an MLIS program myself, now, I'm a little more on the "no" side than the "yes." I'm centrist enough to see both sides, and, certainly, I've learned things in my classes. I don't think the degree, sans professional experience, is worth anything at all, but, on the flip side, I'm not prepared to claim that professional experience alone is enough.

I've been exposed to high-falutin' ideals in coursework and seen the truth of their applicability (or lack thereof) in real library situations; similarly, I've heard of technologies in my digital libraries class that I then got to talk about with real library professionals at a conference. Would I have bothered noticing the larger issues under debate in my workplace, or bothered discussing these technologies at the conference, if I hadn't had the in-class exposure to them? Hard to say. There's always been a feeling of kismet to my intellectual life--different experiences happen in different areas of my life around the same time and build on each other. I've always felt great wonder about this process, but maybe that's just how we all learn (see "experimental bias"). It isn't as though the process started with coursework: I read every blog and news feed I could, over the spring and summer before school started, and a lot of what I read has been talked about [sometimes ad nauseam] in my coursework or has shown up in my library jobs, both public and academic.

So maybe all that's needed is intellectual curiosity combined with experience? I don't know; I'm not here to make a proclamation either way. I'm not all that experienced, myself, and I'm sure my view will continue to change over time.

To the point, though: apparently, ACRL thought this whole thing would be worthwhile to debate, and LJ thought the debate was worth covering.

I was a little unimpressed by some of the arguments presented--whether this is poor summary by LJ or whether the argument is just too stale to interest the debaters, I'm not sure. The MLS "fosters shared values"? (I'm quoting LJ, not Liz Bishoff, here.) I am not convinced that a year--or even two--of courses that are, for financial reasons, stuffed to the brim with students, or worse, taken only online, will change one's values dramatically. The full phrase LJ used was "it fosters shared values--values essential to the transition to the future of the digital library." I think I've made my feelings clear, re: the amount of preparation the average library student receives, as far as "the transition to the future of the digital library" (awkward phrasing). I just don't see it.

But the other side wasn't wildly impressive, either. The argument that--and this is a quote, according to LJ, of Arnold Hirsholn--the library Master's is “devoid of anything unique to librarianship" seemed strange to me. What, really, is unique to librarianship? Like MBAs, we should learn to manage. (I don't know about them, but we don't, really.) Like teachers, we should learn to present thoughts and ideas coherently. Like anyone in the entire world, we should learn to conduct ourselves professionally--and it deeply frustrates and saddens and, honestly, scares me that we waste course time on this, where other Masters programs do not. Like anyone in customer service ... we don't really need a Master's degree for that, though, do we?

Putting aside anti-censorship ethics, the only thing really unique to librarianship is a certain facility with data--an ability to find things other people can't find--and I don't really feel like my coursework has given me that at all. I came in with better-than-average search skills, both in books and in Google, and most of the really library-specific search skills I've gained have been gained on the job. Even the one course dedicated to teaching us those skills just kind of points out that there are things called "bibliographic resources" and "encyclopedias," then sets us loose to find the answers to some contrived reference questions, each week.

This whole discussion has given me an idea. Perhaps we should require some professional experience, in libraries or elsewhere, (like an MBA program does) before we allow anyone into library school. Similarly, a certain ability with computers should be demonstrated. That would allow us to drop most of the really time-wasting aspects, the portion of the program devoted to bringing undergraduates and technophobes up to speed, and focus on the important theoretical and ethical issues.

I mean, it's just a thought. But I think it's clear that some kind of change should be made. Given that the MLS is still a requirement for many jobs--and that most librarians agree there should be some kind of formal educational experience--I'd prefer to see the discussion revolve around fixing the clear problems with the MLS. Better, I'd like to see the schools make some real effort in that direction.

I sound my quasi-heretical yaw over the roofs of the world

(I typed that "foofs of the world" and almost left it.)

The Dialog event today--I hesitate to call it a "training," since it was not focused specifically around learning to use the tool--was interesting and fairly enlightening. (Heads up to any readers in SLAPSG: we may have a Dialog tutorial in the works. I have no more details than that.)

To back up a bit: The word "library" used to bring to mind the public library, for me. Like many MLS-seekers, past and present, I spent a large portion of my childhood in a public library (though I think I had the grace not to say so on my application to library school). But I've been pretty academic-library-centric in my LIS education, thus far, for a variety of reasons that I may or may not get to later in this post. I work in an academic library (or three, depending how you count), I am taking Academic Librarianship, and my classes thus far have all been taught by academics of one stripe or another (even a practitioner in an academic institution is still an academic, I say). This immersion--which I made reference to, in a different way, in my last post--has kind of colored my thinking on the field of librarianship.

Today's event really drilled into me a different way of thinking about the library field, though. Certainly, as an SLA member and technically-inclined person, I was aware of corporate librarians--I have even applied to work as one--but I never really sat back and pondered to myself whether my philosophy about librarianship as a field applied to corporate libraries. Today I realized it does not, and that is exciting.

Whereas, for a variety of reasons*, I think the long-term goal of academic and public librarians (field-wide more than individually) should be to build tools that allow for nearly complete disintermediation: as opposed to continuing to fail at making the "but you don't know how to find things! Google doesn't have everything!" sales pitch and leaving most of the population with a poor view of us and poor information, to boot, the goal should be ... something else. We need to talk about what that something else is--do we team up with Google? Do we build our own tools to search our collections? Do we buy Serials Solutions' very, very sexy new Enterprise Search tool? I don't know, yet, and it's clearly going to take more than just me to figure that out. But before we can get there, we have to drop the self-indulgent view that computers will never compete with us (hey, they already are, and even if they aren't doing as good a job as we could, they're winning in market share) and the self-interested view that having a job is better than not (nobody likes that programmer who writes deliberately-confusing, uncommented code in hopes of retaining his or her job; let's not be that guy). We owe it to the general public, college educated or not, to build them tools that make information accessible to them without our interference. Because, increasingly, they are uninterested in asking us for help.

I'm not totally crazy, though. While I do think most authoritative information can be made accessible this way, and I even think it's a fairly affordable undertaking if we stop working so hard to recruit technophobic liberal arts majors into our ranks and instead beef up the "bright technical mind" bastion of librarians--not a small group, already. (Let me say, I dearly love several technophobic liberal arts majors. I do. But I still don't think they should become librarians unless they can lose the fear of technology.)

Anyway, as I was saying, not totally crazy: I think there will still be a need for professional data finders. Take the consulting firm I used to work for: great firm, hired some great people. But I had and continue to have a fundamental disagreement with their approach to professional development. They believed that a consultant should be all things--good with whatever engineering/IT specialty they had, good with people and management and customer handling, and also good with writing and presentations. We did our own research. I can see where they are coming from, and it seems to work fine for them ($4 billion in income a year is nothing to sneeze at). But, from a gaming perspective, I believe there's a real benefit in min-maxing. I think, if you have a really brilliant technical mind, there's no good reason to stick you behind the proverbial typewriter, as long as you can communicate the technical details to some genius writer you have on staff. Similarly, why would an engineer waste a bunch of time doing research for a literature review when an information specialist could do it for her, freeing her up to go to the lab? Why would a marketer waste time finding statistics that an information specialist could find faster? ... Having everyone trying to do everything is inefficient. Sure, there should be some overlap; the writer has to understand technology, and it helps if the information specialist (you see how I'm not calling the person "librarian" anymore? the word is rooted in the idea of books; no wonder people see us the way they do!) has some domain knowledge. It also helps if the engineer or marketer has a clue how searches are constructed. But each person has their area of expertise, and they spend the bulk of their time really excelling in the work they enjoy, rather than muddling around with things they aren't as good at.

I think corporate librarians will prove themselves indispensable, and I think they will bring some of the esteem back to our field. One day, people won't immediately assume an MLIS means shelving books and "being paid to read." I'm kind of excited about that.

(I'm also not sure I'm going the corporate route. I've sent out applications to several very different jobs. Only one is corporate, and I would love to do that job. The others are all, so far, academic, and I would love to do any of those jobs, too. I get so excited about each job, as I apply for it, and it's kind of hard to realize that I'm not going to hear back for a little while, and I need to keep looking. On one hand, it's a little rollercoastery and a little hard on the motivation, both to keep applying to places and to keep working on homework. On the other, hey, wow, there's a lot out there that I'm really excited to do. That's great, right?)

*Most of it comes down to "Not everyone attends information literacy classes, even on a college campus. Too many people are slipping through the cracks." Honestly, even tenured professors don't all know how to use the tools we provide, or to come to us for help; how many students do we miss? UVA and CMU both missed me (for real, my Master's thesis is online; I haven't had the gumption to go back and look, but I'm sure you can see how abbreviated my literature search was), even though I was one of those people fortunate enough to earn both an undergraduate degree and a Master's degree. What about all those folks who didn't, whose parents didn't take them to the library as a kid (or who were, like me, too shy ever to find out what a reference desk was [I know now :)]) and therefore don't even know librarians exist to answer their questions? How many people are finding bad medical, legal, or other information on the Internet, even as you read this? It's too big a problem to ignore, just for our own egos' sakes.

Calmer in the morning

I was in a bit of a tizzy last night, and cooler heads have reminded me that sometimes rebuttals happen. Still, the rebuttal (which made a few sweeping statements of its own, I thought) was pre-economic-downturn. The special libraries that decreased the size of the applicant pool are no longer as numerous, or as well funded. (While I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," something like three special libraries have closed in Pittsburgh, recently.)

I still believe that continuing to allow enrollment increases--or even keeping enrollment steady--would be short-sighted and unethical. I still think there are too many library schools. I still think 90% acceptance rates are a crime. But I am no longer going to storm my dean's office, I think.

Anger and frustration

Did you know there are roughly 5000 MLS/MLIS graduates per year? And if the 2-month sample of job openings discussed in this article in Library Journal is representative, there are roughly 400 full-time entry-level jobs being offered per year (this was circa 2005--imagine what it is now).

Yet, Pitt's iSchool is hiring five new faculty members (to replace others--no new positions that I'm aware of) and making no noises about decreasing admissions. I have no reason to believe the other 61 ALA-accredited library programs are much different.

How is this ethical? How do the deans of these schools sleep at night? Also, why are people still applying? (It might be that story that keeps going around about all of the librarians who are going to retire any moment now. Magically, despite the losses everyone's sustained in retirement funds. And of course people retiring from a lifetime of library work will leave entry-level positions open in their wake.)

My concern a few months ago, upon hearing that the acceptance rate in our program exceeds 90%, was that it was "watering down" the profession (I'm not trying to demean myself or my classmates, but even if we were a truly exceptional bunch of applicants, numbers like that shouldn't happen). Given Pitt's high ranking, I assume we aren't some crazy outlier; there must be other programs with comparable numbers. And that is a serious problem.

But then to learn that the bulk of the graduates in our school and others will not be finding full-time professional positions, on top of that? It frustrates and angers me. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the lucky ones; I can go back to my previous field if no library offers me a position before my loans come due. But I no longer see the MLIS I'm earning as the valuable asset--the clear gateway to a profession in which I could really improve the world--that I thought it would be. I am disenchanted, I guess, on top of my frustration and anger.)

Am I the only one? No, you know what? I know I'm not the only one. But why aren't we doing something? Why aren't library students picketing in the streets--or at least our deans' offices? Why aren't we writing to our schools' chancellors/presidents, to the ALA Council, to local and regional newspapers, to anyone who will listen, to prevent yet another crop of students from making the same mistakes we did--such as believing the ALA's over-optimistic job predictions? (Maybe we just don't know where to send our correspondence. Who listens to library students? I mean, there are 5000 of us graduating each year; individually, we're expendable.) Why aren't we demanding answers from our professors? Why do we let advice seeker after advice seeker on blogs and forums and listservs wander happily off, thinking their BA in history and semester of shelving books will be sufficient background to get a job in the library profession, if they just get that MLIS?

What's wrong with us?

One down, two-ish to go

I've started a few posts in my head, but only today did I realize that I didn't, you know, post any of them. It turned out that I didn't have the kind of down-time I expected to have during the break: classes (and projects) ran until the 11th, work kept going right up until the 19th, and I started both my field placement and volunteer position in work's "off" days, in addition to trying (and, it seems, failing) to knit a blanket, making Christmas presents, and just generally preparing for two back-to-back multi-state treks. I didn't actually get more than one Sunday at home, and I think I wasted most of it sleeping, instead of doing all of those cleaning/organizing projects I was hoping to do; so, I'm going into next semester with a still-messy apartment, some CSS glitches on my homepage, and just generally less stuff accomplished than I'd hoped...

Moving on to news and starting with the largest first, I decided not to apply to PhD programs. As much as I'd like to continue my education, I'm just not certain enough, one semester in, what specific things I want to work on. Also, as much as I want to work on pie-in-the-sky research--and, wow, would I--I am awfully tired of being a student: the undergraduate feel of my MLIS program has worn me down far more than I would have expected, going in. And while I know a PhD program wouldn't have the same kind of atmosphere to it, I still find my motivation to continue being a student is pretty much gone, for the time being. I want to go out in the world and do stuff.

On that note, I'll be attending the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference in February. I applied for a scholarship, and to my utter surprise and delight, I won. I think it will be a tremendous help to me, as that's the area of the field I'm looking at... but I don't feel like I fully understand what the current state of the art is, or where I would best fit in. I'll learn a lot and hopefully make some good contacts, there.

I'm still signed up for four classes and a field placement, in addition to my 13-hour-a-week internship and the most exciting volunteer position ever. Yep, it turned out my meeting was just a meeting, not an interview, and he actually had me start that afternoon. So, officially, I am a volunteer at the National Aviary, helping to put their library together. They have a small but solid collection of books and journals, which I will help to put in order. For now, their "catalog" will be an Excel spreadsheet; perhaps once I've got a handle on what's there and how much time it will take to get everything together I can talk them into an open-source OPAC of some sort. But there's plenty to keep me busy now.

The field placement is also going well. I didn't get enough hours in December to finish by the end of the spring semester, but I can take an incomplete and finish early in the summer. It's going to be a good experience: I should come out of it pretty knowledgeable about institutional repositories and open access.

It's going to be an incredibly busy semester, but I am excited.

A little essay I cooked up

I've been pretty bad about posting my class essays up here, for a number of reasons. One of the big ones is that they are so specific to the questions, and I make kind of lazy references to books that I don't expect everyone on my blogroll to have read. (Let's be honest--I haven't read all of them. Four books in a week? Really? With a full course schedule and a part-time job? Hah, right.)

In this case, I just use articles, most of which are worth your time to check out, and for good measure [and because I refer directly to it], I am going to post the question, as well. It's still a little cramped, I think, because I had to get it in under 275 words (it's 271). Anyway, enjoy. And comment. And let's discuss. (And sorry for a second post in a day!) And, yes, you could argue that I ignored half the question, but I am actually pretty comfortable with that; knowing my professor, I suspect most of the question was a red herring.

Question:
In the United States, copyright law promotes the public good and protects the exclusive limited rights of copyright holders, in that order. If the copyright law fails to protect the rights of copyright holders adequately, how is the public good affected? Would it be better or worse if the United States adopted the standard for copyright protection in the rest of the industrialized world, whereby the primary purpose of such statutes is to protect the rights and interests of copyright holders?

Answer:
I believe the change referred to in the last sentence is already occurring--and has been for twenty years. Copyright law was written to prevent corporations from reproducing works without permission--something they had the tools to do--in the interest of encouraging innovation by making it profitable. However, the advent of consumer technologies that could make copies, then the Internet, has effectively put the same tools into the hands of individuals, making copyright law into a seriously flawed and poorly patched joke (Lessig). In 1982 Jack Valenti, a lobbyist for the film industry, compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler in front of Congress (Frel and michael). Clearly, this comparison is overblown; in fact, the film industry saw gains from this technology; it makes over $25 billion per year from videotapes and DVDs now (Frel).

Nevertheless, the same logic continues to stream out from their lobbyists, leading most recently to the PRO-IP Act, which "relaxes the standards under which extended prison terms of up to ten years can be given to repeat felony copyright infringers" (Ehmke). Just for comparison, the minimum prison term for rape in Pennsylvania is 4 years (McGill); yes, one could serve more time for copying a CD than for brutally attacking another person. I fail to see how this is "in the public interest."

I'm out of words but have much more to say. So, I would like to point you to an article by Cory Doctorow, which claims that what is at stake in the fight against draconian IP laws is nothing less than our culture itself: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html. Please give it a read. He's right.

Works cited:

Ehmke, A. "Pro-IP Act Signed into Law." Haynes and Boone's News Room. Posted October 15, 2008. Available online: http://www.haynesboone.com/pro-ip-act-signed-into-law-10-15-2008/ Accessed November 20, 2008.

Frel, J. "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded." AlterNet. Posted April 20, 2005. Available online: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21817/. Accessed Nov 20, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Speech: "The Internet at the Crossroads." The Politics of Code - Shaping the Future of the Next Internet, Oxford Internet Institute, 2003.

McGill, A. "Cluck sentenced to four years in prison." The Daily Collegian Online. Posted August 23, 2007. Available online: http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2007/08/23/cluck_sentenced_to_four_years.aspx Accessed November 20, 2008.

michael. "Valenti's "Boston Strangler" Testimony." Slashdot. Posted on Fri May 31, 2002 03:12 PM. Available online: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/31/1622232.

West, J. "little pieces of things that might interest you." librarian.net. Posted November 20, 2008. Available online: http://www.librarian.net/stax/2561/little-pieces-of-things-that-might-interest-you/

A quote I ran into while I was looking for best practices on citing Slashdot (which is something I do tend to avoid): "... citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution." --FallLine, , posted to Slashdot on Monday January 15 2007.

Oh noes!

I've discovered a real problem, folks: most of the people I really want to work with--whose books, ideas, blogs, and podcasts have most influenced my thinking over this semester and who I think have the greatest chance of effecting real change in technology policies and practices (if anybody would just listen to them)--are pretty much all lawyers. (Why are lawyers the ones writing all of these books? Why isn't it librarians? I think this is something worth discussing and would love to hear from some library-related folk why they think we're falling so short on this stuff!)

I just don't know that they want an engineer-turned-librarian following them around all the time, no matter how smart or devoted to their various causes I might be, since they all work in law-related organizations--with quite a lot of overlap between them, if you look at the whole timeline. I also don't think I've got the wherewithal to go to school for three more years, at $100k+ a year, to then end up working with them and the EFF and never paying off my loans. It took some soul-searching to go from engineering to library science and to take on the loans I have. Also, I am really kind of pondering a PhD in LIS, instead, though the question of "now or later?" is still very up in the air--and very dependent on who has the coolest/best/most socially relevant projects for me to work on next year.

(A post to come soon: I identify people within the library field who are also working on interesting and relevant things, of similar importance, in a very different way. I've got a couple, already.)

Stopping the OCLC Power Grab

I found out about this by way of librarian.net and want to pass it along to anyone who might be interested.

By way of explanation: OCLC, the not-for-profit that provides library services around the world, has gone too far. Originally, it was a library collaborative -- one library could catalog a book, upload it to OCLC, and then other libraries could save time by reusing the catalog information. But as the price of such technology has fallen, its prices have risen. It charges membership fees, record retrieval fees, user support fees, and fees for all sorts of additional services. But now it wants to set the terms of use for every library record ever retrieved through OCLC, so that it can maintain its monopoly in the field. In a very real sense, they're trying to steal our libraries. We have to make them stop -- please join me in signing the petition "Stop the OCLC powergrab!" You can do so right now at http://watchdog.net/c/stop-oclc

For more information, see this wiki page: OCLC Policy Change.

My Grad School Life

I feel like I'm neglecting this blog--SNL videos and class assignments aside--but there hasn't been much to say: I've been sick for about a month (bronchitis and a never-ending cold), which has left me completely drained and not really feeling up to the time, energy, and brainpower requirements of my classes. I kind of just want to take a weekend to sleep and eat soup and drink hot tea, you know? But being behind on most of my projects (by my own estimation, not in any official capacity) leaves me no time for that kind of nonsense.

But, you know, such is the life of a grad student. It was the same in engineering grad school, only I didn't enjoy the reading. (I really do enjoy what I get a chance to read. I wish my professors had been a little more realistic in assigning books for the semester--seriously, there were students complaining about 100 pages a week per class, in some online forum, and I kind of wanted to smack them--but if I get around to finishing the books I've merely skimmed [or less], I will be a better librarian for the effort. They are really fantastic.)

One interesting point: I learned that specializations other than Archives actually do matter at Pitt. I couldn't register for the Academic Libraries class without being in the Academic Libraries track, which vexed me, the self-declared generalist, mightily. But it looks like it will not be a big deal to jump into the specialization--the paperwork was easy, anyway! Financially, I might have lucked into something: the only Academic Libraries "course" I had planned not to take was the field placement (3 credits, 150 hours working with a local library under the supervision of someone who has their MLIS--and, as far as I can tell, I can't get the 3 credits for my internship, because it is a separate program that pays a portion of my tuition per semester), which I could sign up for in the spring and finish in the summer. Since summer is pay-per-credit, having five classes in the spring and three in the summer would save me a few thousand dollars--SCORE!

As an added bonus, I found someone at CMU who may be willing to take on an intern. (I found him by asking "Do you need an intern?" out of nowhere, when he told me what he's working on. It was opportunistic, if not downright rude, but it may have worked out OK.) The project I'd be working on would be kind of ideal, in that it would fill in a gap in my goals and interests that my [awesome] Engineering & Science Library internship doesn't quite fill. It's some digital stuff; I'll explain more if this whole thing pans out--which looks promising, but maybe I shouldn't count my chickens prematurely.

So, there's good, and there's bad, and, as always, there's up-in-the-air. I'm excited about the stuff I get to do and worried about the group projects that need to get done and grumpy about the class on Halloween night (I'm not even joking, 5:30-8:30pm, the first Halloween in years I've lived where trick-or-treaters might show up, I'm going to be in a classroom) and tired from not being able to breathe for a month.

Also, I have a midterm on Monday. I'm stressing about it, mostly because that's just how I am. I hate midterms. Knowing what I do now about the structure of library school, I will immediately drop any other midterm-containing elective as soon as the syllabus finds its way to my hot little hands. (Unless it's the Intellectual Property class; not even a midterm could keep me from taking that!)

Coral waxes philosophical on Week 8 Readings for 2670 (and Muddiest Point)

I loved the following quote (from our Week 8 Readings):

Google has taught us, quite powerfully, that the user just wants a search box. Arguments as to whether or not this is "best" for the user are moot—it doesn't matter if it's best if nobody uses it. Moreover, as both Google and Amazon have demonstrated, users have a funny way of determining for themselves what is best for them. --Todd Miller

Right on! I mean, I love highbrow, ivory tower discussion as much as the next girl, but what it really needs to come down to is, "How can we engage the user? What will they use?" And, not to get too far off topic, but this is an issue that's really been on my mind a lot lately. You see, before I started seriously considering librarianship as a profession--and admitting this out here in the open is a little weird for me--I didn't go to the public library. At all. (There's this whole thing about how the library in my hometown was my favorite place in the world until I turned 12 or 13, and then suddenly I realized the librarians were looking at me with ... some negative emotion I didn't bother defining, at the time. Having worked in a public library, myself, and having thought about it a bit, I realize it was probably dread. Teenagers are scary, because they're hard to relate to. We remember being teenagers, but we also remember what we thought of adults. You know what I mean?) I dearly loved the library at my university, but I retained my fear of librarians. How sad! I had absorbed that common misperception of librarians as cranky, bespectacled old ladies with book carts and stern expressions, and it didn't occur to me to ask them questions--even the obviously not old, not bespectacled, sometimes not even female librarians at UVA. Then I went to graduate school, where the Engineering & Science Library (where I work now!) was good as a silent study space, between classes, on days when I could deal with the oppressiveness of it all--something the students who wanted silence exuded, not something inherent to the library itself. (That part of it is still a problem for me. I hate walking past the study carrels. Though as time goes on, I become more sure of myself, and I imagine to myself that they realize I have work to do, to keep the library running.) I didn't know the librarians were super friendly and wanted to answer my questions! I wouldn't have dreamed of bothering them! I did all my searches online, in a combination of Google Scholar and IEEE Explore (which, admittedly, did pretty much encompass my research).

This is all a very long-winded lead-up to the question: how do we deal with potential patrons like I was? I was too shy to ask for help. Frankly, I was too shy to venture into the library, except to study. I was intimidated by the catalog and by the shelves upon shelves of books. ... I guess therein lies a lot of the benefit of digital libraries; if shy patrons can find us online, at least they'll have access to some of our resources. But I'd like to address the bigger question, as it relates to brick-and-mortar libraries, at some point in the future. I'll keep thinking on it. Your comments are welcome!

Now to the much more relevant idea of federated search. I am interested in this. I was considering applying to PhD programs and trying to get funding to build a search utility that would go through a library's catalog and all of its databases, because <rant>the current way we do things is so backward and involved and frustrating. Why, after 8 weeks of doing reference for at least a few hours a week, am I still feeling less than confident in my ability to find absolutely everything in our system? That's absurd. There's no excuse for it. Sure, if you know the name of the journal you want to search, I can help you. And I have a passing familiarity with a growing subset of our journal offerings--and the databases that house them--so that I can find certain types of articles pretty well. But why should I have to know what every journal/database contains, in order to help a patron find the answer to a question I understand? [I get why I have to understand their questions.] Why can't I just type something in a search box?</rant> (I realize I'm proposing something that might end up putting some of us out of jobs, if ever implemented well. I think this is a noble goal, really. We're smart people; we'll find something to do. What's important is that information can be retrieved--ideally by everyone--right?)

It seems to me this is what federated search is out to solve (slowly, and with great limitations). I'm a little embarrassed that I thought nobody else had tried to solve this problem, admittedly, but I guess such is the dilemma of a grad student. Better that I'm thinking of solutions, even if they're already implemented (in some form or another) than that I ... don't? Eh.

There are still, clearly, significant hurdles to be overcome in all of this.

The D-Lib article was published in 2004; I wonder what academic libraries have done, since then, to respond to this problem--for those who don't feel like clicking, the problem is a lack of acknowledgment, on the part of academic libraries, of the tremendous amount of academic resources on the Web. My guess: not much. (I love academia, but I acknowledge its imperfections, slowness being a major one.)

Muddiest Point: Does the Greenstone installation on the lab computers do anything besides show us the demo library? Can we build libraries and burn them to CD at the lab? (This is of great importance, since Greenstone isn't installing properly on Dreamhost, and I have a Mac. Also, an unwillingness to install Apache on my Mac.)

Further Musings

I feel like I was unnecessarily harsh in my post yesterday. Looking at it, there's nothing I consider untrue or really feel a need to change, but the whole thing kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I think what bothers me is that I came off sounding as though I'm unhappy, and, on the whole, I'm really not. Yes, I think there are some serious problems with Pitt's program--problems that may lead to a drop in our rank, honestly--but, you know, I'm still there, and I plan to finish my degree. I'm looking forward to next semester's classes, which I've mostly chosen, even though the official schedule isn't up yet. (An unofficial schedule is available to anyone who bothers Googling for it.) The student groups--something I haven't discussed, thus far, but ought to--are great; SLAPSG is a little late getting off the ground, but there's a lot of interest on the part of the student body, and I know the [super active and awesome] local chapter will help us out. SCALA is fabulous: we're planning on putting together a Book Kart Drill Team (it's spelled with a "K," yes) for ALA Annual 2009--I'm heading that up, because I'm involved in ALA already and because I'm Treasurer--a Technology Petting Zoo for students who want to learn about and play with various kinds of technology, and a t-shirt sale. And there's a new student group, centered around community outreach, called SISCO (which bothers me every time I hear it, because I think about network hardware, but there you go). These are excellent and all make me very happy.

As for my internship at CMU's Engineering and Science Library, I am really enjoying it and learning a lot. Every time I get really confident about my reference skills, someone comes along with a hard chemistry or math question (why is it never electrical engineering? or even computer science?), which reminds me what a beginner I really am. But that's really not a bad thing; it just means I am constantly learning. I'm signed up to help give a talk on RSS and Google Reader, in the near future, which I find pretty exciting (and terrifying), and I will be helping at least one of my coworkers redesign her portion of the library web site. I am super excited about these projects. Slightly less exciting--but certainly useful to the library and still a learning opportunity--is a set of ongoing projects, going through a large collection of materials science books donated by a retiring professor and a smaller, but much older, collection of books that belonged to Roberts' (of Roberts Hall) mentor. A large portion of my time goes, of course, to "other projects as assigned"; earlier this week, I went through some tech reports, to determine whether or not each one was redundant or new to the collection, and last week I picked up some journals from a professor. That kind of thing. I'm hoping for some collection development (spendin' money!) and more instruction experience, before too long.

So, you know, things are actually pretty good.

On a more personal note, I've finally gotten together the bravery and momentum to go out and volunteer for a cause that I think is important (in all that free time I don't have). That makes me feel pretty good about myself, even if it means I go to bed earlier than I otherwise might on some Friday nights.

And, as I predicted, my schedule is changing: I'll be working Saturday afternoons, starting in a few weeks, because the other Information Assistant, who used to do the Saturday shift, got a job. (Yay for enjobination!) I'll have to drop an hour, somewhere in the week (personally, I'm hoping to start at 11am instead of 10am on either Tuesday or Friday morning ;)), to stay on the right side of CMU's rules, but it will be a good experience; back-up is a phone call away, instead of a short walk away, on weekends. Self reliance and all that!

Also, I have a purple iPod Nano. I love it. It holds all of my music, a bunch of podcasts, and a couple of TV shows. I've already used it to listen to supplemental class material that I otherwise wouldn't. (Because I have very little self control when faced with a computer monitor, I have a very limited amount of time I can spend paying attention/not reading random stuff on the Internet, if I'm at my computer--limited by how many photos I have to sort, actually--and the Panopto-only lectures are going to soak that up; no time for the supplemental material on top of it! But with an iPod, I can listen while I wait for the bus, while I walk out to get tasty Indian food for lunch, etc.) It will make the 5 hour trip to Detroit and back, in early November, into usable time, which will decrease my guilt at going (instead of doing homework). This is a win.

[2670] Interesting article

LibraryJournal covers some of the controversy around Google Books:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6601209.html?nid=3285

Hopefully H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush had more insight than I do

I confess: I do not believe in a Semantic Web. I sincerely hope to be proven wrong--we should all hope to have information resources that powerful--but I do not believe, given my understanding of the way the Web works, the way search engines work, and computers' consistently poor understanding of natural language, that we should expect anything like Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila's (2001) almost utopian ideas of information retrieval systems within our lifetimes. I also have serious doubts about Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) ever being implemented consistently, correctly, and for large enough portions of the Web to make a real difference; again, I want to be proven wrong.

Brooks seems, almost, to agree: he discusses the untrustworthiness of user-supplied metadata and search engines' habit of ignoring, or at least devaluing, it. In the past, indexing was done by trustworthy experts, who "possess[ed] a special skill for denoting the meaning of text," and if they failed, they could be found and held accountable. Indexing now is done by various algorithms looking at the content of and links between web pages--and it is imperfect (2004). For the Semantic Web, as Berners-Lee et al. (2001) envisioned it, indexing would be done by the content creators, whom Google correctly distrusts, or perhaps by users of the content, via social tagging/bookmarking. This last approach has shown real promise (Wu), though I have a theory--unexplored in any papers I could find--that the Matthew Effect would apply, and most content would remain untagged by anyone except its creator.

Despite my skepticism, I find the topic fascinating and would love to design technology to mitigate some of these hurdles.


Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila, O. (2001, May 17). "The semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities," The Scientific American, 284(5), 34+ [Available here]

Brooks, T.A. (2004). "The nature of meaning in the Age of Google," Information Research, 9(3) paper 180. [Available here]

Wu, X., Zhang, L., Yu, Y. "Exploring social annotations for the semantic web," Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland

Digital Scholarship and Libraries - Essay

(This isn't part of my essay, but I like to state my biases: I work in an engineering and science library, and the journal costs are debilitating. I also signed away rights to papers I wrote as an engineer and regret it.)

Changes in scholarly communication--particularly in scholarly publishing--are challenging libraries in unprecedented ways. In the past libraries bought books or subscribed to journals and kept physical copies on the shelves in perpetuity. With the advent of electronic journals and researchers' demand for 24/7 access, libraries are moving away from an ownership model and are now effectively leasing access to electronic content, with indexing and preservation done by the publishers (Borgman 68). Unfortunately, because publishers own the content, libraries are forced to pay ever-increasing subscription fees to maintain access, sometimes paying multiple times for the same content, due to “bundling” (Borgman 112).

This is particularly concerning in the sciences: to gain tenure, one must be published in established journals, but to do so, one must give the publishers all rights to her content; campus libraries then pay dearly for the right to provide that content to other faculty and students. Aaronson describes the economic side of the problem both briefly and bitingly, claiming that most of the writing, typesetting, reviewing, editing, and even archiving and distribution of papers is done by academics with no charge to the publishers, while a single journal subscription might cost a library as much as $3000 a year (2007). Willinsky, addressing the greater picture, refers to this closed access to scientific findings as “human research capacity ... being wasted or going unrealized because of ... unnecessarily restricted access to the circulation of knowledge” (34).

Happily, the open access movement is gaining ground outside of the library community: last year's ruling requiring that NIH-funded research be made public within a year of first publication (Albanese 9/5)--to give the public access to research their tax dollars had funded--was slated to be challenged in Congress this month. The issue proved more contentious than expected, with “33 Nobel Prize-winning scientists” and “47 copyright experts and professors of law” writing in support of last year's ruling, while representatives of certain publishers continued pushing Congress to overrule it (Albanese 9/19). Ultimately, Congress postponed making a decision (Albanese 9/18). The publicity given to cases like this will help publicize and gain support for the open access movement.

As Lesk points out, governmental protection of intellectual property was intended to foster innovation but has often stifled it (294). Unfortunately, a clear path out of this morass eludes us; academics are reticent to change their methods (Aaronson), despite the success of over 1500 open access journals (Willinsky 26) and various “open science” initiatives. Journal publishers add some value, but the question of how much--and whether we are willing to continue trading away open scientific dialog--is difficult to answer.

Aaronson, S. (2007, December). “Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky," MIT press, 2005. SIGACT News 38 (4), 19-23.

Albanese, A. “After Hearing, Sweeping Anti-NIH Bill To Be Shelved—for Now,” Library Journal, 9/18/2008. Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6597267.html?nid=3285

Albanese, A. “In Blunt Terms, Copyright Lawyers, Researchers, Librarians Blast Anti-NIH Bill,” Library Journal, 9/19/2008 Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6597446.html?nid=3603

Albanese, A. “NIH Public Access Policy To Face Copyright Challenge in Congress?” Library Journal, 9/5/2008 Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6593398.html?nid=3310

Borgman, Christine. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT Press, 2007. # ISBN-10: 0262026198; ISBN-13: 978-0262026192.

Lesk, Michael. Understanding Digital Libraries . Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2004. 2nd Edition, ISBN: 1-55860-924-5.

Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press, 2005, ISBN: 0262232421.

Libraries and the Internet

Q: Historically, librarians have served as custodians of recorded knowledge and gatekeepers to information resources. To what extent has the rise of networked information services begun to change the roles that librarians play? What other factors, if any, are contributing to changes in the roles of librarians?

A1: Before the rise of networked information services, the library was the only place to find certain kinds of information; as Elizabeth Mahoney pointed out in lecture, librarians in the past were expected to possess a great deal of knowledge, and, much like they do today, they knew their collections and could guide patrons to the right resource to answer their questions. Today, there is discussion of brick-and-mortar libraries facing "competition" from the Internet, especially Google, and there is some belief that librarians might be supplanted (Borgman p. 39). This concern is largely unwarranted: "Almost everything that is best about a library catalog is done badly by a web search service" (Arms). Put another way, someone with training and expertise is needed to choose and catalog information if it is to be retrieved in a meaningful way. Certainly, for many uses, Google and Wikipedia are probably sufficient, but as anyone who has tried doing real research with Google knows, there is a great deal of irrelevant and incorrect information available. This is where librarians come in: we provide authoritative and relevant information, both in the physical spaces of our libraries and in digital collections. Our job, as described by John MacColl of Edinburgh University, is "running pleasant study environments, containing expert staff, providing havens on our campus which are well respected, and building and running high-quality Web-based services" (MacColl). [Word count: 227.]

(A few days pass. I read everyone's responses to the question, and I formulate a response to their responses.)

A2: As several people's essays correctly pointed out, many users do not know how to use library resources or the Internet to get the information they need. Neal Stephenson, an author and technology expert, recently commented on the informational divide: he pointed out that, while many of us have "a sixth sense" about what is a credible source and what is not, many simply do not, and he believes the gap is increasing. Remedying this problem, I believe, is the key goal of the modern information professional, but to do so effectively, our efforts must extend beyond our libraries' physical and virtual walls; we must find ways to reach out to those in our communities who are being left behind.

Of course, that is not our only job. As one of my colleagues pointed out, to serve as effective gatekeepers, we must choose our libraries' electronic resources wisely; if we filter digital content, we should do so just as cautiously as we would when filtering books.

I disagree with the implication some people are making, perhaps unintentionally, that the problem of authority originated with the rise of the Internet. Certainly, the ease of "publication" on the Internet has deepened the problem, but books have long been published more for their potential sales value than for their factual content; choosing authoritative sources has never been trivial. Even Encyclopedia Britannica fails to impress, when compared to Wikipedia (Giles). [Word count: 235. I'm cutting out roughly 80 words and posting what I get after that, to get into the ballpark of the 150 word limit, but it will sound stilted and sad. I share my real thoughts with you, readers!]


Arms, William Y. “Automated Digital Libraries, How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of Professional Librarianship?” D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. 6(7/8). Available online: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/arms/07arms.html.

Borgman, Christine L. From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 0-262-52345-0.

Giles, J. "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head." Nature, 438, Dec 2005. pp. 900–901.

GoodReads Author Interview, Neal Stephenson. Available online: http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/14.Neal_Stephenson?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sep_newsletter. Retrieved Sept 21, 2008.

MacColl, J. "Google Challenges for Academic Libraries." Ariadne, Issue 46. Feb 2006. Available online: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/maccoll/

Review of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Bit of a preface: I hated this book. It contains some really good ideas, which are totally worth discussing, but the whole thing is so much wordier and denser than it needs to be (this, coming from me!); seriously, the ideas put forth in this 200-page monstrosity would have been better shared in a 5-10 page article. Still, we were assigned to read it for LIS 2000, Understanding Information, and asked to write a 400-word review, describing "how the content of this book relates to the information professions. Why do you think this is assigned reading?" followed by a 250-word addendum today, restating our opinion and describing how it had changed in reading the other students' essays, so I tried my best to get through it. Although I'm a little embarrassed to post this--and nervous that people who already took the class will say "No! You are so wrong! You'll see!"--I still think it might be useful to do so. I can't change my answer now (or, well, not after 11pm--but I promise not to, now that I've made this public), so I'm curious what people who've been through this hazing ritualbook have to say.

When we were assigned Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and asked to define its relevance to the information professions, I falsely assumed my professors were implying that our field is undergoing a "paradigm shift." Certainly, that argument can be made: With the Internet making information simultaneously more plentiful and harder to find, the effectiveness of distributed tagging and its effects on discussion of cataloguing, and the popularity of digital libraries and plans for automation thereof, nobody would seriously assert that our field is in any way stagnant or unchanging. On the other hand, paradigms point to fundamental thought patterns, and to suggest that our "paradigm" is in flux seems questionable: We still believe that information should be freely available to all, and we still strive to provide it in the best way available to us; that, I claim, is our true paradigm. That we have one at all shows the applicability of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; certainly, we make assumptions about the world and about information, and we consider questions relevant or irrelevant based on those assumptions. Just as scientists are not the impartial observers that we are told they should be, we are not the impartial information providers that we would like to be.

Although Kuhn has many interesting and widely applicable ideas, I do not agree that his is the best way to think about science and progress. Certainly, the book has its fans (London 2008), but I was pleased to see that I was not its only doubter: Weinberg (1998), for instance, disagrees with nearly all of Kuhn's central assertions. I do not go quite so far. As a scientist*, I believe that science, taken as a whole, does progress with time--to argue that our understanding of the universe today is not fuller than it was 200 years ago seems ludicrous--but we should be cautious in treating any one scientific finding or theory as "progress," in and of itself: First, a scientist's paradigm and her puzzle-solving nature restrict what questions she considers asking (p. 37), and second, the explanations provided by a new theory or paradigm may not be any closer to truth than those of its predecessor (see discussion of opium, p. 104). I think the latter point also applies to the information professions: We may find that any one of the "advancements" we make is really a step back, hampering access to information.

------

With the help of my colleagues' reviews and Dr. Tomer's lecture, my views about Kuhn have changed over the last week. While I stand by my assertion that the information professions, like every field, have sets of accepted viewpoints ("paradigms") at their foundation, I no longer contend that that is Kuhn's sole applicability. Information Science is, after all, not really a science.

Rather, I believe that Kuhn's description of incremental advances--and of new paradigms overwriting, if you will, previous work--is relevant to us in our capacity as guardians and gatekeepers of knowledge. A Kuhnian view of progress requires us to remain both vigilant and flexible in our maintenance of the scientific knowledge base; we must catalog the day-to-day work of "normal" knowledge accumulation in every field, particularly science, but we must also be aware that the rules and accepted facts are subject to change. As such, we must struggle to provide the information that daily practitioners of the field will deem relevant, perhaps in addition to previous "advances," or perhaps instead of them.

I would add that I do not think we can expect to determine, entirely on our own, precisely which scientific information is worth keeping; as Kuhn says, people outside of a sub-field stand little chance of understanding the literature, and even people inside a field cannot predict with certainty which research direction will lead to a paradigm change. Rather, we should maintain a dialog with the experts and seek to improve our collections in collaboration with them.



Kuhn, T.S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

London, S. (2008). Book Review. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/kuhn.html

Weinberg, S. (1998, October 8). The Revolution That Didn't Happen [Review of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions], The New York Review of Books, pp. 48-52.



*As a post-script, separate from my review, I feel it necessary to point out that Kuhn would disagree with my assertion that I am a scientist. My formal training was in engineering (p. 30), and I am female. Both seem to count strongly against me, in his estimation.

[2670] Week 3 - Digital Object Identifiers

I am a cynic and a skeptic and a pessimist, and I'm aware of it. So it's no surprise to me--and if you've been reading for long, probably not to you, either--that I have very little hope for the URN or DOI idea ever really working out. (That is, the idea of giving every digital object a unique identifier, along the same lines as an ISBN/ISSN, instead of relying on URLs, which are subject to change. An important point about these identifiers: they wouldn't necessarily specify where to go to get any given Digital Object; they might just make one clearly discernible from another. Or a URN might resolve to multiple URLs.) I think managing something on that scale--a scale greater than that of DNS/URLs, since each object would be identified, not just each server--is going to be, to put it very plainly, more trouble than it's worth. There would be benefits to such a system, if it were ever fully deployed, sure, but how could it be done meaningfully?

Is this blog post a Digital Object (in the sense of having its own identifier or URN, in the hypothetical scenario where there is such a scheme)? And if I change it a year from now because I think my writing style is embarrassingly informal, has it become a different Digital Object? If you copy it down and put it into your blog--hopefully with attribution--is it the same Digital Object or a different one? (By my reading, it's the same, at least in the URN scheme. But when I go back and change my wording, it won't change the wording of the copy on your blog.)

As the authors of this article say, near the end, there's an awful lot left unresolved about this whole set of ideas. I think it's very pie-in-the-sky, a bit like Semantic Web. (Yeah, i went there.)

Loving this weather

I probably have nothing deep or thought-provoking to say today. It's lovely out here, on the Mall or the Cut--whatever CMU calls the area between the UC and Purnell--and the drama students are providing me with immense entertainment. I like this almost autumn-like weather; my energy level is highest at this time of year, when it isn't yet dark most of the time but the air is cool enough that it's pleasant to wear long sleeves. (I'm looking into job opportunities in Seattle and Vancouver when I get out of here.)

I'm behind on all the things I want and need to get done, but I'm also getting used to that and becoming a lot more Zen/it-will-get-done-somehow on the whole thing. Maybe this is finally my chance to take the laid back approach to schooling that I wish I'd taken as an engineer: maybe I will finally learn to chill out and enjoy the learning process, instead of constantly worrying about having the very highest of grades, at the expense of sanity, health, and a life outside of school and work. (Am I where I am in life because I worked so perfectionistically, as if that were a word, in my previous education? In a manner of speaking, yes. But maybe if I'd slowed down and chilled out, I would still have found this path, or an equally rewarding and socially productive one.)

Out of curiosity, readers, would you say it might be an interesting and useful thing to do, if I were to go to another country and teach English for most of a year, after graduation? My logic is, at its core, "internationalization! and teaching experience!" (I'm deathly afraid of groups of more than ten people. I hate giving presentations. I love one-on-one teaching and fear the classroom. And academic libraries are all about the teaching.) I'm considering it. It would also give Dale more time to really dig into the work he's doing for his current job, you know? But perhaps taking a year to do something more or less entirely unrelated to libraries isn't the right choice, right now.

Anyway, I guess I should eat some of the lunch I bought. I work 2-5 this afternoon and then may retire to a coffee-serving establishment for some quality writing time. I hope the weather's still as pretty when I get out of the library.

[2670] Week 2 Reading Responses

Overall themes: interoperability, modularity.

A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries has me totally sold on the ODL concept and on the extension of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI_PMH) to build every future Digital Library ever. I think it's a great idea; interoperability is a desirable thing. My one critique is that their very simple mock-up and animated gif detracted, a little bit, from the picture they were painting. Perhaps I am unnecessarily picky.

Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries is interesting enough, but I'd love to know what they've done in the last decade. As I was reading, I found myself wondering if the meta-object to object link worked in the opposite direction; that is, whether pulling up an object would pull up a link to its meta-object (for instance, if the object is part of a larger collection). I would think it would come up on the catalog page when a search is done, but I was just surprised not to see them point that out explicitly.

I smiled when I saw that they based RAP on CORBA. That was the big thing, back then. And it stayed big for quite a while; I imagine it's still fairly widely used nowadays, even. (Though I admit, I really don't know. I hear something [neither a protocol nor a language] called "SOA" is in vogue, now, but I don't delve into specifics.)

As I read through Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories, I begin to be grateful that our reading list was put in the order it was. They just whip through those acronyms. But I like the structure of their experiment, and I admit, I was holding my breath, a little bit, wondering whether they would find their systems interoperable--even after extending them (if that's the right conjugation of the verb that goes with "extensibility"). Again, I began to get worried, until, finally, in their last paragraph, they mentioned their plan to add access management. (I know if I were curating a DL or DA, I wouldn't want to grant remote locations the ability to add digital objects except in very specific ways.)

I decided that the broken link in Blackboard must have meant to refer to this particular description of the Internet.

I'm pretty familiar with web technology, so I didn't find too much to say about this article. I think he's a little bit overzealous in his defense of Internet-as-proto-DL; the truth lies somewhere between his statements and the statements he derides. There's hope for the 'net, but I could definitely see it going either way, at this point.

(A lighthearted aside: "Recently, attempts have been made to rewrite the history of the Internet ... and for individuals to claim responsibility for achievements that many shared." Hey, now! That quote was taken out of context! He was joking!)

I have another aside, not strictly relevant to this article, but the discussion of Los Alamos brought it to mind. I've seen several articles--including a required reading for Understanding Information--that suggest that the sciences are all progressive, all sharing their information immediately and collaboratively over the Web, but I just don't see it. At least in engineering, which, despite Kuhn's disparagement in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is a subset of "the sciences" (seriously, ask me about my research), we tended to hold our papers--and with it our most recent research results--until a conference accepted them. And then the conferences (really, the IEEE) required that we not post the papers anywhere else. (That's what I recall, anyway.) With conference deadlines being six months or more before the conferences, themselves, I really feel that this "real-time collaboration" people talk about it is not particularly widespread.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm in favor of it. But the current methods of determining tenure, hooding, and so on would have to change significantly before a "share and share alike" system will really become tenable.

Internship Excitement

Two weeks after my internship started, I am finally beginning to get the hang of it and feel like I really belong. I show up on the Staff Directory (under Science Libraries - I don't know where the phone attached to my name is, but I'm sure it's in the library somewhere). I have successfully answered several reference questions. Yesterday, I even had my very own project to do! I helped process gifts for our CS Librarian. She was amused at how interested I was in the books; most IAs aren't actually science or engineering people.

Tomorrow, I'll be helping our Materials Science Librarian with some instruction--I won't have to instruct the groups that are coming in, but I'll do little administrative things like making copies or running to get the projector, to make her job easier. More generally on Fridays, I will be doing some web design projects, which I think is super exciting.

I'm still a tiny bit afraid to be at the Reference Desk alone, but usually IAs have backup of some sort, in case there's a really hard question. And to be honest, I'm also pretty anxious to try it, to see how I do. I know our catalog fairly well (not perfectly, but that probably takes years), and although I'm a little weak on some of the journals, I at least have a vague sense of what's there. And what's where in our library. So I think I'll do OK. Even if I am over-reliant on Google.

Know thyself. And choose your career accordingly.

As I slide another set of books by Phil McGraw and Laura Schlessinger over the demagnetizer for yet another patron in search of guidance, I can't help but grit my teeth. There's nothing of value in those books, nothing that will make this person happy. I believe these so-called "experts" are ruining America, just as they've each personally ruined multiple families in their own social spheres, and part of me--let's call it my conscience--really wants to take these books away and send my patron back to the stacks, to find something better, and then to remove these books from our collection.

But of course I don't do that; it would be wrong. If a person wants to read bad advice, it is their right to do so, and it is my job to provide them with the means. If they want to check out trashy romance novels, inaccurate histories, poorly-written local newspapers, right-wing propaganda, left-wing propaganda, movie novelizations, Scientology DVDs, or anything else I have the power to provide, it is my job to provide it. My patrons are guardians of their own intellects, and that is a right I wouldn't dream of begrudging them; certainly, I would not want that right taken from me. To be honest, as horrible as I, personally, find some of it to be, at the end of the day, I am proud and happy to provide these things. I know I am serving the greater good, even when I dispense materials I find objectionable. I know my opinion, however deeply researched, however well founded, or however strongly felt, is not more important than my patrons' right to information.

Let's pretend, though, just for a second, that I didn't believe as strongly as I do in intellectual freedom. Let's say I believed that some materials really shouldn't be circulated, and as such, I refused to provide them to patrons who asked for them. How long, precisely, do you think I would last as a library employee? Or, more to the point, how long should I last?

It's not a useful question: of course, if I felt that way, I wouldn't have taken a library job; everyone knows that giving out all manner of materials is a part of the job description of a librarian, so I would have known it wasn't the job for me. Even if I were, as a layperson, to fail to fully grasp what my job might entail, one can assume that library school, or the first month of a job in a library, would sufficiently acquaint me with the field, and with the various ethical standards thereof, that I'd quickly become aware of the "down sides," if you will, of my job description. If I learned that my own moral/ethical stance was incompatible with my chosen profession, I would choose a more appropriate profession. Any reasonable person would.

So why is the Bush Administration advocating allowing people in one particular field, whose consciences may sometimes run counter to their job requirements, to shirk their duties? Are we to assume that someone could finish pharmacy school and not realize that pharmacists are expected to provide contraceptives, along with any number of other medications? That an ER staff member might go through training and yet, at some point, be surprised at being expected to provide pregnancy prevention medication to a rape victim? That medical insurance providers may not realize they are expected to provide insurance for, you know, any medical issue, including prevention of pregnancy? How could this have escaped these people's notice until now?

As the WSJ does a fine job of pointing out, the proposed policy is simply about making access to contraceptives more difficult--a goal I don't begin to understand--not about protecting workers' rights. Just as I know I must sometimes grit my teeth and give out materials I find objectionable to patrons who want access to them, so too do medical workers--even those who hate contraceptives--realize that they have a duty to provide the care their patients need them to provide.

In the library I give out many useful materials that I know others disagree with; similarly, in a pharmacy or a hospital or even an insurance company, one is able to help people by providing treatments that, yes, others might object to--blood transfusions, vaccines, insulin grown in pigs--because people who disagreed with those treatments were not allowed to make that call for the rest of society, no matter how strongly they felt it was wrong. We have a right to take care of our bodies and our health as we see fit, just as we have a right to read what we see fit. Refusing a whole class of service, or service to a whole class of people--patrons or patients--means one can no longer claim to serve the greater good; it means they are trying to impose their will on others and, in so doing, failing to live up to the standards of their field.

If someone's conscience can't handle giving out one particular type of treatment--if they don't believe in helping people with all of the tools at their disposal--they need to get out of the medical industry. If they haven't the courage to get out of their profession, but still cannot live up to its standards, I find it hard to be sympathetic when their employer performs their own duty--protecting clients, patients, or patrons--by removing the wrongdoer.

I'll add, further, that any law--or "rules change" or whatever--that protects wrongdoers at the expense of society is wrong. Plain and simple. I have signed MoveOn.org and Planned Parenthood's joint petition to Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt, and I hope you will do the same. (Links go to both copies of the petition. I signed PP's.)