An Accidental Academic (Librarian)

Wish our repair signs were this entertaining…

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:19:11 -0400

Wish our repair signs were this entertaining…

Major Publishers Go MOOC | Inside Higher Ed

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:11:41 -0400

Major Publishers Go MOOC | Inside Higher Ed:

Awhile back, I wrote about open courses and libraries. Predictably, one of the major companies in the MOOC world has partnered directly with a few academic publishers, including Gale and Oxford, to provide materials to students enrolled in the courses.

For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:04:42 -0400

For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia:

A parallel world of pseudo-academia, with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee, has the scientific community alarmed.

Hmm. If only there were a cadre of professionals out there who kept track of such things, who had a vested interest in keeping an eye on which OA journals were high quality (such as PLoS) and which ones were not. If only there were people researchers could partner with, along with their professional colleagues, to discuss and evaluation publication venues. If only there were people who spend a great deal of their time teaching other people how to critically evaluate what they see and read.

It’ll come to me in a minute, I’m sure.

Used e-books and Amazon

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:22:16 -0400

Technology news sites and authors’ blogs exploded mildly last month on the news that Amazon.com’s patent to re-sell used e-books (filed in 2009) had been approved. (The explosion probably would have been a lot bigger had Amazon actually launched such a service—so far, they have not.)

The response from Libraryland has been more muted, which surprises me a little. Perhaps it’s because library lending of Kindle e-books already exists; it’s no exercise of the First Sale Doctrine, consisting as it does of a licensing agreement between Amazon and Overdrive Media, and the selection is laughable (one gains access to far more borrowable e-books by joining Amazon Prime). Perhaps it’s because we’re still figuring out how to deal with this brave new world of variable licensing models and haven’t had time to think about what transferability of licenses means. Or maybe we’re too amused at the rest of the world’s discovery that you don’t buy an e-book, something libraries have known since the first vendor issued its first license.

The patent essentially articulates a transferable license, be the transfer permanent or temporary, whether money changes hands or not. This covers gifts and loans as well as resales, and that’s what carries implications for libraries. There’s considerable potential here for e-book lending to become more feasible for libraries, not less, since the patent describes a mechanism for iterating the number of transfers and specifies that the number of transfers is finite. While this brings back unpleasant memories of HarperCollins’s 26 loans limit, it’s a model that’s working out well for EBL, though there the loan threshold is considerably higher. It’s easy to see why this model appeals to publishers: a major source of resistance to e-book lending is that digital copies don’t degrade (well, they do, but not in a way convenient to selling more copies) and once an e-book is transferable, why would anybody buy another?

Otherwise, in practical terms what Amazon proposes isn’t all that different from how e-book lending works now, except that instead of being passed from one individual to another, the e-book’s content reverts back to the library in the meantime. One might hope that, should Amazon choose to actually develop this patent, that process might become less cumbersome; right now, library e-book borrowing is a multi-step process requiring multiple applications and sometimes multiple devices, increasing the likelihood that the potential borrower will give up in frustration. It would likely also increase the selection of borrowable e-books, which is potentially good news for libraries.

That assumes that Amazon intends to develop this patent, though. Not every patent leads to a product, and it’s entirely possible that Amazon filed this patent to keep someone else (like, say, Apple) from doing the same.

Ever since content went digital, though, people have been struggling to solve the problem of how you remunerate content creators and distributors when you aren’t transferring a physical object from one person to another. What are you selling? What price can you put on a copy that can itself be copied infinitely? Transferring digital content requires making a copy: when you loan an e-book to someone else, you make a copy that that person then has access to.

The license states right up front that it is attempting to make digital content transferable while maintaining scarcity. Artificial, the objection runs. Well, yes. The whole edifice is artificial, born directly out of the thinking that an idea can be a commodity, that intellectual property has an objective reality. It was convenient enough to think that way when ideas necessarily came packaged as concrete objects, and one could transfer the concrete object from one party to another.

With digital content, that’s no longer the case; thus, vendors have turned instead to licensing, so that what you’re buying is access to the content, not the content itself. Again, this is something libraries have been dealing with for years: our literature is rife with discussion (and occasionally, lamentation) of the shift from ownership to access. Amazon’s patent is essentially an expansion of this licensing model that maps out a way to make content licenses transferable.

It remains to be seen what they’ll do with this idea, now that the patent has been granted. But when you think about it, it seems like a pretty big deal.

A Library for the Subway

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:54:02 -0500

A Library for the Subway:

thelifeguardlibrarian:

counterpunches:

A trio of students from the Miami Ad School—Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez—have came up with an innovative concept that allows people to read the first ten pages of popular books while riding the subway.

Using near field communications (NFC) technology, commuters select the desired book from a list of popular titles and read its first ten pages—upon finishing, the reader will be informed of the closest library location from which they can pick up and read the rest of the book.

This is a simple but ingenious idea that can be adopted and adapted to encourage reading in the 21st century, when new technology is changing the way we consume books.

This will be my second favorite thing today.

Brilliant.

Open Access resource guide

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:50:25 -0500

Open Access resource guide:

While we don’t have a formal OA program on my campus per se, I’ve been rounding up various OA resources for interested colleagues, faculty, and even students. Here’s what I’ve got so far…

Carpet at the Gungahlin Public Library in Canberra, Australia.

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:39:59 -0500

Carpet at the Gungahlin Public Library in Canberra, Australia.

Another day, another publisher sues a librarian

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:44:10 -0500

Another day, another publisher sues a librarian:

Hot on the heels of the recent news concerning publisher Edwin Mellen and librarian Dale Askey, we have something called the Canadian Center (shouldn’t it be “Centre”?) for Science and Education threatening a libel suit against Jeffrey Beall, who writes the excellent Scholarly Open Access blog (which, if you are a librarian, researcher, or anyone with a vested interest in OA, you should be reading).

You have to wonder what these publishers are thinking. Beall has a strong reputation in library circles for his thoughtful analysis of, and occasional warnings about, OA journals and publishers who attempt to exploit the OA model. As usual, Barbara Fister puts it best: “The number of librarians who will never buy a book published by Mellen and the number of scholars who will avoid ever signing a contract with them went up enormously as a result of their nuisance suit. This is not a business plan I would recommend to publishers.”

Open access has enormous promise, but if it is to succeed as a valid publication model, it will need mechanisms of preserving its integrity. Blogs like Beall’s are one of those mechanisms.

From the Blogosphere: Edwin Mellen Press vs. a Critical Librarian

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:08:26 -0500

From the Blogosphere: Edwin Mellen Press vs. a Critical Librarian:

Several articles have appeared in the last few days about Edwin Mellen’s suit against Dale Askey and his employer, McMaster University. This is one of the better roundups I’ve seen (thanks, Shana!).

I knew about their previous suit against another party, but I didn’t know that Edwin Mellen’s owner had gotten himself fired from a tenured position shortly thereafter. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Let This Be a Sign

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:35:36 -0500

If your library is like most libraries, there are a lot of signs. Signs denoting service points, signs explaining how to use the copy machines or the self-checkouts, signs asking please, for the umpteenth time you know we really hate repeating ourselves, take your phone conversation and your Starbucks with no lid outside, thank you.

Or else it’s like ours, with hardly any signs at all (and those it does have are old and dated and have way too many words on them, the picture on the one about cellphones looks like it might date from the late 90s), and a lot of confusion among newer patrons about where to go to get their laptops inoculated against viruses, or where their class that is having a library research class today is located, or what does this call number thingy mean, anyway?

(Our library classroom is in the basement, which is a problem in and of itself.)

Our lack of signage is primarily due to the preferences of a now-departed administrator, and a longtime source of frustration for front-line staff. However, I do think he has a point. Like the Five Man Electrical Band said, signs clutter up the scenery and confuse the hell out of people (well, that’s the gist of what they said, anyway), and in a way, their necessity indicates a failure of design: if you have to explain with a sign what something is, then what that thing is is not self-evident.

This point was brought back to me this week because my current commute listening is Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says about Us). The chapter about signage makes more or less this exact point. There’s some evidence that road signs intended to increase safety have the opposite effect, in some cases because they actually encourage disengagement with the environment in which you’re driving. The chapter features a long discourse about the redesign of streets and intersections in the Netherlands in a way that both makes intuitive sense to the people using them, and more or less forces them to pay attention: not only to their driving, but to the other people they’re sharing the road with.

In other words, if you have a library littered with signs, it might be that what you really have is a library that is poorly designed.

It wouldn’t be too surprising. Many library buildings, mine included, were built before the personal computer was even a thing, never mind laptops, smartphones, wireless access, tablets, e-readers, the Internet (well, there was an Internet, but it was a tiny DoD project at the time), and everything else that has totally disrupted how people seek, find, and access information. And if that’s changed so substantially, wouldn’t people’s experiences of a building in which they use those things to interact with information be different, too?

Maybe, maybe not. But one other thing that Vanderbilt points out is that a lot of the ways we try to manage traffic have remained fundamentally unchanged since the gasoline-powered car totally disrupted how people get from one place to another, with results that are less than ideal.

Signs are a cheap fix. But a better fix might be a full-scale, ground-up redesign.

Justice Department to weigh in on Georgia State suit

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:09:51 -0500

Justice Department to weigh in on Georgia State suit

Thoughts inspired by the person who hasn't been in a library in awhile

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:11:00 -0500

Some weeks ago I met someone who had gone into a library after not visiting one for several years, and who pronounced shock at how things had changed: specifically, at the lack of books. The shock, you may be sure, was disapproving, with a tacit “and appalled” after it.

And you know, it annoyed me. And I think I’ve finally figured out why.

It annoyed me for the same reason that people who assert that nobody uses the library anymore (because everything’s on the Internet! Completely ignoring that Pew Internet found that a major reason people go to the library is to get on the Internet!) and so public libraries should just all be closed.

Both of these groups of people, the people who are appalled at the lack of books (hint: there’s no lack of books) and the people who think libraries are useless in this grand new online age, are operating from the same faulty assumption. They have this mental model of the library that owes a great deal to Dale Carnegie. If you’re American, you know just what I mean: a quaint little building, late 19th/early 20th century, with tall dark shelves loaded down with books, and Shirley Jones in her Marian the Librarian glasses behind the desk. (Ironically, the Carnegie Library building in Freeport, Maine, where I was when this all went down, is now an Abercrombie outlet; the actual library looks like this.)

The thing is, that model no longer operates. It hasn’t for a long time. If these people thought about it for a minute, they’d find the answer in their own lack of use of the library: that model no longer meets people’s needs.

It’s not that we’re getting rid of books. We aren’t. My library’s shelves are still full, except for the reference collection—because those books have moved online (another hint: “moved online” does not equal “ceased to exist”, problems of digital rot and preservation notwithstanding) and that’s where people prefer to use them. Just like our academic journal use skyrocketed when we moved to digital subscriptions, with accordingly fewer magazine racks taking up space in the lobby.

I’m generally a fan of how libraries are changing. Being able to get to the library without going to the library is a boon for far-flung patrons and even those close by who can’t get there easily—those with tight schedules or difficulty getting around, for instance. And the communal nature of the building itself hasn’t changed. At my library, thousands of students come in every year to study, work, and especially collaborate in spaces intended to serve these needs. The library space and the library collection no longer perfectly overlap, and that’s okay. We still get more people coming into the library building every year than we did the year before.

They even check out books.

What I concluded from hearing this person talk is that they had this somewhat romantic notion that libraries don’t change, that we don’t have to be just as responsive to the biggest information technology revolution since Gutenberg as any other public-facing service (even a physical retail business, for example, has pretty much got to have a website these days, or at least a Facebook page), and that we’ll just sort of…be there, just like they remember, more or less indefinitely.

The danger of thinking that way should be obvious: a lot of the people who do also believe that we don’t need libraries anymore.

Inside Higher Ed: JSTOR Opens Access, Sort Of

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:11:27 -0500

Inside Higher Ed: JSTOR Opens Access, Sort Of:

More than 700 publishers, in addition to the 76 that signed on initially, have agreed to make their journal content available to individual users through JSTOR’s Register & Read program, which launches in earnest today after the conclusion of a pilot that started last year.

Library spaces: MIT

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:16:03 -0500

Library spaces: MIT

“Librarians are pathologically helpful. Google could care less.”

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:59:56 -0500

“Librarians are pathologically helpful. Google could care less.”:

expatlibrarian:

—Mark Busse, “Turn Off Google and Go to the Library,” Design Edge Canada, Nov. 23.

New Jack Librarian: The future of libraries is...

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:53:27 -0500

New Jack Librarian: The future of libraries is...:

…and how many library schools are preparing their students for these kinds of futures? Not many, I’m guessing.

Inside Higher Ed: Amherst Launches OA Academic Press

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:48:25 -0500

Inside Higher Ed: Amherst Launches OA Academic Press:

…and the impetus comes from within the library!

C&RLN: 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:23:44 -0500

C&RLN: 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries

Five things the library could pay more attention to than whether students consider us essential to their success

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:06:28 -0500

Inspired by this excellent post from Barbara Fister, who knocks it out of the park as usual.

I largely agree with her; the recent report showing that the majority of college students do not consider the library essential to their success is not news. As an undergrad I probably wouldn’t have either. Certainly not as much as the music building where I spent most of my time and the staff of which had kindly allotted me a practice room of my very own to store my drum set in. (P.S. This is true. Thanks, Smith College!)

Here are some things that I think we should think about instead:

1. Do we really provide better, more suitable and higher quality resources for student research than what they can get through Google and Wikipedia? Equally important, can they find that stuff? I have yet to interact with a database interface that didn’t frustrate me on some level; if it annoys an expert, it stymies a student.

2. Can they get to those resources through Google? If they find a journal article this way, can they access it, or will they run into a paywall?

3. Is our space welcoming, conducive to getting the work done that students need to do, and do the staff provide good service? (This is one place where I do think libraries could learn a thing or two from retail.)

4. What barriers exist to our patrons availing themselves of the content and services we provide? What can we do to remove them?

5. Do the faculty at our institutions consider the library essential to student success? Should they? If we conclude that they should, and yet they don’t, how do we address that? Faculty have far more influence than librarians on student perceptions of the library’s relevance to their work.

Imagining Next Century's Library Today

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:35:00 -0500

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is one of my favorite library blogs. Not just because of the name, which is a direct hotline to childhood memories of playing Clue, but because it contains some of the most thoughtful writing about where libraries are and where they’re headed. It has faith that they’re headed somewhere, which in all honesty is what keeps me in the profession. The instant I’m convinced libraries have no future, I’m outta here.

But I think they do, and this month’s post on libraries in the next hundred years show some possible directions that they might go. Some of those aren’t too dissimilar from some of the things I think libraries should be doing right now:

Preserve the idea of a library as place. Not necessarily or primarily a place for books, either. But, look: most of my library’s collection is digital now,and yet the library building is one of the most highly trafficked on campus. It’s a place for students to meet, work, get help, discover something, and all of those things involve other people as much as they involve information resources. The idea that we’d all be distributed into our own little isolated spaces, often touted as an advantage to distributed networks and online information sources, reminds me a bit too much of dystopic futures envisioned at the end of the 19th century.

Build digital infrastructure. Information’s online? Great, let’s build the access necessary to make sure that people can get to it. At my university, library and IT operations are part of a single administrative unit. When I came here, I thought that was kind of weird. Now, I’m a little surprised this arrangement doesn’t exist elsewhere.

Create more cooperative arrangements. Increasingly, libraries cannot exist in isolation from one another; our cooperative networks and sharing arrangements are critical to our continued success. My library regularly touts the speed and efficiency of our ILL service to new faculty, to help make up for our relatively small in-house collection. Turning over library operations to private companies or corporations is a terrible idea; we need to collectivize, not corporatize. (Does that make me a socialist?)

Help people create, not just consume. One of the amazing and all-too-often dismissed benefits of collective knowledge resources, of which Wikipedia is the biggest and best known, is that they actively encourage people to not just take in information, but put it out. This is hard to do well, which is why so many people go to college to learn how, but too often the library sees its job as done once the information is in someone’s hands. This morning our instruction coordinator told us how much more she’s talking about use in her classes: not just getting the information, but doing something with it. We see more of what people do with information than anyone, let’s share that.

Last month I gave a brief talk on integrating libraries and mobile technologies. But that’s only part of the picture, as are each of the things discussed above and in the In the Library with the Lead Pipe article. It’s a big picture, and I think the only way to bring it to reality is to identify those component parts and work out how to bring them about.

What’s your 100-year library vision? Here’s mine: Knowledge node in an interconnected web.