A Domain of One's Own and Info/Tech Literacies

Give every student a domain name and web hosting, and let freedom ring!

Although Jim Groom, Director of the Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington, probably wouldn't like that wording, that is the gist of his recent pilot project, A Domain of One's Own.

He recently gave an interview for the Chronicle's Tech Therapy blog in which he described the project and its motivations. Have a listen, if it sounds like it might tickle one of your fancies.

So, quick aside: I had this idea to write a post about digital subjectivity in relation to this project, and I was set straight (rightfully) by Althea. Here's how the conversation went:

Me: Hey, I'm thinking of writing a post on subjectivity.
Althea: Ahahahahahahahaahhahahahaha..ahah. heheh. heh... hmm?

Not really. Althea is too nice to laugh that much in my face, but I know she was laughing inside. But, the upshot is this: I think librarians should be interested in what might be called "digital subjectivity." So, let's talk about that sometime. Maybe even write some posts about it!

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Recently, I've been working with a librarian here at UW Bothell to think about the relationship between information literacy (the standard bearer of library instruction) and technological literacy, an ill-defined (perhaps undefinable) set of literacies that are related to information literacy. Although what it means to be technologically literate is as difficult to define and describe as what it means to be to informationally literate, we must forge ahead and do something, despite the definitional problems.

I like the ethos of UMW's pilot project: set up a space and let the students and faculty have the openness to do what they want.

Many would quickly retort: "Ahhhh! What if they don't know what to do!?"

The truth is that learning is struggling, puzzling, feeling the anxiety of not knowing what you don't know. I think the scariness of openness (a term I haven't defined, but so it goes...) is something to work with, rather than something to avoid. When you see someone achieve some success in relation to a research problem (information literacy) or a technology problem (technology literacy), you see them achieving some level of empowerment. But, when we set up systems in libraries and across the university that reduce the fear of the open unknown, we also reduce the possibilities of success and empowerment. There is nothing so effective at reducing someone to powerlessness than a system that never challenges them. Ask any high achieving student in a middling classroom.

In the end, whether you work as a technologist or a librarian, much of your job is becoming a collaborator on all sorts of projects. As we move forward with these projects, we might do well to take some advice from UMW's project and set the bar high, challenge people and then work our asses off to help them achieve success.

Value and Values in Academic Publishing

This week, Alexander K. Brown, of Springer, published an op-ed in The Guardian pushing back against the open access movement by arguing that traditional academic publishers still add value. I want to respond to this, because in his piece he sets up a straw-man argument that misrepresents the arguments in the open access community as much as he claims that community has misrepresented the value of traditional publishing.

Brown paraphrases the whole of the open access argument thus: “the ill-conceived notion frequently advanced by commercial publishing's detractors is that all we do is polish a manuscript, put it online and then sit back and wait for the next sucker to submit an article.” Brown suggests that open access is about taking advantage of the cost savings associated with the move to online journal distribution.

He goes on to list the different ways that traditional publishers add value in the publication process. These include editing, recognizing emerging fields and creating new journals, managing editorial boards and peer review, developing new platforms, helping customers, facilitating access through description and metadata, among other things.

Brown lays out the time and labor that goes into journal publishing, and I don’t want to gloss over the fact that publishers do add value through their work and products. However, the premise of Brown’s argument is flawed. Open access proponents know and freely acknowledge that publishing online takes time and effort. So though open access arose partially in response to exorbitant journal prices, isn’t just about money.

Open access is about the values of academia and who controls the scholarly production of knowledge. Scholars do research in order to create new knowledge and benefit society through advances in science, technology, culture, and theory. Scholarly publishing has its roots in the Republic of Letters, where ideas were freely exchanged in order to further our understanding of the world, and those values are still central to the academy today. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between the values of the scholarly community and those of the for-profit publishing industry. The crisis of journal pricing was merely a wake-up call about the degree to which we had let publishers take control over our scholarship. Open access is about the academic community taking back the ability to decide how we will share and build knowledge.

On Brown’s implicit argument that open access cannot financially sustain a comparable system of publishing, I say: we don’t have to. As Peter Suber discusses in his book Open Access, many of the costs of traditional publishing are eliminated when you are no longer selling subscriptions. The costs of marketing, branding, and customer service evaporate when you no longer have customers. 

Build a Better E-Book: A Wish List for Academic Reading

The following post developed out of many frustrated and fruitless attempts to use e-books for academic research and educational purposes, and more recently from conversations between Bookaneers Freeda and Althea. This is specifically about using e-books for academic and educational purposes, and specifically not about reading for leisure. 

Anyone who has tried to do research in e-books has probably experienced many of the same frustrations we have. The interfaces are clunky and confusing, it is difficult to browse or "berrypick" within the books, you are most likely reading on your computer, and the list goes on. This is exactly the opposite of the experience reading a paper book. Paper books are simple, intuitive, and pleasurable to read, and they all operate in exactly the same manner. 

What we want is optimum functionality: for e-books to take the best aspects of paper books and the many possibilities of digital. We want uniformity across platforms that includes the ability to customize your reading experience. And we would like it happen in substantially less than the several hundred years it took for print publishers to standardize practices after the invention of the printing press. 

Below is our list of "demands": what we would like from academic e-book publishers. We would also love for this to be an ongoing conversation. Librarians, researchers, students, by all means, let us know what your experiences using e-books for research and education have been. Which functions work, which do not? What are your demands?

Hyperlinks

One of the major differences between reading for pleasure and reading for learning is that academic reading tends to be less linear. It is much more common to jump around, refer back to previous passages, and of course to use all of the additional information and material included in the book. E-book platforms and devices for academic reading should hyperlink footnotes, endnotes, citations, tables of content, and indexes. Most importantly this includes being able to jump from the text to the endnote and back again. Ideally, it would also be much easier to bookmark a section and quickly jump back and forth between passages in the text.

Text that is searchable, highlightable, and copyable

These features are more common in e-book reading platforms, but not universal. Freeda recently tried to copy a passage from an e-book in EBSCO in order to use the information for future reference, but she was unable. These kinds of technological controls are meant to prevent "unauthorized" or "illegal" use of the materials, but in an academic setting prevent perfectly legal, even desirable, uses and stifle productivity.

Consortium lending privileges 

The inability to lend e-books to students at other libraries is another casualty of the transition from physical ownership to digital leasing. Legally, libraries are able to lend the books they own to whomever they wish. But in the digital environment, we no longer own books. We sign licensing agreements. This allows publishers to assert all kinds of controls and limitation over how we use the content. Publishers have long been opposed to the First Sale Doctrine, which allows the owner of a book or a CD or any other item to sell that item to someone else, without paying the publisher. However, now that we do not own these books, we cannot lend them outside of our institutions and we cannot sell them when we are finished with them.

For libraries, the implications of not being able to lend e-books to consortium students are momentous, especially as we make efforts to increase our digital collections. Libraries join consortia in order to save money and still provide access to adequate resources, but as we shift more of our monograph purchases toward e-books, we are perhaps unintentionally decreasing the value of consortium memberships.  

There has been some progress on designing new lending options for consortia lending, but it is one among many lending options that is not available for all titles from all publishers.  The result is that students who attempt to use e-books are only presented with the confusing array of appearances and functionality of e-books if they can get into them in the first place.  A federated catalog displays e-books from consortium institutions and sometimes will and sometimes will not allow students into the book from those results.  If students already find the process of finding a book through the library complicated and confusing, we are only managing to make it worse through our e-book acquisition. 

Portability

Though academic reading is different than leisure reading, there are some areas where the features and abilities of leisure reading platforms (like the Kindle) would be beneficial for academic readers as well. Students should be able to download an e-book to their e-reader, tablet, or smart phone, and then access the content off-line, just as public library users can download e-books. In some cases this may mean making a work available in a variety of formats to facilitate use on different e-reader devices.

Permanence  

As we mentioned above, publishers of e-books have found ways to eliminate the pesky features associated with physical books, like ownership and the First Sale Doctrine. However, when those physical attributes work in publishers’ favor, they are happy to reproduce that feature digitally. Some publishers develop into the licensing agreements for e-books a maximum number of uses, so after the book has been checked out X many times it disappears from the collection. This is meant to mimic the deterioration of physical books. Here again, we should be taking advantage of the freedom associated with the digital format, and not build the bugs of physical books into the new medium.

Bottom line: Get rid of DRM
Many of the things we have mentioned above may fall under the heading of digital rights management. Publishers and platforms have different approaches to digital rights management for ebooks. Some publishers offer e-books more or less free of digital limitations. You can print or download whole chapters as PDFs. Others put up more barriers to access and use.

Say what you will about the need for protecting intellectual property, for us all of this DRM in libraries is rehashing territory we covered decades ago. Publishers have always had an uneasy, or even hostile, relationship with libraries. In the decades when public libraries were being built all over the country, publishers feared that libraries would ruin the market for books, and some publishers took legal action. Fortunately for everyone, they were not successful in curbing the functions of libraries. What was the impact of libraries on the book market? Libraries have created generations of literate, intellectually curious, book-reading citizens. Libraries have created more customers for book stores and publishers, not fewer.

The truth is, as online piracy becomes more widespread, and students become more technologically literate, readers will get their books without these restrictions--but they won't get them from libraries, and they won't get them from publishers, they'll get them on the black market.  If we want readers to use good sources, ethically, we need to provide them with resources that are useable and make sense--which simply means granting them access to their fair use rights in e-book form.

The ideas behind DRM are the same basic fear-based approach publishers historically have taken towards libraries, and it is based a flawed understanding of knowledge, and on knowledge acquisition. As Althea posted last week, reporting on a talk by Barbara Fister, "the resources that we offer are, in fact, renewed by use rather than depleted by it." Publishers should recognize that we add value by circulating these resources widely, and modify their services accordingly.

Meaning Making in the Library: My Response to ACRL NW 2012

It didn’t take me long after beginning my work in libraries to realize that the “librarian as guardian of knowledge” idea had become totally outdated the moment our information formats stopped being physically scarce. And Barbara Fister’s critique of the “library as warehouse of information” metaphor at last week’s ACRL NW Conference pushed me to think harder about a couple of key questions: If it’s not a scarcity of resources that gets people into the library, then what is it? Why does the library still hold such a privileged place in our collective imagination, even as it's lost that place in our collective wallet? And, finally, why do I love my job so much, what brings me such intense joy on the reference desk and in the classroom?

I think that beyond information, beyond knowledge, beyond the technology that we provide access to, there is something that the library and librarians facilitate that is as valuable now as it has ever been, and depends on our communities as much as it does on our facilities, technologies, and commodities.  I’m not talking about the writing of papers, or the accessing of e-reserves, or the time in the study room, or the reading of a call number.  I’m talking about the ideal end of all of that work: the making of meaning.

Why do we ask our students to read, to write, to solve, to collaborate?  As educators, we hope that our students’ lives will be enriched by the connections that they make in the classroom.  I argue that that is precisely the beautiful, rich, hard work that I see happening around me, daily, in the library.  What is the library if not a rich site of contextualization?   To that end:

• We provide group study rooms so that students can build off of each other’s work to make something better than they could have made on their own.   
• We fill our shelves with the intellectual work of others so that our readers can discover that their experiences have been shared, or that others’ lives are profoundly different from their own.   
• We wait at the reference desk so that we can encourage the asking of deeper, more probing, more thoughtful questions.   

I feel most exhilarated at work not when I find exactly the fact that a student was looking for, but when I can see in a student’s face the dawning of a connection between their own experience/curiosity/question with another’s work/words/thoughts.

The UW Bothell, where I work, organizes a significant portion of its Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences curriculum around the “Banking Concept of Education” chapter of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It struck me that both Barbara Fister and Char Booth, in their keynote addresses at ACRL NW also used the “banking concept” as an important metaphor to work against.  In this chapter, Freire describes a prevailing attitude toward education that conceptualizes the transmission of information as being a uni-directional flow from the teacher to the student.  This disempowering process devalues the experiences, expertise, and contexts of the student and privileges the teacher as a single authority figure who embodies the “right” kind of knowledge (Freire 72).  Freire instead advocates for a decentralized power structure in the learning environment which recognizes what every member of the community brings to that new context and remakes every student as a teacher, and every teacher as a student.  In this model, the knowledge flow is multi-directional and meaning is made collaboratively in a process that he calls “mutual humanization” (75).

It is no surprise that Freire came up so frequently at this conference, because we are at a moment in our history as a profession when we are liberated from many of the old metaphors that have hemmed us in and occupied our time.  We all know, now, that information is easy to come by, but meaningful information is created, not stumbled upon.  We, as librarians, teachers, learners, and community members, have the license to communicate openly and lovingly with our intellectual communities.  We get to support and be supported by their ideas, energy, passions, questions, and labor.  And in that process, if we are open, passionate, and hardworking ourselves--if we maintain a position of radical curiosity toward our community members, library users, and environment--we can make beautiful meaning together.

Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30^th Anniversary Ed. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.

The Power of Narrative: ACRL NW 2012

This summer, Bookaneer Freeda Brook wrote an impassioned post about the specious stories of demise that are so popular in current discourse about libraries ("The Stories We Tell About Ourselves") after reading "The End of the Twighlight Doom" by Barbara Fister.  Brook ended her piece with a call for more of us to tell the stories of flourishing that constitute our daily experiences of the libraries in which we work, study, socialize, and grow.  It seems that ACRL NW heeded her call, and made the power of narrative the focus of this year's conference of Washington and Oregon librarians entitled: Libraries Out Loud: New Narratives of Enduring Value.  The conversations that followed both the opening and closing keynote addresses were exhilarating, as we all felt the power of our ability to collectively shape the conversation around libraries, learning and information.

We were lucky enough to have Barbara Fister herself as the opening keynote speaker (you can find the full text of her speech here, and I highly encourage you to read it).  Fister contextualized the current crisis narrative within a larger capitalism-flavored movement to monetize experience and fit research and learning into a purely  transactional model.  The overarching story under which we currently operate, goes a little something like this:

Information is something manufactured elsewhere and stored at the library.

For students, she said, that means that,

Authority exists outside of themselves and students come to the library to shop for nuggets of information.  Research is perceived as monetizeable and publications are tokens of productivity.

In this narrative, the library is the information wallet for the larger community of readers, researchers, and reluctant students on our campuses.  The bulk of our interactions with students and faculty revolve around buying resources, and then helping readers to access--through numerous convoluted pathways that have been predetermined by licensing agreements and copyright--what we’ve bought.  While we may bemoan the phenomenon of students who scan articles for useable quotes, we actively participate in this model by working within a market-oriented framework that emphasizes access and productivity over contemplation and creativity. 

But, Fister reminded us, markets, consumption, and monetizeation “are not always what people respond to.”  In fact, she estimates that it is the sense of the library as the intellectual commons of our institutions and communities that continues to bring folks to the library (be it virtual or physical).  In a sense, she suggested, it is our own inability, as librarians, to believe in the possibility of the commons—our buying into the narrative of the “tragedy of the commons”—that has allowed that commons to be enclosed around us in the form of skyrocketing prices, staff reductions, closures, and changes in our service orientation.

Fister called for a reinvigoration of the scholarship that we embody, support, collect, and make sense of by conceiving of it as a republic populated by peers.  Librarians, she said, are wonderfully positioned between professors and students.  We witness the research and discovery process on the part of students, we watch them work, and often, we are there to help them when they run into trouble.  At the same time, we attend department meetings, retreats, and trainings with faculty; we watch them develop reading lists and syllabi, and hear about the agony of the grading process.  We can act as well-informed translators between both kinds of work that we, too, wrestle with.  To that end, Fister called for a rejection of the crisis narrative of libraries, and called for, rather, a celebration of all the work that we excel at, a celebration of the collective, collaborative knowledge work that is done in and through the library.

Char Booth, in her closing keynote (slides here), responded beautifully to Fister’s themes by asking us to embrace the crisis narrative—not as something new and terrifying, but as an old story that signals the centrality of the library to major societal shifts in communication.  “Libraries” she said, have a very real history of decline, destruction, and displacement: they “have a history of being burned to the ground because it is a swift way to destroy a culture.”

Because libraries are, at their core, about the communication of knowledge, our seams will be strained every time there is a major shift in the modes of information distribution and communication.  “Libraries should not be an easy thing to advocate for,” according to Booth, because we have to respond, reshape, and revalue ourselves to stay useful to our communities with “every great format change” that the world undergoes.  This constant crisis state, she said, keeps us sharp.

Keeping that in mind, Booth urged us not to focus on the "container" and "content" metaphors that are so prevalent in narratives about the library as a place that holds books, because, when the boundaries of the physical library start to blur into virtual space, and the boundaries of books begin to dissolve into the ether of e-resources, we risk disappearing from the cultural narrative.  Rather, she suggests, we should focus on "concept" metaphors that speak to the lived experiences that most of us have about the library, or librarians--those positive, powerful, life-affirming narratives that communicate what we see people doing with and in the library: the sleeping, the growing, the making out, the writing, the sharing that has made the library a center of vibrant life on our campuses.

Though Fister and Booth fundamentally differed in their approach to the crisis narrative, each was saying essentially the same thing: we must put the emphasis back on our core values when we shape the narrative of the library in today's society, because those values speak to the role that we play in people's lives--not just the space we take up on our campuses.  The walls may tumble, and the books may crumble, but libraries are here to stay.

Open Access to Open Educational Resources

While watching the webcast "Connecting the Dots between Open Access and Open Educational Resources," I noticed something interesting: the graph that represented the cost of college textbooks for students versus the rate of inflation looked almost identical to a graph that I saw 3 years ago at a presentation on the rising costs of periodical subscriptions.  Both graphs represent staggering rises in the cost to students and libraries for materials that rarely make the college professors and researchers who create them much money.

While libraries have been decrying the crisis in scholarly communication for years, and shrinking their book budgets to accommodate the bigger piece of the pie that periodicals are gobbling up, many students, according to webcast presenter and student Nicole Allen, seem to have adopted a different strategy: simply not buying their textbooks.

I don't think we should underestimate the undue burden that is placed on students by the onerous cost of textbooks (if you've never had a student at the reference desk in tears about how much she has to shell out for her biology textbook, consider yourself lucky).  Even if they've scraped together the loans to pay for tuition, it's sometimes that $200 economics textbook that means the difference between making rent and dropping a class.  The cost of materials should never be the deciding factor for a student's intellectual development, and the way that we, as librarians and scholars, can mitigate that potentiality is to pay a little more attention (or a lot more attention) to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that has been gaining traction in recent years.

The infrastructure for vetting instructional material is not as well developed for OER as it is for traditional textbooks, and this presents a barrier to widespread adoption of OER by instructors.  Most professors know the publishers that are well-respected in their field, they've seen the same names on articles and monographs since they were undergraduates, and using this information, they can make a quick choice of high quality course material from amongst traditional sources while they're in the midst of determining all of the other crucial elements of their course.  Getting newly acquainted with platforms for OER, looking through all new textbooks, and evaluating their quality is a lot to ask of busy instructors.

But vetting material is what librarians are all about, and I think that marriage of student need and instructor/librarian expertise is the making of a truly useful collaboration.  Just as we do for our normal collection, we can begin to look at the OER that are out there for our subject areas and create curated lists to present at our next faculty meeting.  Both webcasters suggested a great list of places to find OER, and two of my favorites are:

• Washington State's Open Course Library- a project that took the highest enrollment courses in the state and asked professors and librarians who worked with those classes to design free or very low cost materials--including syllabi, textbooks, and assessment--to be shared under a Creative Commons license (CC BY).
• Open Courseware Consortium- acts as a clearinghouse of OER material from the likes of Tufts, MIT, and the University of Michigan to be used by educators around the world (I like to look at the MIT literature courses just to see which authors are being taught these days).

A few libraries have begun to take active roles in promoting OER at their institutions--UMASS Amherst, for instance, has begun distributing grants to instructors to support their efforts to adopt OER in their courses--but according to webcast presenter Cable Green, most libraries have focused their intellectual and political energies on the Open Access movement and spent very little time looking at OER. 

The first step that I've decided on for myself is to head over to the campus bookstore to see just how much students are actually shelling out for course materials in my departments.  If it turns out that the cost is burdensome, I am going to take a look at some of those courses and see if I can match them up with some of the peer-reviewed OER that I find online.  Armed with that information, I think I could make a good case to the instructors in my liaison areas to consider alternative texts, and maybe save their students some serious money in the next few quarters.

Open Access across the Disciplines

I’m currently organizing a series of events at my university for Open Access Week (Oct 22-28), so my head is full of open access right now. It is my sense that there isn’t a very high level of awareness about open access or the many related issues in scholarly publishing at my institution, so I’m creating a workshop for faculty that will be, I hope, both informative and persuasive.

Luckily, fellow Bookaneer Althea, alerted me to a piece by Marisa Ramírez in the most recent issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Ramírez relates a true story about a doctor who wanted to distribute to other doctors an emergency room checklist developed by researchers at another institution, but because the original authors had signed away their copyrights when publishing the checklist it took months and many emails and phone calls to receive permission to distribute it. The doctor, when he finally received permission, was glad, but wondered how many lives could’ve been saved if he had been able to distribute the checklist sooner.

It is a great and obviously compelling story about the real-life impact of “locked” content, and the potential value of open access. How can you argue with this? Open access saves lives! However, these stories always leave me feeling bad for the other disciplines. The impact of open access is not always (actually, rarely) about life and death. In most cases, the effects of access to scholarship are less immediate, but I believe still essential and life-changing (if not always life-saving).

The promise of open access is the same as the promise of education. Research and scholarship are transformative because they expose us to new ideas and change the way we think about the world. I still remember certain transformative readings when I was in college: reading Tocqueville and Rousseau changed the way I thought about citizenship and democracy; Amartya Sen haunted my study of Political Science; and two radical feminists bookended my undergraduate career, first an essay by Andrea Dworkin and finally a commencement address by Angela Davis. These are just a few scholars, critics, and theorists that have transformed or impacted the way I see the world, how I interact with it, and really, who I am today. Now I have no idea how I accessed these readers, through books or articles, in print or online. But, does it matter? The point is, access to scholarship is transformative. Knowledge shared and circulated is powerful. Knowledge kept under lock and key isn’t knowledge, it is a secret. This is what open access is about, it is about sharing ideas freely and the belief that more thought, more information, more knowledge make the world better.

I bring this up, because while open access is much more prevalent and less controversial in the sciences, there are still many misunderstandings and reservations in other disciplines. Earlier this week, the American Historical Association issued a statement acknowledging the inequities of the current scholarly publishing system, but also expressing concern over their perceptions of the open access model. Others have addressed the AHA’s statement (here, and here), but it points to a real need for open access advocates to address the value of OA in the social sciences and the humanities as well in the sciences.

As I write this I am very aware of the many elements of and obstacles to changing the systems of scholarly publishing. The AHA is concerned chiefly about the mechanics of open access publishing, and less about the potential value. I have further thoughts about the diffusion of publishing in the open access model, and the return of publishing to the purview of universities and scholarly societies, but these are for a different blog post. For now, I would like to reiterate that sharing scholarship freely and widely can have a profound and lasting impact on our society, be it in the sciences or other fields. I second Ramírez’s call:

As the 6th annual Open Access Week approaches, think about how you can tell your story so others understand “why OA?”.

I personally am thinking of stories in library science, in women’s studies, in history, in political science, and in the many fields where knowledge and scholarship have transformed my life.

Update on GSU E-Reserves Case

The Chronicle reports that on Friday Judge Evans issued an order that denied the requests for relief from the publishers and also directed the publishers to pay for GSU's court costs. The publishers had asked the court to require GSU to keep strict and regimented records of its e-reserves, and to turn them over for monitoring. The court denied this request, because it is excessively burdensome and the court determined that GSU had acted in good faith.

For some great analysis and interpretation of this latest development, see Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

More on the value of libraries

These ideas must be floating around the ether right now. Last week I wrote a post about the persistent narrative of doom and demise of the library, in response to a similar post by Barbara Fister at Library Babel Fish. Now today, First Monday has released its latest issue, including this article by Jessa Lingel, "Occupy Wall Street and the myth of the technological death of the library." Lingel writes,

What we see here is that some of the very tools that have been hailed as signaling the demise of libraries (mobile devices, the Internet) are in fact being used to create an enduring record of what goes into the library. Here, tools of digital media are not exposing the irrelevance of libraries, but instead offer the means of developing it into a complex, sophisticated and digitally–accessible entity.

She goes on to discuss how the People's Library at Occupy Wall Street, and libraries in general, can reflect, instill, and reinforce the values of their community not just through the collection but also through the policies and decisions they make.

Returning to Shera’s ideas that libraries are a reflection of a community’s ethics and values, it makes sense that a movement founded on (at least the ideals of) democracy, free exchange of ideas, egalitarianism and openness would create a library with a collection development policy, with an egalitarian work force and open lending policy.

After I wrote the post last week, I had a discussion with my partner about the value of policies in an organization, when/why/how they are created and also when/why/how they are enforced. This article is well worth the read, thinking about how the values of a library are reflected in all the decisions it makes, even seemingly innocuous ones about what kind of software to use or the length of lending periods.

The Stories We Tell About Ourselves

A while back a friend of mine from high school visited me in Seattle, and as I was telling her about school and my plans for the future, she bluntly asked me, “Aren’t libraries obsolete?” It was not the last time that someone has declared/asked that of me in conversation, and the sentiment always rankles me. In part because I think the answer is, emphatically, no, and in part because I don’t know what to say to a person who thinks that. 

There are countless ways that libraries are invaluable to society, both the people who use them and even those who do not. Every day I see how the information landscape is changing and how libraries are integral leaders in that process. I see students needing guidance in how to sift through the vastness of the Internet and even to choose an appropriate point of entry. I see how librarians are asking the essential questions about the ethical, political, and social implications of the technologies and systems we build to create, store, and transmit information. I see libraries playing central roles in their communities. Yet there is a strong and persistent narrative in the news and even in the profession of librarianship that is always ready to declare the demise of libraries. My day-to-day reality is so far from this narrative of demise that when I come up against it, I am often flabbergasted and unable to succinctly or coherently state why libraries are definitely not obsolete (not to mention why you would probably be a better person if you used libraries more often, but I’ll leave that for another time).

I’m thinking about this today after reading this piece by Barbara Fister, The End of the Twilight Doom. Fister asks,

Why do we love apocalyptic metaphors so much? Nobody reads. Libraries are doomed. Higher education must change radically or die; no, wait, it’s already dead.  

It is almost trite to suggest that the answer is because it sells papers (or rather, pushes page views), though that is definitely part of it. I also think that there is a strong tendency towards myopia in our society, and that we often mistake change for destruction. It is this idea that we are on the edge of a precipice (or maybe we’ve already stepped off it) and this is the moment in time where society is about to fall apart (or already has) and we are the only ones who can do something about it and if we don’t act now it will be too late (or it already is too late). 

It is an engrossing narrative, but critically lacking any historical perspective. I think you could make the same argument about the narrative of demise in almost any context, but speaking specifically about libraries, it is safe to say that we have always been in a state of flux. I spent countless hours in graduate school reading texts like the U.S. 1876 special report on public libraries, Samuel Green’s "Personal Relations Between Librarians and Readers" (1876, assigned in at least two of my classes) or Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945, also assigned in at least two courses). Though at the time I often cursed the poorly made scans and uneven typeset, the overwhelming message I got from reading these historical texts is that the core principles of librarianship remain  the same (public service, access, organization, preservation) while the superficial and technological details are constantly changing (card catalogs, print journals, etc.). Libraries are now and have always been engaging with changes in the way our society creates, accesses, and shares information.

In her post, Fister notes that the attention-grabbing, gloom-and-doom headline has been around for decades, and she suggests that it is time for libraries to create “a counter-narrative to the apocalyptic rhetoric.” I would say that a counter-narrative already exists in the profession: it is the narrative of leadership and innovation in the field of information. The problem is that this is the story we tell to ourselves, but we have been less successful in conveying the idea to others. Indeed, I have trouble imagining making the case to my friend who was sure libraries have become obsolete. We are combatting an emotional argument (Libraries are doomed!) with an intellectual one (Libraries are actually fulfilling the same role in society as they always have, and you are merely mistaking change for destruction.) It is not just that we need a counter-narrative, it is that we need one that packs the same emotional force as the fear-inducing notion that libraries are on the brink of collapse. I am now taking submissions for the parallel rebuttal, so when the next person says to me, “Libraries are obsolete,” I can respond, confidently and persuasively, “No, libraries are ________.” Please fill in the blank.

Will E-book Data Destroy Creativity?

In the ongoing saga of how e-books are changing reading habits, cultures, and markets, it should come as no surprise that publishers and platform providers of e-books have found a new way to cash in on our reading experience.  By analyzing what we read, how much we read, how quickly it takes us to read, and whether we finish a book, Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble are acquiring an unprecedented amount of data about us as readers through the devices on which we read.

Of course, there are a number of potentially dangerous outcomes of this data acquisition that range from privacy to the very nature of creativity. Below I'll work through these issues in order of (my perceived sense of) importance:

Privacy
Records of our reading being kept in great detail can be subpoenaed by law enforcement.  While Alexandra Alter, author of the Wall Street Journal article that kicked off this discussion, says in an On the Media story  that she thinks it's unlikely that law enforcement will use the records in these ways, librarians know better.  Many libraries have taken to keeping minimal records on their patrons--so that they have nothing of substance to hand over to law enforcement--after the Patriot Act debacle of the early 2000s (see the ALA's position on the Patriot Act for more details).

The Market 
The publishing world is contracting, and by all accounts (from my friends in New York who work with publishers), getting an interesting book published is increasingly unlikely.  With new data showing--down to the word--what a typical reader likes, authors of challenging books that are out-of-the-mainstream may have an even more difficult time getting published when market data shows that people didn't get past the 2nd chapter of the last challenging, out-of-the-mainstream book that they bought.

Creativity
But there's an even deeper issue about creativity that lurks beneath the numbers of e-book reading.  Alter points out in her article, "Your E-Book Is Reading You," that 

Publishing has lagged far behind the rest of the entertainment industry when it comes to measuring consumers' tastes and habits. TV producers relentlessly test new shows through focus groups; movie studios run films through a battery of tests and retool them based on viewers' reactions. But in publishing, reader satisfaction has largely been gauged by sales data and reviews—metrics that offer a postmortem measure of success but can't shape or predict a hit. That's beginning to change as publishers and booksellers start to embrace big data, and more tech companies turn their sights on publishing. 

When I brought this up around the dinner table, a friend who has worked in games for a number of years had a swift and decisive response to this that begged the question of whether the "big data" used by the rest of entertainment industry has done anything to improve the quality of what's been produced.  In terms of data being used to shape games, he said, 

It's very scientific, but the only thing that gets you into creating is killed by that process. It's so hard to be creative once you're given the metrics that define your market.  It changes your approach.  If you can't trust yourself as a creator, you can't be as good.

He went on to say that when a new idea is truly original, the usefulness of metrics totally falls apart, because they simply won't apply.  If fact, under those circumstances, metrics act as shackles to a radical idea.  And when they are applied, you often end up with something, "so bland that no one will hate it."

I know that the jury is still out about how creativity, inspiration, and problem solving actually happen in  the brain--but I think there's a real logic in this idea: how useful is data about what's worked in the past, when we're hoping to make something new for the future? 

Counterpoint
The debate about data can get awfully sticky because relying on gut, and doing what's working without getting insight into how it's working or why it's working can produce organizations and industries that are unresponsive to their users and patrons.  This is becoming increasingly clear to the library profession as we scramble to catch up with patrons who could have told us years ago that our approach, equipment, and spaces were outdated--if we'd bothered to ask.  And assuming that people's habits don't say anything useful about their needs and desires smacks of an elitism ("how could they possibly know what's good for them?") that has plagued the publishing industry for decades.  Maybe a little bit of market data will do our writers and publishers a lot of good.

Though Alter claims that before this moment, reading had been a solitary act between the reader and the page, this isn't actually the first time that authors have taken their readers' desires into account in the writing process.  While Dickens was publishing his books chapter by chapter in monthly installments, he was simultaneously finishing them--and you can bet that he knew what people were saying about his plots.   Louisa May Alcott was so annoyed by her readers' responses to the first half of Little Women that she *spoiler alert* married Jo to a man who was old, rough, and grim as punishment.  Whether those books would have been better if genius had been allowed to create in a vacuum is impossible to know--but I feel safe in saying that they're pretty damn good as they are.


So, applying user data to the creative process isn't all bad, but I think that what concerns me most is that this data gathering process feels like everything else that I dislike about e-books: the people who it affects (the readers) don't know how it works, and it's being done first and foremost to increase profit margins, not to improve people's reading experiences.  For more on this topic, don't forget to check out our old old post on the Amazon Kindle DX.  And please, school me in the comments section if you disagree.

What the GSU E-Reserves Case Means for Libraries Now and in the Future

There has been a lot of insightful and thorough discussion of the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by publishers against Georgia State University, notably by Kevin Smith at Duke, at Library Journal, and at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the post below I recap the events for those who have not be following, discuss the purpose and value of reserves, and examine the implications of the GSU ruling for librarians and others who support fair use in higher education.

GSU Recap

In 2008 three academic publishers (Cambridge, Oxford, and Sage) filed a lawsuit against GSU claiming that their e-reserves policy amounted to widespread copyright infringement. The lawsuit was bankrolled by the Association of Academic Publishers and Copyright Clearance Center; CCC is a for-profit company that contracts with publishers to license the use of electronic excerpts of copyrighted works. (See Educase summary). The publishers submitted a list of 99 instances where they felt that GSU was violating their copyright.

In May of this year (so, four years after the lawsuit was first filed), the U.S. District Court for northern Georgia released its 350 page opinion on the case, written by Judge Orinda Evans. The upshot? The Court found that in 94 of the 99 cases fair use applied and GSU had not violated the publishers’ copyrights. Generally people see this as good news for GSU and for universities in general, though the case is not definitely settled and may well be appealed.

The bulk of the opinion is an instance-by-instance examination for 74 of the 99 cases, but Judge Evans also gives general thoughts on when and how a non-profit educational institution can claim fair use of copyrights materials. Before I get into the implications of the ruling, though, I think it is important to step back and think about the purpose and value of the e-reserves in higher education.

What is the purpose of (e)reserves?

Whenever I get to know a new library, I always ask about reserves. As a student in grad school, my professors saved me hundreds of dollars and provided lively, interdisciplinary courses through the use of e-reserves. No other institution where I’ve worked or studied has used e-reserves as heavily as the iSchool (indeed, my non-LIS graduate program made much less frequent use of reserves). I can see how a publisher reading this might blanch at the lost licensing income, but in reality the culture at the iSchool was to use e-reserves as a convenient place to store all of the course readings. Many of the readings were articles accessible (and properly licensed) through the library’s databases. Nonetheless my pocketbook and I greatly appreciate the terms when I was able to spend a mere $20 or $30 on “textbooks.”

In general it seems the use of reserves (electronic or otherwise) varies by institution, department, and even instructor, based on culture, expectations, and preferences. Likewise, the purpose and value of reserves is not the same everywhere. Some instructors don’t use reserves because there are good textbooks available for a course (also, sometimes, because it is just easier), while others need to use reserves because the course draws on a wide and interdisciplinary set of works (and also perhaps to save students money). To be clear, I think it is perfectly valid for an instructor to make use of reserves in order to save students money. I do not think that doing so is necessarily or even likely to be a violation of copyright, and I think that the recent GSU ruling upholds this view.

Practical Implications of GSU Ruling

The ruling is ultimately about fair use of copyrighted works. Fair use is a notoriously (and purposefully) vague portion of copyright law that allows some unlicensed use of copyrighted materials in some instances. At many institutions, libraries craft guidelines or policies for what materials can be considered fair use, but leave it up to professors to determine what they select for fair use. For those who haven’t been pouring over copyright laws recently, the four factors that are weighed in determining fair use are:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In her opinion, Judge Evans determined that in the majority of cases, GSU’s e-reserves were covered by fair use. Specifically, Evans found that the first factor weighed heavily in favor of GSU because it is a non-profit education institution. The second factor also weighed in favor of GSU, because the works in question were all factual in nature.

The question gets more complicated in the third factor. Publishers would like there to be a hard and fast rule about how much of a work can be used under fair use, and they would like that amount to be very little. Evans considered rulings from other key copyright trials and ultimately suggested these guidelines for acceptable fair use: for works with 9 chapters or fewer, 10% of the total pages; for works with 10 or more chapters, 1 chapter may be used. Notably, the Judge deemed that it was “impractical, unnecessary” to prohibit the use of the same excerpt from one term to the next (p. 71), which is a guideline that many institutions follow. Thus, though many librarians and professors are disappointed that the Judge set out a “bright line” rule, she rejected the narrow, limited guidelines that the publishers called for.

The fourth factor for fair use also resulted in a complicated ruling. The Judge rightly pointed out that income from licensing is a very small percentage of the publishers’ overall income. However, she again drew on existing case precedents to determine that when “permissions are readily available from CCC [Copyright Clearance Center] or the publisher for a copy of a small excerpt of a copyrighted book, at a reasonable price, and in a convenient format” (88-89) then unpaid use of that material is not considered fair use.

This ruling is not binding for other libraries or higher education institutions, though as Educase points out it is likely that the opinion could be used in future copyright disputes. 

Though this may seem to help clarify fair use, this opinion will not be legally binding for other institutions. Indeed, the ALA is urging libraries not to change their fair use policies quite yet. Additionally, this case is part of a long-term trend that has important implications for libraries everywhere. 

Long-term implications

As a said earlier I think the laudable purposes of e-reserves include making course readings free and easily accessible to students and enabling professors to design courses that draw on diverse and interdisciplinary resources. Though libraries do not have to be involved in providing e-reserves, many of them are for obvious reasons, and I think the purpose of e-reserves dovetails with the spirit and values of academic libraries. I think it is important to note that many items put on e-reserves are items that the library has already paid for, it simply makes access easier for students in that course when it is on e-reserve. (I’m not sure if this was the case for the instances addressed in the GSU lawsuit.)

Given that e-reserves are pretty innocuous, and that fair use does not substantially cut into the profits of publishers, I find the fact that the lawsuit was filed worrisome. I see this as part of a larger trend in academic publishing in which publishers claim that the digital environment is enabling copyright abuses, while in fact they use these same digital advances to control and limit access to scholarship and research. Consider how publishers have imposed restrictions on the number of times libraries can lend an ebook or how some publishers prohibit ILL distribution of journal articles. While the digital environment theoretically makes access easier for users (those who have the financial and technological means), publishers limit the way that we can use these works to even narrower parameters than we were able to with their print counterparts. By and large, libraries use e-reserves in much the same way they used paper reserves, but now students can access these works from their home. In response, publishers filed an extensive and sweeping lawsuit, claiming that these practices threated their profits and their livelihoods. Judge Evans called these claims “glib”, but I suspect this is just one of many ways publishers are seeking to use technological advances to lock down their content and extract payment for every conceivable use.

Though in many ways this opinion was good news for GSU, I think it is unfortunate that in 2009, after the lawsuit, was filed GSU changed its-reserves policy. The threat of such legislation makes many universities scared and unwilling to assert their full rights as non-profit educational institutions to use copyrighted materially under fair use. By being overly cautious and acquiescing to the unreasonable demands of publishers we risk giving these rights away entirely.