Assessment as Outreach: A Low-Stakes Approach

When I first arrived in September to begin my new position as Research & Instruction Librarian I was (understandably) overwhelmed with all of my new duties and liaison areas.  Being new to the areas of Geography and GIS, I decided to start with some outreach to my faculty—hoping to learn a bit about the subject, and lobby for some faculty participation in collection development, while slowly making myself indispensable them.  My first meeting was with a faculty member who regularly teaches an Environmental Geography class with a research presentation as its culminating project.  As we chatted, he expressed concern about the quality of the research that his students were producing…and I saw my opening: “Oh, would you like me to come in to class and talk about some research strategies for their assignment?”

Since the campus library’s instruction program is robust, and scaffolded, students should be arriving in Environmental Geography (a 200 level class) with a predictable set of research skills based on the library instruction and guidance that they have received in classes previous to this one.  In addition, there were certain skills that I was confident that students would not have according to the outcomes that the library has developed for the 300 level class (BIS 300, for students in the school of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences) that we provide instruction for.

Based on the assignment that the instructor sent me, my understanding of our instruction program, and my previous instruction experience, I bounced into class on Halloween, with streaks of vampire makeup on my face, to teach a very brief introduction to the class guide that I’d made them and a few tips I thought they’d find useful.  The instructor gave me a very generous introduction, and I launched in to my spiel to be rewarded with glassy eyes, and bored stares.  Unfortunately, the students seemed to find my Halloween costume far more interesting than the material I had to present.

After finishing up, I went to talk to Jackie Belanger and Leslie Bussert, about what had happened.  True to their positions (as Assessment Coordinator and Head of Instruction, respectively), they suggested that I conduct a little low-stakes assessment to see if I could figure out why my session had flopped.  As part of this assessment, they suggested that I sit in on the students’ presentations at the end of the quarter to gather information about what sources they ended up using and how the projects shaped up.

In collaboration with Jackie and the instructor, I knocked together a 1 page survey that asked, among other things:

• What did you learn in the library session that helped you with your research for this class?
• What did you find most challenging about your research for this class?
• If you have received instruction in library research methods for other classes at UWB or Cascadia, was the information that you received in this class the same or different from the information that you have received in other classes?

The results were a revelation.

What I found was that over half the class had taken the 300 level class in which they get about 6 hours of in-depth library instruction.  Therefore, the things that they found most useful from my session were not the research tips (that they’d gotten plenty of practice with in BIS 300), but the brief exposure that I’d given them to subject-specific resources for their assignment.  After talking to several librarians who teach in the BIS 300 classes, the consensus seemed to be that students had a lot of practice with humanities and social science resources, but needed exposure to the natural sciences resources that would be most useful for their Environmental Geography assignment.

After a student worker transcribed all of the responses into a excel spreadsheet, I sent them, and my observations, to the instructor with a request that we chat before I did the same session the following quarter.  When we got together, we talked over the results, the analytics for the class guide that I’d made, strategies for what to change, and a plan to continue the assessment process the following quarter.

The session went far better the second time around.  Students were more engaged, took extensive notes, and were visibly and audibly appreciative of the material that I’d presented.  When I sat in on their presentations at the end of the quarter and conducted the second round of assessment, the results confirmed my experience: the revisions that I’d made based on student feedback had increased the relevance of my session.

There were some other unintended but very welcome consequences of this process.  The investment in student learning that I’d demonstrated through the assessment process proved to the instructor my commitment to his classes, subject, and students.  As a result, we have a very open and communicative working relationship that’s been a boon to my other duties as liaison to him and his colleagues.  I got really useful insight into the subject matter of my liaison area, and it has helped me to learn the ropes of what was a previously unexplored discipline for me.  The process also brought me closer to the students that I worked with, and I got lots of reference questions on the assignment during the quarter, and afterward, from students who I’d met in the class.

While it was intimidating for me to conduct assessment on an session that I knew hadn’t gone well, I am convinced that hearing the truth and being able to act upon it was far better for me than living with a vague sense of failure, and several more unsuccessful sessions.  The insight and relationship building that I gained through this assessment experience was an invaluable part of my first year as Geography/GIS liaison at the Campus Library and was instrumental in my process of learning the job, meeting my colleagues, and getting to know the students. 

You'll find a copy of the survey that I used after the jump.

Addressing Social Injustice in the Academic Library: One Approach

In her previous post, Freeda Brook elaborated the connection between the discrimination that our students and colleagues face in the world and on our campuses, and what they experience in our libraries. In this post, I am going to take it as read that it is an ethical imperative--and in our best interest--for librarians to be working actively for social justice and anti-racism, and describe one way that we’ve started to do that in my library.

While inequity is the result of intersecting oppressions based on race, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation, and class, among other factors, I would argue that right now the library community must engage most actively with race and ethnicity because of the incredible racial homogeneity of our profession. As of 2012, 85.8% of all librarians in academic libraries were white—a percentage that’s hardly shifted since the early 1980s. While we stay the same as a profession, the racial and ethnic demographics of our students are continuing to shift in the direction of more diversity. What this means is that until our profession becomes more diverse, a lot of us white folks are going to have to do some serious thinking and talking about race.

As members of a profession that prides itself on staying relevant, we must ask ourselves: how do we respond actively, respectfully, and quickly to a changing student population with shifting cultural backgrounds, experiences and priorities? Luckily, in 2012, the ACRL Diversity Committee provided us with a starting point in its Diversity Standards: Cultural Competency for Academic Libraries (2012) (full disclosure: I will be an acting member of this committee as of ALA Annual in June 2013).

Before I arrived at my present institution, Dave Ellenwood, a fellow librarian here, and Sarah Leadley, our library’s director, began conversations about how our library could engage with the standards. As a result, the library’s Diversity Team was formed and given a formal charge in September of the 2012-2013 academic year. After I muscled my way on to this team of hilarious, engaged, thoughtful, and committed library workers, we made a work plan of two required all-staff trainings, two teaching meetings, and a series of brown bag discussions that all addressed at least one of the Diversity Standards.

Doing social justice work can be exhausting, frustrating, and emotionally taxing. We face pushback from those that we work with, we struggle with feelings of inadequacy, we make mistakes and say things that are misguided or misinterpreted. Most importantly, it’s hard to know when and if we’re making a difference. In fact, as one study demonstrated, it’s possible in diversity work to do more harm than good. Despite all of these challenges, I remain firmly convinced that the immediate and long-term results of thoughtful social justice work outweigh the inevitable difficulties.

After a year of working actively and intentionally toward cultural competency, with the caveat that we are nowhere near done—and will continue this work indefinitely—I strongly advocate for the approach that we took. I want to outline some of the reasons that I think our work was a success, and how we measured that success:
 
We have the support of our library’s leadership. Cultural competency and social justice work can often be marginalized and sidelined in relation to the rest of the work that we do as librarians. Our director recognized that this work was real, complex, and time consuming, and so she made it a formal part of our jobs, thereby legitimating it in our eyes and the eyes of our colleagues. Doing social justice work is emotional and challenging, and often makes those who are spearheading the efforts emotionally and professionally vulnerable. Knowing that we had institutional support for our work emboldened us and gave us courage to do difficult activities and readings with our colleagues that we might have shied away from without that support.

Our team is composed of librarians, professional staff, and classified staff. While this may seem like an incidental point, the whole team agrees that this is one of the keys to our effectiveness. To be successful, we have to have buy- in from the whole library staff (especially since students rarely make any distinctions between us). Workers from different departments and different classifications will inevitably have different experiences of power, diversity, and student interactions. Having input from different parts of the library helped us to plan trainings that would be relevant to all of our work, and to become aware of the varieties of strengths and interests that our whole library staff brings to our community.

We put relationships at the center of our work. Though I didn’t know anyone on the Diversity Team before we started, we very quickly became a closely knit group of colleagues and friends who recognized that supporting each other’s ideas and work was essential to the group’s overall success. We then began to think about how to support the work that our colleagues were doing across campus, and made it a priority to visit the spaces and events where diversity and social justice work was being done on campus. Doing this increased the visibility of the library, added to the team’s knowledge base of issues and strategies, demonstrated support for our colleagues of color (who often organized those events), helped us get to know the folks that we work side by side with on campus, and helped us contextualize our work in a broader effort toward justice and inclusion.

We built formal relationships with other diversity and social justice groups in our college communities. Our library serves two colleges, Cascadia Community College and the University of Washington Bothell. As part of the UW libraries system we also serve and are connected to the whole of the University of Washington. In addition to serving on our library’s Diversity Team, each member of our team serves on an additional committee at the college, university, or libraries level. Our library is the point of intersection for all of these different communities and through this formal interconnectedness we have been able to harness the work going on around us to strengthen our work in the library, and share with these more disparate communities the wonderful work of our colleagues.

We built community around self-inquiry and justice. Many of us got into the work that we’re doing because of an interest in access to information and resources, which is connected, intimately, to justice. Taking a broad view of cultural competency work can help connect us intellectually and emotionally to colleagues at conferences and at our own institutions who can help us think through issues and problems and gather evidence and empathy. Because this is a formal part of our work (see the first point) several of us made it a point to attend workshops and lectures at ALA Midwinter and ACRL this year that discussed diversity and social justice. Hearing about the work of Jaena Alabi , Kawanna Bright, Deborah Lilton, Pambanisha Whaley, Martha Parker and Maria T. Accardi , intensified our sense of urgency about the work that we can do to make our workplaces welcoming and safe for queer colleagues and colleagues of color.

We take pleasure in our work. Building those relationships across campus meant that we got to meet the fun, funny, heartfelt, and like-minded people that enrich our intellectual and working lives on campus. As a team we made time to decompress, talk about our other work, and generally treat each other like the whole human beings that we are (but don’t always act like at work). We encouraged each other to read articles, watch movies, and listen to music that expanded our understandings of power, injustice, cooperation, and joy. When we start to take them seriously, issues of privilege and injustice become profoundly depressing. Keeping the joy of connection in our sight helped us remember why we’re doing this work.

We keep student experiences ever-present in our planning. At every institution where I’ve worked I’ve heard from students stories about the discrimination that students experience in the world, in their home, in their classrooms, and around campus. This campus is no exception, and that informed every decision that we made about what sorts of trainings to offer, what scenarios to present to our colleagues, and what student information and voices to bring into our conversations. Good library work is based on trust and empathy, as anyone who has conducted a successful reference interview knows. It is our operational belief that working toward cultural competence helps us to be more empathetic, and more deserving of the trust of our students.

We put an emphasis on assessing our work. As I said before, one of the most difficult parts of this work is not knowing if it’s making a difference. Assessing our work is the best way to make sure that it’s having an impact and is relevant to the community. After our all-staff trainings we asked participants to fill out anonymous evaluations and we followed up several months later with in-person meetings with each of the library units to hear how the training was affecting their work after they’d had time to put it into practice. We were hoping to find out how to make our work better, but the most important information to come out of this assessment was encouragement. Our colleagues told us in great detail and with enthusiasm how valuable they found our work to be. When things got difficult or tense in trainings, it was helpful to remember that feedback and stay focused on what we knew was working.

I’m sure it’s clear by now that the most important work to come out of this year’s efforts was relationship building in all its formal and informal capacities. While this was initially surprising, it now seems obvious: social justice work is ultimately about exploring identities and building safety and understanding within our communities around those identities. Of course that work would foster deep and meaningful connections when done with a seriousness of purpose and a lightness of heart. This will be the sustaining lesson that our team takes away from this year of work as we plan for a new year (and beyond) of cultural competency work.

If you’ve made it to the end of this post, please share any work, insights, incidents, or conversations that you’ve had around diversity in your libraries. We’re always looking for new ideas!

Call for an Anti-Racist Approach in Librarianship

Lately I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how libraries and librarians can challenge racism in higher education. It is a tricky thing to talk to people about for a couple reasons. For one, a lot of people, especially White people, think of racism exclusively as something that is interpersonal, overt, and motivated by hate. It is not. While that kind of racist behavior is less socially acceptable now than it was in the past, less overt but equally harmful microaggressions are still perpetrated against people of color on a daily basis. Look no further than racist tweets, culturally appropriationist theme parties, or complaints against Affirmative Action.

Beyond these often unacknowledged slights, the institution of higher education in many ways still reflects and upholds the historic social and economic dominance of White people in America. In a thorough and insightful review, Diane Lynn Gusa describes a pervasive White institutional presence (WIP) at colleges and universities across the country. WIP manifests in a sense of superiority and entitlement among Whites, which goes hand-in-hand with monoculturalism of White culture, values, and beliefs. We see this in the curriculum where White authors and culture are the assumed normal, while other cultures are only addressed in separate courses. What do you think it feels like to be an American and a Latina majoring in English these days when authors of color are routinely excluded from “the canon”? Outside of the classroom, Whiteness is equally pervasive: the social activities, performers brought to campus, artwork, names on the buildings, and the faculty and administration. In one study by Mitzi Davis, et al. a student remarked: “A lot of time I feel out of place, because you see all White faces. You know I am the only fly in the buttermilk.” White members of these institutions often fail to recognize the pervasive markers of their identity and their privilege, while non-White members are distanced physically and socially from the community.

Another reason this conversation is difficult to have in the library community is that we see ourselves as being progressive and welcoming communities. Even if racism is taking place on our campuses, could we really be perpetuating in our libraries? Yes, I think we are. Though we may indeed be harboring a bunch of liberal malcontents, we are still a place that reflects the norms of our communities, both good and bad. Students can and do experience microaggressions, hostility, and negative stereotypes relating to their use of the library. A study by Daniel Solorzano and Miguel Ceja quotes a student:

Last time we went to the library ... to study ... obviously, it's finals time ... people are going to study. But when we walked in there looking for somewhere to sit down, it's like ... they've never seen Black people before in their lives, or they've never seen Black people study before!

Another example is the now defunct Asians Sleeping in the Library tumblr (don’t worry, Buzzfeed archived selections of it for posterity).

It is hard to say the extent of racism our students of color face because this is an issue that we have not sufficiently researched or addressed. However, the negative and alienating experiences of students of color on college campuses has been researched, and I think it is naïve and lazy to assume that the problems happening on our campuses are not happening in our libraries. As a community that prides is progressive and welcoming nature, it is time for us to address this head on.

Copyright Roundup: ACRL 2013 and in the Library Classroom

Recently I’ve been thinking about copyright and fair use, and specifically what we are telling students about these increasingly important matters. I think a lot of times we shy away from talking to students about copyright, because we are worried about giving them legal advice or because we assume that they don’t care and won’t listen. However, I think it is really important to talk to students about copyright, because we want them to be responsible users of copyrighted materials and responsible owners of copyrighted materials. If we don’t talk to them about the important social and economic issues around knowledge creation and production, where will they get their ideas about copyright from? The people who are talking the most vocally about it: big media conglomerates who have an interest in protecting their intellectual property at all costs. And if we don’t teach our students about fair use? Probably no one else will.

Flickr user: opensourceway

At ACRL 2013 this past month, I attended a session of three conference paper presentations that all had something to do with copyright. Jean Dryden discussed how online archives struggle with how to educate their users about copyright, and ultimately often fail to do so. I think we (librarians and other information professionals) should be taking every opportunity to talk to our users about these issues, especially in the case of archives, where we are the copyright holders or at least stewards of those copyrights. 

In the same session, James Neal, described the challenges and dangers we face on the intellectual property landscape. Corporate media interests and lobbyists are exerting pressure in Washington, D.C. for copyright reform in their favor, and the new director of the U.S. copyright office is indicating that she is looking for a new set of major copyright reforms. The Supreme Court and other courts have recently taken on a number of cases around copyright and intellectual property. Digital rights management is ever encroaching on our ability to own and use copyrighted materials. What have we been doing to be a part of or even a lead in these conversations? Neal pointed out that when professional bodies create ‘best practices’ they often undermine risk taking. In my favorite line of his talk, Neal reminded us, “Fair use is not civil disobedience; it is our most important tool and must be preserved.” 

Katie Fortney actually provided a great example of how we can use and protect fair use in her talk describing the creation of the Grateful Dead digital archive. She described how they triaged the items going into the collection, deciding if and how they would try to get permission from the copyright holders. For the 23,000 items that they posted under the presumption of fair use, they have received only 15 takedown notices and no claims of copyright infringement. Fortney said that it is misguided to allow fears about copyright guide our decisions about what to put into digital collections—we should be trying to make the best and most useful collections and we can use fair use to do so.

So what does this mean for reference and instruction librarians? I find that opportunities to talk about copyright and fair use come up all the time, and it is pretty easy to slip in some quick information about copyright. When students want to search for images, I send them to Flickr and show the advanced search options for Creative Commons licensed materials. When I cover citations in instruction sessions, I bring in the concept of fair use. (Kevin Smith this week laid out the three questions he tells students (and faculty) to ask themselves when considering fair use: “First, will the “quotation” of the original help me make my point?  Second, will it help my reader/viewer get the point?  Finally, did I use no more than necessary to make my point?”) In fact, I’ve had very engaged discussions with first year students on these topics, because these students have all run up against DRM when downloading or streaming music and videos online. This is a great way to talk about ownership and knowledge production, and to highlight the different norms in different communities. This is precisely the kind of information literacy I want my students to have because it so clearly translates from their academic selfs to their social and professional selfs. 

As I asked above, if we don’t talk to them about these things, who will?

Update on the Outrageous Costs of College Textbooks and a Useful Alternative

From the dp.la Women's Activism Exhibit

While none of this is shockingly new information, I was outraged afresh when a colleague emailed me this Huffington Post  article about the college textbook racket.  The article was written in response to an American Enterprise Institute post that showed college textbook prices rising faster than he Consumer Price Index, new home prices, and the average cost of medical care.  Cripes.

In happier news, last week saw the launch of an excellent open educational resource, the Digital Public Library of Amerca.  While the collection is still growing, some of the thoughtful features of the collection are already apparent: you can search material by era, geographical location, and theme.  I particularly like the Activism in the U.S. exhibit, which has already grown since I checked it out last week. 

Definitions: Archives and Institutional Repositories

Photo credit: Aureusbay

I’m wondering if anyone out there has any particular insights into the varying mission and functions of an archive versus an institutional repository. I thought I had a very clear idea in my head about what an institutional repository is, or at least its purpose. However, when I began to discuss this with my university’s archivist, her response was, “We already have an institutional repository—it’s called the archive!” This stumped me a bit. I don’t think they are the same thing, but it has been difficult to articulate the key differences.

After doing a little bit of research (Google was spectacularly unhelpful in this particular case) and some further discussions with our archivist, I have some coherent thoughts forming. I think archives and institutional repositories have related, but distinct purposes, which inform their policies and practices around content, preservation, and access.

Content

University archives collect a couple different kinds of content, including administrative records and materials relating to the history and accomplishments of the university and its members. While there may be legally required collections policies on administrative records, universities and their archivists generally have a fair amount of discretion when it comes to what to collect. Finally, in most institutions the archives were created in a pre-digital era, many of the objects in the archive were and continue to be physical. The shift to digital means a couple thing, one that archive catalogs are more likely to be online (just as with libraries), and two that archives must develop new policies for preserving objects that were “born digital”.

Institutional repositories collect the intellectual and scholarly output of a university. This may mean works published elsewhere, informally published works, grey literature, or work not formerly published. It is harder to make universal statements about what does or does not belong in an IR, because universities seem to use them different, however best fits their needs. I’ve seen examples of IR software that contain image collections and audio/visual collections. I would like to say that most of the materials in IR are “born digital”, but I’ve seen IRs that have digitized versions of old campus blueprints—something that seems more like an archival object to me.

Preservation or Access?

My crude, simplistic assessment of the major difference between archives and institutional repositories is that archives are more concerned with preservation and IRs are primarily about providing access. The two are clearly not mutually exclusive, in fact, one could ask what the point of preservation would be if not to provide future access, but that is just the librarian in me. However, when I look at the policies, practices, and opinions from these two communities, archivists and scholarly communication folks, this seems to be the key difference. 

The work of archivists is to ensure the long-term preservation of objects, often physical objects that are irreplaceable. They are concerned with original object, accession order, and provenance. While online archive catalogs have enabled more access points for searching and finding documents, archival cataloging is chiefly concerned with office of origin and date of creation. Compare this to library catalogs, even prior to the move online library catalogs still provided access points for author, title, and subject. 

In my mind institutional repositories are inextricably related to the open access movement. While they may serve the related purpose of preserving scholarship, their chief purpose is to provide access to that work. Scholars and librarians have advocated and created IRs in explicit opposition to disturbing trends in the scholarly publishing industry. 

What do you think? Are there other important differences between archives and institutional repositories? Or am I trying to create false distinctions between two things that are really the same?

The e-books is dead! Long live the e-book!

Photo credit: cehwiedel

As quick as we are to declare the death of print and the ascendancy of the e-book, it seems that we are quicker to rush to the gallows of the e-book the moment sales begin to falter.  Or at least that's what I got from Nicholas Carr's most recent review of the state of e-books: "Don't Burn Your Books--Print Is Here to Stay." 

Carr takes a look at some of the recent Pew surveys about e-reading habits, and sales figures for popular e-readers and concludes that readers have decided their Kindles are only good for hiding copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, and that really they'd rather be playing video games on their tablets, or guiltily sniffing the ink between two hard covers of a Pulitzer Prize winner.

While he's not totally wrong, I think that his arguments largely miss the point of why we should care about whether people read a digital or a print text. What's worse, his article reeks of a snobbery that is frankly unhelpful when we talk about the reading public.  Really, what we should be concerned about is not how folks are consuming texts, or whether they're reading the "right" texts--but whether folks are reading at all, and getting anything out of what they read (be that information, titillation, enlightenment, connection, empathy, or thrills).

Based on the sales of genre fiction versus literary fiction and non-fiction, Carr points out something that several Bookaneers presented on and blogged about back in 2010 (please don't watch the video of our conference presentation, because it's embarrassing, just know that it's there): that we read differently for different purposes, and that reading for information and reading for narrative require different technologies (see also Freeda's post about ideal e-books for academic reading).

While Carr chalks up the popularity of genre fiction in e-book format to the shame that he expects readers to feel about "the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports," I would attribute it instead to the addictiveness of  the only novels that most people are reading.  Romance novel addicts will tell you that they read them as fast as they can get them, and if the Amazon marketplace is closer than the supermarket, then they're going to read even more, even faster. Furthermore, even if readers wanted to read things like, say, textbooks on their e-readers, they can't, because the makers of both e-readers and e-books have utterly failed to adapt their technologies to anything other than linear, narrative reading.

There is a consistent conflation in Carr's piece between e-readers and e-books, and it makes for a muddied analysis.  It makes perfect sense to me that e-readers will disappear as single-use technologies when tablets have become their equal in portability and readability and their superior in versatility.  But just because we're not buying Kindles anymore that doesn't mean that we will be reading any fewer digital texts, or any more print texts.

True, paper books are a real pleasure to read.  The codex, as a technology, has had hundreds of years to adapt perfectly to our hands; our eyes; and the way that our brains access, interpret, and recall information.  There are many good reasons why we should keep reading books in print, but until we face the fact that digital texts will coexist with, and perhaps supplant printed texts, we can't focus our energy on what really matters: getting texts (digital or print) that suit our reading habits and needs.  Who cares whether e-reader manufacturers are making or losing money on our reading (because that's what these past 5 years of e-reader boosterism really comes down to, right?)?  What we should care about is getting high-quality, abundant, low-cost, accessible reading materials into our own hands and the hands of our students.

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.