flickr - brewbooks

Apologies in advance to the length of this post. The thoughts and ideas expressed below have been percolating in my head for the last dozen years or so, and it’s time to begin letting them out. Some recent breakfast reading–James Woods’s excellent New Yorker essay on his deceased father-in-law’s library–set the wheels in motion.

Let me begin by making a simple statement: I am a librarian who has no particular affection for the object commonly known as the book. The emphasis here is on ‘object,’ since as texts I have great affection for any number of books. What I am saying is that I do not hold the object to be precious just because it is a book, nor do I believe as do Nicholson Baker and Ranganathan that every book necessarily has its reader. Yes, they are likely correct in a narrow sense, but not to the point to which we librarians often carry the argument in defense of our collections and arcane practices.

Backing up, I need to stress that although I am generally known by my immediate colleagues and in my limited professional circles as a technically oriented librarian who runs systems and now manages IT operations, my educational background is entirely in the humanities, specifically German language and literature. Both my BA and first MA are in German, and when I entered grad school, it was in a PhD program in German with the intent to seek my way into the professoriate. At some point I lost interest in that ethereal pursuit, largely for practical rather than intellectual reasons, but that is another topic. My point here is that as much as anyone who seeks a PhD in literature, I bathed and swam in the textual world for years, and have built my intellectual house on a foundation of textual analysis, close reading, and an endless desire to debate the merit of pretty much any position.

As with many on that path, I once fetishized books and considered their acquisition and display to be essential. One of the strongest memories from both my undergraduate and graduate experiences is the omnipresence of walls of books. Every faculty office had dangerously overloaded shelves, seminar rooms had shelves of elegant hardcovers, and the defining decor element in every grad student’s abode was the book collection chock full of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas et al. When my now wife’s path and mine converged in graduate school, two daunting collections collided, as often happens in academic pairings. We shed some obvious duplicates, but kept others, because of course her marginalia said nothing to me and vice versa.

My entry into what has now become my career came while I was still a grad student at Washington University. In the second semester of what would be my last year in the program, I took a part-time job at the reference desk to supplement my TA earnings, stocking printers with paper and answering questions. Somehow, the librarian who ran the storage library on the West Campus discovered that I spoke German and could at least transcribe most Cyrillic languages, and quickly grabbed me to help with the processing of some massive book donations that the university had received and sat boxed on pallets in the depths of the storage library.

There’s something about going through a departed person’s books that feels more than slightly voyeuristic, perhaps even invasive. As I opened case after case of books from men (all men, alas) who had bequeathed their tomes to the library, I felt that I was peering through a window into their lives. Books, and our choices we make with them, reveal a great deal about a person, not least after tossed in boxes so that we as the owners can no longer control who sees what nor in what order or context. We can no longer explain why we have that distasteful or low-brow (oh the horror!) title, such as a copy of a Danielle Steele novel or the anti-German screed Germany Must Perish!, the latter being part of my own personal collection for reasons I’ll let someone ponder when I’m gone.

The gift processing we did at Wash U was by far the most disciplined and consistent I have encountered in my career, largely due to the management skills of the aforementioned West Campus librarian. We sorted the books into two general categories–duplicates of titles in the collection, and non-duplicates–adding contextual notes where relevant, such as noting new or variant editions, special features such as dedications, etc. After this sorting, the subject librarians were invited to the sorting area to select what they wanted for the collection. Everything that remained after that cull was placed in a storage area until we had a critical mass, typically several ranges or around 7-8,000 volumes, at which point we would put out a call for bids to regional used book dealers. We often netted bids that more than covered my paltry wages, not least because we had a run of utterly fabulous collections full of hardbound titles of interest in excellent condition. After the dealers took what they wanted, we ran a public book sale for the campus which was always popular since we sold books for a flat rate around 50 cents for paperbacks and a buck for a hardback. One sharp-eyed buyer nabbed a Dickens first edition, while I once scored a first edition of Ulysses, albeit the 11th printing and in terrible shape. Anything that remained after that went into a donation bin for the public library, until we realized that putting thrice-culled dregs into a donation bin was just pushing off the burden of disposal to others and wasting their time, so we started putting them in boxes (we didn’t want our own Nicholson Baker exposé moment), sealing them with epic amounts of duct tape, and chucking them in the dumpster.

Wait, what? A future librarian hucking books into a dumpster?

Yes, exactly that, and I felt no guilt. This was right around the time that Baker was barking about libraries discarding books and card catalogs, which means many cultured people were watching libraries for signs of anti-book tendencies, hence the duct tape to keep the boxes intact and thwart snooping. Reading Baker’s jeremiads, I understood some of his anxieties, but unless you’ve ever worked in libraries and been overwhelmed by the sheer mass and absurdity of the printed text, you don’t know anything about managing mass amounts of books. Those of us in the crew that did this dirty work occasionally referred to ourselves as the book executioners. That’s a morbid moniker, but the point was that we did something that others had been too weak willed to do, namely, to look at a book, shrug one’s shoulders, and chuck it in the trash. After all, destroying books is something that Nazis and other totalitarian types do, right?

The inability to discard even the most pointless book appears to be some universal human problem. No normal person has problems throwing out cracked dishes, old shoes, cassette tapes, dead plants, and so on. But old books, no matter how moldy, battered, or pointless, just never get the treatment they deserve, which is sometimes a trash bin. Ask any librarian how many people have tried to donate their lovingly boxed and preserved National Geographic magazines, their basic and battered Shakespeare sets, and so forth, and you’ll get epic tales of pointless gifts that just put an expensive burden on libraries. Who hasn’t seen a garage sale where someone isn’t trying to sell a Gideon’s Bible or a Book of Mormon (the point being that they are given away freely)? How many people still have their college textbooks on their shelves with those little yellow USED stickers intact? People, throw away your own trash!

Back when I was doing this gift processing work, I still fancied myself a book collector, because as I said I love texts, and collecting books was just what literary and intellectual types do. Not to do so seemed morally suspect, or at the very least evidence of a lack of commitment to the life of the mind, which I equated with my chances for landing a professorial job. While still in graduate school, I entered my collection of Czech literary translations into a contest, and later was inspired by my first and only reading of Ulysses to start accumulating Joyce texts. This meant I acquired texts that I have since declared that I have no intention of ever reading, such as Finnegan’s Wake. Over the past ten years or so, I’ve spent a not insignificant amount of time divesting myself of those books, in some cases successfully, in others letting things go for prices about which my miserly side still grumbles.

Lest anyone reading this think that I have chosen to become a semi-illiterate boob, I can assure you that I still read enormous amounts of text. My main pleasure reading is The New Yorker, with which I’ve had a long love affair, and I read a fair amount of professional writing in my field, both in journals as well as on blogs. Books still find their way onto my nightstand and desk, too, although it’s a good year if I make it through more than 10. I’ve always been a multi-thread reader, i.e.- incapable of reading only one book at a time. Currently, I’m reading:

• First, Break All the Rules by Buckingham and Coffman
• Der Turm by Uwe Tellkamp

The latter title is a dense thicket of German prose, so dense as to make Thomas Mann seem like light reading by comparison, so it’s not exactly a quick read. I mention this only to demonstrate that I haven’t entirely lost the ability to read nor the taste for more esoteric literature.

No, my purpose here was merely to sketch the path from bibliophile to biblio-ambivalent. As a librarian, I’ve often been consulted by friends or acquaintances when they have book-related questions or issues. One of the more interesting issues that arises in life is what to do with the massive amounts of books that passionate collectors accumulate, not least after they have died. Nothing can weigh more heavily on heirs than having to deal with someone’s library. On the one hand, they respect the intellectual and perhaps financial investment made by the collector. That person’s library likely represents one of the most intimate personal legacies left behind, and as such it has sentimental and emotional baggage aplenty.

On the other hand, they certainly don’t want the books in their homes, and have literally no idea what to do with them. Unless the deceased was a serious collector–most aren’t, and I mean serious about value and provenance, not the content–the collection has little financial value. Most of the few remaining used book dealers have become quite selective about what they will take, simply because the market for used books is evaporating as younger generations socialized in a hypermedialized world enter adulthood. And yet, despite the lack of value, few have the strength simply to discard the vast majority of the books, as they might do with old bath towels or bed linens, even if that’s the most viable option. So they dutifully box them up, take them to the library, and assume that they’ll find a good home there, much like taking a stray cat to the shelter. We know how that often ends.

I have no desire to put anyone through that particular emotionally charged experience, so part of my book divestment urge, both in the physical and intellectual sense, is simply an attempt to make the problem mine, not my childrens’. Sure, I’m likely decades away from that scenario, but why not get an early start? In the meantime, I can enjoy more room in my home, make moves that much simpler (and cheaper!), and use libraries for what they do best, namely checking out books to me, rather than asking them to do my dirty work.

flickr - karmablue

It’s been a while since we’ve had a cathartic round of Elsevier bashing in libraryland. Most have come to realize that they are no different from other STM publishers. Nothing like this little bit of news from Wired Magazine to get the ball rolling again.

In a nutshell, two U.S. House members have introduced a bill that would make it illegal for any federal agency to mandate open access policies for research. In other words, the NIH Public Access Policy would be nixed. Clearly publishers are behind this, having already tried once to get such a bill to the floor. This time, the conduit between Elsevier and Washington is clear. The Democratic rep who introduced the bill received no less than 12 contributions from Elsevier executives, only one of whom is an actual constituent. Don’t like it? Write your rep.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the wording of the proposed bill. It reads, in part:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that: causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work … (italics mine)

Note that it says publisher without raising the issue of who holds copyright. Many publishers still ask authors to assign the copyright for their articles to the publisher, but some publishers do not, and even if they do, wise authors refuse to sign it over and will in most cases still be published (as SPARC has advocated for years). With this bill, copyright would be taken out of the equation, granting new rights to publishers to prevent authors from making their own choices; put differently, the publishers would receive rights that trump the author’s copyright. Publishers can assert copyright for their form of a published article, i.e.- its particular expression in layout and design, as anyone who uses SHERPA/RoMEO knows, but if the author has not assigned copyright to the publisher, the content in the article remains the author’s to do with as s/he pleases.

Money buys power and influence. We all know that, but read for yourself how noxious this little maneuver is. For anyone attending ALA Midwinter, just remember this when Elsevier and others hand you free stuff, whether a pen, a cocktail, or something more significant. They’re just buying us, too.

flickr - Mike Miley

After the spring Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting, I posted my fairly raw notes from the sessions I attended. It proved to be a fairly popular post, so I thought I’d do the same for the recent fall meeting. Lots of good speakers, as always. My editorial comments are in italics to differentiate them from the speaker’s words.

CNI Fall 2011 Membership Meeting
Washington D.C.
December 12-13, 2011

Opening plenary
Clifford Lynch, CNI Executive Director

Interest in “big data” is coming on strong. Even popular outside of the academy, e.g.- The Economist. We should remember that some big data isn’t so hard. It’s often small in size and found in places like Excel spreadsheets.

Lynch got a good laugh by asking who should archive medical records for dead people. Libraries or insurance companies? Funny but serious question.

Cloud solutions: points out that bandwidth and the time needed to replicate data is a major issue. Not possible/smart to change vendors casually. Heard this mentioned repeatedly in various talks.

Ebooks have hit the point where they impact the economics of popular publishing. Public libraries are suffering with ebooks. No one is even asking the questions about how to preserve ebooks. Another impact will be the disappearance of the used book market. This all impacts our mission to preserve the public record. Also, authors are pulling out of the typical publishing stream and our tools are built for a legacy model.

Building your content into apps flies in the face of all the work that’s been done to develop universal content standards. The iPad is currently hot, but it’s not the only thing.

Ideas That Drive Technology Innovation: Perspectives From Two Institutions
Dean Krafft, Cornell University - Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, University of Illinois

Sandore from UIUC gave a survey of their software development activities. Neat stuff, but fairly retro as in we’ve seen similar apps in that same timeframe. Don’t recall that any of these were ever open sourced. The main question to ask about such projects: do they get used? She called them innovative, but they’re not really innovative, but rather iterations of other innovations. They show DIY spirit, but is that enough?

Her talk also included another reiteration of the librarians on the one side, IT on the other. When can we finally merge them?

Cornell has an army of developers. Hard to find points of comparison.

Paying For Long-Term Storage
David S. H. Rosenthal, Stanford University

If you charge twice for storage what it actually costs, you can store forever. The costs drop so quickly that this becomes true (Kryder’s Law).

Data doesn’t survive benign neglect as paper does. This represents a fundamental shift in our obligations.

Is Kryder’s Law endangered by the fact that the desktop PC market is dwindling? If we were still on Kryder’s curve, we’d have 4TB drives by now, but we’re stuck at 3.

Pointed out that paying upfront for longterm storage may not be a good idea. Moving data is not trivial or cheap. This idea recurred in various talks and chats at CNI, becoming on of those things that sticks in your head. The good news: Kryder sees his law continuing until 2020. Bad news: even if you get a 14TB drive for $40, how do you move that data around?

He doesn’t think solid-state drives are going to save us. They’d have to be building the manufacturing capacity now and they aren’t. Simply not enough wafers and semiconductor fabricators. Then again, he’s done an economic analysis that shows it could work. Admits, however, that his model is not entirely realistic.

There is no global solution. Need to always be thinking about what comes next because life of data goes beyond any given hardware system.

Mused on a future oriented investment plan where you set money aside now to pay for future costs based on a standard investment model (bond-linked, for example). He then trashed the whole idea showing that discounted cash flow (upon which the model relies) is entirely bogus.

What’s needed is a simulation environment that includes more variables and includes more volatility. Include all the costs: capital costs, running costs, move-in costs, move-out cost, and service life.

Rosenthal batted aside questions about format migration, because he doesn’t think these migrations are going to happen, as he stated in a recent article.

Crowd Sourcing Metadata
Barbara Taranto, New York Public Library

NYPL had a nice scanned collection of menus, but needed transcriptions and metadata. Got grants (NEH) to create a crowdsourcing application that would draw in users.

Result was What’s on the Menu? application that displays menus and allows user input. The app allows users to export the data for further use.

While listening to this talk, I transcribed a couple of menu pages, which is both satisfying and kind of fun. What I could not understand during Taranto’s talk nor afterward when I asked her a question was why she seemed so negative about the project and crowdsourcing in general. Her points about contributors making mistakes, being inconsistent, and drifting away when they get bored are all well taken, but given that the transcription would likely never be done internally, isn’t something better than nothing? Also, if any topic would attract a general audience these days, wouldn’t food be the one?

Understanding Use of Networked Information Content: MINES for Libraries® Implementations at Scholars Portal
Dana Thomas, Scholars Portal
Alan Darnell, Scholars Portal
Terry Plum, Simmons College
Martha Kyrillidou, Association of Research Libraries

MINES is an intercept survey, presented to random users when they access an SFX menu. For Scholars Portal, it’s an every nth survey, every 250th currently.

Surveys are short and direct: a few demographic questions and then a brief substantive question. Terry Plum referred to the acquired data as “nuanced COUNTER data.”

Survey tool was LimeSurvey, which was running branded surveys for each school (20 total).

www.libqual.org/documents/LibQual/publications/MINES_OCUL2011.pdf

MINES allows one to get some sense of how users in the building are or are not using electronic resources. It shows most usage coming from off campus. Since SFX is the vehicle for the survey, one can parse the OpenURL for attributes and do further analysis. It’s possible, for example, to sort usage by consortial origin, e.g.- OCUL, CRKN, Knowledge Ontario.

Not sure I believe their low open access usage numbers. I suspect a lot of OA titles hide in packages that get labelled as local or consortial subscriptions. Also, one may not need to use SFX menu to get appropriate copy, since via Google Scholar, among others, link direct to OA.

Using MINES to identify resource type is less than ideal since one is relying on indexers to include new content such as ebooks, and most don’t.

If 4% of Elsevier usage is from humanities (UofT), then I have doubts about representativeness. They have, at best, a handful of humanities titles.

WissKI: An Architecture For A Transdisciplinary Virtual Research Environment
Guenther Goerz, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Siegfried Krause, Germanic National Museum, Nuremberg

DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) funded, of course, as with nearly all academic or scientific research in Germany. Various partners, including Germanisches Nationalmuseum, University of Nuremberg-Erlangen, and the Zoological Research Museum Koenig (ZFMK).

Project is about breaking down what they call workspace silos. These silos arise for publication purposes. Ultimately much of what they gather does not find its way into publications. Silos have value and should be archived, but how does one do this practically. With paper, “it was easy” because you just tossed the papers in the archive.

The tool has to be easy for curators and researchers to use and they have to like it. Goal was to shield the academic user from the technology. Presentation layer of the tool uses the wiki concept. Entirely built on open source tools. Uses Drupal as its CMS. Adopted standard for semantic linking and import/export. Supports OAI, even though as he put it that is anachronistic.

Simple goal: federate cultural heritage with scientific data. Leads from data to information to knowledge. Higher level of understanding. Tagging not enough, for semantic inference you need a reasoning framework.

Delved into the details of the CIDOC CRM, which made sense while he was going through it, but I can’t reproduce in notes.

This talk really brought the use of triples to light. Experts build relationships that give meaning to the metadata that staff enter when doing their work.

Cost Forecasting Model For New Digitization Projects
Karim Boughida, Martha Whittaker, Dan Chudnov, George Washington University
Linda Colet, DaoPoint Digital, LLC

GWU has major collections from Eurasia and the Middle East. For digitization they use a Kirtas and ABBYY like many do.

They studied existing cost models and looked at their processes to identify bottlenecks and variables. Looked at project budgets from grant applications and actual expenditures. They now have an Excel spreadsheet tool and want to get to having a Web tool for doing cost models.

Some public cost models, such as the Internet Archive’s, don’t necessarily seem realistic. Not sure how they arrived at ten cents per page. British Library Lifecycle model has a formula to follow. Includes preservation and longterm costs.

GWU works with a 3-5 year cost model, mainly helps with calculating costs for grants. Considers four phases: project planning, scanning, processing, and making collections available. Storage, metadata creation, and storage are typically the major costs. Even after process improvements, they average four hours to scan and process a book. Overall, planning is the most labour intensive activity. Scanning is smallest, but processing and making available involve more time. Over time, planning decreases in terms of its share of overall resource investment.

Dan’s role is to transform it from a project to a program and make it routine in the organization.

One thing a cost model does is teach you what you need to track–time, state of items, storage float, etc. One can get carried away with quality. Scale it to the needs.

They plan to find ways to give clients access to raw scans before processing so that they can watch progress and have assurance that things are progressing. Dan refers to this as getting value from the float, in other words from items on the assembly line.

Closing plenary: Five New Paradigms for Science and Academia and an Introduction to DataONE
William Michener, University of New Mexico

Pointed out provision of sensors, all of which are creating data, even the four billion cell phones. He asserts we are heading into an age of big challenges: global warming, population, food supplies, etc. Also touted the rise of citizen science. Hundreds of organizations doing a wide array of work. Scientists work in larger teams across broader spatial, temporal, and thematic scales.

Data are increasingly seen as a valuable product of research. The NSF mandate is a manifestation of this rise. Showed Heidorn’s long tail of orphaned data. A small number of repos hold a massive amount of bytes, but most of the datasets are in the long tail. Mentioned DRYAD‘s work.

A survey he cited of environmental scientists that 80% of them were willing to share their data with others to use in different ways. They’re willing, but they confront challenges, also captured in surveys.

flickr - cogdogblog

Caveat lector. Good advice for any reader, but particularly when it comes to the fragile world of ebooks. Since publishers sign deals with certain distributors, but not others, one runs the risk of losing the ability to read legally purchased ebooks if a platform goes away or one buys a new device. Sure, ebook warriors would tell me just to reformat the books using some spiffy converter, which may well be possible in most instances, but, really, is that any kind of viable business model? I want to read, not manage my books.

The latest entry in the list of casualties of the ebook struggles may well be the once popular Stanza reader. Stanza was the anti-Amazon when it came out in 2008. Wired Magazine even named it one of the “10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps” for 2008.

Fast forward three years, and one wonders how such a successful app could fail to thrive. A recent code update for iOS 5 broke the app for iOS 4 users (it won’t even load for many), and the days pass without sign of any movement from Lexcycle, the firm behind the app. Their Website shows no updates since 2009, and the Twitter account (@stanza_reader) hasn’t been used since 2010. So much for graceful deprecation.

Unlike some of the reviewers now flaming Stanza for this failure, I’m not particularly upset. It was free, after all, and I was using it to read public domain works, so had no financial investment at stake. I did have something of a readerly investment at stake, however. I had become attuned to how the app worked (brilliant, to be honest), and had a number of books in progress when it borked out a couple of weeks ago. Nothing to get huffy about, but it is curious to see such a hot app dissolve into nothingness. Surely there had to be a way to build a sustainable business model here.

flickr - yesyesnono

Here at MPOW, we’re launching a library-based centre for digital scholarship very soon. Having now spent a number of months looking around at various operations both in Canada and the U.S., it’s struck me how little consensus there is on what these centres should be offering. Places such as the Center for History and New Mediaset the technical bar very high with their ability to develop applications with broad appeal. Others are looking to bring everyone in the academy along so offer support for basic digital publishing and online content creation. There’s nothing right or wrong with either approach, of course, if what one is offering meets a need.

What interests me as a librarian is what happens when these centres develop in libraries. What should these centres offer that leverages existing strengths or builds new competencies where they are clearly needed by researchers? I find this question quite hard to answer, and frankly the answer changes depending on the faculty member with whom I’m speaking. Some are very advanced digital humanists, and need high-octane programming and server support; others are still trying to find the door, so to speak, and just need a friendly hand.

With that in mind, I tossed together a little query on All Our Ideas that asks the question “what should these library-based centres offer” and poses some possible answers. Feel free to cast votes, submit new ideas, and generally tinker around. Thanks!

I crush your head - Guiniveretoo - flickr

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post where I criticized OCLC WorldCat.org‘s handling of title searching and result ranking. Quick synopsis: when searching for the book Little, Big by John Crowley, it wasn’t coming up in the top 50 results. Part of the reason for that was that I was in Germany at the time, and clearly OCLC was tweaking the relevance ranking based on the user’s IP address (not a wise idea). I compared the results to Amazon, where a search for the title–without even specifying that it was a book–brought it up in first position.

At the time I made a mental note to rerun the test when back in North America. Took a while, but finally did so today. How did it go?

Well, two years on, WorldCat.org’s relevance ranking still gets whooped on by Amazon. Amazon serves up the same results: Little, Big comes up front and center. For a new twist, I brought in the other titan of books, Google, and searched their book database. Shazam. Comes up in first position, followed immediately by the other book for which ‘little big’ is an exact title match, that being Little, Big!. On WorldCat.org, Crowley is at eighth position, while the kids’ book sits at 10. Number one? Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. Great book, but why is it there? Being a sport, I tried a keyword search for little big in the proprietary WorldCat database. After scanning the first 100 results without finding Crowley’s book, I gave up. It’s clear why that is so, since the query is sent with a logical AND operator, but why can’t a database for which we pay money do more sophisticated query processing?

To round out the field, I wondered what would happen if I searched for this title using, say, VuFind, a catalogue overlay/discovery layer currently used by numerous libraries. It’s an open source library application with a small crew of developers, in other words, the least high-powered of the four entries in this unscientific test. I chose to search in Yale University’s YuFind, because I knew they’d have the book but more importantly since it’s by far the largest database using VuFind as a frontend. Where does Crowley’s book appear? You guessed it: number one. (Ironically, in their Voyager-driven Orbis catalog, it comes up at #81 if you do a keyword search – ouch, but not really surprising given that Voyager was developed when some current librarians were in grade school.) Quick shouts to Ex Libris, whose Primo product also plucked Crowley’s book from 47,000+ results and put it number one (catalogue: University of Utah).

My point here? Amazon and Google set the bar for our expectations of search. VuFind uses modern tools (Solr et al.) to deliver similar results, as do Ex Libris and Serials Solutions, albeit only in their newer products. Why doesn’t every product?

UPDATE: How I wished I had made a screenshot of my OCLC results. As with the last time I wrote about this, they’ve tinkered with the weighting of Crowley’s book to push it up the results (I surmise; other factors may play a role). It now comes up in second position in a book or everything search, tucked neatly behind Wilder’s book. This solves the immediate problem, of course, but my point is the underlying handling of any search string, not just this one. Other tools do more post-query processing and deliver better results.

[The logo is used here without explicit permission, since I could not identify a Creative Commons license on the conference site. I use it under the "I'm plugging your product/universal good" exclusion, which I just made up. If you want me to remove it, I gladly will.]

Dinosaurs roaming the halls? (flickr - uBookworm)

I’m a librarian. I’m also fortunate enough to have a library leadership position as an AUL at McMaster University. Where I work is not irrelevant for any discussion of the future of academic library leadership, as anyone who follows libraryland news well knows.

For a number of years it’s been clear to me that we’re not going to be able to master the tasks that arise from the evolution of libraries if we continue to insist on having too many influential positions in the library saddled with the “ALA-accredited MLS or equivalent” requirement. That’s not a revolutionary thought at this stage, but even jobs where that requirement has been softened to allow those with other educational pedigrees to apply tend to include required or clearly preferred qualifications that only a librarian would possess, making them de facto open only to librarians.

Parallel to the discussion of whether to open our positions to non-librarians is a neverending discussion around the lack of qualified applicants for library leadership positions. There seems to be general agreement that libraries do a poor job of creating qualified and eager successors.

Put these two factors together, and what emerges from all of this is that we (MLS-holding library administrators who are open to hiring non-librarians into key roles) could essentially be closing the door behind us for those in our own profession. The logical next evolutionary step would be that library leaders are no longer former line librarians, and that we are essentially the dinosaurs roaming the halls. There are, of course, library leaders already who did not come from the ranks, but doesn’t it follow that in 15-20 years, library directors with an MLS will be a very rare breed? Does that matter? I seem to think it does, but that leaves me with a bit of a paradox: how to get today’s work done and help create the next generation of library leaders. It’s not a simple task.

Coal-fired power plant - Vockerode, Germany

In a meeting at MPOW yesterday, the topic of experiential learning opportunities for humanities students came up. This topic speaks to me, not least because my educational background is in the humanities, but also because I spent a year in the late 90s doing a grant-funded research project that was essentially one large experiential learning opportunity. My boss asked us for ideas, and I wrote mine up in an email. I thought it made sense to publish them here as well since broader feedback would be helpful, and I’m sure there are aspects and opportunities to which I’m entirely blind. Please feel free to share any comments and suggestions.

Here’s what I wrote, edited to generalize the context:

• Crowdsourcing – Students can do the detailed investigations necessary to add richness to archival collections, particularly image collections, but not only. Their findings are used to generate metadata that can make collections not only findable, but give them context that would otherwise be lacking. It teaches research beyond the obvious (i.e.- Google/Web searching) and requires students to develop skills related to deductive reasoning and drawing inferences.
• Urban Documentation – This involves assigning students the task of creating archival collections by gathering images/video/texts. In an urban setting, for example, one could document any number of urban renewal projects. Key components of this are teaching students how to document–salience, thoroughness, contextual information gathering, etc.–as well as initiating them into the world of media rights management, in other words, teaching them how to navigate the worlds of copyright and Creative Commons and to make sensible choices that permit valid research use of their materials.
• Oral History – The old standby, still relevant, although now it would be video, not just audio. Most cities have any number of dying industries whose representatives have stories to share.
• Cultural Reclamation – This encapsulates identifying groups, organizations, neighbourhoods, etc., which are traditionally incapable (due to various circumstances) of gathering and articulating their own history, and essentially doing the work for them. In most North American cities of any size, there have been myriad ethnic and immigrant communities in the past 150 years or so, many of whom organized cultural institutions that have largely faded from view with time (e.g.- Sokol chapters, Turnvereine, etc.). One has to do a great deal of research to identify the groups, locate their ephemera or records, and develop personal relationships that allow one to document the organization and its history. I’ve always referred to my work in the late 90s in Germany (which I’ve chipped away at in the years since) as a cultural reclamation project, for lack of a better term.
• Environmental Documentation – Many cities have old industry and a new environmental ethos living side by side. While there is environmental monitoring done by government agencies, these bodies do not systematically document the aesthetic and visual transformation of industrial landscapes. These are not the images that most people take for fun or profit, but are necessary documents of a massive societal shift.