It's being developed by Nate Kontny and has been out there for about a month at this point, and he's already added new features. One that particularly appeals to me is the ability to publish directly to WordPress and other platforms, which is how I created this post.

flickr – OZinOH

Another great CNI membership meeting is behind us. Saw a wide range of presentations, and found myself wishing as usual that there weren’t so many offered in parallel. As always with these notes, I’ve placed my own editorial comments in italics to differentiate them from the speaker’s words.

Opening Plenary – From the Version of a Record to a Version of the Record
Herbert van de Sompel, Los Alamos NL

Scholarly communication now includes many assets beyond textual articles: datasets, software, blogs, et al. The challenges are to group assets and version them.

Gave a tour of the history of efforts to modernize scholarly communication.

1999 – OAI (Open Archives Initiative) – communication via preprints and non-peer-reviewed papers. Tried technical means to achieve this, leveraging metadata exchange. Next came the protocol for metadata harvesting (PMH), but it ignored search engines as an essential part of the Web infrastructure, as they have become in the intervening years.

He pointed out that Web architecture wasn’t really firmly articulated until 2004, so they were working in an era when things had yet to be established, so to some degree they were creating their own architecture. They lacked faith in HTTP, because, as he humorously put it, “we had just lost Gopher” and had been burned by that experience.

With compound objects, the goal now is not to look at the issue from a repository perspective, but from a Web architecture perspective. What is needed are machine-readable resource maps that aggregate objects. What tools can help with this? URI, RDF, ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange) [n.b. - I may have gotten this list wrong as he flipped slides quickly]. For him, it was a major career shift for him to move away from thinking about digital libraries toward working with Web architecture. What this enables is real interoperability with other existing Web applications, and it also allows other communities (not involved in the development) to make use of the work without having to know anything about the community that created it. Conversely, tools they create can be used by libraries. To manage aggregations, they were able to use existing Web tools that already existed.

Critical to remember that compound asset groups can exist in multiple repositories. This raises questions of stewardship. Who controls access and access rights?

Memento, which has been in development for a number of years now, tackles the issue of versioning. A URI only points to the current version of an asset, while there may be legacy versions available via a number of mechanisms. For example, even an article may have multiple manifestations in the form of drafts and review copies.

As he put it, it’s going from the version of record to a version of the record; “fixity is challenged.” It challenges the notion of a scholarly record, and it will become more important to fix certain versions at a point in time, or to learn of their place in time. Web versioning is inherent in the Web, as he showed using the example of a W3C document that showed its previous versions and their unique URIs. Memento seeks to take one from the generic, time-insensitive version to a given time-specific version.

What’s ironic about watching this talk is that I installed Memento when it was a brand new beta with some wicked little bugs, and now, about five years later, I’m seeing a breakdown of how it works. The irony that this is occurring time-shifted is rich given the topic.

What’s the bad news? Many resources are not archived, or if they were, they may not be from the time of original publication. To resolve this, he outlined some steps one can take with their own resources, including using tools that version, such as wikis. It occurs to me that OJS is actually a really good versioning system, but the drafts aren’t publicly accessible. Wonder if there has been any thought for developing a plugin to release those post-publication, with author’s consent, of course. Would be a great resource.

He finished by talking about scholarly activity in social media arenas, particularly those, such as SlideShare, that have object stores. Many assets living in various portals, all linked by user identities. There are also metrics associated with these, which can be used for review purposes. Under the heading “surface the scholars,” he made a plea for institutions to promote scholars who take part in these public portals. The benefits are visibility for both the scholar and the institution, but also more metrics. For society, it’s a way to show return on investment.

Managing Large-Scale Library Digitization Projects Via the Cloud
Timothy Logan, Darryl Stuhr, Baylor U

They run a fairly complex environment: 15 workstations, three specialty scanners, audio/visual capture, etc. They use redundant mirrors, including one in-house, for storage.

Their project management flow uses a wide range of free or almost free tools: Evernote, Basecamp, OmniGraffle, GoogleDocs Spreadsheets, GoogleDocs Documents, Hojoki. In order, these handle: documentation, collaboration, design, tracking development, training, and monitoring.

Evernote is used for meeting notes, as well as to store documents and audio files or images. Evernote actually runs OCR across uploaded documents. Of course, it can be shared with other users. Basecamp is project collaboration software. Seems similar to Redmine, which we use here at McMaster for project management. Basecamp is not free, but it’s fairly inexpensive.

OmniGraffle is not cloud-based, but it’s a MacOS/iOS tool that allows visual workflow design (flowcharts, basically). Also not free, but fairly affordable.

Needless to say, Google Drive is entirely free, and they use both documents and spreadsheets. Hojoki is a productivity application that they use to monitor activity on the other platforms. It issues notifications whenever there are changes. It also compiles daily briefings and weekly metrics. It integrates with a wide variety of services. It’s app-based and available for iOS and Android. It’s currently free, but they believe that they are moving to a subscription model soon.

Economical Big Local Storage
Tom Klingler, Kent State

As with everyone, they have a lot of data and were looking for cheap storage alternatives.

They calculate the price for using Backblaze pods at $.30/GB. Their numbers are slightly lowers than ours at McMaster, because they are paying US prices.

From his description, it sounds as if the pods are available as storage for a number of staff via multiple upload means. They limit their use to 41 basic file types. Since the library also deals with university archives, items receive an expiration date, and the system sends reminder emails that items are expiring. Items can also be flagged as significant, and considered for long-term storage. They organize the pods by workgroup. They’ve offered options to automate metadata creation, since this is a step where many struggle. Also use IPTC data for images, if present.

Users can be in multiple workgroups, can create any number of projects, and can upload items as long as space exists. They use CentOS, RAID6, and have 36TB in each of three pods (only using 15 drive bays). The three pods sync against each other daily, using checksums, fixity checking, etc. They get notification when bad files are found.

Access is Web-based, username/password. User sees first a list of workgroups and proceeds as desired. Also have other menu options, such as search. The software that drives this is locally developed, and they intend to put it out with an open source license.

Taking scholarly note-taking to the Web
Michael Buckland, UC Berkeley; Ryan Shaw, UNC-Chapel Hill

Creating scholarly editions is critical for the humanities, but the workflows are still bound to the print codex. Beyond which, publishers are no longer interested in putting volumes with those page counts out on the market.

Documentary editing has numerous steps and is generally tedious and detailed work. Many documents are required to create even a small portion of an edition. Often projects have spanned decades, so backups can be on magnetic tape, floppies, etc. Many of the notes are ephemeral in nature, e.g.- written on slips of paper and referencing people who may no longer be part of the project. Some of the questions asked and answered (particularly queries with negative results) do not even find their way to the published volumes. In short, this is expensive work done by experts, but much of the work never sees the light of day nor contributes to future scholarship. Space issues are critical, i.e.- space limitations necessary for publishers to make their profit margins.

There are also issues with fact checking, and having time and space to include falsifications and dead ends, or tangential biographical details.

Their project is at http://editorsnotes.org, and a description is at http://ecai.org/mellon2010.

Goal: “finding a safe place for the ‘debris’ of research.” That’s a good line. In other words, improving the return on investment for document editing projects.

They built the software using existing tools where possible. For example, it integrates with Zotero for bibliographical metadata. The most challenging component was building the notes section. Users want a little messiness, a bit of chaos, since that’s part of the process. Ultimately, notes have multiple sections (multipart) reflecting the variety of sources that can inform notes. Their notes are more topical in nature, rather than being built on the basis of a specific document such as a letter. Notes have a status, too: open, closed, hibernating. Notes can have users assigned to them by an editor. They’re stored as HTML with a full revision history.

What changes when using this tool? Notes move from being free text documents to being structured blocks that can be managed and recombined, etc. Creates explicit links to entities that are cited in notes, as opposed to implicit references. Instead of burying things in filing cabinets, they can be made available via open access mechanisms.

One benefit is that it allows the “outer edges” of humanities research to be visible. That’s good PR for those who wonder what humanities scholars do with their time and grant money.

All open source, available via github at https://github.com/editorsnotes. Also built using mainly open source components: Django, PostgreSQL, Haystack, Google Refine, etc.

There are many desirable enhancements, such as visualization tools (temporal, geospatial, etc.). Doing some really interesting work with harvesting information via linked data, too (pilot project). They learned it was possible to do this, but that the editorial control over what’s been harvested needs to be better integrated into the note creation process. They also didn’t articulate the benefits all that well, so they need to figure out how to better exploit it (in-process reconciliation). In short, they need to create incentives for editors to do this, where they see immediate benefit from using structured data coming from external sources.

Scholarly Communication: New Models for Digital Scholarship Workflows
Stephen Griffin, U of Pittsburgh; Ed Fox, Virginia Tech; Micah Altman, MIT

He views the data potential in the humanities as immense. It’s rich and interesting data, but he notes that there’s a lack of funding for arts and humanities scholarship.

In his work, they kept running across a recurring theme. In science, good research can be repeated and reproduced. The ability to do this defines good and valid research. In order to do this, one needs access to more than just research outputs, but also to process, methodology, workflows, etc. The issue becomes how one can capture and preserve such information and make it part of scholarly communication. Also, how does one deal with artifacts that are not captured well by journal articles.

Pointed out that project Websites are also a record of research and should be considered part of the research workflow and linked together with other research assets. This meshes with what one reads in the Short Guide to Digital Humanities.

Fox noted that a place to start with changing how we do things would be electronic theses and dissertations. Students are more likely to be flexible when it comes to new tools. The outcome would be an enriched ETD, with related artifacts available. Rather than ‘vanilla’ theses, the idea is to have a “macadamia nut fudge sundae” or some such concoction. Useful metaphor.

Altman pointed out that we need more evidence for what is being proposed: case studies, etc. His segment was so brief that it was hard to get his main points, which was unfortunate. He has an economist’s view, as he put it, so ended with a comment about the need to do research and then create forecasts that I wanted to hear more about.

Rights, Research, Results: The Copyright Review Management System
Melissa Levine, Richard Adler, U of Michigan

CRMS has gained an impressive list of partners, all U.S., but a diverse group of institutions. There are CRMS-US and CRMS-World components, which is good to see. World in this case means Australia, Canada, and the UK for now. VIAF has proven to be a valuable resource.

CRMS has developed a review process that involves multiple reviews of candidates drawn from a pool. If the reviewers agree, then it moves forward, if there is conflict, then further review is necessary. Their Website has detailed visual descriptions of their processes.

They’ve built a custom interface for reviewers, and also maintain a documentation wiki based on issues that have arisen in the review process (basically, an FAQ). It’s a secure interface, and it even withholds copyrighted material from people who lack view rights. In other words, they are to review the title without reading it (we’re curious beings!). They ask themselves how much of a work they can show (5 pages, 10 pages?) to help reviewers make their decisions without violating rights.

They’ve discovered that it’s difficult to get valid information such as author death dates. Crowdsourcing is an option, but requires quality control. They feel that at this point a crowdsourcing project is more than they can handle. They do see some general QC issues with their review work. They train the reviewers, and require a 25% time commitment, but given that there is turnover, it’s a challenge to keep up with training and quality. It’s working fairly smoothly in the U.S. at the moment. It is essential that the reviewers have training and comfort with books as bibliographic objects and with the tools of bibliography. Typically, those are librarians, but they’re not dogmatic about using only librarians. They don’t want to use students, however, because of the training costs and turnover issues.

Michigan carries the liability, so they have a need to maintain the quality standards. They have not received a great number of takedown notices, some of which are legitimate (e.g.- essay collections not registered as books and therefore not in the Stanford database). They did a trial using the LC copyright office, and it cost around $5000 and six months to review 100 titles. That’s not cost- or time-effective.

They discovered at one point that they could pull death dates from their own catalogue (Mirlyn), which added 80,000+ dates to CRMS-World. That was a pleasant surprise for them and greatly aided review work.

They are considering pilots with other sites, e.g.- Berlin (Michael Seadle), Madrid, and perhaps Japan. Major portions of the works in the HathiTrust are in other languages, of course, with German in second position behind English. Many other pilots are on the table, too: linked data initiatives, women’s names issues, durationator, etc. Language diversity is also an issue. There are many languages (e.g.- Estonian) where there are small numbers of titles in HathiTrust. Durationator is being developed at Tulane, and seeks to deal with determining copyright term (*grossly oversimplified definition*). In short, this tool shows more works in the public domain than CRMS has found.

Research Data Management Services in Germany: Funding Activities of the German Research Foundation
Klaus Tochtermann, ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics; Peter Schirmbacher, Humboldt U, Berlin

Full disclosure: I nearly always attend talks given by Germans at CNI. For one, I’ve spent a lot of my career working in or focusing on Germany, so have a personal interest in what’s going on there. Beyond that, I want to help spread the word in North America about some of the stellar work done by our German colleagues, which too often goes unnoticed on this side of the Atlantic. I’m grateful to CNI that they continue to offer opportunities to speakers from Germany and other countries.

EDaWaX is a joint project between the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the German Data Forum, funded by the DFG. Their project addresses the increase of empirical publications in economics, where there is often no means to replicate the results. This results from lack of sharing, and the absence of journal policies that would make data available. He showed an example where one paper was refuted by another based on the ability to repeat the experiment and independently assess the results. That kind of exchange is their motivation with this project.

They seek to implement a data archive for an economics journal and create incentives for economies to publish their data. They started by assessing the current state: how many share, how many journals have data policies, do the policies facilitate replication? Not surprisingly, they found that 90% of economists do not share at all, about 8% share some, and 2% share it all. With journals, about 72% have no policy, while of the remainder 20% have a data availability policy, and 8% have a replication policy. They did ascertain that the number of journals with policies is, however, growing. Ironically, half of the existing policies do not permit replication.

Even where journals gather data, their research demonstrated that that does not lead to good archiving and dissemination. Much of it lands on a publisher Website, but lacks metadata and identifiers that would make it findable or citable. Also, no standards are applied; various formats and software are used, which may or may not be viable for all.

re3data.org has the goal of being a global registry of research data repositories. Their workflow includes an ingest process (suggested entries from researchers and others), but then they review submissions based on established criteria before including a repo in the registry. They try to pull in a great deal of metadata about the repos, based on a vocabulary that they created. They use 31 metadata elements and 22 controlled vocabularies, which result in an icon system that make it easy to see what a given repo offers.

Closing plenary – The Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey US 2012: First Release of Key Findings
Roger Schonfeld, Deanna Marcum, Ithaka S+R; Judith Russell, U of Florida

We got a preview of the latest Ithaka S+R faculty survey results. Since by the time that I publish these notes, the survey results will be public, I opted not to take detailed notes.

It was mildly suprising to see that the library catalogue has rallied somewhat as a starting point for research. Just barely, though, and I wonder if people don’t mean the discovery tool.

At one point, a colleague and I were exchanging thoughts on Twitter wondering if there isn’t some mild conflict of interest going on with the faculty survey, given that Ithaka represents a publisher, in essence. Some of the questions seem, for example, formulated to elicit a publisher-friendly response. It’s a mild criticism, and there’s lots of good in the survey, but it seems worth noting and considering.

In that role, the Montana State University Library invited me to their campus recently to speak on digital scholarship and meet with various groups, including one charged with developing a plan for offering similar services. They filmed the talk and put it up on the Tube, so I thought I’d post it here since I’m often asked questions about digital scholarship and what we’re doing here to support it.

The story does not end with the support. It will continue until the lawsuits are resolved, which may take some time. At this point, however, I would like to express my profound gratitude to everyone who has spoken out on my behalf. There are far too many individuals to name, so I say a simple thank you to everyone. In particular, I’m grateful to those who have written articles, started petitions, gathered links, archived posts/comments, and done any number of other things to help spread awareness and document the results. To date, over 2,600 3400 people from around the globe have signed the petition.

Many organizations have also issued statements, including:

• The Alberta Library
• American Library Association
• Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries
• Association of American University Presses
• Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
• Association of Canadian University Presses
• Association of College and Research Libraries
• Association of Professors of Bishop’s University
• Association of Research Libraries (second statement March 11)
• Bibliothek & Information Deutschland (BID)
• Bibliothek Information Schweiz (French)
• British Columbia Library Association
• Brock University Faculty Association Professional Librarians
• Canadian Association of University Teachers
• Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians
• Canadian Association of Research Libraries (second statement March 11)
• Canadian Library Association
• Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries
• Dalhousie University Libraries
• Ex Libris Association
• Kansas State University Faculty Senate
• Langara Faculty Association
• Louisiana State University Faculty Senate
• McGill University Librarians
• McMaster University
• McMaster University Academic Librarians’ Association
• McMaster University Faculty Association
• Medical Library Association
• Mount Royal University Library
• Newfoundland and Labrador Library Association
• Ontario College and University Library Association
• Ontario Council of University Libraries
• Pennsylvania State University Library Faculty Organization
• Progressive Librarians Guild London Chapter
• Progressive Librarians Guild Toronto Area Chapter (second statement March 7)
• Ryerson Faculty Association Librarians
• Saskatchewan Library Association
• Simon Fraser University Faculty Association
• University of British Columbia Library
• University of California’s Council of University Librarians
• University of Guelph Faculty Association Librarians
• University of Guelph Library
• University of Lethbridge Faculty Association Professional Librarians
• University of Toronto Faculty Association
• University of Victoria Libraries
• University of Windsor Faculty Association
• Western Libraries
• Western University Faculty of Information and Media Studies
• Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association Librarians
• York University Faculty Association Library Chapter

I’ve surely missed some, so apologies for that, and please feel free to send me corrections/additions. I’m humbled by this public support from a wide range of professional and academic organizations.

UPDATE Feb 25, 2012: added AAUP and ALA. Am also adding others as they appear. The list grows!

flickr – proteinbiochemist

A bit late with these, but hopefully there are still some useful bits here for people. Missed the entire first day of sessions due to a series of unfortunate airline and airport events, with the result being a 12-hour trip to DC rather than just a 90-minute flight. Tuesday’s sessions more than made it worth the time to go despite missing half the content. The three project briefings I caught were three of the better ones I’ve seen at CNI, and that’s saying something since the general quality is high. As always, my editorial comments are in italics to differentiate them from the speaker’s words.

Piloting Linked Data to Connect Library and Archive Resources to the New World of Data, and Staff to New Skills
Zheng (John) Wang, Notre Dame (ex-Emory); Laura Akerman, Emory

Linked data teaches machines to understand semantics. Everything starts with the RDF triple: subject/predicate/object. John did a good job of introducing the concepts, using CNI speakers as an example.

Emory’s pilot was intended to link existing resources: catalogue, EAD, etc. As he pointed out, it leverages knowledge and expertise already found in libraries. One challenge is the lack of time to learn new things, but one has to take the time and learn the tools.

How did they bring staff on board: ran classes. Learn RDF, learn SPARQL, learn linked data, etc. Two sessions per month, five months in all. Ran a three-month pilot that included tech staff, librarians, archivist, etc., where the time commitment was 1-3 hours per week except for the leader.

To narrow the scope of the pilot, they selected the U.S. Civil War as a topic. They had grand ambitions, but weren’t able to get full support from the development staff, so in the end the results were more modest. They gained valuable insights about the kind of staff and skills one needs to make progress, though.

They are convinced that linked data is coming at us fast, and that it’s going to be a huge issue, but also that, in their words, it’s not entirely “cooked” yet. That reflects what I’ve been hearing elsewhere, and speaks to the need for tools and methods that one can adopt rather than having to create from scratch as they did.

Many other challenges, such as less than ideal data, e.g.- dates buried in notes field. Need more skills with HTML5 and other tools. Despite the pains, they consider it a success on balance. One key conclusion is that they are “beginning to realize how this can be so much more than a better way to provide search,” which is a point that we should all bear in mind.

Their general recommendations:

• focus on unique digital content
• publish unique triples
• reuse existing linked data

Also, within the community we need to create standards and best practices, expand our skill sets, develop and test tools. This resonates with me. Generally speaking, in recent years talks about linked data have been high level and very technical, given by people who are not going to be doing the work of description and processing. This knowledge now needs to be translated into practice and tools so that this can become our work, rather than a topic of discussion and theorizing. This emerged during the Q&A. Many in the audience are quite advanced, but Laura’s point was that not everyone is at an institution that can lead innovation; some just need simpler tools.

A unique role for libraries is interdisciplinary linking. As John put it, we are well positioned and perhaps in a unique role to do this. We should leverage that strength.

Project site.

In response to a question about DBPedia, John quipped that Wikipedia is for humans, and DBPedia is for machines.

Virtual Research Environments in Germany: Funding Activities of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Sigrun Eckelmann, DFG; Steffen Vogt, University of Freiburg; Rüdiger Glaser, University of Freiburg; Yvonne Rommelfanger, University of Trier

Amazing, as always, to see how the DFG embraces a new direction and creates substantial funding streams. 16 million Euros since 2004 for 34 projects, across all disciplines. Now they are keen to move it from a funded environment to a “stable” environment, i.e.- part of the normal budgetary process, as I understood it.

These VREs are tied to collaborative research centres that exist at various universities. Notion is to create “core research foci” at various sites. One common requirement: a team of infrastructure experts and researchers. This is a new challenge.

Tambora.org – Historical climatology and environmental history.

Historical climatology has three main thrusts:

• reconstruction of past weather and climate (mainly documentary, i.e. written, sources)
• impact of climate on societies
• discourses and social representation of climate

Methods include critical source analysis, hermeneutics, as well as statistical analysis. Find texts, transcribe texts, code them, analyze them; that’s the basic workflow. This work underscores that digitizing texts is simply the first step. Coding required to make them sources for analysis. Last, but not least, publish the results (preferably with a lovely DOI assigned to them!).

This is a classic example of the digital humanities. This work was possible before technology, but was laborious at best. With technology, far more is possible, and new insights can be mined and analyzed. Also allows layering with other data sources and alternative representations, such as graphing of precipitation from textual descriptions.

Tambora has useful data back to 1000, and it runs to the present day. That’s an amazing body of work to study. From their data, they can reconstruct temperature records from texts. This information can be assigned to maps; in other words, textual information becomes quantifiable.

What are the challenges: various disciplines (historians, linguists, meteorologists), different tools, locations, working hours, etc. Availability of tools and data to all partners is also difficult. Also, how do you cite data? Since publication is key, citation becomes a possible incentive to engage in collaboration.

The VRE levels this: 24/7, all tools for all. They have a Web interface for uploading and coding texts, also a geolocation tool based on Google data. They have a glossary of historical place names to support geolocation. The interface also permits searching and finding available data for reuse.

For quality control (among other factors), they use project managers who determine how data finds its way into the repository and ensure that standards and procedures are observed. Beyond that role, they have an entire quality control mechanism. Content quality comes from the scientists, but on the library side, it’s reviewed (metadata completeness, e.g.), has a DOI assigned and registered (DataCite), and is published.

Their project was so successful that the Freiburg library adopted the repository for other research data management needs.

Worth noting how strongly he stressed the publication piece. The DOI is a mechanism, in this case, to enhance global awareness, since it transcends a national or regional framework. Were all such data projects so assiduous about assigning and publishing DOIs, we would be a long ways down the road of making data discoverable.

FuD – Uni Trier, founded 2004. German acronym for Research Network and Database System.

Started as support system for a collaborative research centre around the topic of “strangers and poor people,” which involved 70 researchers in 25 projects. The emphasis now is on creating a virtual research environment for the humanities. As of 2015 it should become a “regular and permanent operation.”

It has three subsystems:

• data collection and analysis
• editing and publication
• archive and information (repository, longterm archiving)

Much like Tambora, it sets out to create a tool where texts can be entered, encoded, and analyzed. Intended to be full featured. From the screenshots, it appears to be an installed application rather than Web-based.

The FuD archiving system uses Fedora for the repo and Blacklight for the public interface.

She pointed out that a system such as FuD can drive any number of applications: creation of text editions (complete works), revision and publication of various documents, preparing print publications, etc. Currently only have German interfaces, but are working on English interfaces.

The Future of Fedora
Edwin Shin, MediaShelf; Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe; Tom Cramer, Stanford; Jonathan Markow, DuraSpace; Mark Leggott, Discovery Garden

Why has the level of Fedora development tapered off? One reason: the Moore Foundation gave money to get it going, and as the money has tapered off and now gone away, the task has been to engage the community in supporting the existing projects. Also, it’s 12 years old, which means the code becomes harder to maintain, and it’s also difficult to attract new developers to take up the task.

Move now is to do “something significant” to move Fedora forward, improve the existing codebase, and develop new features and elements. Fedora Futures is a movement to push that forward. There’s a steering committee, a tech group, and a fundraising committee, all of which resulted from meetings held in 2012 between interested parties. Mark Leggott is the chair of the steering committee.

So what are Fedora’s existing strengths? Cramer’s conclusion is that Fedora is a “winner.” It works, has a large user base, and fills a distinct niche. Beyond that:

• flexible & extensible
• support for durability
• decade of maturity and use (way past vaporware stage)
• large adopter community, many contributors
• established in the linked data world (“can meet today’s needs”)

What does it lack?

• performance
• fault tolerance and scalability (built in a different Web age)
• complexity
• code base getting old
• relatively small cohort of committers

Objectives of Fedora Futures:

• preserve the existing strengths (community and architecture)
• address needs for robust and full-featured repo services (which are now much clearer)
• extend the utility of Fedora (as stable platform) another 5-10 years

In its current state, Cramer believes that without this push, the 5-10 year goal is unrealizable.

Many goals:

• work for institutions of all sizes
• support traditional IR use cases (as well as other existing use cases)
• support data management
• interoperability
• go ‘native’ in the Web (missed his explanation of this point)

Organizational goals:

• more contributors
• remake codebase and dev environment (promote “Joy of Coding”)
• get the community involved in support and governance

The Fedora Futures groups identified around 30 use cases for Fedora, which were then reduced to four major topics:

• manage research data
• improve administratibility (heck of a word)
• handle heterogeneous more efficiently (particularly with regard to size; ability to handle massive data sets)
• interact with linked data/semantic Web

As Mattias put it, it was encouraging to see that all of these use cases converge into these four directions. They also discovered that there aren’t that many actors: curators, administrators, researchers, developers. That’s manageable. “Keep developers happy”–if you don’t, they seek other frameworks and projects.

Technical requirements:

• improve scalability and performance
• more flexible storage options
• support for dynamic metadata
• globally unique and reliable identifiers
• improved audit trail

Non-technical requirement: easy and fun to use API. That would be a remarkable achievement in itself.

Eddie did a good job of giving context. Pointed out that Fedora is a platform upon which one should build and develop services, and so part of this push is to simplify the core code to emphasize this role. This panel is a good demonstration of that. There are individuals representing projects (and companies) that build services that use Fedora as their platform. This kind of vendor harmony is great to see, so hopefully it continues.

Eddie also was rather blunt (refreshingly so) about how projects go off the rails. Named names, and detailed how they went off track to some degree. Also pointed out that saying that a project is agile is merely stating something about its technical structure and positioning, not an attribute that makes everything good nor leads de facto to success.

How are they going to proceed? A lean methodology: build, measure, learn. Continuity and results (i.e.- shipped product). The whole business launches December 12, 2012. One example of a quick win he provided was functionality for Amazon Glacier. He sees it as a matter of a couple of weeks to turn such a feature around. He hopes to see continual interaction between developers and the product, rather than monumental incremental releases.

Good first question: so is this further development of the existing code base, or a complete rewrite? The answer is that both are under consideration. Another answer was that even with major versioning, it’s still Fedora, and that continuity will be paramount.

Follow up question concerned the timeline, which looks to be around three years (for the Fedora Futures project). But Eddie pointed out that it’s not a three-year development cycle, but rather a series of accomplishments, so that there’s usable code within six or seven months. “We’re not asking the community to wait and hold their breath” for a product that will take three years was how he put it. Even if it were a “green field project,” he thinks it would still be possible to move the idea/spirit of Fedora forward.

Another question concerned support for multiple Fedora versions. One answer was that it’s not possible, long term, to support multiple versions. Another was that there has to be a clear migration path, and then it’s up to adopters to decide when to move forward. In essence, it won’t be an entirely new product that lacks a migration path from the existing state. As Matthias put it, he needs Fedora for his own projects as well, so this is in his interest as well.

In response to another question, Eddie made clear that the core product needs to be leaner. Practice has shown that adopters use other tools for certain tasks and functions, so there’s no need for those tools to exist in Fedora. He gave examples, but I couldn’t catch them since I’m not familiar with Fedora details.

Closing Plenary
Hunter Rawlings III, American Association of Universities

Didn’t take a lot of notes during this talk. For one, it was a fairly high-level gloss of various current topics in academia. He also was speaking about issues–scholarly communication–to a highly knowledgeable audience where many likely know more about the topic than he. Not his fault, really, but I don’t think he was a good fit for a CNI plenary.

Key question: what is college for?

Gave a good overview of the current challenges that we all hear about daily in the press and on campus: value for money, future of education, purpose of an education, governments reducing higher ed to its financial outcomes, etc.

He highlighted several trends that are driving higher ed, first and foremost the incredible “flood” of Chinese students into American higher education. He ran the numbers through, and he pointed out that the trend is not likely to abate anytime soon since there are huge numbers of students in China and they rank US institutions (and other non-Chinese schools) above their own domestic universities. He called it a “tidal wave of students” coming as undergraduates, where earlier it was primarily graduate students. He feels this wave will alter US higher ed, as well as alter China. He feels that their exposure to US higher ed will change China because they will have experienced academic freedom. Hard not to see his point, but could it work the other way around, and is that worth considering?

What follows are some notes I jotted down in various sessions. My editorial comments are in italics to differentiate them from the speaker’s words and thoughts.

Access 2012
Montreal, Quebec
October 18-21, 2012

Opening Keynote – We were Otaku before it was cool
Aaron Straup Cope, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institute

Otaku – Japanese term with light pejorative overtones used to describe collectors of lowbrow objects.

Asserts that the boundaries between museums, archives, and libraries are collapsing. Holds the speed of delivery (e.g.- Amazon’s next day delivery) to be an unmitigated good, worth ignoring other impacts and issues. His wording was that if this stuff works for what he calls the trivial things, when will we start expecting it for the important things.

His worldview is that of a person who expects everything to be online. Not interested in millions of objects sitting ‘hidden’ in archives. Makes sense given his background at Flickr.

Pointed out that everyone will not experience explosive growth with what they create; we need to have confidence in what we’re doing even if it doesn’t immediately show a huge impact. “History has always been lossy.” Not sure if that’s an original line or not, but it’s a good one to remember.

How do you preserve the content on Flickr (his question)? Answer: you buy it. It’s the only way to maintain the trust.

Ignite Talk – Social Feed Manager
Daniel Chudnov, George Washington University

Application being created to allow students and faculty to collect data from social media. Question: how/why do people study social media? If you can’t hack, it’s manual labour.

Three main Twitter-licensed data providers. Gnip best for the full “firehose.” Not cheap.

But researchers don’t need the firehose; want specific users/keywords, time periods, basic values, 1000s not 10000000s, delimited files to import. Can use the free public API to do this stuff. Selectively one will have to buy data (esp. for historical queries). One way to get data is to start now and collect it moving forward. Going backward means paying some significant fees.

github.com/gwu-libraries/social-feed-manager

Locked in the cloud: What lies beyond the peak of inflated expectations?
John Durno & Corey Davis, University of Victoria

Vendor-managed is perhaps a better word for cloud when discussing having your applications offsite. What does “technology managed by vendor, not library” actually mean? Where does their work stop and yours start?

Lock-in has two periods. In first, there are price wars and competition, but in the second, switching costs are so high and you’re so buried in the existing system that change becomes impossible. Lock-in is the antithesis of innovation. Very simple truth about the software used in libraries.

Durno pretty much exploded the myth of managed technology. It’s not, as he said, all that hard. Information management is really hard; by comparison technology is fairly straightforward.

Irony of all those forward-looking ideas those people articulated in the 2007 CiL article on the future of the ILS (Tennant, Pace, et al.) is that many of them work for vendors who are not meeting the goals they set out.

If you have enough IT resources and skill, SaaS may not be the best option, according to Durno. Can only agree with that statement.

Adventures in Linked Data: Building a Connected Research Environment
Lisa Goddard, Memorial University

Scale matters – scale is a new area for intellectual inquiry; there are human phenomena that appear only at scale (she was paraphrasing Liu). In a linked data/semantic Web world, every entity/object (not just text documents) requires a unique URI: people, orgs, places, things, etc. These URIs should be minted with care, and should be clear and sensible. That means human interpretable, no file extensions, no query string markers, etc. Use mod_rewrite and other tools to achieve this, regardless of what the app requires or creates. It actually requires multiple URIs per object, one for the object, one for its rdf data, and so on. Current Web links are just dumb, i.e.- they connect entities but say nothing about the relationship.

“Linked data is basically an accessibility initiative for machines.” Hope that’s original to her, because it’s a great line.

Reuse ontologies whenever possible. This helps with processing and reasoning. Find them via an ontology search engine such as Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV). If one must create an ontology, remember it needs to live beyond the scope of a given project. As she put it, ontologies are for life.

Get the slides here.

Big Data, Answers, and Civil Rights
Alistair Croll, Lean Analytics

Major change in big data is that fast, big, and varied and the cost of having all three in your analysis, is approaching zero and dropping rapidly. When we do a Google search, we’re using big data, and that’s a demonstration that this big/fast/varied nexus is with us.

Paradox: the more efficient we become, we don’t use less, we actually consume more (used the coal example). Jevon’s paradox.

Big data is about cheap and abundant access to information. We don’t as people ask questions to which we really want answers; we seek confirmation of our beliefs. Big data is good at predicting things, and prediction can come close to prejudice. There are good and dark sides to it.

Four concerns:

• we spew data points everywhere, we are leaky (tweeting, foursquare, etc.)
• big data is easy to piece together and it’s cheap to do so
• something I missed while taking notes
• machines are not flexible

I think I got these wrong and need to view the slides.

A Library in a Box
David Fiander, Western University 

His project builds on the Pirate Box created by David Dart, which is a standalone (no power, no network) file server with wifi. Also builds on LibraryBox, which was an adaptation of the pirate box by Jason Griffey, a US librarian.

Goal: wants to build a dedicated ebook distribution device that integrates with reader devices. Allow searching, allow users to add books to the collection.

Used OpenWRT – Linux-based router software, made for embedded systems. Installed it on a commodity router (TP-LINK). Open Publication Distribution System – specialized version of Atom for ebooks. Good example of taking open tools to create something simple and elegant. He went into the details of his Web programming framework and his templating tool.

Question Answering, Serendipity, and the Research Process of Scholars in the Humanities
Kim Martin, Western University

Talk was built around the notion of seredipity in humanities research. Open minds pursuing threads that were not anticipated. One central idea: we don’t need a simulacrum of the physical library on the Web. That form—both of the library and the book as object—no longer has relevance in an ebook environment.

Quip: take stuff out of the basement of the library, do research on it, and turn it into a compelling visualization (Australia example).

Open Source OCR for Large Collections of Scanned Documents
Art Rhyno, University of Windsor

The way newspapers were filmed makes scanning and OCRing challenging – too many pages in one image, stacked pages, etc. Scanning is cheap, but OCR is the “enabling technology.” ABBYY is the industry leader from the commercial side, as most would agree and know. Abbyy can produce coordinates for every character. Even thought he’s a big fan of OS, he admits that ABBYY is very good and has its place as a solution.

Tesseract is OS, but has fewer languages. Also no UI, but can be embedded in other apps or used via command line. Open source since 2005 and Google is involved, although he said it’s hard to know what their involvement is.

Accuracy of OCR is relative for taking papers off of film. Even 50% can be acceptable since it creates some access (better than none). To improve the accuracy, image preprocessing is key. Removes dots and imperfections. Image processing with GIMP and Image Magick. IM is the go-to tool for things like batch rotation, and GIMP does cleanup.

They spin out Ubuntu virtual machines to their library lab computers so that they can do image processing and OCR using their capacity during downtime. Brilliant reuse of resources. Coordination of this via Hadoop streaming, of which I understood little other than that it’s useful for streaming other languages.

Talked about using cloud services. The processing is cheap and effective, but moving the tonnage of images across networks makes it less than ideal (noted O’Reilly’s notion that data locality is the critical component of big data, i.e.- cloud processing only makes good sense when the data is collected and stored in the cloud as well).

ABBYY good when one has varied images, needs a one-off, or is tied to a Windows environment and has some money at hand. Tesseract fine if image quality is good and work is being done in a Unix environment. Good for large volume (no licensing fees). Good if you need it to work with another application framework. ABBYY has a trial version for testing purposes, including an online processing version.

Tesseract has an HTML output, tries to reflect italics and bold in this version. Nice features in general. Art has published his Tesseract mods via GitHub.

Answered the “why bother” question (why bother if Google will do it all) by pointing out how their newspaper project was abandoned. Leaving this newspaper work to the private sector seems fragile.

Dead easy data visualization for libraries
Sarah Severson, Moment Factory

Why use visualization? Allows easier synthesis, easier to see relationships and patterns. Types: infographics, data visualization, data art.

• Infographic – information is encoded but then decoded by the reader. Simple, fairly easy to grasp.
• Data visualization – also bidirectional (encoded and decoded), but now driven by algorithms that manipulate the data in complex ways. Can be rendered/displayed in multiple ways.
• Data art – unidirectional. No labels, no story, just pretty. “No actionable insight.”

For a visualization – pick your question and work with it as a guide. What, where, how. Avoid why, since that’s a bit tricky. Source trinity: designer + audience + data. Remember the interactions here. For audience – remember attention spans; what will the viewing time be, e.g. Know your data, what can be done with it, how much there might be, what facets/aspects might be interesting.

Fun tools: infogr.am, timeline.verite.co, overview.ap.org

New Means to New Ends
Mike Kastellec, North Carolina State University

Showing new projects at NCSU. Cloud computing, gaming design, flexible spaces. Really exotic stuff.

TaaS – Technology as a service. Not original to him, but libraries as technology deliverers. Goes beyond just providing information.

Cooking with Chef at the University of Toronto Libraries: Automated Deployment of Web Applications in a Library Context
Graham Stewart, University of Toronto

Chef is an integration framework that enables rapid deployment and easy (easier?) management of cloud applications. UofT has been using the tool for about 18 months with positive results.

Gave a fairly detailed run through Chef, sadly using slides that were nearly impossible to decipher from the back of the room. Lightweight white text on a blue background.

Large community. The company that writes it makes their money off of hosting and ancillary services. Many ‘cookbooks’ available from the community, documentation, user meetings, etc.

Why is it useful:

• never do anything twice
• separate config from data and applications from bare metal or virtual servers
• end of monolithic server.

Keeping Books Open
Hugh McGuire, founder of Pressbooks, Librivox, iambic audio

Books are, to some degree, excluded from the Web world because their business model doesn’t allow easy sharing (paraphrasing a ton). As he kept asking, what’s the business model that will facilitate the transition to making them available?

“Information wants to be used.” This goes beyond the information wants to be free idea.

He posits a merger between books and the Web, but he framed the whole talk in terms of business models, and that’s exactly the rub. When will it tip?

Made the clear distinction between an ebook and a webbook. These are pretty clear. The webbook has analytics that are easily accessible. Faster spread, easier to find, can optimize interactions (tie-ins). Last, but not least, they can have different business models (because no middleware—Amazon, Kobo, etc.—is involved).

Making ebooks is easy. Lots of tools (Booktype, Vook, Atavist, et al.) already available and free, and more on the way. The book avalanche that results from this will be considerable.

SPLURGE: The Scholars Portal Library Usage-based Recommendation Engine
William Denton, York University; Cameron Metcalf, University of Ottawa; Kevin Bowrin, Carleton University

Metcalf had a very clear insight around the difference between Amazon recommendations, which he views as indicative of what one buys to have a bookshelf that fits their sense of a collection, and recommendations based on usage patterns. The latter shows, as he put it, how the books are being used together, in context, for real work. What emerges are connections between, say, a graphic novel, and academic works on feminist theory, slavery, etc. Showed a good example of this using Y The Last Man.

Have to counter the Harry Potter problem, i.e.- HP books end up in every recommendation because it correlates to everything because everyone bought it.

Their database structure uses caching, so that if recommendations for an ISBN have already been generated, they don’t have to be created on the fly, which is processing intensive.

They currently capture institution, but are discussing dropping it, for security reasons among others.

This is a project that resulted from multiple hackfests at various conferences. Good fusion of that phenomenon and our organizations.

At the end of the talk, they made a clear call for help and participation, and actually delineated what help they need and why one might want to be involved. Great idea and it puts the substance into calls for collaboration and openness.

Sharing the Unshareable – Dental Clinic Images in a University Image Repository
Janet Rothney, University of Manitoba

Dental school wanted to digitize their slide collection of clinical images. Two major problems: privacy (patient information). They had rights to use them for testing and teaching within the university. Second problem: organization. Who knows what is going on in the images (requires dental expertise)?

Discovering New Dimensions
Marc Comeau, Riel Gallant, Michael Groenendyk – Dalhousie University

Actually, it’s about 3D printing and scanning. Dalhousie has both. Why?

Printer makes it easier to bring an idea into physical reality. The scanner “allows the capture of objects for preservation and/or digital manipulation.”

They didn’t do a lot of planning, just moved forward. They did discover that it has some health and safety issues. Means that the printer had to be in a place where the fumes could be safely handled. It also gets hot, and the machine is fragile. Had to more or less find their own answers from various hackerspaces. They got suggestions, but did their own analysis and worked with Dal’s health and safety unit.

While it seems a bit far-fetched, having these devices attracts interest and inspires students to start thinking about the possibilities. Wasn’t all that expensive, either. Establishes the library as a place where new technology has a home and as a place where there are people out on the bleeding edge and interested in making it accessible and usable by people who otherwise would have no access to such tools.

We Can Do Better! Integrating APIs to improve the user experience
Sonya Betz and Robert Zylstra, MacEwan University

Widgets (e.g.- search widgets) are “like doors into all of these different rooms” that contain library treasures and resources. Simply spawning new windows and tabs is flummoxing. Most Websites do not perform this way. They had metrics, LibQual and others, that showed student dissatisfaction with their Web offerings, and decided to act.

They created an iOS app as a partial response. As he put it, it’s really easy to find articles with a phone, and then you just toss them in Dropbox or some other service and read them on a more suitable device. Interesting observation that reflects my own “two-device” habits, where I often pick up my phone while sitting and my desk to do something fast that I take further on the large screen. Seems to be an increasing trend.

As with all tools, it relies on a vendor API, and they have some complaints about the response time. Generally satisfied, but the response time and documentation issues are worth considering.

Have to admit that it’s a pretty slick mobile app. He showed simulations on the slides, which were quite good at highlighting how it works. Good stuff.

What’s left to do? More content: add MusicBrainz for metadata on musical items; citations; integrate Alexander Street Press content; favourites; shared folders; library maps; barcode scanning; NFC/RFID.

This talk was a great demonstration of how smaller libraries can take the lead in technical areas since they are more flexible and perhaps willing to change than larger shops.

Currently, about 33% of their catalogue access comes from mobile devices now. Fantastic result that answers the question as to whether it’s ‘worth’ having a mobile app. Apparently, if you do it right for the right audience, the answer is yes.

They built their mobile app before their CMS. That alone is a pretty radical thing. Development time from proposal to release was one year. They need one more year for the CMS. Alas, they can’t share the code because they paid a designer, and they cannot share it. It was cheaper for them that way, but they note it was a hard decision.

Brain Injuries, Science Fiction, and Library Discovery
Bess Sadler, Stanford University

Asks the question: how can we create better flow in libraries, i.e.- makes the user experience flow better.

Her research has shown that our views of physical collections are about joy, immersion, and beauty, while digital collections are efficient and fast. These words emerged from interveiws with graduate students. (Sadler, Given. Journal of Documentation, (2007) 63:1, 115-141).

Browsing appears to address some human need, so it’s something she wants to provide.

Mentioned Jill Taylor’s book about her stroke, about how her right brain became ascendant when her left brain was damaged. The words she used to describe the feeling mirrored what people say about browsing physical collections.

Have now heard Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow mentioned at two different events in the space of ten days. Apparently it’s a good read.

Where are we improving: shelf reading in digital search tools. Better details about the book, but also items that would be to its left and right on a physical shelf. This shelf is better than any physical shelf, because it can span multiple physical collections and make them into one whole.

She asks, riffing on science fiction, why, if we can generate a stellar shelflist ,not go further and render it as a 3D gaming environment? “How might a library digital catalogue make a user feel embodied?”

Great talk. I made a comment afterward that when we run focus groups on future library services, we really ought to invite eight year-old children rather than current students and faculty. Dan Chudnov riffed on that and said that next year should be bring your kids to Access year. Perhaps not my kids, but it might be time to let a teenager give a keynote.

Metacommentary

As the conference closed, I had a few thoughts pop into my head, and thought I’d record them here before they evaporated.

Access is an excellent conference, particularly in two regards. For one, there are talks that present concrete solutions: this is what we did, how we did it, and how it went. That’s incredibly useful when it falls close to work one is doing or considering. The other kind of talk falls roughly into the category that outlines a problem, makes some sage commentary on it, and spurs abstract thinking about the larger philosophical problems behind some of what we do.

The category of talk that is perhaps missing here, and in general in our profession, would be talks that address the management issues around some of our decisions. Perhaps this is better defined by describing the audience at an Access conference. It is primarily, but not entirely, made up of people working directly with technical projects, at some level. There are not a lot of decision makers here, i.e.- the people who hire, sign contracts, set strategic agendas, etc. It’s not that they aren’t here, but it’s the same ones who self-define as interested in such technical work, such as myself.

What I would particularly enjoy, but have yet to find at least in a distillled form, would be a meeting of library administrators where the gritty details of our technology decisions could be raised, discussed, and examined closely. We know our relationships with vendors are a constant source of frustration for out staff (and by extension, for our users), but when or where are we going to speak about these issues in a substantive fashion? When are we going to come together to talk about creating robust mechanisms and reward structures that enhance our staffs’ ability to collaborate on open source and other projects? When or where will we come together to talk seriously about the credentials we need graduates of library programs to have so that they can come into our organizations and work successfully on increasingly complex projects: digital preservation, linked data, software creation, etc.

I know that many, including myself, could answer these semi-rhetorical questions by saying, well, that happens at this or that conference or via this channel. However, I would still assert that we’re not doing this with enough consistency or deliberate intent. There are controversial initiatives such as the Taiga Forum, but it is better at making provocative statements that spur thought than dealing with concrete questions of IT practice and management. Do we need to form a professional organization for IT administrators in libraries?

flickr – pinkangelbabe

Working in a service profession, customer service is on my mind a great deal. Being who I am, beer and coffee are also frequently on my mind. Here’s what happens when they all get mashed together.

One could suggest that the customer service experience is largely driven by two things, getting the small things right and consistency of experience. That oversimplifies a lot of the customer service research a bit, but I think it’s hard to argue that small things matter, a lot, and that one wants to be able to predict how a service entity will respond. We may all crab about cable companies, but really, you have to admit it’s a consistent experience, so we’re all still paying.

Bad beer

A few years back I heard the founder of a small and successful brewery deliver a fun and insightful lecture on the state of beer brewing in the United States. He pointed out that in the 1990s, breweries popped out of the ground like so many weeds. As we moved into the new millennium, however, there was a contraction in terms of producer numbers. His astute observation was that it wasn’t so much the objective quality of the beer that led to survival, but the consistency of product.

To illustrate his point, he mentioned a study that he’d read from Wales where some professors in a brewing program took over a marginal Welsh brewery that made objectively bad beer and improved the product using their science and skills. What happened? Sales nosedived. Why? They did some customer surveying, and discovered that people didn’t like the fact that it had changed.

As someone who fancies himself a beer aficionado, this makes sense. A lot of that beer that was coming out in the 90s was horrid, and worse, you never knew what you would get. One month an IPA from Some Funky-named Brewery was stellar, the next month it tasted like hop tea. Sam Adams isn’t a great beer, but it’s hugely successful. If one could time travel and score a bottle from 1998, I would wager that it would be indistinguishable from a 2012 vintage.

The point: you don’t have to have the best product, just a good enough product that tastes the same every time. In library terms, that means that the same question should get the same answer, regardless of to whom one poses the question. I think we fall very short on this front.

Good coffee

Like many people, I have a love/hate relationship with Starbucks. On the one hand, they’re a corporate behemoth crushing smaller coffee shops left and right. Personally, I’m also not fond of businesses that create new languages for themselves. Small/medium/large make universal sense, so why create silly names for sizes that make no sense? On the other hand, they’re able to crush their competition because they are utterly maniacal about quality. Order a drink in Anchorage, Düsseldorf, or New York, and odds are they will taste nearly identical. McDonald’s set the bar here, and we see where that has gotten them. So while I may get the heebies about supporting a machine that is slowly taking over global coffee consumption, I have to admit that more than once I have been utterly grateful to walk up and be handed coffee that made me happy.

At MPOW, there are a few Williams Fresh Cafe locations. Let’s just say I wouldn’t recommend buying shares in the firm. Depending on location, their coffee ranges from good (thankfully, the one close to me) to utterly abysmal. Caveat emptor. Often I just bypass them and buy my coffee–like a good expat–at Tim Horton’s. Qualitatively it’s average at best, but it’s brutally, corporately consistent.

So, just like beer, people will flock to the place where they know what they are getting before they walk in the door. Again, I’m not sure libraries do well on this front.

Grinders

What do grinders have to do with customer service? They illustrate how getting the small things right really matters in the customer experience. My wife and I are fairly coffee addicted, but are not so over-the-top addicted that we buy green beans and then roast and grind them ourselves. We don’t even want to grind our beans. I know, I know, true coffee snobs just stopped reading, but really, we consume a pound of coffee so quickly that freshness really isn’t a major issue for us. Why have yet another device with a cord on our counter to grind a handful of beans once a day?

But here’s the catch: we do like our coffee to be good and strong, which means having the right grind for the machine. Our go-to device is the ingeniously simple AeroPress, which requires a fine grind–but not espresso fine–to make an optimal cup. What this means is that not just the quality of the coffee, but its grind, matters a lot to us. What we’ve found, sadly, is that the grinders in some of the local grocery stores, including the super basic commercial Bunn grinder everyone knows, provide a very consistent and reliable grind. We’d much rather support local businesses such as Homegrown Hamilton, which roasts some great beans, but has a grinder that after repeated trips hasn’t gotten any better and creates a grind with way too many large chunks. Thankfully, there’s a booth at the local farmer’s market where the owner has good coffee and a magical Bunn grinder, so we have options beyond grocery chains.

The lesson: even if you have great products, pay attention to small details in order to win and keep customers.

Libraries

There’s a lot of talk these days about the relevance of libraries and whether they will survive. Let’s bat those aside for a moment and assume that really, it’s higher ed that’s in flux, and as it goes, so too will libraries go. For now and the foreseeable future, we have libraries, so we have to make ourselves relevant to our customers right now. In terms of consistency and attention to small details, we have a long way to go, I think. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or any answer, but tend to think that they are to be found in doing a better job assessing our services, which means doing more than counting numbers, as well as investing far more in training our staff and building their skills. It’s hard work, but if Starbucks can teach us anything, it’s that if your employees all understand and represent your core business well, the path to success is open.

flickr – m4rlonj

Perhaps not, but that’s no reason not to try. An explanation:

For our elder daughter’s 11th birthday,  we bought her an Arduino Uno with which to tinker and hopefully ultimately take over the world. No, really, the idea is to expose her to the simple notion that computers have guts (hardware) and that it takes code (software) to make the guts do something useful. Kids–whether girls or boys–should grow up knowing something about technology other than how to insert a plug into a socket or like a page on Facebook.

As someone who works in an IT environment, it’s also eminently clear to me that there is still a glaring gender gap problem in the workplace. Today a vendor presented their server lines to a campus audience, and other than the two women affiliated with the vendor, there were zero women in a room of 25 or so IT professionals. Zero. This isn’t to pick on my employer, nor is it a dig at the guys in the room (myself included), but rather a general observation about IT work settings, which are still overwhelmingly male in most any organization, particularly the closer one gets to core infrastructure such as networks and servers.

Will programming an Arduino to make an LED blink or play a tune turn my daughter into an IT professional? Who knows? At the very least, though, for her it’s an initial step toward breaking down the shroud of mystery that surrounds higher level IT work. The kid’s great at math and could follow wiring diagrams in grade three, so why not show her how deep the well goes. My hope would be that she develops no concept of girl’s work/boy’s work.

What I did not address in that post, but will do here, is describe my views on the obligations of libraries to collect books, or, as I commented on one of those German blogs, nearly all books. My view is that this is a collective obligation of libraries, an obligation that transcends both borders and library type. In other words, major research libraries do not bear this burden alone, since even with their broad reach there will be myriad titles that never land in their collections. In nations that have the capital and technical means to build and maintain libraries, there are collectively hundreds of thousands of libraries, ranging from a Canadian prairie town public library to the Harvards of the world. There are special libraries with highly specialized profiles collecting items that the rest of us would find mind-numbingly uninteresting. All of this is good.

Where I agree with the German writers and commenters is that libraries have something of an obligation to manage the books that land in their possession. This starts with having a clear collection policy, a document that should permit a library to block a gift before it ever comes in the door. For example, no academic library I’ve worked for would consider collecting mass-market paperbacks, or only in rare circumstances, so having a policy that such gifts will not be accepted only makes sense. Mass-market paperbacks should go to a used-book dealer, or be put on the shelf at the bed and breakfast for people to take, etc. Fiction generally finds a home.

Once a gift has been accepted, however, it’s incumbent upon the library to process the gift carefully, as I outlined in my previous post. This entails both having procedures and actually following them, something that turns out to be harder to do than one would suppose. In particular, before discarding any book, they should pass through at least several levels of consideration: adding to the collection, selling to used-book dealers, selling to the public, giving them to another appropriate library (appropriate being the operative word, not blindly dumping them on some library too unwise to say no), or as many have suggested, just giving them away to anyone who wants them. One does, as I outlined as well, have to exercise sensible judgment. Given the mass that can accumulate, wasting time finding homes for books such as, say, math textbooks from the 1960s or for a cheap edition of a novel that practically every library owns, is simply not a luxury most can afford. Disposal must remain an option.

Several jobs after the job I had at Washington University where we tossed books in the trash (n.b.- this happens at all libraries, whether they admit it or not), I served as a subject librarian at Yale University tasked with managing their already fabulous German language and literature collections. We had both the financial and human resources to add books at a very granular level, and working in a library such as that, one quickly moves from thinking purely in local terms (i.e.- does this university need this book, does it fit the curriculum?) to thinking in international terms, as in, does anyone, anywhere have this book. Yale and libraries of its level have collections of international significance, built over generations. (Sadly, that’s slipping at many of them, but that’s another story.)

At Yale we had an approval plan (dt.) with Harrassowitz that provided a steady stream of current literature, both primary and secondary, so my task was to expend my generous collection funds on more niche and specialized items. After scanning and studying the collection, it became clear that there were some clear gaps in the collection, and I set about filling them. Academic libraries traditionally did not collect children’s literature nor so-called trivial or popular literature, since both were deemed unworthy of critical attention. Needless to say, the canon wars (as well as the entrance of feminism and other -isms into the debate) put an end to that thinking, such that there is now clear demand for both types of works. Beyond that, while the Yale library had a solid collection of titles from the defunct German Democratic Republic, there were significant gaps in that collection for several reasons. Some of the titles had been deemed out of scope according to level/audience as I just described. Others were not exported by the GDR for political reasons, such as those published by the very few religious publishers that existed, while still others simply never landed in the library, likely because there was a less-than-smooth path between GDR publishers and American libraries for the usual geopolitical reasons.

For any librarian who has never done this work–building narrowly scoped collections backed by solid financial resources–I can only highly recommend it. Buying books with someone else’s money is a joy. I took the job in part because I sensed the rareness of the opportunity, and perhaps because I could already see the writing on the wall that the book era could not go on forever, i.e.- even wealthy libraries would be crushed financially by their collecting commitments, as has in fact occurred. While my own personal commitment to book collecting was enjoying its final years, I’ve never lost my faith in the textual value of books, and hunting down and acquiring titles to fill gaps in a fabulous collection and by extension fill gaps in the global library collection is interesting and rewarding work.

The time at Yale was full of some epic book-buying adventures. On one trip to Germany for a conference, I took a trip to the Buchdorf (book village) in Mühlbeck/Friedersdorf, which was founded in the 1990s and had a collection of dealers who specialized in East German imprints. Similar trips took me to dealers in Berlin and Leipzig, among other locales, even to book auctions in Leipzig, which are great fun if a bit stressful. I bought thousands of titles via dealer catalogues. One particularly fun project involved working with a professor of comparative literature to expand Yale’s holdings in children’s literature. One dealer, when I told her I was leaving Yale, lamented that she was losing one of her best customers. These are a few titles from those days:

While I said in the previous piece that I have no particular affection for the book as object, texts do have great value for me. It’s likely utopian to hope that even all of the libraries of one nation–even one as large/wealthy as the United States–could hold a copy of every book every published or at least make such available in digital form, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try when and where they can. That mission is what has driven conversations for decades about collaborative collection development. The high water mark was the Farmington Plan, which regrettably died out. Nowadays, when libraries speak of collaborative collection development, they do so mainly hoping to save money by cutting monograph acquisitions and relying on interlibrary loan. The sad truth of academic libraries is that they have numbingly homogenous collections because they are increasingly built on autopilot using approval plans. With respect to German books, since Harrassowitz has supplied virtually every German-language book acquired by North American libraries for decades, it should not be surprising that everyone has a copy of the same books, while thousands of others fell by the wayside. Sure, some were perhaps dreck–vanity publications, pulp, etc.–and one has to be realistic about boundaries, but a lot of worthwhile titles never found their way to North America.

This isn’t meant as an indictment of Harrassowitz or other approval vendors. If you have qualified staff doing acquisitions, an approval plan is a godsend since it eliminates redundant work in many libraries. What the library community needs, however, is a solid core of libraries who collect deeply in niche areas to the benefit of all others. That’s what still existed when I worked at Yale less than a decade ago, but in the meantime that system has begun to crack and disintegrate. Yale has cut their monograph collection funds and activities, as has Harvard and many others, and while I was hired at Yale specifically for my German language skills, they now no longer have a qualified German speaker to look after that massive and deep collection built over a century. This story has repeated itself at school after school in North America. Anyone working in acquisitions reading this is surely nodding their head.

One might be tempted to argue that the arrival of ebooks will solve the whole puzzle, but that’s a naive supposition. For one, many nations are not nearly as ebook willing or able as others, so books will continue to appear–inconveniently for the modern academic library–on dead trees for decades. Beyond that, the ephemeral nature of the ebook, and the myriad copyright issues that impinge on a library’s ability to own and lend one, will mean that collections will be far more fluid and unpredictable, perhaps serving immediate needs well, but no longer meeting the imperative that libraries long had at the core of their mission: to collect and preserve the human record. While I will not shed tears over books in dumpsters no matter who calls me callous, I do deeply lament the collective abdication of this role.

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Could it be that after years of persistent advocacy by librarians and a subset of academics that the disgruntlement with the business practices of Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, et al. might be ready to go mainstream? Protests against journal pricing appearing on the digital pages of Wired, Forbes, and The New York Times might just mean we’ve passed the tipping point. Let’s hope.

This wave of protest seems to have been set in motion by the proposed Research Works Act in the United States, which I mentioned recently. It would be delicious irony if such a crass attempt to make open access mandates essentially illegal set in motion the chain of events that finally got a critical mass of researchers marching away from the same old way of doing things. The subtitle of the RWA ought to make any academic or librarian squirm uncomfortably: “To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.” Nothing like showing your cards.

Tim Gowers certainly helped get the latest ball rolling with his public declaration that he would no longer publish in or work with any Elsevier journals in any capacity such as editor or reviewer. There’s now an online petition where other scientists can declare their intent as well. I can only hope that, as does Gowers near the end of his manifesto, these scientists realize that although Elsevier is being singled out in this wave of protests, they are only one of many publishers that adhere to what everyone seems to be calling a broken business model (where, in a nutshell, we all buy back research that we paid for in the first place). It’s not going to do much good if they all bail on Elsevier only to publish with other major publishers.

While this is a welcome step, what comes next will really indicate whether this is the latest brush fire, or whether we’re on the cusp of radical change. Will open access finally become the norm, or will we content ourselves with demonizing one publisher? Given how much of an academic library’s budget goes to a handful of publishers, this is a critical moment for our collective future.