September 2008 Archives

I’ve been reading some of the reports that were released last month, especially Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education and CLIR’s No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century. Naturally I’ve been thinking about them in the context of the humanities and the research library. I’m not sure I have a thesis yet, but I do have some reflections. For the most part I suspect that research libraries will continue to be hybrids for perhaps decades to come, especially in the humanities. Just as we collect the past for future study, we’ll live with the past during the long transition to a different future.

As I’ve argued before, though perhaps not convincingly, some things about the humanities don’t change. We continue to ask the same basic questions and continue to study texts in a way that fundamentally has remained the same since the Renaissance. Some new trends are nevertheless emerging, though, the “digital humanities.” Some of the digital humanities seem to be just digital versions of previous physical items, like digitizing archives, which makes these items much more available, but doesn’t change the fundamental nature of our interaction with them. Nevertheless, new techniques are open to us.

But still a lot is the same. Studying texts, interpreting culture, making arguments about human things. Some of this will involve experimental methods and text mining and statistical analysis and specifically data driven techniques: from brain experiments to confirm epistemological hypotheses to using text mining to finally prove that Bacon or Oxford or Rutland or whomever really wrote the works of Shakespeare. But most of it will involve traditional analysis and arguments applied to digital entities. Central questions will remain: What does this cultural text or artifact mean? What does it tell us about ourselves and our world? What happened at such and such a time and what does it mean? And, it seems, for a long time to come traditional methods will also apply. Some people criticize libraries as slow to change, but the traditions of humanities scholarship might be even slower. There have been humanist scholars around a long time. Humanists think libraries, even traditional libraries, will still be important for their future.

The Ithaka report seems to confirm this, at least for the short run. It considers three roles the library plays: Gateway to, Archive of, and Buyer of information resources. The Ithaka folks surveyed scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as librarians. The people who think the library is the most important are the librarians, naturally. But humanists were much more likely than their scientific or social scientific colleagues to continue to rate the library highly is all three functions, though the key function for all is Buyer.

Humanists are much less likely than anyone, including librarians, to want to do away with print journal collections even if electronic versions were available. Humanists are more likely to feel comfortable in the library, and less likely to think they’ll be more reliant upon electronic resources.

It’s possible that humanists are just going to have to be disappointed in the short run, especially with print journals, but the transition might take a very long time, and is unlikely to be complete in the foreseeable future. By then they will have adapted, or gone extinct, as will the libraries they love now.

Despite the heated change rhetoric from some quarters, libraries seem to be adapting to the future already. The CLIR report addressed all sorts of issues, and I liked it because it lacked heated rhetoric. My idiosyncratic take on it can be summarized by considering roles and techniques used by research libraries. What seems clear to me is not how much has or will change, but how much will stay the same even after huge changes.

Same Roles, Same Techniques: Collection, Organization, Preservation, Authority

Things we’ll continue to do and in more or less the same ways:

• Buying books, organizing them, making them accessible in many of the same ways we do now, maybe using digital vendor slips instead of paper, but still more or less the same.
• For scholarly works, we’ll continue to combine with scholarly presses to put our collective imprimatur on such works.
• Building special collections and archives. If nothing else, they have to be built before they can be digitized.

Same Roles, Different Techniques: Collection, Organization, Preservation, Accessibility, Discovery

We’ll continue to collect, but with new techniques we can even make our traditional collections more discoverable and accessible.

• Collection will increasingly be digital. Hardly a surprise. But even providing access to print collections should improve. Even with ebooks, will copyright and DRM allow us to treat ebooks as we now treat print books?
• Organizing it, providing metadata, better web portals, better OPACs
• Preserving the digital collection
• Ensuring quality. this is something we can strive to do.
• Making it accessible
• Making it discoverable! Not just a sealed off archive, but easily findable (study on use of non easily accessible resources not being used as much). We know that not everything is online and easily accessible, even with the Google books project, but if we define everything as “everything anyone will actually use” then everything is increasingly online. Research libraries need to make their collections more discoverable and accessible. Digitization of copyrighted books at least lets them be found, and digitization of special collections and out of copyright books allows access for everyone.

Different Roles, New Techniques: Creation, Collaboration

These are a couple of roles some people are predicting for research libraries in the future, obviously based on activities at least of the fringe of a lot of library operations now.

Creation

• Creators of Digital Content—digital libraries, institutional repositories, open access journals, academic publishers. Obviously we’re already doing some of this, but doing more of this will make the library more central to scholarship.
• Creators of information tools: Zotero, Omeka, LibX toolbar
• Helping scholars create digital content, like at the Center for History and New Media

Collaboration

• Between libraries: Print repositories, keeping ready access to our own copies, but sharing in an organized fashion.
• Between libraries and other campus units: Working with information technologists, for example.
• Between librarians and faculty: collaborating with faculty or enabling faculty to collaborate

Some libraries are doing these things now, and more will probably have to to adapt, but nevertheless many of the traditional roles are likely to remain, especially in the humanities. Still not much of thesis, I’m afraid.

Suddenly I’ve been crazy busy. During the long summer when time seemed to stretch forever and I had plenty of time to do what I needed to do, I would think, boy, I can’t wait for fall to come. The students come back. The weather cools. I start teaching again. Now I’m thinking, boy, this place sure was less hectic without all these classes going on. I’ve been meaning to write here for the past week, but never seemed to find the time. Eventually, I want to write about the Ithaka report on the future of research libraries and a few other things I’ve been reading, but it will have to wait.

I even missed lighter things. For example, I wanted to write about the Ivygateblog’s “Hottest Librarian in the Ivy League” contest. Not that I thought anyone would enter me into the contest, despite my height and good hair. I might stand a chance in an “Ivy League Librarian who doesn’t look too bad in dark clothes and a dim light” contest, but even then I’m not so sure. The contest seems to have been inspired by someone who compared Sarah Palin’s supposed makeover to the “hot librarian effect.” Considering what I’ve been reading about Palin and libraries, it probably wouldn’t please a lot of librarians—hot or otherwise—to be compared to her. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t win the contest. However, though she’s undeniably very attractive, I’m not sure the winner is really a librarian. The whole contest has a whiff of scandal about it, if you ask me.

The Ivies, or at least one Ivy, came up in another post last week I wanted to write about. Over at ACRLog, Steven Bell was exhibiting what looked to me like resentment against Harvard. Resentment is never pretty. He begins, “Does the name Robert Darnton ring a bell? No?” Actually, the name Robert Darnton did mean something to me. He’s a prominent historian of, among other things, publishing and the book, and a Princeton professor emeritus who’s now the director of the Harvard libraries. Bell takes issue with something Darnton wrote about Harvard:

Lesser libraries may rely on Google, JSTOR, and whatever they can harvest from the Internet, but Harvard has a responsibility to keep up with the production of scholarship by increasing its acquisitions of books-old-fashioned books, print on paper…No other university library has contracted such a heavy obligation, because none can compare with Harvard in the depth and breadth of its collections.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to any academic librarian that when we talk about library collections, there’s big and then there’s Harvard big. I’ve argued before that the largest and richest libraries have an obligation to collect the human and scholarly record as completely as possible because if they don’t do it, no one will. They have an obligation that transcends their individual institutions and extends to the entire scholarly world. When I wrote that, I was thinking primarily about Harvard, though I’d include a handful of the other largest libraries. The purpose of a research library is to collect as much as possible and make it accessible. Librarians can provide all the great public service they want, but if the collections aren’t there to support research then the library has failed in an important mission. Bell’s response: “Well I’ll certainly sleep more soundly at night knowing that the future of civilization is safe as long as Harvard continues to amass its huge collections.” Frankly, the response astounds me. I’m not sure it affects my sleep at all, but as a librarian and a human being with an interest in preserving human culture, I am reassured knowing that some library somewhere is amassing this sort of collection so that it will be available for future generations. The time frame of a research library, and especially of one like Harvard, is large. Research libraries aren’t just about helping current undergraduates make it through college. They also have to collect and preserve as much as they can for scholars decades hence. To dismiss a serious scholar like Darnton who has a deep understanding and abiding concern for the mission of a great research library with a snide, resentful remark seems inappropriate to me.

Last week, I heard about a discussion among some academics and some academic librarians over who should teach citation skills to students. An “academic” (as it was put to me) thought the teachers should teach the citation skills, because they were the scholars who cited things. Others thought the librarians should continue to teach such skills because they always had. Is this a controversy anywhere? When I started teaching, it never occurred to me to ask a librarian to teach about citation. Guides to MLA, APA, and Chicago styles are in just about every writing handbook around, and since I was usually teaching academic research and writing, it made sense to teach citation format as well. As a librarian, nobody has ever asked me to teach citation styles in the classroom, though I’ve gotten some reference questions over the years. However, our library does provide workshops on Endnote and Refworks, and we’re all expected to be familiar with these tools and with citation styles in general. I just thought it seemed odd that anyone would care enough to argue that either professors or librarians would be the “best” group to teach citation, as if both aren’t equally familiar with them. Even the argument that the academics are the ones publishing is weak, since obviously lots of academic librarians do publish. The library literature isn’t especially great, but it’s not because the citations are incorrect.

Okay, my house is clean now.

“Students, even of college age, have had very little conscious experience of life or books and it is no wonder their minds are bone dry.” Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, 1945.

I’ve been meaning to write about The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30] for weeks, mainly because it has such a pithy title, but also because I mentioned it in a post a few weeks ago but hadn’t read it yet. Time passes, though. I got back from a week’s vacation to find a ton of work from both the jobs I work in the Fall plus a dead hard drive on my office computer, then classes are starting and along with them the many presentations and whatnot. Life seemed very busy all of a sudden. And then there’s the problem that I just couldn’t make it through the book, and not because I was too depressed by how the digital age has corrupted us all.

Now I’m even more belated, because yesterday’s A & L Daily linked to a two-part column by my favorite CHE columnist on stupidity in these kids today which mentions Bauerlein’s book among others. I haven’t had time to read those, either, and definitely feel that I’m falling down in my obligation to stay informed. Nevertheless, I want to forge ahead and just mention some things that struck me about The Dumbest Generation.

I wanted to like this book. I’ve written before that I’m a sucker for any hypothesis about the world going to hell in a handcart since whatever bad thing happened: Eve eating the apple, Caesar destroying the Republic, Luther destroying Christendom, European settlers killing indigenous Americans, Yankees defeating the Confederacy, Hitler killing everyone in sight, or the latest tragedy—the advent of the “digital age.” I always have a suspicion that the historical period I’m living in is the worst one except for all the historical periods that have preceded it.

And with the sole exception of movies, I’m definitely something of a cultural and intellectual snob, so I’m happy to look down at the hapless masses and say with the cultural critics, “oh yes, you can’t possibly have a worthwhile life if you haven’t read X author or aren’t familiar with Y artist or can’t hum the introductory movement of Z symphony.” Everyone seems to have different standards of snobbery, but for argument’s sake I’ll suggest the complete works of Shakespeare (check!), Albrecht Durer (check!), and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (check!). There, ain’t I cultured. But it could be Joyce’s Ulysses (check!), Picasso (check!), and Bruckner’s seventh symphony (check!). I have this pathological desire to know everything about history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, music, and art, but I’m willing to admit that not everyone shares my passions and that doesn’t mean they’re dumb. They’re just hard to hold conversations with.

As I said, I wanted to like the book, and there are many good things about the book, but I couldn’t accept the argument.

First of all, as I wrote in the previous post, I’m skeptical of the whole enterprise of evaluating 18-year-olds by the standards of middle-aged college professors. Partly, that’s because I remember what I was like at 18, and partly because I haven’t noticed any drastic difference in students, though admittedly I see a limited number of them. However, I started teaching freshmen at the University of Illinois in 1992, and out of the few hundred students I taught there, I recall only a couple who had the sort of intellectual curiosity that one might find in graduate students or faculty. They were very ordinary 18-year-olds, and most of them were intellectually mediocre. And this was in the days before iPods and laptops, when professors were still suggesting their students “word process” their papers, when I assumed anyone with a cell phone was a doctor or a drug dealer.

Let’s also consider just ordinary people out in the world when we start thinking about the kind of intellectual curiosity and engagement with ideas and culture—or lack thereof—that some people complain about. Is it that college students are getting dumber? Or that most people are already dumb, and that more of them are going to college as standards lower? I don’t have an answer, but it’s a legitimate question. If we take a look at the most popular television shows, movies, games, magazines, websites, etc. for every age category, are we intellectual snobs going to find much to impress us? I live a pretty sheltered life these days. Just about every adult I know has at least a master’s degree, and often two or more or a PhD. I just don’t meet many uneducated people. What are they like? Most people don’t even go to college, so I have no idea what the ordinary person is like. Have we always been in decline because most people have never heard of Shostakovitch or can’t explain the Monroe Doctrine?

Some quibbles aren’t with the premise, but with some of the arguments in the book itself, though. For example: “Even if we grant the point that on some measures today’s teenagers and 20-year-olds perform no worse than yesterday’s, the implication critics make seems like a concession to inferiority. Just because sophomores 50 years ago couldn’t explain the Monroe Doctrine or identify a play by Sophocles any more than today’s sophomores doesn’t mean that today’s shouldn’t do better, far better” (30). So, in some ways the kids aren’t getting any dumber at all, but because we’re so much more advanced now and they spend so much time in school and have computers and such, the kids should somehow care about the Monroe Doctrine more than their predecessors. Why is that exactly? Because they more access to cultural information, they thus have a reason to take advantage of that access? I just don’t see the connection. Teenage culture is what it is. I think my previous question still stands. When you’re a teenager, if you can play the blues on a Strat, what difference does it make to you who’s on the Supreme Court?

Or consider the interpretation of the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which showed that from 2003 to 2005 (which seems like a small time frame to me) college freshmen and college seniors seemed to be reading slightly more books. This is a “disappointing improvement” because their college experience hasn’t turned them into scholarly people, like all those scholarly people running around everywhere in past generations (55-56). “Compare this attitude,” Bauerlein suggests, “with that of young Frederick Douglass.” “Or that of John Stuart Mill.” Comparing the intellectual engagement of the majority of college students or even American citizens with brilliant and eloquent men like Douglass or Mill hardly seems relevant. What do we learn by saying that most people don’t have the intellect of such men? We learn that the people who make those comparisons have spent a lot more time reading great books than they have paying attention to what most people are really like. I myself would feel most at home in a world of Douglasses or Mills, but that’s not how life is, and it’s even less like that when one leaves academia.

The book has a series of these irrelevant comparisons. “If cognitive talents rise correspondingly with the proliferation of screens and the sophistication of shows and games, why hasn’t a generation of historically informed, civically active, verbally able, and mathematically talented young adults come forth and proven the cultural pessimists and aged curmudgeons wrong?” (92). This is a typical move in the argument. Some foolish group claims that such and such technology is making everyone smarter. Obviously it isn’t. Thus the kids are somehow dumber. But this isn’t a problem with the kids or even the technology, but with the hype. The criticism shouldn’t be directed against kids and adults who do the same unintellectual things they always have—only now with shinier gadgets—but instead against anyone stupid enough to believe that a child is going to learn better or know more because their information comes from a computer rather than a book. Criticizing techno-hype isn’t as much fun, apparently, as claiming that we’ve just raised the “dumbest generation.” I don’t get the impression that Bauerlein believes the hype, though. It’s just a way to score points. However, just saying the kids aren’t as smart as some people claimed they would be doesn’t make them dumb, or even dumbest.

He asks his students to sit down with their friends at dinner and and as an experiment use some big words to see what happens. They balk at this, thinking their friends will avoid them, or more likely think them pretentious jerks. This “demonstrates that the social settings of adolescence actually conspire against verbal maturity” (155). That comes as a shocking revelation to anyone who has never been an adolescent, but should it for the rest of us? Isn’t there something to be said for discourse communities? Adolescent boys don’t talk like college professors. Neither do grown men sitting around drinking beer and cheering a football game. Neither does anyone else for that matter. Most people don’t have very large vocabularies. That’s just a fact. Most communication takes place with a minimum of words. Unless one wants to be able to articulate sophisticated thoughts or critical insights, or is in love with language, or perhaps just wants to impress other academics, an extensive vocabulary just isn’t required. Blaming teenagers because they don’t sound like educated college professors just seems like another irrelevant comparison. I can feel his pain (I once cringed when someone teaching at Princeton pronounced the “ch” in “inchoate” as the “ch” in “church”), but it doesn’t mean most people have or ever have had large vocabularies.

Finally, I couldn’t finish the book. It’s a quick read. Bauerlein is a fine writer with, I believe, good and serious intentions. There were more statistics and studies quoted, but I just couldn’t get past what seemed a flawed premise: that because teenagers today aren’t as intellectual as college professors, despite their increased access to culture through digital means, they’re somehow dumber than teenagers in the past or most adults today. The book is a great exercise in how to create an imagined crisis and boost sales, but I’m not sure it tells us about any significance between today’s college students and the allegedly smarter generations that have come before.