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The Basic Skills of All Librarians

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In response to my last post, someone asked me “what are the basic skills that all librarians should have, if any?” There are several possible responses to that. The evasive response would be that if library schools can’t seem to figure out that question, the I certainly won’t be able to do so. However, I find that I can’t answer the question as it’s phrased because it needs more clarification. The phrase “basic skills” is deceptively simple, yet I think it can cover at least two different meanings which both determine how one might respond and lead to confusion and disagreement where perhaps none exists. Both basic and skills need some clarification. So here goes.

Basic in the phrase “basic skills of all librarians” can mean either 1) a basic set of skills that all librarians should have, or 2) a set of skills that all librarians should have at a basic level. I might disagree with either interpretation, although I agree with Lane Wilkinson’s argument in response to my last post that there are probably sets of skills that all libraries should have available. Though I might disagree with either interpretation, I’m more open to the second interpretation, which means we have to define what we mean by skills.

As with basic, there are at least two different meanings of skills at play here, a hard sense and a soft sense. In the hard sense, to have a skill means to be able to do something, it means knowing how and not just knowing that. In the soft sense, it means something more like knowing that, or knowing a bit about, or even being aware of. For example, let’s take a skill common in and essential to academic libraries: cataloging. To have cataloging skill in the hard sense, one must be able to catalog materials with some proficiency and efficiency. Cataloging in the hard sense is a skill developed over time and presumably improved over time. Cataloging as a skill in the soft sense means something like knowing how catalogs work, being aware of minimal cataloging standards, or something along those lines. It’s the kind of knowledge of cataloging that, say, reference librarians would need to get the most of of searching OPACs.

We can also interpret coding as a skill in a hard or soft sense. By coding as a skill, we can mean that the person is fully capable of efficiently and proficiently writing code to develop some digital object, OR we can mean that the person is aware of the basics of coding. For example, I couldn’t just sit down and start writing code of any kind. However, I know how code works and generally what it does. My last post mentioned html, and I know a bit of that as well. Just yesterday I had to go into the html of a website I was making and adjust the html because there were some problems with the margins that the editor wasn’t fixing right. I couldn’t write it, but I knew what to look for, I spotted the problem, and I fixed it. Does that mean I have “skill”? I usually interpret skill in the hard sense, so I’d say no. I do a lot of things well. That’s not one of them. Someone totally unfamiliar with how any code or markup language works might say yes.

With these distinctions in mind, let’s break “basic skills of all librarians” into two phrases: 1)  Basic Set of Skills of All Librarians, and 2) Basic Skills of All Librarians. Let’s interpret the first phrase in the hard sense, that is, a basic set of skills (in the hard sense) that all librarians should have. This means that all librarians should have these skills, and they can actually employ them usefully, efficiently, and proficiently. Let’s interpret the second phrase in the softer sense, meaning that there are some number of things that all librarians should have at least a basic minimal knowledge about. As for coding, personally I don’t have skill in the first sense, but I do in the second.

We can apply these distinction to the initial question. Now, are we asking (in my terms) “What basic set of skills should all librarians have?” in the hard sense, or are we asking “What are some basic-level skills of all librarian?” in the soft sense? Our answers might still differ, but at least we’re clearer on what we’re talking about.

Answering the first question, I’d have to say “none.” I can’t think of any library-specific skills (in the hard sense) that all librarians should have, while again agreeing that there are skills that all libraries should probably have. No library operates on this principle, and the larger the library the more specialized the skills get. In smaller libraries, librarians might need minimal proficiency in a larger number of skills, but no one will achieve complete proficiency (skill in the hard sense) in everything necessary to run a library. There’s neither the time nor the necessity. If that’s what people mean when they say “every librarian needs to learn coding,” then it’s very easy to point out the fact that every library in existence gets on without all the librarians having this skill (in the hard sense).

If instead we’re asking “what are some skills or knowledges that librarians should have or be aware of in at least a minimal sense?”, then my answer might change. I would still be very reluctant to claim that there were too many skills in the soft sense that all librarians should have. The world of librarianship is too complicated and diverse for there to be many. I might include things like knowing how catalogs and databases work, understanding the role of libraries in the support of students and faculty, or some other very general things. Regardless, it’s this second question that I think is the most useful one to discuss. Coding might be a good candidate for inclusion in that list, but only if we’re clear on what we mean by basic, skills, and even coding. I’d still say no, but I’m much more likely to be persuaded by others if this is the sense we mean.

EMP Drops the Lawsuit; Richardson Doesn’t

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Edwin Mellen Press dropped the lawsuit against Dale Askey and McMaster University, saying “The financial pressure of the social media campaign and pressure on authors is severe.” I’m glad I could contribute a little to that campaign.

[Update: shoot, I wrote too soon. EMP dropped one of the lawsuits, the one naming McMaster and Askey. There’s another one  by EMP founder Herbert Richardson just naming Askey, but no word on whether it will be dropped as well. We can only hope common sense will prevail.]

A Postscript from Another Perspective

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I kept thinking about my earlier post after I finished it, revisiting it because something about it bothered me, and after a lot of thought I finally figured out what it was. I think my argument about how academia regards scholarly publishers and journals as signs of quality is more or less correct. What bothers me is that in my relatively dispassionate analysis I gave no clue as to how much the situation disappoints me.

Academics use publishers as status indicators without necessarily considering the quality of the publications, just as they use schools, programs, and degrees as status indicators regardless of the quality of the individual scholar. I once heard a prominent scholar mocked (not to his or her face) for having a PhD from a state university. A professor I knew once compared two academics meeting for the first time to two dogs sniffing each other’s butts. Sniff, sniff, oooh, a Harvard PhD. Sniff Sniff, a book from OUP. Granted this isn’t necessarily what happens in the scholarship itself, where superficial stereotypes might give way to consideration of merit in other’s works.

Librarians usually lack the status consideration of professors, at least about some things. As long as an MLS is accredited, few people care what university it’s from, unlike academics considering the origin of PhDs. Some librarians have institutional status anxiety, I guess. I was talking with another philosophy librarian from a university library in the south. He joked that some of his colleagues might see the “Princeton University” on my badge and think, “hey, you could probably come down here and run our jerkwater library.” Trust me, I couldn’t. But I’ve served on numerous ALA committees with librarians from all sorts of libraries, large and small, academic and public, and I’ve never noticed anyone responding to anything other than the quality of their participation, not what employer is on their badge or where they got their MLS from.

However, libraries have pretty much given up control over the quality of their collections.  It’s worst with scholarly journals, i think. As the Big Deals have squeezed out so many choices, librarians have had to give up a lot of that control. We don’t really select many journals anymore, and those we do select we don’t really own. With approval plans, especially in larger libraries, we do relatively little of the individual selection, relying upon vendors to pick and choose for us and send things to us. There are obvious reasons our selection of books and journals must be this way, but we’ve still given up so much control.

Dissatisfaction and unhappiness often come because people can’t reconcile their expectations of reality with reality itself. I try to take things as they are when nothing can be changed and avoid that fate. Thus, I might accept libraries giving up control over their collections or the fact that academics and librarians often make judgments based on superficial signs because there’s nothing I can do about it. But I don’t have to like it or try to justify it. I thought about just deleting the post and starting over. Instead, consider this a postscript.

Edwin Mellen Press Suing a Librarian?

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[Update from Leiter: a statement from McMaster and a petition for Mellen to drop the lawsuit.]

Edwin Mellen Press is suing Dale Askey–a McMaster University librarian–and McMaster University for “$3.0 million dollars as damages for defamation arising from continuous publication on the World Wide web by the defendant Askey.” The alleged defamation occurred in a 2010 blog post Askey–an American citizen–wrote when he was a librarian at Kansas State University. The contents of the action (including the original blog post) are available here. Regardless of the outcome of the case, academic librarians should consider the implications of this lawsuit and its potential attack on academic freedom and the public expression of professional opinions on relevant subjects. Information about previous and potential Mellen lawsuits are below.

[Note: the above is the latest update. Normally I don’t revise posts, but as I want to publicize this case and this is the post getting the traffic, I wanted to be clearer and put to rest the questions I had when writing the original post below. The questions were answered very quickly.

[Update, more coverage from Inside Higher Education. The notice of action is dated June 7, 2012. After 8 months of silence, it’s good this is finally being publicized. And a discussion of the IHE article on Gawker. And from the Chronicle of Higher Education. And from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.]

[Update: the lawsuit seems to be real. Here is the notice of action by Mellen Press against Askey and McMaster, sent to me by Les Green of Oxford U.]

I put the title in question marks because I have no details of any such lawsuit, but allegedly Mellen Press is suing an academic librarian at McMaster University for giving a low professional opinion of Mellen’s offerings. The claim came in comment on this Leiter Reports post reporting on a survey of philosophers about the best philosophy publishers (where, incidentally, Mellen finished 34th out of 34). Leiter brought the comment up to the top in this post: Shocking attack on academic freedom at McMaster by Edwin Mellen Press? (Note the question mark.)  Here’s the comment in full, from a philosopher at Oxford:

The Edwin Mellen Press may well, as this survey suggests, have the worst quality philosophy list but it tops the league in disgraceful conduct in defense of its dismal reputation.

A professional librarian at McMaster University’s library complained, in a 2010 blog-post, that Mellen was a poor publisher with a weak list of low-quality books, scarcely edited, cheaply produced, but at exorbitant prices. Librarians are expert at making such judgments; that’s what universities pay them to do. And the post made a key point about the public interest: ‘in a time when libraries cannot purchase so much of the first-class scholarship, there is simply no reason to support such ventures.’

No one likes bad reviews; but Mellen’s approach is not to disprove the assessment, pledge to improve its quality, or reconsider its business-model. It is to slam McMaster University and its librarian with a three million dollar lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court, alleging libel and claiming massive aggravated and exemplary damages. The matter is pending.

The lawsuit is threadbare. With respect to the parts of Mellen’s list with which I am familiar, the librarian’s statements noted above are all true and the quality judgments are correct. (And this survey suggests that would be a common assessment.) Moreover, on the facts in this situation, it is obviously fair comment, and public policy considerations strongly suggest that university librarians enjoy a qualified privilege with respect to their assessments of the quality of the books they consider buying for their universities. It would be a disaster for universities, students, researchers and the taxpayer if aggrieved publishers were permitted to silence discussions of the quality of their publications by threats of lawsuit.

McMaster University’s response to this appalling tactic has been surprising. Public silence. No one at McMaster has spoken in defense of the librarian or the University; no University administrator has pushed back against the crude threat to academic freedom that this represents. (But then the President of McMaster’s list of the seven ‘McMaster Principles’ omits mention of academic freedom.) Are the McMaster faculty, administration, and faculty associations already so cowed by libel-chill that they are afraid to speak up? Or are they unaware of Mellen’s attack? Or—and this is just as worrying—is it that McMaster values its professional librarians so little that it is willing to let them bear the brunt of such harassment, so long as the University itself can avoid vicarious liability?

Let’s hope someone at McMaster forcefully says ‘enough’ to this sort of bullying. Universities have a negative duty not to abridge the academic freedom of their members; they also have a positive duty to see to it that others do not do it either.

I vaguely remember reading a blog post like that and thinking it uncontroversial, if perhaps a bit sweeping. Librarians have opinions about various presses based on long exposure to their publications. Most academic collection development librarians have opinions on way or the other about numerous publishers, and if pressed they could probably present evidence to support those opinions, because professional opinions don’t form in a vacuum. Regardless, suing a librarian for expressing such a professional opinion seems like an unusual tactic for a scholarly publisher, and the kind of thing that librarians, who probably buy the most Mellen Press books, probably won’t like.

There is a history of this kind of thing. In 1993 Mellen Press sued the greatest magazine of academic intellectual life that ever existed, Lingua Franca, over an article that “referred to the Edwin Mellen Press as “a quasi-vanity press cunningly disguised as an academic publishing house.” (St. John, Warren. 1993. “Vanity’s Fare: How One Tiny Press Made $2.5 Million Selling Opuscules to Your University Library.” Lingua Franca, September/October, p. 1ff. See note 8 here.) They lost. As a mirror site for some old LF content states:

OFFENDED VANITY
Warren St. John deems Edwin Mellen Press a vanity publisher capitalizing on the desperation of credential-hungry academics. St. John also finds that the Press’s offshore adjunct, Mellen University,* is little more than a diploma mill. After the exposé, Mellen chief Herbert Richardson, a former University of Toronto religion professor, accuses LF of libel and sues for $15 million. He loses. In September 1994, St. Michael’s College, where Richardson holds tenure, dismisses him for “gross misconduct.”
There is a book about the case. I haven’t looked at the book, but was actually impressed by the publisher: Reid, Paul H., Jr. 2006. The Edwin Mellen Press Versus Lingua Franca: A Case Study in the Law of Libel. Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press. [Update: I skimmed through the book, which is by the lawyer who tried and lost the case in a United States court. Near the end, the author acknowledges that American libel laws are very stringent, and that if they had this to do over again, they would have sued Lingua Franca in British court, as British libel laws are much looser than American. I don’t know whether Canadian laws are closer to British or American models.]
More lawsuits might be on the way. This is from a discussion forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Re: Edward [sic] Mellen Press–Any insights?
« Reply #16 on: January 21, 2011, 02:04:48 PM »
I wasn’t sure which of the Mellen threads to use for this post, but this seemed like a decent option. I just received a letter from Edwin Mellen in relation to a conference I attended several years ago. Apparently, there was a session on academic publishing at this conference, and one of the panelists (according to this letter) discussed publishers, mentioning Mellen as one publisher to avoid because their books won’t count towards tenure. (Note that I didn’t actually attend this session or appear on the panel.) This letter is asking for “memories” of what this individual said on this panel about Mellen so that they can “seek adjudication” — I’m assuming that means legal action? I’m rather horrified by this.
If these reports are true, the Mellen Press is suing a librarian for claiming the press has a “weak list of low quality books” and trying to sue (presumably) a professor for opining that Mellen books wouldn’t count towards tenure. But are they true? I don’t know what to say. If the reports are true, it does seem that there’s a lawsuit designed to repress the academic freedom of a librarian expressing a professional opinion. And if so, it’s one of the rare cases that illustrate why even academic librarians need their academic freedom protected. If anyone can give more details one way or the other, please do so in the comments.
*The “offshore adjunct, Mellen University” apparently used to exist. Here’s about all I could find online about it. It’s worth a read.

Politics, Economics, and Screwing the Humanities

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My last post rhetorically analyzed a claim by Rick Anderson that it was a “mistake” on the part of librarians to “put politics ahead of mission and service” where politics means “our personal views about how the world ought to be, and more specifically our views about how the scholarly communication economy ought to be structured.” In response to a query from John DuPuis (who has also responded to the post I analyzed) about specific examples, Anderson offered this: “Another might be canceling a high-demand Big Deal package—not because it’s no longer affordable, but because the library wants to help undermine the Big Deal model in the marketplace or believes that the publisher in question is making unreasonable profits.”

In a previous post on vendor mistakes, Anderson elaborated on the mistake of responding to affordability statements with value arguments (and “value” is definitely a misused word in those situations) by remarking: “There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when we had the option of canceling marginal journal subscriptions and cutting our book budgets in order to make space for high-value, high-cost purchases, but for most of us, those days are over. All we have left are core subscriptions, and our book budgets have been gutted.”

Putting those comments together, we can describe a situation that has affected the budgets of a lot of academic libraries. Scholarly journal prices have been going up rates considerably above budget increases, or inflation, or just about any other standard measure, since at least the 1980s. Mass cancellations of journals led to the creation of the Big Deals, which was supposed to be a solution to the problem, although the “historic spend” which they like to take as a benchmark was of course the creation of the previous extraordinary price increases. Regardless, over time these inflexible packages have taken up more and more of the library budgets until many libraries have had to “gut” their book budgets, some to an extent where they have almost no money to spend on monographic purchases at all. We need to remember that book budgets aren’t just gutted. Librarians choose to reduce spending on monographs to purchase journal packages that increase in price and decrease the flexibility of library budgeting, and that choice has consequences for library patrons that librarians rarely want to tell those patrons.

If anyone “benefits” from this arrangement, it’s scientific researchers, because the highest-priced packages and journals are all for science, technology, and medical journals, not relatively inexpensive journals in the humanities. So over time, we’ve seen library support for scholars shift from what was perhaps more or less even or fair funding across the board to funding which struggles to cope with science journal costs and damns any programs that are monograph-heavy, which most humanities programs are. Some of these libraries try to support PhD programs in English, history, philosophy, or music with tiny monograph budgets while still entering into the Big Deals on science journals with the major vendors.

Now, the big question for discussion was, “To what degree is it appropriate to sacrifice the short-term good of our patrons in the pursuit of long-term economic reform in scholarly publishing (or vice versa)?” But let’s spin that another way. To what extent has it been appropriate to sacrifice the short and long term good of patrons in the humanities for the short term good of not having to resist price increases or rethink journal packages that slowly squeeze monograph budgets to death? Are historians or literary scholars or musicologists less deserving because they’re not in the sciences? If so, why bother to offer PhDs in programs that aren’t adequately, or even fairly, supported by the library? If anything, humanists need library support more than scientists. For scientists, libraries hold the report of work done in a laboratory, but for humanists the library is the laboratory.

The humanities are under attack on most campuses it seems, and will never win the fight for recognition if the standard is economic productivity, which many people seem to think is the only standard by which to measure a society, a university, or a human life. But if we’re looking at library budgets fairly, with an eye to all the stakeholders who rely on the library for scholarly research, we shouldn’t pretend that going along with Big Deals because they’re affordable if we severely reduce monograph budgets isn’t screwing over a lot of the scholars that libraries should be serving. Putting the economics of science publishing ahead of scholarly publishing as a whole has done a disservice to the humanities and any monograph-heavy field. So, as a humanities librarian, if I do what I can to resist that assault by encouraging open-access scholarly publishing whenever and wherever I can, I’m not just making a professional (not personal or political) decision based on how I think scholarly publishing should operate, I’m also making a professional decision to support the work of scholars in the humanities who have been shortchanged at so many libraries over the past 20 years. Those patrons have needs, too.

Politics, Personal Views, and Librarian Rhetoric

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A blog post by Rick Anderson on six mistakes the library staff are making [when negotiating with vendors] has shown up in a few places in my personal information universe. The first five activities, if or when they occur, definitely seem like mistakes, but the sixth activity is questionable, at least in the way it’s framed, and framing the issue in as neutral a way as possible would help the discussion.

One of the mistakes, we are told, is “Putting political library concerns above patron needs,” which he admits is a controversial claim and promises to expand further in a later post. The claim is that “too often, we in libraries put politics ahead of mission and service.” However, this isn’t a claim about politics in the general sense conflicting with the librarian’s mission. “By ‘politics,’” he says, “I mean our personal views about how the world ought to be, and more specifically our views about how the scholarly communication economy ought to be structured.”

Instead of arguing with the claim that librarians put political library concerns above patron needs, I’m more interested in showing the rhetorical moves here. First, let’s consider the word politics, which is a very loaded word, and which has negative connotations even within the world of real politics. How many times have you heard some politician criticize another for “playing politics” or for “politicizing” an issue that’s already inherently political? So to characterize the activities of some librarians as essentially “playing politics” with vendor relations is an example of poisoning the well and persuasive definition, both typically considered informal argumentative fallacies. Merely characterizing the activity as “political” biases us against it before we even consider the details. Elsevier funding members of Congress to vote for the Research Works Act is playing politics, for real.

The attempt to define “politics” makes a contradictory, but still questionable, rhetorical move. Politics is by definition public, shared, and social. Etymologically, it’s thinking and arguing about the polis or city-state. Defining “politics” as “personal views about how the world ought to be” is already altering the meaning. The activity of politics might involve the clash of people motivated by personal views, but it’s not about personal views as such. Instead, it’s about dispute over the views that a community must share.

Even if I’m wrong in this interpretation, defining the activity as the result of “personal views” further disparages the activity and defines it in a way that is already biased against it. The connotation is usually that a “personal view” is merely a personal view, and thus has no place in the professional world we inhabit. However, support for open access scholarship, which I assume is an example of “politics” at work here, isn’t a “personal view,” but a professional opinion backed up with various arguments. Thus, one’s professional commitment to open access scholarship as “how the scholarly communication economy ought to be structured” is never a “personal view,” and not necessarily even a political view in any ordinary sense. It’s a professional opinion about a relevant economic, educational, and social matter.

One might even question the use of the word ought here: “how the world ought to be, and more specifically our views about how the scholarly communication economy ought to be structured.” To criticize people for acting on beliefs about “how the world ought to be” implies that “the way things are” is somehow good or worthwhile or at least tolerable. However, all ethical action is motivated by a belief about how the world ought to be. I try to be courteous to people in public, or show up to meetings on time, because I think that’s the way the world ought to be, even though we know that’s not always how the world is. “How the world ought to be” isn’t necessarily the fanciful dream of the fanatic, but a typical motivating factor for action. Again, when Elsevier funds politicians to vote for the Research Works Act, they are acting on a view of how the world ought to be.

He says that “the question is: To what degree is it appropriate to sacrifice the short-term good of our patrons in the pursuit of long-term economic reform in scholarly publishing (or vice versa)?” This is an important question and one worth discussing. However, using the labels “politics” and “personal views,” and implying that acting on a belief of how the world “ought” to be is problematic rather than typical, privileges the corporate view as the only “professional” view and the status quo as a desirable norm before the discussion even begins.

Evaluating Information

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Even though I don’t consider my blog a nag, for some reason I feel I haven’t been blogging much. I guess I didn’t realize what the pressure of writing even a semi-regular column would do to my blogging. Anyway.

Over the holiday break I read a number of books dealing with science and pseudoscience, listed here in my order of preference: Pigliucci’s Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, Shermer’s The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, Wynn and Wigans’ Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends and Pseudoscience Begins, and Grant’s Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality. I was on a kick, I guess. (I also read How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, unrelated but highly recommended.)

I started the reading out of curiosity after noticing volley after volley of patent nonsense coming out of last year’s political campaigns, especially regarding topics like evolution and climate science, and after recently reading a couple of popular books on evolution and watching an interesting if flawed documentary on the Intelligent Design attack on science education. I was sort of shocked by people who rely upon the methodological naturalism that drives science and technology but completely disregarded it in very specific situations, as if picking and choosing beliefs about nature and the world were a matter of convenience. People who probably believe in germ theory and would want surgeons to wash their hands and sterilize their instruments before operating might also believe that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, despite those two beliefs being inconsistent according to the methods commonly accepted among scientists. They believe in their iPhones, but not the science and technology that allows them to be.

It was the documentary on ID that inadvertently led me to Nonsense on Stilts, because both address the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, where the efforts of some ID proponents trying to force ID into biology education in Dover, PA were so obviously motivated by religion that a conservative Christian judge appointed by George W. Bush had to rule against them. The ID crowd’s new motto is “teach the controversy,” which would be fine if it were taught in a politics or religion course where the only controversy exists, but since there is no scientific controversy and ID is so obviously not scientific (from the nonfalsifiability to the lack of hypotheses to test to the inability to say why some things seem well designed but not why others are obviously not well designed), there’s no reason to waste what little time for science education there is to teach that particular controversy.

Nonsense on Stilts was the best of the bunch because it most clearly laid out the theoretical arguments involved, rather than just bringing up case after case of non– or pseudoscience posing as science (which is mostly what Denying Science did). It dealt with the “demarcation problem” between science and nonscience, and examined the difference between a hard science like physics, a soft science like psychology, an “almost science” like SETI, and a pseudoscience like Intelligent Design. Pigliucci argues that, “the common thread in all science is the ability to produce and test hypotheses based on systematically collected empirical data (via experiments or observations),” and distinguishes between the way the scientific method is applied in historical sciences like astronomy or evolutionary biology (where hypotheses are tested on observations) to ahistorical sciences like chemistry or physics (where hypotheses are tested by experiment), arguing that “the more historical a discipline, the more its methods take advantage of the ‘smoking gun’ approach that we have seen working so well with the extinction of the dinosaurs and the beginning of the universe,” while “the more ahistorical a science, the more it can produce highly reliable predictions about the behavior of its objects of study” (23). There is also a rigorous debunking of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist that is a model of evaluating information, even though it does indulge in some humorous jabs while pointing to the discrepancy between the reviews of scientists compared to those of applauding conservative political pundits. (Quoting from a Scientific American review of the book: “[in his] preface, Lomborg admits, ‘I am not myself an expert as regards environmental problems’–truer words are not found in the rest of the book”).

Librarians usually don’t get to the evaluation of information itself, the third standard of the ACRL Information Literacy Standards. That might be where the real meat of information literacy is if we think if it as the benefit of a liberal education. When I taught writing, that was the bulk of what I did, leading students through evaluations of arguments and evidence and rigorously questioning their own attempts at argument, but as librarians we usually just give guidelines. Nonsense on Stilts provides some good case studies, but also gives some general principles by which to judge information, besides the “common thread of science.” One set is a summary of Alvin Goldman’s “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63: 85–110):

“The five kinds of evidence that a novice can use to determine whether someone is a trustworthy expert are:
• an examination of the argument presented by the expert and his rival(s);
• evidence of agreement by other experts;
• some independent evidence that the expert is, indeed, an expert;
• an investigation into what biases the expert may have concerning the question at hand;
• the track record of the expert.” (293)

The Borderlands of Science provides a similar checklist that Shermer calls the “Boundary Detection Kit,” as in the boundary between sense and nonsense (pp. 18–22):

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does this source often make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
4. How does this fit with what we know about the world and how it works?
5. Has anyone, including and especially the claimant, gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought?
6. In the absence of clearly defined proof, does the preponderance of evidence converge to the claimant’s conclusion, or a different one?
7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
8. Has the claimant provided a different explanation for the observed phenomena, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing explanation?
9. If the claimant has proffered a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation?
10. Do the claimants’ personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?

While not all the questions might be relevant for humanities fields, the general trend of scientific thinking is. Humanists tend to value the principle of noncontradiction, and have standards for the presentation of argument and the interpretation of evidence, all the sorts of things that are systematically treated in textbooks on argumentation, rhetoric, informal logic, or critical thinking. Not everyone understands or accepts these norms of thought, of course. I recently read an essay on how the digital humanities are racist that was completely devoid of argument or evidence (and even included a footnote by the author explaining that people outside her narrow academic subfield often resisted the claims of the essay, which I found laughable). You can wade through a lot of nonsense that passed for postmodernism before finding anything worthwhile. But generally rational values about argument, evidence, analysis, and interpretation taught in basic writing or philosophy classes find adherents in the bulk of academic work in the humanities.

Even though these books are dealing with science and pseudoscience, some of the questions could be useful for evaluating information in other fields. For the humanities, a good example of nonsense on stilts would be most of the anti-Stratfordians, those who ignore Occam’s Razor and any counterarguments against whoever it is they think wrote Shakespeare’s plays other than William Shakespeare of Avon. Consider Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram, which argues that Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Run Shermer’s Boundary Detection Kit against that one and it becomes clear that Donnelly isn’t particularly scientific despite this being a question where one should theoretically be able to test hypotheses based on observation. Just answering question three–does this source often make similar claims–starts to make Donnelly look suspect, since not only does he claim that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but also the works of Montaigne and Christopher Marlowe as well as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. That claim reminds me of a quote attributed to a prince when presented with another volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?” Always scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Bacon! Rather than apply Occam’s Razor and consider a full range of evidence, fanatics and ideologues cling to their fantasies and gather all the evidence for their point of view they can while ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

This is a problem for higher education, because the more people who can’t think clearly but can vote, the worse off funding for higher education and noncommercial scientific research will be. It becomes a problem for librarians in those situations where we are expected to teach something about evaluating information. How do we teach that? Do we have clear guidelines for every field? Could we, or do we ever, apply them in practice, especially in the classroom? Of the five criteria in Goldman’s summary, do we ever use any but the last three in practice, the ones relying more on reputation rather than substance? And even then, how often do we rely on proxies for expertise like the place of publication or employment of an author because we have to?
I have to admit, while I sometimes do this sort of analysis on the blog, I almost never get a chance to do it with students in my capacity as a librarian. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I should seek out the opportunity, or try to create the opportunity, but I’m not sure how I’d go about it, and so far haven’t seen any examples of librarians doing that sort of thing.

Amazon Needs Some Catalogers

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Usually I like Amazon. They do a lot of things well. Delivery is fast. Customer service is usually good. I save a lot of money in shipping with the Prime account, and the Prime video  is a good supplement to Netflix. Plus, I don’t have a neighborhood bookstore for them to drive out of business, so I don’t have to feel guilty about that, either. However, considering that they started out in the book-selling business, and have been pretty good at it by all accounts, you’d think they would make it easier to find the exact book you want when you’re looking for it. Amazon sometimes has the devil of a time distinguishing between both different expressions and manifestations of the same work, especially of translations.

Here’s an example. After reading A Guide to the Good Life: the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (definitely recommended) I wanted to read Epictetus’ Discourses, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Epictetus recommends the Robin Hard translation from Everyman’s Library, i.e., this translation. So far, so good. I considered a library copy, but my library doesn’t own that translation (since ordered). But I wanted my own copy and it’s inexpensive. However, Amazon says it’s temporarily out of stock. Okay, fine, I could wait, except I don’t need to because supposedly it’s available in “other formats,” including hardcover. That’s great. I love Everyman’s Library hardbacks because they’re well made.

So I click on over to the used hardcovers, relishing the first sale doctrine and the money it’s about to save me. Had I not been paying attention, weirdbooks would have been a few dollars richer because they advertise the lowest-priced “used–very good” copy and that’s what I usually buy. Fortunately, I glanced at the picture of the book at the top of the page, and knew that whatever that green book was, it wasn’t an Everyman’s Library edition. The title says “Heritage Press” edition. If collecting old translations of classics hardbound in slipcovers is your thing, then the Heritage Press is the publisher for you. Truth be told, that green volume would probably go well with the sofa in my den, so it was tempting. Regardless, I knew at a glance that it couldn’t be the translation from 1995.

From that page, you can click on “return to product information.” I clicked on it, but returned nowhere. Instead I was taken to the product information for for the Heritage Press edition, which lists the translator as P.E. Matheson. Unless Robin Hard was using a pseudonym, or unless P.E. Matheson also translates under his porn-star name, those are probably not the same people, and thus not the same translations. And it gets worse! One of the reviews on the page of the Heritage Edition reads: “I read A. A. Long’s, “Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life” (2002, also rated five stars). Long wrote that the best translation was by Robin Hard (this edition).” But obviously we’re not on the page for that edition. There are a couple of reviewers skewering the translation and copy editing, but that’s true on the Everyman’s Library edition as well, because the reviews are identical. The same reviews are also on this edition, which is obviously a public domain reprint with no translator even listed. But they’re missing from this edition, this edition, this edition, this edition, and this edition, despite them all bearing the same generic title The Discourses of Epictetus. What gives?

I’ve found the same thing throughout the Kindle store as well, especially because for just about any classic work there are several “publishers” hoping to make a few bucks by copying text from Project Gutenberg, converting it to a .mobi file, and uploading it to Amazon, and the results are all lumped together. All of which leads me to conclude that Amazon either needs to improve their algorithms or hire some catalogers. I’d go with the latter, because technology can only take us so far without some human intervention.

Bad Google Scholar Results

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I’ve seen lots of criticism of Google Books, but I find Google Scholar to be more frustrating. Google Scholar tends to be something of a last resort for me. It’s where I go when I’ve tried everything else and hope that the keyword searching will pull up something with at least some relevance that might have been missed in standard indexes. Usually I’m disappointed. For example, I was looking for scholarly information around a controversy within the International Churches of Christ, specifically regarding a controversial letter criticizing the organization and the aftermath. Here’s the Google Scholar search.

There are eight results, only half of which might count as scholarly. The book about God and karate could be considered scholarly. Another is a 4-page article from Leaven: the Journal of Campus Ministry, which I wouldn’t consider scholarly in the way that, say, the Journal of Religion is scholarly, and it has no references, but it’s sort of scholarly. Another is a link to a PDF of “Discipling Sisters” at the University of Georgia’s institutional repository, which wasn’t working at the time. By searching their OPAC and following links, I discovered it was a 2007 dissertation. Finally, success! Except that the only mention of the guy I was looking for uses a Wikipedia article as the source of information. Failure! The only other link that is at all scholarly is to a master’s thesis in the digital commons at McMaster University. That’s scholarly, but a master’s thesis is pretty low down the food chain for scholarly secondary resources. On the other hand, no Wikipedia articles are cited. One actual book, one questionable article, and two theses. Half the search results were sort of relevant.

The other links are not. Two are links to the same article from two different websites, spirtualpornograpy.com and reveal.org, both of which are anti-ICOC websites, so there’s some obvious bias and article is definitely not scholarly. There’s another link to a lecture housed at douglasjacoby.com, which is a Christian ministry site. How did they end up there? The only thing I can think of is that they’re all in PDF format. Does Google assume that anyone who can save a document to the web in PDF format is a scholar? Finally, there is a link to a Christianity Today article, only it’s to a Russian website instead of to the Christianity Today. Not scholarly, and possibly bootleg. Three non-scholarly websites and a bootleg news article. Half the results weren’t remotely relevant.

A broader search for ICOC alone brings more results, and with more results, there is a larger number of actual scholarly sources. However, buried in those results are numerous questionable sources, like PDFs from icocinvestigation.org, whose subtitle is “exposing the International Churches of Christ.” At least their bias is obvious. There’s also gospelpreaching.com, willofthelord.com (both linking to the same non-scholarly article), starringjesus.com (which doesn’t exist anymore), and regainnetwork.org, whose “mission is to outreach, unite and support those touched or adversely affected by the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi Movement.” These might all be great websites, but there’s nothing remotely scholarly about them.

It’s like Google Scholar is deliberately putting in non– or quasischolarly material just to make us have to evaluate the information more. Instead of filtering out the nonscholarly stuff littering the Internet, which is what I thought Google Scholar was supposed to do, it clutters up the results with dubious sources based on a questionable search algorithm. The best I can figure is that if a source on the Internet is in Google Books, is in PDF format, or has any citations, Scholar seems to consider it scholarly.

On the other hand, it’s a good exercise to discuss Scholar with students who want a quick fix when searching for scholarly sources. Do a search and start evaluating the source with even the most cursory criteria for scholarship and it’s pretty easy to show what is and what is not scholarly and why. That’s typically necessary when searching the open web, but it’s the sort of thing I wish one didn’t have to do with something like Google Scholar. There are no royal roads to research.