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Theories of Serial Weeding

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One of the projects I’ve set for myself this summer is weeding serials with no online equivalents from the open stacks for offsite storage. I’ve done a lot of weeding over the past decade, but usually with books. Serials present harder choices. Firestone, our main library for the humanities and social sciences, is packed, and for the last decade we’ve had to ship out an item for every item brought in. And while there might be some withdrawals, especially of duplicate items, most of the weeding is for the ReCAP facility we share with Columbia and the NYPL. It’s a grueling process, but oddly enough one of the activities in which it’s necessary to theorize about if you’re going to do it well.

For books, it’s relatively easy. I factor in the age of the book, how long (if ever) since it has circulated, and its relative importance based on my own knowledge of either the author or subject in question and the language in which it’s written. Regardless of the complexities of languages and relative importance of given authors, books are always easier to deal with. By the time they make it to ReCAP, every book is completely cataloged and identified. This isn’t always true of books in open stacks. Yesterday, for example, I ran across a book that had been bound about 50 years ago with the wrong title and author on the spine. It wasn’t in our system, and according to WorldCat only three libraries have copies. Stuff happens. Anyway, since it’s cataloged and identifiable, it can always be retrieved and if necessary returned to the main stacks. If I make a mistake sending a book our two out, I can have them sent right back if anyone complains, not that anyone does. But with serials it’s a completely different story. If I send a hundred years of Rivista di Filosofia offsite, it’s probably not coming back, because I wouldn’t have anywhere to put it.

For the purposes of weeding for offsite storage, we divide the print serial titles into two types, those with online equivalents and those without, or, in the parlance of the database we use to manage this process, “B range with SFX targets” and “B range without SFX targets,” with SFX being the popular link resolver. Last year I went through 650-odd titles “with SFX targets,” and realized that while SFX is pretty good, it’s only as good as the data it gets, and it gets data from a lot of sources, not all of which are reliable. I encountered dozens of instances where we had more online that SFX indicated, and a few where we had less. Every title had to be checked. When I do projects like this, I document everything from my rationale to individual problems. I could post my nine-page, 2000-word report documenting that process, because that would be some exciting reading.

The biggest questions for me were, did we really have this online and is it from a stable source? The first was tedious but conceptually easy to answer, the second required some thought. What is a stable source? I first went the opposite route and identified unstable sources–aggregators like ProQuest, for example. ProQuest is great, but they just license their content, and some of their online journals go away. I considered JSTOR, MUSE, and anything direct from the publisher to be relatively stable, and shipped out most of those titles. (Plea to JSTOR: digitize more non-English language titles! I have a dozen suggestions to start with if you’re interested.) I also discovered that publisher backfiles for some otherwise expensive journals were pretty cheap, so I filled in some online gaps.

Some of you who have sent your JSTOR titles out years ago (i.e., some of my colleagues) might ask what took me so long with this. Mostly it was about practical space planning. Partly it’s because I really don’t like sending serials offsite, even ones we have online. That attitude is changing slowly as the technology improves, but it’s still true that there are some serials for which the online equivalent isn’t really equivalent at all. It’s slow and clunky, and browsing the print is easier and faster. I ran across a couple of French examples recently that were so clunky I yearned to have the printed journal in my hand. But space is tight, and I have close to a thousand print-only serial titles sitting on the shelves that are potential candidates for offsite storage.

“Space is tight” has to compete with another policy to save the time of the reader. What, if possible, is the best arrangement for scholars using the collection, not easiest for librarians? Sending out titles en masse is easy for librarians, but not always best for library users. Deciding that is difficult, and required (by me at least) a title by title decision in many cases. Deciding that for print-only serials, many of which aren’t indexed anywhere or at least anywhere you’d think to look, is the toughest of the weeding decisions. You can’t go by circulation data and you can’t go by age.

Even going by whether something is indexed is questionable. Okay, the Philosopher’s Index covers the last 30 years of this 60-year-old title. If the last thirty years were online, I might send out the online and keep the print in the stacks. However, of the first 250 titles I’ve dealt with, only three had any extensive indexing, and never for the complete run of the journal. And is indexing enough? Can it be browsed? An indexed journal can be “browsed” through the index, but it’s sometimes clunky. We subscribe to the major indexes in my area from Ebsco, and they do a pretty good job, but it’s hard to replicate the experience of browsing print journals. Regardless, the bulk of the titles reviewed so far have been non-English titles that standard subject indexes haven’t covered.

Some people might think that just because it’s old or a dead serial, it can go, but that’s not true, either. Sometimes, readers really need large print runs, especially if there is no online equivalent. Cultural historians might find a lot of interesting material in looking at 40 years of Life magazine, but if their best access was through an index or offsite storage then the project becomes much more difficult. Every search, every article request takes a bit more time. Most people might just want to access a particular article, but that’s not the only way people use journals.

Access to historical periodicals is sometimes crucial for a research project. For example, while working in the stacks I ran into a scholar working with a number of English, French, and German philosophy journals from 1910-1940. He’s tracing the influence and growth of  phenomenology through Thomistic and neo-scholastic philosophers in the early twentieth century, and the only way to do it is to slog through decades of journals. These aren’t online. They’re not indexed anywhere. But they are sitting on the shelves in Firestone. He spends his days walking back and forth from the stacks to the desk he’s using to work, reading a bit, finding a trace, grabbing another journal volume, and so on. Imagine how difficult that work would be if it all had to be done by recalling journals from offsite, or worse, strictly via ILL. It would be almost impossible, and extremely time consuming. Technically, it’s possible to view materials at ReCAP, but  there would still be the issue of reduced hours and access, as well as the problems of recalling 30 years of eight different journals to sit in the reading room. (I’m not even sure if that’s doable, but I assume it is. It’s a pretty slick operation.) The thing about a large research collection is that you never know how someone will be using that collection, or what scholarly projects might happen sixty years down the line that are possible only because of your wise decisions now. And if you’re thinking “who cares about such projects,” the answer is easy. The scholars who work on them care, and that’s who the library is supposed to serve. Scholarly needs should determine the collections and their accessibility as much as possible.

So far, I’m still working out the rationale. Partly, I’m making assumptions. For example, I’m assuming that no one will serendipitously discover the existence of a historical journal relevant to their research just by browsing the stacks. If you’re looking for a journal volume from 1920, for example, you probably either know what journal you’re interested in (like the scholar mentioned above) or you have a citation found in some source. This could be used to justify sending just about everything offsite, including the non-indexed content, and if I’m still doing this in twenty years and need the space, then it just might. However, there is also an assumption about what will save the time of the reader. What about the scholars who need long runs of journals, especially multiple journals? I’ve run into two instances of that this year alone, and the history of scholarship in various fields isn’t an especially unusual topic. Using imagination and sympathy, I put myself into the place of those scholars (plus I asked some). If I were using the collection for research, what would be a minor inconvenience, and what would derail my project?

A minor inconvenience might be recalling just a few volumes from offsite storage, whereas having to recall multiple volumes of multiple serials and finding a place to store and work with them would be very difficult and time-consuming. Assuming the first, short runs (10 or fewer volumes) of dead print journals can safely go. We have a lot of those from the 19th and 20th centuries. Recalling the entire six-volume run of a Russian philosophy journal and handling it is easy. Recalling decades of one or more serials and handling them isn’t. Thus, for now, long runs stay, especially long runs of live journals. Another assumption is that long runs are some indication of the relative (perhaps historical) importance of the journal. If a journal published for seventy years, it obviously had an audience of some kind. It’s historically important, and historians might be interested. Length is merely one measure, though, since there are, for example, numerous little magazines from the Modernist era that had short runs but significant cultural importance (Blast Magazine would be a good example). But in the history of scholarship, long runs are a good sign. Look how many journals in JSTOR run back into the 19th century.

I’m still working out the kinks, and there are still exceptions. Nevertheless, trying to balance the need for space with the possibility of supporting certain kinds of research is one of the trickier practical problems I’ve encountered. The complexities are partly the result of having a lot of stuff, which is what scholars want us to have. Purely patron driven acquisitions or completely online collections are only possible if you ignore the vast majority of material published before this century and outside this country. I suspect this will change over the next 50 years, but I have no way of knowing the rate of digitization of non-American materials, the intellectual property rights that might be invoked, and the affordability of that material for American research libraries. I’m trying to save space and the time of the reader. And if it turns out I’m too cautious, some successor can happily toss out the whole collection.

Services, Stuff, and Size

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There’s an interesting post at Jenica Rogers’ Attempting Elegance blog entitled Killing Fear part 1: The Problem, in which the problem seems to be that “there’s a contradiction between these faculty expectations and emergent and clearly evident trends in information, libraries, and our future. This particular stakeholder group seems to want the very traditional services and roles that others are pointing out are now part of a legacy model.” The “faculty expectations” are that the most important role libraries play is to purchase and archive stuff, with research support, teaching support, and being gateways to information being strong but distant goals. The “clearly evident” trend is that “Information literacy is our future; anyone who’s paying attention to accrediting bodies, professional organizations, and where our professional excitement is positioned knows we staked the farm on it.” So the problem is that there’s a contradiction between how faculty view, and presumably use, libraries, and how we believe they should view and use libraries. I agree that there’s a contradiction between how faculty view libraries and how some librarians believe faculty should view libraries, but that’s a different contradiction than presented in the blog post, and it’s not a problem with reality so much as with the expectations of some librarians.

We can look at this contradiction and its alleged problem in a couple of different ways. First, there’s the issue of librarian expectations versus faculty reality. Second, there’s the differences between libraries designed to support teaching and libraries designed to support research.

For the first, believing that it’s wrong for faculty to believe that the chief, but far from only, function of libraries is to buy and archive stuff is to misunderstand the role of the library in the life of the professional researcher. By the time people have finished their PhDs and gotten jobs at colleges and universities that require research and publication for tenure, they hardly need librarians to teach them how to do research, which is why they rarely ask for research help, and almost never within their fields of expertise. They don’t need “information literacy,” they need stuff. It would be a little arrogant to claim that librarians know better than researching and publishing faculty how they should be using the library. The proof is in the publication. Librarians treating faculty as if they had the same needs as undergraduate researchers is an inappropriate strategy for understanding what libraries are for. The question is, if faculty perceptions of the library are discordant with the perceptions of librarians, why would it make sense to assume the faculty are wrong? Libraries are there to serve researchers, not the other way around. If our professional organizations and our professional excitement aren’t about supporting faculty research, then perhaps we’re excited about the wrong things.

Second, there’s a question of the size of the library and the institution it serves. In bigger libraries, the amount of stuff available is more important than in smaller libraries, and that benefits everyone. One conclusion of a study she quotes says that collection size is rapidly losing importance. Well, maybe for a lot of libraries, but certainly not for all. Rogers explains her perspective: “I freely acknowledge that my reactions to this data are certainly based in my small liberal arts college experiences.” I understand that perspective. I worked  for two years as a reference librarians and subject liaison for a small liberal arts college. Compared to a large research library, we didn’t have much stuff, so the stuff didn’t matter much. When faculty wanted really expensive material for research, we had to send them elsewhere. However, I spent several years as a student, instructor, and library GA at a huge research library, and having lots of stuff mattered. I’ve now worked for over ten years as a subject selector for a another large research library, and from that perspective I also have to say that collection size matters. Since I can’t find the information online, I assume our acquisitions budget isn’t public. [Correction: a friend sent me the link to the info at ARL (tab eexp1 of the spreadsheet), which should have been the first place I looked. Princeton spent close to $23 million in whatever year is being measured. By rough count it looks like there are about 60 libraries on the list with eight-figure acquisitions budgets in the ARL. That's a lot of money to spend.] We buy a lot of stuff, and it’s not just ebooks and ejournals. In addition to the digital collections, which probably account for most of the current scholarly journal collections, we still collect over 100,000 physical items each year.

Some might argue that all that stuff can’t possibly get used, that we’re collecting on the “just in case” not “just in time” philosophy. There are a couple of responses to that. First, if your library’s mission is purely to support the current curriculum, then “just in time” makes sense. That’s great teaching support, but it’s not great research support because there are some things that can’t be gotten “just in time.” After a certain point, they’re gone. If a library didn’t collect and archive them, you won’t get them. That might not be true in some distant future if everything is digitized, available, and affordable, but it’s true now. In the humanities and social sciences, researchers need collections. The way the current higher education system works creates a cruel irony for many faculty at smaller institutions. They’re still expected to do research, but their libraries aren’t funded accordingly. ILL and visiting larger research libraries can help mitigate that problem, but it’s still a problem that surprises some professors as they move from the R1 university where they completed their PhD to a small college.

However, and here’s the second response, even though they’re not adequately funded to support advanced research, there is a system of academic libraries to rely upon. Research libraries are never collecting just for their own institutions, which is why the stuff they buy helps serve all researchers, including ones at other research universities. The stuff my library buys helps researchers at lots of other institutions, and vice versa. My library lends a lot of items to other libraries, but the faculty and students here also request a lot of items. While services are important, so it stuff. We don’t need to ask faculty whether collections matter, because they’ve spoken in the survey quoted in the blog post. They speak in the amount of material they borrow from their library or request from other libraries. So collections might not be of central importance in your library, but they’re important to your faculty. Fortunately, collectively, we do a pretty good job of supplying them, too.

 

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Where Mobile Can’t Go

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Despite being repeatedly told so by some prominent and even not so prominent librarians, I’m still skeptical that the future is mobile, at least for academic research. This is not to say that I don’t think libraries should do what they can to make things easier for mobile users. It’s just that whatever we do, mobile use of the library and of tools designed to create the products of academe will always face severe limitations.

If you want a depressing exposition of what you can and can’t do as a college student armed only with a mobile phone, read this article: Smartphones Bring Hope, Frustration as Substitute for Computers. It details all the limitations with smartphones as computers, a situation many poorer students with either no computer or no Internet access face. And let’s face it, without Internet access, a laptop might as well be a brick when it comes to research. Sure, many of us wrote numerous college essays on computers with no Internet access (and probably even some typewriters), but that was before most of the research material was online, back with journals and indexes were in print. With a wifi-less laptop, you could still do a lot of reading and writing, but finding and getting to that reading would be a lot more difficult. Imagine trying to all your college research and writing on a smartphone.

One could also argue that “mobile” should include other devices besides mobile phones. However, some of those restrictions are also faced by other mobile devices, especially small tablet computers, which seem to me to be great for consumption of information but not so much for creation. (And please don’t comment, “you just haven’t tried one!” I’ve tried one. I have one. I know what I’m talking about.) Though I do see plenty of librarians carrying iPads around, when it comes time to do anything productive with them out comes the keyboard. Once you have the keyboard, you’re not any more mobile than you would be with a netbook, and still possibly less productive depending on what software you need to use and how long or complicated the thing is you want to create. If you don’t have the keyboard, have fun writing anything longer that a few paragraphs with that virtual keyboard. Imagine doing all of your college research and writing with nothing but a keyboard-less iPad. It would be an improvement over the phone, but not much.

While I have seen some research on the adoption of mobile technology among college students, I’ve seen nothing that shows students relying primarily on mobile phones or even tablets for their work. One article* talks about what services students  want. “These included the ability to check PC availability, search the library databases and catalogue, view their library record and reserve items on loan.” I’m sure there are many more. For my complicated library building, I’d love a library app that would let me scan a QR code embedded in the OPAC and launch a map that would provide me physical directions to the book on the shelf. But none of the great mobile services libraries can and are providing mean that the bulk of student work isn’t done on larger, more powerful, and more adaptable devices.

From what I see in the library, it will be a while before even tablets make much of a dent. While a number of my colleagues tote their iPads to meetings, I’ve yet to see a student in the library using anything other than a library computer or a personal laptop. Even the ones I see in the lobby making phone calls are usually Skyping through their laptops rather than talking on a mobile phone. I’d be surprised if they also started carrying iPads around. The librarians all have office computers to rely on, and they carry the lightweight iPad to meetings. For the students living out of their backpacks all day, their entire life is like going to a meeting, only they also have to maximize their productivity. So while libraries should do what we can to help mobile users, I still think it’s important to remember that the bulk of the real work that people are doing for research and writing can’t be done easily or well on strictly mobile devices. Academic research and writing: where mobile can’t go.

*Lorraine Paterson, Boon Low, (2011) “Student attitudes towards mobile library services for smartphones”, Library Hi Tech, Vol. 29 Iss: 3, pp.412 – 423. DOI: 10.1108/07378831111174387

Signing My Book at ALA Annual

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I’ll be signing copies of Libraries and the Enlightenment in Anaheim at the Library Juice Press booth (2769) at the Convention Center from 10-11am on Saturday, June 23.

The publisher is offering a discount on the book if you buy it before the conference and bring it to the signing.

It will be well worth your time and money because I have lovely handwriting, and the book is pretty good, too.

Petition to Require OA on Publicly Funded Research

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There’s a petition at Whitehouse.gov to require open access for the results of publicly funded research. There’s more about it at the site itself and at Confessions of a Science Librarian (which is where I first read about it).

The procedure from Confessions:

To sign the petition:

  • Have to be 13 years or older
  • Have to create an account on whitehouse.gov, https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions
  • This first requires giving a name and an email address and then clicking the validation link sent to that address
  • Click to sign the petition

I signed it. It takes about two minutes, most of which was waiting for the email confirmation of my new account. Probably the most worthwhile two minutes I’ve spent all day.

If Research Essays Were Written Like Bad News Articles

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‘Tis the season when college students across the country are handing in research essays and term papers. Having graded many hundreds of essays over the years, I think I can speak with assurance that the hardest essays to grade are the bad essays. There are a lot of bad essays, and one of the reasons might be because a lot of popular reading consists of bad news articles, which are legion. I’d like to take a look at one and compare it to bad research essays, mainly as a way of celebrating the fact that I don’t have any research essays to grade this semester.

I chose an article about consumer technology, but I could easily have chosen one about politics. Consumer tech and politics both have a huge amount of insubstantial nonsense written about them, and that’s even when you exclude the ludicrous subgenre of iPhone rumors. Whether it’s the pseudoevent (“It has been announced that the President will be making an announcement later in the day”) or the article empty of real content (“Polls tell us that if people were voting today instead of six months from now when the actual election is held, they would probably vote this way, but there’s no way to know if that’s how they’ll vote in November”), political news is generally stuff and nonsense. What passes for tech news might be even worse.

So, what would research essays look like if they were written like bad news articles? We can see an example with this article: Is There a Future for Laptops?

1) They would have provocative titles that don’t represent the content well.

You have to admit, “Is There a Future for Laptops?” is a provocative title. It’s also a stupid title, because the answer is obviously “yes.” Even the writer thinks so, despite all the dithering. In fact, that’s what makes it provocative. While the title is provocative, the article itself is almost devoid of content, opinion, or argument. The concluding paragraph begins, “Although I don’t see this scenario playing out quickly, there is a real possibility that it could become a trend.” Think about that as a conclusion. The writer has pretty much strung some words together that should make a sentence, but not actually said anything or taken any stance. Plus he probably got paid for it. Now there’s a talented hack. There is a real possibility that just about anything could become a trend, and we all know it, so there’s no use writing it.

2) They would have verbose introductions having nothing to do with the topic.

This article seems to be a bad example of the five-paragraph essay. If you’re unfamiliar with the form, Google it. Plenty of examples will show up. In a diagram, the first paragraph is represented as an inverted triangle, and the advice is to start broad and then narrow to your main thesis. Thus, a bad essay about the future of laptops might begin, “Since the dawn of time, man has wondered about the future of the laptop.” This awful article doesn’t even get points for staying on topic. The first six sentences and two paragraphs are about the writer’s obsession with food and himself. A lot of so-called news articles these days begin like personal essays. As a reader, I appreciate it, because it lets me tell immediately who’s not worth reading. If your article is about some hot button political issue and you begin by talking about what you were having for lunch when you heard about it, I can tell at a glance that you don’t have a thing to say worth saying and move on. Ditto with laptops and what you like to eat.

3) They wouldn’t have thesis statements.

What is a thesis statement? There are various definitions, but a thesis statement is basically an arguable and falsifiable claim. “There are various kinds of computers that suit different purposes” is a falsifiable claim, for example, but not an arguable one, since nobody who knew anything about computers could possible argue against it, but if there were no computers in existence it would certainly be false. If there is a main claim at all to this article, it’s that laptops might possibly sell less well in the future than they do today. Is that really arguable? Can’t we all agree that’s true? Yes, they might. Is it falsifiable? I don’t think so, because it doesn’t really make a claim about anything. They might, they might not. We get pap like, “If this speculative trend becomes a reality, the ramifications for the laptop vendors could be significant because they sell the majority of their laptops to consumers.” The writer can write that sentence and “I have a thousand-word column due and nothing to say” at the same time.

4) They wouldn’t have arguments.

If there’s some kind of claim, there might be some kind of argument, only there’s not. Instead of any sort of argument or analysis, we get stuff like this:

Many conversations also addressed the future of tablets in general and how they could impact the laptop landscape. Quite a few of the folks I spoke with have started to use Bluetooth keyboards with their tablets and they say that using a tablet/keyboard combo really changes their thinking about laptops. A lot of them only take their tablet/keyboard with them on short trips, leaving the laptop home.

I have heard this case repeated a lot lately by tablet users. Many find themselves spending more time with the tablet since they can do as much as 80 percent of their work on it and thus they are relying less and less on the laptop.

So “quite a few” folks this one person happens to have spoken to at a tech conference say something, and that’s somehow evidence about the “future of the laptop”? Even the writer knows it’s not, since he won’t just come out and say the laptop is doomed. “Many say”? “I have heard”? Sounds pretty dubious to me. I’ve heard many people say they will always need their laptops, because there are some things that just can’t be done on a tablet. If nothing else, I’ll say that many, many times, which should count as evidence for something.

The article is so vague and speculative that there’s really nothing to argue for. That should be a sign that it’s not worth writing in the first place. It fails as opinion, because there’s no argument, and it fails as news because of the pointless opening and the vague reporting. “Many conversations.” “I asked some execs.” If you’re reporting on a conference, this is about as insubstantial as it gets.

5) The sources would be vague and disconnected.

This article could be considered a research essay that “writes from sources.” It’s half report, half argument, and all bad, but there are some sources involved. Only none of those sources are named, none of their statements sufficiently analyzed, and they’re all left hanging loosely together. “One guy said this about tablets. Another guy said this about laptops. Someone else said a third thing about some other stuff. And I really like food.” The only way this filler could get any worse would be for the writer to write “very” 10-15 times before every adverb to boost the word count. It’s what writing teachers sometimes call a quotation quilt, except without the quotations or the quilt.

Fortunately, because of the heroic efforts of teachers and librarians to instill a capacity for critical writing into students, there won’t be many college research essays like that. Or at least none that I have to read.

Help Edit Library Philosophy and Practice

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The editors of the journal Library Philosophy and Practice recently put out a call to the editorial board (of which I am a member) for help editing the journal. Specifically, they “would like to identify people who would like to take on responsibility for receiving submissions, handling the peer review process, and copyediting articles that have been accepted.” The problem is that there are way more submissions than the current editors can deal with effectively. With the editors’ permission, I’m putting the call out to interested readers. If you would like to participate somehow in editing LPP, please email editor Mary Bolin [mbolin2@unl.edu] and let her know.

For those unfamiliar with the journal, I want to say a bit about it and what I like about it. According to the site, LPP “is a peer-reviewed electronic journal that publishes articles exploring the connection between library practice and the philosophy and theory behind it. These include explorations of current, past, and emerging theories of librarianship and library practice, as well as reports of successful, innovative, or experimental library procedures, methods, or projects in all areas of librarianship, set in the context of applied research.” It’s that, and something more. In addition to more philosophical or theoretical articles, it has also emerged as a journal chronicling library thought and practice on an international scale. It publishes articles on much wider range of topics than most LIS journals.

I published a couple of articles in LPP a few years ago and have third coming out in September. Most likely, in the future if I write any lengthy article on my own (as in, not by invitation), LPP will get first crack at it. Why? A couple of reasons. First, LPP doesn’t require that I pretend to know or care about LIS as a social science. While articles like those are accepted, LPP also stretches to accommodate articles about librarianship from a humanistic perspective. I don’t do surveys, charts, graphs, or statistics, because quantitative research doesn’t answer the sorts of questions I’m interested in, and that I know from experience other librarians are interested in as well. LPP has a large number of  mainstream LIS articles, but it’s also a place to publish philosophical or theoretical articles and qualitative research. Speaking as a humanistic writer, if there are librarians who want to find a place to publish peer-reviewed, indexed, non-quantitative articles, LPP is a great journal to submit to.

The other important fact is that LPP is an open access journal housed in the digital repository at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The content is freely available, permanent, archived, and fully discoverable by search engines. Basically, it’s the kind of academic journal a lot of us would like to see more of. As a librarian, I think LPP embodies the kind of publishing model that is best for the broad dissemination of ideas in the profession.

So if you want to support a wide-ranging, open access LIS journal and get some experience with editing and peer reviewing, this is a good opportunity.

The Two Cultures

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March has been really busy with work and teaching and some family business, but I have done a bit of writing. Today, the Library Journal Academic Newswire published my first contribution to the newly reorganized Peer to Peer Review column. In addition to Barbara Fister, who has been writing great stuff in that column for a long time, the new column also includes Rick Anderson, Dorothea Salo, Kevin Smith, and me writing weekly in rotation. I was pleased to be asked, but I have to say that when I saw the list of strong contributors I felt uncharacteristically daunted for a moment. Here’s the first column: The Two Cultures.