Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

How to Chair an ALA Committee Meeting

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Although I haven’t the decades of experience of some librarians, I have recently returned from my 26th ALA Midwinter or Annual in a row and have been a member or chair of one or more committees since my first ALA attendance. I’ve been a member of committees at the ALA level and the ACRL section level, and a chair and member of committees at the RUSA division and section level. In that time, I’ve been to a lot of bad meetings and many good ones. I think I can say without too much immodesty that most of the meetings that I’ve chaired have been better than average, at least if the goal is to get the most amount of work with the least amount of time spent. And if that’s not the goal of meetings, then why have them? Below are some tips that I offer freely to anyone who will be chairing a committee meeting at ALA, especially any meeting I’ll be attending.

Remember the Chair is in Charge

The committee chair is in charge, period. Everyone should participate and have a say. Decisions should be the result of group deliberation. But if something derails the meeting, it’s the chair’s job to get it back on track, even if that means being blunt or forceful. The committee is there to get work done, and anything that takes away from that needs to be dealt with. When disorder reigns, people look to the chair to bring things back to order. Don’t let them down. The chair can keep charge of the meeting while still being polite, considerate, and even amusing. While it might seem rude to stop timewasters and squeaky wheels, it’s actually rude to everyone else not to. Members can get away with just showing up, but chairs have to work, and if you can’t do the work, don’t take on the job.

Do Everything Virtually That You Can

This might seem obvious, but the pattern of work of some librarians hasn’t progressed along with the technological capacity for virtual work. Based on my experience, the old norm was for long, multiple face to face meetings, because it was much harder to do group work at a distance. Email has modified that considerably, and tools like ALA Connect and Blackboard Collaborate finish the job. If it doesn’t need some extended discussion, then it can be handled virtually. I once took over a committee that had been meeting twice for a total of 4.5 hours over the course of a conference. I streamlined it to 1 meeting of 1.5 hours and got just as much work done, because everything that could be handled virtually was, and by the time we got face to face we had to deal only with the stuff that required a meeting.

Give the Committee a Structure

Again, it seems like an obvious point, but it’s not. Librarians tend to be nice, democratic people. They want to solicit opinions, gather viewpoints, and then consider acting at some time in the future. But as a volunteer organization, most librarians don’t want or have time to think a lot about the work of a committee until they absolutely have to. They typically won’t respond to general questions like, “tell me what you think.” Instead, don’t ask them what they think; give them something to think about. If the committee needs to come up with a plan, give the committee a plan. If it needs to review a document, review it and submit your suggested revisions. If it needs to create a document, then provide a possible outline. If the committee is between projects, don’t just ask people what the committee should do next. Give them concrete suggestions to consider along with a request for further suggestions.  Then give people the options: adopt this, critique it so that it can be improved, or ignore it and propose your own alternative. Make it clear that you have no personal investment either way. Chances are, they’ll choose the middle option, which will give the committee something detailed to work on. Sometimes it’s just adopted. And then every once in a while someone actually proposes an improved alternative. So much the better. Everyone gets a say, but people are more likely to speak if they have something in front of them to critique.

Give the Committee a Deadline

Again, because of the volunteer nature, librarians are prone to procrastination regarding committee work. So, along with the structure, provide a deadline. Something like this usually works (although fleshed out more to sound less brusque): “Here is a possible plan/revision/document that moves us along on the project we’re working on. Please adopt it, critique it, or provide an alternative by one month from today. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you approve.” That last bit is crucial. Always take their silence for assent. If they know this, those who care will respond, and those who don’t care won’t feel bad for not responding, and you won’t feel bad for ignoring them later if 6 months down the line they don’t like something. People will usually respond, often enough with good criticisms of the proposal. Those who don’t respond had their chance, and everyone knows it.

Call for Agenda Items

Agenda items should require in-person discussion and action. Calling for them includes everyone in the discussion. This is important both to be courteous of the committee members as well as to give teeth to the agenda later if you need to deal with timewasters (see below).

Create an Agenda

Regardless of whether anyone submits anything, create an agenda. If you can’t come up with any agenda items that require in-person discussion or action, then you should cancel the meeting. Avoid announcements or anything that could just as easily be handled in an email.

Send out Documentation Well in Advance 

Any documentation that’s necessary to understand the agenda items or prepare people for action should be sent out well in advance. A month is a good lead time, because it lets you wait to set the agenda, but gives people ample time to read the documentation. Announce that the documentation needs to be read in advance of the meeting. There are two typical failures here. Sometimes the chair sends out documentation at the last minute, and by last minute I really mean anytime in the week leading up to the meeting. The week before a conference is almost busier than the conference itself. If you send it out that close to the meeting, there’s a good chance it won’t be read, and it’ll be your fault. The other failure is people not reading things even if sent a month in advance. That’s too bad for them, because the meeting isn’t the place to be reading or going over background documentation. Don’t let it devolve into that. The absolute worst thing to do is to bring documentation to the meeting that no one has seen before and then ask people to read and react to it. Save that discussion for another meeting unless it’s an emergency, and really, how many ALA emergencies are there.

Start on Time

Time is increasingly precious at ALA. Also, anyone who is late to a meeting (barring some sort of emergency or alternate commitments) is being discourteous to those who showed up on time. Don’t do a further discourtesy to those people by saying, “let’s wait another ten minutes to see if more people show up.” Unless you have rules about quorums for votes, then who shows up shows up, and start on time. Since you never know why people are late, don’t draw attention to them when they come in after you’ve started. At a minimum, you could just announce, “we’re on agenda item X and the question under discussion is Y,” and then proceed as if they’d been there all along. Given the tightness of the schedule, they probably had to attend another meeting simultaneously anyway.

Stick to the Agenda

After you start, stick to the agenda. You might move things around depending on events, you might even drop something, but don’t add anything or allow for irrelevant discussions until you get through the agenda. People know the time and plan in advance, and respect them enough to stick to it. Focus, focus, focus.

Don’t Talk Too Much

By the time the meeting has started, you’ve sent out documentation well in advance, called for agenda items, sent out the completed agenda, and prepared everyone to discuss and act on the agenda items. You’ve done the bulk of your communicating. The meeting is the time for the members to communicate with each other regarding the agenda items. After introductions, move to the first agenda item and ask an appropriate leading question. Don’t give long speeches about it. Don’t try to fill up dead air if no one speaks immediately. The longer you talk, the less they will. So state the question, ask for discussion, then shut up. Your job now is to guide the group through the agenda and make sure action is taken.

Deter or Defer the Timewasters

Timewasting is relative. In this case, it’s anything that’s not on the agenda or relevant to the discussion at hand. Whether you deter or defer depends on the importance of the timewaster’s point. Committees need to get the work of the agenda done. That’s what meetings are for. Some people like to spend time whining or complaining about the organization, or its members, or something else. That’s what bars are for. Don’t confuse the two. If someone brings up an irrelevant and unimportant issue, acknowledge it but then say we have to move on and we can possibly discuss that after we’ve completed the business at hand, by which time everyone will have forgotten about it.

However, sometimes people bring up important issues that just aren’t relevant to the business at hand. They should be deferred, not deterred. For example, I recall a meeting where the discussion went something like this:

“But I thought Important but Currently Irrelevant Question A was decided in Manner B by Organization C.”

“No, it wasn’t,” reply multiple respondents.

“But I thought it was.”

And so on for several rounds, frustrating everyone. Instead of letting that kind of thing take away from meeting time, a good response might be: “No, I don’t think it was, but that’s an important question, even though it’s not directly relevant to the work we need to do right now. However, because it’s an important issue, after the meeting I will consult with Organization C to make sure what actually happened and will communicate the results to the committee. Perhaps that is something we can take up at a later time.” With this response, the agitated timewaster is recognized as a person with a worthwhile point, is provided an explanation of why that point won’t be addressed at the moment, and is promised further action to follow up and to possibly address the point in more detail later on. (And do the following up; don’t be lazy.) Recognition, explanation, promise of activity. Reasonable people will stop there.

If the timewasters persist, then it’s appropriate to be more blunt and say, “we have to move on now,” and then go to the next item on the agenda. Don’t seem angry or annoyed. Just calmly announce that it’s time to move on. The agenda has strength as a guide because everyone has been invited to contribute and everyone has approved it. Furthermore, not deviating from the agenda shows everyone else the courtesy of not wasting their time. Committee members are reluctant to stop the ramblings of timewasters. That’s okay, because it’s the committee chair’s job. The only person who might be upset will be the person who unreasonably expects to take up everyone else’s time. Everyone else will be silently thanking the chair, just as they were silently cursing the timewaster.

End on Time, or Early

Time is tight and people have other commitments. If they don’t they’ll still be tired of sitting in the same chair for an hour or two. End the meeting on time. If you run out of time, postpone the business. If you go way over time, that means that you planned badly or let things go awry during the meeting. Don’t make everyone suffer because of your errors. There’s rarely anything so crucial that it can’t wait. And if you’re focused and get done early, everyone will be pleased. It’s an example of what Edmund Burke called “the unbought grace of life.” Add a little bit of that to someone’s day and they’ll appreciate it.

An important consideration for all these points is that they show courtesy to the committee members, all of them and not just the squeaky wheels. Members of the committee who want a say in the agenda have it. Members who want to propose alternatives to the chair’s suggestions are free to do so. Everyone has a say at the meeting, and everyone has some control, but that control is regulated to ensure fairness and productivity.

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.

Sacred Texts in English Translation LibGuide

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Several months ago I was looking for a guide to reliable English translations of the sacred texts to major world religions. I didn’t find one online that I liked, so I made one and turned it into a LibGuide page: Sacred Texts in English Translation. The subpages for that page list English translations of texts relevant to Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam along with links and catalog records for my library’s collection. It’s based on an article I published this fall: “Sacred Books in English Translation.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 52:1 (Fall 2012), 18-25. The article has a bit more information about the various texts (such as the difference between Theraveda and Mahayana Buddhism) that I don’t include in the guide, but that information can be found in many places.

If any of you want to copy, use, or adapt the page for your own LibGuides or other library guides, feel free to. Also, if you have any suggestions or criticisms, please email me or leave a comment.

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.

People I Neither Hate Nor Fear

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I’ve been trying to ignore the post-election insanity, but it’s pretty hard to do if you follow the news at all. There’s a lot of craziness out there, whether it’s some loonies in all 50 states petitioning the White House for their state to secede from the United States, or the obvious hate of some of the white people mourning Romney, or people defriending Obama voters on Facebook, or a Florida man possibly committing suicide because Obama won, or a pregnant Arizona woman definitely running her husband over with their automobile because Obama won. According to the injured husband, the Arizona woman “believed her family was going to face hardship if Obama were re-elected.” Since he was hospitalized in critical condition and the wife was in jail, it turns out she was right. None of my Republican friends went batty after the election, but there are obviously some psychologically damaged people out there.

Apart from all the gibbering bile, the thing I read that most resonated with me was this blog post: Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people. The Republican apologists had one thing wrong for a lot of independent voters. They seemed to think that people voted for Obama. Technically, they did, but a lot of voters, including me, don’t necessarily vote for candidates they support so much as against candidates or parties they don’t like. I’m not sure I’ve ever voted for a candidate that I’ve completely supported. I’m not a joiner, I’ve never registered with a political party, and I find people who prefer party to country at best misguided and at worst dangerous. I’ve voted for Democrats and Republicans and even one Libertarian. This year I was tempted to vote for the Green Party just for variety, since NJ isn’t exactly a swing state.

I pretty much agree with his assessment. I have no idea what most Republican voters voted for or against, but the Republican leaders’ stances on science or war or marriage aren’t very defensible. Multiple divorcees whining about the sanctity of marriage repulse me. Also, I’m in more or less the same situation as him. I’m a straight, white male, married for almost 19 years, never divorced, raising a daughter, and while I’ll never be in the 1%, I’m solidly in the top quintile. Except for a few semesters in college, I’ve held a job steadily since I was 14. I work hard, pay my taxes, and have never received any sort of direct governmental support (other than student loans, which I’ve yet to default on). Although I do work in the non-profit sector, I don’t work for any government body. I’m exactly the sort of person that a lot of people would consider a “real” American.

And therein lies the problem for me. In addition to unpalatable stances on science or marriage, what I vote against are people who seem to hate me because I don’t hate or fear the right people or for reasons that should have nothing to do with governing the state. What I would like to see are political parties whose leaders don’t try to sway voters by placing large swaths of the population into the Other category. People who talk about “real” Americans or “traditional” Americans are counting on other people fearing or hating a lot of their fellow citizens. I can’t support that, because there are several groups of people I can’t bring myself to fear or hate that a lot of people seem to.

Non-white people

It’s been difficult to ignore American racism this year, from racially motivated protests at the University of Mississippi to the Twitter meme, “It’s called the White House for a reason,” sometimes preceded by “I’m not racist, but….” Unsurprisingly, the map of the most racist tweeters corresponds pretty closely with the red states. Growing up white in the south, I was exposed to plenty of racist sentiments from my fellow white people, who no doubt felt comfortable expressing their true selves around a pasty person like me. Since I’ve never been particularly impressed by most of the white people I’ve met in my life, that whole white supremacy thing doesn’t work for me. And since I’ve spend most of my adult life in higher education exposed to all sorts of people who aren’t like me, I’ve learned to take people as they come. If people are nice to me, I try to be nice to them, and I don’t care what color their skin is. And if they’re not nice to me, then screw ’em, I’ve got enough friends.

Homosexuals

While Rick Santorum, for example, seems obsessed with gay sex, I’ve never heard any of my numerous gay and lesbian friends and acquaintances over the years ever mention sex. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, homosexuals aren’t out to convert anyone to homosexuality, which is about as possible as praying away the gay. As for gay marriage, I really don’t see why it bothers anyone what other people do in private. In fact, I see it as downright unAmerican to try to restrict people’s liberty. Anti-gay types are usually just provincial and limited in their experiences. Since the don’t know any homosexuals, they don’t realize that the defining characteristic of homosexuals isn’t all the gay sex they’re having with each other and trying to have with straight people. It’s the same stuff that defines us all: work, hobbies, friends, family, etc. If the Republicans weren’t so obsessed with gay sex, there would be a lot more Log Cabin Republicans.

Women

Now, I don’t really think that Republican leaders hate or fear women, well, most of them anyway. Calling women sluts is a pretty good sign of misogyny and double-standards. However, even the non-haters often think women are less than full citizens, and their rights to control their own bodies cease when they become pregnant. To some, women are merely baby receptacles and their rights end where a fertilized egg begins. I know they have their reasons, even some good ones, but I just can’t get behind that. “Life begins at conception” isn’t a fact; it’s a catchphrase. And while I’ve never met anyone who was actually pro-abortion, I’ve met plenty who are definitely anti-choice. For the record, I like women, and I think they should have the same rights over their bodies as I have over mine, and that includes all the ones who turned me down for dates in high school, which in my experience is a leading cause of misogyny. One can be morally opposed to abortion without being opposed to its legality. If a belief in equal human rights gets me hated, that’s fine. As for male superiority, I feel about that like I do about white supremacism. I’ve met a lot of men in the course of my life and haven’t been all that impressed by most of them as some sort of superior beings.

Poor people

Otherwise known as “the takers.” I can’t bring myself to hate poor people, either. I’ve been poor myself at times, and grew up, if not exactly poor, then at least in tight circumstances. But I had advantages that a lot of poor people lack: two parents who set examples by working, attending safe if not spectacular schools, living in a safe neighborhood, etc. I’ve even known a lot of truly poor people, especially in the rural south. What they seemed to have in common wasn’t a desire for government handouts or an unwillingness to work hard so much as a lack of knowledge about what is possible and an environment that didn’t allow them to succeed without overcoming extreme obstacles and deprivations. A lot of people grow up in circumstances that make it highly unlikely they’ll succeed without being geniuses of some sort, while others grow up in circumstances where even their stupidest actions don’t allow them to fail. People born rich who think they’re self-made are deluded.

Immigrants

I have a confession to make. Unlike, apparently, all the immigrant-haters in the country, I’m descended from immigrants to America. Sure, they came over a few hundred years ago, but my ancestors were all immigrants, except possibly that Choctaw woman my dad claimed was his great, great grandmother. (Actually, he claimed she was Cherokee, but given that the family is from central Mississippi, if it’s true she was most likely Choctaw.) The thing I’ve noticed about immigrants to America is that they like to work. If hard-working people want to come to America and work hard, I say let ’em. As for the attempt to distinguish between “legal” and “illegal,” well, we all know laws change. If we passed a law saying all immigrants are now American citizens, then suddenly they wouldn’t be illegal. Good or bad laws don’t change the fact that people come here for work and freedom. And if immigrants want to deprive Americans of grueling jobs picking fruit or cleaning rich people’s toilets that no Americans actually want, I can live with that.

Scientists and the scientifically minded

Not only do I not hate scientists, I state approvingly that my Congressman is a rocket scientist, which is what it says on his bumper stickers. Since I don’t stand to make a ton of money peddling fossil fuels, it doesn’t bother me that scientists are concerned about the long-term sustainability and environmental damage of our reliance upon dirty energy. Since I don’t care that I’m descended from monkeys or whatever it is anti-evolutionists believe I believe, it doesn’t bother me that the scientific evidence is pretty much all in the evolution camp. Good science is good for everyone. I don’t have a problem with following the scientific consensus because I don’t have a religious or political ideology hostile to empirical evidence or reasoned analysis.

Atheists and agnostics

According to something I read recently, atheists are among the most reviled people in the country. Personally, I think atheism is a philosophically untenable position, which is why I’m an agnostic myself, but despite our philosophical differences I don’t hate the atheists, and for the haters we’re all the same anyway. The objection seems to be that it’s supposedly impossible to be a morally upright person if you don’t believe in whatever god the person judging you happens to believe in. I think this one is another example of provincialism, a limited upbringing, and a lack of experience. I’m too busy working hard, paying taxes, obeying laws, not being cruel to people, being married, and raising an almost perfect child to worry about what the haters think, though.

Liberals

I saved the most vague for last, because when I read right-wing descriptions of those darned liberals in the comments to a news article or a blog post, I can’t figure out who they’re talking about since none of the descriptions seem to have anything to do with me, and I’m pretty much a liberal. I believe in the individual right to life, liberty, and property; freedom of speech, religion, and association; equal rights; constitutional government; representative democracy; the separation of church and state; the Bill of Rights; basically, liberalism. If you don’t like those things, fine. Hate me. But you know what, liberals are concerned about government spending and the economy, too. If people quit attacking me for something they obviously don’t understand, they might get my vote occasionally.

There are probably some other groups of people I don’t hate or fear, but these are the groups I see being “othered” or demonized the most. When politicians, talk-show hosts, and whatever Sarah Palin is these days demonize people I know aren’t demons, it just makes them look crazy to me, like they’re not part of the reality-based community. If the recent election shows anything, it’s that demonizing or demeaning women, minorities, immigrants, the scientifically minded, and the poor isn’t necessarily a winning strategy, not that I expect it to stop.

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.

Vendor Provided Instruction Materials?

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Last week I spoke at the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable about “Library Research Instruction in the Humanities.” The audience was a mix of vendors, publishers, and librarians, which was a different audience than I’m used to. I was trying to tell the non-librarians in the room, or rather the people who don’t currently work in libraries, what kinds of research instruction librarians do for students in the humanities. On the same panel was someone from ProQuest who then spoke to the librarians about what materials vendors could provide to help with that instruction. Her talk mirrored my points, and I thought it went pretty well.

One thing that surprised her in our discussions (both on the phone and at the Roundtable) was that I don’t attend vendor training on products and almost never use any instruction materials vendors might provide (with the exception being that years ago I did pass out some pretty good material on Refworks when we were first promoting it). I didn’t claim to be the norm, although I might be on my campus. It’s not that there isn’t plenty to learn about various products. It’s just that I’d rather learn it on my own, because that’s how I learn best. When asked what vendors could provide, I said I wanted lots of detailed information available online for me to read, and then I’d go from there. I learn more by tinkering than training.

Also, with some exceptions, in the humanities a database is a database is a database. If you’re mainly concerned with the major subject indexes in the humanities, once you’ve mastered one database you’ve pretty much mastered them all, especially if, as we do, we get most of them from the same vendor. There are some exceptions, such as L’Annee Philologique, but these days the only time I personally use that is when I’m showing it to library school students in my humanities librarianship class, while simultaneously thinking to myself “I wish this were as intuitive as the Ebsco interface.” There are full-text primary source databases that can be tricky as well, such as the Thesaurus Linquae Graecae. Try going to that database and doing an advanced lemma search if you’re not really sure how to go about it and you’ll understand what I mean. But it’s rare that in the humanities I would encounter something of the complexity of a Bloomberg Terminal, where I’d have to know not only a good deal about finance but also about how to manipulate that very specialized interface.

There are apparently a lot of librarians who like to be trained on databases by vendors or other librarians or some combination. That’s a matter of learning style. But what about using the supporting material? The ProQuest trainer talked about all the stuff they provide, which was all new to me. And they do provide a lot of support material, including Libguides boxes that can be imported. I took a look at some of the material, including the Libguides for the Patralogia Latina and the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals. It seemed like good content to me, but would I use it?

Probably not, at least not as it stands. The question is, with solid content explaining how to use particular resources, why wouldn’t I use it, especially if it was as easy as importing into Libguides? The biggest reason is branding. I don’t object to branding as such, and have no problem recommending the ProQuest Research Library or Ebsco Academic Search Premier. They’re good products. It also makes perfect sense for ProQuest or Ebsco or whomever to want to brand everything in sight. I doubt it matters much to students, but interfaces matter to librarians, and many times I’ve chosen to get the same index through one vendor rather than another because the interface was better. I think I’m on my third vendor with the Philosopher’s Index, for example. If Ebsco provides me with a better search experience than some previous interface did, I want to know that, and I keep it in mind for future decisions.

However, when I’m doing some sort of research instruction, either with a class or individually or through online tutorials, I don’t want to brand the product. I don’t want students thinking about brands, but about tools. I don’t want students to think ProQuest or Ebsco or FirstSearch. I want them to think Digital Dissertations or the ALTA Religion database or WorldCat. I don’t want the “ProQuest Start Here” logo on any of my training materials, because I don’t want students thinking that way. I’m reminded of an ebook rep several years ago who said they were designing the product as one-stop, or at least first-stop shopping for books. We basically said our library had 7 million books and this product had 10,000, so we would never promote the product that way, even it’s a good product.

Which brings up another distinction besides my learning style and my desire to have students think about tools, not brands–the size of the collection and library staff and the librarian-student ratio. We create most of our instructional materials in-house and could probably meet individually with every student on campus if they wanted research help. We don’t have 30,000 students and I don’t have to liaise with 12 academic departments or do 40 instruction sessions a semester. (And I’m grateful for all those things!) That was pretty much true at my first job as well at a liberal arts college, except I did a lot more instruction sessions. Thus, we’re not so overwhelmed that we can’t make our own Libguide content.

In addition, we have a lot of stuff. There are smaller libraries that pretty much rely on one vendor to provide most of their database content, so in some ways it makes sense to rely on the brand as a shortcut. If everything you have is from ProQuest, that ProQuest “Start Here” is accurate. That’s also the approach Summon is taking, and I just got an email offering videos on how librarians have used Summon in instruction sessions. However, while Summon might be “web-scale discovery,” it doesn’t have everything, and except for freshmen I wouldn’t recommend it as the first or only tool to use. We have too many specialized databases and indexes for that. Plus the most important means of scholarly communication in the humanities is still the monograph, so I’d recommend starting with WorldCat anyway.

So those are my reasons for not using vendor-supplied training materials. I prefer to learn on my own, I don’t want to brand the research, I have the time to create my own material, and my library has too many specialized resources to focus on a given vendor. Am I the minority here? Are some of you using that material?