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Good Citizens and the Historic Spend

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The news and commentary surrounding the Research Works Act and the Elsevier boycott is coming faster than I can keep up, so I’ve been dipping my toes occasionally, making my way through some of the links posted at Confessions of a Science Librarian, plus a couple of things that I don’t think John has linked to yet, including this Richard Poynder interview with Alicia Wise from Elsevier (via Infodocket) and this long justification of the boycott signed by 34 prominent mathematicians (via NewAPPS).

Alicia Wise was also quoted last week in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education: “while Elsevier in the 1980s and 1990s did increase prices steeply year after year, that has stopped. ‘We got it wrong then. But we’ve improved and have become good citizens,’ she said. So much of the community ire comes from past reputation, not present practice, she said.” The problem is that “past reputation” is related to “present practice.”

They got it wrong, sort of. In my own previous summary of Elsevier’s actions, I wrote that “Pub­lish­ers know how unlikely we are to sac­ri­fice key titles. Many years ago they tried to max­i­mize their profit by rais­ing jour­nal prices at four times the rate of infla­tion. When libraries finally cracked and started cut­ting sub­scrip­tions, they got us to give up all con­trol and agree to multi-year pack­ages where they would raise the prices each year by only twice the rate of infla­tion, and we agreed to ease our pain.” They “got it wrong” because they were raising prices faster than library budgets but were leaving libraries with the option of unsubscribing from individual titles. Now they’ve “gotten it right” because they’ve removed that option.

Regardless, the response acknowledges prices increased too steeply every year for more than a decade. Price have increased less steeply since the rise of the “big deal,” but with other consequences. Nevertheless, if we assume that the previous very steep increases were solely because Elsevier could profit in a monopoly environment, then the prices libraries were left with facing the “big deals” were already exorbitant. Libraries thus began subscribing to “big deals” after paying way too much previously, but it’s not like they started paying less to Elsevier than they did in the bad old days that created Elsevier’s “past reputation.” They still pay more, but the “more” rises less.

Combine this thought with a phrase Elsevier likes, the “historic spend.” Elsevier wants libraries to continue to pay for access to their journal packages based upon what they have paid before, the “historic spend,” regardless of current needs or budgets. But the “historic spend” grew out of pricing levels that were so exploitative libraries finally had to stop subscribing to journals they needed. Add to this the fact that Elsevier doesn’t want anyone to know what anyone else is spending on Elsevier journals, going so far as to sue Washington State University to keep them from releasing an unredacted copy of their contract with Elsevier.

Just considering this and not regarding all the other charges against them, only the truly naive could believe Elsevier is a “good citizen” in the world of scholarly publishing rather than a corporation with the sole goal of maximizing its profit. As I’ve written before, I don’t think that makes them evil; it just makes them a typical corporation. However, that doesn’t mean that anyone in academia should believe their corporate spin.

A Couple of Points about the Elsevier Response

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Elsevier has briefly responded to the steadily growing petition by researchers to refuse to publish, referee, or do editorial work for Elsevier journals until they change how they operate. Last summer I speculated that a faculty boycott would be a necessary step towards more open access. That was in response to the OUP, CUP, and Sage suing Georgia State University. We might finally get to see what, if anything, will happen. 3500 or so researchers have signed the petition so far (about 40 just while I was writing this post), but it’s hard to know how many of those are actively involved in work for Elsevier journals. If the bulk of the people actually providing the research and the free labor quit doing it, what actions can Elsevier take? If they start paying for the articles and editorial work, there goes their profit.

The response so far is that business as usual is the best thing for everyone. At least that’s how I understand their response. To be fair, it’s a clever response, and you can tell that Elsevier has the money to hire intelligent and articulate people to do their marketing. I don’t want to address the entire post, but a couple of the points made especially stuck out. Here’s one quote:

Although it’s tempting to boil issues down to catch-phrases like “Publicly funded research should be free to the public,” it is much more difficult to divine the implications of such statements. I was recently told about a dynamic government-funded research center to develop flexible display technology. What portion of that research should be free: the research report to the funding agency; the peer-reviewed published article; or the new flexi-plastic tablet as the result of that publicly-funded research? How did we come to accept that the peer-reviewed article meets that obligation? I think this is an important discussion; one that needs much more thoughtful debate.

The opening rhetorical move accuses the thousands of scientists and librarians who support open access to scholarship of oversimplification. The implication is that anyone who believes that publicly funded research should be open to the public just doesn’t understand all the complexities of the issue, even if they’re the ones funding or performing the research. Instead, the people who really understand the issue are vice presidents of global marketing for large publishers with a serious investment in defending the status quo.

The use of a specific example is a good move. Draw attention away from the general debate and the accusations against Elsevier (which admittedly are very broad) and focus that attention on a specific piece of research. Of all the stuff that goes on in a research project, “how did we come to accept that the peer-reviewed article“ should be free? It’s a fair question, but not a particularly difficult one to answer. We didn’t “come to accept” that proposition. We began with that proposition. For the past 300 years scientists have been doing research with the goal of publishing and disseminating that research. The article isn’t the research, but merely the report of the results of that research, and scientists have always been interested in having the reports widely available. The petition says it’s about “right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work,” and that’s what scientists have wanted since the 17th century. Moreover, scientists expect to have access to all the published results of other scientists, regardless of whether their particular institution can afford the very high prices of most scientific journals, which is why they’ve always shared amongst themselves regardless of copyright.

This isn’t to say that scientists haven’t been implicitly responsible for the inaccessibility of much of those results. Unfortunately, while scientists have been very good at furthering science, they haven’t been so good at creating mechanisms for the wide distribution of the results of their research. The network of noncommercial scholarly journals didn’t keep pace with the output of scientific research, and enterprising publishers with commercial values at odds with scientific values emerged to fill the gap. Scientists were so intent on publishing, they didn’t think about the implications of creating a large commercial network of journals to publish research that was often publicly funded. They also haven’t thought much about the refereeing and editorial work they did for these journals, treating all scholarly journals as equal, regardless of whether they were published by a commercial firm dedicated to profit or by a noncommercial association dedicated to the dissemination of scholarship.

Which brings me to the second quote from the Elsevier response, in which my claim that international science and Elsevier have different values is implicitly challenged.

Elsevier aims to make research more accessible and discoverable while ensuring the integrity of the scientific record. We’ve always supported the principle that the public should have access to publicly funded research. We believe this can best be achieved in an environment without government mandates.

I would be puzzled by how they could support the principle that the public should have access to publicly funded research and then fight to counteract a law that tries to uphold that very principle, except that I doubt even the person who wrote that response believes it. I understand why they want an “environment without government mandates,” because those government mandates could cut into the profit they make by publishing the results of publicly funded research. But if they supported that principle, they wouldn’t have been paying members of Congress to push the Research Works Act, and if they hadn’t been supporting the Research Works Act this petition against them probably wouldn’t have happened. Of the three accusations against Elsevier, only the third–the support of SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act–is even remotely new behavior. It would be ironic indeed if a push by Elsevier to overturn a law supporting a principle they claim to uphold leads to radical change in scholarly publishing.

The Final Provocation

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Despite the overwhelming negative response to the Research Works Act from the science community, at least as indicated by the faculty blogs John DuPuis links to (what, still no bullet summary, John?), I’m not quite ready to agree with the Library Loon that the shoe is on the other foot. She opines, correctly I believe, that “Faculty don’t like to hear ‘don’t.’ Not from librarians, and not even from publishers.” One example supporting this claim is this English professor’s refusal to sign away his copyright to Oxford University Press. “I am unwilling,” he writes, “to countenance such an abridgement of my ability to make the words that I have written more freely available.” He maintains that scholarly publications are the work of the author and not the publisher.

However, even if the Research Works Act became law, it wouldn’t be telling faculty they can’t do something. It would be telling Federal agencies that they couldn’t do something, which is a different thing. From the bill text:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

As far as I can tell from the text of the bill, though, there’s no stipulation that the authors of research articles can’t post those articles on their own websites or in institutional repositories. It just says that the government can’t force them to do that as a condition of funding.

But, theoretically, the publishers supporting the Research Works Act should want to go further than stopping Federal open access mandates. In the press release opposing the NIH policy that spurred action against it, the Association of American Publishers, they make the following arguments against open access:

When an author asks a publisher to publish a research article, the author agrees to transfer copyright so the publisher will undertake the effort and expense of preparing the article for final publication. The publisher relies on holding copyright to enable it to recoup publication costs and continue to invest in scientific communication. The full benefit of copyright protections is weakened when authors are required to permit NIH to make their journal articles available to the public for free. Moreover, the mandated access policy gives publishers little or no subsequent safeguards from piracy.

Presumably, “the full benefit of copyright protections is weakened when authors” post their work online period, even on their own websites or institutional repositories. How could that not be the case? And if it is the case, then the AAP and others must also be opposed to all such “network dissemination” of research, even if the research isn’t publicly funded by a Federal agency.

Thus, theoretically, the anti-OA publishers should be opposed to the institutional open access policies implemented by Harvard and Princeton and others in the past few years. The faculty of both universities supported making their work more accessible. The faculty at Princeton voted unanimously to adopt an open access policy. It’s not a mandate, because faculty can seek waivers for particular articles, but it’s a sweeping policy that forcefully states the desire to make research publicly accessible and to not give away all rights to publishers. Granted, Harvard and Princeton are private universities, but policies like these still run afoul of the publisher’s arguments against Federal mandates. Articles published in journals from Elsevier by leading researchers will also be freely available online.

The final provocation of the faculty will come when publishers start paying for legislation making institutional open access policies and personal “networked dissemination” of one’s own research illegal. That will be the moment when faculty start hearing “don’t” from publishers, because that will be the moment that publishers try to deliberately and publicly interfere with decisions about their institutions or their research that the faculty have made themselves. When or if that time comes, we might finally see widespread revolt against the worst abuses of commercial scholarly publishers. The question is whether  in their drive for profits the offensive publishers will finally be brazen enough to alienate the community that provides all their free content.

Open Access and the Origin of the Research University

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There’s been a lot written about the Research Works Act in the past week or so. I’m too swamped right now to keep up with it all, but John Dupuis has a nice collection of links for those with a few hours to read up on the topic, though I do wish he’d prepare a bullet list summarizing all the posts for all us busy librarians. I don’t have anything new to add, but I have been thinking of the RWA in historical context. The modern research university was originally created to allow professors to research any topic they wanted, pursue the results of the research wherever they might lead, and to publish the research for the world to share. (You can read all about this development and how it led to the foundation of modern academic libraries in my forthcoming book, Libraries and the Enlightenment.)

There’s a lot of support for open access in the ideas of those who founded research universities. One of the most influential, Daniel Coit Gilman, was the first president of the Johns Hopkins University. He believed that research universities should be “devoted to the discovery and promulgation of the truth,” and that “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures–but far and wide.” Because Gilman believed in the promulgation as well as the discovery of truth, he founded not only the first German Model graduate school in America, but the JHU Press as well, which is the longest running university press in America. University  presses devoted to scholarship and not profits are the natural means of publishing academic research, but universities never adequately funded them, often insisting that they support themselves, even when the whole point was that they were publishing material that wasn’t commercially viable. (For a short history on university presses, consider Cecile M. Jagodzinski’s “The University Press in North America: a Brief History,”Journal of Scholarly Publishing, October 2008, 1-20, available from Project Muse).

One of the founding principles of the modern research university was that the results of that research should be published and widely available, but that principle was ignored over the years if not completely forgotten. If research universities and university presses had lived up to their promise, there would never have been a serials crisis or an open access movement. Were Gilman around today, he might be appalled at the way big universities have become big businesses that cut unprofitable research programs or the way that university researchers give their research results to companies that sell the results for a profit, but he would probably support open access initiatives as among the best ways to promulgate the truth he hoped universities would help discover. The creation of open access directives by the faculty at universities like Harvard and Princeton show that most professors still value the original motivation to share the results of their research widely. Though it seems dark days for the founding ideals of research universities, maybe it’s not yet too late after all, and maybe with enough provocation academic researchers will band together to make their research truly accessible to all.

A Model of a Research Consultation

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In my last post, I discussed research consultations, which seems to be one common interaction in academic libraries that is rarely addressed in library school, at least based on the standard reference textbooks. I examined the two standard texts I’m familiar with–Bopp & Smith’s Reference and Information Services and Katz’s Introduction to Reference Work–and neither addresses the research consultation as such, though Bopp & Smith mention that there are these things called research consultations. The assumption seems to be that the needs of the research consultation are covered under basic reference: conduct a reference interview, assess the information need, address it, etc. Instead, I tend to think of a research consultation as something in between a standard reference transaction and an instruction session.

Though some research consultations focus on specific information needs, most of the ones I have start from a general research topic, usually with the student wanting scholarly books and articles on that topic. Often enough, there’s a gap between the way the student thinks about the topic and the scholarly discussion about it, if indeed there’s any scholarly discussion at all. In that case, the consultation often includes discussion about how to approach a topic based on the research found. Rarely do I encounter a student who has a topic that perfectly conforms to both the research and the controlled vocabulary of an established index. So, considering a student who goes into a consultation with only a topic or even a vague research question, what should that student leave with? That question isn’t addressed in the reference textbooks, and it wasn’t addressed at all in any of the reference courses I took in library school.

In the ideal research consultation, I think students should emerge with a small number of relevant sources and a plan for how to proceed with their research after the consultation. Thus, it is partly about finding an “answer” to a question like “can you help me find sources on X?” However, it’s also a time to provide detailed instruction on how to find more sources like those, and sometimes even on how those sources might be useful depending upon the essay topic.

I’ve given a lot more thought to this since I started teaching in a library school. I wanted to teach reference skills appropriate to academic librarianship. In the arts & humanities librarianship course I’ve been teaching at the University of Illinois, I assume that ready reference in the humanities is dead and focus on research consultations. Dead might be too final a word, but the way reference has traditionally been taught–e.g., sets of ready reference questions and possible reference sources–is much less relevant to the academic library than once it was. For the research consultations, I give fairly well developed research questions based upon actual questions I or others have gotten from students and have my own students write a response in 2 pages or less as if it were an email exchange. There are obviously limitations to the assignment, such as the impossibility of conducting a reference interview, but it’s as close to a real world interaction as I could come up with, and the sort of thing I do on occasion when a face to face meeting won’t work.

In their response, my students are supposed to provide an example of each of the following (if relevant to the topic):

  • Primary sources (archives/ historical documents/ works of literature/ philosophical works, etc.)
  • Secondary sources (including “seed documents”—recent, relevant, scholarly books & articles)
  • Tertiary sources (encyclopedias, bibliographies, etc.)
  • Citations that seem worth chasing
  • Important scholars in the field (if they can be identified)
  • Databases and indexes to search
  • Useful keywords and subject headings/descriptors

Keep in mind this sort of consultation is geared towards the humanities, though I could imagine variations for students who needed help in other fields. Also, not everything on the list is appropriate for every consultation. Nevertheless, students who get to this point should be able to proceed on their own, which should be the ultimate goal of research instruction.

Because I’m curious about what other people do and because I’m always looking for ways to improve the course, I’ll end with questions. Does this seem like an appropriate model for a research consultation? Is it too ambitious? Or does it leave the student with too few documents in hand? Is there something you would do differently in an assignment that could make it mirror an actual consultation more?

Neutrality and Research Help

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog post AL Direct linked to on Dealing with Politicized Reference Questions from the relatively new blog Letters to a Young Librarian. (I hadn’t heard of the blog before, but after a quick skim of the back posts added it to my reader.) The post proposes ways to handle questions where students are “looking for sources to support a position for which there is a lack of academic support.” The advice is practical, and I’m not discounting it. It’s not necessarily what I would do myself, but reference is an art, not a science. However, a couple of statements in the post have been nagging at me since I first read them, possibly because, as happens often enough, they sound like solid librarian orthodoxy and I completely disagree with them. Let’s take them in turn.

“As a librarian, however, I do not have the luxury of telling a patron that their topic isn’t going to work. I’m there to provide objective information access….”

That does indeed sound like the orthodox librarian policy. For “objective,” I substitute the perhaps more common term “neutral.” The librarian should be neutral in providing information. After all, according to Article II of the Library Bill of Rights, “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” Librarians aren’t supposed to take sides in a debate when helping readers find information, or refuse to help find information on topics they disagree with. I agree with this, but I don’t think it means I can’t tell students their topic won’t work. I’ve told numerous students over the years their topics won’t work. If there’s no evidence supporting their thesis (or in my case usually no scholarly debate about their odd topic at all) that I can find after the most rigorous searching, then the thesis won’t work. Research essays should insert themselves into a scholarly debate at some level, and if there isn’t a scholarly debate, then there’s no essay. If there’s no scholarly debate as well as no reasoning or evidence behind a thesis, students don’t have to abandon the topic completely, but they will have to adjust their thesis so they can defend it in a scholarly research essay that demands at least a modicum of reasoning and evidence. I don’t mind telling them that because I don’t think it’s my job with students to provide objective access to information as such. It’s my job to teach them how to do academic research.

In practical terms, I might turn this into a series of question: What prompted you to want to write on this topicn? Did you read something supporting it? Hear about it somewhere? What evidence have you gathered so far? What reasons do you have for holding this position? All those questions get at the core of the problem in a constructive way. I want to know how they got to the point they’re at now, where they’re coming to the librarian asking for a few sources to support a position they arrived at without any support at all, because I want to know where they’ve gone wrong in the research process and begin there. If students are asking for sources to support an argument they want to make but don’t already have some evidence for, something has gone wrong with the research process. It’s broken. That’s not the way research works, and it’s part of my job to make that clear to students.

Which leads me to the second statement: “this post focuses on how to guide students to scholarly resources that support their argument.”

Again, this seems like something librarians should be willing to do, but it’s not. It is never my job to guide students to scholarly resources that support their argument. Not helping guide students to scholarly sources to support their arguments doesn’t mean I abandon my neutrality or my duty to aid their research. It’s just that my job is to educate them as well as guide them. The post was about politicized questions, and thus the desired objectivity was implied to be about the political position of the student’s claim. But one can be neutral about politics without being neutral about process. It doesn’t matter what claim the student wants to make an argument for–whether it’s about global warming or the symbolic meaning of tea cozies in contemporary Lithuanian poetry–scholars don’t pick a claim and then go find sources to support it. They research a general topic and go where the argument leads them, or at least they should. Hence some of my earlier questions. What led you to want to make that particular claim? If you pulled a thesis out of nowhere, then you need to back up and read more about the topic before you can possibly write a research essay.

Research (in the humanities at least, which usually includes the type of first-year writing course research essay I think is being addressed) is a recursive process. Find a general topic of interest. Read some general sources. Formulate a research question or hypothesis based on that reading. Read some more specific sources to answer the question or test the hypothesis. Narrow your topic to a thesis based on your interpretation of the available sources, then argue that thesis using whatever evidence you have to defend it and critiquing evidence for the other side. Without doing the preliminary reading on a topic, students have no reason to assume the thesis they want to argue has any merit whatsoever. Furthermore, one can’t make a good argument, especially on a “politicized” topic, without understanding both one’s own position and the opposite position. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree with a student’s thesis. The thesis itself is irrelevant. It’s about process, not substance.

Let’s consider a hypothetical topic, global warming. It could be anything, but I’ll stick with a politicized topic since I don’t know anything about tea cozy symbolism in Lithuanian poetry. Possible research questions might include: Is the earth really warming? If it is warming, is human action contributing to that warming? If the earth is warming, what will be the consequences? Will the consequences be dire? If the dire consequences predicted are based on models, how sound are the models?  If human action is contributing to that warming, to what extent? If the earth is warming, and if human action could slow or stop this warming, and if that would be a good thing, what are the economic costs now and in the future of that action? All of these are legitimate research questions to begin an essay with, and all leave plenty of room for various political interpretations. But a student in question might say to a librarian, “I want five scholarly sources for my research essay that prove global warming doesn’t exist.” (If they said they wanted five sources that proved global warming did exist, I wouldn’t address that directly, either.) Regardless of the initial approach, the response should be the same. “I can help you find numerous, recent, peer-reviewed scholarly sources on various aspects of your topic. You should then read them, evaluate their arguments, and position your own claims in relation to them.”

It doesn’t matter what the end result is, and over the years as a writing teacher and librarian I’ve guided students through the research of theses I found reprehensible. Nevertheless, it’s not important what students argue; it just matters how they argue it. It’s similar to the process of peer-review. Peer-reviewed scholarly sources can sometimes radically disagree on significant topics, but it only matters for our purposes that they meet a standard of argumentative or methodological rigor. The same should go for student research essays, and we shouldn’t feel bad about saying so when appropriate.

The Library in the Age of Digital Reproduction (for Artspace New Haven)

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Artspace New Haven has an upcoming exhibition about libraries, and a curatorial assistant there asked some library bloggers if they would like to contribute a piece of writing or a photograph for an accompanying volume of some sort, as well as blog about the exhibit. I like art and I like libraries, so I thought it was a great idea. Below is the information about the exhibit (and submission information for librarians who might want to write something), followed by my contribution, a brief essay with a couple of photographs of my personal library. Pity I won’t be in New Haven to see it.

“Library Science” at Artspace New Haven

“Artspace New Haven is a non-profit organization that presents local and national visual art, providing access, excellence, and education to the benefit of the public and the greater arts community. Its upcoming exhibition is titled Library Science, conceived by New York-based curator Rachel Gugelberger. The exhibition contemplates our personal, intellectual and physical relationships to the library, with a focus on how these interactions are changing as libraries adapt to the digital world. From its socio-cultural meaning to its architectural space and classification tools, the library informs the methodology and practice of the artists in Library Science, presenting the work of 17 artists in a variety of media including drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, painting and web-based projects. In conjunction with the exhibition at Artspace, Connecticut artists were invited to submit proposals for research residencies towards creating site and situation-specific projects at local libraries. Library Science seeks to encourage librarians to forge relationships with artists and support the creation and presentation of new artwork by providing assistance with research and access to information. The project will also reach out beyond New Haven to library patrons throughout Connecticut via an online exhibition catalogue.

In a further exploration of personal libraries, Artspace has been contacting librarians (especially those who blog!) to see if they would like to contribute anything written, or even photographs of their personal libraries or top-ten shelves (ten favorite books) and also if they could spread the word about the upcoming exhibition!

Submissions can be sent to sinclaire@artspacenh.org by November 1 (the show opens November 12.) For further information about Artspace, please see www.artspacenh.org.”

The Library in the Age of Digital Reproduction

I barely remember a time when I wasn’t an active library user. From the first grade I recall trips to the school library, where the librarian would seat us at common tables and place a number of books at the center for us to choose among. Instead of choosing one of those books, I always got permission to wander the shelves and find one on my own. Even then, my relationship to the library was active, questing, questioning, and the library was a place I enjoyed visiting. The library was the place with knowledge. It had an aura.

As I grew older the libraries grew larger and my explorations deeper. I found my high school library far too limiting, but I spent a lot of time in the city library reading about whatever passion had lately seized me. My university library was larger than that, with floors of stacks to wander. My graduate school library (the third largest academic library in the country) overwhelmed me, and was the first library that gave me a good picture of just how damn many books there were in the world and how relatively few I would ever be able to read. I spent countless hours in all of those libraries, back in the day when in-depth information about anything was hard to come by without going to the library building.

Even though I’m now a librarian, most of my library use has been as something else—an avid reader, a student, a scholar, a curious human being. People who know libraries but not librarians probably think librarianship is mostly concerned with reading books (or else shelving them, something else I don’t do). When I tell people I’m a librarian, they often say something like, “oh, you must love to read,” or maybe, “you must love books.” Check, and check, but neither has much to do with my daily job. The majority of my work consists of sitting in front of a computer interacting with some form of information technology. The rest of the time is usually spent showing students how to do the same. So my work as a librarian often removes me from direct contact with books, but also with direct contact with the library as place. I could do most of my work from anywhere with an Internet connection. For many people, work no longer describes a place (i.e., I’m “going to work”) but an activity. I might “go to work” in an office or sitting at my dining table. I work for, but not always in, a library. When I’m working, I don’t use the library as a place, the way non-librarians do.

Evolving information technology has altered my relationship to libraries, including the one I now work for. No matter what I’m doing, whether it’s reading for pleasure or doing research for a project, a lot of what I need will be online, available only through my library’s website perhaps, but requiring no visit to the library. Even if it does require a visit to the library stacks, I discover the book through an online catalog. Thus, while my relationship to the library as information provider is as strong as ever, my relationship to the library as a physical place to get information has dwindled. If it weren’t for the library funding and organizing access to information, my life would be significantly poorer, because contrary to popular belief, not everything is free online. But the digital resources of a well funded academic library are significant.

My relationship to the library has changed in this age of digital reproduction, much like our relationship to art that Walter Benjamin examined. In his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,”*  Benjamin argued that technological reproducibility eliminates the “aura” of a unique work of art.

One might focus these aspects of the artwork in the concept of the aura, and go on to say: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura. This process is symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualized that which is reproduced.

The aura of a work of art has rarely existed for books. While there are unique books and editions, books for the most part are made to be reproduced, and the reproduction doesn’t detract from them at all. Books need a mass existence.

Printed books physically embody that mass existence. Everyone reading a printed book interacts with the same layout and font.  Digital books are very different objects. Escaping the physical instantiation in a mechanically reproducible printed book means the end of the mass experience of the book as we have known it. Though they will no doubt evolve, current ebook readers remove us from the mass experience of the codex, leaving only the mass experience of the text, but that text is now experienced in numerous different ways, sometimes by the same person. I can read the “same” book in print, on my Kindle, or on the Kindle app on my laptop or my smartphone. Ebooks increase the variety of reading by allowing us to read on different devices, but they also homogenize reading by reformatting every book to the same font and text size. Ebooks dilute the mass experience of reading a book, making it too fluid and changeable to have even a minimal aura.

But our relationship to libraries is, or was, more like our relationship to a work of art. Each individual library has an aura in the Benjaminian sense. It is unique, it is embedded in a tradition, and our relationship to the space is different from that in other libraries. While they all have books, their books are different and in different arrangements. But just as text has escaped the printed book, it has escaped the physical library. Text wants to be free. What was always a relationship with a unique space is now just as often an interaction with a standardized online interface.

My relationship to my personal library (pictured at the end of the essay) is necessarily more intimate than that to a public or academic library, but even it has changed. I check out lots of books from libraries, but other libraries can’t (yet) supply me with instant access to every book with which I have developed a lasting relationship. My library also tells a story about my life. It grounds me in times and places. When using my library, I not only recall a passage or reread a story. I also recollect and reminisce. For most of my library of 2,000 or so volumes, I can recall where I got the book, when I read it, and what else I was reading at the time. In the days before the Internet revolutionized the used book trade, I remember the days of searching through the jumbled shelves of dusty bookshops and the joyful serendipity of finding a book that I had been wanting, or better yet one that I didn’t realize how much I wanted until I saw it. Benjamin also wrote that, “in even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence—and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.” My library has a unique existence in a particular place. It has an aura, and it bears the mark of my history.

Technology has altered my relationship to my personal library as well, though. For example, Shakespeare is a favorite author of mine, but good editions of Shakespeare tend to be huge, cumbersome folio editions like the Riverside and the Oxford Shakespeares, or else pricey multi-volume editions like the Arden. Many years ago at a library book sale I rejoiced to find a complete set of the old Yale edition of Shakespeare at a bargain price, not that gigantic reprint sometimes found in the bargain section of chain bookstores, but the French blue octavo editions of each play. They were aging, but still tight copies, easy to hold in a single hand or place in a jacket pocket, and they’re on the shelves behind me as I write this. On many occasions I would pick up a favorite play and reread passages or acts or even the entire play. I still do this, but I’m more likely to read the play on my Kindle or my smartphone. It’s just so much more convenient, and for classics cheaper even than my bargain Yale edition. I’ve got hundreds of Kindle ebooks, most of which I paid little or nothing for (often free downloads of individual works in the public domain from Amazon or munseys.com). For contested works like those of Shakespeare, the cheap digital editions don’t have the best texts, or any notes, but they’re good enough for casual reading. I still prefer printed books, especially if I’m referring to many of them simultaneously or reading for long periods, but I also like the convenience of having not just one volume but a large library in my pocket at all times.

Nevertheless, my library, the Library, has expanded beyond any given space or physical collection.  The Library can no longer be confined to one place, or a few places. Libraries can no longer have the sacred aura they once had for a lot of us, because the Library has expanded beyond the building downtown or the bookshelves in my home. Whereas a trip to the library was once always a unique interaction, the equivalent trip to my laptop isn’t. The variety of a printed collection is homogenized into a web browser. The Library is that big building I work in, those shelves along my living room wall, that laptop with access to millions of articles, and that smartphone with a lifetime of casual reading hiding inside an ebook app. Not everything is or will be digitized, meaning the Library will be a hybrid for a long time to come. The Library in the age of digital reproduction is still a place, but now it’s also everyplace. The library has lost its uniqueness, but has achieved ubiquity. For avid readers, it seems a small price to pay.

*For forty years the essay was known to English-speaking readers as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but the 2008 Harvard edition has a better translation of the German “Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” and allows me to distinguish between things mechanically reproduced—e.g., printed books—and things technologically reproducible—e.g., digital books.

My Library in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

My Library in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Rest of My Library in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Rest of My Library in the Age of Digital Reproduction

 

Tools, not Trends

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I’ve been writing lately about “keeping up.” An important part of keeping up is knowing what tools and technologies you absolutely need to use, and what you can ignore for the time being. In academic libraries, it means knowing the tools that students really want and use versus the tools that trendwatching librarians claim they should be wanting and using. You can see some of of those tools in the Educause Center for Applied Research National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology 2011. It’s worth skimming to get an idea of what technology students use and how they use it. Those who believe that students avidly adopt every information technology and social media trend–and who tell us this is essential for librarians to do as well–might get a few surprises.

For example, “one consistent finding is that e-mail remains a potent form of communication, both widely and frequently used—and the tool students most wish instructors would use more often” (5). That’s right, boring old email. Students possibly want the instructors to use it more often because they think instructors don’t communicate enough, but they’re not begging their instructors to tweet them. Also, “Virtually all students (99 percent) use e-mail—and virtually all (97 percent) use it at least a few times a week and most students (75 percent) use it several times a day” (13). If 99% of the students are using email and it remains a potent form of communication, then I think it’s safe to say that librarians shouldn’t feel outdated using it in lieu of some trendier but significantly less adopted social media tool. Though it’s easy to let it get out of control, email is still a remarkably useful communication tool, and one of the best for reflective, in-depth exchanges among people. That’s why 99% of college students use it.

Of course, email wasn’t the only popular medium of communication. “93 percent of students use text messaging, 90 percent use Facebook, and 81 percent use instant messaging” (13). So on the off chance your library hasn’t yet adopted some sort of IM reference service (perhaps with SMS integrated), you’re definitely behind the times, but that doesn’t mean that the more traditional email still isn’t viable and necessary. The study found that while students used Facebook a lot, the desire to interact on Facebook with instructors, and thus presumably librarians, wasn’t great. Ninety percent of students use Facebook, but only “Twelve percent of students say Facebook is ‘extremely valuable’ to their academic success—and one in four students (25 percent) consider it ‘valuable’ or ‘extremely valuable.’ On the other hand, more than half of students (53 percent) think its academic value is limited or nonexistent” (26). If your library has a Facebook page, great. It’s an easy way to make announcements for students who like their information that way, but it’s obviously not an academic necessity.

As for the most hyped social media tool of the moment, Twitter, the student use is much lower. 37% of students use Twitter, but only 11% are “frequent users” (14). Not that those 11% aren’t a vocal minority. The study quotes a “student voice”: “My generation is a social networking generation. We devote most of our time to Tweeting and or reading tweets, it would help if we could communicate with our professors in this way because most of us aren’t able to contact them during their office hours” (26). I don’t know quite what to make of this. If the students are devoting “most of their time to Tweeting and or reading tweets,” then their scholastic success is far from assured anyway. Maybe the student is one of those business majors who don’t work very hard. I can understand an instructor communicating with students through Twitter easily enough if the instructor is already a Twitter user. Set up an account for questions, problems, links to assignments, news relevant to the course topic, etc. But for the rest, that’s maybe a lot of work for the 11% of frequent Twitter users. Instructors also have higher priorities than following all their students’ tweets as well.

For iPad lovers, there might be another surprise in the study: most students aren’t iPad lovers. They prefer more conventional technology. According to the study, “A majority of students own a laptop (87 percent), a USB thumb drive (70 percent), an iPod (62 percent), a smartphone (55 percent), a digital camera (55 percent), and a webcam (55 percent)….Fewer students (11 percent) own a netbook or an iPad (8 percent) or another tablet (2 percent)” (7). I now have a study confirming what I see around me on campus. Most of the time I see students in the library, they’re reading books or articles they printed out on paper (I’ve yet to encounter a student who prefers reading a scholarly book or article any way but on paper), or hunched over a laptop writing papers or crunching numbers. For scholars having to do research and write essays, the affordable laptop computer is a truly revolutionary technology in numerous ways. It changes everything from the discovery of information to its creation. Tablet computers are great for lots of things, but they’re not as useful as laptops for research and writing.

Sometimes the conclusions of the study seem to surprise the writers themselves. We are told that, “students are still attached to ‘standard issue’ technology. A majority of students own a printer (81 percent), a DVD player (75 percent), a stationary gaming device (66 percent), an HDTV (56 percent), and a desktop computer (53 percent)” (9). Anyway, the “still attached” sounds to me like surprise. I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised that students are “still attached” to really useful technologies. Possibly it’s a contrast between the expectations of the authors and the banal reality of students’ real technology use. Even the gaming is conventional. I don’t play a lot of videogames, but I have done enough to know that they’re usually more enjoyable on my big HDTV than on my smartphone.

As with the surprise, the study recommendations sometimes push against the grain of the findings. On a list of generally excellent technology recommendations, they recommend that instructors “Make more and better use of technologies that students value—and that are easily integrated into learning experiences in the shared environments in higher education (e.g., tablets, smartphones, student response systems or clickers) )” (32). However, since we know that only 10% of the students own an iPad or other tablet, compared to 87% with a laptop, why would instructors use valuable time to “make more and better uses” of tablets? Would that be a good use of their time? I just can’t see why tablet computers keep making an appearance when so far they’re not widely adopted among students, except that someone really wants students to use iPads.

Of the technologies seen by students as “extremely valuable” for academic success, here’s a breakdown: Laptop 81%, WiFi 78%, Smartphone 33%, iPad 24% (16). It reflects the reality that a laptop with an Internet connection is a powerful academic tool. An iPad is more of an academic luxury, and with college costing what it does these days, it’s a luxury that most students do without. Everything else pales in comparison. It could just be that students don’t realize how useful these tools are, but that’s for a different blog post. What seems to be the case now is that chasing technology trends isn’t something college students are very interested in, which makes them very different from some of the infotech-savvy librarians interacting with them, including to a great extent me.

The first recommendation of the study is excellent advice: “Investigate your students’ technology needs and preferences and create an action plan to better integrate technology into courses and help students access institutional and academic information from their many and diverse devices and platforms” (32). When dealing with technology, that’s the important thing to remember. What are your students actually using, compared to what some pundit claims they’re using? We’ve all read numerous hyperbolic and poorly supported manifestos about digital natives and millennials and such, but we should ignore them in favor of what we experience on the ground working with students. Recently, I had an interaction with a very bright 20-year-old Princeton student who asked me to slow down on something I was showing her because she “wasn’t good with computers.” Out of curiosity, I asked her if she was familiar with the phrase “digital native.” She wasn’t.

Responsibility and Professional Development

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A lot of you probably saw this article from today’s Inside Higher Education about “the layoffs of eight library staff members” to make “way for the creation of new positions that ensure the library will stay on top of current, digital trends” at the University of San Diego, and the response from some faculty critics who argue the layoffs are an “affront to the Roman Catholic teachings of the university,” which they very well might be. For those who think that Catholic social thought is all about abortion and stem cells, all I can say is that you’re woefully underinformed. (This websiteis a good starting place to find out more.) Several themes within the tradition of Catholic social teaching could be used to criticize laying off competent employees rather than trying to retrain them or find other work they could do. The dignity of the human person, the necessity of economic justice, the responsibilities humans have to each other: combined these would form the foundation of such criticism. But that’s not really the point of this post.

I wasn’t going to write about this until I read this interesting post by the Library Loon. It argues that situations like the one at the University of San Diego could become more common, especially given the library profession’s “lackadaisical approach to lifelong learning and re-credentialing,” because “in a zero-sum hiring environment, the only way to open hiring lines and budget for needed technology-intensive expertise is to cut someone else’s job.” It concludes that “If libraries are to continue to be humane employers…they must insist upon and intervene in professional development before matters with any individual employee reach such a perilous pass. Not to do so is not kind or humane, nor is it healthy for librarians or library workforces.” Points well taken, and I agree. In general, academic libraries are humane employers, especially compared to employers outside academia, and the professional development and well being of their staffs is a professional obligation. I might cavil that it’s not clear that any of the employees laid off at San Diego were actually professional librarians, though it’s clear at least three of them were not, but I believe that libraries also have an obligation to “cultivate their bottom,” and not just because it’s a nice thing to do.

And of course many libraries do provide support for professional development. Many if not most academic librarians seem to have at least some money and time they could devote to professional development, though not all libraries do, a point made clear by Dances With Books‘ comment on the Library Loon’s post. While I completely agree that libraries should provide time and resources to allow for the professional development of their staffs, I’m not sure I completely agree on the aggressive approach that would “insist upon and intervene in professional matters.” Let’s just say I’m undecided, but that waiting for such insistence and intervention is professional suicide. In the immortal words of Prince, “in this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld. In this life, you’re on your own.” And if you’re not really, just to be safe, you should assume you are.

As painful as it may sound to some, ultimately librarians have to be responsible for their own professional development. Eventually, if they don’t keep learning and adapting, if they keep their jobs “for years or decades without going to a single conference, attending a single continuing-education class, or demonstrating new learning of any sort on the job,” and especially if they do so while being given opportunities that they choose not to take advantage of, then they really don’t deserve professional jobs because they’re not behaving like professionals. For motivated learners, there’s plenty they can do as long as they have a computer, an Internet connection, and some time. A library can help, too The learning material is out there, as attested in this blog post from Hack Library School about a book on DIY credentialing.

Just about any skill or knowledge you need to learn to adapt to a changing work environment you can learn for free. Conferences, classes, and workshops certainly help, but if there’s no support for them it’s still possible to keep learning. That learning might be harder and slower for a lot of people, but it’s definitely possible. Usually it’s just a question of motivation and knowing where to look. As an example, consider that “23 things” project going on a few years ago, where librarians would have workshops on using various social media and then go experiment with them. I’m sure the “23 things” workshops were useful for a lot of people, but every one of those 23 things could have been learned without talking to anyone or participating in any workshops. You want to learn how to write computer code, how to design websites, or how to get the most out of a piece of useful software, the resources are out there. They’re also out there if you want to learn a foreign language, or more about assessment or statistics. Books, websites, blogs, wikis, knowledgeable friends and colleagues–they’re out there. Even formal courses are sometimes free or very cheap.

All it takes is motivation and time, and if you’re motivated you find the time. I would be willing to make a small wager (small because I am after all a librarian) that most of the librarians presenting workshops and such at conferences learned most of what they present on their own. It’s not enough to wait for someone to tell you what you need to be learning. If you don’t want to grow stale, you have to go find out what you should be learning, and then you have to learn it. It’s also not enough to sit through a workshop or presentation and think that means you now know how to do something new. You know how to do something new when you can actually do it, and that means practice and effort. When Ptolemy asked Euripides for an easy way to learn mathematics, Euripidies replied that there was no royal road to geometry. There’s also no royal road to professional development. While libraries should support that professional development to the fullest extent possible, librarians have to take the ultimate responsibility and do the work themselves. It could be that no one will tell them what to do until it’s too late.