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How Libraries Work: a Request

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Two months away, and my first post back is going to be a request, since I’m too swamped to write up my hostile thoughts on the Authors’ Guild irritating lawsuit against Michigan et al. For the curious, I did manage to finish my book on libraries and the Enlightenment, and I’m working on editorial revision suggestions at the moment. So no blogging, but I’ve done a bunch of writing in the last two months and I’ll be plugging it like crazy once it’s published.

To the request. Last spring, our library conducted a wide-ranging survey of faculty and students that got a lot of feedback. As I was reading through the hundreds of written comments, I kept thinking that the frustrations some scholars have might be lessened if they knew more about scholarly publishing in general and how research libraries work. I don’t mean how scholars use them, but what goes on in the background, all the messy stuff we often try to hide from library users behind a seamless facade.

It might still annoy someone that X journal isn’t available online for the last year or Y ebook is the only version we have when they really want the print or that what they want is in offsite storage and they have to wait a day to get it, but at least they’d understand why. As a departmental liaison, I especially want people to understand that it’s not my fault, or the library’s fault, and that the best intentioned librarians still have to work within a system they don’t control. I also want to present this as information, not advocacy, so I won’t be talking up open access or pillorying publishers.

As a consequence, I’m putting together a presentation for grad students and faculty about how libraries work, especially large research libraries, and the initial group I pitched it to seemed interested. Here’s a list of topics I’ve thought about so far, loosely divided into content and process/policy:

  • Scholarly information universe: it’s complicated
  • Copyright
  • Approval plans/ firm orders
  • Ebooks
  • Ejournals/ Big Package
  • Archives/ Gray literature/ Unusual stuff
  • Library Cooperation: PTS/BD/ILL/ARL/CRL (PTS and BD are local concerns)
  • Digital Preservation: Hathi Trust/ LOCKSS/ Portico

  • How we get stuff
  • What stuff we get
  • Why we get, or don’t get, stuff
  • Why that stuff is, or is not, online
  • Why some stuff is harder to get than other stuff
  • Why the stuff is, or is not, in the main library building
  • Why the stuff is organized like it is

I’m hoping to fit that all together into a somewhat coherent 30-45 minutes. I have two requests, since I know a lot of my readers probably have similar issues.

1) have any of you done similar presentations for faculty or students, and if so could you share what you covered with me?

And 2) do any of you have other suggestions for general information about how libraries work that I’m missing, but that might be useful for scholars to know?

You can leave a comment, or just email me at rbivens@princeton.edu. I would appreciate any advice people have to offer.

Thanks in advance.

A Bit on Information Literacy

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I’ve been wanting to respond to a well argued postat Sense and Reference that was sort of a response to a post I wrote in response to another post there. Unfortunately, between the teaching and working on the book and my day job, time for blogging seems to evaporate. I”m not sure if this is a response exactly. It’s more a post inspired by a response I might have made if I were more focused at the moment. I’d said something about the librarian’s role in information literacy, implying that I thought they had a relatively small direct role, and I was criticized for that. My response here will be brief, but I’m hoping to outline a few thoughts. Do librarians play a role in information literacy? I absolutely think they do. Do they play a large direct role? I’m not so sure.

First, let’s refresh ourselves about what information literacy is. The phrase has developed various meanings over the past couple of decades, but I’ll go with the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards, since those are widely used. The document is explicit that information literacy is the responsibility of librarians and faculty. The standards are also both broad and deep. I’ll list the basic standards in case you don’t have them all memorized:

  1. The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
  2. The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
  3. The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.
  4. The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
  5. The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.

Standards 1 and 2 are, in my opinion, the ones that librarians would typically have the most direct effect on, though often in relatively limited circumstances. Many of us in academic libraries routinely teach students how to find the kind of information they need for research, and give them suggestions on how to evaluate it which they may or may not apply.

I’m not sure who besides the student could be responsible for Standard 3, and I have no idea how that would be assessed in any broad way. What’s clear from the research I’ve read about is that most people have trouble incorporating new information into their knowledge base and value system, especially if it conflicts with values they already hold. But a rigorous liberal education should help people get past that barrier. Regardless, Standard 3 is really quite expansive, and unless they’re actually teaching an information literacy class (or a writing class, where I’ve worked on this with students), librarians typically aren’t working with students to evaluate information in any depth or look at sources critically. This requires that both the librarian and the student have read the work.  I could be mistaken, though. How many librarians out there discuss any books or articles in depth with students and help them evaluate them critically? Pointing out how to tell primary from secondary sources or scholarly from popular articles is one thing, or doing a quick website evaluation to show that some website is biased or unauthoritative, but those are relatively superficial compared to reading and discussing works with students, and it’s the reading and discussion that teaches students how to evaluate well and signals whether something has been comprehended, much less evaluated. I’ll grant it can happen, and just last week I helped a student working on an essay by discussing the course reading with him and helping him generate ideas, but that’s unusual.

Standard 4 is also goes beyond the level of student involvement that most librarians have. Accomplishing a specific purpose can be interpreted many ways, but the specific purpose of most students I see is writing a research essay of some kind. I help them find sources, discuss the different kinds of sources their are and what they could do for an essay, but I don’t work with them in the way that instructors would, and I’m usually not in a position to know if they’ve accomplished their task well. When I teach writing, I do work with students to help them write research essays, which often involves seeing how students use their sources in their writing and teaching them how to use the sources more appropriately. That’s work I could do as a librarian, but it’s not work I normally do. Librarians who teach courses that have research components have that sort of direct role, but other than that how many do? In addition, the Standard implies that this can be done repeatedly, for any project. Given the relatively limited time most librarians have directly with students, how much would our direct teaching enable students to reach that point without significantly more guidance than we typically give?

Standard 5 is a complete washout, because no one but librarians and publishers seems to care much how information is acquired as long as it’s easily acquired. I’ve written before arguing that the legal and economic barriers to scholarly information are incompatible with scholarly values. For example, if scholars want access to articles their library can’t get for some reason, they’ll go through informal and technically illegal channels to get those articles. Standard 5 says the information literate person uses information ethically and legally, but I think there are cases where scholarly ethics and copyright law conflict. The very willingness of otherwise ethical scholars to defy certain copyright laws supports my point. Though I wouldn’t advocate piracy of copyrighted information to anyone, this standard contains more than just “literacy.” It’s an ethical injunction as much as anything, and for the other standards to be met, sometimes it might be necessary to acquire something illegally. Finding information and incorporating it into your worldview to accomplish a task isn’t the same as using the information legally.

Information literacy as conceived by the ACRL standards is very broad, and covers in its entirety the sort of critical thinking and higher order cognitive skills we would expect to be developed over years of higher education. Standards 3 and 4 especially call for those skills. Let’s say that a student who has completed a traditional college degree has managed to acquire those skills, and is in fact information literate in the broad sense. It’s not just that they know a bit more about research or can complete a specific task, but they’re informationally fully formed. How did they get that way? They got this way by studying, writing, researching, and being guided by professors and librarians numerous times. They took class after class, developed some minimal knowledge of a field of study, and produced work that was judged and commented upon for years.

And what direct effect did librarians teaching information literacy have on that? Over four years of college, how much time does the typical student spend with a librarian? Answering this would, I think, give us some idea. The answer would have to vary by institution, I know, but I’m aiming for a ball park figure. And for the purposes here, I want to exclude those schools that have a formal information literacy class of several weeks taught by librarians. I could still work them into my argument, but that practice is
far from universal. I can answer it easily for myself. I went through college getting very good grades, doing good work, and becoming as information literate as my peers, and I received absolutely no research instruction from a librarian. I never took a class with bibliographic instruction, and never asked a reference librarian for help. Granted, I had spent a lot of time in libraries over the years, but I probably hadn’t had any instruction in how to use one to find information since I was in grade school. Once you know how to use a library catalog, the rest you can develop on your own.  I suspect my experience isn’t that atypical. There are probably lots of students who either never talk to a librarian, or never talk to one after their freshman writing class. However, even assuming that students see their librarians, how much time? Two hours a year? Maybe they have one instruction session and one consultation. Does two hours a year seem too small for an average? Four hours a year?

I’m talking about most students. There will always be a few library travelers, who not only spend a lot of time in the library, but who frequently ask questions of the librarians. I’d be very surprised if even the heavily dependent students spent more than a few hours a year with librarians, though. However, it could just be that my experience is limited, and that your library has students who receive direct information literacy related help on a weekly basis for years at a time. One could make the argument that the more dependent upon librarian help one is, the less information literate one is. This could also differ by discipline, because while humanists are heavy library users, they tend not to seek as much direct help from librarians as students in other fields might. My argument might be blinded by the disciplines I work in.

But for most students, how much time? For the sake of argument, let’s say three hours per year, which I suspect is excessive. That’s twelve hours over the course of a four year degree. How many hours is the average college class? That varies a lot by university as well, depending on quarter systems and other factors. A lot of places have fifteen week semesters, where the students meet for 2.5 hours per week. That’s 37.5 hours. And let’s say over the course of four years, students take 28 classes, four per semester. That gives our average student 1050 hours in the classroom. If these figures are reasonable, our average student has interacted with librarians approximately 1.1% as often as she has interacted with faculty in the classroom. Those figures don’t count the time the student has spent working on their papers and projects, and the students don’t really become educated without that work. One study I read about suggested that college students now study about fourteen hours a week. That might be smaller than in the past, but it’s still 1,680 hours over four years. That puts the time with librarians delivering some sort of information literacy instruction at about 4/10s of 1% of the time students spend learning in college. Even if our number of hours assumed for time with librarians or librarian prepared guides were doubled or trebled, it’s still a very small part, and rarely would librarians have been able to go too far towards directly helping students acquire the higher order critical thinking skills necessary to be information literate.

A given librarian might spend hours every week teaching people how to be more information literate, but that doesn’t mean that any students spend hours a week with librarians learning from them. The time spent with librarians compared to time spent in class and studying is always going to be small, and because of that it seems pretentious to think that librarians direct effect on information literacy teaching is going to be significant, especially if we think of information literacy as a higher order ability in the sense that Standard 3 and 4 imply. It’s not just a question of whether students can meet these standards for a given project, but repeatedly over the course of a lifetime. How could it be otherwise? I would ask even librarians. When you were in school, did a significant amount of your education come directly from librarians?

However, this doesn’t mean that libraries and librarians aren’t essential to a good liberal education and to helping students become information literate. Using the library and directly using librarians isn’t the same thing. I know students who are heavy library users who rarely talk to librarians. I was one of those myself. They’re using the collections the library provides, the interfaces and access tools librarians create, the study spaces the library builds. Information literacy instruction itself can be very indirect, but effective. Students might never read the bits of a research guide about how to find or evaluate information, but just going to one repeatedly they can get a sense of where you might go to find articles on a given topic.

One could also argue that the effect of teaching some information literacy skills is disproportional to the time spent teaching them. Students might spend only four hours with a librarian in four years, but those four hours lay some groundwork for what the students will eventually learn.  Done right and timed well, even minimal amounts of research instruction can give students a good foundation to build upon. That’s what I happen to believe my own effect to be on any given student. What I do matters, is useful and helpful and essential for many students, but I don’t kid myself that my direct role as a teaching librarian has an overwhelming impact on students learning to become information literate. I give them a shove in the right direction, but the learning is mostly done elsewhere. Putting this into perspective, I also don’t think a given professor teaching semester-long courses has a huge effect on the overall education of most students.

If we conceive of information literacy narrowly and focused on one project, which seems to be the way its often assessed, then librarian instruction might have a strong direct effect on information literacy attainment. But if we consider information literacy broadly and deeply, the overall impact of librarians directly teaching information literacy skills is relatively small at most universities. Learning to become information literate in the broadest sense is little different from liberal education without the subject matter (as a commenter mentioned on my last blog post). It’s a cumulative effect of the efforts of many people directly and indirectly influencing the lives of students, and the students themselves working and practicing those skills. Librarians play an important direct role, and an extensive indirect role, and we seem to be the primary professionals discussing or evaluating information literacy, but our role is still limited.

Other Writing

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I haven’t written much here lately, partly because of some personal business and the holidays and ALA, and partly because I’ve been writing other things. A couple of pieces have come out in the past couple weeks, if you’re curious.

Libraries in Pursuit of the Enlightenment, from the Library Journal Academic Newswire, discusses copyright reform and the possibilities of a national digital public library. It’s the sort of thing I would write here, but was asked to write for the Library Journal.

A review in portal: Libraries and the Academy of The Social Transcript: Uncovering Library Philosophy. (The link is to Project Muse.) The Social Transcript is an interesting, if somewhat flawed, book on library philosophy that’s worth dipping into. Also something I’d probably write here if I’d encountered the book on my own.

I also spent quite a bit of December writing an article for RUSQ on philosophy collection development, but I think that doesn’t come out until the late spring or summer.

And then there’s the book and all. So I haven’t been a total slacker. Just a blog-slacker.

Ethics of Innovation symposium [updated]

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Most of you probably already know about this, but next Wednesday, November 17th is an OCLC/ Library Journal sponsored online symposium. It’s free to register:

The Ethics of Innovation: Navigating Privacy, Policy, and Service Issues
November 17, 2010 1-3pm (ET)
http://www.oclc.org/innovation/

Liza Barry-Kessler and Gary Price are the main speakers. I’ll be giving a brief introduction and moderating and participating in the non-Twitter discussions regarding the talks. I think it’ll be interesting. Some of the possible topics I’ve wanted to blog about, but decided to wait until after the symposium was over so I don’t spoil anything.

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Update: I thought the Ethics of Innovation Symposium went well yesterday. I was also surprised at how many people have to work together to make something like that go smoothly. I gave an introduction, but between that and listening to the speakers and fielding questions and paying attention to the back chat channel, it was like real work for two hours. I think the slides will be released at some point, but if anyone’s curious I pasted my introduction below. The conversation between Gary and Liza was great and ranged widely over all sorts of ethical issues, some of which get very little discussion. Anyway, it was fun.
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The title of today’s symposium–The ethics of innovation: navigating privacy, policy, and service issues–covers a potentially huge number of topics that show what complicated institutions libraries have become in the past couple of decades. What once was a self-contained building with only physical items has become a crossroads where librarians, library users, vendors, technology, ethics, and the law constantly interact. The “library” has spread beyond the walls of any building and technological innovation has created a more complicated world of online content and online interactions with the library at one crossroads. In the process, the ethical and legal issues we must consider have multiplied considerably. Where once we had buildings and physical stuff, we now have in addition distributed online networks originating outside the library and intersecting in various ways in an environment now almost metaphorically or even anachronistically called a “library.”

As an example of how traditional relationships have changed, consider the issues around licensing an online journal instead of owning a print copy. With print copies, libraries could do more or less what they wanted once they had the copy. They could copy an article and give it to another library or put it on reserve and no one would be the wiser. Now that we license journals, vendors have more power over content and more knowledge of its use. Can we “lend” a copy of an online article? Maybe. If we subscribe to journals, can’t students use the articles for course readings? It makes technological and pedagogical sense to do so, but Georgia State University was recently sued by several publishers who claimed that doing so was a violation of copyright. Access is easier and the legal and ethical landscape more complicated than ever.

Or think about the situation with ebooks. We have the technology to allow multiple library users to read the same book at the same time, but the technology is legally hampered. Libraries have built up over the past few decades an elaborate national network for sharing books and making them as widely available as possible, and this network of resource sharing has been one of our valuable services to the public, but that network and the access it allows may disappear if ebooks take over printed books but the current digital rights remain. Here technology, copyright, and library ethics could come together somewhat violently and libraries are the crossroads where they’ll meet.

Librarians like information to be free, and it’s easier than ever for us to distribute much of our library content, which makes it harder sometimes to comply with the legal restrictions. How often are we tempted to send articles to friends from subscription databases they aren’t allowed to access? Or how often DO we send them?  Recently there was an online discussion about how independent scholars or scholars with poorly funded libraries get articles they need from friends with better library access. This is done routinely, with no ethical qualms whatsoever. It’s the ethic of scholars and librarians to share information. But is this practice ethically any different from distributing digital copies of movies or music? Legally it’s NO different, but we can imagine scholars who would balk at DVD piracy thinking nothing of emailing someone an article from ProQuest. Here we have an area where the illegal seems ethical to many people.

Librarians feel an ethical obligation to make information as freely available as possible, but this obligation goes along with other ethical and legal obligations. As we create new services, we approach gray areas. Witness the recent brouhaha over a librarian writing publicly that her library lends Netflix videos to library users even though it technically violates Netflix’s user agreement. She more or less said it was okay because Netflix wasn’t asking her to stop yet. To some librarians, the ethical obligation to provide what people want–in this case DVDs–overrides the legal obligation to abide by user agreement, or even with the traditional library ethic to loan only what we’ve purchased or specifically licensed. What’s the proper response in situations like these? Do we ignore the law? Rationalize it away? Adhere to its strictest letter? Advocate for different agreements? Regardless, we have to know about the issues involved before we can make decisions.

Libraries could also preserve the content they purchased, which is a service to future generations, but even preservation becomes more difficult and raises ethical and legal questions that didn’t matter before. Before we just kept the physical stuff, maybe in cold storage. Now things are more complicated. Vendors and publishers license content, but they also sign agreements for long-term preservation and storage with organizations like LOCKSS, Portico, and the Hathi Trust. Thus, information is preserved, but not necessarily accessible until the occurrence of some rather unlikely trigger events. This is undoubtedly good for preservation purposes, but it has created another complex legal and ethical situation around libraries and digital information.

Librarians like information to be free, but not about library users. Librarians traditionally want to protect user privacy, and they also want to provide goods and services over the Internet. But the Internet is the place privacy goes to die. While libraries are routinely deleting patron borrowing records to prevent the FBI from snooping in them, librarians and library users are also using online services where they willingly give up some privacy to get better service. Amazon makes useful recommendations for purchases because Amazon knows what we buy. Facebook and Twitter are useful or fun because we put so much information about ourselves before the public. Foursquare or various geolocation applications work because people are willing to say not only what they think, but show where they’re located.

As libraries adapt social media for their purposes, what happens to patron privacy in the traditional sense? OPACs could function as reader’s advisory, but only if we start collecting and storing user data. Encouraging online interaction with the library encourages a reduction in privacy. And library users can’t become the “mayor” of our library without disclosing a lot about themselves. How do we adapt our traditional ethical principles to a new world where, contrary to the old Peter Steiner cartoon, on the Internet everybody DOES know you’re a dog, and what doghouse you happen to be sleeping in at that moment? And in the midst of social media that can erode privacy, do we ourselves know how to navigate popular programs and applications to protect our own privacy, and to educate library users to protect their privacy if they desire? Are we aware of how much data is being gathered about us every time we search the Internet or interact with a website? Can we explain that to library users? Do we have policies on what information we collect and why?

The amount of information we have to keep track of regarding all these issues can be overwhelming. Do we know all the user agreements and vendor licenses and copyright laws that apply to the resources and services libraries provide? Are we aware of our own ethical principles and how they apply to various technological and legal situations we find ourselves faced with? Do we know what Facebook or Google does with our data, and can we explain that to library users if necessary? Do we know enough to navigate the world of social media and recommend or explain services and what they do with our information? How can we educate ourselves and our users about all the technological, legal, and ethical issues involved in using libraries these days?

Upcoming Stuff

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I probably won’t be blogging much this summer, but wanted to check in so people woudn’t think I’d died or something.

The main reason I won’t be writing much here is that I’m planning to spend most of my writing time on a book instead, or at least part of a book. I’ll be researching and writing a book entitled Libraries and the Enlightenment for the Library Juice Press. The announcement is here. I’ve been toying with this topic since last summer, and it took a good discussion with Rory Litwin and a contract to spur me to action. I’m hoping to capture a lot of my thoughts on politics and the importance of academic and public libraries. The book will be part history, part philosophy, and all wholesome goodness, so if I do manage to finish I hope you will all buy multiple copies. It’s a pity Oprah’s television show will be over by the time it comes out, because I think this would right up her alley. 

I’ll still be somewhat busy with conferences, including a few days in DC for ALA Annual. Though I always seem to be busy at ALA, this will probably be my least busy ALA for the next three years, since I somehow managed to win two different elections this spring. I’m going to be a Director-at-Large for RUSA and the Vice-Chair/ Chair Elect for RUSA CODES.

I will also be attending the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver in August. I attended the first one of these two years ago and enjoyed it. If you’re going, you’ll have the rare opportunity to see me speak at a conference, and the unprecedented opportunity to see me speak twice. I’m participating in a debate/discussion with Joe Janes over the ethics and efficacy of what I call "fake reference," the secret shopper type assignments where library school students go out to chat reference services and ask questions that may or not be genuine. Our hope is for a bit of us and a lot of audience participation. 

I was also invited to be one of the four plenary speakers at Ref Ren. For some reason, I thought of the great Lady Bracknell  line from The Importance of Being Earnest: To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Steven Bell and I and a couple of others will be speaking about the "user experience." I haven’t decided what I’m going to say yet, but I’m going back and forth between satire and seriousness. Maybe I’ll try both.

 Busy times ahead, but the CV is sure looking good. So if you don’t see much of me here, you’ll know why. Have a good summer.

Knowledge and Reference Effectiveness

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A couple of people were very quick to criticize this statement in my last post: “But it seems to me that for advanced research a librarian who knows nothing about the topic itself won’t be very useful.” The offending implication is that reference librarians who aren’t subject specialists or who don’t have advanced degrees can’t do good reference work, which isn’t the case, with the related and quite good point that a big part of reference work is negotiating with the patron, not just having a lot of knowledge about a subject.

Points happily granted.

So I want to revise my question. It might help to make a few distinctions. First, by area, I mean one of the general large divisions in academia: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, etc. These could also perhaps be called cultures, following C.P. Snow. These areas, or cultures, have different methods, objects of study, assumptions, foundations, and shared knowledge.

By field, I mean a subdivision within that area: English, Sociology, Physics, etc. I also want to distinguish between queries which have a definite answer–no matter how complex–and more substantial help providing guidance on a research project, work that is necessarily more open-ended. For the sake of argument, let’s call these reference help and research help, even though in practice we know they’re mingled and we’re fine just calling them reference. I make this distinction because there is an obvious difference between answering a question and providing guidance in a research project. I was and am talking about research help.

My revised question is: When providing advanced research help, do you think reference librarians in general (or you in particular) are equally effective in both 1) areas or fields they know well, and 2) areas and fields about which they know nothing?

A follow-up question could be, how do you know, given that often you don’t know what you don’t know? (For example, I know that I know almost nothing about engineering, but I know there is such a field and roughly what it does. However, there must be gobs of subjects that I’m not even aware of, and thus I don’t even know which of them I don’t know about.) This question could probably be studied empirically with various reference assessment tools, but I’ll leave that job for the tenure-track librarians.

For my own part, I think I’m less effective the further I get from my area of greatest knowledge–the humanities. In fact, there are areas, such as engineering, about which I know so little that I wouldn’t know if I were providing effective research help at all. My knowledge about the field is so limited that I don’t see how I could possibly feel confident. The assumptions, approaches, methods, etc. are so foreign to my education that I have no subjective way of measuring my effectiveness. In fact, the further one gets from the humanities, the less it even makes sense to talk about research help. Natural scientists don’t do much of their research in the library, but in the lab. For the humanist, the library is the lab.

This changes as the areas move closer to the humanities. There are fields within the social sciences I’ve studied from interest or enjoyment, especially political science and sociology. The field of law is similar for me. In those fields, I’ve learned enough to have some idea of what I don’t know. I understand my strengths and weaknesses, and thus I have some way of knowing how effective my research help can be. I know when it’s time to refer to someone with greater knowledge. Political theory and qualitative sociology? I’ll give it a whirl and feel comfortable. Economic data? Referral time.

For the humanities, there is hardly a field about which I don’t have at least some minimal knowledge. For this area, I will include literature, history, philosophy, and religion. I know a lot about these fields because I’ve been reading widely–if not always deeply–for over twenty years. And to be clear, I’m not talking about credentials and degrees, but just knowledge. One of my commenters rightly pointed out that a PhD and no communication skills a bad reference librarian makes. I agree. I don’t have a PhD. I just read a lot of books and am intensely curious about the subjects. In the humanities, I know very well my strengths and weaknesses. I have a very good idea about what I don’t know.

This plays out when I work with students. The farther the research project is from my main area of knowledge, the less comfortable I am that my work is effective. I’m not even sure how I’d know. And what’s more, the work I can do in other areas takes longer for me and for the patron, and I still can’t guarantee my effectiveness, because I don’t know enough about the fields to know what I’m missing.

Thus, my own answer to the question is, No. I don’t think reference librarians are equally effective for research help in areas they know well and areas about which they know nothing. Also, outside of an independent assessment, I don’t see how anyone could possibly know if they were, given what they don’t know they don’t know.

And if the answer generally is, No, then that lends support to my previous speculations that both background knowledge and swotting up for a research consultation make one’s research help more effective. The more I know about a topic, about its context, its background, the better I am able to offer guidance, discuss alternative research strategies, and recommend sources. Perhaps I am the exception, though. Perhaps most other librarians believe they are equally effective in all areas. I tend to think that if one is really equally effective in every area, then it really means one is ineffective in every area, but I could be wrong.

Notes on the Ithaka Faculty Survey

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I’ve been wanting to write on the Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009. but I’m not sure I have time for more than selective comments This is the latest in the series of surveys that seemed designed to show how irrelevant librarians are becoming because while faculty used to see the library as a gateway to information, they now find the buyer role much more important. Thus, we librarians need to do something.

Here’s the first main finding:

1) "Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years, and as a result the academic library is increasingly being disintermediated from the discovery process, risking irrelevance in one of its core functional areas;" 

The phrase "risking irrelevance" makes this sound bad, but I can’t see where this is a problem. The details aren’t any more fear-inducing. "As Figure 1 illustrates, the library‟s physical edifice and catalog have declined steadily as starting points for research. The research process is no longer likely to begin with a face-to-face consultation with a librarian, a visit to the library‟s special collections service points, or a search of the online library catalog. Rather, faculty most often turn to network-level services, including both general purpose search engines and services targeted specifically to academia" (5).

Why would we think that more faculty talking to librarians first or coming to the library building first would be good for anyone, including librarians? If the faculty came to librarians at all before, it was because resources were hard to find. Disintermediation is exactly what we should want. According to Figure 1, almost half of faculty begin their research with a subject-specific database, which is almost certainly paid for by the library, linked to the library’s website to enable easy access, and either providing the full text of resources the library subscribes to online or citations of books and articles the library has in print or will have to get through Interlibrary Loan. Thus, the library is still the "gateway" to resources far more often than the leading questions of the Ithaka survey would indicate.

About a third now begin with a "general purpose search engine" (gee, I wonder which one), which would merely duplicate the function of a subject specific index for anything behind a pay wall, plus link out to lots of free resources that we don’t even have to purchase and catalog. This is a good thing. I don’t mind at all being disintermediated for faculty beginning research. Academic librarians have worked very hard to make sure that the resources we have are easily available. Disintermediation has been our goal, and it looks like we’ve been very successful. Far from signalling some problem, this indicates to me a job well done by librarians. This is the decline of the "gateway" function of the library, but as Figure 7 shows, 59% of respondents still find the gateway function very important.

According to the survey results, faculty now find the "buyer" function more important than ever, with 90% of them indicating this function as very important. This is made to sound dire as well. "While the buyer role has always been important to the most faculty members, it is now by far the most important of the three" (9). Ah. By far! Here I might be betraying a research library bias, but the buyer role has always been by far the most important thing libraries do for faculty, and in a world of pay walls that’s going to be the case for a very long time. This becomes even more important when we consider faculty with research interests that can’t be satisfied by English-language books and journals.

This also seems a good thing. It at least means there is a function the library performs that 90% of faculty see as very important. Any thoughtful faculty member, if presented with a discussion rather than very focused questions, could easily see that "buyer" is never a category by itself, but often necessarily includes "gateway" as well. For a lot of material, someone has to select it, buy it, make it accessible somehow. "Buying" is more than just handing over money, unless you’re buying from Elsevier, in which case it is.

In addition to the "buyer" and "gateway" roles, there are also "teaching support" and "research support" to give us something to worry about. 

"A roughly equal share of faculty members rate these roles as very important, and the importance of both of these roles is rated at almost exactly the same level as the library‟s gateway function [about 60%]. Neither receives anything close to the universally high importance expressed about the library‟s buyer role. In the absence of tracking data, it is impossible to speculate whether recent library investment in these roles has positively affected their value to faculty members or if they will over time come to be among the most widely valued roles of the library (although analyses stratified by years in the field or faculty rank do not show noteworthy patterns)" (10).

In this case, the statements themselves are worded to get low responses.

The library supports and facilitates my teaching activities (which we refer to as “teaching support”)

“The library provides active support that helps to increase the productivity of my research and scholarship” (which we refer to as “research support”)

Given the questions, I’m surprised even 60% acknowledged them as very important. How do libraries directly support and facilitate teaching? Library instruction. Course reserves. Research guides. Sometimes classroom space. Nothing else is coming to mind at the moment. There’s lots of indirect support, of course. Reference. Collection development. From a professor’s perspective, teaching doesn’t have much to do with the library. 

And notice the way the second statement is phrased: "active support." What does "active support" mean? I buy materials requested by faculty, answer their library questions, solve their library problems. Are those too reactive? Maybe I could do their research for them and provided bulleted summaries of articles for them. No, that would still be reactive since they’d have to tell me what they’re working on. Maybe if I pestered them in their offices until they gave me some work to do, that would be active. Or, could it be that these particular questions are too vaguely worded to drive any generally applicable change? 

Some might read the Ithaka report as a sign that librarians are doing something wrong or that they’re "risking irrelevance." Instead, I think the report shows we’re doing something right, and at worst that something is too hidden from outside eyes. Providing the librarians are actually doing something, it shouldn’t be too difficult to show the usefulness of that work if pressed. I can read this as a call to engage faculty more and explain our work, but even without that, the librarians aren’t irrelevant.

There is the argument that irrelevance is in the eye of the beholder, and that if faculty view the library or librarians as irrelevant, then they are irrelevant. But most faculty don’t see the library as irrelevant. The 90% that see the buying function as very important tells us that, and the buying function entails a lot of other functions.

Also, the faculty are not the only users of the library, and depending on the library might not even be the primary users. More students than faculty use the library, and they have different needs. If some of the same questions were asked of them, the answers might change. Do librarians provide active support for their research? Research instruction, online and in-person reference, consultations, workshops, outreach–
many of the public services of academic libraries are designed to provide active research support to students. When it comes to their own research, the faculty are the experts. Many of us work to educate students to the point they don’t need us anymore, not to make ourselves more necessary. This would seem foolish from a professional perspective if there weren’t always new groups of students. Our job is to make ourselves unnecessary in any direct way.’

Because it’s focused on faculty, the Ithaka survey ignores a distinction I’ve notice in my own work and read from others. There is split between the major library needs of faculty and students. Faculty need libraries to buy materials for their research. Students need support services to teach them to do research and find the materials the library already has. This report confirms for me this statement about the faculty. Do they think the buyer function is overwhelmingly important? Of course they do! And so do I. That’s mostly what faculty need, and I’m mostly in a position to fulfill that need. 

We need a parallel survey of students, but that’s more problematic. To get a fair comparison, it couldn’t be all college students, because that category is an incoherent mess these days. It would have to be students actually working on research projects. Ask them about the gateway function and research support of the library, and I think the responses would be more favorable than those of the faculty. What little I’ve seen on the topic indicates that after starting with Google and Wikipedia (which is pretty much what I do these days), students working on research papers visit the library website next. We are their gateway to scholarly information, and when they don’t need us as a gateway anymore, we’re still their buyer.

 I wanted to comment on another part of the report, but I’ll spare you now and save it for a post on pooching the serials crisis.

 

LibGuides for Library School

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I just had one of those epiphanies in which I realized I hadn’t written for a while. I’ve been meaning to, but have been preoccupied with teaching "Introduction to Sources and Services in the Arts and Humanities" online for the UIUC library school. It’s not so much the time commitment, which is considerably less than teaching a writing seminar. It’s more that I’ve been thinking about the course, but writing about it while teaching seems inappropriate. For the curious, it’s going okay so far. I’ve had a few successes and definitely made a few mistakes.

One success was choosing to have my students prepare a library research guide for an upper-level undergraduate course in the humanities. I knew I wanted to use something like LibGuides, and when talking about it with a colleague he suggested contacting Springshare, which turned out to be a great idea. I wrote Springshare asking if they could set up a domain for my course so that the students could learn to use LibGuides, and pointed out the mutual benefits (they get some free publicity and maybe get to hook students on LibGuides, and my students get to use the product that has become something of a standard in academic libraries in the last few years). Slaven Zivkovic from Springshare responded quickly and warmly to my request, and as far as I know my library school course is the first one to have its own LibGuides domain.

I’ve written favorably about LibGuides a couple of times before when it was a newer product. My enthusiasm for it hasn’t changed. It’s no surprise to me why so many libraries have subscribed, since LibGuides delivers a great product at a great price. Also, as my experience shows, Springshare is responsive to the library community in very positive ways. I don’t normally plug products on the blog, and at this point I’m not sure LibGuides really needs plugging, but I do want to give a hearty public thanks to Slaven and the folks at LibGuides both for making a very useful product and for letting my students use it.

Ten Years In

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After I wrote a draft of this post, I discovered the blog made the LIS News 10 Librarian Blogs to Read in 2010, which is a nice way to start the year. Now I suppose I’ll have to keep blogging for 2010.

It seems to be the season for reminiscing, and somehow I can’t resist. We may or may not have begun a new decade, but I’m beginning a new professional decade. I graduated from library school ten years ago this month and began my first professional library job a few days later. Since I started this job eight years ago this month, the majority of my professional career has been at Princeton. The good news, for me anyway, is that I’m fine with that. The environment here can be challenging in ways both good and bad, and it’s certainly not a warm and fuzzy place to work, but so far it’s been a place where self-direction and autonomy are supported and even necessary for any success, and where the standards of library support for teaching and learning are very high. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a place with a lot of intelligent and knowledgeable librarians, which is also good.

I’ve been trying to think about what’s changed in the profession in the ten years I’ve been a librarian, and I’m having trouble coming up with many things. This might sound silly, but for me librarianship hasn’t changed as dramatically as it has for some more senior librarians. I am unable to recall with relieved nostalgia the days of card catalogs, or DIALOG, or CD-ROMs as dominant forms of information retrieval. By the time I was a librarian the Web was booming, Google already existed, and Wikipedia wasn’t far behind. The days of librarians as authoritative controllers of access to information were already gone, and I never went through the Kubler-Ross relationship with Google and Wikipedia so many librarians did. I also came along when constant change in information technology was the norm rather than the exception, so I’ve never had to adapt to that fact. If I weren’t comfortable with constant learning and frequent change, I wouldn’t have become a librarian ten years ago.

The search for scholarly information hasn’t changed much, though, at least in the humanities. There’s more full-text online, but that was an obvious trend ten years ago. In the humanities, scholars are still reading books and chasing footnotes, despite the new media surrounding us. I read occasionally about libraries without printed books, but it’s pretty clear that no serious college or research library will be print-bookless for a long time. And as long as the DRM and preservation problems are solved, it won’t bother me a bit if we go completely digital.  For me the book is just a storage for information. If something improves on the extremely useful codex, then so much the better.

The biggest change I’ve seen is with communication, and that one will be obvious to anyone reading a blog. If nothing else, my cell phone is a lot smaller and does a lot more than it did ten years ago. It’s a lot easier to communicate with other professionals than it was ten years ago. Blogs were just taking off, but by the time I began this blog two and a half years ago, the system was entrenched and easy to use. Add in all the other social media that librarians use, and it’s clear anyone can communicate with anyone else in the style they prefer. Blogs especially have given librarians the opportunity to discuss serious issues in a thorough but informal manner, and they’ve allowed humanistic librarians like me an outlet for professional writing that was mostly missing from the previous library literature.

They’ve also given us unprecedented public insight into the profession Ten or twelve years ago I would have loved a blog or three that gave me a feel for what actual academic librarians were thinking about. reading, and doing, the issues they thought important, something that was deeper and more personal than either the scholarly literature or the approved commentary in the major library publications. I’ve tried to do that with this blog. Despite the general title, it’s usually pretty clear that I’m not speaking for all academic librarians, or posing as the voice of the profession, but instead presenting what this librarian in this job with these issues and interests thinks about. Combined with a few other blogs from other academic librarians doing various library jobs, the curious can get a much better idea of what we do than was possible when I started library school.

The blog has changed me as well. I started it as an experiment. I’d been using library blogs as a way to understand the profession a little better. I was aware of their possibilities, not just as outlets for professional communication, but for professional growth. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I’d have anything to say worth saying, or whether anybody would bother reading, both of which were essential if I was to continue. I learn a lot and think through ideas by writing this blog, but if nobody ever read I’d just write in my journal and not bother anyone. Following E.M. Forster’s line, "how do I know what I think until I see what I say," it turns out I had nascent thoughts on the profession I wasn’t aware of.

Another change for me is that I have the freedom and security to do the professional development I want rather than what is supposedly good for my career. I don’t need tenure, so if I want to write, I just write here, and if I feel like writing an article I’ll write an article. I’ve been giving more public talks and workshops the last few years, but always things I want to do or that I learn from, not because I think I need exposure or another line on the CV.  I enjoy taking on projects now that I’ll learn something from, because I have the freedom to say no if I feel like it. I don’t do things because they’ll "keep my options open." I try to do them because they’re worth doing. I have more freedom to follow my intellectual passions and professional interests than I ever thought I would have. I’ve also learned that I only enjoy or value success if I succeed on my own terms.

When i started out, the path to success everyone seemed to agree on was hierarchical and managerial. That’s how librarians supposedly advanced. Many librarians still think like this. "First you do this, then you become head of that, then you move on to become AUL of this other thing, and finally director!" I was told something like that by a professor in library school, a professor who of course followed no such path for himself. Now I know that’s not the only path to success, and certainly not the only path to professional fulfillment. Rather than aiming for some supposedly worthwhile administrative slot, I think the goal should be mastery. Instead of thinking about the future, I want to do things well in the present and see where those things lead. For all I know, the end goal will be the same, but the path is much more interesting and less predictable.

So that’s me ten years into the profession. I wanted to end with some big lessons I’ve learned, but I’m not sure I can list any that are general to other people. I’m still learning my way, and that because librarianship is an art as much as a science, the virtue to develop is phronesis, or practical wisdom, and that takes a lifetime of practice. Ten years isn’t a lot of time when there’s so much to learn.

Creationists Come to College

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Most of you might already have heard about the creationist edition of The Origin of Species that an evangelical Christian ministry will be passing out on college campuses in November. I first read about it here. U.S. News has a pair of dueling blog posts from the creationist introduction writer Ray Comfort and the director for the National Center for Science Education.

I’ll have to reserve judgment completely until I actually see a copy, but based on Comfort’s blog post and the Kirk Cameron video promoting this, the creationist introduction by Ray Comfort sounds like it’s going to be a whirlwind of fallacious reasoning.

Supposedly it claims that Charles Darwin was a racist and didn’t like women. That’s a standard ad hominem attack that’s a fallacy if it is used to try to discredit the person’s views on other things. Darwin’s personal views aren’t relevant to the theory of evolution.  If a Christian minister has sex with children or murders someone in cold blood, does that mean God doesn’t exist?

Or there’s the Hitler connection. Every muddled thinker likes to bring Hitler into an argument if they can. Far from clinching an argument, it usually just shows the irrationality of the person making it. From Comfort’s blog post: "It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf showing Hitler’s undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that…." There’s no need to go on. His point is that he’ll use the evidence to support his criticism but ignore that it also undermines his own position, a very convenient double standard. Confirmation bias or suppressed evidence might be the fallacy.

There’s further suppression of evidence. This one was spotted by the Salon article. "[Cameron] then narrows in for the killer point: ‘A recent study revealed that in the top 50 universities in our country, in the fields of psychology and biology, 61 percent of the professors described themselves as atheist or agnostic.”\’ True, though he fails to point out that the same study found only 23.4 percent of college professors overall declare themselves atheist or agnostic. College: still pretty damn godly!" I wish I’d written that.

One major fallacy is the false dichotomy of this creationist’s claims. "An entire generation is being brainwashed by atheistic evolution without even hearing the alternative," Cameron intones in the video, as if there were only these two options, and in exactly the form he proposes [my italics]. Since this is a church that apparently believes that Catholics aren’t Christians, astounding ignorance about the world’s possibilities shouldn’t surprise me. One very likely possibility is that the students have in fact heard "the" alternative and found it wanting.

Resting on this false dichotomy, the whole project is based on the belief that debunking The Origin of Species somehow proves that creationism is true. This fallacy is known as argumentum ad ignorantiam, the argument that because some proposition hasn’t been proven, then some other contradictory proposition is therefore true. But Darwin and the creationists could both be wrong. Some creationists act as if The Origin of Species is the "Bible" of evolutionists, but that’s projecting the way fundamentalists think onto the way scientists think.

I’m not at all surprised by this lack of reasoning ability. I took a look at the Living Waters Ministry site. They produce something called the Evidence Bible that seems to be devoid of any actual evidence. Fundamentalists of any religion are always guilty of the begging the question. They assume as true what needs to be proven for their argument to proceed. Begging the question is the essential fundamentalist fallacy.  A standard example of question begging offered in classes is this circular argument: "The Bible is true because God says it is. God exists because the Bible says He does."

Living Waters directly addresses this charge: "The ‘circular reasoning’ argument is absurd. That’s like saying you can’t prove that the President lives in the White House by looking into  the White House. It is looking into the White House that will provide the necessary proof." Actually, it’s not at all like saying that. There is plenty of observable evidence that the President lives in the White House, evidence open to public inspection and verification. Merely looking into the White House wouldn’t prove that the person in there was the President or was actually living there. Trying to rebut the charge of question begging with another fallacy–the false analogy–doesn’t get very far. (The answers regarding Bible versions are downright dissembling. If you get that far, pay attention to the weasel word versions

Cameron seems very concerned that students come to college as creationists and leave as "atheists." I doubt that most students who come to college as theists of some sort leave as atheists. Is there any proof of this? This is like those claims that the students carefully indoctrinated into right-wing doctrines by their parents are then indoctrinated into left-wing doctrines by their leftist professors. That one is merely assumed but not proven as well. The creationist one in particular is guilty of the fallacy of persuasive definition, that is, of defining something in a way that seems neutral but is in fact very loaded. Anyone who doesn’t subscribe to this particular intellectually limited version of Christianity is somehow not a Christian. Belief in the Nicene Creed isn’t sufficient for the this particular cult.

Persuasive definitions are a fondness of Comfort’s, it seems. His U.S. News post says "The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything—which is a scientific impossibility." That’s a very peculiar definition of atheist, but then again people incapable of meeting rational arguments on their own ground must resort to this kind of move. Does anyone believe nothing created everything?

What a college education should do is knock the fallacious reasoning out of someone and instill a capacity for critical thinking. These creationists demonstrate that they are incapable of sound argument or scientific reasoning, which puts them at a disadvantage when coming onto college campuses. The enterprise is loaded against them from the start because they are trying to use  the tools of science and reason against their main practitioners without understanding how they work.

What I find either amusing or sad (depending on my mood) is that these creationists think there is actually a debate and they’re just not being heard, if indeed they do think this and are not merely being disingenuous. Obviously there isn’t any debate. To have a debate, one must share some premises, and there aren’t any shared premises. One must also demonstrate a willingness to be persuaded, rather than confining one’s mind inside an unfalsifiable ideology. At the very least one must have shared standards of evidence, and this is completely lacking.

They think there is a scientific debate between creationism and evolution, but the debate is whether the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and literally true Word of God. That’s a religious debate, though, not a scientific one, and it’s been tried and found want
ing by the vast majority of educated and intelligent people open to an examination of the evidence for a few centuries now. There’s no battle between science and religion. In this case, there’s just a battle between fundamentalists and modernity.

It’s ironic that creationists try to dispute evolution because it supposedly has no evidence to support it (which the evolutionary biologists deny, but then again they would, wouldn’t they!) when the creationist position not only has absolutely no evidence to support it outside of the Bible but has to ignore what scientific evidence there is. This is only a problem for creationists if they attempt to persuade people for whom science, reason, and evidence are important. Begging the question works on people who can’t think clearly.

I wonder what will happen if Cameron and the LIving Waters visit my campus. As far as I can tell, Princeton is a remarkably tolerant place for people of reasonable views. Perhaps they’ll encounter prominent Catholic, conservative professor Robert George and tell him he’ll burn in hell because he’s not a Christian. Given his ability and his willingness to engage adversaries calmly and critically, that might be an interesting discussion, indeed.

There’s no use arguing with fundamentalists. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way. In my home state of Louisiana, I used to be accosted by fundamentalist Christians asking if I was "born again" before they began selectively quoting the Bible at me. Back in the day when I had more time on my hands, I would engage them in discussion, to no end. Usually they couldn’t even defend the Bible well, much less their other claims. (Seven years of Southern Baptist private school–don’t try to trade Bible quotes with me, buddy.)

I’m not trying to argue with Comfort or against this edition of Darwin. He sensibly asks why angry atheists would want to suppress this book or rip out the introduction. I’m not an angry atheist, so I have no such desire. If one of the books somehow ends up in my hands, I will, in my capacity as religion bibliographer, definitely add it to the collection. it will make a nice curio someday for a religion scholar studying quirky manifestations of fundamentalism in America.