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?

The Future and/of the Research Library

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In my last post, I presented what I consider a likely scenario for the future of research universities and their libraries. Eventually, most of them could either go away or devolve into focused research institutions, but will cease to be “research universities” in the sense we have used that term for the past century or so. They won’t attempt to cover the universe of knowledge, and their libraries–if such still exist–could become information centers focused exclusively on the needs of the moment with no regard for the future. A true research library cannot take into account merely the desiderata of current researchers who happen to be working or teaching at a given moment on a given campus, but must instead consider what’s important to save in the world and preserve that heritage for future generations who will be doing their own historical research. Along with the treasures, research libraries must also collect a lot of trash, because trash and treasure are curiously shifting terms, and historical researchers often discover hidden treasures in what people at the time would have considered unimportant ephemera.

The problem with doing this is the cost. Collecting material from all over the world and cataloging and preserving it is a very expensive endeavor, which is why relatively few such libraries might still be around in a few decades. The model of the research library collecting broadly and deeply spread during the middle decades of the 20th century, when material was relatively inexpensive. This was the period when state universities started to become research universities and began to build very impressive collections, collections, I should add, that allow current researchers to do research they never could have done otherwise, and that preserved our and others’ cultural heritages for future generations to discover. This model is sustainable only if there is concern for the future. However, a large amount of library funding, especially in many public universities, is at the whim of people who notoriously have no consideration of the future beyond their next election. Because politicians usually have no concern for future generations, they cut funding of the tools and institutions we need to build a better future and preserve our world heritage. Thus, when state budgets get tight, they cut educational funding, and this has been going on steadily for several decades. The recent recession just caused a more rapid drop in higher education funding than usual.

In an era of declining funding for higher education and a lack of concern for the future, including future research, we will probably be seeing more things like the “patron-driven acquisition” model discussed in this article. The article profiles a librarian who is supposedly “part of a wave of librarians testing a different and, they say, more efficient mechanism for purchasing library materials: patron-driven acquisition. The idea is that the library users help determine what to buy. For instance, a purchase decision might be based on how many times an e-book is accessed via an online catalog.” This is allegedly “a fundamentally rational method of acquisition” because it doesn’t use resources to purchase and preserve material nobody uses. As the librarian notes, “A big reason for [more libraries exploring this option ] is we’ve all experienced pretty significant budget cuts, and when the money gets tighter, it gets harder and harder to justify spending money on materials nobody wants.” The question not even considered is, how will we know what users 50 years from now will want from the collections we’re building now? That’s the sort of question that research libraries have to consider.

Depending on how extensive patron-driven acquisition is, it seems to me like a good idea. According to the article, Purdue has such a system, but only devotes a small percentage of their funding for it. “Purdue now spends 5 to 7 percent of its book-buying money this way, she says, and expects to increase that to 10 to 15 percent.” For getting contemporary scholars some of the material they need for their research, the method no doubt works quite well. However, if such an acquisitions model were extended to a significant portion of the budget, or even all the budget, and material acquisition was determined solely by current research needs and then discarded when their use drops, it would be difficult to consider such a library a research library because of a complete lack of regard for the needs of future researchers of the now discarded past. They will have to rely on the few strong research libraries left.

There are potential developments that would render this problem irrelevant. For example, the United States could develop a national digital library, as recently called for by Robert Darnton. The ideal digital library would be the universal library that scholars have been dreaming of for centuries. If every document contained in American libraries were digitized and fully available, there would be little need for research libraries of the sort we have now. In Darton’s words, “We can equip the smallest junior college in Alabama and the remotest high school in North Dakota with the greatest library the world has ever known.” This is remarkably similar rhetoric to H.G. Wells’ 1938 World Brain, in which, buoyed by a giddiness about the latest information technology, he predicted “microscopic libraries of record, in which a photograph of every important book and document in the world will be stowed away and made easily available for the inspection of the student….  The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica” (54).

The irony of his prediction should be clear to any librarian. Because of copyright laws, we are not even allowed to microfilm or digitize his 60-year-old book and make it freely accessible to the world. Allowing the Alabama junior college student and the high school student in remote North Dakota to search inside books they can never read isn’t much help. There is good reason to speculate that we’ll have a national digital library with significant accessibility of content created within the last century when Disney decides Mickey Mouse is no longer profitable. Right now, even successful preservation efforts like Hathi, LOCKSS, and Portico can acquire and preserve digital content that will only be accessible after some rather unlikely trigger events.

Or there is the chance that the future will be the rather fanciful one conceived in this article: The User-Driven Purchase Give Away Library: A Thought Experiment, which takes patron-driven acquisition even further. The vision is that libraries buy only the books patrons want and then give them to the patrons. It’s predicated on the assumption that Google Books and the Hathi Trust will have most books digitized and preserved, and that everything else will be digitized and available at least as a license.

Possibly for the most popular content, but it seems unlikely that all the collections of major research libraries will be digitized in a decade, as this thought experiment envisions, unless we’re just talking about monographs published in the United States. If current trends persist, documents formerly printed on paper and sold to libraries could become digital content licensed and controlled in ways that will make it impossible to preserve for future research, whether by a research library or a national digital library. And even if Google Books and the Hathi trust have digital copies of most books, and even if those books are preserved, they will still not be accessible to many unless libraries can purchase and control them. And even if, somehow, the licensing agreements work out well for libraries and long term preservation as well as short term access are achieved, this is still only a portion of what research libraries actually collect.

Sustainable cooperative collection development would also mitigate the problem. Research libraries collect all sorts of material from all over the world, including parts of the world where print publishing is still the norm and might well be for decades. However, by divvying up the world and working collectively, consortia of research libraries could collect and preserve just about everything anyone in the future could possibly want. I suspect regional cooperative collection would be the best alternative, because access to much of this material would probably be restricted to a physical location for a long time to come. The ability to participate in these projects would distinguish the research libraries from others, but the great thing about this model is that regional consortia of even poorly funded research libraries could still develop a robust and diverse regional university library system upon which scholars everywhere in the region could depend.

These are all possible futures for research libraries, and not necessarily dark ones. I believe the ultimate goal of American libraries, as a system, is a universal library accessible to all, and to some extent we have achieved that for academic libraries through resource-sharing. While I hold out little hope for an Infotopia in which such a library exists digitally for everyone, it is still worth working towards, and ultimately is a measure of the success of all libraries, but especially research libraries. Nevertheless, the future of research libraries depends on the relationship between the future and research libraries. Research libraries that cease now to think about the needs of the future will cease to be research libraries in that future. Creating a national digital library, or a universal library of any sort, would be an appropriate goal for libraries collectively, and especially for research libraries collectively, but it requires thinking beyond the needs of the moment. It requires us to think about what scholars and students decades from now will either be thankful for what we have done, or regret what we failed to do.

The “Crisis” in the Humanities

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As a humanities librarian and liberal humanist, I have both a professional and personal interest in the fate of the humanities, especially the professional study of the humanities. Thus, it is sometimes distressing to hear about the crisis in the humanities, especially the heated rhetoric of late. The “scenarios” from ARL threw a few sops to the humanities, but the general assumption seemed to be they would disappear from research universities within 20 years. The president of Cornell just issued a call to defend the humanities. The pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education bring us frequent laments for the state of the humanities. Martha Nussbaum has a new book out about the humanities crisis. I haven’t read it yet, but according to this review it opens: “we are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” The reviewer thinks she overstates the case, but she’s not alone in using such apocalyptic rhetoric. By now, most of you probably know that, despite still calling itself a university, SUNY Albany is planning to cut several of its foreign language departments, with the foreign-language classes to be replaced by talking- very-slowly classes.

Here’s one scholar on the crisis in the humanities, especially for foreign-language study: “in our days the field of modern languages is undergoing a severe crisis….There is a general crisis in the humanities, there is a particular and more acute crisis in modern foreign languages.” That sounds ominous, and given the current crisis it is prescient indeed. It’s from the introductory paragraph of an essay by Hans W. Rosenhaupt, “Modern Foreign Language Study and the Needs of Our Times,” published in the journal Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht in 1940. And Rosenhaupt was right to be concerned, because SUNY Albany, which in 1940 was the New York State College for Teachers, would within seventy years slowly expand into a research university before beginning the gradual slide backward. Germaine Brée, writing in the Modern Language Journal, is just as concerned about this crisis. “For our literary heritage has come to seem more and more overwhelming in its mass, burdensome and without significance. We have tended to lose the sense of delight and newness all good literature gives. This, I would say, is one aspect of the crisis in the humanities.” That was in 1949.

In the South Atlantic Bulletin, you can read about the twelfth meeting of the Southern Humanities Conference: “The Crisis of the Humanities in the South” was the theme. “The participants seemed to agree that a real crisis does exist. But, as one panelist put it, the crisis is neither ‘new nor localized;'” The conference was in April 1959. Given the turmoil of the times, such as the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and the Little Rock Nine in 1957, I think there were bigger crises in the south to worry about, but fretting humanists often look inward in times of social unrest.

Throughout the 1960s the humanities stayed in crisis. In 1965, Penguin published the widely read book Crisis in the Humanities, edited by J.H. Plumb. That work analyzed the crisis in depth in art, philosophy, literary studies, and history. In 1964, The American Council of Learned Societies published The Commission on the Humanities, Report of the Commission on the Humanities. It’s a pessimistic report, in which we find that “the humanities in the age of super-science and supertechnology have an increasingly difficult struggle for existence,” and that “Today, more than ever, those concerns which nourish personality, and are at the heart of individual freedom, are being neglected in our free society. Those studies which refine the values and feed the very soul of a culture are increasingly starved of support.” I found out about this study through W. David Maxwell’s essay on “The Plight of the Humanities” (Journal of Aesthetic Education, April 1969), in which he argues that the humanities are in crisis because of a gap between their methods and their goals. In the same journal issue, Stuart A. Selby thinks the crisis results “from the fantastic specialization and fragmentation of scholarship which is incapable of presenting to the students a comprehensive enough view of the world.” It’s always something.

Unfortunately, the 1970s didn’t relieve the crisis in the humanities, either, maybe because of stagflation or Watergate or pet rocks. It was an acknowledged crisis that seemed to be spreading. In his essay, “Should Religious Studies Develop a Method?,” Richard E. Wentz warns that, “If religious study does not find a method appropriate to itself, it may fall victim to the crisis in the humanizing arts and to the crisis in theology.” (Journal of Higher Education , Jun., 1970). I think theology has been in crisis since the Origin of the Species was published, but it seems to keep on going. According to a professional note in the October 1975 PMLA, The School of Criticism and Theory Program at Irvine was created in 1976 “in the belief that a unifying conception of the humanities and humanistic discourse can be grounded in literary theory,” and that “a major reason for the crisis in the humanities” was that this belief didn’t “flourish in our intellectual communities.” Wolfgang Iser, in “The Current Situation of Literary Theory,” posits much the same development, and says that “As a reaction to the crisis in the humanities, literary theory became increasingly dependent on the relationship between literature and society-a relationship which stood in urgent need of clarification” (New Literary History, Autumn, 1979). Literary theory certainly took off in the next couple of decades, but it still didn’t fix the humanities, darn it.

In “The NEH and the Crisis in the Humanities,” Mel A. Topf tells us,”That the humanities are in trouble is no secret. Current discussion revolves around declining public support, declining enrollments as students turn away from the liberal arts to professional studies, and overproduction of Ph.D.’s.” As timely as today’s headlines! Except that was from the November 1975 issue of College English. Not everyone was convinced, though. In “Much Ado about Little? The Crisis in the Humanities,” Byrum E. Carter, opens, “The humanities, if we are to trust their academic spokesmen, are in trouble. They are plagued by declining student enrollments, a surplus of PhDs, a skeptical public, a sense of uncertainty as to mission, and a decline in available money. Dire predictions are made as to their future and cries arise for assistance in meeting the “crisis” that confronts humanistic scholarship” (Change, March 1978), but he doesn’t believe the situation is so dire, and predicts that the humanities will be around for a long time. It’s 32 years and counting so far.

In “Legacies of May,” Christopher I. Fynsk writes of economically driven education reform in France that is removing philosophy and the other humanities disciplines from the high place they traditionally held in the academy (MLN: Comparative Literature, Dec. 1978). He warns hat “some of the social forces that have made this reform possible in France are functioning similarly in the United States to create a situation of crisis in the humanities.” Apparently nobody told him the humanities had already been in crisis for 40 years. But again, as timely as today’s headlines, as philosophy departments are threatened with closure in several universities. Ellen Ashdown opens her essay “Humanities on the Front Lines” with an acknowledgement of the tenor of the times:

The threat to the humanities in colleges is now a common theme. Worried scholars and teachers face with dismay the public demand for “accountability” and its inappropriate consequences when applied to disciplines dealing unapologetically with questions of value. Those who feel the threat most deeply have responded with eloquence and passion that the traditional arts and letters are not antagonistic to scientific and practical studies, are not dispensable, are, in fact, central to education and life. (Change, March 1979)

I could go on, and on, and on. Search JSTOR for the phrase “crisis in the humanities.” Starting with the oldest articles first, I stopped reading at record 69 out of 217. The phrase first appears in a JSTOR journal in 1922, and from 1940 on becomes a steady stream of complaints. I think this is enough evidence to suggest that there has been a sense of crisis in the humanities almost as long as there have been departments of humanities. The organization of modern universities seems timeless, but the development of departments and disciplines as we know them now is a product of the late 19th century. Not only is the sense of crisis decades old and persistent, but for the most part the causes are as well. Students are choosing professional programs over the humanities; the sciences have the most authority and get the most funding; there are too many humanities PhDs; they’re evaluated by standards appropriate to the sciences but not the humanities. Every generation of scholars wakes up afresh, looks about, and thinks the sky is falling.

The sky might indeed be falling, but if it is, it seems to be falling very slowly. It could also be that the sky is not so much falling, as readjusting itself, if that makes any sense. The story at SUNY Albany exemplifies my scenario for the future of research universities and their libraries. After World War II, college enrollments and higher education funding swelled enormously, and the humanities benefited from the largesse heaped upon the universities to pursue scientific research. I knew a professor of English who claimed the Defense Department paid off the student loans he had taken out to fund his English PhD in the 1960s. Money was flowing, enrollments were up, and every teacher’s college wanted to become a university, and every research university was molded on a model of research appropriate for scientific investigation but inappropriate for the humanities. However, that level of support was not sustainable. The New York College for Teachers became the University at Albany, and it may become the New York College for Teachers again. Or, more likely, it may shed its humanistic programs and devolve into a technical and scientific research center and undergraduate vocational training school rather than a research university as such, dedicated to creating and disseminating new knowledge in all disciplines. Such may be life. But that doesn’t mean that Cornell and Columbia and NYU will undergo similar changes. “The humanities” will survive just fine, only they’re likely to survive at a research level at considerably fewer universities. Maybe there’s only so much new knowledge that can be created in the humanities.

The unfortunate thing is that state governments seem to think that higher education isn’t sustainable, but that’s not the case. It’s the current number of research universities with thousands of humanities professors teaching light loads and doing research that requires expensive libraries that aren’t sustainable. The country just doesn’t need as many PhD programs in the humanities as it has, and research universities are going to start eliminating them as state funding dries up. My worry is that entire departments will be cut instead. It would be much worse for future generations if only the elite could study foreign languages or philosophy than if the number of PhD programs and research-intensive programs were reduced. That’s going to happen at any university that demands immediate profitability from every department.

The humanities were from the beginning about creating free, well-rounded people who could think clearly and communicate at a high level. In the middle ages, what we would now associate with the humanities (the trivium–rhetoric, grammar, and logic) was part of the “School of Arts” and taught to undergraduates, who then went on to the advanced schools for master’s degrees and doctorates in theology or the professions. In Renaissance Italy, the literae humaniores--rhetoric, grammar, poetry, history, and moral philosophy–were studied by the sons of the elite so they could advance themselves in a world that required abundant knowledge, critical thought, and clear communication to succeed. Today is no different. Every university should have people teaching literature and history and philosophy to undergraduates, but not every university needs literature and history and philosophy graduate programs. Their emergence and growth were the result of historical forces unrelated to the need for the number of such programs we now have.

The sense of crisis as a lack of historical memory effects librarianship as well. My friend Kathleen Kern at the University of Illinois is working on a project related to the “serials crisis.” It seems the phrase first pops up in the library literature in the mid-70s, but she found discussions of similar issues going back much further. I’ve been doing some research related to “information overload,” and have found evidence of a “crisis” as far back as the 16th century. By definition, a crisis requires a period of normalcy by which to define itself. I argue that we don’t really have a “serials crisis” or a “crisis in the humanities,” because the state in which we find ourselves has been the normal state for decades. Humanists, like librarians, always think people are out to get them (which is true), but they also think that the situation is new (which isn’t true). If we’re always in crisis, then we’re never in crisis.

The existence of patterns like this is why I’m so skeptical about hyperbolic or apocalyptic rhetoric in general.  People who say “X is the future!” with such boundless optimism usually have a very short historical memory, and they don’t realize that the majority of predictions about such and such being the future were just plain wrong, and even the most accurate ones were partially true at best. The same goes for the overly pessimistic predictions of decline. They’ve been with us at least since Plato. The humanities as a profession, like librarianship as a profession, always faces challenges, but constant challenges don’t a crisis make. They are the normal state of affairs. The appropriate action isn’t to jump for joy that we’re saved by some hot trend or panic because we’re supposedly in the midst of crisis, but to face the challenges soberly, make our case, and do the best we can to create the future we want. I find it more comforting to realize we’re not in a state of unprecedented crisis. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

On Homosexuality and Non-Neutral Stances

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This post from the Gypsy Librarian resonated with me. In it, he discusses his reaction to the anti-gay bullying and subsequent suicides, and the possible difficulty caused by taking public stances as a “neutral” librarian.

I, too, have been wanting to write about this, especially the Rutgers case, which I found both disturbing and depressing. Since I rarely treat this as a personal blog, I felt I didn’t have an appropriate space to write, but I’m going to do it anyway. At least I’m warning you up front.  In the case of Rutgers, I found myself wondering if we’re raising a generation of sociopaths, or at least of mild sociopaths. The inability to distinguish between right and wrong and the incapacity for empathy are characteristics of sociopaths, and both seem evident in the behavior of the student who created and publicly posted the videorecording of Tyler Clementi. Something about the anti-privacy culture of teens on Facebook encourages this, and I think it’s telling that Tyler Clementi’s penultimate act was a Facebook status update.
I very much disagreed with this response from an Inside Higher Ed blogger. In it, she argues that the minds of the young aren’t fully developed, and that we shouldn’t blame the student who posted the video. After all, we all did dangerous and foolish things when young! One example is driving drunk or stoned as teenagers, and thus endangering others. However, while such behavior is itself foolish and dangerous, the danger is also to the drunk driver. This doesn’t excuse it, but it changes the situation somewhat. Drunk drivers don’t deliberately try to harm themselves or others, whereas the video-posting student must have meant to harm Clementi, though I hope not to the extent he actually did. Her best example is the “hot lips” scene with Frank and Margaret in the movie M*A*S*H, a scene which the Rutgers incident eerily parallels in some ways. But the parallel doesn’t go far enough to to provide a good analogy. In the movie, Frank and Margaret are the outsiders, but they’re the outsiders only because they’re establishment figures temporarily in the midst of the real outsiders, whom they relentlessly criticize. Part of the motivation of that scene was to show the hypocrisy of a Bible-thumping and bullying Christian committing adultery. In the Rutgers case, Clementi was the outsider, or at least he felt himself as such. That it happened at a university makes the whole thing more disturbing.
I’ve never quite “gotten” anti-gay prejudice. Unlike other forms of hate and bigotry, it’s directed at something you can’t even see. One usually doesn’t look at a person and see desire for the same gender in the way one sees skin color or age or (often enough) social class. And I assume most anti-gay bigots have never actually seen two homosexuals having sex with each other (and two women in porn movies doesn’t count). It’s a prejudice against a way of being that has no effect on anyone else. I really can’t imagine why people care if other people have harmless desires or engage in harmless acts they don’t even have to see. Because the prejudice is based on something not actually seen but only sensed through often flawed signals, I myself have been a target of anti-gay bigotry, even though I’m not gay. I grew up in the deep south, and I met plenty of people who assumed that if a man didn’t watch football and hate gays, he must be a homosexual. In college, a friend of mine–at the time a semi-closeted homosexual–told me that he’d been warned by a mutual acquaintance to stay away from me because I was gay and people might think he was as well if he was seen with me. Somebody’s gaydar was sure messed up. The irony amuses me to this day. Another time in college, I apparently was verbally attacked by drunken frat boys in a bar. (I say “apparently” because the details are, um, a bit hazy to me, and I’m relying upon a friend’s testimony.) I’m not sure what the provocation was, but some guy called me a fag. According to my friend, I told him I knew I wasn’t gay because I gave a blowjob once and didn’t like it. I suspect that I (6’2″) and my friend (6’5″) were saved from physical attack because of our size. Possibly my antagonists believed it would be embarrassing to be beaten up by someone they thought was gay. Bigotry should be ridiculed, and bigots should be mocked.
Obviously, I’m not neutral. Like the Gypsy Librarian, I’ve given some thought to the supposed neutrality proclaimed for the profession of librarianship. As I understand it, librarians are supposed to be neutral in the sense that they build collections that represent diverse views, especially on controversial topics, and they don’t allow their personal prejudices to influence their selection of books, etc. In this sense, I am to some extent neutral. But in this series of posts, I argued that academic librarians aren’t really neutral about our collections. Every view doesn’t have to be represented if that view is poorly reasoned or unsupported by any evidence or argument. As the religion selector, I frequently receive gift books about all kinds of wacky stuff. If it’s about astrology, or crystal healing, or someone explaining scientifically that Jesus really was the son of God and that he can help you lose weight, the chances of it reaching the collection are slim. It’s always good to keep a few curiosities so that future researchers will know how some people believed in the past, but popular books on crystal healing aren’t exactly an area for a research library to collect to strength. Limited budgets mean some silly things just have to fare on their own. It’s part of our jobs to say one book is better than another in the sense that it adheres to a higher standard of reason. It’s also part of our jobs to teach students to critically analyze the sources they find. It’s not a matter of indoctrination into a particular position (as conservatives sometimes claim), it’s a matter of indoctrination into a standard of criticism and reasoning.
Typically, it’s some “controversial” topic that receives book challenges, but in academia there aren’t many controversial topics, and the ones that are controversial are the ones book-challengers tend to agree with. Controversial positions are roughly whatever social conservatives would support. The positions aren’t controversial because they’re conservative, whatever that means, but because they don’t adhere to the values of the academy: reason, liberty, and equality. There’s a conservative conspiracy theory that there aren’t many conservative academics because liberals dislike their politics. However, it’s very clear to me that there aren’t many conservative academics because conservatives tend not to defend their views with reason, analysis, careful argument, and evidence. Most liberals don’t either, but liberalism is a rational political philosophy because it believes political decisions should be based on public reasons, which is exactly what many conservative intellectuals have criticized it for. Academics tend to be liberals because they tend to value reason more than faith or tradition.
Conservatives value faith and tradition more than reason; that’s what makes them conservatives, and it’s what makes them so hard for liberals to understand. Most conservatives are impervious to argument about certain political and religious issues not because they’re stupid, but because they don’t believe in reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. To the liberal ac
ademic such a position appears just short of insane. Relying upon reason rather than faith or tradition will lead you to more liberal positions on most social issues. (I’m exempting so-called fiscal conservatives, who are often just libertarians, and thus a variety of liberal.) Add to this the freedom necessary to explore (almost) every topic and the equalizing nature of reason and argument. For the most part, what matters isn’t how much money you make, or how good you look, or what kind of car you drive, or who you prefer to have sex with, or what God you claim to believe in,  but how reasonable and civil you are. Other values are leveled by the value of reasoned discourse. We judge people by their reason and their civility, not their sexuality. Thus, one goal of a college education is to teach people to engage in civil debate and to think and reason critically, and once they do there are certain beliefs they’re unlikely to have. It’s merely a coincidence that these happen to be mostly conservative beliefs, because there are plenty of irrational liberals out there, too. The liberals who projected messianic qualities onto Obama two years ago were no more rational than the conservatives who now blame him because they can’t find jobs.
Thus, in academic libraries, as in academia more broadly, we have an ethic based in reason, liberty, and equality. It’s about the only place left in America where calm, reasoned discourse can prevail, which might be why some conservatives want to destroy it. We don’t have to be neutral about anti-gay bigotry, or racism, or sexism because they all conflict with our values. If someone tells tells us that “God hates fags,” the appropriate response is to ask why? And how do you know? And then to point out all the flaws in his reason. In open debate, bigots and bullies don’t fare very well, which is why they don’t engage in it. But we can. We can say to the bigots and bullies of the world that if they have something to say worth taking seriously, they can defend it with reasons, arguments, and evidence, rather than name-calling, fear-mongering, and demagoguery. And we can say with assurance they’re wrong because they’re incapable of working within the neutral framework of shared human reason to persuade anyone. They might be dangerous and popular, but that doesn’t mean they can hold an intelligent conversation with an opponent. And then we can mock them, because there’s not much point engaging irrational bigots in rational argument.
The values of academia are also the values of librarianship more broadly, at least in public libraries. Librarians might not keep someone from reading a book they disagree with, but it doesn’t mean they can’t criticize the ideas it contains. A dedication to intellectual freedom is a dedication to reason, liberty, and equality.
Does any of this help the children and adults being harassed because of their sexuality or anything else that marks them as “different”? Obviously not. If I saw an act of bullying, I would intervene, but there’s not much more I could do. I do wish someone had been able to tell Tyler Clementi, or Billy Lucas, or Seth Walsh that the bullies are wrong, their hatred pathetic, that there are people in the world who judge others as individuals and not types, that it does get better, that there are places in the world where outsiders are accepted and tolerated and inspired, and that one of those places is the library.

Notes on Scenarios

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I just finished reading the ARL 2030 Scenarios: A User’s Guide for Research Libraries. For lack of a better term, it’s an interesting read. It’s only 92 pages, so you might want to read it through and then come back to this post….

Okay, if you don’t have time to do that, you might read the article about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 
It would be easy to criticize the scenarios themselves, which posit very drastic changes to research universities by 2030, most of them involving the near-total corporatization of research and the demise of research universities as viable independent entities. And that’s just the good news. However, while the scenarios are provocative, the report continuously tells us that the long-term scenarios are designed only to spur short-term strategic planning, and much of the report details ways to integrate them into strategic planning workshops. Thus, I won’t be criticizing the scenarios themselves, though I do have some questions about this method. Since reading the report, I’ve done a bit more reading about scenario planning, but until this it was new to me. I’m less curious about the scenarios than what seems to be the ideology of scenario planning itself. 
A few of the passages left me with questions. For example:
The goal in using scenarios is not to pick one as more likely or more desirable but to accept that the future will  contain elements of all four scenarios. (8)
For a method designed to get people thinking about radical changes and how to deal with them, this seems remarkably passive to me. It’s not clear to me why I (or some group) can’t deliberate about which of these scenarios might be more likely. One in particularly seemed much more likely to me than the others, and I didn’t especially like any of them. I understand that the goal is to get people thinking outside their comfort zone, but why this “user guide” gets to speculate on possible futures and I don’t puzzles me. Combined with the second clause about acceptance, the sentence seems to imply that none of these scenarios are more likely than any others and yet they are all true. That the future will contain elements of all four scenarios is both vague and highly likely, because the present already contains elements of all four scenarios. Past that, I’m not sure what is really added here.
No single scenario ever captures the future with accuracy. Instead, the set of scenarios as a whole contain the  elements and conditions the organization will face in the future. (11)
This restatement of the premise of scenario planning doesn’t make things clearer for me. Obviously no single scenario accurately predicts the future. But if no single scenario captures the future with accuracy, then how can we say the set as a whole will accurately predict the future? Why this set of scenarios and not others? If one scenario is faulty, adding multiple scenarios will multiply the flaws as well as any accuracies. Even if this particular set contained all the elements and conditions organizations will face, we’re still left with the question, which elements are those? And once we choose which elements, we will be constructing a new scenario, which we also can’t trust to be accurate. This will create an infinite regression of never quite likely scenarios. We certainly can’t plan for every element in every scenario, and yet without speculating about likelihood that is what we’re challenged to do.
In order to fully engage with this material, you must a) avoid the desire to choose a scenario as a more likely or desirable future; and b) suspend disbelief concerning the possibilities that stretch beyond your level of comfort. (14)
This is too therapeutic for me. I’m not sure I have a desire to choose a scenario as more likely, but based on my own knowledge I have an inclination to do just that. I see that the authors are trying to get us to check our desires and blindnesses, but it’s possible to do that while still remaining critical about the scenarios themselves. My own scenario (perhaps the subject of another post) is rather different from most of these, and yet is far from the future I would desire for research universities and libraries. 
Scenario planning is not an analytic process. It is not about assigning probabilities to future events or choosing  a desired future. Scenario planning is based on the belief that the future is inherently uncertain and that an organization cannot choose the future environment in which it will operate. However, an organization can take a disciplined approach to understanding the critical uncertainties that it faces and develop a robust strategy that will  work across a wide range of possible futures. (41)
This partly gets at what makes me uncomfortable about the process as I understand it so far. We are told that scenario planning isn’t an analytic process, and yet without analysis of future possibilities and likelihoods I don’t see how we can do much planning. The future is inherently uncertain, I will grant, but that uncertainty rests within relatively narrow bounds. We might be colonized by aliens, but I don’t think we should consider that scenario when planning for research libraries. It’s less obvious that an organization can’t choose the future in which it will operate. Must we be so fatalistic? I’m probably overnalyzing this, but it seems to say that we can’t do anything about the future, so we have to do something about the future. 
Most of the “Common Themes Across the Scenarios” are make more sense to me than the reasoning behind the scenarios themselves. Here they are:
  • Developing Diverse and Novel Sources of Revenue and/or Funding 
  • Balancing Mission and Values with Sustaining the Enterprise 
  • Engaging Fully in Research Activities as Service Provider and Steward of Content 
  • Developing Focused, Specialized Capabilities and Scope 
  • Creating Research Library Cooperative Capacities 
I’m not sure they’re all reconcilable with some of the scenarios, though. If in the future all research is corporately funded and driven, and thus it’s also all STEM research, there really won’t be much need for research universities or research libraries. Research universities originated as places to systematically create and disseminate new knowledge about all subjects, and they have developed standards of investigation and evidence, especially in the STEM fields. If the future is one commercially driven research with no external standards, created by private enterprises and locked into proprietary corporate databases, there’s really no possibility of, for example, balancing the mission with sustaining the enterprise. There’ll be no mission or enterprise. There’ll also be no research library, and certainly no professional librarians in the sense we understand it today. Curating proprietary corporate data requires expertise, but not professionalism in the sense that one evaluates the information and maintains intellectual values as well as technological standards, not to mention the
mission of the research library to preserve knowledge as well as make it accessible.
To be clear, I’m not trying to project my desires onto the future. This might very well be the future, but it’s not a future we can plan for, unless we can somehow plan for our own obsolescence. But that’s not necessary, because if it comes to that, we won’t be doing the planning; someone else will, and we likely won’t have anything to say about it.
Because I was curious about its effectiveness, I tried to find scholarly evaluations of scenario planning, but couldn’t find much. There are lots of descriptions of when one might use it, but not much proving that it worked. That’s one problem with futuristic thinking. Only time will tell. For example, this article* (ScienceDirect, so there’s definitely a paywall there) claims that “realistic evaluations of scenario planning and correspondence measures leave us wanting,” and concludes:
Real-world evaluations lack measures of verification, are subject to biased sampling, rely on invalidated reports, do not explicitly define the reference goal or measure the reference goal inappropriately in terms of the method and are unable to distinguish between the effects of organisation, method and environment. Theoretical evaluations are constantly evolving rationales about which completeness and sufficiency are difficult to assess. 
But, you know, except for that everything’s fine! Though it’s popular, the method’s effectiveness seems to be like the claims that one must “accept” the scenarios without analysis. It’s an article of faith that is difficult to empirically verify.
Anyway, a few raw thoughts after a quick reading. Despite my quibbles about some of the rationale behind scenario planning, the scenarios themselves are worth reading, even if we refuse to suspend our judgments about likelihoods. No doubt they’ll lead to some provocative discussions during strategic planning.
*Harries, Clare. “Correspondence to what? Coherence to what? What is good scenario-based decision making?” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 70:8 (October 2003), 797-817.

Resource Sharing and the Republic of Letters

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At the risk of creating an infinite blog post regression, I’ve been wanting to write about this post at ACRLog by Steven Bell, and this post partially responding to Bell’s post by Barbara Fister on her Library Babel Fish blog. Bell responded to the Netflix-in-libraries debate by pointing to a scholar who didn’t understand why he couldn’t get JSTOR access from a university he no longer attended, and the apparent willingness of the scholar and his commenters to share resources illegally if necessary to get what they need for their research. Fister added into the mix an article from The Scientist in which a scientist realized (better late than never!) that if libraries can’t afford scientific journals then the progress of scientific research will be retarded, as well as the recognition that outside of R1 universities access to scholarly resources is often severely limited.

The discussions, as usual, are well worth reading in their entirety, but I’ve been thinking mostly about the willingness of scholars to share articles and books amongst themselves, even if that sharing is technically illegal. This doesn’t surprise me at all, nor does it alarm me. Instead, it confirms my hypothesis about the mission and ethic of scholars, research universities, and their libraries. Last post, I speculated that the mission of research universities is to create new knowledge and disseminate it through publication. That creation and dissemination are not confined to institutions. The mission isn’t just that of a university or a library, but of every individual scholar.
For my purposes, I will give you an oversimplified and bastardized history of the Republic of Letters and its relationship to current scholarship. In the 17th century, an international network of scholars developed who shared their works and ideas with each other, often through letters (hence the phrase). In the late 17th to the 19th century, the Republic of Letters metamorphosed into a network of scholarly journals, where scholars both independent and institutionalized published their work for the benefit of themselves and the public. The purpose of organized research since the Enlightenment has been to create knowledge and disseminate it for the public good. Before research universities were even founded, scholars considered it their duty to share their work and their ideas with other scholars. This freedom of publication was difficult in countries and principalities with censorship policies, and sometimes scholars had to publish anonymously or underground, but the ideal and goal of sharing was always present. 
Fast forward to today. Early 21st century America is a very different place from 17th century England or 18th century France, but the scholarly ideal of the Republic of Letters remains strong. It’s only natural, since academia is by its nature conservative and traditional, with generation upon generation of scholars training other scholars in the theory and practice of research. Scholars in universities have been organizing and training their predecessors in remarkably similar ways since the 12th century. Some believe this tradition has no place in the contemporary world. I tend to think that this ideal of knowledge creation and dissemination are shining lights of intellectual virtue in a sea of compromise.
Though I’m oversimplifying my history for brevity’s sake, I don’t think it’s mistaken, and if true it would explain the willingness of scholars to this day to share scholarly articles among themselves, even if such sharing is prohibited by licensing agreements and copyright. The ethics of scholarship require that scholarly resources be made available to other scholars, period. Laws and contracts created centuries after the formation of this ethical code are irrelevant. Pay-walls might keep an individual scholar from an individual article or database, but they are merely an inconvenience for the dedicated scholar, not a moral encumbrance. Such is evident from practice.
When that happens, when a law or regulation is widely flouted without compunction or guilt, what do we normally say about it? Recall Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He draws upon Christian and Jewish sources to argue that positive laws (the laws on the books) that don’t adhere to the natural law are unjust laws, and that unjust laws are not laws at all. Legislators can pass any laws they want, but that doesn’t necessarily make them just.
There are numerous laws that the vast majority of us consider unjust, and thus ignore. I argue that scholars believe severe copyright restrictions, or restrictions on sharing of scholarly resources, are inherently unjust, and thus not worth abiding by. Scholars operate under an ethic of sharing several hundred years old.
Granted, the history of scholarly publishing has demonstrated that scholars aren’t very good at living up to their ideals, often because they pay no attention to how the real world of publishing works.  They do their research, and work for free for publishers who then charge their universities outlandish prices for their journals. That after almost a generation of library advocacy, a scientist is just now discovering that the rising cost of journals might endanger research is a case in point. 
Also, since the emergence of what William James called the “PhD Octopus,” scholarly journals have become not just media to distribute scholarly research, but status markers in a competitive profession. However, I would argue that such developments are the result of incentives created by administrators and non-scholars rather than the natural development of the modern scholarly ethic. Scholars participate in this system because they ignore its legal and economic restrictions, quite possibly because they believe that those restrictions don’t apply to them.
How does this relate to libraries? I’m not entirely sure. I’m not arguing that libraries should disobey the law or violate licenses. Even if it weren’t illegal to argue that, it would be impolitic. I merely point out why scholars pay no attention to copyright or license agreements, why they freely share resources, why they post copyrighted content to their open course websites, and and why they have no ethical qualms about such actions. Understanding this helps us understand the ethos of the profession academic librarians support.
But I also wonder about the clash here between the scholarly ethic and the laws regarding copyright and licenses. Can we make a right choice here? It seems an impossible dilemma. The positive law requires us to enforce copyright and licensing agreements, but the positive law conflicts with the centuries-old ethic of scholarship as well as the freedom of information that librarians champion. What would the natural law be in this situation? Wouldn’t it be that the results of research freely provided, and often even publicly funded, should be free to the world? That open access to scholarly publications is part of the natural order of scholarship? If that’s true, then what are we to make of copyright laws or licensing agreements that are designed to benefit the publishers and not the public? How can we believe that the most stringent of current copyright laws are just laws at all? It seems all we can do is advocate change and hope for the best, neither of which has helped much so far.

The Mission of Research Libraries

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AL Direct linked today to a blog post I hadn’t yet read at the Book of Trogool blog. In that post, and in another linked from it, Dorothea Salo responds to a challenging question she received at a meeting at UCLA:
“How do libraries justify spending on open access–making local materials available to the world–if our guiding mission is to buy appropriate materials specifically on behalf of our patron base?”
Her answers were that promoting open access is better for us financially in the long term, and that unless we achieve a “collective openness,” libraries will die as their and the publishers’ business model dies. These are good answers, but not the ones I would give.
Instead, I would choose to challenge the original assumption, that the guiding mission of research libraries (and I’m assuming research libraries only, which UCLA has) is to buy appropriate materials for local (and presumably currently existing) patrons. That’s not now, nor has it ever been, the guiding mission of research libraries, or in the interest of the research institutions they support. The guiding mission of research libraries is to collect the human record in its totality and make it accessible for study by all scholars. We have not yet achieved a “collective openness,” but we’ve achieved a remarkable amount of collective organization.
Salo is primarily concerned with journal publishers and open access, but considering other areas will help us understand this mission. Archives and special collections exist at every research library, and yet in my experience archives and special collections aren’t funded specifically because the local patrons want to use them. The purpose of archives is to collectively preserve the human record. Visiting scholars are as common in many archives as local scholars. Special collections exist because someone somewhere may want to study them because they are important. If local scholars study them, so much the better. And libraries are increasingly digitizing these archives because the mission of the library is to disseminate as well as collect and preserve human knowledge. Scholars everywhere benefit from the preservation or digitization of knowledge by libraries at institutions they don’t work for. 
Another way libraries try to fulfill this mission is through interlibrary loan and other forms of resource sharing and cooperation. No library is an island, and librarians have worked very hard for several decades to build up networks to share resources and information. Stand outside the profession for a moment and think how amazing it is that thousands of libraries are connected through OCLC and other organizations, and that a scholar in Florida who needs a book available only at libraries in Oregon and Alaska could probably get the book in a few days without traveling. 
The interconnectedness of libraries today is no trivial fact. And the more that libraries cooperate and share and digitize and allow open access, the greater the totality of resources available to all scholars. It’s the totality and access that are important. Scholar A at University B also benefits when University C digitizes content or shares it through ILL or an institutional repository, and all scholars and librarians should remember that.
Research libraries are not like, say, community college libraries, because the driving goal for every purchase isn’t that a resource fills an immediate curricular need. Research libraries also buy materials for immediate need, but they have to consider the needs of scholarship in general, both now and decades from now. A lot of scholars are able to do their work now because some librarian some time in the past collected material just for the sake of collecting it, and the same will be true of scholars in the future. Or it won’t be true, depending on whether research libraries live up to their mission. Research libraries that purchase only what is absolutely necessary for their current local patrons fail in their mission.
The mission of research libraries is motivated by the mission of research universities, which were founded to create new knowledge and disseminate it through publication. Sometimes this new knowledge has practical and commercial applications, and so often receives more funding, but that’s not necessarily the case. The mission to create new knowledge extends to every area of human experience, from the mundane and practical to the esoteric and purely abstract. Knowledge creation in history, literature, philosophy, or even higher mathematics doesn’t lead to startling commercial products, but still research universities support this work to the extent they fulfill their mission. Unlike undergraduate teaching, which until recently was necessarily confined to local classrooms, the research mission of universities and the community of scholars have always been international in scope. 
Thus, an answer as to why research libraries should spend money promoting open access publications is because open access publications perfectly fit in with the mission of research libraries to collect the human record in its totality and make it as accessible as possible to all scholars. While the bean counters at every university may think only of short term expenses and gains, librarians and the current and future scholars they serve have an obligation to think globally and collectively. Research libraries and research universities are all part of a vast network to create, preserve, and disseminate human knowledge, and while they have many challengers with less pure motives, and are far from perfect in fulfilling their mission, it’s still astounding how much they have accomplished. Whether they can better accomplish this mission in the future considering the current economics of information is still an open question, but that they should do what they can to accomplish the mission should not be in question at all. Instead of being contrary to the mission of libraries, open access to the results of scholarship would be the ultimate fulfillment of the mission of research libraries and universities.

Alternative Ebsco

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Most of you are probably familiar with the Alternative Press Index. If you’re not familiar, you might check out their “history” page. Here are some selected quotes:

the Alternative Press Index (API), a unique and comprehensive guide to the alternative press in English, French and Spanish
With increased corporate conglomeration in the media industry, readers are now turning to the alternative press for news and analysis.
The Alternative Press Centre (APC) is a periodicals library and nonprofit collective that promotes access to independent and critical sources of news and information.
The APC networks with activist librarians, such as the Progressive Librarians Guild.
The spirit of the late 60s brought new publications that reflected the movements of the time
The original founders came together to promote a many-sided dialogue aimed at the development of a radical consciousness by providing the tools for analysis that are necessary for meaningful social change.
As of this month, the API is available only through Ebsco. The original database went back to 1969, but Ebsco has split it into the Alternative Press Index (1991+) and the API: Archive (1969-1990), which I assume allows them to charge more for the full content. Though perhaps they’re being true to the alternative spirit, and trying to make the more recent content more available by lowering the price. I doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible.  
It’s ironic that an index founded as an alternative to the corporate mainstream media that wanted to develop a radical consciousness is now available only through Ebsco, one of the most aggressive commercial content providers around. This is the company, after all, that has made it a policy to secure exclusive licensing agreements for any journals they index, thus monopolizing information and making it less accessible if more profitable. Perhaps the “spirit of the 60s” met the “need to pay the bills.”

Does Every Question Matter?

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I know it’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled. I had a two-month research leave this summer to work on the Enlightenment and libraries book, which meant that I did little but work on that for July and August, and am still catching up with regular work after the hiatus. Fortunately for me, the time was productive and I got a lot of writing done. 

In August, I also attended the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver and participated in a couple of panels, including a debate with Joe Janes about “fake reference” questions over IM from library school students. It wasn’t earth-shattering, by any means, but it was a good discussion with a lot of audience participation, which was the goal. Typical for a debate, a lot of issues were raised, but I don’t think any minds were changed on the spot either way. 
The most significant question arising from the discussion had nothing to do with fake reference, though. At one point, someone in the audience (I think it was an LIS professor) asked me if I thought every question mattered.  I can’t remember the exact wording, but the basic idea was whether I believed every reference question, no matter the content or motivation, was worth answeringor had equal value.I think I surprised both her and Joe when I answered, No, I don’t. I wasn’t alone in that opinion, but it seemed like I was in the minority, perhaps even in the profession as a whole, so I’ve been working out what I think about the question.
I think the motivation behind saying all questions matter is the idea that the answer to any given reference question matters to the person who asks it, and that the job of the reference librarian is to take questions as they come. Thus, it shouldn’t matter to me whether the query comes from a library school student asking me a fake question or a student at my university with a research need. In other words, the questions matter because the people matter. But, as with the initial debate, it’s important to consider the context. All questions don’t matter to all librarians in all libraries all the time, because all people don’t matter to all librarians all the time. If you agree with that statement, then you agree that all questions don’t matter, at least in the sense I’m talking about here.
The initial debate was about library school students pretending to be genuine patrons and asking questions they really didn’t care about of librarians working at a private university, even when they had reference services at their own university. Their questions don’t matter for at least two different reasons. First of all, they aren’t genuine needs for information, and the job of the reference librarian is to fulfill information needs, not act as guinea pigs in LIS research. Only LIS professors think the role of the librarian is to serve as a guinea pig. Someone lying to me and asking me a fake question isn’t worth wasting my time to answer the question, especially when there are people with real information needs.
In this example, the questions also don’t matter because of the institutional context. I work at a private university, and our reference service is very specifically for my university’s affiliates, visiting faculty and students, and anyone with questions specifically about the university or the library’s collections. It is not our role to answer general questions from students at other universities, especially if that university has a reference service of its own. Also, in New Jersey, there is a statewide cooperative reference service called NJ Answers, in which we do not participate. This isn’t a public university, and unless they pay for access, we do not let members of the public use the library (and given the quality of the Princeton Public Library, I don’t see why many would want to use ours anyway). 
Some of you might consider this policy restrictive, and believe that academic libraries should serve everyone. However, I would bet that even academic libraries which have an open-use policy (as the previous two academic libraries I worked in do), there are still categories of questions you don’t answer. The big one that springs to mind is homework help. I’ve never heard of an academic library providing homework help for K-12 students, and the academic librarians who don’t provide homework help implicitly believe that not all questions matter. In almost all academic libraries, there are going to be categories of questions or patrons who are less important than the libraries’ core constituency, and generally this will be the result of staffing and expertise. Because it’s not our mission to answer every reference question in the world, we don’t staff as if it is. If we didn’t have to make choices among scarce resources, then we might answer every reference question in the world. 
I’m less experienced with public libraries, since my public library experience was in circulation, but based on my experience working reference in a public university with an open policy, I suspect there are distinctions in question-validity there as well. For example, most libraries have their crazy or obsessive patrons, the ones who are calling the library every day asking for celebrity birthdays so they can cast horoscopes, or the ones who come to the desk regularly and ask creepy questions about serial killers as long as the librarian is a woman. Sometimes it’s clear the patron just wants someone to talk to. I’ve seen all of these myself. I’d suggest these questions matter less than others because of the type of patron. Indeed, sometimes those questions are so crazy or creepy that if asked enough times the patrons will be banned from the library. Generally, we have less respect for obsessive questions coming from insane people. I don’t think we’re wrong to, either.
I would like to make one last distinction, that of the validity of the answer sought rather than the status of the patron. Can we not say that there is a hierarchy of knowledge, and that the validity of the question has some relation to the validity of the answer as knowledge? Maybe this could be the epistemological distinction between types of reference question, especially since the distinction relies somewhat on the status of the knowledge relevant to the knower. 
Let’s take the example of astronomy versus astrology. One is a genuine body of knowledge, and the other is a genuine body of hokum and bunk. However, the validity of reference questions related to them could depend upon the questioner’s relation to the information need. Astrology itself is nonsense, but as an object of scholarly study, it has equal status to astronomy. Studying astrology historically or sociologically is as valid as studying astronomy scientifically. Thus, questions about celebrity birthdays motivated by a desire to cast horoscopes would have less validity than questions about astrological beliefs motivated by information needs relevant to an academically legitimate area of study. While I might indulge the obsessive astrologer if there were nothing else to do at the reference desk, the celebrity astrologer would have to wait indefinitely if there were pressing information needs of sane people doing real research. 
So there’s at least four possible hierarchical distinctions among questions, depending on the genuineness of the information need, the institutional context of the library users, their relative sanity, and the relationship of the question to an actual body of knowledge. Even if every question matters to the person asking the question, the person asking the question doesn’t matter equally as a user in every library. Here I’m more or less brainstorming about possible responses than putting out firm beliefs, but if any of these distinctions hold, then for practical purposes not every question matters. 

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.