Visions of Students Today

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I ran across this YouTube video: A Vision of Students Today (found via It’s All Good). It came out of an intro anthropology class at Kansas State University. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to learn from it. Based on a collaborative semi-survey, students hold up signs talking about their lives, with the overall point (I think) that university education isn’t “relevant” to their lives. Students have been chanting that mantra since at least the 1960s, but now the education is irrelevant in different ways.

It seems to me that one of the biggest criticisms is of the large lecture format, and I couldn’t agree more. One student holds up a sign saying her average class size is 115 students, and another that 18% of her teachers knows her name. It’s no wonder that students get discouraged in this environment. I’ve never taught a lecture class, but I did used to TA for one on early British literature, and it was deadly (except for my discussion sections, which of course were delightful). Right now I teach 12 students, and know all of their names, but I know that even here some of the students have very large lectures and grow bored in them. The large lecture format should probably die, but there never seem to be enough teachers and money to teach everyone in small seminars.

Some of the other criticisms seem more like whining and less like constructive criticism. One student sign reads “I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me.” What are we to make of this? Lots of students don’t read course materials. Lots of students also don’t make good grades. How is that the fault of anyone but the student? Or is she saying that the professors assign readings irrelevant to the subject? That could be a problem. But she then follows that sign with another saying “only 26% are relevant to my life.” To which I would want to respond, so what? Is a university there to teach only classes relevant to the lives of late teens, or there to broaden the knowledge and understanding of those teens by trying to educate them?

Another students signs that she “will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages & 1281 Facebook profiles.” Does that mean that professors should no longer assign books, but instead teach the content of Facebook?

Another signs that she will “write 42 pages for class this semester but over 500 pages of email.” I teach writing, but don’t see the relevance. Those 500 pages of email have no obligation to be clear, thoughtful, and coherent. They don’t necessarily teach you to order your thoughts about a complex subject and make a compelling argument. I don’t know what kind of writing there is for this course, but writing 40 pages of argumentative prose is very different from writing a lot of emails, unless you write long emails arguing difficult questions with lots of citations and careful analysis and use of evidence.

Several students hold up signs saying how much time they spend on various activities each day: 2 hours on the phone, 1.5 hours watching TV, 2 hours eating, 3 hours listening to music, 3.5 hours online, 7 hours sleeping, etc. It adds up to 26.5 hours, and there’s not even any mention of drinking or hooking up. Another sign reads, “I’m a multitasker,” then “I have to be.” But one doesn’t have to talk on the phone for 2 hours or watch TV at all, and I’m not sure listening to music while surfing the web should count as multi-tasking anyway. Still, I agree that educational methods that encourage students to sit in a lecture hall while IMing and listening to music are problematic. The solution is smaller classes that engage students in the content of the course, but also students who want to learn. (Based on my experience, I don’t think online classes are any answer. I had to take one in library school because no one on campus would teach gov docs. The fact that I could eat my dinner, play my guitar, and still participate in class didn’t impress me with the format much.)

Another signs about having a job after graduation that probably won’t exist today, leading another student to hold up what I think is a Scantron sheet with writing on the back saying, “Filling out this won’t help me get there.” In some ways I sympathize with the student. Filling out bubbles on a test sheet won’t get the student a job. I would be more concerned, though, that it won’t help the student get an education. I balk at the notion that the goal of a university is strictly to get people jobs. That seems to be a common factor with many students, but the failure isn’t that of the education, but of their understanding of the purpose of that education. The students frustrated that not all the readings are relevant to their lives and not all the classes will help them get jobs might be more happy with vocational training. No wonder they’re bored out of their minds in these classes. Colleges need to engage students more, but students need to want to learn. Both are necessary for the best college experience.

If they’re so bored, and if so much is so irrelevant to their concerns, then why are they there? Why don’t they quit and do something else? I know why they don’t, because they believe that a college degree is necessary to get a job that will allow them to almost have a decent middle class lifestyle these days. I think they’re right, but it’s not the presence of the degree that will fit them for challenging and constantly changing knowledge economy, but the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that come with learning.

Guitar Heroes, Juke Box Heroes, and Scholars

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I think I will make another irrelevant and grasping video game analogy for today because this is an issue I’ve been thinking about for a while. Some of you may be familiar with the video game Guitar Hero. My nephew and his friend were telling me about this game. It’s played with a controller that looks vaguely like a Gibson SG, only without any strings or frets and without looking cool. The game plays rock music, and you’re supposed to press buttons at different parts of the song and act like a guitar hero. I haven’t played, but the description on the Wikipedia makes it sound like a rock version of that game Simple Simon, only with a different controller. I told them I didn’t think I would like it, since I know how to play a real guitar. If I wanted to pretend to be a guitar hero, I could pick up my Strat and start playing some rock music. At one point in my life I wanted to be a Juke Box Hero, and even bought a beat up six string in a second hand store. Eventually I realized that I like reading and research and ideas, and didn’t like working with other people in a band.

This contrast between the Guitar Hero and the Juke Box Hero makes me question the training we give students and whether it has anything to do with what they want or need. Academic librarians (and I think a lot of professors as well) want students to be juke box heroes, but the students only want to be guitar heroes. We want them to train them to be scholars, but they just want to play at being scholarly.

In one of the encyclopedias of library science there’s a distinction between liberal and conservative reference service. Liberal service is giving the patron the answer, and conservative service is teaching the patron how to find the answer. Obviously it varies within context, but usually for students I take the conservative approach. The idea is to make them independent scholars, able to locate and evaluate scholarly resources for their work. Some students enjoy this a lot. They want to be the scholarly equivalent of the juke box hero, with a book in their hand and their laptop slung low. I get the feeling that a lot of the students would rather be guitar heroes, going through the motions and putting on a good show, or in this case writing a decent paper, but they don’t want to be independent scholars. They want someone to hand them the resources and they’ll play the game.

Professors tend to like the students who are most interested in their discipline, and they love creating future scholars. I think librarians are similar. I like to encourage students to do research and see it as part of a life of learning rather than a chore for an essay assignment. However, one might question how realistic it is to think that most students have any interest in scholarship. And here I’m talking about very bright and well prepared college students, since based on my experience at a big state university and a mediocre liberal arts college, at many places most students have almost no scholarly inclination and are interested mainly in getting a diploma in any way they can because they think this will get them a job. It’s possible our research instruction falls mostly on deaf ears because the majority of students don’t want or need what we have to give. We want the students to be juke box heroes, passionate about scholarship, interested in research, but they want to be guitar heroes. I don’t see this as a problem, because our purpose isn’t necessarily to help all students equally, but to aid and further scholarship and scholars.

Second Life, Pac Man, and Computer Chess

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Recently, I was asked my professional opinion about Second Life, and this is one answer.

When I give periodic talks about Google, I demo Google Gadgets and show the variety of them, including ones that are games such as Space Invaders or Pac Man. Usually I make a joke about how great this is, because now I don’t have to be bored at work anymore, that I’m ranked in the top 100 of Space Invaders, but with another slow semester I’ll probably make the top 10. It usually gets at least a chuckle from the audience. I made the joke in a talk to the university community, and some of my colleagues then claimed I’d told a hundred university employees that I sit around all day playing Space Invaders instead of working, thus making librarians look bad. One colleague actually asked me if I sat in my office all day playing Space Invaders. With as straight a face as I could muster, I told her that no, I usually played Asteroids instead. The irony is I don’t even like computer games.

However, I do play a lot of games with my computer, though rarely at work. I especially like abstract strategy board games and know how to play many different ones, though I also play backgammon and cribbage. A few years ago I was trying to play games with my daughter and yet escape the living hell that is Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders, so I started researching games we could play together with no chance involved. She was a bit young for chess, but I taught her some. However, I’ve also taught her checkers, reversi, go, gomoku, ninuki-renju, mancala, Cathedral, Blokus, connect 4, fox and hounds, nine men’s morris, chinese checkers, alquerque, tafl, surakarta, and probably a few more I’ve forgotton. The last three were so obscure I had to make the boards myself. (By the way, I highly recommend surakarta for small children; it’s a checkers-like game where one captures by moving pieces around big loops on the corner of the board.) I have computer programs that play almost all of these games, and I rely upon Fritz 10 and Hoyle Backgammon as ways to relax of an evening. I find these applications invaluable for playing, practicing, and even learning the games. I taught myself to play chess with the Chessmaster. But I don’t like computer games.

Okay, so what am I talking about and how is it relevant to Second Life or librarianship? For my purposes here, I’m considering computer games to be games that one couldn’t play without a computer, games that were born in a computerized environment. This would include such relatively simple games as Asteroids or Pacman to such complex games as World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs. I don’t like them. I never liked them. I gave away my Atari as a child. I didn’t hang out in arcades. I just found them all boring. However, I love computer chess because the computer program allows me to do better something I like to do in real life. I don’t like World of Warcraft because exploring strange worlds and fighting monsters isn’t something I want to do in real life, and even if it was, this game wouldn’t make me any better at it. Wielding a virtual sword just isn’t the same as wielding a real one, and I should know since I just bought a sword, the primary purpose of which is to give my wife something to look at me and shake her head about.

This is how I at least relate to various kinds of social software. I like the ones that help me do something more efficiently that I was already doing. Recently, I set up a wiki for our reference department because I was trying to capture in one accessible shared place all the information we had in files folders or post it notes or hard drives or email folders that we need to do reference work. We were already keeping this sort of information, just not in a convenient form. Thus, I like this wiki. It makes real life easier, and I consider this the best reason to persuade people to use it.

But so far, I don’t see how Second Life helps me do anything better that I’d ever want to do away from the computer. This may change in the future, and I’m open to development, but so far it bores me. From what I’ve read, virtual shopping and virtual pornography are the most popular things in Second Life. I do almost all of my shopping online, but that’s because I can shop for real things more efficiently. I don’t want to do any virtual shopping. I don’t like to shop at all. I’ve also visited a lot of islands that might be of interest to me, but I couldn’t find anyone there, including the chess island. I wouldn’t go to Second Life to hang out with my friends, because none of my friends visit there.

Thus, while I realize that there may be academic uses to Second Life, so far I’m skeptical of its usefulness. It still seems more like a computer game to me, something that one does mainly for fun and can only do with a computer. It doesn’t seem to build on real life so much as provide a fun alternative to it. It is purposeless, like games and even perhaps like the humanities themselves. I don’t consider this a criticism. Reading a poem is purposeless, yet nonetheless valuable and enjoyable, at least if it’s a good poem. Second Like, like a game, provides an end in itself, but so far it’s just not an end I value. If I found it more utilitarian, I’d have a higher professional opinion of it.

Controlling Our Information

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Recently, I attended a meeting where we discussed a growing problem for our library–the inability to get all of the electronic resources we subscribe to in our catalog, especially the ejournals. Part of the problem is staffing; I’m not sure we have enough people to treat these journals as we do print journals. Part of the problem is sheer quantity. We purchase a journal package, and suddenly that’s a thousand new titles, and perhaps they don’t have easily available MARC records. The catalog has always traditionally been the place of record for what the library owns or has access to, and if it could still be that I’d be happy, too, but clearly it’s not. People are finding journal articles through Google Scholar that, according to our OPAC, we don’t subscribe to, and yet obviously we do subscribe to them because otherwise the patron wouldn’t be able to access some of them through Google.

I’m torn in the debate. I like the idea of the catalog of record. I’m comfortable searching the catalog and teaching others to. I like the power over information that a perfect catalog can give me. And I know that admitting that the catalog can no longer function that way and that alternative searching methods are inevitable means giving up a lot of the control we have over our own resources–control which we have very good reasons for wanting. It means we have a lot of uncertainty that doesn’t benefit us or the patrons, but which may be inevitable.

Yet I still wonder if we’re fighting a Sisyphean battle. We roll those MARC records up the hill into the catalog and think it’s complete, and along comes another thousand journals unaccounted for. (I know that was a bit strange, but I was trying to figure out what Sisyphus would do with a MARC record.) Increasingly, I have the nagging feeling that trying to catalog every item we own or have access to is analogous to trying to catalog the Internet. I just don’t see how it can be done. (Perhaps that’s what the elusive semantic web is supposed to be able to do some day, but I won’t comment because I’m not sure I understand the issues well enough.)

Some of us are understandably bothered that we have resources we don’t control, or that people can find our own journals through Google but not through the OPAC. I think this is where I part company with some of my colleagues. As much as I would appreciate the perfect OPAC, I don’t think it’s possible anymore, and it doesn’t bother me that people find resources through other methods. It’s enough for me if people find the information they need, and if they find information we provide but not with tools we provide, I’m fine with that. It’s possible that librarians are the only ones bothered by this, and the fact that people are already accessing our journals through Google in the first place is an indication this might be true.

I also know there are other next generation catalogs that attempt to do some of this stuff. We don’t have one of those, though. And even with these I wonder whether there can any longer be one-stop shopping for library resources.

If there can’t be, and clearly there isn’t now, then it causes obvious problems, especially perhaps for reference services. If we can no longer depend on having a catalog of record, how can we verify what we have? Is the catalog even useful if we can’t trust it? I’m certainly not arguing that the catalog isn’t still useful, only that it’s usefulness is limited in yet another way, and that we must use alternative ways to find information, even information we’ve purchased. The world of information is a great big mess these days, and I appreciate the problems as much as anyone, but if problems can’t be solved, then worrying about them doesn’t help much. Sisyphus might have been better off if he’d left that MARC record at the bottom of the hill and searched Google instead.

Using Our Own Services

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Teaching a writing seminar this semester means I’m working two jobs, and during some weeks it feels like three. Why do I do it? Purely so I can have something to blog about.

Librarians would probably be better librarians if they occasionally used the library as a non-librarian. It’s very easy to become library-centric and to think the library is the most important institution on campus. It’s undeniably an important campus institution, but it’s not necessarily the most important one to faculty and students most of the time. The collections and services are important, but the library as a building is of secondary importance to many scholars.

Last week I had a problem with one of the library services related to my seminar, a service which is normally very reliable but which I thought had performed unsatisfactorily in this instance. After an email exchange, the problem was fixed, but I knew the person fixing the problem would rather not have done so right now, because this particular service is very busy around this point in the semester, and any extra demands interrupt the already hectic flow of work. As a fellow librarian, I sympathize; even as a fellow human being, I sympathize; but as an instructor relying upon this service to teach, I needed the problem fixed and I wasn’t going to stop until it was.

Our library has an article delivery service for faculty that many librarians think is extravagant. The service attempts to deliver electronically within 48 hours any article requested by any professor, whether it’s an ILL article or one in a journal sitting on a shelf in the library, which might mean only a short trip to the library for the professor to retrieve. Needless to say, this service is very popular and heavily used. Is it expensive? I assume so, but I’ve never seen any figures. Is it extravagant? Not to the users of the service, it isn’t. They don’t want to make even a short trip to the library if they don’t have to. Being in the library itself has no value for them. The collection has value, and if they can get to the collection without coming to the building, that’s fine by them. Librarians work in libraries. They’re in the building all day. It’s their business to be there. A lot of professors work in the library, but the library is a support to their work, not their primary work. Their business isn’t hanging out in libraries; their business is teaching and research, and the library is there to support that. If the library makes their job easier, then it’s doing a better job than if it doesn’t make their job easier. Librarians who don’t rely on the library for their scholarship or teaching and who don’t work in the library might not appreciate the usefulness of the service. The scholar’s main business is using the resources to produce scholarship, not schlepping over to the library to do some photocopying.

Our library also, as you might imagine, has a lot of electronic resources. Our pockets aren’t bottomless, and we could always use more money, but our collections budget is substantial and we subscribe to or purchase hundreds of databases and e-collections (or perhaps thousands by now, I lose count). Often these resources duplicate items we already have in print or microform, and some librarians make the argument that we shouldn’t pay to have electronic access to this material. After all, it’s just sitting here in the library, or perhaps in offsite storage. Interested scholars can just walk over to the library. Why cater to their laziness, especially if they are students? But most scholars don’t spend all day in the library, and many scholars don’t even work on campus all the time. Some have even been known to work when the library isn’t even open. Research isn’t necessarily something scholars just stop doing when they leave campus at 5pm or leave town for a few days or go on holiday. Just for my own research or teaching I know how delightful it is to be able to retrieve that article on New Year’s Day when I’m 500 miles away from the library building. I can understand not being able to afford certain electronic resources, but I don’t think it’s much of an argument to say we shouldn’t buy something just because we already have it in a different and less useful format. Only librarians who do little research or teaching would find this a compelling argument. Again, it’s the collection that’s important and supportive to research, not walking over to the library.

Most librarians probably already agree with me that the library’s job is to support research and teaching and save the time of scholars and teachers, and when they don’t agree with me I always suspect they’re thinking as librarians who don’t use libraries very much, rather than thinking as library users. Our job isn’t to make things easier for ourselves, but for the library users, and it’s easier to see that if we also, at least occasionally, are put in the place of the non-librarian library user.

Libguides

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Right now I’m playing around with the new Libguides service that most of you have probably heard of. I’d read about it on various blogs, but we just got a trial subscription, which I’m hoping will become permanent very soon.

For those who don’t know, Libguides is a site that lets you create locally branded subject and library research guides that are very easy to make and take advantage of lots of social softwarey stuff. Here’s what our trial version looks like. Here’s what the developed and implemented site at Boston College looks like. Libguides has all sorts of features I haven’t used yet, such as chat and rss and alerts, but the main part of it works like a wiki. It’s easy to add content and make it come out looking good.

Warning: the next three paragraphs are a rant only tangentially related to Libguides. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

When I got here almost six years ago I set about making new research guides with little help other than Dreamweaver. The research guides we have were, and still are, not at all uniform and are housed in a variety of places, including personal public html drives. My research guides are still housed on my own drive. None of our subject or course research guides look alike. At the time I went out of my way to make mine mimic the color scheme of the library website. Two years ago our website was redesigned, but no concerted effort made to make it easy for us to create new research guides in line with the new template.

Along with some of my colleagues, I think it’s my job to come up with the intellectual structure and try to understand what users might need, and someone else’s job to manage the technical nuts and bolts to make it easy for me to do. I’ve learned that I can’t keep up with everything, and keeping up with the latest website development technology hasn’t been possible. I remember sitting in computer class in high school back in 1985 learning how to program in Basic and Fortran and being told that if we didn’t know how to work with computers we would never get a job, because the future was all computers. I recall thinking something like, if this is the future of computers, only programming geeks are going to use them. At the end of the class I got an Apple IIc. Strangely enough, I could do several things with it without knowing how to program, which was no big loss for me because the only thing I ever learned to do was make a message scroll endlessly across the screen. I can do that with my screensaver now if I want to.

I’ve been feeling the same way about website development the last couple of years. Most larger libraries at least are past the days when one of the reference librarians doubled as the web designer. Web design and the systems that support it have grown more complicated and specialized. It’s a full time job. In some places, it’s several full time jobs. If this is the future of library website development, I might have said, not many librarians are going to be doing it well. That’s the beauty of social software like wikis and blogs. We don’t have to do it well. We just have to create the content and organize it. We don’t also have to program it to look good. Admittedly, it helps to know html to get this Movable Type blog working correctly, but I shouldn’t have to keep up with the latest developments in someone else’s job to do my job well. I don’t expect the web developer to help students do library research or answer reference questions.

Sorry about that rant. I got a little carried away.

I’d already decided that if we didn’t do something different by January, I was going to move all my research guides to a wiki and be done with the current library system. If all goes well, I can recreate them in Libguides instead. It’s easy to use and it looks good. I like it.

I haven’t done anything with the widgets and other features yet, but making the basic guides themselves seemed very intuitive to me. It works like a wiki, but is perhaps even easier to use, with more hints. Once you start a new guide, click “Add a Box” to add content and you’re given the following choices for the” Type of Content Inside the Box:”

  • Rich Text/Images/Dynamic Content
  • Web Links
  • Web Links
  • RSS feed
  • Podcast feed
  • Embedded Video
  • Del.icio.us Tag cloud
  • Documents and Files
  • Dates and Events
  • Interactive Poll/Voting
  • Link to another box in the system
  • Copy another box from the system

Lots of choices right there, all apparently easy to add. You can also add a profile of yourself with pictures and contact information. I’m working on the philosophy resources guide right now, and I’m hoping to at least try out many of the different features. I don’t think I’ll add the interactive poll or embed a video, though I might add a podcast just for the heck of it. I can’t think of anything more exciting than Wayne’s Weekly Research Broadcast, brought to you by Libguides.

Open Access Library Journals

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The ACRLog had a short piece this weekend on librarians and open access. Barbara Fister mentioned reading in Current Cites about a U. of California study noting the discrepancy between the words and deeds of faculty when it comes to information access, then trying to link out from Current Cites to another possibly interesting sounding article from the Journal of Academic Librarianship and finding a shopping cart. When I tried it, I got the article, but that’s because it seems to be written into our library’s charter that we subscribe to everything no matter how much an individual publisher might gouge us. (Not that I’m saying Science Direct gouges us.) She rightly wonders “Why do so few librarians bother to put our words into action? Maybe because it’s work? Maybe because nobody says you have to? Maybe because we’re hypocrites?”

This problem has bothered me for a long time. I’ve never been on the tenure track, so I’ve never had a requirement to publish. If I write something, it’s because I want to write it. Since I don’t do anything even remotely related to social science or statistics, there isn’t much discursive space in the library literature for me anyway. Regardless, years ago I decided that whenever possible I would write only for open access library journals. As an academic librarian who has discussed these issues with professors and tried to promote the idea of open access, I have also wondered why so few library journals are openly accessible.

That includes the offerings from the ALA. American Libraries isn’t openly accessible. I don’t often read it, because I read almost no journals in print now and going through the member signup page and navigating Ebrary isn’t worth the trouble. It especially bothered me that the ACRL publications weren’t openly accessible, though that seems to be changing. C&RL is mostly accessible now. When I visited the site for the current issue, I saw a notice about full text articles: “The full-text of these articles are available to current ACRL members only. You will need your password to access them.” But they were all available without my password. Maybe there’s a category of article not available.

Back to Fister’s question, why don’t we put our words into action? I suspect it’s for the same reason most other fields don’t. If one has to publish to keep one’s job, and publishing in the most respected journals is the best way to impress people, then that’s where people will try to publish if they can. Why take a chance on Library Philosophy and Practice or E-JASL when you can publish in standard journals like the Journal of Academic Librarianship that people have heard of. I suspect that fear keeps people from changing, the fear that publishing in a little known journal won’t look as good come review time.

There is one silver lining to this cloud. At least library journals don’t cost $10K a volume.

A Student’s View of Second Life

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Some librarians are excited by the prospect of Second Life. I don’t have any strong opinions about it. I’ve been on a few times, played around with my avatar trying to make it look like me except handsome, and watched other neophytes run into obstacles because they couldn’t navigate very well. I can never find any islands with many people on them, but perhaps it’s because I don’t go in for virtual shopping or virtual sex.

Princeton now has a Second Life island. I had to visit it from home, though. Because I don’t have administrative rights on my work machine and we inhabit a culture of distrust when it comes to our computers, I couldn’t download the software. (Cultures of trust and distrust could definitely be another post.) Then when I got someone from systems to download it, my computer crashed, possibly because my graphics card wasn’t powerful enough. Thus, I visited the Princeton island from home. Very pretty, but not much there. And I felt strange being the only person on campus. It was like one of those end of the world movies. I kept waiting for some horrible space monster to leap out of Nassau Hall.

The Daily Princetonian, our school newspaper, published an editorial about the Princeton Second Life island today entitled Second Life and the Soul. From the very first sentence, you can get an idea of what the writer thinks of Second Life. “You are alive. You are reading this newspaper.”

I’ve noted before that I don’t think these kids today are ahead of me technologically, even though I’m getting old enough to be their father, except with less money. I’m not sure I believe the hype about how the “millennials” are all that much different from other generations. The writer for the Prince might agree with me on this, being skeptical about the value of a Princeton on Second Life.

The editorial concludes:

“In fairness, we do not yet know the purpose of this program. Perhaps alumni will be interested in seeing Princeton online and will have fond memories of Chancellor Green. Perhaps perspective students will lie about their age to catch a glimpse of what could be. Maybe if the software is flashier more strangers will download our lectures. To some, these applications may seem trivial, but more importantly they are harmless. Should Second Life begin to intersect or usurp student life, however, this campus will be radically worse off for it.”

This seems to me exactly the kind of skeptical attitude one should take toward social software. Try it, perhaps use it, try to adapt it to good uses if possible, be ready to admit if it doesn’t work very well, and be aware of the dangers.

And all this from one of the millennials.

(You might also be interested in a more hostile reception of Second Life by a Princeton Student.)

UPDATE: I asked my students in class this morning how many had ever visited second life, and none had. One woman said, “We have real lives.”

How about Those METS

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Lately I’ve been working on a slightly different library project than usual, and I’ve learned some important things about digital libraries, my job, and myself. (That sounds a bit like those revelations celebrities always make on the covers of women’s magazines. I always thought it strange that the celebrities learn everything in threes.)

A philosophy professor here wanted the library to acquire and digitize a copy of Histoire Naturelle de Mre. Francois Bacon, a seventeenth-century French translation of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, published as far as I can tell just a few years after the English version. The library did manage to acquire a copy, which makes us one of the few libraries in the country to have one. I know you’re jealous. The finding and purchasing was relatively easy. I was pleasantly surprised that the book was under a thousand dollars considering its relative scarcity and decent condition. However, I wasn’t sure about the digitization because I hadn’t worked with the digital projects people before. Partly to get the project going, and partly to learn something new, I agreed to help out with the project if it was accepted into the queue. The project was swiftly approved, and within a couple of weeks of receipt the book was digitized (with excellent images).

I’m hesitant to admit my previous ignorance of what goes on behind the scenes of these digital projects, but I had little idea. I figured it was more than scanning pages and loading the images on the web, but that’s about it. I use these projects all the time, but hadn’t thought much of their creation, much like I’m happy to use the catalog but glad someone else does the cataloging. This may be the only project I’ve followed from selection to the very end, which I hope is near. I watched the digital photographer photographing some of the images. I watched the head rare books cataloger do some minor tweaking of the MARC record.

Then came my part, the METS record, which according to my favorite easily accessible encyclopedia–the Wikipedia–stands for “Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard” and “is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium.” That sounds about like what the more knowledgeable programmers and catalogers told me, so I’ll stick with that. My task in this project was to help create the METS record, which among other things creates the points of entry into the digital document. You probably knew that already. I had no idea. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with myself the past few years. If you go to this project and click on the drop down box that marked SHOW, you’ll see one thing the METS record does.

With 628 images, I suspected the METS record might be a little tedious to create. I also knew that it was in XML, which I have no experience with. I foolishly thought there would be some sort of editor program to help with this. I don’t mean an XML editor, because I had one of those. I mean something more like Dreamweaver, that creates html and css and all that good stuff without having to hand code it. I wanted a Dreamweaver for my METS record. Imagine my shock when I was told there wasn’t one, that some people have been handcoding parts of these projects. I’m always more or less happy I’m not a programmer or a cataloger, but this confirmed my feelings.

Fortunately, another of our catalogers has created a macro that translates an Excel spreadsheet into a proper XML METS record. Though initially thinking this project might be a good way to learn XML, I was counseled by wiser heads to use the spreadsheet method instead. Most of it was me going through the images and creating points of entry on chapters or subchapters, labeling them, matching page and image numbers, etc. Very detailed work. I finished the spreadsheet was told it looked pretty good, and am waiting to hear if it made its miraculous metamorphoses into a workable METS record.

What I learned about digital projects is how complicated they are and how much work goes into even the simplest one. Some of my colleagues have criticized the rate at which the digital projects have been moving, but after seeing how much had to be done, and how many people had to work together just to digitize one book properly, I understand why it’s not the same as scanning and loading onto a website, which some people seem to think. The whole project has given me a better understanding of the behind the scenes work of a lot of my hardworking colleagues.

I can’t say I learned anything new about my job, but I needed a third insight to sound like a celebrity. Still, it was reinforced for me how dependent we all are on other people doing their work well. When I’m doing it, it seems to me that most of my work is independent. I don’t often work in teams, and I can do a lot of my job without interacting with other librarians or being in a particular location. In any given week, I’m much more likely to interact with a professor or student than with a colleague. I like the autonomy, but my autonomy depends on all the teams working behind the scenes making sure that when I click a button ordering a book, that book later shows up on a shelf, or even in a digital project.

What I learned about myself is that I’m still glad I’m not a cataloger or programmer, but now I have more concrete reasons. I’m just not cut out for that detailed work. I’m an end user and proud of it, but I’m even more thankful for the detail-oriented people in the background making all this stuff work for me.

Threat and Communication

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Rhetoricians sometimes talk about the psychologist Carl Rogers, specifically his notion that threat hinders communication and persuasion. The basic idea should be obvious to everyone. If I feel threatened by you, I might listen to you, but I won’t be persuaded. I might be ordered, forced, coerced, or manipulated, and I may have to capitulate to your demands, but I won’t be persuaded and won’t willingly do what you want me to do. In an organization, this means I might very well resist you in cunning ways, especially if I feel I have little power in a direct confrontation.

I say the basic idea should be obvious, but often isn’t, because persuasion isn’t necessarily what some people set out to achieve. Chaim Perelman writes in The Realm of Rhetoric that the aim of argumentation is “to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent.”

Communication may be hindered even by relatively mild threats. I don’t need a gun put to my head to feel threatened. I can feel threatened professionally or personally, and this can mean standard arguments might not work. As Maxine Hairston writes:

“Ironically, those situations in which the classical methods of using proof, evidence, and logical deductions are most apt to fail are just the ones we care about most. Such arguments often concern issues that affect us deeply-racial and sexual matters, moral questions, personal and professional standards and behavior. Where there is dispute about this kind of issue, communication often breaks down because both parties are so emotionally involved, so deeply committed to certain values, that they can scarcely listen to each other, much less have a rational exchange of views. ” (Carl Rogers’s Alternative to Traditional Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication 27:4. Link is to JSTOR)

I bring this up because I think it has some relevance to discussions of change, technology, politics and other contentious issues within librarianship. How much do proponents of certain changes or political positions try to persuade reluctant librarians? And how might reluctant librarians feel threatened? And if they feel threatened, how might that perception of threat be reduced? Saying “you just don’t get it” isn’t persuasion.

Rogers contribution adds more understanding of the person to traditional rhetoric. Rhetoric isn’t just about argument, it’s about persuasion. Arguments sometimes don’t work. An argument may be sound, but if people aren’t persuaded, it still fails. To persuade, those arguing need to treat their opponents with respect and understanding, to try to see the world as the other sees it. Hairston outlines 5 rhetorical actions based on Rogerian theory:

1. Give a brief, objective statement of the issue under discussion.

2. Summarize in impartial language what you perceive the case for the opposition to be; the summary should demonstrate that you understand their interests and concerns and should avoid any hint of hostility.

3. Make an objective statement of your own side of the issue, listing your concerns and interests, but avoiding loaded language or any hint of moral superiority.

4. Outline what common ground or mutual concerns you and the other person or group seem to share; if you see irreconcilable interests, specify what they are.

5. Outline the solution you propose, pointing out what both sides may gain from it.

If we all followed these guidelines, there might be fewer librarians who feel threatened by change. Frustration and hostility never persuade anyone.