Journal Archives and the Future

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JSTOR announced last week that they won’t continue to digitize Science, because “after a very productive association of nearly 10 years, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has decided to discontinue its relationship with JSTOR, effective December 31, 2007.” JSTOR customers will continue to have access to what has already been digitized (1880-2002), but the previously moving wall won’t move anymore. For many, perhaps most, academic libraries, JSTOR is a model of a dependable, space-saving, archive. I know a lot of libraries have moved their JSTOR-archived issues offsite or weeded them completely. I’m assuming this won’t be the norm for JSTOR journals, but what if?

This raises concerns for me about the future of digital archives. JSTOR has done a great job and now has an outstanding collection of journals in many areas, but unless the future lies with JSTOR-type projects and non-commercial digitization projects, scholars will eventually be the ones suffering. Any one particular journal is relatively unimportant, but it is still an example of an unfortunate development for academic libraries. Today Science, tomorrow everything else, and then we’re done for.

A related concern is the future of science journals in general. I have a feeling the AAAS will be coming out with their own backfile package like some other journals have done, and many libraries will subscribe. The AAAS isn’t commercial, but their move still bodes ill for libraries. Commercial science journal publishers seem to be under the impression they can do whatever they like and large academic libraries will just fork over more money to them. Given the difficulty libraries have had in resisting the large increases in STM serial prices in the last decade and the only moderate success of establishing non-commercial, open access, peer-reviewed journals that garner the same respect among publishing researchers as some of the most expensive commercial journals, it seems unlikely that libraries will be able or willing to resist more of this kind of thing in the future. And yet it should be obvious to everyone that the current science publishing model is probably unsustainable. Even if 100% of acquisitions budgets were dedicated to STM serials, eventually the price increases would outstrip the budget increases.

The current model of much academic research is just bizarre. Either university or public monies go to fund a lot of scientific research that is published in journals that the universities then have to subscribe to at often exorbitant rates that usually climb faster than the rate of inflation or library budget increases. In the case of public universities, the public funds the research, and then has to buy it back. I could never see how this benefits anyone but the journal publishers.

An article in the most recent C&RL examines a couple of arguments behind the open access movement. “Does Open Access Really Make Sense? A Closer Look at Chemistry, Economics, and Mathematics,” by John C. Navin and Jay Starratt, concludes: “The case made that public funded research needs to be fully accessible is, at least intuitively, one of the most satisfying arguments. Clearly there is considerable public funding supporting the research published in the journals we examined. Even in our lowest publicly supported field, economics, nearly one third of the published research articles acknowledged public funding.” (According to their results, 59% of chemistry articles, 31% or economics articles, and 59% of mathematics articles specifically acknowledge public funding.)

I’m obviously conflating a number of issues here, but only because they seemed connected to me. One journal pulling out of JSTOR is not a catastrophe, though we can certainly hope it’s not the wave of the future. And the AAAS isn’t a commercial publishing venture like Elsevier or Wiley. But the discontinuation of the relationship between JSTOR and the AAAS could very well be another symptom of a disease that will eventually kill library budgets.

Infotopia

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I read a good book last weekend that I think a lot of librarians might find interesting:
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, by Cass Sunstein. The book concerns the way information is used in society to improve decision making, among other things.

There’s nothing in it necessarily specific to libraries, but I found some of the issues about the use of information in society thought-provoking. I’m not going to provide a review, since there seem to be plenty around. I just want to mention a few representative issues.

Consider the “Condorcet Jury Theorem,” which says that if a group of “people are answering a question with two possible answers, one false and one true,” and that there is a better than 50% chance “that each voter will answer correctly,” then “the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100 % as the size of the group increases”(25). The converse holds as well. If people have a better than 50% chance of being wrong, then the possibly of a right answer declines with every new voter. Think about that the next time you step into a voting booth.

Deliberating groups often fail, though it’s been the view of many since Aristotle that when more people come together and share ideas there’s a greater likelihood of making a wiser decision. Apparently Aristotle isn’t always right, but the fault isn’t deliberation itself, which can aggregate knowledge and lead to better decisions, especially if including people in the decision process and getting their consensus is itself important for the decision. Some problems: deliberating groups work best when most people in the group already have the correct or best answer; groups tend to reinforce the prejudices of the majority within them and lead to group polarization (e.g., with conservatives getting more conservative and liberals getting more liberal); people bow to social pressure and don’t share knowledge they think might be unpopular; they amplify errors; “hidden profiles” (knowledge which should become common but doesn’t, thus hindering the deliberating capacity of the group; “informational cascades, or what happens when you agree with her because you respect her and I agree with you both because I don’t know any different, and he agrees with all of us because how could so many smart people be wrong.

Chapter 4 has a fascinating discussion of “money, prices, and prediction markets.” I wasn’t aware of the extensive use of prediction markets. Guess I should read more economics. Anyway, groups set up markets with various rewards for the right prediction, and this provides incentives for people to use their dispersed information to profit. In deliberating groups, people may stay quiet, because “by speaking out, they provide benefits to others, while possibly facing high private costs. Prediction markets realign incentives in a way that is precisely designed to overcome these problems” (104). There’s a list of urls for prediction markets at the back of the book, but he discusses the Iowa Electronics Markets among others.

Sunstein likes wikis and the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is successful because so many people come together to share knowledge and a core of people work hard to correct errors. Despite the lack of prices, some have considered the Wikipedia to be partly explainable in terms of F.A. Hayek’s criticism of socialist economic planning, that such planning is theoretically flawed because no person or group of people could possibly have all the information necessary to make most economic decisions in a society (or perhaps even in a large organization). Prices provide us with the dispersed information available through billions of transactions. I tend to think the Internet and Wikipedia works this way, and was recently reminded that way back in 2001 I was noting the way “ask an expert” services on the web took advantage of useful dispersed knowledge. Sunstein disagrees, at least in respect to the Wikipedia. “Because Wikipedia uses a “last in time” rule, because no literal price is created, and because economic incentives are not directly involved, Hayek’s central arguments about that “marvel,” the price system,” do not apply, at least directly” (159).

While he thinks wikis can be great ways to share and aggregate information, Sunstein isn’t as sanguine on blogs. He specifically criticizes Richard Posner’s “blog triumphalism” for claiming blogging is “a fresh and striking exemplification of…Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge.” I tend to agree with Posner, but Sunstein points out that blogs have all of the polarization and other errors of other deliberating groups, with political blogs perhaps being the worst. Bloggers tend to create their own “information cocoons,” only reading or linking to like minds, and information cocoons often result in bad decision making, whether the cocoon is a political blogger or a CEO. At their best, though, blogs get many ideas out quickly. Hmm, maybe this blog wasn’t such a good idea.

If you’re interested in how information can be better used in society, or perhaps just in your organization, you might want to read Infotopia, and think about polarization, information cocoons, hidden profiles, etc., and how in our own libraries and communities we can make the best decisions by aggregating dispersed knowledge, and perhaps how as librarians we can facilitate the use of information in society.

Thoughts on Authority

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I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts about Authority after the Wikipedia post. I guess if my thoughts were too organized, I’d write up the idea for an authoritative peer-reviewed journal instead of blogging it.

Academic librarians are very un-postmodern. They like Authority, at least in some senses, and have never subscribed to the “death of the author” proclamation once so prominent in literary critical circles. The notion of Authority helps up both in academic collection development and in reference. We don’t have the time or expertise to read and evaluate everything we buy or recommend, so we often rely upon some authority to distinguish the best material.

But what are we doing when we use Authority as a criterion for scholarly materials? Surely none of us believe that because Renowned Professor A published this article in Standard Scholarly Journal B that the article is thereby true, even if we believe in notions of truth. If we do, then what do we make of the undeniable fact that Acclaimed Scholar C has refuted Professor A’s claims in great detail in her most recent book from Outstanding University Press? The scholarly conversation captured in books and journals and even blogs isn’t necessarily any better because of who wrote it or where it was written, but we often act as if it is, using Authority as a metonym for something else. I’m not sure what that something else is, though. Truth? Probably not. A certain standard of scholarly rigor? Maybe.

I hope most librarians only use Authority as a criterion early on in the research process, and don’t try to teach students that only certain authoritative sources are good. Even very short source evaluation guides like this one go a little bit beyond who wrote or published the source, but it might be better if such guides regularly included more on content analysis, like this one.

But I’ve seen that in a lot of standard introductions to students, evaluating information often boils down to authority of some kind, rather than if the work is well reasoned or carefully researched. We just hope that if the writer and press have Authority, then the rest will take care of itself, and without becoming experts on every topic that’s often the best we can do. (It’s not just librarians, though. I was teaching a research session where the young instructor more or less said that any books not published by either Oxbridge or Ivy League presses or by professors from or at least with PhDs from such universities were suspect until proven otherwise.)

Tips for evaluating websites usually have the same approach. Who wrote this? What’s the url? Where is the page from? Does the author have the right credentials? I’m not saying this is bad. I do the same thing myself. (My writing students and I compare and evaluate two websites on the World Trade Center: this and this. The results of our comparison might make its own blog post.) But is this anything other than a shorthand way of evaluating something without reading it? Would what I write, for example, be any different, any better or worse, if the url of this blog were different or if I had a different job title?

When we challenge students to evaluate information sources, the “authority” of the source should only be one method to evaluate the source, and even then only if it’s a relevant criterion. We need to emphasize that “authoritative” means that a work has met some standard of criticism and has been judged a worthy entry into the scholarly conversation by someone or some group, but that it doesn’t mean the source is “right” or “true,” and it doesn’t necessarily mean other sources aren’t also useful or reliable.

We also need to understand when the notion of authority has no relevance (as when there is no author), and when we have to substitute some other standard of value instead. For Wikipedia and other wiki products, what would that standard be? Or perhaps a more relevant question — what can the shorthand criterion be if we can’t use Authority the way we’ve been used to?

Wikipedia and the Word of God

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A review of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman says that in “many respects, the Bible was the world’s first Wikipedia article. So many hands have altered and edited the now lost originals that we will never know for sure what those originals said.” I don’t think that’s a very useful analogy, because it breaks down on so many levels, but it does bring up the question of authority, which librarians and scholars like, and which doesn’t seem to matter to most people, at least not in the same way. In terms of authority, how do Wikipedia and the Bible compare?

The review points out out that the Bible we have in English is a translation based on nonexistent original documents written by we know not whom, copied and recopied over several centuries in numerous manuscripts that may neither be complete nor agree with each other. This is hardly news to anyone who knows much about textual criticism of the Bible, but it seems to be unwelcome news to people who believe the Bible (and especially the KJV) is the unerring Word of God even in its details, so unwelcome that they probably wouldn’t read Ehrman’s book anyway and if they did they wouldn’t believe it or wouldn’t care, despite the fact that the reason people consider the Bible as authoritative is precisely because of its author, or at least who they think is the author — God. The Bible is an authority because it was written by God.

This is much the way some librarians would approach scholarly or reference sources. These sources have authority because of the authors.

The Wikipedia, however, is different. It can’t be judged adequately by the “authority” standard, because we don’t know who the authors are. For many people, this is enough to dismiss it as a useful reference source. The Wikipedia is often judged to be unreliable because anyone can edit it and we don’t know who really writes the entries. Because anyone can edit at any time, it can be changed for the worse, and the entries might be written by crazy people! Everyone has a favorite Wikipedia entry scandal to trot out in these discussions, even though I suspect the mini-scandals are in fact exceptions. If we apply the standard criterion to the Wikipedia (and similar wiki products), then they have to be dismissed out of hand. Is this a problem with the Wikipedia, or with our limited criteria of quality?

Librarians like to judge reference or scholarly sources by their authority. We know this book is good because the Outstanding University Press published it, or because some respected scholar at a respectable university wrote it. Professor Smith of Ivy U wrote this Encyclopedia Mundi entry, so it must be better than the corresponding Wikipedia entry in some way.

Authority is one of the tools of academic collection development and reference, a necessary tool because we don’t have the time or expertise to read and evaluate everything before we buy it, but we should be wary of using it too indiscriminately. After all, it’s not like authorities are necessarily right or true, and most renowned scholarly publications have other scholarly publications criticizing their shortcomings.

(To be fair, it’s not just librarians who have this sometimes irrelevant and medieval respect for “authority.” A lot of students of the humanities seems to have the same view of authority, and will use Derrida, for example, as an argumentative trump the way medieval scholastics might have used “the Philosopher.” I can’t count how many times in an earlier life I heard someone say “Well, Foucault says,” as if that somehow settled an argument.)

Perhaps the Wikipedia should be judged by a different standard, though, since authority isn’t relevant. Perhaps Wikipedia should be judged by some criterion of truth or usefulness. Because whatever librarians think of Wikipedia, it’s clear that people love it, and we’d be better off remembering that and figuring out how to exploit the Wikipedia than in dismissing it out of hand.

Changing Information Needs of Faculty

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The latest Educause Review has an interesting article on “The Changing Information Services Needs of Faculty.” In it the authors report on a study of “attitudes and perceptions of academic collection development librarians and faculty toward the transition to an increasingly electronic environment.”

For the most part the perceptions of faculty are encouraging for any anxious librarians. Faculty value libraries highly for their collection development functions: buying materials and preserving them, especially in electronic formats. This hardly comes as a surprise to me, since buying stuff is one of my main functions for the faculty in the departments I serve, along with solving problems and explaining any library procedures that might be considered byzantine by the uninitiated.

One minor disagreement concerns the “consultative role” of librarians. “The consultative role of the librarian in helping faculty in their research and teaching is viewed as an important function by most librarians [I bet it is], but most faculty members do not put the same emphasis on this role of the library.” Again, not much of a surprise. I often get requests to track down hard to find resources or to purchase materials the library doesn’t have, but almost all of my research consultations are with students. Usually professors only contact me for help if they’re doing research out of their usual areas. Librarians who think they know more about a scholar’s research than the scholar does are often deluding themselves.

The major disagreement between librarians and faculty concerns the relevance of the library in the future. For example, “in the future, faculty expect to be less dependent on the library and increasingly dependent on electronic materials. By contrast, librarians generally think their role will remain unchanged and their responsibilities will only grow in the future.”

Some anxious librarians may question the future of the library, or whether libraries will be needed, especially since so much information and so many resources are online and more or less easily searchable. Why bother with the library?

One key problem is the meaning of “library.” I think the article uses the word “library” equivocally. The major disagreement may be that faculty expect to be less dependent on the library, while librarians expect their responsibilities to grow, but faculty and librarians may very well mean different things by “library” when they answer these questions. Faculty expect to be “increasingly dependent on electronic materials,” but who provides most of these electronic materials? The library, obviously.

By “library,” do we mean the library building, or even the library website as first stop portal to scholarly resources? If we do, then the library probably will become less relevant. Even some of the hard core humanities professors I know don’t come to the library if they can help it. They want everything available online, so they can work from anywhere. I can’t blame them, because I’m the same way. I don’t want to be tied to a particular place for research.

But the library as place is increasingly not what I and some other librarians mean by “library.” The library building is great, and will probably always be an important location for residential college campuses. Physical books will probably still be an important part of research, at least in the humanities, for a long time to come, and traditional library functions will survive for the time being. Personally, I get great satisfaction from wandering around a research library with millions of books, which may help explain why I’m a librarian. I’m not alone in this satisfaction, but the joys of wandering around a good research library are not the same as the joys of research and scholarship.

The “library” will eventually become a mostly virtual world, consisting to a large extent of “electronic materials.”. It’s only a matter of time, as much as some librarians try to fight it. Librarians care about the format of information, but researchers usually don’t; they care about the ease of access. However, that doesn’t mean that whatever the library becomes isn’t the library, or at least the functional equivalent for the library in scholarly research.

Academic libraries will be useful for what content they provide and for helping people find and use that content when they need help, just like they are now. Libraries buy and organize materials, even if the materials are all online. Perhaps scholars aren’t using the library website as their first portal to information, but even if they use Google Scholar or some equivalent the content is often available only because someone in some library has made a decision to purchase it or digitize it and a lot of people have worked to make it available. This stuff doesn’t just buy or digitize itself, and it doesn’t just organize itself, either. And if researchers need help using it, they will need the expertise of librarians, even if these librarians don’t sit at a reference desk or even in a building called a library.

Some librarians grow anxious with declining circulation or reference stats, or with the disappearance of traditional ways in libraries. In many ways, it’s the success of librarians and others to make so much information easily available that leads to the anxiety. We’re so successful we won’t have jobs anymore! For some reason, this doesn’t bother me, and as a relatively young librarian who has an interest in supporting serious scholarship I should probably be more anxious than some of my older colleagues. I’ve got at least 30 more working years ahead of me, and it would be nice to have a job for those years, but I’m not sure it will bother me if that job changes radically over the decades.

Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but I can’t imagine a time when all relevant scholarly information is digitized, organized, freely available, and easily accessible to all, at least not a time in any immediate future. (If I can just make it to 2040, I’ll be safe!) And if that ever happens, I think that whatever World Brain the library evolves into might just be called a library, and the people who make it happen librarians.

Google 2.0 as a Teaching Tool

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One of the best ways to encourage people to try new things is to show how they benefit and how easy it can be. Librarians should be persuaded by the argument that a particular change will benefit library users, but some aren’t, and to be fair, it’s not always clear the latest new tech fashion really will benefit anyone in the library but the people who enjoy playing around with new gadgets.

But just considering changes in information technology and social software, I’ve lately been trying to make the case that learning new tools isn’t just fun (since for many people it isn’t) or a good way to communicate with students (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but that it also brings some personal benefits. What personal benefits can it bring?

(On a side note, as I’ve been working on this post, I’ve run across two interesting blog posts that try to provide reasons for librarians to learn about some of these new tools: David Lee King’s follow up post on Basic Competencies of a 2.0 Librarian and 20 reasons why learning emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job at Librarians Matter. Both of these posts present good reasons to learn new technologies and show how such learning is relevant to contemporary librarianship.)

I’ve been focusing on ways the technology can immediately benefit librarians by helping them personalize and organize their own information environment, and I’ve been doing this specifically through Google, because in their drive to take over the world, Google has made it easier for people to come to many of these new tools through a one-stop shopping exercise.

Recently, I’ve been giving some talks through a New Jersey library cooperative called Infolink, and also working closely with a couple of colleagues teaching what I call Google 2.0. Focusing on Google is a good way to introduce people to a wide array of tools at one time. (By the way, I’m giving a hands-on Infolink workshop at some New Jersey public library sometime in August. That’s about as specific as my self-promotion can be right now. If you get the opportunity, sign up. I’m entertaining and informative, and I bet that’s more than you can say about your last few library presentations.)

For example, lately I’ve sat down for long sessions with two colleagues who wanted to know more about all of this 2.0 stuff. By the end of my last two-hour session, the colleague I worked with had accounts for Google email, Talk, Bookmarks, Calender, Groups, Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, and Page Creator, as well as a Blogger account and new professional blog. Orkut seemed a waste of time, especially since he already had a Facebook profile. Whenever Google gets around to merging completely with Jotspot, I’ll even be able to add wikis.

The Google-phobic librarian might ask, why Google? Google isn’t the only place, or even necessarily the best place, to get all this stuff! The answer should be obvious. Google has a great search engine, and they are putting together in one place a lot of useful tools. My goal isn’t to be a shill for Google (though if they want to give me a lot of money, I’ll be happy to shill for them); my goal is to introduce librarians to new information technologies as easily as possible.

By the end of the sessions, my colleagues also had the tool I think is essential for making this as easy as it can be — the iGoogle page, with all of its movable gadgets. We loaded up their iGoogle page with the Gmail, Gtalk, Bookmarks, Calendar, and Reader gadgets, plus some other things. We loaded the Reader with a few blogs and feeds relevant to their work. We loaded the Bookmarks with some useful websites. I showed them how to easily add items to the Reader and the Bookmarks. And it’s all right there on one web page once they log in. They don’t have to move from page to page or go out and find the information. Now information comes to them. They don’t have to remember. It’s just there, and my assumption is if it’s there they’ll use it.

And what was my rationale for encouraging them to do this? Because they’ll have fun? Absolutely not. Because they’ll recapture their youth and be “relevant” to the teenagers coming into the library? Of course not. Because they’re inferior if they’re not up on the latest trends? Considering they are among the colleagues I respect the most, certainly not. (I have to say that, because if all went well, they’re reading this on their feed readers right now.)

My rationale was that these tools could save them time and effort, and allow them to replicate a common information environment wherever they log in. With these tools, they can get information relevant to them and share information in many formats more quickly and efficiently than they could before. The tools make their life easier and help them in some way. If they see further applications for them, or if the knowledge allows them to know more about current trends, that’s just an added benefit. What sells a lot of us on emerging technologies is not that we want to be relevant or “hip” or something, but that we see benefits in the technologies that others might not see, and we see those benefits because we have incorporated the technologies into our lives to a greater or lesser extent and lived with them for a while. Most people are already comfortable living with Google as a search engine, so the transition is made easier.

Sure, I’m ignoring all the competing services by concentrating specifically on Google. I’m not talking much about other feed readers or social bookmarking applications like Del.icio.us that would let people share their bookmarks. For the most part, I’m even ignoring the broader concepts behind this technology. (I’m certainly not trying to define what Web or Library 2.0 means.) But at the end of a couple of hours, someone receiving this training knows more about the possibilities of social bookmarking, online group working environments, blogging, RSS, and other tools than they would before. They are able to use a lot of social software in practice and see its benefits for them. The theory can come later.

Reasons to Change

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In an essay published last year — Technological Change, Universal Access, and the End of the Library — I argued that before considering any sweeping or radical changes, librarians should take a teleological approach to change and know what end they aim at before changing. This sounds commonsensical or perhaps just trite as long as you don’ t think librarians ever make significant changes in response to crises or anxiety, to give two possible causes of change.

Libraries can of course make changes merely in response to a crisis, or because of anxiety, or because powerful people order the change. I’m certainly not disputing that. I just want to briefly consider how to persuade people to make changes willingly, assuming that the change is rationale and has a coherent end in view.

Let’s consider a common change called for in today’s libraries: learning (or at least learning about) new technologies. Why might people keep up with the latests gadgets and tools?

1) They like change. Some people just get bored with their regular routines. I like ritual and routine, but I’m also incapable of looking at a system or process or tool without considering the flaws and how it might be changed for the better. I don’t always bother to make the change if the opportunity cost is too high, but I still see the problem. But I don’t think most people like change, at least not change that effects their daily lives and isn’t obviously an improvement. It could be that a lot of people just don’t like to change even when it would be an improvement.

2) They like learn about new stuff. This might seem the same as number one, but I can imagine people who like to play with new tools without liking other kinds of change, and I know there are a lot of people who just like to play with the new gadgets for no useful reason. I like to learn and play around with new tools simply for the sake of learning, just like I read books and articles on various subjects for the sake of learning about them. I’m naturally curious and also adapt quickly. I like the opportunities my job gives me to learn new things. However, I wouldn’t want to come into the library every week to find a new office or a new reporting structure or to find they’d moved the restrooms around. For a lot of people, myself included, to enjoy change, the change has to come in the midst of a lot of routine. We need the safety of central order to enjoy novelty and eccentricity.

3) Change is good for the library users. In an ideal world, this would be a persuasive reason for librarians to change, if in fact a particular change was good for the library users. Ultimately, libraries are there to serve users, even if your concept of the library user includes, like mine does, library users not yet born. As a common ideological point among librarians, it should serve as a basis of agreement that can then lead to an argument for change. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and a lot of librarians don’t care about library users, or at least not enough to overcome a natural resistance to change.

4) Change is good for the librarians. Now we have, I think, struck upon a persuasive reason. I like change when change is good for me. I’m the self-interested rational person that economists dream of, or at least sometimes I am. Changing for the library users is great, but if the change is going to hurt the librarians, most librarians are not going to change unless forced, and forced change creates so many problems and grievances that it rarely seems a good idea.

Forced change is itself a way to hurt people. To treat people with respect and decency, you can’t force them. You have to persuade them. Often to persuade them you have to show them how a change benefits them, not just how it benefits others. (The corollary to this is that to treat people with respect and decency, one must be willing to listen to them and accept when they’re right. Refusing to do something just because you can refuse isn’t any more ethical than forcing people to change for no good reason.)

Sometimes this can’t be done, and the argument that a change is good for the library users will have to suffice. I think that’s okay, because properly defined and defended, that should be a decisive point in most arguments for library change. But showing that change is also good for the librarians helps to build more consensus for possible changes.

In this post, I’ve merely put forward some theoretical reflections on change. In my next post, I’m going to consider how librarians can be persuaded to keep up with some technological changes relevant to librarianship.

Two Cheers for Wikipedia

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The Wikipedia seems to be the reference source reference librarians love to hate. Unfortunately, the rest of the world loves it, and they don’t pay any attention to reference librarians anyway.

Marc Meola (down the road from me at TCNJ) argues on the ACRLog that the Wikipedia has no place in academia because of its lack of accuracy or reliability, and that’s an understatement of his position.

Edward Zalta, editor of the outstanding open access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, told a group of librarians at the ACRL Philosophy, Religion, & Theology Discussion group a couple of years ago that he could never support an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, which is generally the librarian criticism of the Wikipedia as well. If anyone can edit it, there’s no authority in the sense we librarians like to have.

Last year Jaron Lanier wrote a scathing (and in my opinion overblown) attack on the Wikipedia and similar things as examples of the “hive mind,” “digital maoism,” and a “new online collectivism.”

The Middlebury College History Department banned it as a source in history essays (though I have to wonder why encyclopedias are showing up at all as scholarly sources in essays).

There’s even a website called Wikitruth, dedicated solely to lambasting the Wikipedia. I found out about this site when I discovered that in their zeal to attack the Wikipedia, they had taken a quote from me in our school newspaper out of context. The tag on Wikitruth is “the truth hurts,” but apparently they’re willing to sacrifice truth and accuracy to score points against their nemesis.

And most famously, perhaps, Stephen Colbert attacked the Wikipedia with his notion of “wikiality,” or “truth by consensus.” (Since I don’t watch television, I had to find out about that one on the Wikipedia.)

The New York Times a couple of weeks ago published an article about how a Wikipedia article on a current news event was created by, in the words of someone commenting to me about it, pudgy, Mountain Dew-drinking adolescents. It turns out they were very dedicated Mountain Dew-drinking adolescents, and if the adolescents are anything like some of the ones I see in classes at Princeton, there could certainly be worse people writing for the Wikipedia.

I want to go on record as saying that I like the Wikipedia, and I use it a lot, especially for information where I don’t care about accuracy. Does that sound heretical for a librarian? Perhaps, but let me point out some of the things I like about it.

First, I like the way it takes advantage of dispersed knowledge. This is not the same as a “hive mind” or “online collectivism.” I’m no fan of hives or collectives or that sort of thing. But, despite being surrounded by experts on numerous subjects, I also don’t think expertise rests solely with tenured professors and PhDs. Wikipedia takes advantage of the expertise of hobbyists, obsessives, fanatics, and dedicated pudgy adolescents and makes it easily accessible to everyone.

But it’s easily accessible crud! I’m not so sure about that. Based on my own reading in the Wikipedia and tests I’ve read about, most of it isn’t crud, and so it escapes Sturgeon’s Law. 90% of the Wikipedia is probably fine. The problem is distinguishing which 90%, which granted is a serious problem.

The Wikipedia realizes this, and one of the things I like about it are the built-in signals that you should beware the content. You see notices at the top of pages that “this article cites no sources” or other clues that it may not be reliable. In a sense, the Wikipedia is doing for its readers what reference librarians try to get all readers to do: question the accuracy of sources and go to more than one place to verify facts.

In practice, I’ve found it isn’t really that difficult for an experienced searcher to tell when information might be problematic, but even if it is, the Wikipedia is still a good place to begin an information search. Articles often do cite sources, and I’ve gotten to other more “authoritative” sources saying the same thing as the Wikipedia article faster than I might have otherwise.

Also, considering that the alternative to Wikipedia for many people is simply a Google search, not the in-depth techniques of advanced reference librarians, which is it better to begin with, Wikipedia or Google? Unless you’re shocked by the revelation that there was a factual error found on the Internet, would you necessarily think Google is any better place to begin than the Wikipedia for a general web search for certain types of information, especially factual information of the sort encyclopedias traditionally provide?

That’s exactly when I use Wikipedia the most, when I want that sort of information quickly. Why search Google or Ask when you can plug the query into Wikipedia and often find an article with citations and external links? For certain queries, it cuts down the search time considerably to just start with the Wikipedia.

I should admit, though, that there are times when I rely almost completely on the Wikipedia. I rarely go elsewhere when I really don’t care about the accuracy of the information, and when the information is on a current popular culture topic, and those are often the same thing.

But when wouldn’t I care about the accuracy of the information? Does this even make sense for a reference librarian? What can I say. I’m not always a reference librarian. For example, say I want to find out more about Monty Python. I could read any of the several books about them, but I’m not that interested. I certainly wouldn’t find out much in the Britannica (less than 200 words). I might find out a lot on various fan pages around the Internet, but I’d have to do a lot of sifting. But if I go to the Wikipedia, I find easily accessible about 10,000 words on Monty Python, including:

  • Multiple references
  • Info on all the Pythons, including Carol Cleveland, the “seventh python”
  • Brief descriptions of each of their films
  • A listing of their albums
  • A listing of the shows they worked on in various partnerships before Python
  • Hyperlinks with longish biographies of all of the cast members
  • Link to another page about the show proper (5000 words on Monty Python’s Flying Circus)
  • A link from there to an episode list and guide (3000 words)
  • Plus information on Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus and individual pages on a large number of the famous sketches.

But, you say, this information on Monty Python could be completely bogus! Highly unlikely. Even so, I don’t really care. I just like the TV show, I’m not writing a dissertation on it. I just want to find out a bit more about it, and if a few of the details are erroneous, I just don’t care. I’m not going to quote them, and I probably won’t even remember them.

Recently, I was also looking on information about German-style board games, because I was looking for more board games to play with my daughter after I’d taught her a dozen or so abstract strategy board games. There’s a website called BoardGameGeek which isn’t bad, but I found out more information more quickly on Wikipedia about German-style games, board games in general, abstract strategy games, tables games, the Spiel des Jahres, and specific games such as Carcassonne or the Settlers of Catan than I did anywhere else. And as a single source for information on specific proprietary games, the Wikipedia seems to be unrivaled, even by such excellent sources as the Oxford History of Board Games, and it’s better than most of the sales websites trying to describe the games or fansites raving about them.

Is some of this information unreliable? Perhaps, but what I can verify isn’t. Is it likely to be in Britannica? No. Is it likely to be in a more “authoritative” or “scholarly” source? No. It might be scattered around the Internet, but no source will gather this sort of information as thoroughly as the Wikipedia.

For certain types of current or popular culture information, especially the kind that is usually overlooked by scholars, the Wikipedia is likely to be as reliable and useful as any other source, and more so than most. It’s not a matter of obsessives overtaking experts. It’s taking advantage of the dispersed knowledge of ordinary people about subjects unlikely to be covered well or at all in standard sources.

Obviously Wikipedia isn’t perfect as a reliable source for information. Since anyone can edit, it might be wrong, or right one moment and wrong the next, which is even worse. So even if it’s generally right, and I would concede that it is, academic qualms about using it as a source are understandable and justified. Along with Marc Meola, I wouldn’t recommend this as a reliable source for any students.

But it can get us to more authoritative sources more quickly, and often more quickly than a simple web search. And for some topics, such as popular culture topics or very current information, it’s often more comprehensive than comparable sources. And when we want just a bit of information, but don’t really care if some of the details are accurate, it’s a quickly accessible and navigable source of information. For these reasons, I’d give two cheers for the Wikipedia.

Digital Natives and Me

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Inside Higher Education reported on a program at the ALA Annual Conference about video-gaming and how we should do more of it in libraries to learn to speak to the “digital natives,” sometimes known as the millennials. I can’t imagine this going on in my library, but I’d be happy to sit around and play video games in the library. I play a lot of games, video and otherwise, with my 7-year-old daughter, so it would just be an extension of my home life.

I was struck my a couple of things in this article. The first was a quote from George Needham of OCLC. From the article:

“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “altar of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”

Perhaps this is related to Robert Pirsig calling the university the “church of reason.” I wonder, though, who has ever thought of librarians as information priests. I managed to make it through college and two graduate programs without ever talking to a librarian, so obviously not me. In fact, though I’ve answered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of reference questions, I’m not sure I’ve ever asked one. Maybe that’s why I ended up a librarian. (Well, that and having better job prospects than an itinerant rhetoric teacher.) I don’t think most students see librarians in this way. On the other hand, maybe Needham was criticizing some librarians who think of themselves as information priests, in which case, it’s a sound criticism.

But I was most struck by the label “digital natives,” which I’ve been seeing a lot lately, and its contrast with “digital immigrants.” The “digital natives” appear to be the current generation of high school and college students (i.e., the Millennials) who have grown up with the Internet, cell phones, and digital technology, while the “digital immigrants” are those oldsters who came to all this later in life.

The IHE piece links out to an article from 2001 on the “digital natives” and how they’re so much different than everyone else. If we assume 2001 wasn’t back in the dark ages, then the article might still have some relevance.

Here’s an interesting quote from the “digital natives” article:

“The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their ‘accent,’ that is, their foot in the past. The ‘digital immigrant accent’ can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were ‘socialized’ differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even ‘thicker’ accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). I’m sure you can think of one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the ‘Did you get my email?’ phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our ‘accent.'”

I must admit, I found this sketch humorous, especially having the secretary printing out the email, but I wonder how accurately this describes librarians in general, or me in particular.

I have many older colleagues, who, while they might not be as comfortable with digital technology or constant adaptation as I am, aren’t all reactionary luddites either.

However, it may depend on what counts as an accent. I was looking at a list of minimum tech competencies on the Library Revolution Blog, which includes very basic skills like creating word documents or using spell checking. One of the commenters left a rather depressing note:

“I have so, so many colleagues who think sending an e-mail is a huge task. Who don’t know how to scan and save a picture. Who can type a letter in Word, but looks blank if asked to write something on a blog. Just today I had a fellow-librarian under 40 not getting that she’d created two documents with the same name in the same place, let alone being able to figure out what to do with them.”

That doesn’t sound like a huge number of my colleagues whose work I’m familiar with, but maybe I just don’t get out much.

David Lee King expanded Library Revolution’s list to a list of “Basic Competencies of a 2.0 Librarian.” If lacking knowledge of social networks or RSS means one is a digital immigrant, then most of the librarians I know probably are. On the other hand, I usually ask my students if they’re familiar with RSS, and they generally aren’t, so who knows.

I’m still not sure whether I’m a digital native or immigrant, though. For the record, I’m 38 (or will be in a couple of weeks), which puts me a generation behind the “digital natives,” but I certainly don’t feel like a digital immigrant. I may not have been on the Internet as a child, but I did have an Atari. I couldn’t do much with it, but I did have an Apple IIc, which according to the now standard reference source Wikipedia debuted in 1984, and hadn’t been out long when I got one. So maybe I was 16 instead of 6, but remember that Joseph Conrad spoke little English until he was about 20, and he wrote some pretty good stories. I may be a digital immigrant, but I’ve been one longer than I was an analog native.

I adapt quickly to change. i solve my own problems. I learn new technologies easily and by doing. I seldom “RTFM” unless I hit a snag.

I spend a lot of time with my various computers, and interact with them quickly and seamlessly. I always turn to the Internet first for information. Except for books, of which I read aplenty, almost all of my reading is done online, and I also do a lot of reading with the ebook reader on my pocket PC. I can’t remember the last time I touched an actual newspaper. I read, I write, I edit, I IM, I play games, I play around with social software, I surf the web, I study subjects, all on my computer. I have a feed reader, a Facebook account, a Del.icio.us page, and a Second Life avatar. I’ve been giving talks lately on what could loosely be termed “Google 2.0.” I can do all the stuff on the tech and 2.0 competencies list. My use of gadgets is mainly limited by my bank account, and if my library would foot the bill for all my technology desires, I wouldn’t have to suffer from knowing someone else has a sleeker, lighter, more powerful laptop than me.

On the other hand, I’m not an addict. Really, I could quit anytime I want. For example, when I teach writing, I rarely allow laptops in my classroom. For the Princeton Writing Program, I teach a writing seminar on political philosophy and political rhetoric. (Current title: “Liberalism and its Critics.”) I teach essays by John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Oakeshott, Susan Okin, etc., and I insist the students print out the essays and bring them to class. Probably the only time I print out essays anymore is when I teach them.

Is that a “digital immigrant” accent? I don’t think so. I think it’s a way to slow down the rapid thoughts of both myself and my students so that we concentrate on the details of difficult philosophical essays and discuss the fine points of the articles. I don’t lecture, I lead discussions, and there’s no room for multitasking when engaged in a serious philosophical discussion about the applicability of Rawls’s “difference principle” or whether liberal egalitarianism should be more “ambition sensitive.”

Even if the students process some things differently, they are still human, and one goal of humanistic education is to teach students to read, write, and think deeply and carefully, to abjure the easy path, and not to think they’ve mastered a subject by reading the Wikipedia and Sparknotes (both of which I like, by the way). Hegel thought philosophy was superior to other forms of writing because it is the most abstract and can do away with images entirely. While one may be able to use a videogame to help teach philosophy, I doubt one could reproduce the Phenomenology of Spirit as a music video. Difficult thought requires concentration, writing requires concentration, and if the digital natives deny that I can only think they’re dissembling or that they avoid difficult thought.

Even with this example of a digital immigrant “accent,” I definitely don’t feel like an immigrant, and apparently in many ways I have a lot more in common with people twenty years younger than me than I do with people twenty years older than me. Or at least a lot more in common than I would have thought.

I’m very comfortable with technology and am happy to pick up and use any digital tools I need. But I do wonder whether rhetoric about “digital natives” and how vastly different they are obscures the overwhelming similarities we all share as humans. Do 2.0 tools make us different, or just better able to do things we’ve always done in a more efficient fashion? I see the value in new modes of communication and social interaction, but I also see the value in older methods of social and especially educational interaction: Slowing down. Reading closely. Thinking carefully. Discussing thoroughly. Writing precisely. If we don’t teach these skills, then we will have lost something important and valuable in our society.

So I wonder how much of this stuff is real, and how much hype. Perhaps that’s because I’m a Gen Xer, and we’re cynical and don’t like hype.

Thoughts on the Millennials

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There’s been a lot talk about the so-called Millennial generation the past few years.

Radical Millennialist librarians often make sound recommendations, for example that libraries should provide better and more various services and that OPACs can be made more customizable. I think those are great ideas. My disagreement with the most radical of the Millennialist camp, and the Millennial rhetoric in general, is not that libraries shouldn’t change or adapt, and even adapt quickly, but that the revolutionary rhetoric goes too far. Some librarians talk about “reinventing” everything these days, but reinventing the library might be as foolish as reinventing the wheel.

We have an obligation to integrate today’s students into a culture of research and learning. Adapting ourselves to current communication styles is fine as long as we remember that. We should know our ends so we can choose our means. We should always ask ourselves what we lose by scrapping the way we have done things. A healthy attitude to change doesn’t involve reinventing everything every generation, but always reevaluating what we have and deciding whether to keep it, keeping the best and discarding the rest.

Making the OPAC more user-friendly should of course be done. It’s not like there’s a great tradition behind OPACs. They’ve always been bad. But it would be different to abandon classification schemes or ignore the complexity of scholarly research just because one can’t do it on Google.

One of the most flawed analogies frequently made about college students these days is that they are customers or consumers. Millennials are customers who are used to getting things fast and now and they get impatient if they have to wait. Certainly college students or their parents are paying for something, but are they consumers in the ordinary sense?

So the Millennials want everything fast and now. Instead of reinventing ourselves completely to try to cater to their expectations of instant gratification, perhaps we should try instead to altar their unrealistic expectations. Scholarly research does not offer instant gratification. Instant gratification must always be shallow gratification. The gratification that comes from researching a topic, formulating a claim, and making an argument is never instant. On the other hand, neither is it fleeting, as instant gratifications often are. By including students in the culture of scholarship, we are instead offering them the lasting gratification of knowledge and skill that comes with mastering a topic, however small that topic may be.

Let us also consider whether we should think of college students as consumers. The implication is that the customer is always right. Consumers know what they want and they’re paying to get it and they don’t want any argument. But do we benefit anyone by thinking of college students this way? Is the customer always right? Does this not imply that the customers already know what they want?

I think it does, which is why I think the analogy breaks down. Students may indeed come to college thinking they know what they want. But can we really believe that 18-year-olds have enough knowledge of the world and its possibilities, especially its intellectual possibilities, to already know what they want? Is this very realistic? Or is it more likely that students come to college to learn, or that at least ideally that’s why they come to college. If college students are consumers, just what is it they’re consuming? Is it what they want when they want it? Or is it the knowledge and expertise of those who know more than they do and who guide them?

The claim that we should completely reinvent libraries for every generation is no more plausible on the surface than the counter-claim that we should seek to integrate each generation into the best traditions of our culture. The competing claims are: 1) Every new generation is superior to what has gone before and we have to adapt to them; and 2) What has gone before has been built up over generations, reformed, improved, and that the desire of youth to start over could be motivated by their lack of understanding of what exists and why.

Before we reinvent the research library, shouldn’t we at least ask what it does well, and why it does what it does? Shouldn’t we ask, if we are going to reinvent ourselves every generation, how can we possibly progress? The question isn’t necessarily whether we should attempt new ways to communicate with the Millennial students. Of course we should. The question is why. Why are we trying new ways to communicate with the current generation of college students? Is it just to deliver to them everything they think they want, or to integrate them into the tradition of research, scholarship, and thought.

Libraries should be stimulating environments, but do we stimulate students by creating an illusion of seamlessness, or by revealing the challenges of research and learning? Are we here just to solve problems for students, or to give them problems to solve? Are we here to hide complications, or to show how complicated the world can be?

Library research is complicated, and it likely will be for a long time, and it’s not because librarians want it to be that way. We can adapt and change all we want, but that doesn’t mean that vendors and publishers aren’t going to keep protecting their copyrighted content or that everything will be easily accessible from one interface. We can work hard to make research appear seamless, but it’s not and possibly never will be. As long as the information world is as complicated as it now is, librarians can only try to make things more accessible, not reinvent the world through an information revolution.