The Director's Blog

A snapshot of the Olin Library

2011-11-04T11:56:00.001-04:00

Every year the Florida Library Association runs a Snapshot of Florida Libraries project that shows how people are using libraries around the state. Susan Montgomery took comments the users of Olin Library contributed and created this wordle word cloud.

What really strikes me about this is how closely their comments reflect what we are trying to achieve at Olin -- library, place, study, quiet, focus, friends, help, good.

Nice job Susan.

Persistence Pays Off for Mobile Site.

2011-10-31T09:37:00.000-04:00

Paul Gindlesperger has been working for weeks to find a way to automatically redirect visitors using mobile devices who come to our regular site to our mobile site. This should not be difficult, but our CMS made it so. He finally did it (with an assist from Bill Svitavsky.) So, give it a whirl. Go to http://www.rollins.edu/library from your mobile phone or iPad and let me know what you think.

I will be interested to see if this results in a bump in traffic from mobile users.

CLIR Symposium : Collaboration with untraditional partners (Sam Demas.)

2011-10-11T19:38:00.000-04:00

People had some great ideas for collaboration:

Participating in art gallery crawls
Local history collaboratives
Information literacy in community engagement and service learning.
Gaming nights
Rock bands in the library (how about tiny reference desk concerts?)
Flash lectures (advertised on Twitter.)
Social tagging of archival images
(evidently the new version of Contentdm will allow this.)
A mobile library (on a bike!) to take to event son campus with a laptop for check out.

CLIR Symposium (Chuck Henry, President of CLIR)

2011-10-11T19:29:00.000-04:00

This was a really interesting session in which we really began to think about what kind of futures we might have (if any.) Chuck introduced a series of what he called "deep collaboration" projects:

Hidden Collections
Digging into Data
Digital Public Library of America
Data Curation:building a new profession
Linked Data
Federated Research and Educational Depository System (secure digital preservation. Can't find a link for this.)
Centers for Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts (no link for this either.)
Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative
National Humanities Press (sorry, no link.)
CLIR/Mellon Fellowships: Dissertations in Original Sources

"From a strategic vantage point, there is no ambiguity: the future of academic libraries and higher education rests on the ability to reconceive ourselves holistically, with the various components of scholarly information-- discovering, reconstituting, publishing, and sharing knowledge, and keeping its various manifestations securely preserved and accessible -- understood as interrelated and interdependent. The inherited norms, customs, traditions, and institutions that have structured research and teaching now need to be constructively challenged, redefined, and subsequently reassembled."

So what is the role of librarians at liberal arts colleges in this environment? Are we ready to connect our faculty and students to such macro solutions?

CLIR Symposium: the Future of the Liberal Arts College Library (Victor Ferrall.)

2011-10-11T11:21:00.023-04:00

I am in Milwaukee at this symposium with about fifty other college librarians worrying about whether we have a future or not. Victor Ferrall, author of Liberal Arts at the Brink is giving the keynote.

We fail to recognize that there has never been much demand for liberal education.
Single biggest change in US higher ed. was post war opening up to first generation students who were looking for a practical degree.
Are we selling education, or buying students?
Competition for students raises costs and cuts revenue. It is the tragedy of the commons.
Vocational education focuses the student on the utility of the knowledge they acquire. Liberal education focuses them on the utility of acquiring knowledge.

What does the move away form liberal arts education mean for libraries (specifically collection use)?

Vocational majors are likely to read more manuals, with more focus, and read less widely.
Since they read for answers, this will emphasize online information.
More pressure to support the curriculum, and less to support scholarship in general.

Move from liberal arts to vocation is a trend not a cycle, we need to cooperate not compete.So here is my question:

Librarians are good at cooperating, yet we still have a library at each liberal arts college. What if we had one library for all liberal arts colleges, with librarians available to each campus and all students? Would we save money and improve services?
It turns out Victor Ferrall is specifically thinking about cooperation in marketing liberal arts education, but he is not getting much traction form other presidents.

Oberlin Group 2011 day One.

2011-10-07T16:28:00.008-04:00

The day started with a discussion about organizational change in our libraries. While there are some common themes -- refocusing staff away from traditional cataloging and acquisitions and towards digital services, focusing our librarians outward to the faculty and students -- but what is really striking is our distinct this discussion on each campus. My colleagues have problems I had not even imagined, and vice versa.

Then I moderated a discussion of e-books and open access. Joanne Schneider discussed progress towards the Digital Public Library of America, Ray English discussed the Open Library's digital lending library, Neil McElroy discussed the Hathi Trust and finally Bryn Geffert discussed the proposed Liberal Arts Open Access Scholarly Publishing Project (which has no website yet.)

We had a tour of the impressive Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center (you will find my idiosyncratic photos from the tour in this folder.)

Then it was open mic: at Neil McElroy at Lafayette gave iPads to the members of their Library Advisory Council to get them thinking about mobile technologies, Deb Dancik at Willamette is further along with records management than we are, Terri Fishel at Macalester organized a reading group for librarians and staff around Char Booth's book Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning that seems to transformed their teaching, and lots, lots more.

The final session was about digital archives and repositories. Richard Fyffe just mentioned DataVerse, sounds interesting. Deb Dancik just mentioned Pachyderm. Willamette has developed a Contentdm/Pachyderm plugin (open source) and is using it to help students incorporate institutional repository images into presentations. She also mentioned Islandora. Rick Provine also mentioned ArtSTOR's Shared Shelf.

Enacting the Mission

2011-08-20T18:37:00.000-04:00

The title of this post is a quote from Scott Bennett (Bennett, Scott. Libraries and Learning: A history of paradigm change. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol.9, no. 2, (2009), pp. 181-197.)

"Those of us responsible for libraries and other non-classroom learning spaces should be mindful of what [John Seely Brown] says, however, if we want buildings that foster intentional learning and that escape the pitfalls of schoolwork, if we want to promote learning communities rather than trafficking in information, if we want ourselves to enact the mission rather than merely to support it."

At Olin we are definitely interested in fostering intentional learning and promoting learning communities and we are working in all kinds of ways to make this happen. One small example of this finally came to fruition this summer.

Readers of the library's Facebook page and this blog already know that we have done some small rejuvenation on the 4th floor. Well we finally took possession of seven of the end tables created by students in Josh Almonds 3D Foundations course and installed them on the fourth floor. They look great.

Why is this enacting the mission? Well the library is now a site for the display and use of student work, not just a place student study or 'traffic in information' in order to produce work of their own. I visited the class in the spring and explained what kind of end tables we needed, the dimensions, and specifications, and how they would be used. Then, at the final show, I negotiated with the students to buy the end tables that met my criteria. This was an important element in the course for Josh, who wanted the students to understand about the business of art. Finally, the tables are now in use, and on permanent display for the student artists to enjoy and as reminders to all students that their work has real impact beyond the classroom.

Mission enacted.

Check out Archive's new blog.

2011-07-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Darla Moore for her first post on the Special Collections & Archives blog. An interesting piece about Virginia Roush d’Albert-Lake, a remarkable alumna of the College.

What might the DPLA end up being?

2011-07-01T11:49:00.000-04:00

Update from John Palfrey on The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/dpla
DPLA Beta Sprint: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dpla/

Great library sign.

2011-07-01T10:07:00.000-04:00

I love this sign. Libraries always struggle with how to explain to users that they can ask for help. "Reference" is meaningless jargon to most users. Any particular library might want to change the words on the sign to reflect their services, but this can be seen from various angles, is entertaining, and covers all your bases. Anyone know where it is from?

Innovative Fund Raising -- ALA 2011

2011-06-26T21:05:00.000-04:00

Most of this was not new (for any private college, but it was useful to check that.) There were a couple of things though:

The public library in Williamsport, PA has program to enable donors to support days of service. Literally, you call the library's general phone number and you hear that, "today's library services are brought to you by ...." I love this idea! What a great way to celebrate a birthday or anniversary. They are under charging at $100 per day, but I wonder if the idea would fly at Rollins? By the way, a day of service for the Olin Library would cost you $6,000, an hour just $400. Williamsport thanks donors with this card.

Gettysburg College library accepts donations to supply coffee from friends and a poster asking students to, "thank a friend for coffee!" The student all write cute thank yous on the poster and then the library publishes this in their friends newsletter.

Berlin Declaration -- ALA 2011

2011-06-25T22:45:00.001-04:00

The Berlin Declaration is one of the founding documents of the open access movement. Berlin 9 (the first of the Berlin Open Access Conference Series to take place in North America) "convenes leaders in the science, humanities, research, funding, and policy communities around The Berlin Declaration."

Dieter Stein talked about the changing role of librarians in an open access environment. So much of our society is based on science and "free and equal participation and access" to scientific research is a necessary foundation for participation in "democratic discourse." I was reminded of the debate around global warming. This is true on a global, as well as a national level.
He argued that open access is not just open access to the final, published end results of research, but throughout the research process and the relationship is changing between the research and the reader(s.)

Lorraine Haricombe gave a far more pragmatic presentation based on her experience at Kansas University:

No whining!
Two of David Shulberger's Seven steps:

6. "Develop habits of depositing articles." (But students will respond much better to a mediated service in which library staff add manuscripts to the IR on the author's behalf.)
7. "Develop PR program and outreach strategies." (Liaison librarians and faculty liaisons have been really useful in this regard.)

Lunch with Brewster Kahle and Robert Miller -- ALA 2011

2011-06-25T15:59:00.000-04:00

Ray English arranged this lunch meeting with these two representatives of the Internet Archive. Unfortunately it was a long table at a loud restaurant, so I will have to wait for Ray's summary, but their project to create an open lending library of digital books will definitely appear on the Oberlin Group agenda in October. Stay tuned.

ALA 2011 -- ACRL Copyright Discussion Group

2011-06-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

ARL Fair Use Best Practices project released a report in December 2010 -- there are problems and solutions out in the community, and identifies 'points of friction.' E-reserves, access for the disabled, digitization for preservation, digital exhibits, ILL, institutional repositories, and non-consumptive research. The project is designed to provide some kind of clear 'best practices' for libraries to follow to make appropriate, canonical, fair use of materials. Librarians end up being gatekeepers, they are on the front line for answering copyright questions.
The Center for Social Media has developed other codes and the fair use principles will follow a similar format. Expect to see the code by the end of the year.

ALA 2011 -- the exhibits

2011-06-24T22:49:00.002-04:00

Today was my time to check out the exhibits. Two things in particular: web-scale discovery/management systems and e-books.

But first a shout out to Lexis-Nexis (bet you didn't expect to hear that on this blog!) At the last ALA I whined at their both about the absence of a mobile site for their resources. Now they have one. We will add this to our own mobile site, so stay tuned. Elsevier on the other hand has taken a different tack and created apps for Science Direct and Scopus. Good, but they really need to create a mobile friendly site(s) as well.

Discovery

Even though we have Summon, I try to keep up with other major unified discovery tools. Someone from EBSCO finally explained to me why libraries would want to choose EBSCO Discovery Service even though they have to use federated searching to access none EBSCO resourses and those results are retrieved, late (of course, it is fed searching after all) and somewhat uncomfortably, to the left of the main results where students really aren't going to see them. The answer is; if you are a heavily EBSCO library EDS makes sense, particularly if you can swap even more resources to subscribe via EBSCO. EDS is basically EBSCOHost.

I also stopped by the OCLC booth to get an update on their Web Management Services, which get more impressive, comprehensive, and practical each time I check in. The big development at the moment seems to be in their electronic resources module at the moment. They are still pushing WorldCat Local as a unified discovery service and say it can provide discovery for all resources, but I think that is an over enthusiastic salesperson speaking. We shall see.

E-books

Checked in with EBL, whose non-linear lending model looks interesting. Also Project MUSE, who has a long way to go on the University Press Content Consortium, but it looks very promising. I also stopped by the Overdrive booth. They are mostly knowne for working with public libraries, but do also contract with academic libraries. Everyone is working on downloadable copies to e-reader devices, but Overdrive is way ahead in this.

More from the Summon Advisory Board.

2011-06-24T11:15:00.000-04:00

Other recent interesting developments include:

Artstor
The fulltext indexing of Hathi Trust (only about 1%of the fulltext is so far indexed in Summon) and matching and merging with local records for books so that you can search for words in the fulltext and retrieve a record for a book on the shelf in Olin.
Elsevier's Science Direct and Sciverse.
Expanding the JSTOR pilot.

Things we will see in the next few weeks/months include:

A new, more scanable results lay out.

Better handling of multiple content types.

Fine tuning availability (so that users can easily and conveniently distinguish between an item available locally in fulltext and one available locally in print.)
Discipline searching -- so that we can present a "physics" slice of the database (for instance) to users to a libguide, webpage, etc.

Tammy Allgood from ASU and David Pattern from the University of Huddersfield talked about embedding Summon in sites beyond the library. For instance Tammy has been successful in placing a default Summon search box in their iteration of Blackboard, in the campus portal and marketing info all over the ASU web presence. I would really like us to do more of this. They have branded Summon as "Library One Search."
David is using QRcodes in marketing materials to take people directly to their Summon iteration. He is also making great use of the API to liberally sprinkle access to Summon in their catalog etc.

Andrea Michalek, of Summon, gave us some background into how relevancy is calculated and has promised to share her PowerPoint with me, it might help with the librarians, and perhaps in advanced instruction sessions.
There was lots more, but that is enough for now.

Summon Advisory Board at ALA 2011

2011-06-23T19:44:00.001-04:00

Today was an all day Summon Advisory Board Meeting.

The Summon team are still focused on comprehensiveness and continuing to grow the index (currently up around 800,000,000 items, including those in local catalogs) and relevancy. They see their competition for student attention as Google. Good to see them concentrating on both comprehensiveness and relevancy.
The big issue as this ALA is Serial Solutions announcement that they are moving into the web scale management marketplace along side OCLC. Their aim is to enable libraries to "turn off their ILS." This is going to get interesting.

More news:

Database recommender is now coming from an analysis of the retrieved results.
Summon staff have spent a lot of time and money on the hardware and infrastructure underlying the system so that indexing and other good stuff can happen overnight.

More news coming very soon:

Intriguing summer reads about technology's turning society upside down.

2011-06-06T09:31:00.000-04:00

I have added this reading list recently published by the Chronicle of Higher Education with links to available copies of the books. Interestingly, Rollins owns seven of the ten books linked here.

Geeks at the Beach

9 intriguing summer reads (and a video) about technology's turning society upside down

Technology nowadays is supposed to be disruptive—in a good way— so let it disrupt your summer vacation. Enrich it, we mean, with these provocative books. Last grades submitted? Last commencement handshake done? Take a little time to find out what's in store next year and after that: Social media might rot students' brains—or create a cognitive surplus that improves society; hackers' pranks have definitely improved aspects of MIT; and Twitter may help repressive regimes more than it aids democracy activists. Also watch a video in which a professor outlines the future of smarter robots. Most of these are available in various e-book formats as well as print, so toss your tablet computer or smartphone into the beach bag along with the flip-flops.

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (Basic Books). You're not as good at multitasking as you think. That's a key take-away from the latest book by Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who blends personal observations with case studies from her research on how children, teenagers, and elderly people interact with various gadgets. She's not antitechnology—her once-gushing views on virtual identity landed her on the cover of Wired magazine in the 1990s, as outlined in a Chronicle profile this year. In her new book, she argues that we're so excited about checking e-mail and Facebook that we're neglecting face-to-face relationships, but that it's not too late to make some "corrections" to our high-tech habits. It's time to turn off the BlackBerry for a few minutes and set some ground rules for blending cyberspace with personal space.—Jeffrey R. Young

Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators [note: link to an earlier edition, with a different subtitle] (Penguin). The technology enthusiast Clay Shirky argues for the transformative potential of the Internet, as more people use their free time in active, collaborative projects rather than watching television. Critics have argued that this view fails to take into account yet more opportunities for passive entertainment, but Mr. Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program who was featured last year in The Chronicle, points to examples such as Wikipedia and a ride-sharing Web site as proof that "the harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways." —Ben Wieder

The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Stanford University's YouTube channel). The dream of creating general-purpose robot helpers is back! Since he was a kid, Andrew Ng has wanted to build smart robots. Soon after becoming a computer-science professor at Stanford University, though, he advised his grad students that making all-purpose thinking machines was just too hard. But now Mr. Ng has had a breakthrough that renewed his faith in his childhood dream. In a short talk he delivered last month at a Stanford conference on new ideas, he showed off an algorithm that can be applied to different kinds of problems, so that the same algorithm can do speech recognition and also help a robot make sense of images it sees through its camera eyes. C-3PO is looking more realistic by the minute. The talk is available on Stanford's YouTube channel, proving that some of the newest academic ideas these days can be found in video form rather than text. —Jeffrey R. Young

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (Simon & Schuster) and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press). The search to determine how Google came to be and how it has shaped society gets two new entries this year. For In the Plex, Steven Levy, a senior writer at Wired, interviewed hundreds of Google employees past and present, including top management—and ate countless meals at the company's Mountain View burrito joint—to document how Google grew from humble origins, in a garage belonging to friends of the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to its current ubiquity. The implications form the subject of Siva Vaidhyanathan's Googlization of Everything. Mr. Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia and frequent contributor to The Chronicle Review, reminds readers that they aren't consumers of Google's offerings. Rather, their use of Google's services is the product it sells to advertisers. Both books look at the continuing evolution of the Google Books settlement as a key test of how far the company's reach could extend and a sign of how the perception of Google has changed from that of scrappy upstart with a clever motto, "Don't be evil," to global behemoth accused by some of being just that. —Ben Wieder

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf). Is the Internet on its way to getting monopolized? That question underlies Tim Wu's The Master Switch. The eccentric Columbia Law School professor—he's known to dress up as a blue bear at the annual Burning Man festival—recounts how ruthless companies consolidated their power over earlier information industries like the telephone, radio, and film. So which tech giant seems likely to grab control of the net? Let's just say you probably won't see Steve Jobs reading Mr. Wu's book on the beach this summer. —Marc Parry

Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Polity Press). To judge by the sometimes breathless news stories about publishing in the digital age, it feels like we're perpetually on the verge of a tipping point, when e-books will overtake print books as a source of revenue for publishers. John B. Thompson, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, analyzes the inner workings of the contemporary trade-publishing industry. (He did the same for scholarly publishing in an earlier work, Books in the Digital Age.) Mr. Thompson examines the roles played by agents, editors, and authors as well as differences among small, medium, and large publishing operations, and he probes under the surface of the great digital shift. We're too hung up on the form of the book, he argues: "A revolution has taken place in publishing, but it is a revolution in the process rather than a revolution in the product."—Jennifer Howard

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs). Sure, the 2009 rebellion in Iran was on Twitter. The uprising in Lebanon and pro-democracy movements in Russia and China also made Facebook and even old-fashioned e-mail. But technology is actually doing far more to bolster authoritarian regimes than to overturn them, writes Evgeny Morozov in this sharp reality check on the media-fueled notion that information is making everybody free. Mr. Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, points out that the Iranian government posted "most wanted" pictures of protesters on the Web, leading to several arrests. The Muslim Brotherhood blogs actively in Egypt. And China pays people to make pro-authority statements on the Internet, paying a few cents for each endorsement. The Twitter revolution, in this book, is "overblown and completely unsubstantiated rhetoric."—Josh Fischman

Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT (MIT Press). The word "hacking" is said to have originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sometimes referring to students' ingenious pranks involving the university's iconic buildings. The tradition of engineering-related pranks on the campus is celebrated in this well-illustrated coffee-table book by T.F. Peterson (described as "MIT historian" but actually a nom de plume hack), just released in an updated edition. One of the glossy photos shows a fire truck placed on campus's Great Dome in 2006 to commemorate the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001. MIT even employs a team of security officials charged with removing hacks, though they agree to let the most clever and harmless stunts stay around for a few days. —Jeffrey R. Young

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton). Multimedia—dangerous! Online research—depthless! Classroom screens—dubious! If you want a contrarian take on technology, Nicholas Carr is your man. In The Shallows, just out in paperback, the Colorado-based author warns that the Internet is rewiring our brains and short-circuiting our ability to think. And that has big consequences for teaching, he told The Chronicle last year: "The assumption that the more media, the more messaging, the more social networking you can bring in will lead to better educational outcomes is not only dubious but in many cases is probably just wrong."—Marc Parry

The Filter Bubble.

2011-05-31T17:03:00.000-04:00

Dorothy Mays shared this with me today. It is a great introduction to the problem of the filtered web. As she said,

"Here is a 9 minute video that has some really eye-opening information about google and Facebook algorithms, filtering, and its implications. I have been struggling with the best way to teach this stuff in IFT106, but I think I will just show this video and host a short discussion about it instead. I have already ordered this guy’s book (“The FilterBubble”) for Olin."

Seth Godin on the Future of Libraries

2011-05-16T17:30:00.000-04:00

Richard Russell sent me this on Facebook and asked me what I thought. Rather than just a quick Facebook oneliner, here is a bit more of a response.

First, so many people read Godin's stuff that it is nice when he talks about libraries. He is also a bit of an iconoclast so it is good for us to be challenged by someone from outside the profession.

That being said, the post is disappointing. There is nothing new here that librarians don't already know. It is a shame that Godin takes a very traditional view of libraries and tells us that we are behind the times. Spend some more times in libraries and with librarians Seth and see what is going on. I would contend that you can find many of the attributes of your vision of libraries,

"The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear."

in many places around the world. As Godin states, "We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime."

Too true, but if you actually spent time in libraries or with librarians you would soon find we have them already. But as Gibson said, "the future is here, it is just not widely distributed yet."

Iconoclasts get to say "do this one thing and nothing else! Stop doing what you have been doing up to now!" But professionals, and librarians in particular, don't. We have to serve everyone in our community, and honor the past and the future. This means we have to guard dead (and very much alive) paper and we have to find ways to get ebooks (and information in a myriad of other formats) into the hands of our users at no direct cost to them (beyond their taxes and tuition) and we have to do a lot more than just 'warehouse' it. Unlike Godin, we cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater.

One more thing. Godin states "Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data." Yet on his own blog he is providing links to his own books for sale. Ironically, at least one is a rehash of various blog posts. So he is actually swimming against what he thinks is an inevitable tide (the demise of paper based books.) He is obviously free to do so. If you and I are dumb enough to buy what is available for free -- all power to him. In fact at least 647 libraries, including Rollins, purchased a copy of this book (I wonder who requested that one!)

But is does seem a little rich to then lecture us on the demise of paper. Maybe he will donate the royalties from those 647 copies to a forward thinking library.

So you want to be a librarian ....

2011-05-12T14:59:00.000-04:00

This morning I was the keynote speaker at the MLIS Information day at UCF. Here is my presentation and the powerpoint that went along with it.

Faculty and Staff Blogs at Rollins

2011-04-26T22:32:00.003-04:00

I am trying to gather all the blogs published by faculty and staff at Rolllins. Ths is what I have so far. If you know of others, let me know and I will add them.

Bob Moore -- Culture World 21 C
Dawn Roe -- has two, one for students and one for her own work.

Julian Chambliss -- various blogs.

Phil Deaver -- Long Pine Limited

Rachel Newcomb -- at Huffington Post.

Rachel Simmons -- The Wonders Blog.

Not including my own of course! It turns out that the College website also has a partial list.

A Day in the Life of a Librarian

2011-04-22T11:25:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I participated in FLA's Virtual Job Shadowing by tweeting throughout the day about what I was doing. The idea was for library school students and others interested in the profession to get an up close view of how we actually spend our days. If you use Twitter, search for #libjobshadowFL and you can see all the tweets form all the librarians who participated

Normally I don't tweet. I had to set up an account on Twitter (rollinsmiller) to participate. I have never really seen the point of Twitter. I have a few things to say, but not enough to tweet frequently and if I something to say it usually can't be expressed in 140 characters or less, which is why I have this blog. I also can't keep up with all the news and information coming at me from e-mail, professional journals, books, blogs, my colleagues, and the traditional media so adding another rapid fire channel for communication just stresses me out.

But the experience was interesting in another way. I rarely have to reflect on my work while I am actually working, except during reviews. So it was interesting to pause every few minutes and think about what I was doing and then try to express it in 140 characters or less. It made the day seem somehow more purposeful. It was also interesting to see other participants tweets and how varied (and yet how similar) our experiences were. All in all a worthwhile experience, I wonder what the students thought of it.

A strange and wonderful part of librarianship

2011-04-20T15:11:00.003-04:00

Digital librarianship meets the Republic of Letters. Readers of this blog know that we launched an institutional archive of faculty publications in 2010. One of the articles posted there is Vidhu Aggarwal's Talking body parts and missing commodities: cinematic complexes and Sylvia Plath.

A graduate student all the way out on the old Silk Road in Urumqi, Xinjiang in China found that article on the web and contacted David Noe, the librarian who administers our IR, asking for help in tracking down a copy of Plath's Ariel, not the version edited by Ted Hughes, but the restored version of Plath's original edition.

We were so touched by the idea that our repository had reach far western China and by the student's herculean attempts to complete her literary studies that we decided to give her a copy. It would be cheaper than trying to arrange an interlibrary loan to Xinjiang anyway. It felt like an echo of the old Republic of Letters with a scholar at one end of the Silk Road reaching out to colleagues 13,000 miles away. With help with the Chinese address from Wenxian Zhang I just mailed the book today.

Let's hope it gets there and makes it through Chinese customs. Sometimes i just love my job!

ACRL Poster sessions

2011-04-02T14:34:00.001-04:00

The posters were in many ways more interesting than the panel discussions and contributed papers. Couple of ones to watch include:

Competence vs. Confidence: Assessment Knockdown! by Amy Hofer and Margot Hanson.

Student Success Retention, and the Academic Library. by Pam Baker and Jacqui Grallo.

Ithaka S+R urvey 2010 Report

2011-04-01T13:45:00.001-04:00

The report will come out on Monday. We got a brief preview and comparison to the 2009 faculty survey. Ithaka surveyed library it.directors, which seems to assume that directors have all the ideas and set the direction. It doesn't feel like that to this director, but hey.

I am afraid it is pretty underwhelming report. Library directors perceive the value of libraries as higher than faculty, particularly in the areas of teaching and information literacy development (see figure 4 on page 15.) Part of my job is as a cheerleader for the value of the library, so I am sure that inflated the figures. Also, teaching is a core function of our institutions so library directors like to link to that. We are also not in the classroom and faculty offices every days so we overestimate the library's role in teaching.

The conclusions on discovery are just as underwhelming, are we "a starting point" or "the starting point" for research. The former is reasonable, the latter is not.

Google Book Search, what's next?

2011-04-01T11:40:00.000-04:00

Corey Williams of ALA's Washington Office led a discussion of what might be next in terms of Google Book Search, now Judget Chin has rejected the amended settlement.

There is some trepidation about pursuing orphan works legislation because it could result in onerous procedures for libraries who seek to digitize such works. Jim Neal, of Columbia University, suggested that libraries continue the work of researching the copyright status of those purportedly orphaned works that have in fact already passed into the public domain because their owners did not fulfill all the various requirements that were law before the passage of the 1976 Act (like renewing the copyright) and digitizing those "new" public domain titles.

This could significantly shrink the number of orphan works. If we also take a somewhat more assertive view of fair use as well we may well be able to do without orphan works legislation.

Corey also promised a forth part of Jonathan Band's "Guide to the Perplexed" but I haven't found a link to that yet. Here is the link to Part 3.

ebrary thinking about downloadable e-books

2011-03-31T13:30:00.044-04:00

Libraries have been providing access to e-books for more than a decade now, but until the advent of the Kindle the model has largely been browser or at least online, web accessible e-books. You had to be tethered to the network to use the book.

The mental model users had of e-books changed in 2007 with Amazon's release of the Kindle. Now with multiple readers available readers are demanding not only online access but also the ability to download titles to their reader (or other mobile device) of choice.

Vendors for the academic market like EBSCO and ebrary are responding, if a little later than trade publishers and services like Overdrive for public libraries. So ebrary wanted to know form librarians what users were asking for in terms of downloadable ebooks.

We suggested being able to download to a wide variety of devices, making sure search, navigation, and annotation etc. features were all available and avoiding the 'check out' model, which just annoys digital users. Instead think about non-linear limits upon use (like EBL's 325 uses) whether they happen simultaneously or over time.

We should see some early versions this summer. there are lots of technical and intellectual property issues to deal with.

ACRL 2011 Conference

2011-03-31T10:16:00.002-04:00

I am in Philly for the Association of College and Research Libraries 2011 National Conference and will be blogging various interesting stuff. Stay tuned.

Library Copyright Alliance Responds to GBS decision

2011-03-24T14:21:00.000-04:00

http://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/bm~doc/lca_gbsstmt24mar11.pdf

I have also been sharing a number of news article from my facebook page.

What happens next to Google Book Search?

2011-03-23T09:51:00.000-04:00

Mary Ellen Davis just reminded me that ACRL has a flowchart (developed by Jonathan Band) of possible outcomes in the Google Book Search Settlement issues. Here is an updated version. Although it looks complicated, it is actually a simplified version of the options available to actors in this drama. It leaves out Congressional action, and continuing developments in the commercial space.
So you need to imagine a multi-dimensional dynamic -- albeit very slow moving -- version.

A response to Will We Endure?

2011-03-22T23:53:00.000-04:00

This is my response to Bob Moore's recent post on his blog Culture World 21C.

Bob's piece grew out of a discussion of the nuclear crisis in Japan, its impact on the industry in the US and specifically the storage of nuclear waste and how to ensure that society retained and communicated the information about such storage over the very long term -- 10,000 years.

For an optimist like Bob this is easy because of, "widespread literacy, replicated texts, both electronic and in duplicable hard copies, and an international political/economic system that has apparently eliminated the kinds of catastrophic wars that in the past routinely toppled civilizations (e.g., Sumeria, Rome, Ming China). It is, after all, wars like these that resulted in the trashing of the information of the deposed civilizations making them largely lost to future generations. (I did not get to make all of these points last night, but they are still very, very valid.)"

Let's set aside for a moment the idea that, "catastrophic wars ... routinely toppled civilization" and instead address the issue of widespread literacy and replicated texts.

Obviously, as a librarian this is what I am most concerned with. We have developed robust systems for the preservation and replication of texts over the last 500 hundred years since the invention of printing in Europe. In some part as a result of printing, but also with the Protestant Reformation, and later the Industrial Revolution, we have also developed widespread literacy. I am confident that, as we continue to migrate texts and communication to the digital environment, we will continue to develop robust systems for the preservation and replication of texts and literacy will become even more widespread. But even within this single era -- let's call it the Gutenberg Era -- we have irretrievably lost significant bodies of work. The one that come to mind most readily is early film. I understand that we no longer have copies of about 50% of the films produced before 1930. That is just eighty years ago, in a medium we still use, during a period of unprecedented economic growth, in a society which makes a fetish of preservation. So I am not optimistic that all texts (and information) that future generations regard as important will be available to them.

10,000 years include twenty 500 year periods (and 125 eighty year periods.) It is also twice as long as the whole of human history since the invention of writing, so I am very dubious that we can preserve anyting for that long. In the meantime, let's look for some lessons over longer time periods than 500 years, but shorter than 5,000.

Again, taking the European experience, if we go back to the manuscript era before printing we again see systems of text production, replication, and preservation (and far less widespread literacy.) If these systems seem less robust from our perspective we should remind ourselves that they were developed and maintained over a thousand year period from the end of the Roman Empire in the west in the 5th and 6th centuries to the development of printing in the 15th century, which is pretty damn robust. Many manuscripts survived into the first two centuries of the Gutenberg era, but in the 16th and 17th century we also saw a wholesale deaccessing of manuscript volumes from European libraries and archives in which a lot of information was lost.

The same situation happened during the transition from scroll to codex in the 2-4th centuries of the common era and this transition, which more or less coincided with the decline of the Roman Empire in the west, was a more significant transition for our purposes. This is because it coincided with a a massive economic collapse and reordering of society. An urban, international society with well-developed systems of text replication, a robust and long lived medium (the papyrus scroll), many great libraries (both public and private), and a high degree of literacy (for its time) gave way to an agricultural society, largely illiterate, with small text collections, with a system of values so radically different from the Roman Empire that preceded it that huge numbers of texts were lost, either permanently (Aristotle's second book of Poetics on comedy) or for many hundreds of years ( Menander's plays, admittedly perhaps not as great a loss.) Scrolls, were not preserved (except in garbage dumps or by being lost in dry climates) and the contents of scrolls were not preserved through copying into codices unless they were seen as valuable by the struggling Christian societies of the west.

Luckily much of great value was preserved and replicated in Byzantium and in the Islamic societies to the east and south of Europe.We may not be so lucky next time, our next collapse may well be global.

This is how our society will collapse, not with a bang, but a whimper. And the first things to go will be highly complex systems contingent upon complex and wealthy economies -- systems like libraries, and the Internet. The survivors in the wreckage, like the citizens of Rome will flee to the safety of strongmen and warlords with little thought to the culture they leave behind.

Which brings us back to Bob's contention that catastrophic wars topple civilizations. I would argue that the collapse of societies leads to, amongst other nasty things, wars; and that those wars, in an era of declining economic activity and societal collapse become catastrophic. Part of that catastrophe can be the destruction or abandonment of the, now unsustainable, rich cultural tradition of the previous era.

So, is there a way for human beings to somehow preserve and communicate the knowledge of the invisible danger of radiation to the pastoralists and hunter gathers who will be wandering near Yucca Mountain (or wherever we decide to put this stuff) in 10,000 years?

One more thing. There are three books I would recommend if you want to think more about these issues.

Matthew Battles. Library: An Unquiet History.
James O'Donnell. Avatars of the Word.
Iain Pears. The Dream of Scipio

Google Books: latest news

2011-03-22T17:34:00.002-04:00

Judge Chin just rejected the settlement and Google is now, "considering its options."

I have written about Google Books Search settlement many times on this blog. Most recently, during the 2010 ALA Conference I wrote,

"any definitive decision in the Google Book Search settlement is a long way off and when it does come the outcome will be more limited and lead to less radical change in library service than I had hoped. In the meantime we have to proceed to provide access to those Hathi Trust public domain titles, and pursue digital book access via licensing with individual packages and unify the search experience for users via services like Summon."

In the early news reports the comments are trending mostly against the settlement, and for Chin's decision. It was the safe one after all. But I am not happy about this. I had hoped this settlement would be a huge leap forward in access to digital books post-1923 as libraries pony-ed up for the "institutional subscription." But it seems we will be sticking digital collections together with spit and baling wire as usual.

Even Chin recognized the huge potential benefits of the settlement for readers. "The benefits of Google's book project are many. Books will become more accessible. Libraries, schools, researchers, and disadvantaged populations will gain access to far more books. Digitization will facilitate the conversion of books to Braille and audio formats, increasing access for individuals with disabilities. Authors and publishers will benefit as well, as new audiences will be generated and new sources of income created. Older books -- particularly out-of-print books, many of which are falling apart buried in library stacks -- will be preserved and given new life."

I can't help but think authors and publishers, and our society at large, have missed a huge opportunity here. However, Judge Chin does (in a classic judicial response to copyright) lay the orphan works issue right back at the feet of Congress. Perhaps this will lead them to finally act on orphan works.

What does Watson's victory on Jeopardy mean for libraries?

2011-02-17T10:21:00.001-05:00

Here are some of the early reactions to the victory of IBM's Watson on Jeopardy.

John Markoff in the NYTimes on 2/14/11 quotes John Seely Brown, “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them,” In today's paper, Markoff writes, "Watson, specifically, is a “question answering machine” of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades — a computer akin to the one on “Star Trek” that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them." Markoff also reports on IBM's plans for Watson, the company, "plans to announce that it will collaborate with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to create a physician’s assistant service that will allow doctors to query a cybernetic assistant. The company also plans to work with Nuance Communications Inc. to add voice recognition to the physician’s assistant, possibly making the service available in as little as 18 months.
“I have been in medical education for 40 years and we’re still a very memory-based curriculum,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University who is working with I.B.M. on the physician’s assistant. “The power of Watson- like tools will cause us to reconsider what it is we want students to do.”
I.B.M. executives also said they are in discussions with a major consumer electronics retailer to develop a version of Watson, named after I.B.M.’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, that would be able to interact with consumers on a variety of subjects like buying decisions and technical support."

James Weinheimer, Director of Library and Information Services at the American University of Rome, wrote on 2/9/11, "the traditional reference questions termed "ready-reference" are probably already gone from the reference desk. But questions that demand more thought and require a deeper understanding will (I hope!) always be asked and I don't see how a computer can answer those."

To me the most interesting words here are from Chase, “the power of Watson- like tools will cause us to reconsider what it is we want students to do.” He is talking about medical education, but what would this mean in the liberal arts?

Quiet Space in the Library

2011-02-11T11:46:00.001-05:00

As the library becomes even more popular for group study and as a place you can be sure to find your friends, we have to make sure we maintain space for quiet, contemplative study and relaxation. Some of our users made this clear to us when responding to the LibQual survey. The 3rd and 4th floors are designated as quiet study and we wanted to do something to make them even more attractive, so we took the window nooks on the 4th floor which had been furnished with built in window seats when the library opened in 1985 (puce formica and hessian -- very 70's) and replaced them with leather chairs (or love seats in the larger ones) and reading lamps.

They are already proving popular as you can see from this photo of Wes enjoying wireless access and quiet contemplation.
There are three 'nooks' with love seats and four with chairs. Over the next couple of weeks we will be adding ottomans to the chairs and students in Josh Almond's 3 Dimensional Foundations class are creating unique end tables that will be added before the end of the semester.
So, thinking in terms of Oldenburg's Third Place, and Bennett's idea of libraries enacting the mission of the college, we have created varied, attractive, flexible, functional, spaces that students can use in ways that make sense to them, and that include elements growing directly from the curriculum (the end tables.) The 21st century college library in action!
Thanks to Lori Voorhees, Darcella Deschambault, and Susan Montgomery for making this happen.

Usage Statistics for Summon

2011-02-09T13:58:00.000-05:00

We just got access to the new analytics tool from Summon. There is a lot there to process, but here are some early points of interest.

We introduced Summon in September 2009, but only as a beta. It became the top search box on our website in January 2010. This images show visits and searches for the first partial academic year, September 2009 through May 2010.

You can see the jump when we made it the top box. We ended that year with a total of 8,998 visits and 45,759 searches, which is about 8% of total searches on library databases. Users did on average 5 searches every time they visited Summon.

Of those 8,998 visits, only 65% came from Winter Park. The rest came from elsewhere in the US, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

We can also see what domains users are coming from. Only about 60% of users are coming from rollins.edu.

When we compare visits and searches between January 2010 and January 2011. We see a rise from 774 visits and 4,220 searches in January 2010 to 1,282 visits and 5,709 in January 2011. A 65% increase in visits and 35% increase in searches. That is good news and interesting as well. The average number of searches per visit has dropped from 5.4 to 4.4. Does than mean Summon is getting better at delivering the right results or that users are leaving earlier unsatisfied. Isn't this always the way with data the more you get the more questions you have!

Olin Library's Mobile Ready Website

2011-01-10T08:48:00.008-05:00

Over the last few weeks, Paul Gindlesperger has been building a mobile ready website for us. As readers of this blog know, I think smartphones will play a significant role in the future of access to the digital library, so I am delighted that we can now provide access to our services and information resources for our users from these devices. The big issue for us now is to make sure the vendors we work with are also making their resources "mobile-friendly." This is a work in progress. Frankly, most of the databases and publishers have not made enough progress on this yet as you will see if you try and do any searching and reading of documents on the site. While I am at ALA Midwinter in San Diego, I will talk to vendors about this issue.

In the meantime, in a continuing series of posts from guest authors I have asked Paul to describe the process of developing the site and some of the issues he faced:

The mobile site is intended to provide the most useful content from the main Olin website that you would want to use when you’re not in front of a computer. We tried to make it easy for you to quickly pull out your phone and look for a book, consult with a librarian, see how late we’re open, and perform several other functions. The mobile site loads quickly from any phone and doesn’t require you to zoom in and out or scroll to get to what you need. Imagine how convenient it would be to hear a professor or classmate mention a good book for your research, pull out your phone, check to see if we have the book at Olin, and place a hold or even order it via Interlibrary Loan – all within a couple of minutes. With the increase in online resources, it is becoming less necessary to come to the library to get what you want since we provide so much content to our patrons remotely…this is just another step in that direction.

The first step in the design process was looking at other libraries that already had mobile sites. Jonathan had already investigated and gave me a few to look at, including Smith College, Skidmore, St. Benedict, Bucknell, and NC State. Each of these sites has its merits and drawbacks, but I found the designs of Smith and Skidmore were the most in line with what I wanted to do with our site. Webmasters from these schools graciously offered to assist me if I ran into any problems or had questions; one of the great things about working in the library community is the ubiquitous helpfulness and sense of camaraderie in this profession.

I knew from the start that I was going to design the site based on these principles:
1. The site needed to be as elegantly simple as possible, both in terms of aesthetic design and in the code on the back end. It should load quickly and not overwhelm the user with too many extraneous options.
2. The design should be viewable on nearly any device, in portrait and landscape view. Since phones are very different and users could have their settings configured in ways I can’t anticipate, this was the hardest principle to enforce.
3. There should be an option to go to the full site.

The core of the site is basic HTML – the same language that comprises most regular websites, and a little bit of simple Javascript to make the menu options work. What truly makes the site mobile friendly, however, is CSS – cascading style sheets. The style sheet is the secret to getting the site to display properly on phone screens. I wrote the code the old-fashioned way – writing it from scratch in Notepad. That was the way I originally taught myself to make web pages, so it was kind of fun returning to my roots and doing things low-tech.

I was a little worried at first; I had only taken one day long CSS class over two years ago and hadn’t done anything with it since, but I was now being called upon to write original code from scratch. I wasn’t about to back down from the challenge, though.

My biggest problem in creating the mobile site was a frustrating one….I don’t actually own a smartphone. It has been my experience that people who design things for something they don’t have or use tend to create broken designs, even when they put in a lot of hard work and have the best intentions. The lack of a smartphone also made testing my designs difficult. Luckily I had colleagues with Droids, iPhones, and a Blackberry, but I had to balance my need to preview the site with my desire to not bother them too much to borrow their phones.

Other issues were code-based and would have been funny if they weren’t so annoying. At one point, the header kept disappearing and not coming back when someone switched to landscape mode. The zoom factor would also randomly change on an iPhone for no apparent reason. After a lot of experimentation, I was able to fix these problems.

In the future, I’d like to see the other departments at Rollins create mobile sites of their own. Until then, it’s fun being the first on campus to offer this service to our students, faculty, and staff.

If there are any questions or comments about the mobile site, I can be reached at pgindlesperger@rollins.edu .

How important will Google Editions be?

2010-12-02T22:54:00.000-05:00

We have been waiting for this for quite a long time. I have written before about the Big G's promised book distribution platform. It looks as though the launch at the end of December might really be on this time, though Google Editions has been promised since summer 2010.

But what is Google Editions? The Wall Street Journal (12/1/10) explains that, "Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets."

So, where Amazon's Kindle model is one bookstore (you can only buy ebooks from the Kindle Store) to many devices (mostly the Kindle,but increasingly you can read these ebooks on smartphones etc.) Google's model is more of an hour glass. Many stores, all purchased ebooks stored in your Google account in the cloud, read on many devices.

GeekBeatTV thinks this will be big because of Google's dominance in search. Many independent booksellers seem to think it will be their route round Amazon and Apple and their entry point into e-book sales. The WSJ in the article linked above indicates that publishers are signed up and transferring files of ebooks, so this could be big because one of the main impediments to e-book use on any one device is the inability to get the full range of titles a reader wants. If Google can get most publishers involved and display content on most devices this could be quite useful.

But, and this is a big but, there seems no place for libraries in all this. Everything is based around the individual and their Google account. I suppose we just have to wait for the ultimate resolution of the Google Book Settlement and the final cost of the institutional subscription.

QR codes

2010-11-18T09:45:00.008-05:00

I mentioned QR codes earlier in this blog, and lo and behold, one of our librarians, Susan Montgomery, has made great use of them! I have asked her to guest blog, Here goes....

QR stands for "Quick Response" and is a matrix barcode which smartphone and mobile phones users scan with their phone. If your phone doesn't have a scanner, you can download the app. QR codes were developed in 1994 by Densa-Wave, a Toyota subsidiary. Companies have been using them to provide easy access to their products and services. For libraries, we can provide access to relevant information that interest our users.
QR codes are easy to create. For these, I used Kaywa Code Generator. The code can link people to websites, videos, text messages and even phone numbers. If you haven't had a chance to see the QR codes at Olin, no worries! I've pasted them here for you to see. I think you'll enjoy what you see.

Enjoy and now you know what these weird looking designs mean.

Scan it!

More on the future of the book

2010-10-25T22:10:00.000-04:00

The transformation of the book continues.As I wrote in an earlier post I think digital technologies and their ability to add multimedia to text will change the nature of the book. But I had not thought about this variation. Stephen Elliott, a writer, has produced a book as app that enables the interactivity that is such a feature of the web. As the NYT article puts it,

"Once readers buy the app, he says, they are beginning a relationship with him and other readers; they can leave comments and read responses and updates from the author. They may even be told down the line that he has a new book for sale and then be able to buy it through the app."

Again, we see the book in digital form seems to inexorably move away from quiet individual reading and communion with the author's words and towards a more social, shared, collective experience.

Who is that guy in the library?

2010-10-22T17:17:00.001-04:00

21010 is the 125th anniversary of Rollins and the 25th anniversary of the Olin Library so we are celebrating. We thought it might be fun to populate the library with some ghosts of libraries past. So Susan Montgomery and her group of display mavens are busy dressing mannequins in appropriate clothes (and giving them appropriate information accoutrements.)Here is Darla Moore working on the 1960's era student.

Did you know the first African American students enrolled at Rollins in 1966? I personally find that shockingly late, but I suppose that is part of the point of the display.

If you wander round the library before November 7th you will also find models from the 1880's, the 1930's and one from 2010 lurking in various spots.

Gotta love the cool Malcolm X shades! Kudos to Susan, Darla, Marina, Shawne, Cathleen, and Kim Griffis for a great job.

Excellent customer service like a beagle on a woodchuck.

2010-10-20T13:11:00.003-04:00

One of the fun parts of my job is to read and respond to all the comments we receive from users. I respond to each one, then we place the comment and the response on the plasma screen outside the library and archive them on the website. I send my responses to each person who leaves an e-mail. But then the fun begins. When a user mentions a staff person or department in a positive way, we congratulate that person and often give them a pickle pin as well. This time I got to congratulate two of our student workers, Allia Alli and Steven

One user described Allia as a librarian. In my response I wrote that she was something far more impressive: a Rollins student! Here she is with Patti Haley and Pat Grall of Circulation.

Steven wins for garnering the most creative comment, he "tracked that book down like a beagle on a woodchuck." This is our new standard in customer service! Here he is with a whole bunch of us.

From Drop Box

Now This Is What I Am Talking About!

2010-10-07T14:36:00.000-04:00

Alexander Street Press just announced that you can download clips from their Dance and Opera in Video databases to your iPhone or Android.

If you read this blog you know I think mobile devices are going to play a big part in your library future. This is exactly the kind of functionality that I have been envisaging.

You search their databases, click on the mobile phone icon next to the record, up pops a screen where you can scan a QR code or type in your phone number,

and a link to the video download appears on your phone. Hit play. They have managed to design this so that it is about as easy as viewing a video on the Onion Network. Brilliant.

Why would students or faculty want to do this? Maybe the student has been asked to bring an example to class or wants to show an example of a particular genre to a study group, or a topic comes up during office hours (in the Bookmark Cafe) and the instructor was to show the student an example.

Give it a try, but be warned we have a limit of 3 simultaneous users on these two databases at Rollins.

Going forward with Georgia State lawsuit

2010-10-05T17:11:00.000-04:00

Kevin Smith discusses the latest ruling in the Georgia State copyright case (which concerns course reserves and fair use)in this post Going forward with Georgia State lawsuit.

He highlights three points that I will excerpt here (but, really, read the whole thing.)

First, ... Judge Evans includes a substantial discussion of the economics that underlie providing course materials to students. She acknowledges statements from several faculty depositions that they would not ask students to buy the books excerpted in e-reserves if that option were not available and also that they would not use many of the readings if a licensing fee were necessary. ... the upshot seems to be that a ruling against fair use would have significant negative social consequences and little real benefit for the plaintiffs. ...

Second, ... the Judge is following the Supreme Court precedent that says that a technology does not show “culpable intent” if it is “capable of significant non-infringing uses.” Since e-reserves and course management systems clearly are capable of such uses, the Judge declines to hold that merely making those systems available renders GSU liable for contributing to copyright infringement. So the plaintiffs will have to prove “ongoing and continuous misuse of the fair use” by producing evidence of “a sufficient number of instances of infringement.” The defendants — Georgia State — will then have the burden of proving fair use as to each alleged infringement. ...

Finally, .... This emphasis on the local practices rather than the policy itself will certainly make it easier for other campuses to learn from an eventual ruling and, if necessary, adjust their own implementations to meet whatever standards arise, but it decreases the likelihood that large and dramatic changes will be needed.

Oberlin Group Meeting 2010

2010-10-01T14:01:00.023-04:00

First day of one of my favorite annual meetings. The first discussion was an example of why I like this group so much. An open, thoughtful, egalitarian, discussion of whether and how we should be organized. As a director, I rarely get to participate in such discussions.

I was asked to lead a discussion with Ray English of Oberlin on open access. My part was OA trends to keep track of because they are relevant to the liberal arts. I included OA campus policies, OA content -- production and consumption -- including journals, monographs, reference works, and data, institutional repositories, open education resources, and OA student activism. I tagged a bunch of sites in delicious for examples etc.

This afternoon we are talking about institutional repositories with Sabrina Pape of Vassar, Richard Fyffe of Grinnell, Carol Dickinson of Colorado College, Amy Badertscher of Kenyon, Gail Scanlon of Mt Holyoke, and Niel McElroy of Lafayette. Things to keep track of include:

LASR
MDID
Grinnell College Libraries Data Repository
Alliance Digital Repository
OhioLINK Digital resource Commons
Digital Collections at Lafayette
MetaDB

Next step Dave Pilachowski of Williams College on EBL. An e-book collection development system in which you only buy the book once it is used three times.This patron driven acquisitions model is something I am very interested in.
Pat Tully on cooperative collection development of e-books using Coutt's MyiLibrary. A similar product to EBL.
John McDonald of Claremont Colleges has done a study that found that patron driven purchases result in higher circulation beyond that patron request. They are using Elsevier. Loaded the MARC records (14,000) to the catalog, and would buy the most heavily used at the end of the year. Users are comfortable with the model, they use fewer books that you think, we would not overly buy books. Conclusion: use patron driven purchasing for non-core titles and subjects.
I will publish this now, but add to it as the day progresses, so stay tuned.

Kindles, iPads, and Nooks, oh my!

2010-09-27T22:01:00.000-04:00

We have expanded our offerings of e-readers to include iPads, Nooks,and Kindles. Last year we bought a couple of Kindles and circulated them. Users were able to request titles to be added to the readers and those titles are listed in the OPAC. They proved remarkable popular and circulated pretty continuously, at least until one of them broke. They were particularly popular amongst the college staff who seemed to use them to read popular titles. Our goal was to introduce such readers to our community in an effort to get people thinking about how such devices might be used in the future.

This year we have expanded our offerings with two Kindles, two Nooks, and two iPads. I was lucky enough to take a Nook and an iPad home with me to get a feel for them over the weekend. Personally I prefer the iPad. It is capable of doing far more than simply enabling one to read books and the technology and the software is elegant, although I do find the Apple/Steve Jobs universe a little totalitarian which is ironic is you look back to that iconic ad of 1984.

So first impressions of the Nook and iPad? The Nook is much the same as the Kindle, but the split touch screen is counter intuitive. One is encouraged to touch the screen at the bottom, and so almost invariably you want to touch the screen at the top. I did it, the two teenagers I showed it to (both deep into touch screens at this point in their lives, did it too.The iPad was elegant and functional and just felt good, but not good enough to replace my Android phone. I don't need that large screen enough to lug it around with me.

What I found most interesting was to see my son and his girlfriend begin to use them. I gave both devices to them open to a book but within a few seconds they had left the book behind the and moved to more interactive pursuits. The Nook was used to play sudoku and the iPad to play videos. This confirms my long standing idea that these devices will inevitably have multimedia capabilities and those capabilities will trump simple text.

Here is another aspect of all this. Tomorrow I sit down with a instructional technologist, the director of the Institute for Effective teaching and a professor in Art & Art History to discuss a project to provide pre-loaded e-readers for an archeology field study course.

Research based web usability lessons

2010-09-24T14:00:00.001-04:00

Bill Svitavsky shared this piece on web usability by Cameron Chapman with me. It is a good reminder about effective web design.

This is Broken

2010-09-18T22:04:00.000-04:00

There are so many things about libraries that are broken.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

What do you think is broken? I would love to read about it in the comments.

Things to Unlearn

2010-08-25T18:14:00.000-04:00

Although this list by Joyce Valenza was written for school librarians, it made me think about librarians in higher ed as well.

What do You Know About Google Editions?

2010-08-23T18:56:00.000-04:00

" Google Editions seems poised to become the world's largest seller of e-books." (Peter Osnos for The Atlantic 7/20/10.)

"What do we know about Google Editions? The answer, unfortunately, is not a heckuva lot." (Eric Freese for DigitalBookWorld 7/19/10.)

Stephen Abrams (late of Sirsi, now at Gale) is positive, but Clint Boulton at Google Watch is not.

I like the idea of device independence and the scale of the offerings, but so far everything I hear is aimed at the individual consumer market. No place for libraries until we see the institutional subscriptions that come out of the Google Book Search Settlement.

Ripping DVD's for classroom use.

2010-08-13T09:18:00.002-04:00

In an earlier post I discussed the recent Library of Congress DMCA Exemption and noted that the Chronicle was going to publish a 'how-to' piece to help faculty who are interested in actually making use of this exemption. Here it is.

Using clips of movies in the classroom.

2010-07-28T09:22:00.004-04:00

The Library of Congress's Copyright Office has released its latest round of DMCA exemptions and there is a big one in there for faculty who use DVD's in teaching.

First some background. This rulemaking process undertaken by the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office is designed to, "determine whether the prohibition on circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works [in the DMCA] is causing or is likely to cause adverse effects on the ability of users of any particular classes of copyrighted works to make noninfringing uses of those works." If so, then the Library of Congress can exempt that class of works from the Act's prohibition on circumvention.

Here are a couple of pieces that go into more detail, one from Inside Higher Ed and one from a Chronicle Blog (which is really good by the way, and will be followed put by a how-to guide to actually ripping DVD's.)

Bottomline: it always was legal to use clips of movies in the classroom to help teach particular concepts or content, but the DMCA stopped teachers getting clips of movies off DVD's. Now this exemption to the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA means that that barrier to getting these clips has been removed.

IT departments and libraries will have to understand how to rip clips from DVD's so they can help faculty who want to make use of this exemption.

Kindle Android App Review

2010-07-18T09:32:00.004-04:00

I downloaded the droid Kindle app to my Verizon LG Ally so that I could read books (Jane Smiley's latest novel, Private Life, and OffBeat Guides' Sao Paulo Travel Guide) while on vacation in Brazil and to test the program since we at Olin are beginning to invest more in e-books and in mobile computing. Here are my initial thoughts.

The app is great in terms of portability. Instead of carrying a number of paper books with me I can fit a bunch of titles (I certainly haven't found the limit yet) on my phone. I downloaded the books quickly and very easily before leaving the states (why I can't -- or won't -- do this in Brazil is a different story and concerns Verizon's own brand of money grubbing idiocy not the droid Kindle app, but more on that in a later post.)

Readability is good as well. The screen is backlit so reading on the plane and in bed has been fine, even outside in cloudy Sao Paulo. The text size can be adjusted, and the font (a comfortable serif style, which cannot be changed) is comparable to a printed book as well. The pages turn instantaneously with a convenient tap on the appropriate side of the screen. About 70 words fit on the screen (though this depends on the text size one selects) which is fine, although it means one turns a page far more often than would be the case in even a mass market paperback. This contributes to a somewhat disjointed reading experience (exacerbated by Jane Smiley's character strewn narrative.) The app automatically takes you to the last page viewed when you open the book again, which a great. So for vacation novels the app works well. I will certainly use it again.

The experience of using a travel guide is less happy. Here search and navigation through the text is very important and the app falls down badly. The table of contents consists of clickable links which is good, but there is no index and the text is not searchable a major drawback for this kind of reference. There is a reference in the app to search coming soon, so maybe this will change. There is also no ability to see any context (smaller images of the pages before or after your text, or some information about the chapter of the book for instance.) The only information you can see is a vague indication of how far, in percentages, you are into the title. One possible solution to this would be to set ones own bookmarks and the app does allow you to do this. However, you cannot edit these bookmarks and they are identified with an incomprehensible position location and some text from the page, not even the closest subtitle. Not very helpful. Finally, the app taunts the user with a function called , but no ability to actually write a note! Also you cannot change the size of images, so the map of the excellent Sao Paulo Metro system is utterly useless.

All of this means that that app does not meet the needs of researchers (even very relaxed vacationers) and certainly not of scholars or students, but works well for pleasure reading, which is in line with the results of a recent survey from the Chronicle.

Wikis in Higher Education

2010-07-14T09:18:00.003-04:00

There was an interesting piece by Steve Kolowich in Inside Higher Ed today on wikis in higher ed. he concludes that unless wikis find a satisfactory way to attribute specific content to individual contributors they will not satisfy academic researchers, but they that have been more successful in teaching and administration.

I am not sure I agree that they have been more successful in teaching or administration. I have used them in the classroom (as a glorified annotated bibliography in a one credit information course) and in administration (as regular readers of this blog know the Olin Library's strategic plan is a wiki.) The major problem I have found it the lack of enthusiastic adoption by the group one wants to participate in building the wiki. I think this is because the barriers to entry -- logging in, and the WYSIWYG editing features -- are just a bit too high for casual users to manage, even those who have no problem with other web based technologies. That combined with a the lack of attractiveness of much of the content (I am shocked, shocked, to find that our library staff are not as excited about strategic planning as I am!) leads to a lack of uptake.

Painting the Exterior of the Library

2010-07-09T12:39:00.001-04:00

This summer we are having the exterior of the library painted. You can follow progress on the Olin Library's Facebook page. But I couldn't resist this photo of the sky blue ceiling of the atrium at our entrance. This is something of an American tradition. Don't worry, the rest of the exterior will be a variation on the Rollins' Mediterranean stucco style.

ALA Advocacy Day 2010

2010-07-02T10:47:00.003-04:00

Tuesday was Library Advocacy Day, a sweaty but a fun, and I hope productive, time was had by all. Of particular concern to me was to assess the interest amongst Florida legislators on the Federal Research Public Access Act (H.R. 5037 and S. 1373) and to make sure they understood how important this bill is to college librarians and the people they serve.
There is a lot of cynicism around U.S. government but I always get a great feeling when I am on Capitol Hill. Groups of ordinary citizens are purposefully walking from office to office earnestly lobby for their particular issues. On the day we were there the flags were at half mast for Senator Byrd, and the Kagan hearings were in full swing. It just gives me that warm and fuzzy, democracy in action feeling.

Creating Change in Scholarly Communication

2010-06-26T22:50:00.001-04:00

I was a panelist at the SPARC-ACRL Forum on Saturday (and at the discussion group on Sunday.) Here are my notes.

Change from the ground up – Campus-based policies to ensure Open Access to institutional research outputs through proactive copyright management, with Jonathan Miller, Library Director at Rollins College.

First I must acknowledge the work of Cynthia Snyder, Bill Svitavsky, David Noe, all librarians at Rollins. They are doing the real work of building the repository.

Rollins is a good selective liberal arts college in central Florida. With 3200 FTE students and 203 faculty. We emphasize teaching excellence. Our mission is to educate students for global citizenship, and responsible leadership. Most of our faculty members are active researchers, creators, and writers, but their main job is to teach.

We have an endowment that is better than most, but not as big as we want it to be. We have survived the latest recession better than most, but the library has had a flat G&S budget for three years.

So, in the context of US higher education, a perfectly normal school.

So how have I, the director of a small college library, found myself in the august company of colleagues from Duke, and UC San Diego?

Since the Rollins Arts & Sciences faculty passed their Open Access Policy a number of my librarian colleagues from around the country have expressed surprise that Rollins should be one of the first liberal arts colleges to pass such a policy. In fact I think we were third, after Trinity University in San Antonio and Oberlin.

Well, I would argue that Open Access is not just for the big guys. It is not just the concern of research universities. In fact I think it might be more relevant for small colleges than for larger schools.

Rollins, as a small, largely undergraduate, teaching intensive, school with a liberal arts curriculum that, at least in one sense, means we need broad not deep access to information. We are net information consumers rather than net producers and our students and faculty make a little use of a lot of resources, rather than a lot of use of a few resources, or a lot of use of a lot of resources. The subscription model of collecting a relatively small number of periodical titles “just in case” students need articles in those titles, doesn’t make much business sense for us. What we really need is “just in time” access to a broad array of information resources, none of which will be used particularly heavily.

Our Open Access policy was simply one part of a larger strategy to change focus of the faculty and students of Rollins College from a local library collection to a larger world of information. There are four parts to this strategy that I will mention today:

1. Working politically to create the scholarly communication system we prefer and that meets the needs of the students and faculty at liberal arts colleges.
2. Building collaboration and cooperation with – amongst others -- the state universities of Florida.
3. Moving aggressively from print to digital periodicals.
4. Contributing to open access initiatives and exploiting open access resources.

First, working politically – I am the outgoing chair of the ACRL Government Relations Committee which plays a leading role in the advocacy efforts of ACRL . For the last few years, pre-dating my involvement, much of that advocacy has focused on open access and on finding a productive balance in terms of copyright law. I also serve on the SPARC Steering Committee. My research and writing also concerns copyright policy. On campus I have looked for opportunities to present that research to my colleagues and build a reputation as someone with whom they can discuss copyright issues.

At the state level I have worked with others to get libraries in the three Florida higher education silos – state universities, state colleges and community colleges, and the private schools to think about cooperation and collaboration. That has led to some interesting strategic planning, some cooperative licensing, and to Rollins and Miami participating in the Florida group involved in the Open Library Environment Project, putting significant money into the project.

I also led an effort amongst liberal arts college library directors nationally to protest the Nature Publishing Group’s recent exorbitant increase in the online subscription price for Scientific American. We also cancelled our subscription. This was not universally popular on campus, but it was an opportunity to explain why we thought we had to hold the line on periodical prices.
That is a good segue into the next point – aggressively moving from print to digital periodicals. Obviously, most if not all of us are doing this these days, we at Rollins are doing for the usual reasons – our users prefer digital articles to print, we are able to link these articles into our wider information systems, we save space, etc. But, in response to flat budgets, we also did a major periodical cancellation project in the last 18 months, focused on print subscriptions because the use was so low and the subscription prices were increasing so fast that the model was unsustainable. We worked closely with faculty on this project and this increased their awareness of just how expensive the annual subscriptions to scholarly periodicals have become. That project was definitely about cuts, but we described it as a necessary pruning. We made sure that faculty understood that when budgets came back, we would consider adding subscriptions to digital content. In the meantime we continued to make them aware of open access journals, open repositories and made sure to incorporate these open resources into our systems and services.

So: I have a reputation on campus as someone who thinks about copyright. The Library is acting in a concerted way to protest journal price hikes, to limit our exposure to periodical inflation, and to find ways to improve our users access to a broad array of resources, including open resources, and our faculty are primed to think about scholarly communication in general and journal pricing in particular.

Which leads us to my presence on this panel. If are going to encourage our faculty and students to use open access resources as information consumers, shouldn’t we also contribute to those resources as information producers?

We were given good advice by those who had traveling this road before us: the good people at SPARC, Peter Suber, Ray English, Diane Graves, Terri Fishel. So I pass this on to you:

Find faculty champions to push the OA policy
Build the institutional repository at the same time as you develop the policy.
Find the message that resonates with particular audiences: on our campus the provost was interested in institutional reputation, the Dean of Faculty by the idea of a stable repository of faculty publications, IT and the librarians in a hosted solution from Bepress which did not involve much staff time and expertise in implementation, and – most importantly – the faculty were interested in more visibility for their own research and a policy that was flexible enough to enable them to get an automatic waiver when necessary, and that recognized the diversity of their output. Fully half of the output of Rollins faculty is something other than the classic peer-reviewed scholarly article.

The policy passed the A&S faculty unanimously in February. The institutional repository site http://scholarship.rollins.edu went live at about the same time. We have spent the last few months tweaking the site and loading materials. The next big push will come in the Fall, once we get the data on last year’s publishing output from the annual report each faculty member submits to the Dean.

What are the next steps?

Continuing to populate the repository.
Passing a similar policy in the other faculty on campus: the faculty of the business school.
Reaching out to journal editors on campus – both faculty and students -- and offering to host their content. Preferably with open access, but toll access if necessary.
Building other collections – theses for instance.
Continue to work on other parts of the strategy – statewide collaboration and cooperation, rewriting our copyright use policy so that it offers more practical guidance to faculty, moving from print to digital, and working politically. I will be on the Hill on Tuesday, lobbying for FRPAA.

Let me end by just mentioning the faculty champions on our campus. Both were members of the Professional Standards Committee. Thom Moore, a physicist who directs the faculty/student collaborative research program, and Claire Strom, a historian and journal editor of Agricultural History. Claire drafted the policy, Thom shepherded it through the faculty.

Throughout the process I was in the background, frankly “loaded for bear” ready with facts, figures, and arguments. I worried we needed to hold all kinds of informational meetings with various constituencies. Thom said, “nah.”

I came to that final faculty meeting ready for any eventuality and just sat and watched Thom and Claire quickly and quietly move to the unanimous vote. At the end the meeting Thom came over and just said, “told you.”

Demonstrating the Value of Libraries

2010-06-26T21:54:00.002-04:00

This session from the University Libraries Section was formally titled "Demonstrating Excellence in Higher Education: What Universities are Doing. What Libraries are Doing." University libraries, particularly public ones, and libraries in Europe and Asia are very concerned with this, but we all need to be. Personally, I am increasingly interested in trying to find ways to accurately indicate what value we add to the mission of Rollins.

The speakers included Alexander C. McCormick, Director, National Survey of Student Engagement & Associate Professor, School of Education, Indiana University; J. Stephen Town, Director of Information, University Library and Archives, The University of York; Patricia Brennan, Director of Product Management for Evaluative Products, Thomson Reuters; and the moderator was Marilyn Myers, Associate Dean for Public Services, University of Houston Libraries.

McCormick talk on NSSE was interesting. He pointed out that ranking largely track the incoming SAT scores of students, research rankings ignore undergraduates entirely, and that the official measure of quality assurance in the US is the accreditation process. He did note that there is a direct relationship between students' reported library use and measures of institutional quality, but when one isolated library there is no independent impact on outcomes. He urged libraries to emphasize a “Discourse of improving, not proving.”

But the best speaker was Towns, the University of York in the UK. One measure I use to determine if I have been in a good session, is if I come out with a reading list. Towns gave me that:

ARL SPEC Kit 305

SCONUL’s “Performance portal”

Roxanne Missingham. 2005. Libraries and economic value: a review of recent studies. Performance Measurement and Metrics 6, no. 3, (September 1): 142-158. http://rollins.summon.serialssolutions.com (accessed June 28, 2010). [Rollins people can find the fulltext here.]

Petros A Kostagiola, and Stefanos Asonitis. 2009. Intangible assets for academic libraries. Library Management 30 (6/7): 419.

Town made the point that, “All of this [talk of value and impact] may damage the idea of libraries as ‘transcendent’ collective and connective services.”

He said we need comprehensive and holistic measurement --- true worth, transcendent valuation, in a narrative of worth.

Google Book Search Settlement Discussion

2010-06-26T20:57:00.003-04:00

This was a session organized by the ALA Washington Office. The session focused on the future rather than on describing the case. It included Jonathan Band, who provides legal advice for the Library Copyright Alliance, James Grimmelmann of NYU, Mark Sandler of the CIC, Mary Beth Peters (who will be retiring as Register of Copyrights at the end of this year) Johanna Shelton (previously a Congressional Committee staff member and now a lobbyist for Google.)

Peters described the proposed settlement as a "bridge too far." The Judge, Denny Chin, recently appointed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals may provide a roadmap to a more reasonable settlement, the two parties are keen to find such a settlement.

Band laid out a series of scenarios and each of the panelists responded to those.

The first was if the settlement is rejected, litigation ensues, and Google is found to have infringed.

Shelton pointed out that the settlement addresses the legacy problem, not the future of books. Google’s future of books is their “Google Editions” in which consumers can buy and store online books in a personal account. This will be an open platform with opportunities for device developers and bookstores. Not proprietary like Kindle or iPad.

Sandler addressed what the libraries partners might do. He pointed out that we still have Hathi Trust with over 1,000,000 books in the public domain and 6,000,000 in copyright. He stated that, “It is inconceivable that anyone with a shred of a sense of social justice will suggest that those files [the 6 million in-copyright digitized books] be deleted.”

The second scenario was that we scale back to scan and snippet display.

Sandler pointed out that this would still be a substantial benefit to people, because they will use Google Books as a discovery service and come to libraries to find the print. Band pointed out that one can also just use of snippets for reference and Grimmelmann noted other fair uses like the ability to search and conduct research across the collection. Peters suggested that under these circumstances other companies could push for legislation.

Grimmelmann used that opportunity to argue for a radical revision of copyright law with shorter, fixed terms and clear notices. Peters, with long experience, pointed out the difficulty of achieving the correct balance in legislation and that Europe was proceeding with mass digitization and using licensing to manage compensation.
Sandler described the recent decision in Viacom v. YouTube as encouraging. Google’s ability to take down when notified was enough. We can do this in higher education; digitize and then take down if the owner comes forward.

My take away from this is that any definitive decision in the Google Book Search settlement is a long way off and when it does come the outcome will be more limited and lead to less radical change in library service than I had hoped. In the meantime we have to proceed to providing access to those Hathi Trust public domain titles, and pursue digital book access via licensing with individual packages and unify the search experience for users via services like Summon.

Here are a couple of unsubstantiated factoids from the presentation: the size of the existing digitized collection at GBS is around 12 million titles -- 2 million in the public domain, 2 million commercially available and under copyright in the Google partners program, and 8 million potentially in copyright scanned from library collections, 20% of those 8 million are orphaned works. About 35% of the public domain works are viewed during any month.

Summon Advisory Board

2010-06-24T21:16:00.001-04:00

This was the second meeting of the advisory board and, as with the first, it was an meeting of a committed group of developers and of thoughtful librarians from all over the world. I think Summon is still ahead of the game in unified discovery but has some competition particularly from EBSCO's new discovery product.

New publishers and resources continue to be added, search and relevance continue to be refined, de-duplication is improving, next week we get better usage stats, and an autocomplete feature. As well as lots more stuff a bit further out.

I have lots to talk to Bill and the rest of Digital Services when I get back.

Sustaining Copyright in Culture

2010-06-23T20:46:00.002-04:00

I am in D.C. for the next week for a variety of meetings, the Center for Intellectual Property's 2010 Symposium, the Summon Advisory Board, then ALA, followed by a visit with Ms. Evangeline Moore about her father's papers, and then the ALA National Day of Advocacy on Capitol Hill.

Let's start with the symposium. This is the first one I have attended and I am not convinced it was money well spent. First that title. Hybrid C: Sustaining Copyright in Culture. I get the hybrid, we live in a hybrid world of analog and digital works and have for many decades, the phrase "sustaining copyright in culture" is as confusing, hazy, and empty as the Symposium turned out to be. I signed up because I thought I might learn something more about fair use, but the argument put forward by Jaszi and Jonathan Band, was pretty extreme. Here is the abstract to Band's 2007 paper for ARL.

“Three appellate decisions [Blanch v. Koons, Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com, and Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley] concerning fair use should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege. In all three decisions, the courts permitted extensive copying and display in the commercial context because the uses involved repurposing and recontextualization. The reasoning of these opinions could have far-reaching implication in the education context.”

Band thinks these decisions “should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege.” Because, if I understand the argument, simply copying copyrighted works originally published for a non-educational market, in an educational context "re-contextualizes" the work and thus makes the use fair use. But he also notes, “many copyright owners will not agree.” (Band, December 2007.)

I did enjoy listening to Maria Pallante and David Balto on the Google Book Search settlement. They disagree on whether the judge will accept the settlement or not, but seem to agree it will be appealed. We could be in for a very long wait on this one.

I had hoped to get some good ideas on how to incorporate issues of copyright and information policy into information literacy, and some of the audience had some ideas (focus on carrots not sticks for undergraduates with contexts that interest them like textbook costs, fan fiction, and open access), but the panelists didn't.

I think that was the overall problem with the symposium. The format of theater style seating before talking heads on a raised panel, left little time for Q&A or interaction. I could have watched a webcast.

Thinking About the Future of College Libraries

2010-06-14T13:39:00.005-04:00

It is planning time at Olin (when isn't it planning time? Planning should be continuous!) I am gathering readings to be shared with the librarians. So on top of my hastily put together presentation to some Balinese librarians, I also have the following:

Horizons 2010

A collection of 21 pieces gathered by Alire and Evans.

C&RLN's 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries: A review of the current literature.

I haven't had a chance to look at the IMLS wiki yet, but it looks vaguely promising.

Do you have any others I should take a look at?

Indonesian Food

2010-06-12T13:10:00.007-04:00

From Bali Photos

I really enjoyed the food we ate in Bali. The traditional food of Bali was sweet potato and corn served with vegetables. Meat was rarely eaten and rice was a cash crop. This changed with the green revolution when white rice became more common, as Bali became more open to other Indonesia cuisines, and particularly with the increased economic development that came with tourism. Now the Balinese eat rice up to three times per day and eat more fish and meat. The result has been an increase in obesity and diabetes. We obviously ate in restaurants, tourist restaurants, but it was fun getting to know Indonesian dishes like nasi goreng, nasi campur, mei goreng, and gado-gado. We even had a cooking lesson with Nyoman's family. here are some videos of me learning how to make gado-gado, a vegetable dish with bean sprouts and a spicy peanut sauce.

Trust me. I did more food prep than these videos show. We made about five different dishes. All were delicious.

Bali Photos

2010-06-10T11:22:00.002-04:00

You can view all my Bali photos here on picasa. I have identified many of them.

Nature news article on open access and government mandates.

2010-06-07T15:59:00.003-04:00

As I try to catch up with at least a semester's worth of e-mails, this article from Nature (April 7, 2010) caught my eye.

Blogging from Bali

2010-06-07T15:39:00.003-04:00

Phil Deaver just sent me this. We would go to this local restaurant (Marni's? Mauni's?) and use their wifi while drinking Bintang's, the local beer. Many of my posts came from here. I am surpised I got any blogging doen at all!

Rice Field Run Ubud, Bali, Indonesia by jonathan1239 at Garmin Connect - Details

2010-06-06T16:49:00.002-04:00

This is the regular run that Mark and I did in Ubud, that I wrote about here.

The Lontar Museum in Singaraja.

2010-06-02T22:49:00.008-04:00

The Lontar palm leaf is a common traditional writing surface in southeast Asian and India. You can learn a bit more about them here and there is a fine digital archive of them here.

Museum is a misnomer, it is in fact a library or archive. We got a great introduction to the collection from the trained librarian guide who appears in these videos.

One amazing thing about both the art museums and the library we visited is how open they are to the elements in such a tropical climate. As you see in these pictures

From Bali Photos

the lontars, although protected in their boxes, were open to the humidity and temperature changes. This was also true of the Arma and and Neka Museums in Ubud.

The Impact of Balinese Religion upon the Rollins Group

2010-06-02T22:47:00.009-04:00

Throughout the trip I have been asking members of the group about how they see our engagement with aspects of Balinese Hinduism based their own religious beliefs. Here are some of the clips.

Ilan on cockflighting

2010-06-02T02:42:00.003-04:00

This is what it feels like ....

Balinese Cockfight (with apologies to Geertz.)

2010-05-31T10:46:00.011-04:00

Yesterday we went to another trance possession ceremony, this one in Denpasar. But the thing that really took me out of my comfort zone at this one was the cockfighting. The Balinese have this marvelous way of mixing the sacred and profane. So while those in the inner temple are concerned with prayer and other sacred pursuits, in the outer temple there is a cockfight tournament and market and the place is absolute Bedlam.

Hundreds of men gather around the cockpit which is about 30 feet across and underneath the usual open pavilion. Some sit at the front, most stand and those that can afford it buy a plastic stool for Rp. 3,000 (30 cents) to stand on so they can see better. Around the back, women ply their trade selling drinks and snacks.

To one side sit the officials with a gong for calling the rounds. In the ring, about a dozen men, big fat, hard, betting men, and short, wiry, hungry men. Not your usual temple goers. These cock fighters, spur tiers, and referees all gather to sort out who will fight whom, everyone is looking for an even fight with well matched birds. The birds are about 8-12 months old and have been lovingly cared for by their owners. The handlers hold their cocks at shoulder height, gently under the belly of the bird, with the razor sharp spur on the left leg held away from the body. This protects the bird and handler and also displays it to the crowd. Other handlers retire to the edge of the ring to tie on the spurs.

The ring clears and the two handlers and referees strut around the ring gathering the money to support the main bet. This could be Rp. 7,000,000 at this temple (about $7,000. But this is chump change at another temple cockfight where the locals invite big gamblers from Java, the main bet can be Rp. 700, 000, 000.) Once each bird has accumulated enough money, the bets are opened to the floor and all hell breaks loose as the crowd wave their right hand to the left or to the right (indicate which bird they want to bet on.) The minimum bet is Rp. 10,000, a dollar, usually even odds. Sometimes it is easy to find a taker, other times the crowd has decided on a favorite and you can't place a bet. For the record I, with the guidance of our driver Nyoman, parleyed Rp. 50,000 into Rp. 200, 000. I gave Nyoman Rp. 100, 000. He will save it for his daughter. All this time the handlers are holding their cocks closely together, almost in pecking range, and are riling them up with pinches, feints, and ruffling of feathers.

The fight begins. The two men move with their cocks to opposite sides of the ring and let them go. the birds immediately rush at each other and jump, slash, and peck for their lives. Often the fight is over very quickly, in seconds, with a mortal wound from the spur. Sometimes the fight lasts a round or two. Occasionally, the two birds tire and refuse to fight. In these cases they are placed together in a bamboo cage and fight to the death, or until one cowers in defeat. During the whole thing the handlers bob and weave as though fighting themselves, the crowd roars, and the blood is up. The fight is the blood sacrifice at the temple.

Outside the ring the processions of Barong from local villages, accompanied by the syncopation of clashing cymbals and gongs of the traveling gamelan, continue to wind into the temple, the priest intones over the sound system. All this clashes with the roar of the cockfight and the sensory overload of a Balinese ceremony is achieved.

The defeated birds are plucked at ring side and taken home by the victor to be eaten. Imagine what it must be like, the cock you have lovingly raised for a year crows in the yard, you have millions of Rupiah in your pocket, and you are eating your defeated opponent -- smells like victory.

Here is Geertz's article.

The betting...

The flight ....

The ignominious end of the defeated.

Tourism in Bali

2010-05-28T20:58:00.014-04:00

We are staying at the Puri Bagus Candidasa resort, so this is a perfect opportunity to write about tourism in Bali, with the caveat that I have been here all of twelve days. So take these thoughts as the first impressions of an ill-informed neophyte.

There seem to be three kinds of tourism here. The majority of visitors come for relatively cheap fun in the sun beach vacations. This place is pretty close to Australia and to the economic powerhouses of east Asia. The second is cultural tourism, centered around Ubud and Balinese art, music and religion. The third is high end resort vacations in tropical paradise. Finally, I suppose you can also add the ex-pat community. Foreigners who have moved here.

Tourists are coming from Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Europe, particularly the the UK, France,and Germany, the U.S., and from other Indonesian islands, particularly Java. Millions of people come here for vacations every year.

All of this is having a huge impact upon the island. Some positive, even if most tourist dollars stay in Bali for less than 24 hours before transfer to Jakarta or to Japan and destinations elsewhere, this industry is bringing a lot of jobs and money to the Balinese. Tourism is also bringing new ideas and opportunities to the Balinese and while that is not always positive it seems clear that some, perhaps many Balinese find that refreshing. Tourism is also building infrastructure, some of which can be used to meet the needs of ordinary Balinese. Finally, tourist interest in the environment and in Balinese culture seemed to have led to an increased sensitivity and interest in maintaining the environment and Balinese culture.

But it is also pretty clear, in fact it is blinding obvious as soon as you leave the airport that there are significant negative impacts as well. Western tourists bring western consumption expectations with them. This is having a huge impact on water use, electricity consumption, land use, and transportation (to and on the island.) Culturally, tourists come to Bali to see and experience this unique culture and form of Hinduism. But by our very presence and interest we impact on that culture. Ceremonies that were purely Balinese are now attended by foreigners with varying levels of knowledge of and sensitivity towards the ceremony and the people involved. Like European cathedrals, Balinese temples are overrun with people whose relationship to the space and the activities conducted there is very different than that of the local population. Aspects of Balinese ceremony and culture have now become performance or product for tourists and have been radically changed in the process. Hoyt contends that change is inevitable and the the Balinese may be strong enough to find a way to incorporate change brought by tourism on their culture and still maintain control of that culture. I would argue that while cultural change is inevitable, change brought about by post-modern global tourism is almost inevitably corrosive. Environmental change is perhaps the most destructive. Over-consumption by tourists (like me), pollution, the impact on global climate change of simply flying here, all negatively impact the island.

I am living in an object example now. I am sitting by the pool, using the wifi (and too much water and electricity) in a resort hotel that is constructed on a global model and has little connection to Bali. The beach has eroded away because someone mined the coral. The coral reef we went to yesterday evening was gorgeous, the best I have ever snorkeled in (above? over? Whatever!) but then I have only snorkeled in the Dry Tortugas. Seriously though, amazing. Acres of coral, feet from the beach, shoals of brightly colored fish, Mark followed a turtle. Just amazing. But as we swam we had to wave away the plastic garbage floating in the water. Exactly the same stuff Mark and I collected yesterday. Some of the coral was bleached and some had been damaged by boats that have come here to deliver tourists (like me) to the coral reef. Unusually, in my experience, one sees few offerings around the hotel grounds. There are few holy places, and few people employed by or connected to the hotel who feel the sense of connection to the place and culture that would lead to the leaving of daily offerings.

Ironically, it is now May 31st and since I began writing this post we have returned to Ubud, traveled to Denpasar (more on that in a later post) and now find my self at another beach resort hotel in Livona. This is first Internet connection I have had since Candidasa. The experience is much the same. Not much beach, buffet lunch, swimming pool with bar, 1970 - 80's resort experience, twenty middle-aged German tourists all drinking Coke, plonked down in Bali. These experiences have been the least satisfying of my time in Bali.

With one exception. Margaret and I walked out of the hotel in Candidasa through the banana groves and along the cost to the water temple perched on the promontory where the caretaker priest welcomed us and allowed us to take photos and patiently answered all out questions as we gazed over the sparkling Indian Ocean towards the island of Nusa Penida and watched Balinese cows graze on the hillside as the tropical breeze .lofted the cotton awning over the open-air temple.

A Little Taste of Home

2010-05-27T20:54:00.003-04:00

During the prayer service at Selat Pecan the woman I sat behind was wearing a Mickey and Minnie hair clip.

Chemical Baggies

2010-05-27T20:25:00.003-04:00

Today we drive to Candidasa for a few temples and some snorkeling. So Mark and I collected plastic garbage on our regular running route this morning. There is a real problem with plastic garbage on the island. The Balinese used biodegradable containers and wrappings for centuries (banana leaves etc.) and they composted after use. Now they use a lot of plastic (though not as much as the average American) but have continued to toss their waste aside.
The waste we gathered (about 20 lbs in two miles) consisted of plastics bottles, individual candy wrappers, individual hygiene product wrappers, and a large number of small clear plastic bags that the farmers use for agricultural chemicals -- chemical baggies.

What we did not find were any condoms, needles, aluminum cans, or any broken high end plastics (cell phones, sunglasses, etc.) It was also interesting how little plastic garbage there was in light of that fact that they do not seem to ever collect it.

You can learn a lot from garbage.

The Future of College Libraries

2010-05-27T05:20:00.005-04:00

Today I spoke to a group of librarians from Udayana University at the new campus at Bukit Jimbaran Badung, near Denpasar about the future of libraries. Here is my PowerPoint. No surprises here for anyone who has talked to me about the future of libraries recently.

The librarians' questions were good and perceptive. They were particularly interested in embedded library instruction, partnerships with faculty, library automation, the library as place, and working conditions for U.S. librarians.

Jaya took this picture of us all with his iPhone.

Procession in Mas

2010-05-25T10:32:00.008-04:00

This afternoon we went to see a procession in Mas, a village in Ubud region. This is one of the iconic sights of Bali. Women processing to the temple with very tall offerings on their heads. Each neighbourhood gathers at the community center and then they all set off to the village center and then to the temple, accompanied by a marching band. We were told that the offerings are as tall as the family can afford. They are constructed around a banana stem and the fruit, chicken, and cakes are attached with bamboo spikes. Each offering is topped with three Chinese coins (the round ones with a square hole, these commemorate a marriage between a king and a Chinese princess (but don't quote me on that.) The offerings will be stored at the temple overnight and then taken by the family and eaten at about 5 a.m. tomorrow.

And now for something completely different ....

2010-05-24T22:06:00.004-04:00

The Water Temple Tirta Empul at Tampaksiring

2010-05-24T21:31:00.008-04:00

Today we went to the Water Temple, Tirta Empaul, and also visited the healing waters there. This was very special, again outside my comfort zone in the sense that it challenged my simplistic dismissal of all things spiritual. The temple is located at a spring. The water from this spring is channeled (the Balinese really know how to manage water) into a series of pools fed by multiple water spouts.
We entered the pool area in just our sarongs and sandals, and prayed in the Balinese manner. Men cross legged, women kneeling. Each with a small bowl containing flowers, a bouquet, and an incense stick. After wafting the incense over us we extinguished the stick and prayed with hands clasped in front of our foreheads, then we prayed again with a frangipani flower between our hands, then with the small bouquet, and with two petals, and finally with empty hands one more time.
Then we entered the left hand pool, walked to the first spigot, clasped our hands in prayer one more time and ritually washed our heads five times. Then proceeded to the next spigot and so on. Each spigot was labeled in Sanskrit and Balinese with the particular power, so some we avoided (cremation etc.) The repetition, the rain, the constant falling water, the communal nature of the act, the coolness of the water, the echo of the pool enclosure, all added up to a quite remarkable experience.

From Bali Photos

As Hoyt reminds us, Balinese Hinduism is a religion of orthopraxy (correct ritual practice and behavior), unlike Christianity's orthodoxy (correct belief or thought.) The ritual is important, not the thought, which is why a bunch of westerners like us can be so accepted, as long as we
do the right thing.

Hunting the Durian

2010-05-24T07:01:00.009-04:00

One of my goals for Bali has been to taste the fabled Durian. Today I succeeded. As we drove back from the Batur volcano, our driver Wayan Sarma, stopped at a roadside stand and helped us select the best fruit. Here is the video. Because of the smell no one wants to transport these fruits in the passenger compartment, so instead he secured it inside the engine compartment and off we drive. Once back at the hotel, Margaret cut the beast open and we all dug in, I have also posted the reviews here as soon as I can.

Reading in Bali

2010-05-23T11:07:00.004-04:00

This short video is a great example of one type of reading practice in Bali and I think it is a great example of the totemic power of reading. The sermon is being read in Sanskrit, and translated and interpreted by a second "reader'" in High Balinese.

I used to think that it was unlikely that anyone, other than perhaps a few priests and priests-in-training, hearing these performance understood what was being read or the translation. But today our driver, Nyoman, translated some of the interpretation for me and said that most people understood High Balinese, but did not use it. That doesn't change the point though, what was important was to hear the words in the original and in a revered older language. Another example would be jewel-encrusted codices paraded through medieval European towns but not read, the Latin Mass, or Tibetan prayer wheels.

For an illiterate population or a primary oral culture (which is what Bali would have been when Hindu texts were introduced to the island, perhaps around 800 -- 1100 C.E) the technology of reading and writing -- which enables people to move information through time and space outside of the human brain -- was magical, and those that controlled the technology, the priests and the rulers who employed them, were anxious to keep it that way.

Mass illiteracy is not the case today in Bali, but remnants of these practices remain in this kind of activity.

Jaya at Selat Pecan.

2010-05-23T10:59:00.009-04:00

Dr. Cokorda Bagus Jaya Lesmana is the son of Professor Surayni, a leading Balinese psychiatrist and a psychiatrist himself. He is a friend of Hoyt's and I met him at the ceremony at Selat Pecan.

Biting the heads off chickens

2010-05-22T23:54:00.002-04:00

This afternoon Hoyt took us to a temple ceremony in Selat Pekan up in the mountains. This was the first time we have had an opportunity to attend such an event that was not designed for tourists. There were hundreds of Balinese there and just a couple of dozen tourists.
The event began with Sanskrit chants and sermons, then prayers, then a long kind of mummers play with kings and demons, and lots of comic relief, and then the main event, a variant Barong dance, during and after which a number of men went into trances. This was quite well organized with a clear group of men officiating. They held the trancees (is that a word?) down -- not an easy task, or at least they made it look theatrically difficult -- and emptied their pockets, not sure if they did other things as well. Then let them go and gave them large knives (which a number of us thought was inadvisable since they then proceeded to charge the crowd, but it certainly added to the excitement of the evening, to most people's glee.) The officiants then dangled live chicks in front of the trancees and also bottles of arak -- Balinese moonshine -- because the possessing spirits love blood and alcohol (reminds me of this song.) The trancees, about five guys at this point, would grab the chicks and bite their heads off, then proceed to eat the birds heads and all. One guy must have eaten a dozen chicks. Finally, they are woken from their trance with holy water and weariness and proceeded through the temple gates and the evening is over. At which point we all stream out of the temple.
Generally a good time was had by all, exciting, communal, gossipy. It reminded me of a bullfight.

The most powerful point for me was when the temple guards forced everyone to crouch down below the spirits and Barong (no one could be higher than a spirit.) They were more successful with those people nearer the action. There was this wonderful transgressive amoeba-like quality to the crowd, everyone wanted to stand up and see but also were scared to exceed the gods or defy the guards. As we crouched down we needed more space and the crowd was pushed back. As we rose, we pressed forward. So under the hot lights in this enclosed space on a tropical night we wavered back and forth as the gods moved amongst us and the Barong paced around.

Next I will post a couple of videos from the event, so stay tuned.

Traditional Healer

2010-05-21T23:46:00.005-04:00

In another trip outside of my comfort zone, Hoyt took us all to a traditional healer, Cok Rai. I will share Micki's video response when I can get blogger to accept such a big video. But in the meantime let me tell you about my experience. Cok Rai was a superb listener and observer and he very quickly understood quite a bit about each of us. i think this comes from natural empathy, careful observation, and long experience. Hoyt would say I am safely staying in my western rationalist comfort zone and that I should at least consider that he has some other power that is best understood from within a Balinese worldview. Perhaps so, but I think my rationalist explanation still leaves him as an amazing guy. He spent a lot of time poking me in an eclectic mixture of pressure points that seem to be based on Chinese and Indian Vedic medicine. Ultimately ending up poking me between my toes with a stylus, each point connected to a different internal organ. I have one problem, a memory lodged in my head (luckily it has not progressed to my chest) that I need to let go of.

After lunch we went to a mask maker, I Wayan Muka, in Mas. Masks are a common component in Balinese performances. I was amazed at how he was changed by simply putting on the mask and dancing, which is his specialty. But these tourist things, however, accomplished leave me cold. When I have some time I will have to blog about tourism in Bali, or at least my uninformed early impressions of same.

Micki on the traditional healer

2010-05-20T06:29:00.005-04:00

Running in Rice Fields

2010-05-20T06:11:00.004-04:00

Mark and I found the most amazing run this morning. The hotel staff recommended a run through the rice fields in Ubud. About 3 miles. We ran through a neighbourhood of the usual B&B's and art galleries and then the road narrowed to a track and then to a muddy lane and we suddenly rose up into the rice paddies. we were running along the dikes that separate the rice fields, past coco palms and small compounds. Ducks were working eating bugs and weeds in the flooded fields and leaving their fertilizer behind them. Cocks crowing, We ran up one irrigatin system and then down another and could see the subak system at work. It reminded me of a similar system in Colorado created by the Spanish, but on a much more sophisticated level.
The run was a real mixture of pre-lapserian rural idyll and post-modern responses to globalization. About half way through we met a young man tending an art gallery, yes, an art gallery in the middle of a rice field! But he was also watching his water alarm a simple water balance that continuously filled and emptied and rose and fell, hitting a bamboo pole as it did so The regular "thock" notified the farmer that the water was still running (and thus that his neighbour had not cut off this water supply yet.) We also saw a man shinning up a coco palm after the ripe coconuts above and small fields of mustard greens and soy beans amid the rice.

It ws a run I will always treasure, but as Hoyt said, in ten years time those fields will probably all be art galleries. bali is a strange experience.

Outside my comfort zone

2010-05-19T09:23:00.004-04:00

One of the points of these trips is to get you out of your comfort zone. So there we were this afternoon lounging in the pool of a truly superb hotel in Ubud (I will post photos later. I was dumb enough to forget to bring the doo-hicky that allows me to download photos from the camera -- so i will take some with the flip tomorrow. Stay tuned.) Trying to work out how this could possibly be outside of our comfort zone.

Then we went to get ceremonial temple clothing -- sarong, saput (over-sarong), and prayer sash, udeng (hat.) So there we all are choosing colors and styles, mixing and matching, and feeling foolish, but also somewhat peacocky in our finery, at least the men were. That was a little out of my comfort zone.

The reason we got this garb was to be able to attend and participate in an "opening prayer." A prayer tat the Balinese use to begin all kinds of activities, including a visit like ours. Again, photos to come, but this was way out of my comfort zone, old materialist that I am. The service consisted of interlocking prayers from the temple priest, offerings by the family, and various ritual actions by the audience/laity. So all our senses were engaged, hearing the prayers being snug to the sound of bells, the smell of incense, the incredibly rich visual environment, feeling my sorry butt on the hard floor and the feel of flowers between my hands as I pray. I can't wait to share some of these with you.

While we were waiting for the temple priest to arrive we watched a troupe of young girls practicing their dancing with the local gamelan orchestra in the district community center, an open pavilion on the street. These children were totally unconcerned with the audience, in fact pleased to have one. There level of skill was remarkable. Again, photos to come.

Running on the beach at Sanur

2010-05-19T07:13:00.005-04:00

Mark Anderson and I went running on the beach at Sanur before dawn today. There were crowds of boisterous young Muslim people who came on big tourist buses and watched the sun come up. Lots of people were delighted to see two lumbering western tourists doing such a silly thing as running on the beach and greeted us with hellos and good mornings. Each beach restaurant, hotel, and house had numerous offerings and shrines clothed in distinctive clothes with lots of offerings placed about.

No pictures I am afraid, I could not run with the camera. So just my memories, but here isan accurate one from someone else.

Why are you going to Bali?

2010-05-18T04:25:00.004-04:00

In Orlando airport I asked some of the group why they are going on this trip. Here is John Houston's answer.

The road to Bali

2010-05-15T14:51:00.003-04:00

On Monday I leave for Bali, Indonesia on the latest Rollins faculty trip. Each faculty member goes with a particular interest. I have two, the first is traditional Balinese writing and reading practices, Lontars, and reading groups, and the other is tropical vegetable gardening.

I am taking a laptop and flip camera with me and will try blogging from Bali as we go. I could have done this all from my phone, but Verizon would have charged me an arm and leg, and probably screwed it up anyway. One non-blog example: they put skype mobile on their phone and then only let you use it via their phone system, for which you need an international plan. Dumb.

Wish me luck. By the way, you know where the title of this post comes from.

Olin Library on the iPhone

2010-05-11T17:31:00.002-04:00

The Olin Library have now been added to the Rollins College iPhone App. You can search the library's online and physical collection with R-Search, search individual databases or the online catalog more selectively, check your account and renew books, access online reserves or your interlibrary loan materials, ask a librarian for information, and more. Download this free app here using iTunes, or search the iTunes Store for Rollins College.

Next steps: a website tuned for access form mobile devices, and apps for other phones, particularly the droid.

The New Yorker on the iPad

2010-04-27T17:02:00.002-04:00

Allen Kupetz and I have been discussing Ken Auletta's article in the latest New Yorker. The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books: newyorker.com

The thing I find most interesting about the article are the publisher plans to use the iPad to add multimedia to books. I have always thought this was bound to happen when we went digital and will ultimately lead to the overwhelming of text by multimedia, which in turn will lead to a counter trend in which some, smaller publishers, return to a "purer" form of the book dominated by text (probably in both print codex and digital forms.) That counter trend will be smaller, and thus we find ourselves ultimately (as much as there is any 'ultimate' when it come to information storage and distribution) in a situation in which, what we would recognize today as a book, occupies a far smaller place in our information economy and culture than it does at the moment, something akin to poetry today.

Response to "OCLC's Uncommon Dilemma."

2010-04-08T09:33:00.003-04:00

Today is Fox Day at Rollins, so I finally have a moment to respond to Barbara Fister’s LJ column “OCLC’s Uncommon Dilemma” of March 18^th.

First, let’s deal with the metaphor of the “tragedy of the commons” that I used in response to her column “Something There is That Doesn’t Love a Wall” of March 11^th. It seems clear from the tone of her piece that Barbara thinks that the end of OCLC, at least its current business model, would not be a tragedy and certainly not a tragedy of the commons. While I think it is good for the OCLC members and leadership to take the challenges we face in a new digital environment seriously and to consider alternative ways of continuing to serve libraries, I do think it would be a tragedy if we walked away from forty years of progress and experience to follow a relatively untested and rather utopian idea of a, to quote Barbara’s quotation from Yochai Benkler, “new modality of organizing production.” The important word in the quote Barbara takes from my response, which she does not seem to address, is “comprehensive.”

Although OCLC WorldCat is not completely comprehensive, it is the closest thing we have to a global bibliography of the contents of the world’s libraries. This very comprehensiveness makes it a valuable resource. If I need a cataloging record, it is likely to be in OCLC. If I want to borrow an item from a library, I am likely to find a willing lender in OCLC. Such one stop shopping is a huge efficiency for libraries, even if it is only as a resource of last resort after the resources of ones local consortia have been exhausted. So, the membership needs to plan a future that maintains and expands this comprehensiveness. I think it is worth investing some money in ensuring that.

Comprehensiveness is not very useful if it does not last. Long term sustainability is important. OCLC has been a remarkable success for libraries over the last forty years. Apart from the books and print journals my predecessors purchased four decades ago I can’t think of too many other significant resources from the last 1960’s that our staff and users make use of every day. Our library building was not built until 1985, our own OPAC is not that old, we disposed of the physical shelflist last year, and none of our staff were working here in the late sixties. NLM’s Medline might be the only example of a similarly long-lived and stable resource. As a director of an OCLC member library I feel a responsibility to ensure the sustainability of the OCLC bibliographic database for the long term if only for selfish long term planning purposes. We live in an age of enormous turmoil in the information economy, much of it very valuable creative destruction, but some of it just plain tumult. A reliable resource that we depend on to underpin many of the information resources and services we make available to our users, now and for many years to come, is extremely valuable and worth paying for to maintain. Barbara offers Wikipedia as an example of this new modality, but Joseph Janes in American Libraries (What Do You See? March 2010) cites recent work by the Augmented Social Cognition Group at Xerox’s PARC indicating that the rate of expansion in both articles and the number of contributors at Wikipedia has slowed. He wonders whether, “it is a lot harder to than it looks to make an encyclopedia using boldness and no firm rules.” And Wikipedia is just nine years old.

That sustainability has to be balanced with innovation. If the OCLC database had the same interface librarians began using all those decades ago, or even the same one I used when I became a librarian in the early 1990’s (anyone else remember the F11 key?) It wouldn’t be half as useful as it is today. This blog is littered with URLs to records of books in WorldCat and now WorldCat Local. I can now imagine, perhaps even begin planning for, a future without an integrated library system because the bibliographic record of the Rollins library collection is secure within the OCLC database and OCLC staff are making impressive progress on taking library systems to web scale. This innovation comes from a solid, long-lived, membership based not-for-profit organization, not from a hot startup, and not from a privately held, or publicly traded for profit corporation, and is not the result of, “loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands.” (Benkler.) That again, is worth investing in.

I do not want to leave the impression that I am opposed to Open Access, I am not. In fact, OCLC already provides open access to the WorldCat database. It is freely available for searching at worldcat.org. I also don’t want to come across sounding like a cheerleader for OCLC, which really isn’t the case. Rollins College is a Summon customer. We are committed to using this unified discovery service to provide the kind of information retrieval experience our students demand. Summon would be even more useful for our students if it included the bibliographic records from WorldCat; that way our users could quickly find a book and request it through interlibrary loan, through our link resolver, without having to sequentially search Summon and then WorldCat. But I don’t think Serials Solutions (and ultimately their parent company, ProQuest) should be able to load all that wealth of data for nothing. Serials Solutions should share with the members of OCLC in the cost of sustaining the comprehensive database. I also don’t think that OCLC should act as a monopoly and use its access to the database to deny access to that database to competitors to its own web-scale unified discovery service –WorldCat Local.

So, how to balance these apparently conflicting goals? The answer might be to divide OCLC into two parts. OCLC1, the bibliographic utility, responsible for maintenance and development of the bibliographic database and records of library holdings, with a specific charge to attempt to be as comprehensive in terms of containing the record of the bibliographic production of humankind, and to provide unfettered access at the lowest price (the same price for everyone) that guarantees sustainability; and OCLC2, a systems and services vendor like any other (except that it is member owned and profits are ploughed back into development and to support the members) that seeks to compete with other vendors to create innovative services for any library. OCLC1 should be low priced enough to obviate the need for any other entity to find it necessary or profitable to attempt to duplicate a similar comprehensive bibliographic database, also other vendors will have a vested interest in maintaining the comprehensiveness of the database since their own systems will be layered on top of the bibliographic utility, and OCLC2 can sink or swim in the marketplace based on price and innovation.

I doubt if Barbara will like my solution. It is based on hard-nosed self interest (albeit organized collectively.) But then so was the enclosure of the English commons in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Powerful landowners forced Parliament to provide a legal structure that enabled them to enclose common land and disempower villagers and landless peasants. This was a painful and violent process, but ultimately it contributed to a rise in English food production, the creation of an urban working class, and ushered in the Industrial Revolution leading to raised living standards for all; because landowners were prepared to invest in sustainability and innovation, while commoners were not. While I don’t want to down play the pain my ancestors endured as they left rural Lincolnshire to enter the maw of industrial Sheffield, the tragedy here was the underinvestment in the commons prior to enclosure.

NITLE Summit

2010-03-26T14:48:00.003-04:00

Assessing the Impact of Information literacy and Technologies on Learning (David Baird, Colgate and Sondra Smith, St. Lawrence), the last session before Pat and I get on the plane. Some interesting sites:

Media Scholarship Website at Hamilton.
The "freshman" (hate that word!) survey of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute.

NITLE Summit

2010-03-26T12:28:00.004-04:00

The ERIAL Project is a really interesting anthropological study of research in academic libraries in Illinois. Akin to the Rochester Study. I am really interested in working with our Anthropology department on something similar -- maybe a student faculty collaborate research project?

NITLE Summit

2010-03-26T10:13:00.002-04:00

Olin is conducting the LibQual survey of library service quality again this year. Here at the Summit, Pat and I are in a session about the MISO survey, which measures both IT and the library services. Since our IT and Library share the same building students and faculty often conflate their perceptions about the two. Using MISO might overcome this.

NITLE Summit

2010-03-25T22:16:00.001-04:00

Bryan Alexander gave his usual bravura performance about two particular emerging technologies on Thursday night. Here is an interesting alternative to PowerPoint. A report worth taking a look at as the Reed College report on e-books.

25th Anniversary

2010-03-23T09:27:00.002-04:00

2010 is the Olin library building's 25th anniversary. This weekend we have Reunion on campus and so we sprucing ourselves up and celebrating the anniversary. As I wrote here a while ago, we have hung some posters and banners. I think Strategic Marketing did a great job.

Digital Preservation and Access

2010-03-16T07:25:00.002-04:00

An interesting juxtaposition of articles in the Arts section of the Times this morning. Emory has made some of Salmen Rushdie's papers available, including the original Mac machines on which he wrote, and there is an interesting discussion of the difficulties of preserving "born digital" materials. Like most archives, our own Archives & Special Collections has not begun to tackle this yet, too expensive, not enough standards, etc.

The second article concerns C-Span placing their video archive on the web. You can find the archive here. This is not about preservation, but all about access, and what incredible access. This is going straight on my politics libguide. But C-Span is actually archived at the Research Park at Purdue.

OCLC Records etc.

2010-03-14T16:44:00.004-04:00

Barbara Fister, of Gustavus Adolphus, has written her usual thoughtful comments about the latest controversy concerning how we can use and sustain large shared bibliographic databases. My major concern here is how we can enable the maximum sharing and reuse of data while enabling such organizations as OCLC just enough control so that they have an incentive to continue to do the great work that we have seen over the last forty years.

Google Bikes

2010-03-11T09:03:00.002-05:00

I love this!

Unfortunately, when I look for my daily commute, it takes me through a gated reserve that would be lovely, but illegal. The real route slightly shorter and goes along Mizell, and east, not west of Lake Mizell. But Google Maps won't let me change it, because I take a pathway, not a road for a 20 feet of the route and I bike aacross campus, not around it.

C'est la vie!