Changing Faculty Needs Report from Ithaka

Sorry it has been so long since I posted. I have had a really busy month. Crazy really because it is the summer and I am on my own in Florida, so what keeps me so busy? Selling and buying a house, the diss. of course, strategic planning, prep. for Fall, all kinds of personnel issues. I should have learnt by now, summer is never summer ...

Anyway, that is not what I want to post about. Have you seen the new report from Ithaka, "2006 Librarian and and faculty Study"? There is a good overview of it in the July/August issue of EDUCAUSE Review.

I am not going to summarize the report, you can read it yourself. But here are some things that strike me.

According to the report, faculty see themselves as decreasingly dependent on the library to meet their teaching and research needs (figure 1) and they ask the question, "how can libraries ... strategically realign the services that support [this] function?" I think part of the answer is that we cannot. This is simply a function of the disintermediation of information retrieval that we will have to live with. But part of it is a product of digital access to licensed databases that faculty don't realise is organized and paid for by the library. We can do something about that and about how integrated we are into the scholarly and educational process. We have to build relationships at a retail level, through our liaison librarians for instance, and make it clear to faculty how we add value -- assuming that we do.

E-Books -- (figure 2) Librarians seem to be responding to student rather than faculty needs here and are leading rather than following. I expect us to reach a "tipping point" in faculty attitudes at some point in the next 5-10 years when Google Book Search and services that add value to those digital objects really take hold, and our students become the next generation of faculty.

Institutional Repositories -- (figure 3) the report's findings reflect the current groupthink that institutions are going to get a huge bang for their buck from digitalizing special collections. Like some others, I worry that libraries do not make good publishers and I also think that we often over rate our special collections -- they may be rare or unique, but that does not necessarily make them interesting and worthy of wide distribution.

From print to digital journals -- I agree with the authors of the report, "the elimination of print current issues is a fast-arriving reality" for all but the most iconic or marginal periodicals. Here, I do think we have reached a tipping point. The question we face is how to manage the transition. I am pleased to be able to say that Rollins will be hosting a workshop organized by Ithaka on Transitioning to Electronic Only Journals in November 2007 (more on that in a later post.) This workshop is designed to help librarians, faculty, and administrators think through the issues associated with this transition. Not least of which is ...

Preservation (figures 5 and 6.) According to the report, "faculty members expect librarians to find a solution to the preservation needs that they view as critically important." The authors make the very important point that, "some sort of collective action may be needed here to avoid any losses." I would put it even more strongly, collective action is absolutely necessary. Colleges like Rollins have to be able to rely on international, national, or consortial archives of electronic journals if we are to move to, and to persuade our faculty to support, all electronic access. There is already evidence that we cannot rely on research universities who are already abdicating this role as ultimate repositories as they face these same user demand and budgetary pressures. Services like LOCKSS and Portico are part of the answer here.

One final thing, in a liberal arts context, the library supports the faculty members' teaching role but not always their research. We simply do not have the resources. So faculty rely on interlibrary loan and on other relationships with libraries (their graduate school library, etc.) We can help them with services and infrastructure. Still others are working on the cutting edge in such rarefied areas that no library supports their needs. A computational biologist once told me that there were only five people whose work he needed to keep track of, they did that via e-mail. Once the work was in the library it was too old.

ALA 5 -- Lincoln, Reference, Learning Commons, and Ambassadors

Monday, and we are in the home stretch. this seems to have been a long conference and I am ready to be home. I enjoy Washington as a city, but four days of ALA is quite enough!

About Washington. I try to run every day when I am at a conference. It helps make up for the inevitable high-fat, low-fibre eating out or being fed conference diet. This morning I ran with Sue and we visited the Lincoln Memorial and reading the Gettysburg address gave me goose bumps all over again. The short declarative statements, the memorable phrases ("Four score and seven years ago,""last full measure of devotion," and "a new birth of freedom") the patterns of three ("dedicate ... consecrate ... hallow." "Little note... long remember ... never forget." And of course, "of the people, for the people, by the people." It is the greatest piece of American rhetoric ever written.

The two sessions today were the best I have participated in at this conference. The first considered the question, "Is Print Reference Dead?" As in the print reference collection. The general conclusion was that if it is not dead, it is dying and we need to move on to electronic reference. Not just librarians but also publishers. Librarians continue to buy reference works, publishers continue to publish them, it is just library users (particularly students) who are not using them. Segregating them in the Reference Collection and in the OPAC (where they tend to not even come with the same summaries, and table of contents info that many of our other books come with) makes them almost invisible to users. Publishers need to develop open standards of cross platform searching for their online reference tools (like journal publishers have done with OpenURL for instance.) Librarians need to bite the bullet, shift most print reference books to the circulating collection, spend the money on online reference, and find ways to link reference works together and with the rest of their offerings (see products like Reference Universe) and find solutions to archival, permanent access, and preservation issues (like Portico.) Finally, we need to consider the future of the reference collection as just one part of the wider discussion of the future of reference service.

The second one concerned Learning Commons. I had to leave early, but I am really interested in this idea of moving beyond the library as "box of books" into a shared space emphasizing learning, where all the various services and functions that support the educational mission of the college -- information technology, the library, tutoring services, the writing center, etc. -- all come together in one space to provide coordinated services and also collaborative and contemplative spaces, facilities, and technologies for student learning.

Now I am staffing the ALA Ambassadors' Desk here to help new ALA attendees with questions and a friendly face. Luckily the desk also has a chair and power outlet so I can get this blog written over the wireless connection the Conference provides.

ALA 4 -- Directors, and Govt. Relations,

Today was the ACRL College Library Directors' Discussion Group, one of my favorite sessions at ALA. It is great to talk with other directors who are struggling with many of the same issues we are. Topics that came up included: Technical Services for the 21st Century, staffing (inspiring, hiring, retaining, new skills needed), the future of Reference, learning commons, and space. Unfortunately, I had to leave early because the ACRL Government Relations Committee met that same afternoon.

The Legislative Advocates program seems to have got off to a good start, with 40 + Advocates, but we agreed we needed more -- preferably one in each Congressional district. The Judiciary Committees in the House and Senate (that oversee and develop legislation in the area of intellectual property) have been otherwise occupied so there have not been too many developments in that area,but take a look at the latest ACRL legislative Agenda for details.

ALA 3 -- federated searching, RFID, and supervision

I took in the new developments at Webfeat over breakfast. They are building on their core of federated searching to add remote access and ERMS. As you know we have gone with Serial Solutions for our initial foray into federated searching, but Webfeat remains the market leader in this area and it is interesting to see what they are doing. I am getting a real sense of convergence at this ALA. In the exhibits I visited the OCLC booth because I am interested in Worldcat Local and the beta test at the University of Washington. OCLC is thinking about this as a single interface that sits on top of your Integrated Library System (ILS, in our case think Sirsi) and it can do the same for multiple databases. I also took a look at AquaBrowser because so many people are talking about it. It is a web based search interface that sits on top of your ILS and can also do the same for multiple databases. See a pattern here.?

Bibliographic and inventory control is being decoupled from discovery and access. The former will remain with traditional ILS vendors (for now, though look for more generic database vendors to step up in this area and also for open source solutions to appear) and the latter will be dealt with by these new single interface solutions. So our job in the library becomes both simpler and more complex. Simpler because we no longer have to compromise between control and discovery in selecting just one integrated library system, and more complicated, because -- well -- we can no longer rely on just one integrated library system.

Then I caught a session on recent developments (standards, security, minturization, etc.) in RFID for libraries. This session was packed which surprised me, but this is one of those issues that libraries are very concerned about and, according to some people, are very actively implementing. RFID helps with logistics -- check in, check out, stack maintenance, and inventory control. A library really gains from economies of scale so it makes lots of sense for large consortia or systems with high circulation and many locations. It doesn't make much sense for low volume, high-touch operations like Rollins College. The start up costs are too high. I would contend that we have to move in an almost diametrically opposite direction. We need to find ways to squeeze costs out of our print operations so that we can use those resources on digital resources.

After that it was a session designed for new Technical Services supervisors. Not that I am one, but we now have one, Darla Moore, and I wanted to see if I could pick up any tips that might help her. I didn't, but I did have an idea I want to pursue when I get home. Or at least float it by the managers in the Olin Library and see what they think of it. I am wondering if a monthly supervisors' discussion group might be helpful. Over coffee we could discuss a particular issue a manager is facing in our library and solutions we might have. It would have to be very open, non-evaluative, and strictly confidential, but it might help us overcome what I am coming to think of as our "management deficit" and enable people to concentrate on the skills of management and learn from each other.

Finally it was dinner at Kanlaya Thai Cuisine with friends. John Pollitz has become Director of Libraries at UW Eau Claire and shamelessly copied my idea for a blog. Steve Ostrem has cut off his pony tail (the sixties are over!) Sue O'Dell continues to prosper at Bowdoin. It was good to see them all.

ALA 2 -- Advocacy

I spent all to day in the Advocacy Institute. The morning was a bit of a bust, but in the afternoon Stephanie Vance of Advocacy Associates, a lawyer and an ex Hill staffer led a lively and very practical workshop on lobbying Congress. I have always wondered whether I should visit, call, write or e-mail a Representative or Senator. Calling is for urgent issues, visits can really show you care, but what about e-mail versus a letter? I always thought that a letter showed more effort and therefore concern. But it turns out that since the anthrax scare of 2001 all mail to the Capitol is first sent to New Jersey where it is irradiated. This not only delays the mail, it also turns each sheet of paper brown, brittle, and leaves it with a strange smell. Vance therefore suggests e-mail or fax.

However, the particular mode of correspondence matters less than the content of your message: be specific, keep it short, and personalize it.

ALA -- Corcoran

As with ACRL I am going to blog the 2007 ALA Annual Conference in Washington DC. I arrived today and just registered. So, with nothing substantive to write, you will have to excuse the following dyspeptic outburst!

Why is it that conference organizers always give you so much stuff? This conference is a little better than ACRL. At that one they tried to give me a great big, elaborate messenger bag with a vendor's name plastered all over it. Here they just attempted to foist a cheap nylon tote bag with the Conference logo on it on me. Honestly, why would I want either? Do they think I didn't bring a bag with me? Do they imagine I like to be instantly recognizable as a tote bag wearing, overloaded tourist/librarian? Why are they wasting my money on such things? Needless to say, I gave the bag back to the nice, but mystified, lady behind the registration counter.

Inside the bag was the obligatory badge holder. These have become more elaborate over the years. We can no longer have a simple plastic sleeve that fits the badge and no more with a choice of a simple clip or thin cord to either attach it to our clothes or hang it round our neck. Oh no, we have to have a great big sleeve, twice as big as the badge, connected to a thick blue ribbon so that I am forced to hang it round my neck. "Hang" being the operative verb. This thing is literally substantial enough to hang oneself with! Why so robust? Because lord knows we cannot miss another advertising opportunity; a vendor's name is emblazoned multiple times on the cord. Now I know where all our library subscription money goes.

The Corcoran Gallery is open late on Thursdays, so I took the opportunity to go and see their exhibition, "Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939" Brilliant.

Keep it simple.

The librarians got their first group look at the link resolver on Wednesday. Bill Svitavsky took us through a basic run through of how it works (take a look at any of our databases if you want to test drive it yourself. Look for the "find fulltext?" button.) We then discussed the format of various pages and wording choices etc.
Dorothy Mays did a great job of keeping us on track with keeping it simple and focused on what the technology is supposed to do: enable a user find fulltext of an article they are interested in. All library software packages come with lots of bells and whistles and the temptation is to make use of all of these options. As librarians we can all think of situations in which a particular feature may be useful for our own work with users or for one sophisticated user. The trouble is that as you add those features the screen fills up, obscures the main purpose of the page for most users, and confuses more people than it helps.

I was reminded of this when I read James Surowiecki's piece called "Feature Presentation" on the Financial Page of the May 28, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. Surowiecki makes the point that, "although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It's only when we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity." (p.28)

This is another view of Christiansen's "disruptive technologies" argument. Successful corporations design products and product enhancements to meet the needs -- or requests -- of leading established consumers with whom they have a relationship. Those consumers ask for bells and whistles to enhance their sophisticated use of the product. This adds complexity and cost and thus leads to a disruptive market entrant creating a simpler, cheaper, paradigm shifting product that attracts users frustrated by the cost or complexity of the market leader. Peter Murray maintains a good blog about this

In our implementation of the link resolver we are determined to resist this and stay focussed on the needs of the majority of our users to just find the article. Our deadline is July 25th, when the Crummer School "begins" its ceaseless round of programs again. So you can judge whether we have succeeded then.

Our Strategic Plan

Earlier in the spring I told you that the library had written its mission statement. At a series of meetings in the Spring semester we developed a series of "Strategic Directions." The Library Advisory Council and the Provost had an opportunity to comment. Here they are:

1. In partnership with the faculty and through the curriculum, educate all Rollins students – in groups and individually -- in the skills of critical thinking, research, and evaluation of information.
2. Improve our users’ experience of the library; with exceptionally good, consistent, friendly, and professionally competent customer service to users, both online and in person.
3. Develop, organize, and provide easy access to the best possible information resources in the most appropriate formats for the Rollins community.
4. Find new and more effective ways to provide services and information resources beyond the library building so that the user need not come to the library, but the library services and resources are where the user needs us to be.
5. Develop the Olin Library as a welcoming and well organized space, in the building and online, that fosters the love of learning through services, programming, and exhibits.
6. Effectively communicate with and learn from the Rollins community and consistently use quantitative and qualitative evidence in decision making and development.
7. Support professional development and engagement aimed at continually improving all library personnel ability to implement this plan and improve library operations.

These are all priorities for us, but they are also in priority order. Maybe in years past collections(3) would have been number one, but that now comes below our educational (1) and user (2) services. The others, particularly six and seven are aimed at helping us achieve those top priorities.

All of these are situation and time specific. We decided on these for the Olin Library, at Rollins College, in 2007 (and hopefully for a few years hence.) We fully expect to have review them and change them as conditions change.

We are now actively engaged in the next level down of our strategic plan: determining the projects, action plans, and responsibilities that actually take us over the next year (or two) in the direction we think we need to go. After that we will incorporate those items into individual people's annual goals and begin measuring progress.

In the meantime, I would love to hear your comments on these strategic directions. Are we on the right track? Wat have we missed? What is not clear?

More from the Cornell Fine Arts Museum

Luanne McKinnon, Director of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, has created another really interesting series of exhibits that if you are near Winter Park are worth taking a look at this summer.

"Diverse Africa" continues from the Spring with some striking examples of African sculpture. "Winslow Homer: Joys of the Day" is a wonderful exhibit of engravings of Homer's work that were originally published in various magazines (library trivia: libraries lucky enough to have collections of original printed 19th century magazines like Harper's Weekly or Appleton's Magazine have to be very careful to make sure that these engraving are not razored out by nefarious visitors.) The sense of movement Homer was able to achieve in prints like (don't quote me on the title) "The Dance at the Music Academy" is astonishing. "15th - 20th Century European and American Painting" is perhaps my favorite because I was struck by the number of early British modernists represented. These are not the greatest art from the period (the British visual arts, like composers, are rarely the very best or most avant garde in any period, why is that?) but I enjoy them as examples of the familiar.

The Cornell really is an incredible resource for us to have on campus and we are luck to have Luanne to show it at its best.

Blogs at Rollins College

In an idle moment I was wondering what other blogs exist at Rollins. Here is a list, feel free to add any blog to this list that is created or maintained by anyone at Rollins, or is about Rollins.

These seem to reveal some interesting aspects of blogging. First, there are not all that many. A school of 3,200 FTE students and only fifteen blogs (including yours truly.) Some are more current and more active than others, some are clearly moribund, but they stick around for a long time. Only two seem to be course-related, it is clear that a number of teachers are discussing and using blogs in teaching, but not necessarily creating them (unless they are keeping them below the radar of the search engines, which is perfectly possible.) Some are corporate and institutional in nature, others are very personal. Some are well designed, visually interesting, carefully written, others are a mess. Finally, some are concerned with communication about specific time limited events others have no obvious limit.

These are in the order I found them. So thank Google.

http://www.rollins.edu/4C/blog.shtml (a short lived experiment in communication by the 4C's Committee?)
FoxBlogs (Ken Posner's test, only a test ...)
Welcome to the Wonders Blog (certainly the most visually stunning blog at Rollins.)
Rollins College Alumni Association (is this official?)
IMFourPlay (David Charles being wacky again, as only a Kiwi can.)
Economics Broadly Writ (Ben Balak and Charlie Rock are contributor to this course related blog.)
R-Journals (do these count?)
I.T. Lab Assistant Report (This is so cool! IT keeps a blog of problems in the lab, but how do I add to it?)
Morocco for the Professors (Sounds like a great trip.)
Annie Russell Theatre (As they say, Blog with Annie.)
No Hassles (the Olin Library's internal blog aimed at improving service.)
Moody Meow (a recently graduated student?)
Activism 101 (another course related blog.)
Kenneth J. Posner (Ken's personal blog.)
Rollins China Journey (Another great trip. Wenxian told me about this blog)

So that's it for now, do you know any others I can add to the list?

Rollins Undergraduate Research Journal

You may have seen the link to the RURJ on the library's home page or elsewhere on campus. Here is a bit of background.

Fay Pappas, a remarkably energetic student at Rollins, didn't think that there was enough scholarly research going on at Rollins, at least amongst the students, and what there was didn'tget enough airtime. She thought about starting a research journal for students. She kept on talking about this idea with friends. Some said it would never take off, but others encouraged her. She got involved in Brushing, the long-standing student literary journal at Rollins, met Clay Ferrara, got him interested in the research journal idea, and became the Brushing Editor. Even this was not enough work for her and she still kept on thinking about the research journal. She met with President Duncan who found a little cash to help her get it going. She gathered a group of interested students and looked around for faculty sponsors. Ben Balak from Economics was interested and I offered to help with the journal side of things. Fay and Clay got excited about the idea of an online journal, tussled with the issues of copyright and with peer review, website design, and the submission process. They now have it up and running. It is really quite impressive.

I am proud that the library was able to help with the journal management issues, with copyright, and by archiving the articles. This is one of the things academic libraries should be doing these days. We should be a locus of expertise on systems of scholarly communication, intellectual property, and institutional repositories for digital objects.

The RURJ is a great example of student entrepreneurship, scholarship, and engagement at Rollins and one of the reasons I thoroughly enjoy working here.

Libraries make you fat.

I have written about link resolvers before. In case you are not au courant with the latest library jargon a link resolver is software that makes a link between an article citation in one database and the fulltext of the article in another. It helps libraries maximize our investment in online information. How many times have you found a reference to an article and been frustrated to find that the database you are searching does not have the fulltext available? Perhaps you have given up, perhaps you have asked a librarian for help, perhaps you have placed an interlibrary loan request and been chagrined to find that the article was available all along -- just not where you were looking. Well no more, if we have it in fulltext, you will find it. Even better, if we don't have it in fulltext the software will guide you to search our holdings of printed journals to find a copy and if we do not own a copy will guide you to interlibrary loan (more on that in a later post I hope.) Link resolvers do more than that, but that is enough for now.

Olin Library just signed a licence with a company called Serials Solutions to use their link resolver and Bill Svitavsky is feverishly working on customizing the software as I write. In another example of the synergies possible when information, and particularly "metadata" (information about information) becomes digital we licensed their link resolver as part of a suite including monthly updates of MARC records of the online periodicals we have access to, which will be loaded to our catalog thus making that database a much more attractive option when you are trying to find out what we have access to or own. The suite also includes a federated searching software that will enable you to search more that one database at one time; helping to overcome the eternal question of all library users, "where do I start?" Finally the suite includes an Electronic Resource Asset Management System or ERAMS. This is a piece of backroom software that will enable us to better manage all this digital information we have licenced. All of this is based on the fact that Serials Solution has a knowledge base of the databases and the fulltext journals the Olin Library has licensed. This knowledge base underpins each one of these softwares.

I have been trying to come up with a metaphor to describe what is going on here. Time was, if you wanted to use a library, you entered the building, searched the card catalog, consulted printed periodical indexes, and than walked from floor to floor collecting the books and journal articles you needed. Along came networked computers, the Internet and the web. You entered the library website, consulted the online catalog and the periodical databases and moved from database to database collecting and printing the items you needed. With a link resolver, federated searching, and an enhanced online catalog you still enter the library website, but you no longer need to move from database to database. The next step is to put library resources where you are -- in Blackboard, Google, departmental websites, Second Life, etc. so that you do not even need to take that first step.

And people wonder why there is an obesity crisis in America. It is the librarians!

I was reading Harper's Magazine (June 2007) in the airport on my way back from Pittsburgh. As I write, it is only available online to their subscribers and our subscription at Rollins only makes the May 2007 issue available. If you have read the magazine then I am sure you know about Harper's Index, a mind bending list of weird stats, ratios, and numbers about life that generally amaze and appal. (e.g. "Number of the sixteen states of the South where more than 25 percent of adults are clinically obese: 12. Number of all other states where this is true: 5." Yikes!)

The ones that caught my librarian's eye this month were the following:

• Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000
• Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000
• Number that sold more than 100,000: 483.

I am not sure you can define 99, as published,as in "make generally known" and over 100,000 is a definite bestseller; that leaves 322,517 in the middle. Olin library buys about 1.25% of those. It is a tough task the librarians and faculty have to do: which one book out of eighty belongs in the collection now and for decades to come?

More importantly, about 1,000,000 books get written, but hardly read. Yet another factoid that lead me to the conclusion that we are writing more books, but reading fewer, which is another way of saying we are more interested in talking than listening. (Kinda like the bloggers amongst us.) A liberal education should attempt to rectify this situation.

Academic Library Success

This is a really interesting post from Steven Bell on ACRLog. So interesting that I intend sending it to everyone in our library to help inform our strategic planning process.

Steven's formula is "Greater Awareness + Usable Websites + Flawless Authentication = Better Results."

Here at Olin, we have made great strides with authentication, and some progress in terms of greater awareness, but need to do better on both of those and we still have a long way to go with a usable website.

What is Mapstats?

If you look at the bottom on the right hand column you will see a link to Mapstats. This is a free way of keeping stats on the (depressingly low) readership of this, or any, blog. The cool think about this (apart from it being free) is that it also maps the usage so I can see where usage is coming from and which specific post is being read. As a visual person anyway, I am increasingly interested in the various spatial ways we can display data, interactively and in real time.

You can see my readers are all in the US, not even my mother reads it!

NITLE Liaisons' Summit

I am just finishing the NITLE (National Institute of Technology in Liberal Education, pronounced "nightly") Summit. My first since becoming NITLE Liaison at Rollins. Rollins is the first NITLE school I have worked at so this is also my introduction to this group of liberal arts colleges. NITLE is a child of the Mellon Foundation and is run out of Ithaka. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know at those three websites.

I have a few take homes from this summit:

1. We still need to be involved in NITLE as it transitions from "2.o" (a fixed fee with effectively unlimited opportunities for participation) to "3.0" (a low membership fee and a pay as you go model of participation.)
2. We need to make greater use of NITLE professional development opportunities particularly in relationship to curricula renewal/reform at Rollins and our in involvement in general needs to be more more planned and strategic. As liaison I need to plan who I will invite to participate and try and pair interested faculty members with IT staff and librarians so that participation is more productive when participants get back to campus.
   
3. We have a lot more to do at the interface between IT and the Library in supporting the use of technology in teaching and learning if we are to match the activities at our peer and aspirational institutions.

Information Literacy

In a recent post on the AHA Blog Peter Townsend reviews Google Book Search and finds it wanting. His entry has been discussed elsewhere so I will not enter the fray. But I do want to say that his original post and the associated comments are a perfect example of an information literate discussion. Of course, this is to be expected from the Assistant Director of the American Historical Association and readers of the AHA Blog.

Townsend's original post was not perfect, he misunderstood a particular aspect of US copyright law concerning US govt. publications and the public domain and did not know all there was to know about serial cataloging rules (I can only sympathize with him!) But both of those issues were quickly dealt with in the comments and did not affect his basic argument.

I want students to graduate from Rollins with the kind of information literacy competencies exhibited by everyone involved in this discussion -- the ability to be able evaluate information resources and compare and relate them to similar resources, to be able to understand information in context, to appreciate the long term implications of aspects and context of information resources, and to be able to discuss these in a civilized manner. They are going to need them if they are to thrive in the information, and misinformation, rich world that we live in and become more than just consumers of ill digested corporate pap.

An age of irrationality

I rarely read the Financial Times, but one of the peculiar things about living in Winter Park is that one finds papers like the FT abandoned on tables in my favorite coffee shop -- Palmano's. This says something I am not prepared to explore here about the particular mixture of acquisitive luxury that seems to be a feature of life in Winter Park.

Still I had left the Times at home, so I read the FT while enjoying my delicious cappuccino. This quote from an interview with Francois-Henri Pinault (owner of YSL, Gucci, et al.) caught my eye. "We are entering what I think is an age of irrationality." OK, I thought, this is going to be about fundamentalists, creationism, Al Qaeda, a retreat from science and the Enlightenment, or perhaps a comment upon a Presidential Debate in which someone can ask whether or not the candidates "believe" in evolution and be taken seriously! I expected Pinault to be against irrationality.

But I was wrong. Pinault continued, "and a return to luxury. We are at the beginning of a social trend, change in values that could go on for years -- the age of rationalisation, after all, lasted for more than a century. The question we all have to resolve is how big can these brands grow?"

So the previous century was the age of rationalization and is now over. We can now all return to the Gilded Age, or perhaps the Ancien Regime. How awful.

As someone who works in higher education, and libraries in particular, I am a big fan of reason.

OK, so what next?

So, the furniture is popular. It is getting used and changing the way the space outside the library is used. Jane Wright told us it would slow people down and make the space more social. She was right. The new hours and offerings of the Bookmark Cafe have had the same effect inside. Our experiment with 24 hour access during exams and the lead up to exams is also changing how students think about the library. This is all good, but it is not enough.

These are all good things and they change students' perception of Olin Library -- they are ready to give us another look. But now we have to make some more fundamental changes to the library and, of course, when I say library I don't just mean the building that houses the personnel, the print based collection, and lots of study space. I mean the library as a physical space, an online presence, a collection of information resources, services, and relationships -- both online and the physical world. OK. So what might those changes be?

• Integrating the library's educational role more effectively into the curriculum so that we work in partnership with the faculty to help students become more information literate by the time they graduate, and doing that online (synchronously and asynchronously) and in the physical world.
• Continuing the hard work of making sure our customer services are consistently excellent and that our personnel are not undermined by poor planning, space, or procedures.
• Linking all our digital resources so a document in one database is accessible from any other.
• Linking our digital resources and services out from the library to digital places where the users are: Blackboard, the College website, Google, Facebook, their cell phone, campus plasma screens, etc.
• Building alliances with other academic support organizations (IT, the Writing Center, TJ's, etc.) so that the truly integrated nature of research, writing, and dissemination is supported by our services, not hindered by them, and making sure such alliances are happening both online and in the physical world.
• Creating extra-curricula reasons for students and faculty to spend time in the library, or online at the library: poetry slams, reading groups, exhibits, workshops, seminars, events of all kinds. At the same time, when it is useful, integrating the library's resources into other events happening around campus.

All of these are more difficult to do, are more expensive to implement, and in some cases mean a change in our mindsets. It is like a row boat. With the furniture, cafe, and hours we kicked off from the shore. Now we have to set the oars in place and bend our backs to rowing. It is hard work, but you get further.

The new furniture has arrived

At least the outside rocking chairs and cafe style tables and chairs are here and were set out today. This picture really doesn't do them justice. They are an elegant green and the space is much sunnier. The inside furniture will be installed before the start of Fall term.

It all looks great and is getting used already. At least three students have complimented us on the furniture. One told me it was great to have when she brought her dog to campus, another said he had thought about this idea years ago, but never told anyone. I told him to let me know of any other great ideas he has. That goes for everyone, don't keep them to yourself.

We have put no smoking signs on the tables to try and set that as an expectation for the space. We shall see if it works. When I took this photo, it was.

The Cult of Barbara

Some time ago I wrote about the Bookmark Cafe, amongst other things. We have been trying out some changes over the last semester with food offerings, extended hours, and new personnel. According to Dining Services these have so far been very successful. A big part of that success is due to Barbara a tireless source of energy, ideas, and good cheer who just makes the students want to come back, spend some time in the cafe, and buy another coffee. As Jim Collins says -- its all about the people. As Gerard Short of Dining Services said, "Barbara seems to have a cult following."

Library of Congress

The Madison Building has this magnificent relief of tumbling (or are they flying?) books above the main doors. I am happy to say that I managed to get all the way through all 64 boxes of unprocessed materials in the ARL collection. Now I just have to digest everything I learnt.

Research in the Library of Congress

I am lucky enough to have another week in the Manuscript Reading room of the Library of Congress buried in the ARL archive once again. I am still working my way through the 64 boxes of unprocessed materials, but it is going reasonably quickly this time, since most boxes don’t have anything about copyright in them or cover the period after the passage of the 1976 Act. It is only Tuesday and I have already passed the half way mark on the final collection: box 32 of 64. The thing about working in an unprocessed collection is that you have to open every box because no one has done so before.

Things are getting a bit clearer now. I am contemplating organizing my findings around a series of key documents in the revision process. Perhaps the following:

• The early study of photocopying practice and the report of the Joint Committee in 1961
• The Joint Committee’s acceptance of Fisher’s strategy.
• Rutherford Roger’s testimony before the House Subcommittee in 1965.
• The joint ALA/ARL proposed amendment to S597 in 1969
• Joint ALA/ARL proposed amendment to §108 (d) in S1361 and Philip Brown and Stephen McCarthy’s testimony on 7/31/73.
• The ARL response to §108 (g) (2) in 1974.

At each case I will show how the association developed these documents and the positions they represented and what actions flowed from these positions.

You come across the most wonderful things while doing archival research. It is fun to see that Robert Bork, as Solicitor General, was involved with the government’s case in Williams & Wilkins, to see letters form Fred Kilgour (founder of OCLC) agreeing to talk to the ARL librarians about library networks in the early 1970’s, and to see letters signed by Robert Maxwell. On a more post-modern self referential level, I have come across files concerning the funding for the building in which I am now doing my research, the letter in which L. Quincy Mumford invited the ARL to deposit its papers at the Library of Congress, and the minutes of the ARL Board’s decision not to publish Frank McGowan’s dissertation on the history of the ARL from 1932 to 1962, a dissertation that I read before coming here.

Rollins Colloquy

I live in the vain hope that someone may be paying enough attention to this blog to notice the large gap between my March 7th and March 31st posts. My aim is to post two or three times a week (ha!) So what happened?

Well a number of things. Spring break was crazy busy with the librarians' workshop on March 12th when we worked on the Olin Library's strategic directions, then the 13th was spent at St. Leo University with Brent Short , Director of the Library, who I am working with as part of the ACRL College Library Directors Mentor Program, and then I also participated in an online SOLINET workshop on Web 2.0: Social Software Applications for Libraries. More on that later.

Then a couple of weeks after Spring break, Les Lloyd, George Herbst and I went to Tacoma, WA for a NITLE workshop on Learning Spaces and Technology. More on that later as well.

But what really had my attention was the Rollins College Colloquy. I was asked to facilitate a panel with Duane Ackerman, Sally Ride and Anna Deavere Smith and the follow up Q&A. You can imagine this was a little nerve wracking. But it seemed to go off quite well because these three people are consummate professionals with some fascinating experiences and plenty of well articulated thoughts about the future of liberal education in the 21st century. Some of the things that came from them and from other panelists and speakers that most struck me include:

• American parochialism in terms of language, geography, and cultural literacy is unacceptable.
• In an age of fluid cultural production and ubiquitous access to (mis)information, some body of shared knowledge, a core curriculum, is necessary.
• The ability of people to critically engage with information, data, and the media, to find, evaluate, and use information in their own work is only going to become more important in an age of disintermediation, and information overload, and technology is not going to solve this problem. Our students need to learn the skills of critical thinking and information literacy.
• At least two speakers mentioned the importance of memorization. Particularly in an age that actively works to enable us to stop using our memories.
• Predictably, C.P. Snow's Two Cultures got a good workout.
• Many of the faculty were very concerned with how to create the conditions in which our students can take risks and learn from failure.

ACRL 3 Usability testing

Perhaps the most interesting session was on usability testing with Nora Dimmock from the University of Rochester. They have a usability program that works with programmers and designers on digital projects. The usability group deals with 5-6 projects each year; new homegrown digital products, evaluating and suggesting changes to vendor products, and revising existing systems. The workshop went through a number of usability techniques including card sorting in which you give 21 users cards with one element from your website in each card (for instance a library website might have journals, books, articles, hours, staff, news, events, ask-a-librarian, departments, and policies) and ask the user to group them in a way that makes sense to them. Also the reverse, when you put flip charts on the wall with headings and ask users to put postit notes with when they would expect to find under each heading on your website for instance. Both these tests reveal the users’ mental model of the service. Heuristics, when you ask expert users, like librarians, to critique a digital product based on specific criteria. This latter one has the added advantage of enabling librarians to have input into web design etc. something that is politically useful since librarians have very strong, but usually conflicting, ideas about website design and like to be consulted. Finally, she took us through assessment, when you have a user complete 5-6 tasks on a website (e.g. "Find a book on fish farming.”) and see where they click and how long it takes them. This can be combined with the Talking Out Loud Protocol in which the subject articulates their thinking while they are working on the task.

Rochester used to then write copious reports on the results of the tests. Now they just record them using Morae and send the file to the designers and programmers.

Oh, one final point. They often save expensive programming and designer time by creating paper mock-ups of the website and having users work through those. This means that big problems can be fixed before it ever gets to the programming stage.

OK, I lied: one more point. In a few years Rochester may not even have a stand alone website. They are considering moving to widgets to be inserted in appropriate places, often at the users discretion, through the users’ personal “infosphere.”

ACRL 2 -- librarians and technology

A recent theme in librarianship (recent as in 3 maybe 4 years) is this idea that everything is now different. A combination of digital technology and the so called Net Generation has changed our tradition role. At this point one is usually subjected to a hectoring tirade about how we have to keep up or die. It gets a bit exhausting after a while.

I was subjected to it today at a session called "Keeping Libraries in the Flow: Being Relevant in the World of Amazoogle." The trouble with this is that, like every other generation, this on is not monolithic. Rather than being all digital all the time I find that they are very selective about what technology they use and when. The other problem is the idea that librarians are not adapting to change and seeking new ways of doing things. Obviously this is not true. There are certainly Luddites and curmudgeons in the field but there are also quite forward thinking people and most -- of course -- are like the Net Generation: selective about what technology they use and when.

There were some interesting things that also seemed to be consensus positions:

• The current model of the "just in case" reference desk is doomed.
• As is the locally maintained catalog
• Librarians must integrate themselves and their services and resources into the educational process.
• Planning needs to speed up and improve.

It will be interesting to see if these come to pass.

ACRL

I am at the ACRL Conference. Strange to say this is the first time I have attended so I thought I would record some things. I am going to do this in bits, so expect more of these.

First, at 3000 people it is 10 times smaller than ALA and all academic librarians so I have met lots of friends, far more than I would meet at ALA. I like that.

Sessions, as usual, are a mixed bag but there have been some useful things.

Luz Mangurian, had some helpful things to say from a brain biology perspective about improving learning: emotions matter, show your students you care, sleep is important to memory retention, group learning, interactivity, discussion, and getting them to do the work all really work. We know this, I just wish we practiced it more! The other thing she said that I think is very important is "exclude the irrelevant." I always tell librarian teachers to show a model of success (in using a database etc.) before you get into the possible problems etc. Since she emphasizes the importance of emotion in learning it is no surprise that she describes online education as "the McDonalds of education."

Off-campus access

We just made the jump from OneLog to EZproxy to provide off-campus access to our restricted databases for the Rollins community. Back in the fall Steve Kahana, a student and Mac user who was unhappy with OneLog's PC-only solution, promised to donate two books to the Library if we found a way for him to access the databases etc. form off-campus. Here he is making good on his promise.

Incidentally this was a good early experience for us of people from the Library and IT working in a cross-departmental team. It also feels like the first substantial change in library operations that I have been able to help happen since I arrived.

Other comments include, "This is excellent, thanks!" "A big thank you to you from all of us Mac users!!! Thanks so much!!" and "As far as I can tell, this is GREAT, because now I can actually GET ON THESE VARIOUS D-BASES from off campus, which I could not do before!"

Power in the 21st Century Library

No, this is not some arcane discussion of Foucault, knowledge, and information services in the post-modern world. I really mean power. Regular readers (in the vain hope that there might be such people) will remember that I wrote some time ago about transforming the experience of entering the library. I am delighted to say that many of these ideas have been taken up by the administration. Facilities installed power outlets on the loggia in anticipation of the imminent arrival of furniture. The idea is that if you put rocking chairs and power in such a delightful location then students will begin to linger there, meet their friends, and use the wireless network. Well it seems two at least can't wait until the furniture arrives, simply adding power is enough.

Thus the issue of power. We used to think that what we needed to do when building a new library was put as many network jacks in as many places as we possibly could. We were wrong. Wireless has become ubiquitous, but battery power is still a precious resource. Have you noticed the cluster of salespeople around power outlets in airport waiting rooms, like zebra mussels around an warm water outlet? Well students exhibit the same behavior in libraries and other academic buildings. So my mantra (at least until someone develops a reasonable wireless power solution) is put power everywhere.

Rollins on YouTube

Like every other college, Rollins is on YouTube and our students show the College in a good (or this) and a bad light. This is just zany. Who knew compact shelving could provide so much pleasure? I am heartened to see that the various safety features on this shelving worked perfectly.

We have a New Mission Statement!

Exceptional services, information resources, and a welcoming environment for the Rollins community.

It passes my tests. It is short, it sets a high standard that we must work hard to reach, and I can easily communicate it to people with just the fingers of one hand -- services, resources, environment, and Rollins. I am publishing in in this rather informal place because it still needs to go through a few more trials by fire. I spent some time Friday showing it to various people in the library to gauge their reaction (perhaps the best summary of their reaction would be "cautiously optimistic") and it needs to be presented to the Library Advisory Committee (probably at our April meeting.) We will see how it fairs over the next few weeks.

The staff are now invited to write vision statements based on this mission statement. The idea is that such statements will enable them to fill in some of the gaps in the mission. Because it is short, it doesn't explicitly state whether an environment is physical or online, how the Rollins community is defined, what might constitute exceptional services, what kind of information resources, or whether we own or access them.

In my own opinion our environment is both a physical place and online, the community is the students, faculty, and staff of the College, exceptional services are customer services like circulation and ILL, educational services like group and individualized information literacy teaching and learning, and library services, like collection, description, organization, and preservation, that make a user want to recommend us to their colleagues, and to come back, and we will own some, access others, and provide a portal to still other information resources -- in all formats -- that our users need to fulfil the College's mission to educate responsible leaders and global citizens.

What I like about the new British Library website

Take a look

1. I like the clean white page with a single striking (and changing) graphic in the background that is clearly linked to what the library collects.
2. I like that a federated search box is front and center.
3. But that search function lets you know exactly what collections you are searching and provides easy access to advanced searching.
4. I like the uncluttered news feature.
5. I like that all the business links ("about us" "collections" "services" etc.) are right on the front page, but not the first thing you see
6. Finally, those cute graphic boxes along the bottom for featured "stuff" are cool. I particularly like the support us box.

What do you think?

Seen my tattoo?

The story in the library is that one of our student workers said that a mission statement should fit on a tattoo. We have started calling it the "tattoo test." So as we held the last mission statement meeting today everyone got tattoos. Here is mine -- Read or Die.

We will have a mission statement (knock on wood) by the end of the month.

Leapfrogging social networking

Librarians are exercised these days about social networking sites and whether to jump on this trend (fad?), just watch it roll by and wait for the next wave, or whether it is even relevant to libraries at all.

We even have a couple of staff people in the Olin Library working on this issue. I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

So I was interested to see this piece in Wired (Feb 2007) about MTV's attempt to leapfrog social networking sites like Second Life, MySpace, Facebook, etc. with a site called Virtual Laguna Beach.

"With its headlong leap into virtual worlds, MTV hopes to forge MySpace 2.0—and find its way back to the cutting edge. “It’s like the moment you went from listening to music to watching it,” Bostwick says. “Now we’re taking it from watching the show to actually becoming the show.”"

If library users are listening or watching the show -- passively searching and reading documents, what would it mean for them to "become the show"? I am not suggesting we should try and compete with Laguna Beach, but is there a connection here to the undergraduate research movement and the concept of institutional repositories? Will students not only be consuming information in (I use the preposition loosely) libraries, but also creating it? Of course, they always have, but will it be shared more widely (no longer just between student and professor) and stored more permanently?

As they say in my country, "I dunno."

Iraqi National Library and Archive

The news that the Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, was blogging on the British Library website was reported by the New York Times yesterday and taken up by American Libraries Direct on that same day.

His blog is a harrowing diary of what it is like to live and try and continue to work as a librarian in the midst of a country that is spiralling out of control. Libraries are build by functional, stable societies and are destroyed quickly or deteriorate slowly as those societies -- what would be the appropriate word here -- implode? devolve?

Kudos to the BL for publishing this and best wishes to everyone at the Iraqi NLA.

To say things in Baghdad look bleak is an understatement, however, this quote from Dr. Eskander's diary shows his , and his staff's, determination to continue their work to reconstruct the Iraqi NLA and to build for the future. "Marco rang me from Rome to tell me that a conference would be held in the city of Florence on next Tuesday, and that he wanted me address it. I agreed to talk about the impact of violence on my staff, the reconstruction of the NLA, and its future projects. "

Build for the future: this is what librarians do.

Planning: the mission statement

Long ago I wrote an entry here on planning. It was mostly about listening. While we will continue to listen to our users, our colleagues, and to the general hubub in the "infosphere", we are now entering a new stage in our planning. This month we are reviewing and perhaps revising our mission statement, in March we will be moving on to developing a short list of strategic goals or directions for the library to pursue over the next three to five years, and then in May we will get down to the level of an operational plan with annual projects etc.

One book I like on mission statements is Linda Wallace's "Library Mission & Marketing: Writing Mission Statements that Work." Chicago, ALA 2004. As Wallace puts it a mission statement should be a source of guidance and inspiration, define the unique contribution of your library, and be easy to say, read, and remember. (p. 16)

Our current statement is "The Olin Library provides instruction, information, and services to support the teaching and research needs of the Rollins Community." I like that it is short, and it covers the bases, but if it did not start with "the Olin Library" would it be unique to us? Couldn't IT or the Writing Center say much the same thing?

A couple I like from other Oberlin group schools include, from Union College, “Schaffer Library is a teaching library. We provide access to information resources that support the educational mission of Union College and we teach the critical and analytical skills necessary for the intelligent use of those resources.” It is blunt and to the point. The other is from Connecticut College "“Keeping you CONNected: Partnering with the college community to provide innovative, reliable, and universal access to information resources in support of academic and administrative endeavors.” I think I just like the creative use of CONN.

The other thing about mission statements is how you write them. Democracy and consensus can create buy-in which is important, but it can also lead to overly long, inclusive, and forgettable statements.

We have decided to do the following:

Having supplied them with some examples and some guidance from Wallace I asked everyone to write a mission statement for the library on their own. I also invited the Library Advisory Group (mostly faculty) to contribute their ideas if they wanted to. Then we held a 1 hour all library personnel meeting at which we did the following:

a) discussed the purpose of a mission statement.
b) Swapped all the individual mission statements are so that everyone had someone else's statement.
c) Everyone read the statement they had to the group and said what they think was positive/strong/exciting about the statement and why.
d) We divided everyone into four groups.

Each group was asked to appoint a facilitator (who will make sure the group gets its work done) and a reporter (who will report back to the next all library meeting.) Each group is asked to prepare a mission statement for the Olin Library before the next meeting. They can do this is a group meeting, via e-mail, whatever works for them as a group. It is the facilitator's role to make sure everyone gets to participate to the extent that they want to.

Then we will hold another 1 hour all library personnel meeting at which:

a) each group presents their mission statement.
b) we all discuss and arrive at a consensus (or as close as we can get) for what our mission statement will be.

If necessary, the librarians will meet afterwards and wordsmith the final product. Once we are satisfied, we will present it to the library and the Advisory Council for comment, and we hope endorsement.

The final product will be a revised mission statement by the end of February 2007. This puts us in good shape for the librarians to begin goal formation at an all day workshop during Spring break.

Wish us luck.

The Bookmark cafe 6:45pm Monday 1/29/07

I was going to present to a Communications class last night and noticed how busy the Cafe was. The new hours seem to be popular.

Living in a Hybrid World

If you have spoken to me for more than 2 minutes about librarianship, then you have probably heard me say that we live in a hybrid world of both print and digital resources, and that we will continue to do so for quite some time (if not for ever.) The challenge for the early 21st century librarian is to manage the processes necessary to maintain both a print and a digital library and to help our users work in this hybrid world.

Having said that, I do not think that we live in a stable hybrid world. The general direction is of course from print to digital, but there are plenty of retreats along the way (the Rocket e-books being a good example from the 1990's.) If we consider the various formats (for want of a better word) that we deal with -- catalogs, indexes, journals, reference, and books -- and Bill Clinton's "bridge to the 21st century" then we have crossed the bridge from print to digital in terms of catalogs and indexes. Any print indexes or card catalogs left now are just remnants. We are rapidly crossing the bridge in terms of journals. More quickly than I expected in fact and this is true of music as well. We are only just getting on to the bridge with reference books (we still need to solve the problems of OpenURL compliance and federated searching across reference collections) and books in general? Well, I am not sure. I think the printed codex will be with us for a long time. I will be reading one on my death bed and my 14 year old son is a voracious reader of books.

However, I think the traffic on that bridge (to stretch the metaphor way too far) is going in both directions. Books are being created, edited, produced and distributed digitally, but also the technology is impacting the nature of the "book". Our society produced 2-300 page documents because it made economic sense. Creators then tailored their works to that format. In the digital environment (particularly if the reading device of choice is the cell phone) documents -- the packets of information -- may be distributed in much smaller forms. We may buy or access chapter length works, or even paragraphs. You can see this already as what were reference books are now reference databases; like the two most recent additions at the Olin Library: Gale's Literature Research Center and Springer Verlag's Prokaryotes. Both of which also illustrate the amount of work still to be done to truly cross the digital bridge.

Team of Rivals

I am reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: the political genius of Abraham Lincoln. (E457.45 .G66 2005 in the Olin Library, but it is checked out at the moment, not by me, I got mine from the Orange County Public Library with my shiny new library card.)

Before this semester started, I spent six days buried in the Association of Research Libraries archive in the Manuscript Reading Room at the Library of Congress doing research for my dissertation. I had a wonderful and, I think, productive time. Now I just have to process it all.

When I am doing historical research I like to read history. It somehow gets me thinking along the right lines. I like to notice how the historian marshals her evidence and writes history. I particularly enjoy reading about Lincoln, the United State's greatest President (in this foreigner's humble opinion). The book was also meaningful since every night I ran on the Mall and would stop at the Lincoln Memorial in the dark, look up at the looming seated figure of Lincoln and read one of my favorite political speeches, the Gettysburg Address.

On a more personal level I was struck as I read the book by how much time so many of the married couples in that period spend apart. As the United States exploded westward in the decades before the civil war couples would often be separated for long periods. The curse of modern academe is not so new.

Avatars of the Word: from papyrus to cyberspace

Elise Friedland recommended this book to me (although once I started reading it I realized I had read at least parts of it before. Does that ever happen to you?) James J. O'Donnell published it in 1998 and his ideas about the impact of the digital revolution (if that is what it is) have stood up remarkably well.
Find it in the Olin Library at PROSHELF P96.T42 O36 1998. O'Donnell is an scholar of late antiquity, St. Augustine in particular. He is also interested in Cassiodorus. The book relates what we are living through now to the move from orality to literacy and from the scroll to the codex. Along the way O'Donnell discusses libraries, the liberal arts, the future of higher education, amongst other things. He intersperses these chapters with short pieces he calls "hyperlinks" on issues like the "How does Teaching Work" and "The Instability of the Text." It is one of those books that sparks lots of ideas. I particularly like how he ends the book because I think it speaks to what we as librarians need to do.

"Cassiodorus chose a course that succeeded in placing some new wine in old bottles. He used the instruments, the habits, and the cultural expectations of the old Roman culture in which he had been brought up to do new things, create a new kind of library. He is not a savior of western civilization, nor should any of us expect to be. He is rather a single responsible individual helping shape to the limits of his ability the institutions and the cultural tools that his world needed. That he accepted and thrived on the disruption of his life and expectations, and that he succeeded in using his past and his expectations so resourcefully to help him shape a future , are lessons we can all take away with us."

Warts and All

The title of this post is attributed to Oliver Cromwell, but Walpole quotes him as actually asking Lely to paint his portrait, "roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything." Lely was asking how Cromwell, the new Protector of England, wanted to be portrayed in what was to be his official portrait. It was an important moment. Cromwell could follow in the footsteps of his predecessors; Charles I, Elizabeth I , and Henry VIII (amongst others) and be portrayed in a way that both flattered him and emphasized his majesty as a form of propaganda. Instead, he wisely chose a different, new image that had even more propaganda value -- Cromwell as the "plan russet-coated captain."
Any Irish readers will by now, I am sure, be grinding their teeth. Cromwell is no hero in Ireland. His actions at Drogheda and Wexford would make him a war criminal today, but were not so unusual during the Wars of Religion of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The reasons Cromwell remains a hero to me are, first his overthrow of the English monarchy, and secondly his words to the Scottish Assembly, "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Those words were used by Joseph Bronowski during his TV series "The Ascent of Man" (Olin Library Q175 .B7918 1974) to make the point that utter certainty is a dangerous thing. To quote a reviewer on the Amazon site for the book, "JB walked fully clothed and shod into a pond at Auschwitz in acknowledgment of family and friends and fellow countrymen whose ashes were dumped there by fascists who laid claim to a handle on absolute certainty." I saw that scene on TV in the 1970's and remember it to this day.

So why this essay on 17th century English history? Sorry, I got carried away. The Olin Library just completed the LibQual survey and we have begun using that data in our planning process. On Friday I sent a message to the Rollins community announcing that we had posted our results -- warts and all -- on the website. I have been heartened by the number of responses I have got from students, faculty, and staff, complementing us on doing this and openly and honestly communicating not just our strengths, but also where we can improve.

Listening

I have some catching up to do.

There was an article in the NY Times on 11/5/06, "The Silent May Have Something to Say." It was about the importance of, and techniques for, gathering input from people who may be reluctant to speak up in meetings. I remember hearing the Provost of the University of Pittsburgh -- James Maher say once that in some ways academe was way ahead of the corporate section and that engaging its personnel in the management of the organization was one of them. It may not always feel like it and it may not always be pretty, but if you compare it to what happens elsewhere it's not bad.

Still, this article was a useful reminder to find ways to try and listen to the less vocal members of our organization, and that includes the library. As the VP for Human Resources at Intuit, Jim Grenier, was quoted as saying in the article, ''It's not about a consensus culture. ... You're looking for more input so you can make a better decision. Employees know that we are serious about asking for their feedback, and we listen and we do something about it.''

This is not something that I always do , or always do well, so it is good to be reminded.

Thinking About Librarianship

My defense has led to another long break between entries on this blog. I am glad to say that I am now ABD -- all but dissertation.

Two books that I have been reading have made me think about librarianship (beyond my monomaniacal interest in librarians and the Copyright Act of 1976.)

The first is William Patry's "The Fair Use privilege in Copyright Law." (1985.) I have been aware of this title for some time but it has been on my list of second tier titles, one of those titles that I should get round to reading but not a core text for a couple of reasons. First, not many copyright histories refer to it, which is probably related to the second reason, the title is ahistorical, and third the Library of Congress subject headings are

Fair Use (Copyright) -- United States
Fair Use (Copyright) -- United States -- Cases

Nothing about this leads the researcher to suspect that Patry wrote a legislative history of the development of the doctrine of fair use and included quite a detailed history of the evolving text of section 107 and 108 from 1955 through 1976. It is so good in fact that for one awful moment I thought he had written my dissertation! He hasn't, but his book is going to be very useful.

So why does this make me think about librarianship? Its all about precoordinate description and post coordinate searching. Precoordinate description is when an indexer creates ways in which an item can be retrieved and hopes that they have considered all the ways future researchers might search for the book. In this case, Patry and his publisher titled his book in a way that they thought would most interest their core audience -- copyright lawyers. Then the cataloger (or maybe even the publisher again, since the subject headings were part of the "Cataloging in Publication" record) created the subject headings, neither of which refer to "history." Post coordinate description happens after the event. A good current example of this is the Google Book Search program in which a researcher can search the fulltext of a book in ways that make sense to them. If I had been able to do that, Patry's book would have quickly appeared in my retrieved sets and, I hope, I would have recognizes its usefulness.

I am not suggesting we do away with pre in favor of post coordinate searching. I think that the most powerful information retrieval comes when searchers have access to both. Since precoordinate description is so expensive we should reserve the combination only for those most important items and rely on post coordinate searching for the rest. Of course, as my example shows, it is tough to know ahead of time which are those "most important items".

The second book that made me think about librarianship will be the subject of a later entry.

Thanksgiving

I have just spent Thanksgiving at home with my family. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday. First, it is such a great concept: a day just for giving thanks. Every country should have one. Second, it's all about food and not about shopping. All the shops close and there is no wild potlatch of gift giving. Though that later aspect is spoiled by the recent rise of "Black Friday" and its spread into the late hours of Thanksgiving.

This year I got to bring back from Florida:

1. Fresh pecans to bake into a superb pecan pie using John Thorne's recipe in Richard Sax's "Classic Home Desserts." They really do make a difference.
2. Key limes for a chiffon key lime pie. A perfect feather light ending to the meal.
3. Kumquats that I boiled in a syrup and tossed into roasted sweet potatoes.
   

In return I am coming back from Pennsylvania with half a bushel of magnificent empire apples from Soergel's to share with our student employees.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year. My family seems to be coping fine without me, my move to the Olin Library has proved to be very professionally rewarding, and I am enjoying becoming part of the Rollins community.

Next year I hope I can be thankful for the Miller-Hicok clan being together again and happily esconsced in sunny Orlando.

Future of the Library readings.

Here are a series of readings I gathered for our Library Advisory Council to help them think about the future of this library as they become more involved in our planning process. You might find them interesting.

Thanks to colleagues on the newdirector-l listserv and the Oberlin Group listserv for their suggestions.

Peggy Seiden "Forecasting the Future" @library.edu 9(1) (Fall 2006) p1, 4. http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/library/fall06.pdf

OCLC "Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A Report to the OCLC Membership." OCLC 2005 [excerpts] http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm

Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shelley K. Hughes. "Information Literacy as a Liberal Art: Enlightenment proposals for a new curriculum." Educom Review. 31(2) (March/April 1996)
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/review/reviewArticles/31231.html

The Horizon Report. NMC & EDUCAUSE (2006 Edition.) [excerpts]http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2006_Horizon_Report.pdf

Taiga Forum Steering Committee. "Taiga Forum Provocative Statements" March 10, 2006. http://www.taigaforum.org/docs/ProvocativeStatements.pdf

Jerry D. Campbell. "Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination." EDUCAUSE Review (January/February 2006) p.16-30 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0610.pdf

Joan K. Lippincott. "Net Generation Students & Libraries." EDUCAUSE Review (March/April 2005.) p.56-66 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0523.pdf

Isn't it interesting that they are all openly accessible on the web. What does that say about our professional literature? Or maybe my searching preferences.

I feel the need to explain my silence ...

on this blog. Until last night's post I had written nothing here since October 20th. Steven Bell told me that the rule of thumb was to post a couple of times a week to give people some reason to keep on coming back to the blog. So, why did I suddenly go silent?

You may now I am completing my PhD at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. I defend my proposal on November 27th and have spent the weeks since October 21st writing my methodology section and editing the whole document.

So, I have been writing, just not on the blog.

Events in the Library

It's 12:30 a.m. on 11/8/06. I am the last one left in the library. We organized an Election Results Viewing Party in the Bib Lab. Cable TV on the big screen, some websites, cookies, chips and soda.
We did it at the last moment, after checking to make sure that we were not stepping on the toes of the College Democrats or Republicans, Student Life, or the Poli. Sci. department, and I am pleased to say we got quite a good turn out -- probably forty people in all. Students and faculty came in and out all evening. Some stayed for quite a while, others for just a short time. But everyone seemed to enjoy themselves (though based on the results, the Democrats amongst us probably felt better than the Republicans.)
Another interesting aspect of this was that when I sent out the e-mail notice about the event I got at least a dozen responses saying how happy they were to see that we were organizing such an event. In my experience, an interesting feature of liberal arts communities like Rollins is that people may not show up for events on campus, but they like to know that events are taking place.