This is a library — we’re not supposed to be cool.

The title of this post came from an interesting article in today's NY Times about user behavior in the Reading Rooms at the British Library. It seems that the Library liberalized its policy about access to the rooms when they moved to their new building in St. Pancras and some of the long time users are objecting to the number and type of people now using the space -- too many noisy undergraduates who are not serious enough about research evidently.

This is the classic conflict within library spaces -- how to attract new users and allow for new forms of use while enabling traditional silent study to continue -- that I have written about before. Of course this being the British Library it comes with overtones of a national crisis, class, and generational conflict. What the article missed is why the BL is liberalizing access. The current British government has made it clear that some portion of the Library's funding will be dependent upon increased use of the facility. The Labor government, to their credit, is not interested in encouraging even more exclusivity at taxpayers expense.

Fundamentally, every library faces this because every library is an expression of the society from which the library grows. As that society changes and conflict arises the library becomes one possible locus of conflict. This can be serious, as in Sarajevo in the 1990's or less so as in Olin at the moment.

Actually, I have not heard any comments about noise in Olin for a while. I wonder if that is because our efforts to encourage quiet and noisy use on different floors is working, or some set of quiet users have given up on us. I hope it is the former, not the latter. I am sure we will find out when we repeat the LibQual survey next year.

Publishers did not take the bait.

I just got back from the Florida Library Association annual conference in St. Pete's. I gave this presentation (it is best viewed using IE.) I hope to turn this into an article soon.

Olin's version of the New York Lions

The NYPL has its lions, Patience and Fortitude, we have our peacocks, and ours are live! This pair have been spotted on campus before. On Sunday morning Les Lloyd spotted them enjoying the Library's atrium and patio. They must have wandered around Lake Virginia from the Genius Reserve, where a resident flock have lived for many years.

My first podcast

Last year Kara Malenfant, Scholarly Communications and Government Relations Specialist -- which has to be one of the longest titles in libraryland -- at ACRL) interviewed me for a promotion of the ACRL Legislative Advocates program. I have enjoyed being an Advocate. ACRL is looking for more volunteers. If you are interested, find out more here.

Research on the Web

I have just finished teaching a one credit course that the librarians teach here at Rollins. It is called "Research on the Web. " Three weeks of three 50 minute sessions. Pretty short, so it really just ends up being an introduction. But an introduction to what? Each librarian uses a different syllabus, content, and obviously teaches in different ways.

I chose to cover different forms of content or providers on the web (search engines, government information, digital books, digital archives, open access journals, images, and Web 2.0.) The assignment was to create a wiki that consists of a a series of annotated webliographies on any acceptable topic the students chose. So the first couple of class sessions were about wikis using Wikipedia as an example (this was also an opportunity to talk about wikipedia in general) and about evaluation.

We could have produced the same assignment as printed Word documents, but I wanted to make the point that the students are both consumers and producers of information on the web since the wiki is opening available, although it can only be edited by class members. But I found some other advantages to using a wiki. For instance, I can comment on the students' work on the page, simply by editing the wiki myself and I received an e-mail each time a student edited a page. Finally, the next group of students get to develop the site -- the cumulative, cooperative web.

I enjoyed the class. they were a good group of students, though 8 a.m. for three days per week was tough on all of us. It felt much too short to me. I think the students could have used more time to search, there are obviously many more forms of content and providers we could have explored. Also I found myself talking about the economics and history of information far more than I expected (or perhaps the students wanted.) It made me think about possibly teaching a more extensive course on the history and economics of information. Time was, the course would have been call the "History of the Book." I think it would be fun to teach an updated version.

Again with the website

The design of the Olin Library website has been a theme of this blog from very early on. Almost no one in the Library is particularly satisfied with the website as it is now, but we have been waiting to do a major redesign because the College is engaged in a wholesale redesign of the College web presence as part of a wider strategic marketing initiative.

But we have not been able to resist making some changes. Even though I have been trying to put the brakes on too much change in the website, while encouraging people in the Library to think about what kind of website they would like to see and use in the future, the pace of change has recently quickened. I thought it would be a good time to acknowledge some of these changes and talk about where they might lead us in the future.

Use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to look at the website as of August 2006

We have cut down on the number of quicklinks, changed the orientation from two vertical columns to two horizontal rows, removed the bottom row of links to library departments, and switched from a Times to a sans serif font.

More importantly, we have added a quick search of the library catalog and selected other databases, a beta of federated searching and more ways of connecting with librarians (see the Meebo IM box.) Hopefully these are the beginning of new ways of enabling people to search and new ways of communicating with our users, and more importantly, them communicating with us. In general I think we are seeing a move away from a website designed around how the library is organized and towards a website designed around how people want to use our library.

Moving beyond the homepage, our link to article indexes and databases has also changed significantly. Again, we are trying to provide multiple forms of access to the major reason people use our site -- to find information resources and documents. Instead of trying to find the one best way, we have given people lots of ways. Previously we had a two column list of databases, followed by a duplicate list of databases with descriptions. It worked, but people got confused by the two columns. Now they can choose from a quick list at the very top, a linked alphabet that takes them to databases plus short descriptions that start with that letter, or scroll down to that list of databases plus short descriptions . In my humble opinion, it is not there yet, but it is closer. We need to emphasize a sophisticated form of federated search for our users, reducing the need to choose a database unless they really want to.

Another page that is, I think, all new is the ask a librarian page. Just a very different design from other pages on the site. I will be interested to see what our students make of it when we conduct usability testing. What I really like about this is that we have really expanded the potential channels of communication between our users and librarians. We now need to find ways to get those channels off the library website and out to where our users are -- Foxlink, the student intranet, Blackboard, department websites etc.

Finally, our About page has changed. The design is still as clunky as ever, but there is some new content. We have begun to recognize that most people, most of the time, do not want to know about the library. So this is the place to put access to departments, to people, to plans, etc. I am happy to see access to the current plan, and that is a wiki, so that is constantly developing. Also the calendars are now part of the wider campus calendar. This calendar system is not perfect, but I think we are on the right track when we use existing infrastructure rather than trying to make our own.

Expect to see more radical changes in the future, I think we will soon see a website that emphasis find, help, online services, communication, and interactivity, while being aesthetically pleasing and amenable to small parts being broken off and added to other webpages. In the meantime, I want to recognize the changes that have taken place so far and also complement Paul Gindlesperger and Bill Svitavsky both of Electronic Resources who have done most of the web editing and development that has got us here, and to everyone else who has participated in making these changes.

I would love to hear your comments about these changes.

Harvard and Open Access

After Harvard A&S faculty made their decision, the Rollins Arts & Sciences faculty Executive Committee asked me to prepare some information about the issues associated with this decisions. I haven't heard that they are going to take this any further, perhaps it is early days yet. Here is what I gave them.

Harvard's Decision to Publish on the Web the Scholarly Work of their Faculty

Jonathan Miller

2/26/08

Harvard A&S Decision

“The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted Tuesday (Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.”

“Harvard will take advantage of the license by hosting FAS faculty members’ scholarly articles in an open-access repository, making them available worldwide for free. The faculty member will retain the copyright of the article, subject to the University’s license. The repository contents can be made widely available to the public through such search engines such as Google Scholar. Faculty members may request a waiver of the license for particular articles where this is preferable. The new legislation does not apply to articles completed before its adoption.”
(http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html)

Open Access Movement

This is a significant move in the much larger open access (OA) movement, which generally seeks to make scholarly research literature freely accessible on the Internet. For an overview of OA see Peter Suber’s work at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

The other very significant OA development in the last year was passage of a measure by Congress that made the National Institutes of Health (NIH) access policy mandatory rather than voluntary. The NIH policy “ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/).” For more information on the NIH Access Policy see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/.

Major Issues Involved in OA

OA is a response to two developments in scholarly publishing. The first is the high rate of inflation in the price of subscriptions to scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals. These increasing costs have put enormous pressure on library budgets over the last few decades. Interestingly, this price inflation has not happened to the same extent in the humanities. Overall, for instance, the Olin Library has experienced a 9-10% annual increase in journal subscription costs. Obviously this is not sustainable and has been addressed by moving monies from book purchases to journals, cuts in journal subscriptions, cuts in other library budgets, and (occasionally) increased library budgets. This unsustainable situation has led many librarians and faculty to address the model of scholarly communication and publishing in an attempt to change the rules of the game and force down, or at least slow the rate of increase in, prices. The best example of this is can be found at Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC http://www.arl.org/sparc/) of which Rollins is a member.

The second issue is the growth of the Internet and digital media. As we move from print to digital publication the cost structure of distribution of scholarly literature changes. Significant cost saving can be found in the elements of journal publishing associated with printing, distribution, and storage of printed journals while the costs associated with research, peer review, editing, and design remain somewhat stable. In the print world libraries (and to some extent individuals) paid subscriptions to publishers who financed editing, design, printing, and distribution of journals. Universities and granting agencies financed research costs, and publishers and universities shared the cost of peer review. Libraries (and therefore universities) financed long term storage of the literature. In the digital world, at least where Institutional Repositories (IR) like the ones used by Harvard and the NIH are concerned, universities and granting agencies continue to finance research costs, publishers are allowed, and usually offered some incentive like the 12-month moratorium allowed in the NIH Access Policy, to participate in peer review, editing, and design, and government, granting agencies, and universities finance storage and access. Distribution costs are minimal and borne by the individual or institution downloading individual articles from the IR. This model is still new and not yet stable. It is not clear that institutions (particularly government) will accept their role as really long term archivists of this scholarly literature, and it is not clear publishers will survive to participate in peer review, editing, and design.

Another big issue in the OA movement is copyright. In the traditional print journal model, the author assigned copyright to the journal publisher who made money by selling subscriptions, reprints, and permissions. Copyright can be handled in a variety of ways in OA distribution. The author can waive copyright, effectively placing the work in the public domain for anyone to use, copy, and distribute in any way their like. Or the author can make use of a license that enables certain uses of the work, but not – for instance – republishing for commercial gain. The best examples of such licenses are to be found at Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org.) Increasingly, scholarly publishers are including language in their contracts with authors that allow the author to retain certain rights in the work, specifically the right to load a copy of the manuscript to a website, or into an IR. This language varies from publisher to publishers, sometimes from journal to journal. Sometimes publishers are open to negotiating such language with authors and sometimes they adamantly oppose it. In effect what Harvard and the NIH are doing is forcing the issue. They are saying to publishers if you want to publish work by Harvard professors, or by researchers funded by the NIH, let us have a copy for our IR. We won’t resell the works, but they will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Publishers will have to make a business decision about whether they can continue to make money under these circumstances. If they decide they cannot, then the IR’s will seek to assume the roles relinquished by them.

Issues for Rollins

First the development of the OA movement in scholarly literature is a boon to small schools like Rollins. We could never afford a comprehensive print journal collection. The ability to access some portion of the literature freely on the web has the potential to significantly expand our student and faculty access to the journal literature. However, the instability in the system over the next couple of decades has the potential to undermine our access. Also, the varying levels of quality of IR’s and the foreseeable challenges to the peer review system will mean that librarians and faculty will only have to work harder to help students navigate these murky waters. Information literacy competencies will only become more important in the years ahead.

If Rollins faculty wanted to institute a system similar to the one that will come about as a result of the Harvard system a number of issues will have to be confronted. First, we do not have the hardware and software available on campus necessary to upload article manuscripts, organize and make them accessible via search engines like Google Scholar, and archive them for the long term. However, such systems do exist and if this is a priority could be implemented relatively quickly (I would particularly recommend investigating a system called DSpace http://dspace.nitle.org).

Secondly, we would have to face the fact that we are not Harvard and have far less bargaining power with journal publishers that Harvard. Even the Harvard A&S faculty gave themselves a get out clause “Faculty members may request a waiver of the license for particular articles where this is preferable.” (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html) My rather cynical guess is that this translates as, “when the publisher baulks and the faculty member is anxious to get the work published.” This issue is particularly important for untenured faculty members under pressure to publish.

Thirdly, Rollins would have to commit to very long term storage of these materials. When librarians talk about long term storage we mean centuries. Rollins is a young institution and yet we have journals in the Olin Library from the 1870’s and before. Rollins would have to agree to this level of institutional commitment. In practice this means robust back up systems, long term financing, migration of files as formats become obsolete, and constant vigilance on the part of faculty and librarians.

Finally, we would have to design a system that could actually ensure that the IR received the appropriate files from faculty members and, where necessary enforce compliance.

All of this very practical. I have been interested in an IR since I arrived, and I know Donna Cohen was before me. Many institutions have already developed IR systems to collect various digital materials (faculty research, student research, institutional publications, archival documents, etc.) and many others are revisiting the issue in the light of the Harvard decision. I would welcome an opportunity to discuss this issue further with the Committee or with the wider faculty.

Losing Control

I just changed the settings for comments to this blog. Up to this point I have moderated all comments. I was concerned about spam or an inappropriate comment being posted. Well like most blogs, and indeed most writers over the centuries, I should have been more worried about not enough readers instead of the wrong kind of reader!

So now comments appear immediately and I get an e-mail when one is posted. If I am encouraging our staff in the Library to reconsider (not abandon, just reconsider) the level of professional control we exercise over information delivery in this Web 2.0 world, then I should practice what I preach.

So go ahead, comment away. Please, I'm beggin' ya.

How are we doing?

Since the beginning of the semester we have invited our users (at least our users of the physical building) to complete a traditional comment card. The card includes two questions with Lickert scales ("How did we treat you today?" On a four point scale from 4, outstanding, to 1, terrible and "Did you get what you needed today?" On a three point scale from 3, everything, to 1, nothing.) On average, in answer to the question, "How did we treat you today?" we score a 3.2 (closer to good than outstanding.) In answer to the questions "Did you get what you needed today?" we score a 2.4 (between "everything" and "something.")

The meat of the card though is the invitation to add any comments our users want to make. I have already copied these responses to everyone in the library. I want to add them here and respond to each comment. I am also going to ask Paul to put these in rotation on the plasma screen in the atrium of the library. I think it is important that we show our users that we value their comments by actually responding. When the comments are about a similar issue I have grouped them together. I have also removed the names and titles of library personnel noted in the comments (both positively and negatively) and also users' e-mail addresses. In each of these cases the specific comment has already been shared with the person mentioned and with their supervisor. So here goes. The comments are italicized, my responses are not.


Hours: "How is it two weeks into the semester and the 24 hr lab is still not open? Don't we pay close to $50,000 a year in tuition?" "OPEN THE 24 HOUR LAB PLEASE !! :O(" "Please stay open more often - Thanks!" "I have lots of work and it would be great if the library was open Friday and Saturday nights." "stay open on Friday and Saturday nights." "It is so, so, so frustrating that on the weekends you guys open at 11 and that is too late. I get up and the earliest I can eat breakfast is 9 am. Then there is an awkward 2 hour gap I can't do any work. I feel for library staff in the a.m.. One solution is to be open 24/7. I see no reason not to be open 24/7." "Why aren't you open on Saturday nights?" "Can you stay open Saturday nights?" "The library/24 hour lab needs to stay open for Saturday nights and Friday nights. I like having a quiet place to do homework and study." "Please stay open later on weekends."

Response: I am delighted to be able to say that we heard you loud and clear. Information technology has extended the hours of the late Night Lab in the Olin Library until midnight on both Friday and Saturday nights throughout the semester. Every other day it is open 24/7. We will also be opening the whole library 24 hours a day for the week before and the week of exams. Also, if you crave quiet study space through the night, the Provost has started a program that allows any Rollins student to request that a classroom be opened for them 24/7. All you have to do is ask, by calling Campus Safety at ext. 2999.

Good Service: "Comments: Every time I call on or come by, someone with a smile is always willing to help me. Thank you!!" " I appreciate the great service!" "I have been coming to the library to study and check out books for quite a while. The ladies at the front desk at night are extremely helpful, knowledgeable and friendly. I love the atmosphere. Thanks to all!" "Great staff" "I would like to say that **** was especially helpful at the front desk and I really appreciate it!" "**** is wonderful, excellent!"

Response: High quality service is our highest priority. I am glad to see you appreciate it. Thanks for letting us know, I immediately discuss the comments that we can link to a specific employee or department with the people involved immediately.

Bad Service: "In general, this library does not have a service attitude. Patrons are often treated like an annoyance or a disruption." "****, the ****, is rude and talks to students in an inappropriate manner." "The people are very unfriendly, need work on people skills."

Response: Personally, these are the most painful comments we receive. Rest assured when we can link these comments to a specific employee or department, I discuss them with the people involved immediately. We have changed many policies over the last 18 months in a effort to improve service and we are currently working on strengthening our personnel review procedures so that we can deal with these problems effectively and help all our personnel provide high quality, consistent, service to everyone. Please keep letting us know if we don't meet your standards. the more specific you can be the better.

Books: "you need a bigger selection of books (fiction.)"

Response: It is great to hear from someone who still likes to crack open a good book. If you mean the rotating collection of bestsellers that we shelve in the lobby, titles in that collection change frequently, so I hope you keep checking. You can also always let us know if you want us to get a specific title. But don't forget that we also have a lot more works of fiction up on the 4th floor. These are the books we own. You will generally find them in the P's on the 4th floor. But we also have a large selection of science fiction on that floor as well. Again, let me know if you want something and we will do what we can to get hold of it. Also don't forget your local public library.

Noise: "I wish the team members would not talk so loud when students are trying to read."

Response: I passed this comment on to all the staff at all service desks as soon as we got it. Thanks for reminding us that our workplace is your study space. Remember that the 3rd and 4th floors are designated as quiet study areas, while the 1st and 2nd are for group study. Find a quiet spot upstairs if you find the main floor too noisy. My favorite is the Tower Room.

Bookmark Café: "It would be great if the bookmark café opened earlier on Sundays and carried some supplies i.e. highlighters, pens, pads of paper, index cards etc. We have been working and exhausted our supplies and had to leave campus to find and buy supplies. Thank you!"

Response: The Café has gradually been extending its hours of operation and the range of food and drinks it sells. Personally, I would like it to be open all the hours that the Library is, but I understand the need for them to work efficiently and, based on how much revenue the Café generates, it doesn't make much sense for it to be open those hours. Sorry, but the Cornell Dining Center is open, as is 7-Eleven for supplies. I have passed your suggestion on to Dining Services.

Bikes: "The library needs a second bike rack out front."

Response: As someone who bikes to work every day, I agree. I have passed your suggestion on to Facilities Services. I also have a suggestion of my own. At least one bike has been parked in our bike rack since December. Share the road guys! Don't take up space you don't need.

Cables: "I almost tripped over one of the cables powering a laptop being used in the area beside the teaching lab. Would it be possible to have outlets on the same side as the chairs?"

Response: Power for laptops is a big problem in libraries built before 2000. The Olin Library opened in 1985 well before we saw the advent of wireless access and students with laptops. As we renovate space we definitely take this issue into consideration (see all the outlets on the loggia as an example.) Power in the middle of rooms with concrete floors is even more of a problem. You can either hang it from the ceiling (which only fits certain industrial style aesthetics) or drill from below, which is not always possible. I have come to realize two things: first, you can never have enough power outlets and second, they will always be in the wrong place!

Bathrooms: "Bathrooms are over-scented."

Response: Hey, it is better than the alternative! Seriously though, I have passed this comment on to our custodial staff.

So keep those comments coming. I hope you can see we read them all and they do make a difference. Thanks.

River of Grass

The Library just bought a copy of the 60th anniversary edition of Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades River of Grass. I checked it out (don't worry we have a bunch of other editions if you want to read it.)

If you read my Facebook profile you will notice I have a thing for the openings and endings of books. Douglas' book now joins the list. This is such a poetic opening.

"There are no other Everglades in the world.

"They are, have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltiness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow moving below, the grass that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is the river of grass."

Doesn't it just make you want to go to the Everglades right now?

Wow, they went for it.

It was not at all clear to me that the Arts and Sciences faculty of Harvard would go for mandatory submission of their articles to the Harvard institutional repository (IR.) But they just did.

Since Harvard is such a leader in US education, expect this to ripple through the rest of the ARL.

One thought: if open access IR's are such a great idea why do the NIH and now Harvard need to mandate submission? Were authors ever told they must submit to traditional journals? Well, yes they were, by tenure evaluation committees on campus and prospective employers. But there is an obvious difference. Authors still had to compete to get things published in the best journals,which is why tenure committees valued peer review publication so highly. The economics of IR's are different. Unlimited storage space and the lack of what we might call market discipline means that potential authors aren't clamoring for limited space in the journal. Instead IR managers are out there beating the bushes for content, which may be why tenure committees have not taken submission to them seriously.

Is this a vicious cycle or simply a start up problem?

Top Five Issues facing the Library

Later this spring we have a consulting firm -- R2 -- coming to take a look at our Technical Services and advise us on what kind of operation we need to support the Library over the next decade. I have been impressed with the kind of questions they are asking to prepare for their visit. One question they asked us was to identify the 3-5 top issues facing the library. Here is what the librarians agreed we should send them.

• In the context of an ongoing process of curriculum review and revision, finding the appropriate role(s) for librarians and the library in developing the information literacy competencies of Rollins students.
• Providing information resources in a hybrid world of print and digital resources so that we adequately respect, maintain, and develop print resources, while recognizing that an increasing proportion of use will be of our digital resources and our resources will be just a fraction of the information resources accessed by our users.
• Balancing our services to users so that our digital services (for instance instruction and reference) are as well developed online as they are in person.
• Raising the level of competency and effectiveness of our personnel in this hybrid world and making sure we are focused on what really adds the most value to the educational mission of the College.
• Enhancing our users' experiences of the library (in this building and online) so that we become a destination on campus and a preferred "third space" in the lives of our users.

Careful readers of this blog (if such people exist!) will note the similarity between those five and our strategic plan. You can see more of the plan on our planning wiki. More on that in a later post.

Permission and innovation

Thad Seymour came to the library a couple of days ago to invite me to lunch with Jack Rogers whose father was the architect of the Olin Library. As is his way, Thad never comes empty handed, he gave me a copy of this entry from his daughter's blog.

I don't tend to read too much about public libraries. I have enough trouble keeping up with College ones. I do know that the way in which public libraries serve or do not serve the homeless has been a significant issue for many public librarians so I was really struck by this librarian's innovative solution to this problem.

It is so easy when we are so busy to simply enforce the rules, to protect the status quo. Sandy Neerman didn't do that. Instead she used the problem to reorient the whole issue. It was no longer about whether or not a group could serve food at a particular location outside the library. Instead it became a way to serve an underserved group. This is the kind of thing that wins you the Charlie Robinson Award.

Super Tuesday

We held a Super Tuesday Viewing Party in the atrium of the library last night. I left at 11:30 and there were still a hardy few hanging out for the California results (well, not so hardy. This is Florida and so it is perfectly possible to enjoy an evening outside in February in t-shirt and shorts.) As with the 2006 elections we had lots of people show up for short periods throughout the evening. We kept our own poll using red and blue snacks (a split decision: the red chips won, as did the blue candy.)
Local TV showed up and spent the evening interviewing groups of students. The sororities on campus were rushing (have I constructed that sentence correctly? It is all greek to me.) So at times we had this bizarre post modern mash up of elegantly dressed young ladies parading past the politicos to vote in the Library computer labs.
The atrium, with good furniture, the plasma, and wireless access, worked well as a space. It gave lots of people the opportunity to sit or stop by and became a great meeting and mixing space. Exactly what we were looking for.

Information wants to be free, but writers want to be paid.

Google the first part of that sentence and you get about 101,000 hits. Google the whole sentence and you get nothing. At least at 10:30 a.m. on 1/28/08.

I came up with the second half of this pithy statement. Unfortunately, I am also convinced that someone came up with it before me!

The first part was originally written by Stewart Brand (I understand in the May 1985 issue of the Whole Earth Review, transcribed from a 1984 conference) and has since metastasized through our culture. His original quote was, “information wants to be expensive, because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” This is a far more nuanced thought than the short phrase normally quoted. So where did the second part come from?

Bryan Alexander suggested that Bruce Sterling had originally made this point. But I have been unable to hunt down any of his writings where he makes this exact point. The closest I have come in a speech he gave to the LITA Conference in San Fransisco in June 1992 in which he rails against the commercialization and commodification of information and states, ironically, “You seem to be under the misapprehension that information wants to be free and that enabling people to learn and follow their own interests will benefit society as a whole. Well, we no longer believe in society as a whole. We believe in the *economy* as a whole -- a black hole!”

Another possibility is John Perry Barlow's March 1994 article in Wired "The Economy of Ideas." In which, while proposing a new system of encouraging creators to create because copyright will not function in the digital age, he states that, "Stewart Brand is generally credited with this elegant statement of the obvious [information wants to be free], which recognizes both the natural desire of secrets to be told and the fact that they might be capable of possessing something like a "desire" in the first place."

Trouble is neither of these express exactly the pithy second part of my statement. They are about as close as the ur-statement of copyright's purpose, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8.)

So, I am looking for some help. Do you know who first said or wrote the second part? Let me know, leave a comment.

I find Barlow's article really interesting for another reason. I have always been unsatisfied with information science's understanding of information. We have tended to define and think about information as objects. As though an reference interaction for instance is as simple as a question and and answer that ca be captured with a hatch mark on a stats sheet. Any reference librarian will tell you it doesn't feel like that. Barlow articulates the reason for my discomfort. He writes about information as an activity.

"Freed of its containers, information is obviously not a thing. In fact, it is something that happens in the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of information.

Gregory Bateson, expanding on the information theory of Claude Shannon, said, "Information is a difference which makes a difference." Thus, information only really exists in the Delta. The making of that difference is an activity within a relationship. Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods. It is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer."

Mystical, but really, really good. There is lots more there that is worth considering. Read the article.

Seasons 52 5K Race

TR and I (and about three thousand other people) ran this 5K today. My first Florida race and my first 5K. I was pleased with my time of 23:45. TR (of course!) did it in 18:21. It was a beautiful course up and down Park Avenue and around the neighborhood near Lake Maitland


Thanks to Melanie for taking the photo and particularly for coming out to support us at 7:30 a.m.

ILLiad

Way back in September '06 I mentioned ILLiad as one possible software package we should consider using in interlibrary loan (ILL.) Well we just signed the agreement to begin using the software. Our goal is to implement it over the summer of '08. It took longer than I hoped but I think this is going to make a huge difference in how easy ILL will be for our users. It will also make ILL more efficient for the staff who work on ILL requests and thus get stuff to our users faster. Imagine this:

• You find a citation to an article in one of our databases. It works for books too, by the way.
  
• You use the "Find It" button to see if we have it in full text
• The link resolver shows that we do not have it in fulltext and recommends you use ILL.
• You click on the ILL link and the system asks you to login, you use your Rollins username and password and you're in.
• ILLiad automatically finds your account based on that authentication and also fills in the citation information. You check to make sure everything is OK and press submit.
• If you fit certain criteria the request will go straight to the lending library. The next thing you know an e-mail arrives in your inbox inviting you click on a link to get the article.
• Behind the scenes the system is collecting all kinds of stats and helping the staff place requests and manage requests to borrow from other libraries.
• If you get curious about what is going on with your outstanding requests (or even if you realize you need that green book you borrow on ILL last summer, but can't remember the title) you can login, view you record and track your outstanding and past requests.

I make it sound so easy, and it is for our users. But I want to acknowledge how much work this will be for our staff, particularly Shawne Keevan. Implementing ILLiad is going to be a huge job for her. I hope I am right in thinking that the pay off for our users will be just as huge.

Thinking About Information Literacy

I think about information literacy a lot. What college librarian doesn't? But a couple of interesting reports have come out recently and Rollins is going through a process of curriculum review at the moment so I am particularly interested in the role of information literacy in the curriculum.

The AACU 2007 report of its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative "College Learning for the New Global Economy" lists information literacy as one of six "intellectual and practical skills" that are "essential learning outcomes" should be "practiced extensively, across the curriculum, in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance" (p.22.)

On the other side of the pond JISC and the British Library just released a report on the Google Generation. According to the Executive Summary, they aimed to, "identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way" (p.5.)

Although they define the Google generation as people born after 1993, they note that the information seeking behaviors of that generation are now common to us all, "horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile" (p.9.)

There is so much in this report it is tough to pick out just a couple of thing, but here is what really concerns me. "The information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems" (p.12.)

The JISC report is aimed at helping libraries change to serve this new generation, but I am more concerned with the how liberal arts colleges like Rollins need to change our curricula to effectively educate such students.

Information literacy isn't the point of a liberal education but I agree with the LEAP report. It is an essential skill that should be practiced repeatedly in increasingly complex ways throughout the four years that students spend with us.

Great new exhibits at the Cornell

Bethany and I went to the preview of the new Cornell exhibits on Friday evening. A superb collection of works by Louise Neville -- cool, black serene. Figure drawings, prints, etc. from the museum's permanent collection that once again so how rich that collection is. Finally a couple of crazy contemporary installations. Watching Bethany traverse the crocheted rope of Orly Genger's installation in her high heels was the high point of the evening as far as I was concerned.

Yet more reasons why I feel lucky to working at the same place as Luanne McKinnon.

OCLC ILL Direct Borrowing

Imagine placing a request for an book via interlibrary loan. You fit a predetermined profile for the library (for instance you are a faculty member, or a student), you are requesting a book that is not owned by the Olin Library, it is owned by a couple of libraries that lend to us for free. Having met all these criteria (automatically, no extra steps for you) your request doesn't stop at Olin waiting for our staff to review it. It goes straight to the lending library. The first we ever see of the book is when it arrives via the US Mail. The same can be done for articles. It adds speed and cuts work and all depends on setting up the custom holding paths and policies correctly.

OCLC has been doing this for sometime, but I had kinda lost touch with it. It used to cost for each request ,which is pretty unsustainable for most libraries. They have now included it as part of our regular OCLC fee. This makes it much more interesting.