Information Masters and Slaves

Fons Wijnhoven knows how to attract attention. Wijnhoven's article in JASIST has interesting language. To describe the information providers or authorities and information seekers Wijnhoven writes,

 ...these authorities may be named information masters, and the people who need to be informed may be called information slaves, because they are dependent on the master's resources to become well informed. This inequality of informing resources results in opinion-influencing power of the masters, from which it is difficult for slaves to emancipate.

After the dramatic language near the start of the article, straightforward source evaluation techniques are framed with Hegelian dialectic. I prefer simplicity to the 17-step flow chart in the article. On the other hand, it's possibly that I'm eliminating important steps when I boil things down to a handful of steps for myself and for students.

I like one step of his method that I don't use or teach enough. The step is to formulate an antithesis, the mortal enemy of your thesis, and to look for and evaluate information supporting the antithesis. That step could counteract confirmation bias.

Waiting for Word on a New Dean

[June 4 Update from the Provost's Office:  A campus announcement is forthcoming. Pending the relevant approvals, the library will have a new dean on July 16.] 

I admit it; I'm jealous of other academic units on campus that are between deans. Those three colleges have updates in the Daily Egyptian about the selection stage for their replacement deans. The library's dean search didn't make it to the article. At Morris Library, the interviews for a new dean have been completed, but no one in the library knows* whether a new dean is "to be determined" or is "to be announced."



* By "knows," I mean has an official confirmation that can be shared. I heard a rumor from someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, but I don't know in any official way what has happened since the decision process went to Anthony Hall.

E-Books + Access over Ownership = A Pretend Price Panacea

NPR had a story about e-books in libraries this morning. For a quick news story, they did pretty good. Soon after the story mentioned dubious claim that libraries could save money by using e-books, it mentioned the difficulties and costs of e-books.

To recap:

• Many (most) e-books are not purchases. The content disappears when the library stops sending money.
• E-books are provided to libraries through licensing agreements, and e-book providers put restrictions on their use that they can't put on physical books. The big one is lack of interlibrary loan. 
• E-book prices for libraries aren't like e-book prices for individuals or prices for print books. They can be much higher. 

At public libraries, they are more willing to compromise on the lease vs. buy, access vs. ownership issue than academic libraries are. They know that at some point, their copies of Harry Potter will stop flying off the shelf and may need to be removed to make space for the Next Big Thing.

Academic research libraries, at least traditionally, have taken it upon themselves to worry about maintaining a record of the past, and not just what's popular now. Lack of money is pushing libraries like Morris Library to move away from that model of an academic research library and archive and toward being just an academic access library. To do that, the library pays for what is most needed and most used and borrows or leases the rest. The obscure and the unpopular can be borrowed via interlibrary loan or got some other way. If someone else will be the archive, lack of interlibrary loan on e-books, combined with the lack of ownership is a problem. There has to be a "someone else" out there that can supply the material at a reasonable price. 

CARLI, the consortium behind I-Share, is working on consortial purchasing or licensing of e-books. That approach can certainly improve the access to a wider range of content than individual libraries could get on their own, as at least there's a form of interlibrary sharing among consortium members. The consortial approach doesn't guarantee a price reduction, though.

Academic libraries are developing best practice guidelines to encourage publishers to license e-books with the same benefits and limitations as print; interlibrary loan is fine; simultaneous use by more than one person costs more; and access to content is for the long-term and isn't a year-by-year payment.
 
At SLA last year, one of the sessions I went to described e-book licensing as a jungle, similar to what journal licensing was fifteen years ago. The short version of the journal licensing story as that libraries have done pretty well at pushing publishers (with some exceptions) toward licensing restrictions that work for academic libraries, except for the price issue.

The starry-eyed optimism from the early years of the Web that technology would make journal publishing cheap, and therefore journal content would be cheap is laughable today. It would be nice to think that librarians would have learned from that experience to be more cautious about believing that switching to e-content would save money. In the past month, I've heard librarians make that claim, so I know we haven't all learned that lesson.

If academic libraries are to do more with less through cooperative collection development and also are to save money on space and shelf maintenance through e-books, something has to change.

Teaching Information Literacy or Just Pieces of it?

I was happy today when I saw a ProfHacker post in the Chronicle of Higher Education using the phrase "information literacy" and was not written by a librarian. A couple years ago, I read letters to the editor in the Daily Egyptian from SIU faculty that superficially were about climate change. They seemed to me to really be about information literacy. Not one of them ever used that phrase. Maybe it's finally catching on -- just in time for librarians to switch to the phrase "information fluency."

Granted, an assistant professor of English is not that far afield from a librarian, but it's a step in the right direction. The comments on the post so far have come from librarians and composition instructors, and they seem to understand that information literacy is more than how to use the library or how to find information.

The Google resource that the article is about, on the other hand, is not so clear that the people at Google understand what else is involved in information literacy. Admittedly, most of my one-shot sessions in classes focus on those two things too. In the long run, though, those two things aren't the most important parts of information literacy for students to take with them after they leave college.

Knowing how to order a book from the McLafferty Annex or how to use Boolean operators will help them in the short term. After graduation, students won't need to think about the McLafferty Annex again. Online searching is moving toward something more like weighted text matching of search terms and less like the set operations that most library databases use today, so I don't know how valuable Boolean operators will be in the long term.

In the long term, it's more helpful for them to be able to recognize limitations in their knowledge and that research is needed. It's more helpful for them to be able to discern differences among sources. It's more helpful to use that discernment to decide how much trust to place in their sources.

Now the challenge for me is to keep the long term in mind when I'm doing one-shot instruction. I want to make sure that the students can handle the basic (but convoluted) mechanics of getting information sources from the library. Too often, I lose the long term in that.

Success and Failure of New Journals

The last couple weeks had me thinking about new journals. 

I "attended" a webinar from bepress, the company that supplies the software for OpenSIUC, called "Journal Make-Over: Practical Steps to Better Journals." A lot of the webinar was about helping fledgling journals develop. The gist that I got out of it was that editors for new journals need to build up a steady stream of submissions and articles to publish. Approaches that would make the journal look desperate could backfire. The stream has to be built through personal networking with potential authors and editorial board members. 

A few days later, a librarian encouraged other librarians on an email list. He encouraged people to contact Thomson Reuters to include a fairly new journal (started in the last five years) from a scholarly society publisher in Web of Science.

I also saw  "New Journals in Education and Psychology: General Trends, Discoverability, and Ubiquitous Journals of the Decade, 2000–2009" in College & Research Libraries. In it, Bernadette Lear found that new journals in education and in psychology from big for-profit publishers were more likely to receive coverage from indexing and abstracting databases and be listed in library collections than new journals from colleges and universities, small for-profits and societies.

One of Lear's other findings was that more than 83% of the new journals in her study that started in 2000-2005 were still publishing in 2010. To put that in perspective, Lear provides a footnote that over half of new magazines fail in the first five years. Heck, the high rate of new business failure is the stuff of urban legend -- though research puts it at about five ninths failing in the first four years.

To me the success rate defies economic logic. How can so many new journals appear year after year with so few failing? Why don't more of them fail? Where would libraries get the money to pay for the new journals? A few big research libraries can find a way to subscribe to new journals (maybe), but college and university libraries aren't faring that well. With the high inflation rate on existing journals, new subscriptions have to be offset by cost cutting somewhere else. Are the costs of production so low that the commercial publishers can release new ones ad infinitum and turn a profit on them from a handful of subscriptions?

Information Literacy Fail

Which of the following statements comes closest to representing the point of view expressed by the American Library Association (ALA) and presented in class or in class readings?
a.    Do No Harm: A library collection should not include any materials that would be harmful to the most-vulnerable members of the community the library serves.
b.    Neutrality: Libraries should carry only materials that have been vetted as fact and should avoid controversial materials.
c.    Freedom to Read: Libraries should include materials that express diverse viewpoints and should oppose censorship.
d.    The Best Thinking: Libraries should carry materials that represent the best thinking on topics and should not carry materials that contain bad, unorthodox, or dangerous ideas.
e.    All of the Above are statements of principle from the ALA.

This semester, I promised myself to spend more time with my students on evaluating information sources. After last semester, when one of the students who earned an A in the class didn't notice any potential bias in a source funded by groups promoting low taxes and reduced government intervention, I thought that I hadn't done enough for them. I felt like I had failed them in this area.

I feel like I've failed again. This semester, we looked at The Freedom Read Statement. I tried to convey to my students that the statement includes emotional language like "censorship," "coerce," and "freedom" and that language conveys a particular point of view. I tried to explain that a site that would take the opposite point of view would not describe what they are doing as censorship or coercion and would use positive language. When I wrote this exam question, I made sure that the answers all had details to make it clear which answers were contrary to the Freedom to Read Statement. Nevertheless, E was a popular answer choice for this exam question. 

What can I do next time to get them to see when sources are not neutral and to see the stands that writers are taking?

Books Coming Back

Today's Daily Egyptian reports that the books in the McLafferty Annex soon will be returned to the Morris Library building. I'm excited about the books coming back. Since my first couple months at SIU, I've looked forward to the day that I no longer have to answer the question, "What part of the building is the McLafferty Annex?" As excited as I am, I try not to grin too widely in front of Dean Carlson.

The McLafferty Annex is just one of the storage facilities that the library has. The renovation and expansion was not designed to be big enough to hold all the materials in those other buildings. "Another concern is two of the storage areas are in horrible shape, he said, causing recent mold problems to affect thousands of books. Although the books have been taken care of this time, Carlson said he worries about more problems it may cause. He said the storage facility on Marion Street has caused the most trouble and is in the worst condition. Carlson said these buildings were only intended for short-term storage." On top of that, with the 6th and 7th floors of the library incomplete, space for new books will run out within a few years.

The dean's hope was that after the books were returned from McLafferty, the library could continue to have McLafferty for storage. Materials in the other storage buildings could be moved to McLafferty Annex building, and the library could vacate the other storage buildings.  Fisheries labs are going to move to the basement of the McLafferty Annex. Other units on campus eying the McLafferty building for their own space needs, including to get out of other buildings that are in horrible shape. Prospects for the library being able to keep the rest of the McLafferty building do not look good.

David Carlson leaving Morris Library

Texas A & M has made an official announcement that they are hiring Morris Library's dean away from SIU. The dean won't start at A & M until July. If all goes well, that should give the library time for a smooth transition.

Dean Carlson will have to be sneaky if he wants to reuse his SIU apparel. Aggie Maroon is not quite the same color as Saluki Maroon.

My Banned Book Reading

The following is the introduction from my presentation at the Banned Books Reading in Morris Library. Following the reading, I received confirmation of the rumor that the request had been for the books to be destroyed. The dean, associate deans, and director at Morris Library have been suggesting alternatives, such as redaction or restricted access, to the University Legal Counsel that would protect the books while also protecting the privacy of students' records. 

The book that I’m reading from is special to me. On the inside cover there’s a bookplate with my name and note that it was put in the book in 2010 in honor of my five years of service to Morris Library. I could have put a book plate in any book in Morris Library outside of Special Collections and thought carefully about which book I would put it in. I sentimentally decided that I would choose a book and if I continued my career at SIU, I would put another book plate in the same book at my 10-year, 15-year and other special anniversaries of my employment. My book is the SIU Personnel Listing, sometimes called the Salary Book. This one in particular is the 2005-2006 Salary Book from when I started working at SIU.

On Tuesday afternoon, I received the following message from an associate dean in the library.

“If you are looking for the Personnel Listings (also known as the Salaries book) that was kept in the office collection, I have all the volumes upstairs.  We have been asked by Legal Counsel to pull these volumes from the shelves because they contain information about student employees (GA’s, TA’s, Research Assts, etc) and this violates FERPA laws.  I am waiting for further information before proceeding.  I will keep you posted.”

I’ve heard rumors that the original request made of the library administration was to destroy these books. I’ve also heard speculation and alternative stories about the reason for this request. Given that the timing of this announcement coincides closely with the timing of strike authorization votes for four unions on campus, union supporters and even some union opponents are wondering whether FERPA is being used to justify hiding other information about salaries on campus.

The odd thing about that conspiracy theory is that the information can cut both ways. The information in the book might lead someone to question the priorities of a university that pays its basketball coach not just more than its chancellor but more than twice as much as its chancellor. But it also might lead someone to question the amounts that the union presidents are paid. In Texas, the kind of information found in the Personnel Listing is being used to publicize the teaching loads of faculty relative to the amounts that they are paid. Quite simply, the salary books contain information to help concerned citizens understand how this public university spends money.

You’ll notice that I’m not going to read directly from the Personnel Listing but rather from a photocopied page of the book. I’ve redacted the graduate students’ information -- partly to protect myself from the trouble I could get into for reading this information and partly to point out that a lot more than just the graduate student information is being hidden by pulling these books and could be lost if the books are destroyed.

University Home Page Update: THANK YOU!

The university's home page now has a link to Morris Library.

Thank you to everyone who encouraged the university to add the library to the home page. I've heard that a few members of the Faculty Senate even spoke with Chancellor Cheng to emphasize how the library contributes to the academic image of the university and to the academic success of our students. Everyone's emails to the Web Advisory Group and the senators' conversations with the chancellor worked.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Banned Book Week

Melissa Hubbard, the main organizer of Morris Library's Banned Book Reading and her co-conspirator, Megan Lotts, had the misfortune of choosing the afternoon of Thursday, September 29 for the event. I call this a misfortune because they may lose some people to the Chancellor's State of the University Address. They scheduled and announced the reading before the address had been announced.

I will be one of the readers. The book that I have selected is one that a patron called the "naughty book" when I helped him access it in the library. One librarian told me that she considered reading from it but didn't "have the balls" to do it.

Are you intrigued yet? If so, come to the reading in the library rotunda next Thursday afternoon from 12:35 to 3:00. Students from a University 101 section will read from banned books from 12:35 to 1:50, and other people will be reading from 1:50 to 3:00. If you would like to read a selection yourself, contact Melissa Hubbard at mhubbard@lib.siu.edu.

How Do I Cite this Citation Management Comparison Table?

I really like Cornell’s table of similarities and differences among RefWorks, Zotero, EndNote, EndNote Web, Mendeley, and Papers. I also enjoy the irony that it has two dates, July 2009 and the last update date, currently March 4, 2011, so it would be difficult to choose the appropriate date to cite this table.

Recently a librarian listserv had a discussion of comparative merits of different citation management tools. A few of the messages pointed out advantages or disadvantages of particular tools. The differences were small. One handled citations with journal abbreviations worse than another. A couple exported references to BibTeX better than the others. The differences would be important for people in specific situations, but they wouldn’t matter much to most people.

I switched from EndNote Web to Zotero for my last paper for my own quirky reason. The version of Word on my office computer didn’t have an up-to-date Cite While You Write plug-in. I could install the Zotero add-in to Word without administrator privileges, but I would have had to contact a system administrator to install the one for EndNote Web. Administrator privileges aren’t a make-or-break concern for people on their own computers, but it mattered to me.

When students ask me which citation management tool is best, I honestly say that I don’t know. I usually suggest that their field, and so they can find other people in the department when they run into (inevitable?) technical glitches. I’m just glad that they are asking. I can’t imagine how someone could study for comprehensive exams or write a dissertation without something to help keep track of what they’ve read and to take care of most of the citation formatting.

Anthroplogists Study Students and the Library

Some colleges and universities in Illinois have worked with anthropologists to study library use. This study is one of several that come on the heels of the University of Rochester study. Their results are that both librarians and faculty expect college students to be more thoughtful, skilled, dedicated researchers than they are.

Their results match my experience, so I'm surprised at their surprise. Someone who is 20 years old today does not have much of a memory of a time Before Google (B.G.). The whole frame of mind about how search is supposed to work completely different from what an "old fogy" like me expects. I've tried to explain how sparse the information in the library's catalog is compared to what Google pulls off a Web site and why it requires a different mindset. I think it just gave them the impression that the library catalog and paper books are a lot of bother.

The one statement that troubles me is, "Librarians tend to overestimate the research skills of some of their students, which can result in interactions that leave students feeling intimidated and alienated, say the ERIAL researchers." Comments on my teaching evaluations sometimes say that the information I present is too basic, but at the information desk, I see students struggle with things that I think should be easy. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot: not too easy and not too difficult.

I'm Celebrating a Subtle Change in the Catalog

A few weeks ago, Morris Library reintroduced "Location Codes" to the online catalog. I'm celebrating because the new limits let me narrow my search results down to just things that are available in the Morris Library building. When I help someone at 9 PM who has a paper due at 8 AM the next day, the limit will be much better than the tricks I had been using.

The location limit (marked in maroon) appears in the right-hand section of the results page in I-Share.

I won't break out the champagne until the books in McLafferty are back in the Morris Library building, but this change is good enough to merit some chocolate. 

How to Find Morris Library's Web Site

The most popular way for people to access Morris Library's Web site is by going directly to http://lib.siu.edu, but about 12-15% of the library's site visits came from the link on the siuc.edu  home page for the university. It rivaled Google's 11-17% as the second most popular way to get to the site.

The library does not have a link on the university's home page right now. It's hard to find the library on second level pages such as "Academics," so the most efficient way currently to get to the library from the university's home page is to type library in the search box on the upper right hand corner, being careful to remove "SEARCH..." from the box.

If you are in the 12-15%, I hope this helps.

Special Librarianship Research: We're Number 32!

The July / August issue of Information Outlook has a list of U.S. universities ranked by number of articles published in 2000 - 2010 for subject specialist librarians. To create the list, Amy Hardin and Tony Stankus counted the number of substantial articles librarians had published in fourteen journals. The fourteen journals were in special librarianship areas such as medicine, law and music.

I already knew that SIUC would be on the list. SIUC comes in at number thirty-two with twenty articles. A lot of the credit for this rank goes to the librarians at the law school for publishing in law journals. There's also plenty of credit to go around at Morris Library. Mary Taylor was a coauthor of four articles in medical librarianship journals. Cassie Wagner, Beth Cox, Andrea Imre and I were authors or coauthors of two articles each in special librarianship journals. Jonathan Nabe, Melissa Hubbard, and Ann Myers also have written articles in these journals.

Are you a Physicist who Compulsively Checks for Reviewer Comments? There's an App for that!

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) just announced iPeerReview. It’s an app to make it easier for authors and reviewers to access AIP's manuscript submission system from an Apple mobile device. 

My first thought, probably because I'm curmudgeonly, was that a mobile device is not the right tool for the careful thought that peer review should receive. On second thought, it could be useful at times. When a reviewer gets the notice that a deadline for returning a review is fast approaching, s/he can act on it immediately. An author who is eagerly awaiting the reviewer comments can find out whether the news is good or bad as soon as s/he gets the message that the comments are in. As someone who submitted an article at the beginning of summer and who is hoping to get the comments before school starts, I know that urge.

PDA found in the Cornerstone

No, the library isn’t giving away Blackberries to readers of its Cornerstone newsletter. No, the latest Cornerstone doesn't have a picture of a couple getting intimate in the stacks. This PDA is Patron Driven Acquisition. Dean Carlson’s column describes two kinds of “patron-initiated on-demand acquisitions” that the library has for books.

PDA is different from a “suggest a purchase” form because there’s less librarian involvement in the purchase decision. At the outset, a librarian decides on parameters such as the price range and the types of books to include for PDA. After that, library users pick the books. When someone requests a book on interlibrary loan or when an electronic book crosses some threshold on how much it is used, the purchase happens.

The idea didn’t make it into the Chronicle of Higher Education until late last year because it’s becoming popular lately. Even at Morris Library, the idea has been around for a few years. By definition, books selected this way are going to be used by someone at least once. Moreover, within certain limits, being used in the past is one of the better predictors of whether a library book will be used in the future. 

Most libraries that I’ve heard about, including Morris, are only setting aside a fraction of their book budget for PDA. Even though programs have been popular, librarians are hesitant to jump in with both feet. One concern is whether this approach produces coherent collections that will be valuable over the long term. Another concern is that PDA mainly is sold for electronic books.

PDA for electronic books brings in all of the problems that electronic books currently have. Basic functions of print books are missing from many electronic library books. Being able to skim and browse without DRM blocking you, being able to print or copy a few pages for personal use, or being able to send a book on interlibrary loan are often (usually?) missing from electronic library books. At one of the sessions of the SLA conference, a speaker described licensing for e-books as “a jungle.”

If you want to know more about how “patron-initiated on-demand acquisitions” has worked at Morris Library, Andrea Imre and Jonathan Nabe have posted some conference presentations about it.

Why don’t we have volunteers bring the books back?

Every couple of months, I see something in the comments section of a blog or a news article that asks why Morris Library can’t just have volunteers bring the books, all the books back from the McLafferty Annex. Aside from all of the issues with liability, loss, misshelving, and the scale of such a move, there’s an obvious reason that it isn’t happening. The basement of Morris Library, where the books are to go, does not have shelves. Despite all of the people who have been to the basement for events or tornado warnings, this information still is not widely known.

In case you don’t believe me, here are some photographs of the unfinished parts of the library.

The basement has space for shelves but no shelves.

The sixth floor needs more work than the basement.

The seventh floor looks a lot like the sixth. 

Morris Library after Midnight

The north end of Morris Library will be open all night for SIUC students Sun. - Thurs. this fall. The possibility to open part of the library late at night without having the entire building open was part of the building design when it was renovated a few years ago. Morris Library had been cutting back on late night hours because there wasn't enough money to have enough staff to monitor all of the floors late at night nor interest in having lots of security cameras instead of staff. The extended hours area at the north end of the library has study and computer space but does not have print books or other physical library materials that would need to be protected.

According to the article in The Southern, Chancellor Cheng comments on this change were, "Institutions that have high quality and rigorous programs, like SIU, must provide appropriate opportunities for on campus and off campus students to study individually and in small groups in a quiet and safe setting." I'm not sure if the extended hours area will live up to that. It already is a challenge for the library to be simultaneously as welcoming, busy, and quiet as everyone would like. The quiet part is especially hard. For example, the UIUC Undergrad Library at 12:13 AM is busy, but it is not quiet.