Libraries

The Silencer

The decline of Western civilization proceeds apace. One shudders to imagine life in decades hence. A case in point: People now use cell phones in research libraries.

Wandering the stacks, they babble away in a blithe and full-throated manner -– conversing, not with their imaginary friends (as did the occasional library-haunting weirdo of yesteryear) but rather with someone who is evidently named “Dude,” and who might, for all one knows, be roaming elsewhere in the building: an audible menace to all serious thought and scholarly endeavor.

This situation is intolerable. It must not continue. I have given this matter long consideration, and can offer a simple and elegant solution: These people ought to be shot.

I am no extremist, please understand; no gun nut in a rural compound; no wild-eyed advocate of freelance vigilantism. Just a temperate and long-suffering citizen who has heard quite enough about the affairs of Dude for one lifetime.

Max Weber pointed out that one of the hallmarks of modernity is that the state retains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. I have no disagreement with that principle. It just seems like time for it to be applied in a new way.

The people who do the shooting ought to be suitably trained, tested, and certified. (Their accuracy as marksmen would be demonstrated beyond all doubt.) A poster at the entrance to the building would give fair warning that no cell-phone conversations are permitted beyond a certain clearly marked boundary line. The consequence of violating this rule could be illustrated with artwork, perhaps involving some easily recognized cartoon character.

Shooting with actual bullets might be excessive. If the budget permits, some kind of taser gun would be appropriate. Failing that, buckshot would probably do the trick.

Admittedly, a rational person could object to my plan. “Wouldn’t shooting cell-phone users in research libraries be counterproductive?” you might well ask. “Wouldn’t that actually make the library more noisy?”

A fair point. Yes, it would. But not for long....

I began pursuing this line of thought under two inspirations. One of them came from reading the conservative British essayist Theodore Dalrymple, who frequently contributes to The New Criterion. A selection of his work appeared last year in Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, published by Ivan R. Dee. There is a grand tradition of reactionary cultural criticism. Regarding comprehensive misanthropy as a justified inference from the available evidence about mankind, it turns disgust into a systematic world view. Dalrymple often seems like the most skilled practitioner of this approach now writing in the English language. Many rant; few have his gift for it.

So, in part, I wanted to pay homage. At the same time, Dalrymple comes to mind for a reason. My policy suggestions are the result of long experience and growing frustration. In other words, I want to shoot those people. I really, really do.

Which is not, of course, a socially acceptable emotion. Acting on it is discouraged by law. One understands this, of course; hence the imagined compromise, in which trained personnel would execute the punishment.

Being forced to listen to one side of a manifestly inane conversation is now a routine part of public life. It is tolerable on the street -- but not, somehow, in a library; and in one mostly full of academic tomes maybe least of all. What’s worse, the rot is spreading.

Professors routinely complain about the presence of cell phones in the classroom. But the culpability is not so one-sided as all that.

A friend reports attending a session of a major scholarly conference -- a panel on some grave topic in military history, I think. From the audience came the distinctive noise of a cell phone ringing.

No surprise there, of course. But then its owner pulled out the phone, answered it, and began a conversation.

Here, a line has been crossed. Some implicit rule of conduct (normally unstated, simply because nobody should have to spell it out) has been violated. A fissure in civility has appeared -- and the responsible party deserves to be swallowed up in the abyss so opened.

At very least, that person has lost all reasonable claim to immunity from having a powerful blast of electricity delivered to his or her system by somebody carrying a stun gun and a permit.

Not likely, though. Without being too much a determinist about this, it does seem as if technology, in making certain kinds of behavior possible, also makes it inescapable. That, in turn, results in deep changes in attitude and personality.

A sense of entitlement trumps the capacity for embarrassment. By that point, there’s no going back.

Or is there? For many years now, I’ve been a fan of The Civilizing Process by the late Norbert Elias, a great study in historical sociology that was first published in 1939. In it, Elias worked out an account of how behavior changed in Europe between the middle ages and the early 20th century. He analyzed the evidence from diaries, letters, and etiquette books to see how the rules of everyday conduct developed over time. Things considered acceptable and normal in one century would be regarded with disgust and outrage in another.

Elias found that such changes were not a matter of fashion or whim. Nor were they trivial. The rules governing routine behavior were tied to two long-term processes underway. One was the growing complexity and interdependence of economic life. The other was the concentration of military power in the hands of the state. (We take it for granted now that the army or police are -- or at least should be -- accountable to the political authorities. But this is actually a fairly recent development in human history.)

As these tendencies were taking shape on the macro level, the little rules of daily life were changing accordingly. To keep things running more or less smoothly, each person was expected to internalize certain rules. Things that once happened without anyone noticing them came under increasing scrutiny.

“Do not spit into the basin when you wash your hands,” a medieval text admonished, “but beside it.” In 1714, a French handbook on etiquette suggested that you not spit unless absolutely necessary. In that case, be discreet enough to put your foot on it. (Also: “Do not spit so far that you have to look for the saliva to put your foot on it.”) By 1859, a British author noted that spitting was not just disgusting “but very bad for the health” -- so you should never do it, period.

A similar change could be traced in discussions of flatulence. In 1530, the very learned Erasmus of Rotterdam noted: “If it can be purged without noise that is best. But it is better that it be emitted without much noise than that it be held back.” If necessary, he said, you should cough simultaneously to avoid embarrassment. (My wife, who gave me The Civilizing Process as a birthday present some years back, would probably rather I not cite Erasmus so much.) By 1729, a French rulebook warned that the release of gas “is very impolite ... either from above or from below, even if it is done without noise.”

Over the course of two or three hundred years, then, the expectation grew that each individual would practice more and more self-regulation. Social life, as Elias puts it, came to resemble a modern highway: “Every individual is himself regulating his behavior with the utmost exactitude in accordance with the necessities of this network. The chief danger that people here represent for others results from someone in this bustle losing his self-control.”

It is the analysis of table manners that most closely anticipates the present cell-phone problem. Originally, the use of knives and forks was restricted to very elite members of the aristocracy. At first, even some of them found it pretentious and affected. (Here, one thinks of the portable phones of the 1980s, which were nearly as big as your head, and seemed mainly to be used by hotshot lawyers and stockbrokers trying to broadcast how very important they were.)

As the use of eating utensils spread, various rules emerged. “Do not clean your teeth with your knife,” the advice books often warned. That is a pretty good indication that lots of people were cleaning their teeth with their knives, since you don’t have to forbid something nobody actually does.

But Elias also notes something even more interesting. The knife, while a useful tool at the dinner table, was also potentially a dangerous instrument of aggression. The very sight of it may have provoked a fear that it would inspire hostility -- or that, if you mishandled it, you might carelessly hurt somebody else.

So the pressure grew discouraging people from using knives at the dinner table for any but a very few functions. If a piece of food can be cut with the edge of a fork (the rule goes) you should do so. By no means stab a hunk of steak with your knife and eat it. Etc.

“There is a tendency that slowly permeates civilized society, from top to bottom,” writes Elias, “to restrict the use of the knife ... and wherever possible not to use it at all.”

The cell phone, then, is a little like a fart, and a lot like a knife. In the most optimistic scenario, people will learn to control their behavior over time. Civility will be restored. It should take about two centuries. I figure three, tops.

Author/s: 
Scott McLemee
Author's email: 
scott.mclemee@insidehighered.com

Passion for Paper

I am a digitally-enabled, network-ready scholar. I check e-mail and browse the Web. I read RSS feeds. I leverage Web 2.0's ambient findability to implement AJAX-based tagsonomy-focused long-tail wiki content alerting via preprint open-access e-archives with social networking services. I am so enthusiastic about digital scholarship that about a year ago I published a piece in my scholarly association's newsletter advocating that we incorporate it into our publications program. The piece was pretty widely read. At annual meetings I had colleagues tell me that they really like it and are interested in digital scholarship but they still (and presumably unlike me) enjoy reading actually physical books. This always surprised me because I love books too, and it never occurred to me that an interest in digital scholarship meant turning your back on paper. So just to set the record straight, I would like to state in this (admittedly Web-only) public forum that I have a deep and abiding passion for paper: I love it. Love it.

It's true that there is a lot of stuff you can do with PDFs and the Web that you can’t do with paper, but too often people take this to mean that digital resources "have features" or "are usable" while paper is just, you know, paper. But this is not correct -- paper (like any information technology) has its own unique form of usability just as digital resources have theirs. Our current students are unused to paper and attribute the frustration they feel when they use it as a mere lack of usability when in fact they simply haven't figured out how it works. Older scholars, meanwhile, tend to forget about paper’s unique utility because using it has simply become second nature to them.

Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The Big Electromagnetic Pulse the PDFs will be wiped clean off my hard drive but I will still be able to barter my hard copy of Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life for food and bullets.

But my passion for paper is about more than preserving the sociological canon in a post-apocalyptic future. Using paper is embodied in a way that using digital resources are not. Paper has a corporeality that digital texts do not. For instance, have you ever tried to find a quote in a book and been unable to remember whether it was on the left or right hand side of the page? This just a trivial example of way in which paper’s physicality is the origin of its utility.

And of course professors have bodies too. This is another way that scholarship is embodied -- we often do it while in libraries. Here our bodies are literally in a vast assemblage of paper with its own unique form of usability. And as scholars achieve total communion with the stacks, they find books based not just on catalog number, but on all of their senses. The fourth floor of the library I wrote my Ph.D. in sounded and smelled differently than the second did. How many of us -- even the lab scientists -- with Ph.D.'s will ever be able to forget the physical layout of the libraries where we wrote our dissertations? Or our undergraduate libraries? I find books in my current library by comparing its floorplan with the layout of the college library where I first studied.

And catalog systems! I am a DU740.42 man myself, although I freelance in B2430 at times and of course retain a broader competence in G and GN. I was visiting a colleague at Duke once and went into its library to see what sort of GN treasures it might have stored away only to find that the library used Dewey Decimal -- a fact I experienced with surprisingly raw sense of betrayal.

The very fact that libraries can’t buy every book is a form of utility, not a disadvantage. True, there is tons of hubub about Web sites that provide users "personalized recommendations" based on their preferences and the preferences of people in their social networks. But in practice all this has boiled down to the fact that after years of using Amazon.com, it has finally figured out that since I enjoyed reading Plato's Republic, I might also be interested in Homer's Iliad. But every book in my library has been "filtered" by my librarian, and browsing through stacks arranged by subject allows "discovery" of "resources" in a non-metaphorical pre-Internet way.

At Reed, where I went to college, the library had a disused, musty room dubbed the "multiple copy room." Not surprisingly, it was where all the multiple copies of books were stored. The librarians at a small liberal arts college like mine did not buy 10 copies of a book unless they sure that it was a keeper, worthy of being taught for eons, its wisdom instilled into countless generations of students who would value it so much that they would weep when bartering their own copies of it for food and bullets after The Big Electromagnetic Pulse. Browsing through and reading from those shelves was the best "filter" for "content" that I ever had. So much for "the long tail."

And of course browsing doesn't just happen in libraries. Amazon may have a bintillion books for sale out in the ether of the ethernet, but there is no better place to take the pulse of academic publishing that a good used book store near a university.  Bookstores mark the life cycle and disposition of the community where they are physically located -- the end-of-the year glut of books dumped by students eager to rid themselves of dead weight like Anna Karenina in order to spend more time tinkering with their MySpace page is itself a good indicator of what a university has been assigning.

Bookstores also connect us to the larger scholarly community. Remainders -- books that are being sold at discount prices because publishers want them out of their warehouses -- are a remarkable measure of what fads have just passed in scholarly publishing or what is about to come out in paperback. And of course just being in a good bookshop can be therapeutic. A good friend of mine worked his way through college at a Walden Books. After work he would spend a half hour in the aisles of our local used book store, staring at the covers of Calvino novels until he had recovered from eight hours of selling people copies of The Celestine Prophecy.

The used book store is the horizon at which our human finitude and our books intersect. I have actually been turned on to the work of scholars based solely on the fact that I've purchased so many books from their collections. One book store I frequent actually put a picture of one recently deceased professor in the window to advertise that his library was on sale. Some find the practice morbid, but for me this sort of thing is the academic equivalent of the life-affirming musical number in The Lion King about how we are all part of the circle of life. Roscher and Knies costs $180 off the Internet and is scarcer than hen's teeth, but in that magical, electric moment that I found it used for 20 bucks I knew that in cherishing and loving it I would not only be honoring the memory of the previous owner, but perpetuating the hopelessly over-specialized intellectual lineage which we both cared about so deeply.

What I am trying to say is that owning and reading books is about our lives as scholars in a way that e-journals are not. Our libraries are furniture. They are decoration. They threaten the breathable air to paper ratio in our apartments and offices. Books spill over my shelves. They crowd my kitchen table. We are what we read. On my bedside I currently have one Hawaiian language textbook, Dan Simmon's science fiction novel Hyperion, Jonathan Lamb's Preserving the Self In The South Seas: 1680-1840, Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperable Community. In this combination I find elemental solace.

Our collections of physical, paper texts do not only help explain who we are to ourselves, they signal this to our visitors. When my guests first enter my apartment and make a beeline to my shelves they are actually learning more about me. When they admire my copy of Roscher and Knies I am learning something about them. When they spot my first edition of Ricky Jay's Cards as Weapons or Scatological Rites Of All Nations I know that I have found a true soul mate. I am convinced that this is somehow more important than finding out that the professor in the office next to me reads the same cat blogs that I do.

It is easy to see that paper will continue to be used by academics for a long time to come purely on the basis of its utility as an information technology. But we are not passionate about paper because it is a good research tool. We are passionate about it because of the way that it smells and feels. Our love of paper springs from the way it insinuates itself into not only our career, but our souls. This is why, after The Big Electromagnet Pulse, I won't be working desperately on some computer somewhere trying to resurrect my metadata. I’ll be fortifying the multiple copy room and trying to figure out how few copies of The Andaman Islanders I’ll have part with to keep alive until someone manages to turn the power back on.

Author/s: 
Alex Golub
Author's email: 
info@insidehighered.com

Alex Golub finished his dissertation in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2005 and is now an adjunct professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He blogs at Savage Minds, a group blog about cultural anthropology.

Defiance!

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Still, it is natural to assume that the title on that cover will give some clue about what is inside. It seems as if a book called Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge might be very interesting indeed, for it will be about ... well, Google and the myth of universal knowledge. Presumably it will start with Leibniz, who, apart from creating a working prototype of the analog computer in the 17th century, also brainstormed the principle of a new kind of language.

This would not be one more lingua franca, but rather something far more powerful. What Leibniz had in mind was a language that would be, in essence, mathematical -- hence, perfectly rational. Just by translating your question into Leibniz-ese, you would already have more than halfway answered it. (For really tough ones, I guess you’d use his computer.) He didn’t get very far beyond sketching the concept for this language in his notes. But the ambition of it is astounding. It makes the Google search-engine algorithm seem, by contrast, kind of wussy.

Anyway, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge would probably be a great book -- one that would be hard to put down. A volume bearing that title has just appeared from the University of Chicago Press. Alas, it bears no resemblance to the one I expected. The author, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, is president of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He has nothing to say about Leibniz -- nor, for that matter, about the myth of universal knowledge -- and his book is all too easy to put down.

In fact, I did so many times --  even though the argument is clear, and book itself very short. The margins may be called generous, and the text runs to not quite 100 pages, but only if you include both the forward (by a prominent Canadian librarian) and afterward (by the translator). The author mentions that he wrote it in about three weeks, and I will confess to needing almost as long to read it. Much of that time was invested in seeking the will to go on.

The original version was called Quand Google défie l’Europe -- that is, “When Google Challenges Europe.” (A snappy title in the EU, perhaps, but one understands the need to relabel it for export.) Its arguments came to public attention in a newspaper article by Jeanneny appearing a few months after Google announced its book-digitization initiative.

When his much-discussed article first appeared, some commentary in the Anglophone world rendered “défie” as “defies.” Google defies Europe! Very dramatic. That is semantically wrong, and yet not altogether out of tune with the spirit of Jeanneney’s complaints. He may frame things in terms of Europe facing a “challenge” from Google. But in fact his booklet is suffused with, not righteous indignation, exactly, but rather a sense of cultural lèse-majesté.

The whole thing is structured, deep down, by a persistent and astonishingly trite polarity. On the one hand, there is Europe (deep sense of history; respect for social values; passionate sophistication regarding cultural legacy of humanity). On the other hand, there is the United States (no sense of history; free market in total control; gave mankind the cheeseburger). It would appear that these two monoliths are embodied, respectively, by Charles De Gaulle and George W. Bush.

Surely the one must save us from the other -- even though De Gaulle is dead, and cheeseburgers are strangely appealing. Google is a manifestation of the profoundly un-European (or at least un-De Gaullian) cultural logic of free-market capitalism. The future of humanity now depends on the emergence of an alternative.

The announcement of Google’s plan to digitize some 15 million volumes -- most of them in American research libraries “convulsed our daily lives, our activities, and our imaginations,” writes Jeanneney. It appears to have been particularly disturbing because the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford was also involved.

That, he writes, showed “the familiar Anglo-Saxon solidarity” at work. It is perhaps rare that major developments in the field of library science correspond so closely to tensions in the realm of foreign policy. Rather than see this as an unfortunate but episodic circumstance, Jeanneney finds in it dire signs of cultural imperialism, if not an overt move towards total planetary domination.

xx
The initiative was, for one thing, undertaken by a private company. The algorithms used for Google’s search engines are proprietary, hidden behind a wall of trade secrets. Most of the books to be digitized would be in English -- a situation both reflecting and bolstering that language’s tendency towards global (or at least Internet) hegemony.

This prospect is worrying in ways that the former ubiquity of Latin among educated readers around the world (let alone that of French, until recently) evidently was not. It hardly follows that the dispersion of English automatically yields “Anglo-Saxon,” much less American, domination. It might just as well portend a 21st century of explosive economic and cultural innovation coming from India or the Caribbean.

But I am rude to interrupt the worries of M. Jeanneney. So to continue:

The ranking of search results from Google tends to reflect the popularity of whatever links are followed by the search-engine’s users. That is another sign of Google’s market-like logic. (It would be preferable for results to correspond to the cumulative wisdom of the learned.) But the effects of the profit motive may run even deeper.

“What pays for the digitization of materials,” writes Jeanneney, “are linked advertisements from companies that have an interest in associating their image with old or recent works likely to promote that image. As a result, books will necessarily be hierarchized in favor of those best suited to satisfy the demands of advertisers -- again, according to the principle of the highest bidder.” This conjures a future in which people will be able to search the pages of Proust only thanks to the sponsorship of a manufacturer of madeleines, or read only read a digital Don Quixote amidst pop-up ads from somebody trying to sell you a windmill.

“Am I exaggerating?” he asks. “Can we be sure this won’t occur?”

Well, few things in life are sure. And those that are -- death, for example -- seldom prove encouraging. Be that as it may, the commercial dynamics of Google are nothing compared to the real horror that Jeanneney imagines for the future.

It seems that during an event held in Paris to celebrate the bicentennial of the French revolution, Jeanneney was exposed to a skit by Bob Hope. The details are unclear, but it sounds as if there were a lot of jokes about guillotines. Any American old enough to remember Bob Hope can imagine that the performance could only make you laugh from pity at how lame the whole thing was.

In any case, the experience must have been traumatic for Jeanneney. He is convinced that future generations of the Republic’s schoolchildren will have their minds warped by googling “Jacobins” and getting Anglo-American accounts not much more sophisticated than whatever hilarious hijinks involving a guillotine were performed that day.

One longs to assure Jeanneney that, no, Bob Hope did not reflect anything like an Anglo-American scholarly consensus on the aftermath of 1789  and that the Revolution was never defended more strongly than by, say, the late Morris Slavin, a professor of history at Youngstown State University who died a few months ago.

That’s assuming, of course, that the Republic’s schoolchildren will be using Google to study historiography rather than to keep up with the Eurovision song contest. (You can blame “the familiar Anglo-American solidarity” for a lot of things, but not for the Eurovision song contest. We have no global monopoly on the production of cultural crap.)

Before assuming his current position in charge of the national library, Jeanneney served in a variety of government positions. His booklet is the work of a capable political functionary -- in essence, a memorandum festooned with the occasional erudite quotation. The intent is to persuade people in the European Union to commit to a serious, coordinated development of alternatives to Google, both at the level of digital collections and search tools.

If that means employing rather dumb clichés that will help some readers enjoy an unearned feeling of cultural superiority to their boobish American cousins -- well, so be it. The citations from Plato and Diderot are there strictly to dazzle the rubes. The important thing is to get a budget together.

When he leaves off the bouts of stereotype-laden geopolitical grumbling, Jeanneney does make some good points. “In 2006,” he writes, “we can’t help but be struck by the number of projects Google is showcasing, and this gigantic appetite will only be satisfied if its exceptional profitability continues to satisfy Wall Street. But there’s no certainty whatever that it will continue....”

This is all the more worrisome given the company’s “apparent indifference to the question of long-term preservation and conservation....The instinct to preserve a cultural heritage, by contrast, is intrinsic to public institutions with a lofty mission, for which government funding ensures steady budgets or even, in the best of cases, periodic increases.”

Similar thoughts may form in an American brain. Developing both a digital archives and a non-Google search engine is something scholars in the United States would welcome. Let every important work ever stored in a Bulgarian or Rumanian library be scanned, and fully indexed, and made available to anyone on the planet capable of reading them. And if Jeanneney knows how to harness the brainpower of the EU’s intelligentsia so that only really smart items will result from an Internet search, then more power to him.

Yet one notices certain things about how he appeals to his European readers. He talks about the civilizing mission of the European spirit, etc. But he does not forget what is sometimes called, in the market-crazed world of the Anglo-Saxons, “the bottom line.”

The proposed  European Digital Library would benefit humanity through the sheer force of its non-American-ness. But it would also, he notes, enhance the EU’s economic power.

Nor, it seems, would the initiative be entrusted solely to “public institutions with a lofty mission.” Unless IBM is one of them, that is. He mentions that the company is serving as a consultant to the European Digital Library project – helping to get “competitive bids from those companies that might hope to obtain part of the European market.” For many years, Jeanneney held appointments under Francois Mitterrand. But at times, he sounds quite a bit like what, in the United States, was once called a Rockefeller Republican.   

Author/s: 
Scott McLemee
Author's email: 
scott.mclemee@insidehighered.com

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. Suggestions and ideas for future columns are welcome.

The Changing 'Place' of the Library

I run a library at a university of nearly 22,000 students, but I know that two-thirds of them will never step foot in our library. Ditto for hundreds of our professors. These students and faculty are either teaching or learning online or at one of our over 100 extended campuses worldwide.

So when I read any of the slew of reports that come out about the library “as a place,” I worry a bit.  What do these on-site spaces mean to our growing population of distance education students and professors? The concept of the "library as place" was most recently reviewed in a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources entitled "The Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space." Few would argue with the authors that the library is vitally important to higher education institutions in helping them achieve their mission. Indeed, if designed or renovated around the institution’s learning principles as outlined in an issue of Educause Review,  the library can offer spaces and services to support virtually all of the latest learning theory principles. As summarized by Colleen Carmean and Jerry Haefner, deep learning occurs when it is “social, active, contextual, engaging, and student-owned.” What better place on campus to provide social, active, contextual, engaging, and student-owned environments than the library with its wired reading and study spaces, reference and access services, collaborative study rooms, rich print and digital collections, media facilities and -- in many cases -- cafes, information commons, conference space, classrooms, displays, and art installations.

How can libraries translate the benefits that our physical libraries offer to on-campus students and professors to serve our distance education students and faculty members in an equitable way?  I believe we can do this through careful planning during building and renovation projects, through the creation or revamping of services and collections, and through the creation of specialized services to promote community and active learning.

During library building and renovation projects, space and technical infrastructures should be planned in a new way. Private office space for professionals, for example, is more important when a librarian could be on a lengthy, complicated phone call with a student overseas. Ample processing space is necessary for paraprofessionals providing document delivery and electronic reserves service. Growth space for developing print and media collections and robust technical infrastructure for access to the library’s digital resources also take on new importance in a distributed campus network.

Many other changes are needed that don’t have to do with physical structures but with services and resources that have real costs and need to be part of the library budget. For example, creation or revamping of services and collections should be undertaken with the overarching goal of providing services and resources to distance education students and faculty that are the equivalent of those provided on-campus. Services might include, for example, online request forms and second-day delivery of books and media from the main library to the requestor’s home or office with prepaid return labels; or online faculty reservations of videos/DVDs with delivery to the faculty’s home, office, or campus (if any). Several options might be offered for reference service, including live chat; Web conferencing with the capability to share screens; e-mail with a guaranteed 24-hour response; or low-tech, low-cost toll-free telephone assistance, which some patrons may prefer. Options for posting required or suggested readings might include a full-scale electronic reserves system or assistance with scanning and posting items to a courseware page, university portal, or Web page. Increasingly, libraries are taking a leadership role on campus in educating faculty about copyright compliance, while ensuring that their faculty may make full use of the rights accorded under the fair use provision of copyright law.

Providing opportunities for information literacy instruction to distance education students can be challenging but is possible through a variety of means. Options range from designing an online credit course to creating a series of online tutorials. The latter may be home-grown or adapted at no charge from established sites such as the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial. Webcasting technology offers the opportunity to “visit” remote classrooms at the request of the faculty member and tailor an instruction session to a particular assignment. All that is needed is a camera, computer, Internet connection, and Web conferencing software.

Providing equivalent resources to distance education students has a few challenges but is increasingly becoming easier. The number of academic databases with full-text content is growing exponentially. In many cases, it is possible to use existing funds by shifting resources from print to online. In other cases, consortiums may reduce the costs for a particular institution. Students love full-text articles but appear to be slow in adopting electronic books. If e-books are provided as a supplement to print resources available via document delivery, however, and marketed effectively as a database of information rather than as discrete titles to be read cover-to-cover, they can be useful.

Our challenge increasingly is not the inability to provide sufficient online resources but to make them the resources of choice by our students. We must compete with Internet search engines such as Google to market the quality of our resources and to make them as easy to search as possible.  Software tools such as federated searching, which enables searching across many databases, and open URL resolvers, which enable more direct linking to full-text sources, go a long way in making our resources easier to use. However, we need to work with these software producers on continuing enhancements to these products and on new products that make research more seamless.

Perhaps most challenging for libraries in serving distance education students and faculty is creating a sense of community to promote learning. Some libraries are experimenting with blogs to address this, but these seem to have limited reach and focus. One promising direction, however, is helping distance education professors to promote community and active learning. The new library at my institution, Webster University, includes a Faculty Development Center that supports both on-campus faculty and distance education faculty. Resources for off-campus faculty include a discussion forum, where faculty members may discuss any topic on teaching and learning; share their expertise with each other; review new techniques to improve learning outcomes; discuss instructional technology software/hardware; or address common learning issues.  Other resources include a new faculty orientation course, an active learning handbook, and most recently, live Web conferencing with a staff of instructional support specialists to offer individualized instructional support to faculty regardless of their location. Many institutions may find similar ways to serve the teaching and learning needs of their faculty in ways that benefit students.

In the last decade, almost a half-billion dollars per year have been invested in new or renovated academic libraries. With this rate of investment, it is imperative that we ensure that these new and renovated libraries meet the needs of our growing distance education population. We can do this in many ways -- by investing in new resources, staff, and services; or by leveraging existing resources (in some cases across departments) in creative ways -- but do it we must.

Author/s: 
Laura Rein
Author's email: 
info@insidehighered.com

Laura Rein is dean of University Library and co-director of the Faculty Development Center at Webster University. ReinÂ  Laura co-teaches an online seminar for the Association of College and Research Libraries entitled “All Users are Local: Bringing the Library Next Door to the Campus Worldwide.”

Indies Under Fire

Last week, the Borders chain -- which in 30 years has grown from a single used bookshop largely serving students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to a global empire, with stores in the U.K. and Australia among other places -- announced that it would be undertaking a major restructuring. Its new strategic plan will (in the words of a press release) “revitalize, refocus, and ultimately reinvent the company to achieve its mission to be a headquarters for knowledge and entertainment.”

So much for the usual nourishing corporate baloney. When you see that many “re-“ formations in an official statement, it’s a pretty reliable sign that steep cuts are planned. And so they are, in the wake of losses of more than $73 million that Borders suffered in 2006. Over the next year or two, Borders will close nearly half of its remaining Waldenbooks outlets in shopping malls (having already shut down a fifth of them in 2006) and scale back its overseas operations. It will also end its relationship with Amazon – clearing the way for “the debut of a new proprietary e-commerce site in early 2008.”

One provision of the new strategic plan is a call for “increasing effectiveness of merchandise presentation.” The press release does not give details, but somehow it bring to mind an image of life-size animatronic displays of Ann Coulter and Al Gore waving copies of their books.

Perhaps things won’t go quite that far. But it’s clear that moving beyond the familiar, pre-digital model of book buying is on the Borders agenda. “A new technology-heavy concept store that has been in development since late 2006 will open in early 2008,” according to an article in The New York Times. “Borders also promised to introduce ‘digital centers’ in its stores that will allow customers to buy audio books, MP3 players, and electronic books.”

All of which goes into the file for an essay that might be called – with a nod to Anthony Trollope – “The Way We Read Now.” If you doubt that Borders has had a profound effect, not just on the book trade, but on how readers interact with one another and with texts, then keep an eye out for a remarkable new documentary called “Indies Under Fire: The Battle for the American Bookstore.” It has been making the rounds of film festivals and been screened at libraries and bookshops, and a trailer for it is available online.

When a DVD copy of the film arrived a few weeks ago, it sat on my desk for a while before I found the will to pop it into the player. That hesitation reflected a suspicion that "Indies Under Fire" would prove to be an exercise in Michael Moore-style muckraking, with plenty of sardonic editorial commentary stomping all over the documentary format. (That sort of thing has its uses, of course, but a viewer really has to be in the mood.)

My misgivings were misplaced. Jacob Bricca, the director of “Indies,” has taken a far more subtle and balanced approach to showing the effect of Borders on small independent bookshops. Through interviews with the owners, staff, and patrons of five West Coast stores -- most of them eventually put out of business following the arrival of the chain in their neighborhoods -- “Indies Under Fire” makes a strong case that the explosive growth of Borders over the past two decades has undermined community institutions that can’t readily be replaced.

The shops that Bricca portrays in the “Indies Under Fire” are perfect examples of what Ray Oldenburg , a sociologist at the University of West Florida, has dubbed “the third place,” with home and work being the first and second. A life spent shuttling between those two poles is, in important  respects, only half a life. Third places are genuinely social venues -- areas where friends and strangers can meet, mix, talk, argue, pair off, and otherwise create new connections. Oldenburg discusses the third-place concept in The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Paragon House, 1989).

The passionate attachment to their neighborhood bookstores expressed by patrons in “Indies Under Fire” makes evident why they qualify. The relationship with a store includes personal associations that mingle with public space. It is the place where one met certain people, first started reading a favorite book, or heard a local author talk about her new novel.
 
“People are saving two bucks on a book by buying at a chain store or on the internet,” says one person interviewed for the film, “but they’re going to lose this larger resource, this community resource they have. So the circle of reading gets smaller -- it’s just you and the book and your computer screen.”

But the documentary also gives employees of Borders a chance to make their case -- and it's perhaps a stronger case than anyone on the indie side would want to admit.

Protesters complain that Borders is imposing cultural uniformity across the United States by destroying small businesses. (Some anti-corporate activists, as we are told by one person hostile to the chain, will go into a newly opened branch and quite literally vomit.)

The representatives from Borders respond that the stores are competitive for the simple reason that they are attractive and well-stocked. And they have a point. As with most bookstores, Borders makes a great deal of its money by selling whatever the public is demanding at the moment. But even its least well-stocked stores tend to have a decent selection of work that will only appeal to small audiences. Unlike certain other chains one could mention, Borders has (for example) a philosophy section where you can find Judith Butler and W.V. Quine, rather than gallons of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

An indie advocate who speaks in the opening of the documentary says that a great bookstore is one that doesn’t just have the title you are seeking. It also carries books you never knew existed, but that you discover you need.

Well, by that definition Borders may well qualify as a great bookstore -- painful as this is to say about an engine of soulless corporate monoculture.

What makes last week’s news of restructuring worrisome is that all the talk of “right-sizing” and “reinvention” might translate into reduced inventory, plus a heavier emphasis on sure-fire bestsellers. And the changes sure won't address one situation that the documentary doesn't mention: The Borders work force is almost completely non-unionized.

The DVD for “Indies Under Fire” is not listed in the Borders catalog. But you can purchase a copy here .

Author/s: 
Scott McLemee
Author's email: 
scott.mclemee@insidehighered.com

Libraries at the Cutting Edge

The trendiest meeting place on many college campuses these days features a coffee bar, wireless Internet zones, free entertainment and special programs, modern lounge areas and meeting rooms.

And free access to books. Lots of books.

This educational social hub is the campus library, which is beginning to look more like an Internet café than the academic library you remember from your college days.

Far from fading away in the Age of Google, which has begun digitizing millions of books from university and other libraries, and despite the almost universal availability of vast online resources, circulation and visits at college and research libraries are on the rise. Campus librarians now answer more than 72 million reference questions each year -- almost twice the attendance at college football games.

In other words, this is not the beginning of the end for campus libraries, but the dawn of an exciting new age.

Strategies for today -- and tomorrow

A quick look at two familiar Web sites will demonstrate that academic libraries now play a vital role in how students and faculty find and gather information via the Web as well as in the stacks. Both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland offer a full range of online library services, from catalogs (formerly known as "card catalogs") to research help to DRUM -- the Digital Repository at Maryland, which provides a permanent online address for computer files and eliminates the need to attach them to e-mail messages. The Julia Rogers Library at Goucher College subscribes to services that provide students with access to over 22,000 online titles, while Baltimore City Community College's library gives students technology support and online access to research materials.

The volume of information available on the Web has led some students to believe that if a resource can't be found online, it doesn't exist. This mistaken idea, coupled with concerns about the reliability of information on the Web and the potential for plagiarism from online sources, has led faculty and librarians to team up to teach information literacy skills.

Nationwide, higher education institutions have developed information literacy instruction to help students understand how to find and evaluate information online and in print  -- more bang for their tuition buck! Many colleges and universities even provide "personal trainers," so students can work with librarians one on one, or with a group project team to brush up on the best databases for a particular class or assignment.

Technology training helps students succeed in class, but also prepares them for future careers.  Information literacy is critical to a competitive work force, and information-literate people know how to find accurate, useful information that will help them through family, medical or job crises.  

Partners in education

College and research librarians are partners with professors in educating students, offering new perspectives, developing curriculums and facilitating research projects, and they lead the library world in digitization efforts and online reference.

Our nation's college and research libraries are constantly finding new ways to better serve students, faculty and staff, online and in person. More than 90 percent of college students now visit the online library from home.

Yet use of the nation's physical academic libraries and their collections grew from more than 880 million library visits in 2002 to more than a billion in 2004, according to the most recent data from the National Center on Education Statistics -- an increase of more than 14 percent. Circulation of library materials in the same period was up by 6 percent, to more than 200 million items.

In short, if the classroom is the first stop in the learning experience, the library is the next, and great libraries continue to be a key to a great education.

Author/s: 
Pamela Snelson
Author's email: 
newsroom@insidehighered.com

Pamela Snelson is the president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, and college librarian at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. The ACRL is holding its National Conference in Baltimore March 29-April 1.

Good at Reviewing Books But Not Each Other

Academic librarians are the nice guys of higher education. We dwell in neutral territory; the library belongs to no one and everyone. So do we. Our reputation is mostly one of being excruciatingly helpful. We give service with a smile. Our academic roost is a peaceful haven, and we welcome all. As an academic librarian who regularly navigates the library blogosphere, I find that the librarian’s penchant for pleasantry extends to our own virtual nest. In the world of library blogging the sky is always sunny, and nary is a dissenting or argumentative thought expressed.

Why is it that “flatlined” may be the best term to describe the state of discourse in librarianship? In the traditional library literature one rarely sees an article that takes issue with the research or perspectives of a particular author. There may be a dissenting letter to the editor every so often, but one would be hard pressed to identify a juicy back-and-forth between two camps engaged in academic discourse about a controversial issue. Maybe we’re just too nice to take an intellectual sledgehammer to a colleague’s work, even if it was well deserved. Some librarians might point to any number of the profession’s electronic discussion lists as the virtual ground where real debates between librarians are happening, but I would argue that what debate takes place on these lists often occurs between the same small crew of librarians who simply have an axe to grind with each other’s positions. The vast majority of list members never get involved, and what transpires might be more accurately described as bickering than intellectual discourse.

As one explores and delves into the world of library blogs it soon becomes apparent that the rules of disengagement dominate the landscape. There one is likely to see a repetitious flood of posts exclaiming “What a great post by so-and-so” or “She’s got a must read post today”. Rarely does one see a post that starts with “I have to disagree” or “Boy, does he have it wrong.” Most commenting is no better. It’s mostly gratuitous back patting. But why bother anyway? Comments are secondary to actual posts and they reach a much smaller audience. One exception might be ACRLog, a blog for which I write. Geared specifically to academic librarians it still allows fairly unrestrictive commenting, and on occasion comments may offer brilliant opposing views. But these are few and far between; the overall dearth of comments, even for posts that make controversial statements, is shockingly surprising for this profession.

Other areas of academia have fostered some excellent exchanges between dissenting parties -- in blogs, journal back and forths, and at scholarly meetings -- in fact many professors worry that some fields are too contentious. That’s hardly a concern the library profession must address. If anything our professional meetings are exceptionally notable for the atmosphere of courtesy and collegiality. On those unusual occasions when parties do disagree it’s typically handled in a jovial manner so that neither side perceives any offense. On those occasions when the gauntlet of disagreement is thrown down, rarely is it taken up by the opposition. At the recent ACRL conference in Baltimore, in response to a participant comment, a speaker said “that was passionate but you are completely wrong”. It ended there. I wonder how that exchange would play out at a faculty conference. The outcome, I think, would be quite different.

It’s not that librarianship lacks controversies worth getting worked up. Remember the virtual firestorm created by Michael Gorman? Gorman’s critical essay about bloggers in a 2005 Library Journal column set off an explosion of anger in the library blogosphere. How, bloggers asked, could an American Library Association president be so out of touch with a communication medium so important to his own profession? How dare he attack bloggers and even the blog as a form of expression! Even non-librarians got in on the action. But the action was all one way. There was hardly a defense of Gorman. It appeared no one wanted to step forward and take on the hoards of critics. And what he said and why he said wasn’t completely indefensible. Bloggers had attacked Gorman over comments he published in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times ("Google and God's Mind," December 17, 2004) that were critical of Google’s plan to digitize books. So Gorman responded in kind. After the assault Gorman claimed his words to be hardly serious, but from the reaction you would have thought he said that the blogosphere was an evil plague that needed to be eradicated. Did any library bloggers come to Gorman’s defense? None that I could detect. And I know why. Fear of underserved and irrational reprisal.

Although many library pundits and A-list library bloggers would be quick to deny it, it seems increasingly the case that a speech chill has descended on the library blogosphere. On the few occasions when a dissenting comment is attached to a post in the spirit of discourse, the commenter is likely to find him or herself the target of an unpleasant post in which the blogger uses his or her bully pulpit to lash out against someone who’s dared to take an opposing view. Even if the commenter responds with a follow-up comment (and more bloggers refuse to allow them these days), few readers take the time to look at them. Posts on the other hand can be quite memorable. The blogger has the upper hand. Ultimately, those who make an attempt at discourse are discouraged and the next time simply ask, “Why bother?”

Even more remote is the possibility of discourse between opposing bloggers, particularly in an attempt to bring to the table an observation of groupthink. In those circumstances the woeful dissenter is subject to swift condemnation that quite quickly quashes any chance of thoughtful dialogue. The essential trend of 2006 was Library 2.0. But exactly what it meant became the subject of some promising back and forth exchange among bloggers. As a far less heated issue than Gorman’s blogger incident, a few librarians felt encouraged to wade in against the tide to voice opinions that Library 2.0 was little more than old wine in a new bottle, a new fad for those who seek out new technology solutions before they’ve identified a legitimate problem. Library 2.0 advocates were quick to band together in a “they just don’t get it” response. Ultimately groupthink won out over efforts to help all those interested in the topic to better understand it through thoughtful examination. Is it any surprise that few oppose the majority? And in the end the nice thing to do is just go along with the crowd.

What makes this situation all the worse is that the library profession has long nursed a debilitating inferiority complex when we compare ourselves to other disciplines. It’s supposed to be library science, not library “let’s all just be nice and agree to think the same way." What seems to define many other disciplines is the discourse that occurs. When academics challenge each other’s thoughts their understanding of the issues evolves, and as a result the entire profession’s body of knowledge moves to a higher plane of discovery. Instead library science is the Rodney Dangerfield of the social sciences; it gets no respect. Lack of discourse is not the sole reason, but it points to the profession’s lack of interest in engaging each other in discourse. It’s just easier to agree – or better yet share no thoughts at all.

Perhaps what the library profession needs to do, if it wants to be taken seriously as a science, is to realize that we need to be accepting of rigorous discourse. We need to learn that there’s something special about it, and that we do a disservice to ourselves and our profession when we fail to do all we can to encourage it. Despite the chill factor that has descended on the library profession there may be some hope. We need to look at how other disciplines stimulate and support discourse. At our conferences and through online communities we need to engage in discussions about how to encourage discourse and appropriate ways in which to engage. We need to hear from scholars in other disciplines with experience in discourse so that we can better understand how to inspire ourselves and our colleagues to be both constructively critical and accepting of criticism. We need to focus on the content, and resist the temptation to make it about personalities.

Library educators should begin to integrate into the curriculum more opportunities for verbal and written discourse, as well as present students with case studies that serve as good examples of discourse and how it advances professional knowledge. What contemporary issues are deserving of discourse that might provide good examples? The role of reference services and the future of the reference desk are topics that emerge every few years, but that issue is now re-energized as new technologies make the need for traditional desks less important. Arguing the values of face-to-face interaction versus the immediacy of delivering services virtually is certainly fertile ground for debate. As future professionals, students would undoubtedly find challenges in discussing the qualifications required of academic librarians. As new professionals without library degrees, such as Web programmers and Ph.D. bibliographers, increasingly join the ranks of MLS degreed librarians, there is opportunity to debate the relative merits of an evolving new class of non-MLS professionals in the academic library. What academic librarianship shares with other disciplines is a seemingly never ending parade of controversial issues and challenges that invite the sharing of multiple, strong perspectives. If our future professionals can learn to appreciate and be inspired by the collegial expression of disagreement, it would serve well the future value of scholarly discourse in librarianship.

Another encouraging factor is a recent library blog thread about there being too much politeness in the library blogosphere. This originated in a post by a public librarian, Rachel Hartman, at the Tinfoil + Raccoon blog. The gist of the blog correctly noted that when everyone is too polite to say what is really on their mind we construct a rather boring echo chamber in which all we do is exchange pleasantries. Others responded with observations concerning the need for librarians to engage each other with more constructive criticism. Finally this small segment of the profession began to awake to the possibilities of improving the quality of our discourse, and how that would provide a serious blow to the groupthink that was bringing a slow death to any serious conversations. Of course, the challenge is to simultaneously eliminate the atmosphere of personal repercussions, real and perceived, when expressing opinions while stressing to colleagues that their polite act of suppressing opinions is actually a disservice to our professional advancement. Only time will tell if the profession moves beyond this initial attempt at creating more rigorous discourse.

Whatever we may think about the Web 2.0 phenomenon, whether you love or hate the concept, it is clear that at its core is the creation of conversations between those who build the web and those who use it. The latter seeks to participate by adding their voice, in whatever medium that may occur, and by virtue of doing so helps to build new layers of content. It is ironic that a profession dedicated to community building and embracing Web 2.0 has so miserably failed to create a conversation among it own members. But one thing I greatly admire about my librarian colleagues is how vastly open minded a group they are. They are widely accepting of new ideas, and welcome into the discussion anyone who is willing to share their thoughts. But perhaps we have become too welcoming, too complacent to remember that we share a responsibility to take our profession forward through intellectual discourse. Maybe a good place to start is with a well thought out response to this article. It offers great opportunity for argument. Who wants to take the first shot?

Author/s: 
Steven J. Bell
Author's email: 
info@insidehighered.com

Steven J. Bell is associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University.

Off the Shelf

“I am on the verge of making a radical decision,” a professor told me in an e-mail note a couple of weeks ago. The plan taking shape was “to get rid of almost all the books I have in my office,” he said, “based on their almost total superfluity.”

He found that he regularly consulted around two dozen volumes – “references, timeless classics, a couple of recent and invaluable syntheses.” But they were always the same titles. The rest were starting to look like “ugly wallpaper.” The sight was getting oppressive and he started to imagine what it might be like to have a change of scenery.

“I feel increasingly overrun by these things that, day by day, seem less useful,” he explained. “I am thinking of keeping only those books I refer to on a regular basis for writing lectures. Anything else, I can get from the library, or in a pinch, find a citation via Google Books or Amazon. I've already stopped keeping most paper journals, though there are a few things that aren't available online. Is this crazy? Is anyone else you know making this kind of decision?”

The implied notion was interesting: my correspondent seemed to think this urge to purge might be a product of the increasing ease of instant access to material not on one’s shelves. I have no idea whether or not this is the case, or whether it represents anything like a trend. But the sense of being overwhelmed by accumulated books is only too familiar. My office and library are at home, and it has been necessary to trim the excess books on occasion, sometimes hundreds of books at a blow, just to keep them from piling up on the floor. (This is known as “preserving domestic tranquility.”)

It seems like a fair guess that, digital access or no, many other people share this daydream of a book apocalypse-in-miniature. I asked my correspondent to keep me posted if he decided to go through with it. As it turned out, this was a formality, for his first note seems to have been a matter of psyching himself up to face the job.

He gave permission to quote from his messages. He is an up-and-coming professor in the humanities who – so it emerged from some passing references – has in recent times taken on some administrative responsibilities. I won’t identify him or name his field, for reasons that are not too hard to understand. There is a potential breach of collegiality in clearing away books by one’s friends or peers.

At the start, my correspondent estimated that he had 130 feet of books occupying his office. That works out to the equivalent, with ordinary bookshelves, of about 40 to 50 shelves’ worth. He said the moment of decision came when he realized that reducing the collection to “the hard core of actually useful information [without] a lot of filler” would have a fringe benefit: “I could fit a comfortable reading chair in my office.”

It sound like the first thing to go was the dream of reducing his holdings to just two or three dozen titles necessary for preparing lectures. This extreme ambition was revised to trimming down to roughly 60 feet of books. The effort would take a few days, he thought; and he hoped to finish before leaving on a trip that would take him away from the office for a week or so.

“I guess the first thing is, we're talking about work-related books,” he said early in the process. “Maybe that's a distinction most people don't make. But P.G. Wodehouse books get kept, at home, and re-read. They're on separate bookshelves and don't count for this discussion. The books that really form intellectual landmarks for me aren't in my office anyway. Things like the essays of William James or Isaiah Berlin, they're at home where they can be dipped into at leisure.”

After a couple of days, I asked how things were going. Progress was steady, he said, but his new role as bureaucrat was imposing demands on his attention, plus he had just signed up with Facebook. But it sounded like the biggest impediment to ruthless purging came from the mixed feelings that accompanied by the process. “I find it hard to pull the trigger,” he said.

“I'm worried I might suddenly want one,” he wrote. “I feel strangely attached to books I haven't opened in, no kidding, 12 years. What if I need to? (You won't need to. Anyway there's a copy in the library.) What if my colleagues see I don't have these books anymore? Will I lose intellectual street cred?”

As the veteran of several such deep purges, I can understand his misgivings, and will say that all of them are completely justified. You will rue the cuts you are making. You will be chagrined when something you need, and once owned, is not readily at hand. There is no getting around this. It’s a trade-off: The pleasure of substantially reduced clutter comes only at the price of regret.

Still, it is possible to create so much momentum in the process that you blast right through the second thought – getting rid of books in a kind of frenzy, something akin to the “berserker” state. There is a kind of exhilaration to it. But it requires full acceptance of the reality that there will be pain later: the remorse over titles you never retrieved from the discard pile.

But this professor’s schedule didn’t leave him the option of getting worked up to go all Viking on the task at hand.

“I'm not being ruthless enough on the first pass,” he said, “ and I will have to go back through and cull, again. In hard cases, the question is, how guilty will I feel if I toss it?”

After he’d been at it for a while longer, I asked if he had established a method or a routine.

“It's going like this,” he responded. “First few minutes of the morning, look over shelves on home office. Shuffle books around, begin to pull books that I don't think I should really keep. Put in bag. Take to office. First few minutes at office, shuffle books around, pull books I don't think I should really keep. Look at pile of discards, pull one irresolutely out, flip through to see if I'd written anything in it and if I can tell how long ago. Fidget, put disputed book back on shelf. Remove from shelf and put back in pile. Take a walk up the corridor and back, get impatient, throw all discards in bag, leave in a place where graduate students can pick them over and take what they want.”

Monographic works tended to find their way to the discard pile without doubt or long delay.

“The exercise," he wrote, "has confirmed concretely what had hitherto been an abstract conviction: it's a rare monograph that's actually worth a book. You can digest the idea, pick out a few key pieces of evidence, decide whether or not it really changes your mind about an overall interpretation, and then you're really, sadly, done with it. Scarcely ever will you revisit it -- scarcely ever will it repay you to revisit it, except to check a citation maybe -- unlike a good essay or synthesis, which you can always come back to for insights.”

On another day, he wrote: “Monographs suffer unduly in this process; mostly, one gleans them for information and/or ideas. One can very easily remember that a monograph had a particular fact or quotation in it, and can if need be discover it again via Google Books or Amazon’s ‘Search Inside.’”

My correspondent also found himself developing a new appreciation of his library at home. Apart from holding the absolutely essential titles he might want to read on the spur of the moment, it constituted a kind of professional safety net.

“I can always tell people who want to know why I don't have many books in my office anymore, ‘Oh, I have bookshelves at home.’ True enough, and maybe that monograph of yours is on them.”

But it turns out he won’t be needing that escape clause after all. “In the end,” he wrote near the close of our exchange, “my colleagues' books all stayed, though one former colleague's went.”

Along the way, he minted an aphorism: “A personal library is the physical version of a bibliography or ‘for further reading’ section in something you’ve published; some books are there because you actually used them, some are there because everyone else thinks they should be there, and some are there because your friends wrote them.”

On Friday, before he took off for a break, I asked if he’d met the goal of reducing the books on his shelves to 60 feet’s worth – a cut of more than half. He said he had.

“Still some shuffling around to go,” he wrote. “In the end, I decided I could have ‘household gods’ at home, in the household -- so shelves of favorite thinkers available first thing in the morning. Reference works, surveys, things needed to look in when giving lectures, are at the office. But generally speaking, the great purge occurred, and it left room to grow.”

The comment about leaving “room to grow” seemed ominous. Having gone through this process myself a few times now, I contemplated the situation with the sense of mingled familiarity and apprehension that Prometheus might feel, upon waking, at the sight of of his new liver.

This might be the right time to adopt the outlook of Mae West. A friend asked her what she wanted for her birthday. “Just don’t get me a book,” she replied. “I’ve already got a book.”

Author/s: 
Scott McLemee
Author's email: 
scott.mclemee@insidehighered.com

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. Suggestions and ideas for future columns are welcome.

Open Library

Open Library is a new online tool for finding information about books – even (perhaps especially) for titles that are out-of-print, scarce, or likely to find one reader per decade, if even that. It is, so to speak, a catalog with benefits. If a text is available in digital format, there is a link. you to it. Citations and excerpts from reviews will be available. Likewise, cross-references to other works on related topics. A user of Open Library can see the cover of the book and, in some cases, search the contents.

The project is still very much under development. Force of habit makes us speak of the pre-optimal version of a site as its “beta” version. With Open Library, given its ambitions, chances are that “gamma” is probably more accurate.

But here's an encouraging sign: The basic framework is being established by my appallingly accomplished young friend Aaron Swartz -- who, at the age of 21, has already helped create RSS (that was in his early teens), published a couple of computer-science papers, and developed Infogami, a system enabling his digitally clueless elders to set up their own websites.He studied sociology as an undergraduate at Stanford University, presumably in his spare time. Aaron has written an essay called “How to Be More Productive” that can be recommended on the grounds that the author does know something on the subject.

I recently sent him a number of questions about the project. Some of his answers were, it seems, typed into a mobile phone. A transcript of the e-mail interview follows.

Q:How is Open Library funded? Are you working on it full time? And how many people are involved in the project?

A: It's currently being funded by the Internet Archive, with the help of some state and federal library grants. We have some volunteers, but also about 5 people working full-time (a couple programmers, a designer, and a product manager).

Q:What will Open Library offer that you can’t already find online? What was missing from the existing array of online book-data resources – WorldCat, Google Books, Amazon, etc. – that makes it worthwhile to create a new one?

A: As the kind of person who reads Intellectual Affairs (an academophile?), I'm often looking for interesting books on an obscure topic. I can look on Amazon, but its coverage of out-of-print books is pretty poor. (In my experience, most of the really interesting books are out of print.) I can search an academic library or WorldCat, but the quality of data is pretty weak -- you can get basic bibliographic info, but no reviews and weak search and a painful interface and most require a subscription.

So I wanted to build a site where one could more easily find those hidden great books, by combining all the data we have on them in one place and letting the people who love them go back and annotate and highlight them.

Q:With any Web 2.0 project, the question of safeguards comes up. Are any built in? I mean, to keep people from going through and systematically attributing the complete works of Shakespeare to Francis Bacon, or whatever.

A: Our plan is to leave it open and then lock things down as need be. Right now we're watching all the edits so that we can revert things if people do that and we hope to let users watch their favorite pages and so on. That kind of thing has worked pretty well for Wikipedia and we're hoping it will work similarly here. But we're willing to try other things if it doesn't.

Q:Some serious questions have come up about the shrinking depth of subject cataloging from the book records issued by the Library of Congress. That might sound like a problem just for librarians, but it isn't. It’s basic infrastructure for intellectual life, pretty much. To anyone doing research, having books adequately cataloged by subject offers tremendous benefits. Will Open Library be taking up the slack on this?

A: Yes, it's amazing the amount of politics around Library of Congress Subject Headings. (And I had no idea that they were thinking about abandoning them -- that's incredible; thanks for the pointer.) Lots of people have different opinions over how things should be characterized and cataloged and which things were important. When we first started the project, librarians kept arguing about which system we should use.

We decided early on to not be partisan but to be a clearinghouse for all the cataloging data we could get our hands on. So in areas where the Library of Congress doesn't do the cataloging, or doesn't do the cataloging to your taste, we'll try to make that data available.

We're hoping we'll be able to pull series data from the specialized libraries so that you can view them on our web site. We'll also republish them so that other libraries can import them from us.

Q:Will you be asking permission before incorporating data from, say, an academic library's online catalog?

A: Yes, we're talking to the academic libraries to make deals on how to import their catalogs. Our main pitch so far has been that this is an opportunity to contribute to a public commons -- contribute your library catalog to the public, and not only make it available to interested library users everywhere, but also contribute to a system where you'll get back everyone else's work, just like libraries have done with RLG.

Q:Open Library will also serve as a central directory for books available in digital formats. Some such material is freely available to everyone (e.g., the Project Guttenberg editions). And some of it has more limited access. Will you link to the latter? And do you have a policy or opinion about dealing with Google Books?

A: Yes, we hope to link to everything interesting -- free or not, although obviously we prefer free and can do more with it. We're planning to link to Google Books and we're hoping we can get copies of their public domain books.

Q:Do you have a long-term plan to make digitizing books part of the Open Library project? Or does it make more sense to leave that kind of initiative to others?

A: The Internet Archive has a big book digitization project, with scanning centers at the University of California, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Brooklyn Public Library, Library of Congress, and others. We hope Open Library can raise money to increase their scanning.

Q:I have a question about Open Library to pass along from Matthew Battles, a senior editor of scholarly books at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the author of Library: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2003). It’s about metadata – an important issue that I will admit just barely understanding. So before going on to the question itself, would mind giving a crash course on the topic?

A: This is a bit tricky. Metadata generally is stuff like cataloging data. It's what lets you find books when you want to do a search more complicated than "which books have these words in them?" (or when you don't have the full text of every book made available for searching, as seems to be the case for the foreseeable future). Whenever you look for everything by a particular author or in a particular subject, you're using metadata.

It becomes useful in two cases: When you don't have all the data and when you want to ask more interesting questions. If you just want to find a particular page, searching by full text is usually enough. But if you want to do something more interesting -- like graph an author's output by year, or see which country has produced the most romance novels, or find out which genre has the most growth in the past six months -- you need metadata. Here's a dorky metaphor for you: data is literary criticism and metadata is Franco Moretti.

Q:OK, now on to the question from Matthew Battles: “I wonder how much a resource like Open Library can make itself open to metadata mashups--giving developers openings through which they might take metadata, bibliographical info, and text and organize it in undreamt-of ways... and how robust and open will the system become not only with respect to image formats, but metadata concepts? In less convoluted terms, will it be possible for Open Library to ‘accrete’ tags and other metadata, to layer cross-references and hyperlinks--for its metadats to ‘learn’ from users?”

A: Yes, opening up our data to others is a key part of the plan. We will have full database dumps and XML and other formats as export. A big hope of mine is that by making all of this data available in a centralized place, we'll make it vastly easier to build applications around books. Want to build a site that lets people find other people who have the same books who live near them? No longer do you have to build a whole bunch of infrastructure to locate and refer to books -- instead, you just need to build the part relevant to your application. (Like the geolocation stuff.)

As for "accreting" tags, we spent a lot of time building an advanced new type of database for this project so that we could load in data of all sorts from numerous sources. So if someone has been keeping track of, say, the fonts used in every book, we can import all that data and store it with the other stuff we have. Similarly for any user-created data.

Q:So what is your sense of the master plan for this project? The future course of development?

A: We're taking it step by step. Our first goal is to get catalog information for every book -- a big project in itself. We've been calling all the publishers and national libraries and research libraries to get copies of their catalogs (we'd love readers' help with this, by the way!) and then we're working on algorithms
to integrate all that data into one coherent site.

After that, we want to work on improving the book-reading interface for books that we have scans of. We're hoping to make the scanned text into a wiki as well, so that people can fix typos and correct errors in our processing (OCR) of the scan. We'd also like to think about new ways that people can work with a book's full text online and what the proper interface for that should be. And, of course, we want to think about ways we can get more books scanned. One idea is a "Scan this book" button on every out-of-copyright book, where for $50 to $100, we'll page the book from a library, deliver it to the scanners, and then email you a PDF of the book and put the full text online, with a little nameplate thanking you for funding it.

And then, of course, we want to expand beyond just books. We're eager to do the same thing with journal articles: one open site where we list every journal article, all the journal articles by a particular author, sorts by subject and topic, the abstracts and references, and links to places where you can find a full text copy. I just got back from a science conference and the folks I talked to there loved the idea. And after that there's music and movies, naturally.

Q:One last thing... People should be using index-card catalogs to find print-and-ink books in brick-and-mortar libraries! This is just one more effort to turn the US into a nation of screen potatoes! Admit it -- you just hate books, don't you? (I say this tongue in cheek, but there are bound to be people muttering it in all earnestness.)

A: You found me out: I love books. Every time I walk into a library, my face just lights up. There's something so grand and inspiring about collecting all those books just to share them with people. And I visit them constantly; I always have a dozen books checked out at anyone time, with a couple new ones each week. I'm sure that's nothing for most IHE readers but to my friends in the computer industry, it's like I'm some kind of bizarre alien. I do this because in a world of Googles, Amazons, and Wikipedias, all encouraging people with computers to stay at home and talk to their screens, I want to have at least one countervailing force encouraging people to go find dusty library books off of disused shelves.

Author/s: 
Scott McLemee
Author's email: 
scott.mclemee@insidehighered.com

Face Value

My corner of the Internet has been abuzz over a muckraking article that recently appeared in The Guardian on the subject of Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson, the highly principled slacker behind The Idler and author of How to Be Free, makes some familiar complaints: online friends are a pale imitation of face-to-face relationships, Facebook encourages high-schoolish obsession with popularity, it prompts its members to reveal too much about themselves, and it uses that information for commercial gain. But the article goes further. Facebook is not just an American-owned company with global ambitions. According to Hodgkinson, it’s highly influenced by a “neocon activist” board member and funded by a venture capital firm that has ties to the CIA. Their ultimate aim: “an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands.”

Ironically, The Guardian helpfully provides a “share” link so you can send the article to all of your Facebook friends.

One of the most interesting responses to this article bubbled up on A-Librarians, a forum for anarchist and radical librarians. (Yes, I am, in case you’re wondering. And “anarchist librarian” is not an oxymoron. Look it up.) While other lists were debating whether the article’s claims were credible, or whether Facebook is valuable regardless, the members of this list were getting down to philosophical basics. Why does the concept of property so thoroughly infuse our understanding of rights? Are our conceptions of privacy dependent on owning one’s individual “self”? If we own our identity, is our public persona a form of intellectual property, as a trademark is?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, which relate not only to Facebook, but the debates over Google’s project to digitize great university library collections, and the fights over access to journal articles written by professors whose institutions can’t afford to gain access to them. But as a librarian who is in favor of sharing ideas freely, these debates made me rethink the fundamental relationship between the individual’s desire to share their thoughts and experiences with others and the commercial entities that provide the distribution channel for that act of sharing. It seems to me the crux of the problem is that the profit motive influences both sides of the equation – differently.

Corporations like Google and Facebook are worth a lot of money, which is a bit odd. They don’t create their content, and what’s there, they give away for free. They mediate the space where we go to express ourselves, and where find out what others think. Sure, we have to put up with a bit of advertising, but that’s just a minor irritant for something that’s free.

But there is a cost.

These corporations provide us with a space to play, engage with others, and make connections. We get to build our own identities in a public way. In return, we give them (perhaps without realizing it) a panopticon view of our lives, a chance to gather data on what we think, do, read, say, enjoy, and with whom we associate -- our "communities of interest" in the parlance of the FBI, or "friends" in Facebook’s lexicon. It’s exceedingly valuable information because it can be sold to companies who want to follow trends and focus their advertising dollars on just those individuals most likely to respond. The more people involved, the more valuable the data.

The terms of this contract are never quite clear. The Facebook Terms of Use explain we’re allowing these companies to keep track of what we enter into these systems (our searches, the words we use in our Gmail messages, our profiles and connections at Facebook), but we can’t be sure exactly how that information gets used, because that’s a trade secret. They could tell us, but then they’d have to kill us.

Facebook embarrassed itself last fall by overestimating our enthusiasm for this exhibitionist social contract. They launched Beacon, a service that would send information about one’s online purchases to a Facebook member’s friends unless an obscure “opt out” box was checked quickly before it disappeared from sight. Their assumption was that everyone would enjoy sharing their shopping lists as much as their playlists -- your friend Mike just bought Hanes underwear and thinks you might want to buy some, too! -- but that idea hit an invisible barrier of resistance. Whoa, that’s going too far! We got cold feet when the commercial consequences of our sharing was made visible. The outcry, ironically mobilized through Facebook itself, forced them to back off.

But on the whole, the public is content to go along. Just give me a place to express myself to the world, and you can do ... whatever it is you do.

People trust these playful-seeming corporations to not do evil far more than they trust their government. In 2007, an ACLU poll found a majority of the public opposed warrantless wiretapping. Earlier, tens of thousands of people signed petitions opposing the government’s ability to track what they were checking out of libraries or buying at bookstores.

Libraries have always taken privacy seriously – not because it’s valuable in itself, but because it’s a necessary condition for the freedom to read whatever you want without risk of penalty. When the PATRIOT Act was passed, librarians checked to make sure their databases erased the connection between a book and its borrower as soon as the book was returned. That erasure, however, makes it harder to offer the kind of personalization, such as recommendations based on previous book choices, that the public increasingly expects from online systems. After all, it’s what they get from Amazon.

Suspicion of the government does not extend to corporations running the Web 2.0 playground. Those guys just seem so ... nice. And after all, if they give us the tools to tell people we read a good novel or like a particular band, why not let the company make a little money from it?

The complexities of private/public digital tradeoffs have been debated in many different contexts. Siva Vaidhyanathan has questioned why libraries, a public good, should partner with Google, a private corporation, to digitize their contents; aren’t we concerned that Google will control the most complete library in the world? Others defend the practice because – well, without Google’s deep pockets, it simply wouldn’t happen on so vast a scale. Besides, the books go right back on the library’s shelf once digitized. What’s the harm in sharing?

Let’s set aside the contentious copyright issue for the moment and concentrate on why Google is providing “free” resources. Unlike libraries, Google gets content for free, gives it away for free, and makes its money by being an enormous distribution channel for everything from physics research to 19th century scanned books to the latest YouTube video. By watching the traffic through those channels, they are able to provide highly-specific information on who’s interested in what. The more we use Google, the more information they accrue about what we’re using, and the more valuable that mountain of information becomes.

And, let’s face it: we have selfish motives, too. Social networking blurs self-expression and self-promotion. The idea of property and its exchange has so infiltrated our culture as a defining concept that many people do, in fact, think of their public persona as their brand. It’s important to “be out there.” Their lives grow more valuable as more people recognize and acknowledge their ideas, their tastes, and their interests.

This isn’t just a youthful obsession. Facebook has recently opened its service to everyone, regardless of school or college affiliation. A novelist I know was just advised by her agent to set up a Facebook profile to increase her online presence and engage in “relationship marketing” with potential customers. In other words, she’s expected to act as her own sock puppet so she can sell more books. Make friends and influence people.

Here’s the interesting paradox: The only way to increase the intellectual property value of your identity is to give it away. That’s the only way it can be shared, linked to and recognized by others. Trading a little personal information for a public platform, whether for personal expression or self-promotion (or both), seems a fair exchange.

Does this sound eerily familiar? It should.

As scholars, our ideas gain value as we make them public, and we have been historically myopic about the consequences of trading the rights to our ideas for access to distribution channels. This unexamined practice put us all over a barrel when publishers required the academy to ransom those ideas back through prohibitively expensive journal subscriptions for libraries. The personal advancement attached to making our ideas public only added to the problem; more publications translated into higher prestige. There was just too much stuff for libraries to buy back, and not enough budget. The Open Access movement is on track to significantly change the “terms of service” when it comes to scholarly communication. Though the battle’s far from over, we’ve made real progress.

But we’ve barely begun to examine the unintended consequences of the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through privately-owned digital domains of the public sphere.

Tom Hodgkinson says we have a choice: we can help Facebook’s right-wing investors make a lot of money, or we can simply opt out of “this takeover bid for the world.”

But hold on – it’s our world. And we didn’t approach the problems of scholarly communication by ceasing to publish. We started by educating the community about the consequences and renegotiating the terms of our relationship with publishers.

Scholarly work isn’t the only form of communication worth fighting for. The privately owned digital public sphere is a fertile if febrile commons where millions of people play out their identities and share ideas. The bargains we used to routinely accede to in order to get our research published were easy to ignore because we personally benefitted from them. In fact, we didn’t read the fine print, and we didn’t anticipate the consequences. Something very similar is going on in social networking.

Scholars and librarians champion the value of free and open exchange of ideas for the public good. It’s time to take those values beyond the academy. If we made an effort to help the public understand the tradeoffs we make to be part of the digital social sphere, maybe we’d all think more critically about how our public identities are formed and exploited – for what they are worth.

Author/s: 
Barbara Fister
Author's email: 
info@insidehighered.com

Barbara Fister is academic librarian and professor at Gustavus Adolphus College.

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