March 2008

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Survey(s) on the use of ICTs in the Humanities

March 28, 2008 in *OIINEWS | No comments

I’m currently conducting a survey on the use of ICTs in humanities scholarship. If you are a student or faculty member in the humanities, please feel free to participate: http://limesurvey.oii.ox.ac.uk/index.php?sid=77244〈=en
I could really use your feedback.

The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds is also conducting a couple of surveys — a bit more focused on teaching than mine. http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/view.html/prsnews/13

I am really happy to see the amount of data gathering about the use of digital projects in the humanities increasing. The next steps will be for us all to (hopefully) coordinate our efforts and share our data :)

What do libraries and librarians do?

March 21, 2008 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | 1 comment

I reread the JISC, BL, UCL report that I mentioned in my last posting and it has left me equally unsettled about what precisely it is that people think that libraries and librarians do. There seems to be a general mis-characterization of libraries and their relationship to research, information, and knowledge. This becomes evident in the concluding recommendations / implications for research libraries section of this report.

The report comes down firmly on the side of libraries/librarians becoming more involved in understanding their users. This has seemed like an obvious direction to go in for some time now. A friend of mine gave an keynote address to this effect almost 20 years ago.* He said that librarians are “user experts” and the future of the profession lies in embracing that role, but I’m afraid no one seems to have listened because here we are are all over again… wondering what our users do and how libraries can stay relevant in the face of the Internet.

Beyond advocating the role of libraries/librarians in teaching information literacy, the authors of this report seem to have a very common–but I dare say wrong–(mis)perception of libraries as primarily a place for information retrieval and the librarian as “intermediary” in the information retrieval process. The logical outcome of this sort of thinking is that that the Internet and Google are a threat to libraries.

…tools like GoogleScholar will be increasingly a real and present threat to the library as an institution (p. 9)

The problem isn’t Google, but a mis-representation of librarians as providing only (or even primarily) information retrieval services. And librarians are just as guilty of this misrepresentation, if not more. This is in many ways the classic Aristotelian dilemma of confusing the accidental with the essential. Information retrieval is just one quality of libraries, the accidental, in Aristotle’s terms. Libraries are dynamic spaces for discovery, learning, knowing, and creation. Libraries are essentially there to facilitate the creation of knowledge. They do this by connecting people with information AND providing the tools for them to organize, evaluate, and transform it. They are about structuring relationships–between researchers, and between publishers, researchers, information, and knowledge.

If libraries fail or become irrelevant, it will be because they have failed to support all of these roles. Libraries used to provide all of these roles, but shifted to more of an information retrieval focus at some point (I think in the mid twentieth century). So, while I agree with the report’s doomsday speculation about the potential irrelevance of libraries, I disagree with the “why“ and the “how to avoid it“ scenarios. If you thought your job was to retrieve information for people… or somehow stand as “intermediary” between a patron and the information they need, I have news for you… you are going to be replaced by the Internet.

* You can download a pdf of that speech here. And you may be interested to know that its author is now heading up an organization–the Open Learning Exchange–that has the potential to change what we think of as a library. Dr. David Carr, is someone else who I think really gets what a library is… and I am always looking for others… any thoughts?

Plato (and JISC, UCL, and the BL) on the Myth of the Google Generation

March 19, 2008 in *OIINEWS, Libraries | 1 comment

Last September JISC, UCL, and the British Library released a report on the information seeking behaviours of the “Google Generation.” I think this is a significant report, and I have a number of reactions to it, so I think I will spread my response(s) over a few postings…I was also pleased to see that they have recently released all of their work packages as well. You can find the whole report here.

This report does a few great things.

1. It debunks a lot of the myths about the “Google Generation” being good at finding information. It turns out they just aren’t. (This should not come as a great surprise to reference librarians, and if it does, we have a problem.)

the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying points.

2. The authors point out how so much writing today overestimates the impact of ICTs on young people and they have some evidence to back that up. Unfortunately, I think they fall into a bit of their own trap by constantly over-emphasizing the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the digital shift. This is not the first time that people have feared that a new technology would dumb down society:

Socrates, in conversation with Phaedrus said about that new technology, writing:

for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
:: Plato, Phaedrus, translated by Benjamin Jowett ::

When the report talks about the perils of “power browsing,” I think they start to drift off their mark, though. I don’t think “power browsing“ is inherently a bad thing, just dangerous if it is the only method of selecting information. I would have liked to see the report dig a little bit deeper into the importance of teaching real research skills (of which evaluation is one component). It is not about teaching students evaluation skills so they can be good researchers, it is about teaching a whole suite of research skills because this is how we turn information into knowledge.

The report also has some harsh, but I think fair, things to say about the current state of libraries and librarianship (more on that to come…). Overall, its definitely worth a read. And they provide an executive summary :)

Bob Stein on the Future of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era

March 4, 2008 in *OIINEWS | No comments

On Monday, Bob Stein presented his thoughts on the future of books, reading, and authorship here at the OII. [It was recorded, so should be available on the OII webcasts page soon.] Bob is founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book and has been publishing interactive media, (including the first movies to include the audio commentary and extras that we all now expect on DVDs) as well as interactive educational CD-Roms for many years.

It was a real treat to have someone looking at big issues like “authorship” and “reading” that we tend to take for granted as such an integral part of our culture and to try and discern what is really new today now that networked technologies are in the mix. As he pointed out, carrying on dialogues in the margins of books is not new–Stein used the example of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus as chronicled by Owen Gingerich, but I often think of the long history of commentaries in Islamic manuscripts. But as he pointed out, what is new is the instantaneous nature of the exchange and the number of people that can participate.

He reminded us that the notion of authorship that we have today–as “owner” of ideas–is quite contemporary. He postulates that the authors of the future will be something more like seminar leaders, driving and shaping a conversation. This, he says, signifies a dramatic shift from the topic as the center of writing (or a book). Authors will no longer simply write about a topic, but engaging with readers within the context of a topic. The conversation itself becomes the whole point of the endeavour.

Stein also had some interesting thoughts on how we might tackle some of the big questions of the “information age.” As he sketched out his “Unified Field Theory of Publishing,” he suggested that perhaps in the future we will have professional readers–those whose job it is to read things and tag them and this will be one means of dealing with information overload… this will be one of the means by which we decide what is important.

One of the most (r)evolutionary of his thoughts was how to deal with version control. If books evolve into discussions and are therefore essentially never finished, how do we decide which is the authoritative version? In short, he said, we don’t. Authority just won’t matter any more in the future. Much in the same way our lives evolve and never stop changing, so will these discourses and we will deal with documenting them the same way — with snapshots. This will be a hard sell for librarians, who aren’t used to making decisions about when to “snapshot” something, but with the right tools, could be the next logical iteration. Perhaps someone will even print these snapshots up, sew them together and put them in protective cover. Et voilá, we’re right back where we began.

Shinto shrines + love = linux ?

March 2, 2008 in *OIINEWS | 4 comments

I’m almost convinced. Or, at least I can say that Clay Shirky has the most convincing argument that I have heard so far about the power of Internet to mobilize the masses for the good .. or the “wisdom of the crowds” .. or whatever you’d like to call it.
From his talk:

We have always loved one another. We’re human. It’s something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system. In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love.

Most of the discussions I hear on this topic run something along these lines: the Internet (e.g. digg.com) makes it really easy for lots of people to voice their opinions in a coordinated way (or to vote for what they like.) Tools like digg therefore allow the “best” parts of the internet to rise to the top. But I have a hard time equating the most popular things with the “best”
things. I suppose I am just not enough of an economist to believe that market forces are really indicators of anything other than popularity. And I don’t necessarily equate popularity with quality or “best.”

Shirky makes some really convincing points, though–in part because in his argument the “love” is as important as the coordinating tools. He puts the love first, in fact.