Author Archives: christine

In praise of silence

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On my last visit to Manhattan I had a small revelation about the cost of quiet. There are thousands of bars and restaurants in New York, but if you want a quiet one—where you can have a conversation with a friend or be left alone with your martini and your thoughts—you are going to have to pay a lot for your drink. Only the high-end expensive restaurants seem to provide the possibility of calm. I find the same thing in London. Granted some of the hippest, most expensive restaurants are also deafeningly loud, but the quiet ones are almost exclusively the pricey ones.

I think that this is the only the beginning. As we start to understand the impact that technology and constantly being connected is having on our well being (cf, Does Technology Affect our Happiness), places of quiet and dis-connection are becoming more valuable and more expensive.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. (The Joy of Quiet)

Many will read this and see it as a call for more information literacy training. That is part of it – we need to teach people how to wade through all of this stuff that we are producing, but we also need to teach people how to leave all of the buzz behind and just think. At the risk of proliferating the image of the shushing librarian…this is why it is vital that our libraries remain quiet. Sure, put meeting rooms and group study rooms in the library–that is an important part of knowledge creation and innovation. But in the future we are going to need more and more quiet spaces to escape all of that as well. And our libraries will (hopefully) remain the last free (or at least affordable) place to disconnect and be quiet, to renew not just our intellect, but our lifelines.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. (Ibid.)

Ebooks, ebooks everywhere, nor a thing to read

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With apologies to Coleridge, I wanted to take some time to summarize the flurry of news about ebooks, ibooks, etc. that happened at the beginning of the new year and talk a little bit about the impact on libraries.

Social Reading

Back in 2010, news started bubbling to the surface that seemed to imply that now that we had all of these ebooks, we needed something to do with them. So several projects for ‘social reading’ were launched.

In 2010, Bob Stein created a ‘taxonomy of social reading’ that is well worth reading.

Several project/companies have emerged in this space, but I have yet to see one take off and become heavily used.

Libraries Struggle with How to Handle EBooks

The Washington Post reported at the beginning of this year about the struggle between libraries and publishers to come up with a business model to make both sides happy. This doesn’t seem to be moving forward, unfortunately.

Because publishers are failing to come up with a business model, they are being replaced—Amazon and Apple are the new publishers.  (Although some disagree with the latter). There is also arguments on both sides about the rise and fall of self publishing. Are we in a self-publishing bubble?

Either way, if the ‘traditional’ publishers are being replaced because they can’t keep up with new delivery systems and formats, who is taking the place of the libraries? Are the social reading initiatives aiming to fulfill some of the role traditionally held by public libraries?

I can’t help but think that both sides — libraries and publishers are both missing a trick. Both are still trying to fit the old things into the new form.

Marshall McLuhan 1960 from bob stein on Vimeo.

 

 

Will 2012 be the year of crowdsourcing in libraries?

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I started to compile a list of library news from 2011 and was sidetracked into thinking about the various crowdsourcing projects that have come about over the last couple of years.

Galaxy Zoo was first released in 2007 and while they expected it to take two years to classify the million galaxies, within 24 hours they were receiving 70,000 classifications an hour. The Galaxy Zoo project has now branched out into the Zooniverse collection of crowdsourcing projects – currently 11 of them – mostly astronomy focused but now entering into climate change, biology, and the humanities. We will be launching our own Zooniverse project – What’s the Score at the Bodleian? – this year.

As libraries and archives saw the power of crowdsourcing they jumped on board and began releasing some projects of their own. The most well known of these from the .edu/.ac world is probably Transcribe Bentham. Released in April of 2010 with the goal of transcribing a portion of Jeremy Bentham’s papers, they are now 42% of the way into the 5,580 manuscripts uploaded to the website. Like a lot of digital projects, though, Transcribe Bentham only had funding for one year and they are now searching for was to remain sustainable.

Nonetheless, crowdsourcing has spread in the library world and in 2011 a number of new projects have been launched. NYPL’s What’s on the Menu? has been quite popular, and with Digital Koot, the National Library of Finland ‘gamified’ the type of newspaper OCR correction that the National Library of Australia started in 2009. And just this month the US National Archives released their Citizen’s Archivist Dashboard for transcribing and tagging digitized archives.

I think we are likely to see even more library-based crowdsourcing projects in 2012, but I would like to have an honest conversation about the successes and failures of these endeavors. I think we need to discuss what we really want out of these projects and whether they are worth the money. By some accounts (although I can’t find the citation now), UCL could have hired a team to transcribe Bentham’s manuscripts and for all of the money they have spent to date they would be further along. However, if their goal is not just to transcribe Bentham’s papers, but to build a community of people around the archive—to create amateur and young Bentham scholars, then that is a different kind of success.

Looking around the world of crowdsourcing (both online and offline) I think there are some important lessons that libraries need to pay attention to in order to engage users in these projects.

1. Stop being obsessed with context. Library/archive projects tend to provide users with an artifact—a manuscript or page—and ask people to transcribe it. But this can feel a lot like work. Some of the most successful projects I have seen, namely DigitalKoot and reCAPTCHA do just the opposite – they provide snippets or words for people to transcribe. This allows the tasks to be completed completely out of context, for the former as a game and the latter to prove that you are human. If the goal of the project is quantity of transcribed materials (rather than community building or engagement) I think this is important.

2. Reward your users. It doesn’t take much. I think the Zooniverse projects do this nicely. They tell you right up front how your work will be of help, and as the participants of Old Weather transcribe shipping logs they progress up the ranks of the ship to Captain. You can also loose your Captain status if you don’t stay active. In the Original Galaxy Zoo project, each of the contributors was also named as a co-author in one of the resulting papers and active participants continue to be occasionally listed as co-authors. One of the rewards from the NYPL’s menu project is that the data is made available to the public, and they encourage its re-use.

3. It’s ok to fail. As I mentioned above, there are reasons beyond just getting the data to do a crowdsourcing project. And sometimes you will get things you would never expect. In 2010 the GAP company famously released a new logo that was universally hated. They quickly tried to turn lemons into lemonade by ‘crowdsourcing’ the design of a new logo. You just can’t buy the sort of publicity this whole discussion generated. Chiquita banana let the public both design and vote on their stickers. This may not have sold more bananas, but my guess is that it built community around their product.

4. Remember that crowdsourcing is a form of engagement, and it can happen offline as well as on. The Tate Britain does this very well with their ‘Your Collection’ pamphlets (which are also online but I first saw them in the museum and so think of the analogue version.) They have pamphlets scattered around the Tate that provide interesting paths through the collections (e.g., the ‘rainy day’ collection or the ‘I’ve just split up’ collection). They then have blank pamphlets that allow you to build and name your own collection. Lovely, simple, and analogue.

So either 2012 will be the year of crowdsourcing in libraries and archives, or it won’t. If we are lucky, we will get some well-described and/or transcribed library collections. But if we are successful, we will engage more users than we did last year and build communities around some of our library collections.

On Grace and Elegance (RIP Steve Jobs)

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The passing of Steve Jobs has really touched a lot of people and left me, like many, wondering what it is about Apple’s products that is unique. I would argue that it is their grace. His genius was not in figuring out what technologies people want but in delivering them with grace and elegance. Near the end of his life, I think that he embodied the same.

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

Why JSTOR?

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I continue to be baffled by the commentary surrounding the recent download of millions of articles from JSTOR and now the upload of about 18,000 to Pirate Bay…

Why JSTOR? Why pick on that publishing access model? Do people realize what the publishing model is in the sciences? Most scientific journals charge authors $2-3000 to publish an article… and then they charge institutions hundreds of thousand of dollars for a subscription. Even PLOS, a pioneer of ‘open access’ publishing in the sciences still charges publications fees.

So I guess there seems to be two questions in my mind that I have yet to see decent answers to from the ‘free culture’ camp.

1. If we go down the ‘information should be free’ (as in free beer) route, who pays the salaries of all of the people who are working to make these materials findable? And who pays for all the electricity to keep the disks spinning? N.B., the Pirate Bay feed of the JSTOR articles has been down for most of this morning. Perhaps they should consider charging a fee for either publication or access so that they can hire some proper system administrators to keep this from happening ;)

2. If you are going to pick on a cost model, why pick the humanities at all? Where costs are relatively low compared to the sciences…

Update on 1 Aug, 2011

A recent article from the Chronicle might go some way to explaining the question of why JSTOR…pointing to a presentation in April by Larry Lessig in which he brought up JSTOR’s charging model for the public.

The closing quotation at the end of the article is a further example of my continued bafflement. They quote a friend of Schwartz:

“What Aaron’s case begs us to remember is that universities are supposed to be public, not-for-profit institutions,” Mr. Summers says. “They owe a standing moral debt to the public.”

This sort of statement can get me really worked up and at its simplest shows a misunderstanding of a) universities b) morals c) public and d) debt, but I will save that for another day. In short, what I still fail to see is an understanding of how much work it takes to making something actually accessible. A torrent file containing a big lump of text or pdfs is NOT accessible for soooo many reasons. This may be making something free (as in free beer) but it is not free (as in free speech).

I am so very interested in seeing more cultural heritage material freely available. It is what I have spent the last 15 years doing. I also make all of my scholarly publications freely available and have turned down offers to publish from places that either charge too much and/or won’t let me retain rights. This is a great model for freely scholarly content going forward, but it takes lots and lots of money to ‘free’ historical information. Someone has to pay for this work.

The Economics of Access

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The arrest of Aaron Schwarz recently for downloading 4.5 million articles from JSTOR has revived discussions about whether online full text subscription databases like JSTOR ‘should’ be acting as gatekeepers to our cultural heritage. Most of the discussion, though, seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what JSTOR and other such services do (note I call them services, not collections or content providers), and by association, call into question the role of libraries.

First common argument: Isn’t it ridiculous that JSTOR charges $12 for a download of a single article to users who don’t have access to a subscription?

Answer: Yes! This is a fundamental failure on the part of JSTOR to update their pricing model. They would sell far more than enough articles if they a) used the Apple $.99 download model and b) diversified their distribution model to take into account the other places people now get ePubs.

Second common argument: But JSTOR is selling access to an article that is otherwise freely available because it is in the public domain. Isn’t that crazy/immoral?

Answer: No. This is where you need to understand what JSTOR, Web of Science, Scopus, etc. do. They are services that provide access to collections. They do this by creating rich, article-level metadata and often by indexing the full text of something. Lots of old books that are in the public domain have been digitized by Google. Hundreds of thousands of scholars, though, still find Early English Books Online (a subscription database) to be useful. Why? Because it is useful to have accurately described books that have painstakingly hand-corrected text. You can find things. And someone has to pay to keep all those people that do the hard work of describing things employed.

What we now consider big content providers–Wiley, ProQuest, Ebsco, etc.–came from a world of indexing services. No one thought it was crazy to pay LexisNexis for their news or law research services, even though you could acquire the content for less elsewhere. You used LexisNexis because it allowed you to find the content in a fraction of the time you could have otherwise.

And this is where this becomes an interesting argument about libraries. Are libraries storehouses of content, or are they places that help you find things? They aren’t doing any good as the former if they aren’t doing the latter.

 

 

 

 

Gene Smith, librarian

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Gene Smith revolutionized his discipline–Tibetan Studies–twice. If we’re honest with ourselves most people can’t say that they’ve done it once, let alone twice.

In the 1960′s Smith–a Mormon from Utah–was charged by his teacher, exiled monk Deshung Rinpoche with helping to save the written Tibetan corpus. He spent nearly 20 years collecting often rare and valuable texts from exiled lamas and scholars. By 1985 he had a collection of over 12,000 volumes.

It’s easy to romanticize and even mythologize Smith’s life and activities (and in fact a movie is being made about his life http://www.digitaldharma.com/). What interests me the most, though, is Smith’s work as a librarian. From 1968 to 1985, he worked the New Delhi office of the Library of Congress. It was here that Smith found a creative way of distributing the texts he was amassing — Public Law 480 (PL 480, aka the Food for Peace programme). The programme allowed him to purchase Tibetan books and to print copies which were then shipped to research institutions in the United States. By building great research collections in the West, Leonard van der Kuijp, professor of Tibetan studies at Harvard, credits Smith with having “single-handedly put Tibetan studies on the map…”

Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, the abbot of Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery (center) receiving a Mac Mini computer containing eight thousand texts from Gene Smith (right). He lifts it to his head and recites a blessing. (©Lunchbox Communications)

In 2008, I had the great fortune of spending an afternoon with Gene, interviewing him about why he decided to digitize his collections through the TBRC. His motives were clear–he was passionate about facilitating access to these texts, not just collecting them. His means were sometimes controversial: in order to sustain the program, he relies on selling to subscriptions to those who can afford it, in order to give the digital texts to those who can’t.

Digitization is pretty common these days in most academic libraries, and so I asked him why he didn’t continue to work with a library when he wanted to digitize the collection. The most surprising moment of the interview (and in fact of all my fieldwork) came when Gene said, rather emphatically, that he simply could not be doing what he was doing in an academic library. This statement gave me a lot to think about. In fact, it formed the central question for my work for the next several years. How could someone whose work seems so perfectly aligned with the core activities of librarianship, feel that he couldn’t get this work done in a library.

Abundance of X Leads to Trivialisation of Y

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In 2007 I participated in a workshop about the future of journalism. I was interested in the parallels between the state of journalism/ists and the state of libraries/ians. Both were showing signs of panic about the ‘democratising’ of their profession. With the rise of citizen journalism is there any need for professional journalists? With increasingly easy access to information is there any need for librarians?

This idea–that an abundance of something may be leading to the trivialisation of the professions associated with that something–seems to be spreading. A new post on the Neiman Foundation’s blog asks the same about photograph/ers.

At what point do we need to have a more general question about the relationship between abundance and trivialisation? If we generalise the discussion a bit more can we not look back to some of the great work that has come before about this?

 

 

Librarians and Serendipity

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A couple of interesting ideas have converged this week and I think they are worth looking at together. First Seth Godin set of a firestorm amongst librarians, when he wrote about the future of libraries (and librarianship):

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture.

It is really an excellent post and highlights a lot of what I have been saying for a while about libraries being spaces for learning and creation, and not repositories of content.

A recent post by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen interpreted Godin’s post and some other recent writings on the subject as a problem of tying the librarian too closely with the library.

Librarians have a lot to offer, but as long as they are tied to libraries, the calculation will continue to be:

  • book warehouse shrinks > need fewer librarians

I think there is danger in taking this approach. I think there is a lot of hope for libraries in the future, just not as books warehouses. The danger is that as libraries recreate themselves back into something more interesting than book warehouses, librarians will miss out on participating in that creation.

The problem isn’t about linking librarians with libraries, it is in linking libraries with books–or any content for that matter. This obsession with the library as warehouse is really just a blip in the long life of libraries–one that has otherwise been centred on libraries as active spaces for knowledge creation. If we go back to that model, it doesn’t matter if libraries are filled with books and manuscripts or iPads and Kindles, what matters is that libraries are filled with people. And the role of the librarian is to promote serendipity…to act as provocateur…to re-shuffle the shelves and to curate collections in ways that make people think.

As Ethan Zuckerman recently pointed out, people are going to be longing for serendipity. The library is one place (virtual or digital) that may be able to provide it. The lingering question is whether librarians will have the toolset to run these spaces.

 

Activating Prayers

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I am very pleased to have an article in the most recent issue of Glimpse Journal, all about text. The article was informed by my recent research on the use of digitization in the Tibetan diaspora. I had been studying the impact of digitization on the scholars of Tibetan and Himalayan studies, but found a fascinating side-theme about the use of technology to replicate prayers and sacred texts within the community.