The FutureTech for Libraries Symposium, which I attended on Friday, June 13th, was held at the College of New Jersey on June 13. , There were eight presentations, each dealing with technologies in libraries and technology adoption into academic libraries.
The keynote speaker was Steven Bell, Associate Director for Research and Instruction at Temple University, a main writer for ACRLog http://acrlog.org, the blog for academic and research librarians, and for Designing Better Libraries http://dbl.lishost.org/blog/, a founder of Blended Librarian Community, and the author of Academic Librarianship by Design (see our Reference Collection Z682.4.C63 B4 2007). To my mind he’s one of the most eloquent, knowledgeable and hardworking advocate for new and emerging technologies in libraries. I have been trying to keep up with his ideas and articles since my first year in library school. The theme of Steven’s presentation was: “Why are we doing this? Designing Future Technology Adoption into the Business of Libraries”
Is it enough to just offer our students information? Maybe not. According to Sohrab Vossoughi, whose article “It’s All About Experience” influenced Steven Bell’s ideas “companies that try to create holistic experiences by emotionally engaging their consumers are flourishing.” Experience innovation is “the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company’s DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market. “
The emotional part of students’ experience is key to a successful library. When we go to Sturbucks and buy overpriced coffee, we don’t just buy the coffee, we buy the experience. The environment, the people, the music, the design — all these elements comprise the overall experience. But in order for our library users to have a good relationship with us, they first have to have a good relationship with the products that we offer.
In “It’s All About the Experience” post on Designing Better Libraries blog, Steven writes: “While we have more products than the OPAC or databases, those are high exposure products for libraries; users frequently come in contact with them. If our users’ experiences with those interfaces and the results they get shapes their relationship with us, we could be in real trouble. All the more reason for librarians to work harder at developing personal relationships with community members. Knowing our technology is good; knowing who we are and how we can use our technology to create relationships with our users is even better.”
It’s not enough to conduct surveys and organize focus groups. We have to observe individual students on the daily basis and see what we can do to design their experience in such a way that it would make them want to come to the library even if their papers are not due the next day.
The rest of the symposium was presented in Pecha Kucha format. Pecha Kucha is a presentation format originally designed by two American designers/architects in Tokyo, Japan, in 2003. ”The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20×20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up. Each event usually has 14 presenters. Presenters (and much of the audience) are usually from the design, architecture, art and creative fields, but recently it has also stretched over to the business world.” (Wikipedia). Read more about Pecha Kucha…
Each presentation featured two presenters, Pro and Skeptic, who only had 6 minutes and 40 seconds to make their case. Below are some of the pros and cons.
Open Source Tools for Libraries
Pros: Open source software is typically created and maintained by developers crossing institutional and national boundaries, collaborating by using internet-based communications and development tools. Applications and source code (the programming instructions written to create the applications) are free to use and modify. Successful applications tend to be developed more quickly and with better responsiveness to the needs of users who can readily use and evaluate open source applications because they are free.
Cons: No technical support. Constant rewriting because it’s fun. Cool stuff gets done, boring stuff doesn’t. Bugs don’t often get fixed.
Video Production and Marketing
Pros: Videos are a great way to promote the library and offer library instruction. Today’s popular culture is a visual culture and we should adjust to the students’ way of learning. The videos are fairly easy to make (provided the right software is available) and can be uploaded to YouTube or streamed from the library server (more complicated, but very doable).
Cons: YouTube Videos are limited to 10 minutes and 1024 mb. They have to be really well produced and edited to hold the students’ attention. Some of them work too hard to attract attention and forget about the intended content.
Gaming in Libraries
Pros: Games are highly interactive and teach basic reading and critical thinking skills. The presenter was well versed in various video games and took the view that in 10 years gaming will be a major avenue for learning.
Cons: Fun and games is not always the best way to learn. Having video game contests in the library to attract students is one thing but using video games to teach and learn is anti-learning and should not be allowed in higher education institutions.
Virtual Reference
Pros: Often students are shy to talk to the reference librarian (especially foreign students or the students whose native language is not English) or not sure what they want to ask him/her. Since writing is the mirror of the mind, they can formulate their questions properly in the process of communicating with the librarian (provided he/she patient and discerning enough). One doesn’t have to be off campus to use virtual reference. Students often IM the librarian on duty while sitting ten feet away from her. It’s easer for many students to communicate by typing rather than by speaking.
Cons: Many students prefer to have a face-to-face interaction with a librarian. Visual signs and body languages cues are absent in virtual reference. Students tend to use SMS abbreviations while typing and aren’t always capable of explaining themselves fully or communicating with the librarian. Difficult to conduct a reference interview while exchanging short sentences. Librarians tend to help the students at the reference desk first before they work on the online questions.
E-Books and Digital Library
Pros: The new e-book readers (Kindle, from Amazon.com, for example) are light and can easily contain several books, so you don’t have to pack a “book suitcase” for your flight to Hong Kong. You can search the text, jump from page to page, reference names, look up the words in a dictionary and thesaurus, etc. Reading books on a desktop computer is just as easy. And E-BOOKS DON’T KILL TREES!
Cons: Who can look at an electronic screen for too long? Do you know anyone who actually read a novel or a large book of non-fiction online? E-books are not cheap and e-book readers are still pretty expensive. When you download an e-book, you don’t own it and can’t share it with a friend or give your copy to someone as a birthday present. We don’t yet know how staring at an electronic screen for too long affects our health.
Federated Search Tools
Pros: Federated searching is also knows as “metasearching” or “cross-database searching”. When researching a subject, you’re able to do a single search, including subscription databases, Internet search engines, and electronic publications, instead of doing multiple searches across different sources and deleting duplicates. It simplifies navigation and research for the novice user.
Cons: A federated search is quick and broad, lacking preciseness and depth. Many results are duplicated.
Library 2.0 Social Networking
Pros: Social Networking sites are the rage among students and faculty. Sites like del.icio.su, Flickr, Facebook, My Space, etc. Linking, connecting, sharing, learning. The sites create communities and encourage social interaction. They are free and very user friendly. Every library should have a link to a few social networking sites.
Cons: Social Networking is a waste of time. They’re nothing but toys that keep tabs on what your friends are doing, publishing their thoughts as if they were scholars and scientists. The only social interaction worth encouraging and supporting is face-to-face interaction, also known as “human interaction”. Computers and the Internet are important and useful tools, but let’s not turn our lives over to them!
Second Life in Libraries
Pros: Second Life, created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, is a persistent online world: a 3-D virtual continent where 10% of its 3.7 million account holder citizens log on daily as avatars to socialize, attend classes and events, learn, build and create. Since Second Life is becoming more and more popular, the island is a great place to advertise your library and promote library services. Plus it’s fun.
Cons: There is a steep learning curve and the design is patchy and not always user-friendly. It’s more difficult to insure that students take their work seriously. It’s fun to see yourself being represented by a green-skinned avatar, but it’s of no use to libraries and library communities. Unless you have lots of spare time to burn, stay away.
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Google is a behemoth. It’s got the biggest text and image database, and is expanding its tentacles to various media and resources. It is also the most popular Web search engine on earth. However, it’s not the only search engine. There are others, like Yahoo (http://search.yahoo.com) and Ask.com (http://www.ask.com) that are definitely worth checking out. But hardly anyone mentions EXALEAD (http://www.exalead.com). It’s a newer search engine from France that uses its own algorithm structure and provides snapshots of websites. Its database is smaller than Yahoo!’s, Google’s or Ask.com’s, but it’s a lot more fun to search. It supports full Boolean as well as truncation (asterisk * symbol), something that the bigger search engines do not support.
Below is a blog post by Phil Bradley, a librarian and information specialist from the UK on the virtues of Exalead (http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2008/03/10-reasons-why.htmlhttp://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2008/03/10-reasons-why.html.
Back in September 2006 my colleague, the Librarian in Black wrote an excellent article entitled
Ten Reasons Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google Given the recent news about Ask, I thought I’d revisit this idea only this time I’m going to focus on
Exalead. My apologies in advance to Sarah for basing some of the following on her original work.
1. Exalead has excellent functionality when it comes to focusing down on a search. The ‘narrow your search’ option lets users limit/exclude terms, blogs, forum, multimedia, languages (and it gives you an indication which languages are important with respect to a search term). There’s a directory function, at least 8 different ways to limit by file type (again with a percentage figure for the number of results you’ll get) and a really good geographic location option which includes both countries and importantly entire regions. There’s also a very helpful little ‘search within results’ box too.
2. Like Ask, Exalead clearly indicates what links are sponsored, but unlike Ask I don’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of advertising I’m faced with.
3. Image search is excellent – not just for the number and relevancy of the images, but the sheer range of options to narrow searches – by size, content, wallpapers, colour, layout and file types. I would like more in the way of related terms as well, but that’s a minor point.
4. The preview option allows me to view the page directly from the Exalead screen. Importantly this is a large preview – no peering at a tiny image on the screen – it’s certainly clear enough to view perfectly easily. To be fair, Ask has done some work in this area recently and their statistics function is excellent (both being better than Google’s offering which doesn’t exist). In fact, I have three different presentation options with Exalead – text only, text and images or text, images and other information.
5. View recent results. There are times when I don’t want the old information – I just want the new stuff. A single click gets that to me without any fuss. In fact, this functionality is excellent since I can narrow down even further (by using the advanced search screen options) to very precise specific date ranges.
6. Video search is also good, and once again I can narrow by source or length. Importantly I can resort my results by relevance, most recent, oldest, most rated, viewed etc. Why is this an area that so many search engines ignore? We’d all get on a lot better if they spent a bit of time working out ways that searchers could simply reorder the information that they are presented with; so much more attractive than some of the social search engines that are around these days.
7. Exalead allows users to create their own set of shortcuts which appear on the home page. It’s a useful feature and a good way to bring certain sites to the attention of users.
8. There’s a good feedback option. This in and of itself doesn’t mean a great deal, but what it does do is to illustrate that they are a company that listens to their users and addresses their concerns, rather than shutting up shop on librarians when they bored listening to them. These people actually want to do something different. Their blog is also worth reading, with interesting things in it.
9. It’s European. Again, no particular reason why this should appeal to librarians (especially not American ones!), but it’s nice to see an alternative to Silicon Valley.
10. The advanced search functionality. I’ve left this until last because it’s the most important. You can run phonetic searches, proximity searches, specific language searches (and boy! do these people have a lot of alternatives), a title search, link searches, search by date, a prefix search, site search, exact words or phrases, optional terms, proper Boolean logic with parentheses as well, and regular expressions for things like character repetition, ‘or’ options, single character options and so on. The example they give is /mpg(1|2|3)?/ which is very neat.
It’s a search engine for people who like to use search engines, and it’s an engine for librarians. If you’ve not used it, I’d strongly recommend giving it a whirl next ‘Google free Wednesday’.
This is a link to a review of Exalead on a fun site called “Search Engine Showdown”, maintained by Greg Notess, a fellow academic librarian from Montana. http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/exalead/review.html
A.K.
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Just a mere mentioning of Wikipedia sends shudders through academia and makes responsible librarians wince, if not vomit. We have good reasons to be suspicious of the free, online encyclopedia: anyone can edit the entries; some, if not most, entries are unverified; anyone can write anything before someone decides to change it… or not.But being suspicious of Wikipedia is like being suspicious of the World Wide Web, social networking, web logs, etc. Wikipedia is not going away and we had better make friends with it, or we’ll have to join the horseshoe makers/vinyl record collectors guild, drink lemonade and reminisce about the good old times.So, instead of turning students away from Wikipedia, how about we use it as a starting off point, a springboard to other (verified) information sources? Here’s an example:
Library Science. There is lot of information on library, librarianship, and librarians. Let’s assume that none of it is correct. At that end of the page there are links to books, reputable websites, and other authenticated sources that would be of great value to students doing research on “library science”. We just have to teach them how to evaluate information on the web. It may not be easy, but getting angry at Wikipedia or the people who use it is of little value at this point.
Here’s an interesting article from Associated Press.
Wikipedia, Britannica: A Toss-Up
Associated Press 
12.15.05 | 7:53 AM
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.
The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries.
Two weeks ago prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.
Such errors appear to be the exception rather than the rule, Nature said in Wednesday’s article, which the scientific journal said was the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia to Britannica. Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.
Of eight “serious errors” the reviewers found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source, the journal reported.
“We’re very pleased with the results and we’re hoping it will focus people’s attention on the overall level of our work, which is pretty good,” said Jimmy Wales, who founded St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Wikipedia in 2001.
Wales said the accuracy of his project varies by topic, with strong suits including pop culture and contemporary technology. That’s because Wikipedia’s stable of dedicated volunteers tend to have more collective expertise in such areas, he said.
The site tends to lag when it comes to topics touching on the humanities, such as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for a particular year, Wales said.
Next month, Wikipedia plans to begin testing a new mechanism for reviewing the accuracy of its articles. The group also is working on ways to make its review process easier to use by people who have less familiarity with computers and the Internet.
Encyclopedia Britannica officials declined to comment on the findings because they haven’t seen the data. But spokesman Tom Panelas said such comparisons, assuming they’re conducted correctly, are valuable “because they tell us things you wouldn’t know otherwise.”
While some Britannica officials have publicly criticized Wikipedia’s quality in the past, Panelas praised the free service for having the speed and breadth to keep up on topics such as “extreme ironing.” The sport, in which competitors iron clothing in remote locations, is not covered in Britannica.
Britannica researchers plan to review the Nature study and correct any errors discovered, Panelas said.
Unlike Britannica, which charges for its content and pays a staff of experts to research and write its articles, Wikipedia gives away its content for free and allows anyone — amateur or professional, expert or novice — to submit and edit entries.
Wikipedia, which boasts 3.7 million articles in 200 languages, is the 37th most visited Web site on the Internet, according to the research service Alexa
This article is from Ars Technica.
By Nate Anderson | Published: November 27, 2007 – 11:58PM CT
Banning books has a long and storied history, but it’s not nearly as much fun as burning them in midnight bonfires. (Wikipedia knows all about this.) With so much text moving online, though, burning has lost much of its practicality. Have you ever tried to burn a server? Not very exciting.
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Banning, though, is very much alive, and Wikipedia knows about it too, but for different reasons. The online encyclopedia has been on the receiving end of many a ban hammer; China isn’t too thrilled about the service or its penchant for hosting articles on troublesome topics like Tiananmen Square, and the Dutch Justice Ministry wants its 30,000 employees to stop making Wikipedia edits from government computers. But educators, well, they love it. Right?
Not all of them. Earlier this month, Pennsylvania’s Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own “Just Say No to Wikipedia” signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia’s unverified accuracy and ease of use are making it too tempting for students to use as a primary source.
Wikipedia officials certainly don’t dispute that characterization and have never held the site up as a tool for academic work, except as a jumping-off point. But the New Jersey response is interesting in that it represents an extreme response to the problem.
Perhaps it’s a necessary one, though. I checked in with my wife, a college professor who assigns plenty of papers to her students. Despite an unceasing stream of comments about how Wikipedia cannot be used as a scholarly source, students without fail will use it every semester and cite it in their work, even in upper-level classes. The site is just so easy to use that the temptation to do so can be overwhelming… especially when it’s 1 AM and the library has closed.
These are bright kids, and they’re in college. Middle-school and high-school students may need even more “encouragement” to avoid sources like Wikipedia.
Turning Wikipedia into a learning opportunity
But banning may not be the best way to do that. The issue goes beyond Wikipedia and concerns over accuracy, for one thing. Britannica isn’t a viable source for most high school or collegiate work, either; should we ban it for students’ own good? And what about textbooks? They offer an introduction to new ideas but are rarely appropriate sources for academic papers; indeed, their best use in such cases is as a jumping-off point.
Besides, Wikipedia is easily available from home and personal computers, so maybe what’s needed is more “source literacy” and media education instead. Banning Wikipedia also gives it the sweet scent of forbidden fruit as well, and it invites the same sort of circumvention techniques that students have used to get around MySpace blocks.
Denise Gonzalez-Walker, writing yesterday on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s education blog, argued for making Wikipedia a learning opportunity. “It’s a shame that the teachers and librarians quoted in the article didn’t take advantage of the situation—finding inaccurate information on Wikipedia—by having their students revise the Wikipedia site with their own research, or engage in broader discussions about how authority and truth will be staked out in new media,” she said.
It’s a great idea, but are students in places like the Warren Hills Regional School District really going to fact-check every stat they dig up from Wikipedia? And if they do so, why use Wikipedia at all?
Still, teaching kids how to critically analyze information sources is an increasingly valuable skill in an information economy. If teachers want to use Wikipedia as a way to talk about this, more power to them.
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Of all the breakout sessions I signed up for at the Ex Libris Mid Atlantic User Group’s conference, which I attended on Tuesday, October 30th, there was only one worth writing about: E-book and the Academic Library. The session was conducted in a form of a panel, and the three presenters (E-service librarians from Ithaca College and Cornell University, and a cataloger from Columbia University) made it clear from the outset that because e-books and O-books are still in their nascent stages, there is a lot of concern regarding such issues as maintenance, licensing, download space, general copyright, preservation, and pricing. However, all three were very enthusiastic about the future of e and o books, and believed that the faster academic libraries adopt to the electronic book market, the easier it will be to manage digital collections in the future.
Main points and highlights:
What is the difference between an E-book and an O-book? An e-book is a digitized version of a print book, usually in PDF format. An o-book is a more interactive and experimental model that abstracts the idea of a book and allows the reader to participate in the book’s creation.
But even though an e-book is a digitized print book, once it’s digitized it is no longer a “book”. It is a database and one has to learn how to manipulate the data.
Most e-books have to be bought in bulk. Several years ago, Ithaca college purchased licenses to 40, 000 titles in ebrary for around $15,000. Now the annual fee is around $12,000. Below is some info about ebrary:
“ebrary® has been serving the global library market since 1999, and we currently have more than 1,000 customers around the world, representing more than 6.8 million patrons.
Based on feedback from the library community, we have developed a single eContent platform that addresses a number of needs. Libraries may use the ebrary platform to acquire authoritative content from leading publishers under their choice of payment and access models, and they may distribute their own PDF content online.
All documents in the ebrary platform can be cross-referenced, are full-text searchable, and integrate with other digital resources in the library and on the web through the ebrary Reader™ and InfoTools™ software.” (http://www.ebrary.com/corp/about.jsp)
Karin Wikoff, the electronic services librarian at Ithaca College Library, said that the purchase was worth every penny. The faculty and the students love ebooks,
and they don’t take up any space.
Most of the e-books are REFERENCE BOOKS. No one wants to read novels from cover to cover online. But when it comes to ready reference, ebooks are much more convenient than print books because they’re similar to electronic journals and databases. The books contain in-text hyperlinks that allow to jump from one part of the book to another in a matter of seconds. In order to read the books a special compiler software (READER) has to be purchased by the library. The reader provides a single interface for all the titles.
Perpetual access vs. Perpetual ownership.
The former refers to the titles parked on the publisher’s site, the access to which the library pays for annually. The latter, to the titles the library purchases from an e-publisher and puts on its website or database.
Most of the time, however, the publishers want the library to have perpetual access. The are several advantages to this: no overhead cost, the ease of cataloging, and 24/7 technical support. But there’s one big disadvantage. Last year a publisher decided to 86 a title that Ithaca College Library had purchased access to. A professor assigned the title to his class of 140 students. In the middle of the semester the syllabus had to be rewritten and the students had become familiar with another textbook.
Pros and Cons
Multiple users can read an e-book simultaneously.
An e-book doesn’t take up space.
An e-book is easy to use.
Preservation over time? Unclear.
Access and licensing may be a problem.
Copyright issues.
Titles have to be bought in bulk.
Useful links:
http://www.obook.org/what.php
http://www.against-the-grain.com/ATG_AnaEbook.html
A.K.
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Ever heard of the Contact Zone? A linguistic, philosophical, and social hybrid, the Contact Zone, according to Marry Louise Pratt, who presented a paper titled “Arts of the Contact Zone” at the 1991 MLA conference, “is a social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other”. The presentation barely made a ripple in the academic world… until reference librarians got a hold of it, albeit fourteen years later, and turned the ripple into a tsunami. The reference desk, naturally, is the ultimate CONTACT ZONE.
The latest ACRLog post, written by the ubiquitous Steven Bell, promotes the editorial written by Bill Miller and published in Reference Librarian, Vol.47, No.2, 2007.
Reference librarians dealing with a diverse student body need to be very aware that they are operating in a contact zone in which many library users have fundamentally different assumptions from our own about what is valuable and important…our imagined community in which every student is assumed to be a fledgling scholar who would naturally want to practice research…is truly more imagined than real. If one views young people as coming from an entirely different culture, things start to make more sense (Miller, 2007)
Barbara Fister, who commented on Bell’s post, provided a link to a terrific article written by James Elmborg and published in 2005 in Reference & User Services Quarterly. The article is titled: Libraries in the Contact Zone: On the Creation of Educational Space.
Here’s an exceprt:
While libraries have always managed space for aesthetic and functional reasons, little consideration has gone into the ethical or pedagogical dimensions of the way libraries create and manage space. The contact zone is a metaphorical space, or rather, it is a way of conceiving the nature of shared educational space. When one enters the contact zone, one enters a kind of space that recognizes culture, language, and individual identity. Recognizing difference initiates a process of translation across boundaries for both students and academics. Students’ research questions arise from this rich mix. For authority figures, awareness of the contact zone brings increased consciousness of the way power is deployed and of the ethical demands of that power. As librarians continue to conceive of themselves as teachers and of their libraries as classrooms, it becomes increasingly important that they bring their management of the library as pedagogical space into alignment with the values of information literacy. Teaching brings new dimensions to librarianship. They do more than provide information. They challenge learners’ assumptions, and they set academic standards. They encourage learning and they challenge lazy thinking. All these activities are appropriate at the reference desk and in the information-literacy classroom, but they require an awareness of the contact zone and knowledge about effective and constructive ways of working there (Elmborg, 2005).
Click Here to read the entire article.
a.k.
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Dispatches from the Virtual Battlefield
On 8/16 I participated in a webinar sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center. Although the web presentation concentrated on the annual academic copyright license, most participants (myself included) asked questions about general copyright law and fair use.
Below are the main points:
Content users: More than 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities; more than 9,000 corporations. Copyright holders: Thousands of publishers; hundreds of thousands of authors and creators.
An annual license permits the reuse of text-based content at colleges and universities. E.g. classroom handouts, electronic content, library reserve, e-mail.
Features: Single, comprehensive license that reduces the need for pay-per-use permissions. Extends to the students traveling abroad.
Covers course materials produced by off-campus copy shops, bookstores, etc.
Benefits: Comprehensive, institution-wide coverage. Fosters respect for intellectual property.
Exclusions: Interlibrary loan and commercial document delivery transactions; non-educational use; reproduction of the entire work.
The Form: (www.copyright.com/aclacademic)
Required information: Publication Title, Number of Pages reproduced, Course name and enrollment.
License Pricing: Based on Carnegie Classification and Full time equivalent students (FTE). Price per student drops as FTE increases.
My question was “If we’re creating an online instruction tutorial for our library, can we use links to other libraries or websites found on the free Web(or use parts of information from other people’s tutorials found on the free Web, followed by the name of the creator or institution, and a link to their website)?
The answer was “yes”. But to be safe, we should contact the institutions or creators to whose websites we plan to have a link, and request their permission. The librarians I contacted to ask permission were surprised. Their response was “If it’s on the Web, it’s free for anyone to use. But we’re flattered you contacted us.”
a.k.
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A professor at Boston College gives up on textbooks and turns to wikis.”My wiki is my textbook now,” says Gerald Kane, an Assistant Professor of Information Systems. “This platform is infinitely better and gets better information from a variety of sources. It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated. [The use of] textbooks will begin to fade … and these more collaborative-based, environment will probably rise to the surface.
More…
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In a controversial article published two years ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Deborah A. Carver argues that tenure doesn’t mix well with librarianship. It would be interesting to hear everyone’s opinion on this one.
Should Librarians Get Tenure? No, It Can Hamper Their Roles
By DEBORAH A. CARVERMany of the arguments made on behalf of giving tenure to librarians are, in fact, arguments for academic status. I have no objections to academic status for librarians, which usually means they are more involved in their institution’s governance, more inclined to participate in core academic activities like curriculum reform and course development, and more engaged in professional development.However, those benefits can exist without librarians’ earning tenure. The issue of tenure should therefore be considered separately. To explore it, one needs to ask two questions: First, why does tenure exist? And second, do the reasons for its existence apply to librarians?Tenure exists to protect the expression of ideas and opinions from political pressure inside and outside the institution. It allows scholars to explore controversial issues and to present unpopular perspectives in the classroom. Perhaps most important, tenure exists to support and protect the pursuit of diverse and specialized areas of research.Universities create knowledge. Unlike the fabrication of a market commodity, the creation of knowledge requires nurturing, patience, and the highest tolerance for experimentation, and tenure helps create those favorable conditions. All new knowledge, no matter how specialized, is valuable to society: Professors who spend their careers investigating the religious rites of ancient civilizations contribute to our understanding of the world, just like professors who devote themselves to finding cures for diseases.But even people inside academe acknowledge that tenure can have negative consequences. The unparalleled job security that it provides can be exploited, and often is. Only a tiny percentage of faculty members have their tenure revoked, and post-tenure review processes are not known for their rigor. But tenure for teaching and research faculty members has survived despite its flaws because, in the balance, tenure fosters the high level of creativity and independence that is essential to the mission of higher education.Inertia also plays a role. In part, tenure continues to exist because it has been in force for so many years. The opportunity to apply for tenure has become a standard expectation of teaching faculty members. With nearly all colleges and universities offering tenure-track positions, it would be very difficult for an institution to recruit the best and brightest without giving tenure.Those reasons for tenure do not apply to librarians. One of the most basic principles of our profession is that we collect and preserve the broadest possible range of scholarship, opinions, and ideas. The American Library Association’s “Library Bill of Rights” specifies that “materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.” If we are doing our jobs, we are building collections that, in the words of the ALA’s “Freedom to Read Statement,” represent “the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.” A corollary is that librarians are also expected to maintain neutrality with respect to political, moral, or aesthetic views.Because we work under that different set of expectations, librarians do not need the academic-freedom protection that faculty members get through tenure. Our role is to collect material espousing a range of perspectives. Professors’ work, on the other hand, may well include communicating or even endorsing one particular controversial view.Librarians do not need tenure in our role as teachers, either. Although many academic librarians teach courses, in the classroom we usually focus on research methods and information literacy. We teach technique more than content, and technique is seldom, if ever, controversial.A few librarians engage in original research, but that is not the norm. We function as knowledge providers, not knowledge creators. Therefore, we do not need tenure to protect the pursuit of highly specialized research interests.Some colleges and universities do offer tenure to librarians, but it is certainly not the norm that it is for faculty members, and its absence does not make an institution less appealing to prospective employees. According to a recent survey by the Association of College and Research Libraries, fewer than half of baccalaureate institutions give librarians tenure. In fact, the pressure associated with achieving tenure could actually discourage some applicants.Librarians are in the service business. Some teach courses, and some do research, but those are not our primary activities. Most of us work year-round, which leaves little time to do original research. As a consequence, the tenure bar for librarians is often set lower than it is for other faculty members. But even in those cases, tenure expectations can mean less attention to our core responsibilities of providing services to library users.When librarians argue for tenure, they often focus on the privileges: the opportunity to build closer relationships with faculty members, the right to “sit at the table” in matters relating to the governance of their institution, and salary equity. But those opportunities can and do exist at universities that do not give librarians tenure. In addition, lowering the tenure bar for librarians might well result in resentment from other faculty members, rather than in closer relationships with them.Within academe, libraries are at the forefront of rapid and unprecedented change. Administrators need the flexibility to respond to and direct change, which means encouraging librarians to rethink their responsibilities and roles. The tenure process could hamper that flexibility because librarians with tenure do not have the same incentives to adapt to change.Tenure for librarians is not necessary. It provides few benefits beyond job security for the individual and may work against the library’s best interests.
Deborah A. Carver is university librarian at the University of Oregon.
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This is an article from World Wide Words (www.worldwidewords.org) on double possessive (it’s also called post-genitive). Double possessive has been around since the fifteenth century, and is widely accepted. It’s extremely helpful, for instance, in distinguishing between “a picture of my father” (in which we see the old man) and “a picture of my father’s” (which he owns). Native speakers will note how much more natural it is to say “He’s a fan of hers” than “he’s a fan of her.”
DOUBLE POSSESSIVE
[Q] From Frances Pack: “You recently wrote ‘a friend of Pope’s’. What? Do I not remember correctly that Pope’s is already possessive — so the use of of before it makes a double possessive? That was drummed into my ears when I was a freshman in high school in Latin I class. Curious — because I sometimes slip and write it that way — then have to go back and “correct” it. Is this no longer the rule?”
[A] It never was. You’ve been led into a misunderstanding, as some grammarians of the eighteenth century were, by trying to apply the rules of Latin to English, where they don’t fit. It must be said that disputes about it are unrelated to effective communication, since nobody would ever fail to understand “a friend of Pope’s”.
You can immediately see that the construction is valid in English by replacing the noun with a pronoun. You wouldn’t say or write “a friend of you” or “a friend of me” — that is, not if you wanted to be thought capable of composing acceptable standard English. If “a friend of mine” is good English, why not “a friend of Pope’s”?
The technical name for this construction is double genitive or double possessive (it has also been called the appositional of-phrase, and the post-genitive). It’s of great age — examples are to be found in writings of the fourteenth century; by the eighteenth century it was common and unremarkable. This instance, picked pretty much at random but showing both forms of the idiom, is from Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield: “An aunt of my father’s, and consequently a great-aunt of mine, of whom I shall have more to relate by and by, was the principal magnate of our family.”
In particular, grammarians say a double possessive is essential to avoid giving the wrong meaning when a word indicating ownership is placed after of, as “a bone of the dog’s”. The extra possessive is required because “a bone of the dog” means, not a bone in the possession of the dog, but one inside the dog. “A picture of Jane” means an image of Jane, whereas “a picture of Jane’s” is a picture of any sort that happens to be owned by Jane.
But there are some limitations. The phrase has to be indefinite — “a friend of Pope’s” is OK, but if I meant a particular one I would have had to write “the friend of Pope” or “Pope’s friend”; also, “a friend of ours” is idiomatic, but not “the friends of ours”, which would have to recast as “our friends”. And the second noun must be human, or at least animate, and also definite — so you can’t say “a friend of the British Library’s” or “a lover of the furniture’s”.
What’s fascinating about all this, and one reason why I’ve gone into so much detail, is that the rules are precise and strict and are understood and followed by every speaker of idiomatic English, even though they’re not usually taught in school. Fluent speakers don’t know they know them and couldn’t explain them, say to someone learning the language, but they know immediately when they’ve been broken. Native speakers pick up the rules for using such idioms by example and experience and only suffer confusion when these real-life rules conflict with the ones that grammarians of an earlier period would have had us believe were correct.
If you feel these rules to be arbitrary and unreasonable, the only response I can make is that it’s an idiom and that’s just the way things are. Robert Burchfield says at the end of his entry on it in the Third Edition of Fowler, “It is not easy to explain why such constructions are idiomatic: one can only assert that they are.”
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