Saturday, August 22, 2015
Out of Africa:
Moments of Reflection
I am just returning from my first trip to
Africa - Cape Town, South Africa where I attended the IFLA World Library
and Information Congress. While the trip was for professional purposes,
this is a more personal reflection.
Being a baby boomer I grew up in a time in history where South Africa was a
pariah, with much of the world sanctioning South Africa in an attempt to force
change. So much anger and angst and not much change for many years and then
Nelson Mandela and FW DeKlerk managed a peaceful and transformational change
and brought South Africa back into the family of nations as a full participant.
So much of what we hear about countries and people outside of the US is
negative as the news media always focuses on the negative and seldom on what is
really happening. I confess because of this I approached this trip with a
bit of trepidation as safety was intimated as a serious issue.
However on arriving I found the people of South Africa to be warm and engaging.
They smile easily and are quick to engage in conversation. They are pleased
that you have come to their country and want you to know its charms and its
history. I walked many of the city streets in day time and evening and never
felt threatened. As with most places the majority of citizens are good
people who want the best for themselves, their family and friends, and their
country. Like most places, in every large city, there are places to be
cautious, and even places to avoid.
Visiting any of the local shops you can buy many wonderful African crafts but
you can also buy Louis Vuitton and Prada, just like in New York. You can listen
to African and European music but are also as likely to hear the latest hits
from the American and British music scene.
The Cape Town area is known for its food and wine and there are many fine
restaurants, cafes, and bakeries. I was pleased to see very few of the US
fast food shops (1 McDonalds, and 1 KFC) and not surprisingly there is
not the problem of obesity that we suffer in the US. It is also great to see
local businesses thriving. Food is plentyful and not expensive by US
standards.
Besides some good coffee (Truth coffee roasters and Mother Africa coffee) I had
a most memorable afternoon the last afternoon of my stay at the Mount Nelson
hotel for high tea. A throwback to the British colonial period of the
late 1890's, the Mount Nelson, or the "pink palace" as it is more
commonly known, hosts a high tea that the high society matrons of the time
would have recognized. Wonderful teas, served by a "tea
ambassador" along with specialty sandwiches, scones with jam and cream,
and a fabulous assortment of sweets. I spent two and half hours of quiet
reflection, enjoying the service, the immensely diverse group of people
enjoying tea, and the superb service. This was one example of how far
South Africa has come - no single racial group predominated or was excluded.
I did take the opportunity to visit Robben Island, home to the infamous Robben
Island Prison where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners spent
long years of their lives. The tours of the prison are given by former
political prisoners who attempt to give you a sense of what it was really
like. While the prison conditions may not have included all the worst tortures
that one can think of, the prison was certainly designed to break its
prisoners will.
Robben Island is in the South Atlantic and while day time temperatures can be
pleasant, a stone prison without beds, no glass in the windows, and no heat, is
cold and heartbreaking. Black prisoners were treated especially harsh because
they were only given short pants and short sleeve shirts to wear year round. No
socks, hats, or jackets were allowed though these were provided to other
prisoners. Prisoners were provided a felt sleeping mat, no pillow, and
two blankets. The mat and blankets had to be folded properly every morning to
avoid a beating. Non political prisoners slept 60 to a room, and had a
couple of toilets, with shower privileges three times a week.
I visited Nelson Mandella's cell, about 6 ft x 6ft. There was a heavily barred
window (no glass), a chair, a bucket to be used as a toilet, and the sleeping
mat and blankets. He spent 18 years in this cell before being transferred
to other prisoners for another 9 years. Every day he and the other political
prisoners were taken to the limestone quarry where they did hard labor
quarrying limestone by hand with nothing to protect them from the glare from
the limestone or the dust.
In spite of these hardships Nelson managed to write his famous book "Long
Road to Freedom" , including a second copy which he managed to get
smuggled out of the prison to a publisher. Certainly a coup as the first copy
was discovered and destroyed. Ironically despite the horrendous treatment in so
many ways, many of the prisoners were allowed to study and were provided access
to university courses, with many completing degrees by the time they were
released.
What has struck me from Nelson Mandella, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and our political
prisoner tour guide was the willingness and ability to move past the horror and
repression of the past to build a new future, one that recognized the past but
did not dwell in a wish for retribution but to move forward to a just society.
Living as I do in the whitest state in the nation, it is easy to forget that
not everyone sees the world as I do, and that not everyone looks like me. In
South Africa, I was definitely in a minority and I was struck again by what my
Hispanic children must feel at times in a predominantly white world.
Despite the overwhelming otherness I also felt welcome.
In the US (outside of Maine) you will notice that in most of the hospitality
industry (hotels, restaurants, fast food) most of the lineworkers are non-white
and the mangers are white, even in areas where whites might be a
miniortiy. In South Africa many if not most of the managers I saw were
black or brown and looked like the majority of the people. Some people
may think this is trivial but it is not. Workers of all type should be able to
aspire to and achieve top positions across the spectrum.
These type of experiences are eye opening and help us realize that we are
all human with many of the same hopes and dreams.
One other memory of Cape Town was the visit to Table Mountain via the cableway
- a 65 person cable car that gets you to the top in 4 minutes. Listed as one of
the 7 geographic wonders of the world, the mountain dominates the Cape Town
skyline. If it is clear the views are magnificent, but at other times a table
cloth of fog and cloud cover the mountain and can obscure its view.
As this was a trip for a professional library conference, you might how does
any of this relate. One of the key values of the library community is the
respect and support for diversity and providing equal access to information to
everyone. One of the values of attending the World Library and
Information Congress is getting to meet and know colleagues from around the
world and to understand the work they do and the issues they have, many of
which we don't even think of (like limited electricity). During my trip I
met librarians from South Africa, Namibia, Swaziland, Mozambique, Nigeria, as
well as from France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, and the UK. Stepping
outside the US gives you the perspective of the other and to see that other
librarians will look at similar problems and come up with a different
solution. It helps me think outside the box. It also helps build a
global network of colleagues that can be important in an increasingly global
world of scholarship. This perspective helps make me a global citizen.
Sunday,
September 21, 2014
Supporting
Research - Perspectives from the Library
A growing
part of the academic library mission is support of faculty research and
research conducted by researchers at various campus institutes or research
labs. Libraries are moving beyond the mere provision of physical and digital
research collections to build a suite of services that support the research
enterprise. A variety of basic and enhanced services need to be deployed in a
sustainable manner. Some of these will be existing services that can be
leveraged; others will need to be planned, budgeted, and staffed. The library
will build partnerships with campus IT and the Office of Research to leverage
their expertise and in some cases build shared services. The library will work
to support the complete research life cycle from idea through long-term
curation.
Services fall into six broad categories.
CITATION MANAGEMENT AND IMPACT
Citation/Bibliography Management: The library will provide basic tools to
manage citations and documents/articles relevant to the researchers work.
Common tools include - RefWorks, EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, ProQuest Flow.
Research alerts: The library can build customized research alerts based on
faculty profiles. This allows researchers to receive automatic notifications
about new research in any area they choose. This can be especially useful for
researchers in multidisciplinary/cross-disciplinary research.
Impact tools: Making an impact is critical to faculty and researchers and
measuring that impact is complex and time consuming. The library can
provide tools and training to assist researchers. The library can assist in
understanding various types of impact factors, including new and developing Alt
Metrics that is attempting to assess impact of citations in an open web
environment. The library can support new and emerging standards such as
ORCID ID which supports persistent identifiers for all of a researcher's work
(articles, books, data, etc.).
RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT
The library, in conjunction with IT, can offer and support Virtual Research
Environments. A VRE provides web-based tools to support research projects
within and across organizations, disciplines, and geographic boundaries. VREs
bring together researchers, information professionals from the library and IT
to build a robust support infrastructure for campus research. The library may
also embark on building a Research Commons, a physical space that supports
in-person collaboration and research support for data-driven research and
digital scholarship. The Research Commons is intended to bring graduate
students and faculty together to discuss their research as well as get support
for all steps of the research process from funding, to writing, to publishing,
to long-term curation.
PUBLICATION
The library can offer a variety of services to support publication of
research. The library can provide support for “open access” publication
through information on “author’s rights” as well as copyright and IP, and Creative
Commons license information. Libraries may also support Open Access
publications through funding author fees that are typical to the OA model. The
library may offer journal hosting and production capabilities for researchers
that would like to produce their own open access publications. In order to
provide long-term stewardship to the institution’s intellectual output the
library can collect, showcase, and preserve a researcher’s publications in the
institutional repository.
DATA
Many science and social science disciplines are increasingly data driven. The
library can support this by providing support in finding and using data for
quantitative and qualitative analysis. As faculty and researchers create large
and small scale data sets, the library can assist with data management plans,
organization and metadata, and long-term curation of research data. Digital
humanities offer an opportunity for the library to provide large scale textual
data for research and teaching. The library must also look to the growing
desire from researchers for data mining of existing journal content and
negotiate licenses accordingly. Large scale data visualization is another need
that many researchers have to effectively conduct their research and teaching.
Many libraries are providing data visualization studios that contain the
software and hardware for data visualization, staff expertise to help use the
technology, and space for both research and teaching.
TECHNOLOGY AND SOFTWARE
The library can provide researchers with a variety of technology and services.
Increasingly faculty and researchers are using a variety of multimedia hardware
and software in their work. The library, in partnership with campus IT, can
provide hardware, software, training, and consulting services for digital media
projects. The library can also provide high quality digitization services
(digital scanning, reformatting and capture of born digital objects). The
library and IT can also provide geographic information systems (GIS) and data
mapping software and services.
COLLECTIONS AND PEOPLE
The library provides a rich set of physical and digital collections to support
the research enterprise. InterLibrary Loan and other resource sharing networks
expand access to a global collection. Special & archival collections of
manuscripts, rare books, and other archival materials provide a rich
research collection in the humanities.
Subject Librarians can support teaching, research, and learning through their
subject expertise and expertise in locating relevant information. Available in
person, through email, phone, or chat, librarians can connect researchers to
the library's rich physical and digital collections, as well as to the global
information space.
Thursday,
March 13, 2014
Being
"OPEN" : SPARC OA and the Library Publishing Coalition
Last week I attended the SPARC Open Access
meeting and Library Publishing Forum in Kansas City. This was the 4th SPARC
conference I've attended and it is interesting to reflect on how the
conversation has changed over the past 6 years. The world has moved
from convincing people that Open Access must happen to an accepted fact, at
least in the world of science. Even Elsevier, one of the largest
science journal publishers believes that by 2020 most journals will have an
open access model.
Keynote,
Phillip Bourne, Associate Director for Data Science, National Institutes of
Health. In the scientific realm the next big advance will be in the
"open data" realm. The ability of large scale health data
that crosses interdisciplinary as well as national, international boundaries
will allow for new areas of research and significant scientific
progress. As silos are broken down, data becomes a catalyst and an
accelerator of change. He cites the new Google driverless car,
thought to be possible by 2020, but already in testing as an example of
accelerated change. The availability of mass GIS/geolocation, traffic, and
weather data, has accelerated this Google research beyond expectations.
Making a
move to large scale open data and open science is complex and will require
social and political capital as well as changes in how we reward
researchers. Some change is being driven by government, notably the
White House directive in early 2013 on making federally funded research open,
the European Union science funding mandate, and the UK open access
mandate. Other open access initiatives are driven by scholarly
societies, such as the American Heart Association, which mandates open access
for all of its publications because open science helps "accelerate
discovery”; a critically important element of heart disease research.
Erin
McKiernan, Researcher in Medical Sciences, National Institute of Public Health,
Mexico talked of the struggle to do research on cures for important tropical
diseases when most of the necessary research is behind paywalls and the
Institute has insufficient funds for access to the
literature. Despite this handicap, and her junior researcher status,
she made a public commitment to publish in only open access journals because of
the benefits this brings in advancing scientific knowledge to the whole world.
She challenged SPARC to develop a statement that junior and senior faculty
might sign as a commitment to open access publishing.
Jill Emery,
Collection Development, Portland State University, talked about the need to
rethink collections and e-resource workflows in light of open
access. As open access is poised to become the dominant model,
especially in the sciences, how does a library move from a subscription based
model of access management to curating and providing access to open access
journals in our catalogs and discovery layers? In the interim, as
Author Process Charges (APC) are the model, how does the library track APCs at
an institutional level and demand a reduction in subscription prices based on
what the institution is already paying to the publisher in APC fees.
Another
important and growing part of the open movement is Open Educational Resources
(OER).The OER movement is predominantly a system response to the exorbitant
cost of traditional textbooks. OERs typically take the form of
textbooks but may also be learning objects, or supplemental course material.
Their focus is on creating open textbook-like resources for the 40 most common
courses in the community college and university market.
Connie
Broughton, Director of eLearning and Open Education, Washington State Board for
Community and Technical Colleges, Dave Ernst, Executive Director, Open
Academics Textbook Initiative (University of Minnesota), and David Wiley,
Co-Founder and Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning, reported
on OER projects in the United States. Each of the three
projects have created 10 or more open textbooks, all faculty written, and
entirely open with the ability for anyone in the world to use. OERs
are licensed with the intent to encourage the principles of reuse, revise,
remix, and redistribute.
More than
160 librarians and publishers gathered for the first annual Library
Publishing Forum, sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition
(LPC). The LPC is a coalition of more than 50 college and university
libraries. "Based on core library values, our mission is to foster
collaboration, share knowledge and develop common practices, all in service of
publishing and distributing academic and scholarly works. Our goal is to
explore how to better serve the scholarly communication needs of the academic
community, through sustainable, innovative library publishing solutions aligned
with institutional missions." http://librarypublishing.org/
Opening
Keynote speaker, John Unsworth, Brandeis University Librarian talked about the
convergence of librarians and publishers that has occurred over the past 10 or
more years. The publishing role of librarians has grown out of the
Institutional Repository and the opportunities the IR has provided to help
faculty publish. Libraries regularly support the publishing of faculty edited
journals, student journals, and the gray literature. He noted that over the
past 10 or more years 20 university presses came to be housed in and report to
the University Libraries.
John Shere,
University North Carolina talked about a library and press partnership to
publish collections of slave narratives from Special Collections. He
noted that while some presses frowned on publishing a book from a dissertation
that was already available in open access format. UNC Press is using library
supplied data on downloads of electronic dissertations from the institutional
repository to predict which authors they should approach about creating a
monograph from their dissertation.
Tom
Hickerson, University of Calgary and Lisa Macklin, Emory University shared the
need to match library policy with both open access and publishing initiatives.
University of Calgary is leveraging approximately $200,000 annually from its
collection budget to support article processing charges for faculty authors.
Emory recently renovated part of the library to highlight their digital
publishing program by creating a digital publishing lab with staff in a
prominent area of the library and inviting students in to work on digital
publishing projects.
Paul
Royster, University of Nebraska at Lincoln Libraries, reported on Zea Books, a
library imprint that publishes approximately 10 monographs per year using the
Digital Commons platform. They concentrate on work by
researchers/scholars from Nebraska that have publishing needs that cannot be
met by traditional publishers. These are often manuscripts that university
presses don't think have sufficient market, or have too many illustrations, or
are too long. They find a home in Digital Commons, often with a print
on demand equivalent. (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zea/)
Closing
Keynote speaker, Peter Berkery, Executive Director, Association of American
University Presses also echoed the library and university press alignment and
explored the idea of complimentary and collaborative rolls that might advance
scholarly publishing. Both groups have complimentary and sometimes overlapping
skills sets and working together they could help secure a sustainable scholarly
publishing model.
Reflecting
back on the 4 days of meetings it is clear to see that the library’s role in
relationship to scholarship continues to change. Libraries have moved from
predominantly a collection and stewardship role to an active role in creation,
dissemination, partnership, and innovation role. Librarians seek and active
role in scholarship and making scholarship open and vital to their local
communities and the world at large.
Saturday,
February 8, 2014
To store or not
to store -That is the question?
In April 2013 the Colby College Libraries opened a new
purpose-built library storage facility. Built with 12ft high compact shelving
and a capacity of 500,000 plus volumes, the facility is on college property,
approximately 3/4 of a mile from the main library. 170,000 monographs and
30,000 bound journals volumes found a new home. The facility is climate
controlled, secure, and materials are retrieved twice-daily. 54% of the
collection remains in one of the three campus libraries.
Most library storage facilities are built on the
"Harvard model"; a high-density system that stores books by size and
managed with a complex inventory system. There is no way to find an item
without knowing its barcode which tells row, bin, shelf, and box number. The
automated or robotic systems are similar in their complexity and
non-browsability. These models are highly efficient from the perspective of
housing and managing a growing physical collection. The end result is that all
intellectual access to the collection is through the library catalog.
Colby chose not to implement the Harvard model because of
the high staffing level necessary to run a high-density facility and because
having a browsable collection (even if you have to stand on a ladder) was
important to a small but important cohort of faculty.
Shakespeare's Hamlet bemoans his fate with the famous
line "to be or not to be, that is the question". Like Hamlet,
libraries must seriously consider the fate of their print collections when
considering their options. From a strictly collection management perspective, a
storage facility is a moderately straightforward and sound decision. From a
faculty and student perspective, the idea of moving books to a storage facility
will range from a shrug of indifference, to mild concern, to cries of dismay
and betrayal. Each of these reactions comes from their own experiences and
emotions, the way they interact with print collections, and how their
discipline does scholarship.
Contrary to what some faculty and students say, there is
no single right answer to the long-term stewardship of print collections. The
idea of keeping a ceaselessly growing collection within the walls of the
library proper is an idea whose time has passed. College and university
administrations are unwilling or unable to fund the cost of a library addition
every 15-20 years to house collections. With 40% of academic library
collections never circulating, this argument becomes even more difficult.
Among the options that might be considered are (1) weed
the collection regularly to keep it within existing shelving capacity, (2)
install compact shelving to increase capacity, (3) rent storage space, or
(4)build a storage facility.
Weeding the collection, while practical in many ways, has
numerous political pitfalls. Weeding protocols need to be developed that match
with overall curricular needs, use patterns, and faculty needs and desires.
Weeding out superseded editions, old textbooks, and multiple copies is
relatively straightforward. Discarding materials for curricular areas that are
no longer taught are also relatively easy to defend. Faculty,
especially in smaller institutions, may react negatively to removing books,
even if much of the collection is not used. Extensive weeding of a
collection is often seen as a rejection of print in favor of digital.
Many libraries that are considering extensive weeding are
beginning to think about collective instead of individual action. Academic
libraries are moving to an era of “shared print”. Weeding has often been done
with the sense that someone in the library community would have a copy of the
book that could be borrowed. As more and more libraries are looking at
down-sizing print collections it is important for the library community to
think about this in a collective way and to effectively plan to provide
long-term stewardship and protect the scholarly record.
Compact shelving is a reasonable option provided the
library building has the floor loading capacity necessary to hold the greatly
increased pounds per square foot that happens when compact shelving is
installed. There certainly are political consequences as well as there will be
some that feel compact shelving inhibits browsing. Compact shelving is also
expensive; shelving for a half million volumes likely to cost about $1 million
and every library has limited floor space that can be devoted to shelving.
Renting storage space is a complex option that can have a
variety of costs and political consequences. Some libraries have opted to rent
warehouse space and use their own shelving. While these costs may be
reasonable, the library needs to insure adequate climate control and security.
If the lease to the space is lost then the library can be left scrambling to
find new storage space, often without sufficient time for planning or
budgeting. Other libraries have opted to rent storage space in an existing storage
facility and to contract with the facility for ingest, retrieval and
delivery. Entry costs and even retrieval and delivery costs are
reasonable if the number of items retrieved is low. If a library decides to
remove the collection from storage, the deaccessioning costs are often
prohibitively high. The political costs can also be high if faculty become
outraged that parts of the collection are stored elsewhere; even more so if the
storage facility is many miles or many states removed.
Building a storage facility is not an endeavor to be
taken lightly. Decisions need to be made as to shelving type, storage capacity,
retrieval mechanisms and protocols, staffing, and location.
For purpose built facilities to live up to their
potential they must have adequate facility to process incoming materials and
handle retrievals and delivery in a timely manner. They should also include
digitization facility for materials that are better delivered in digital format
(journal articles, fragile or rare materials). Adequate climate control (HVAC)
and fire suppression need special design/engineering considerations.
Requesting mechanisms must be built into library catalogs
and discovery systems. Materials must be retrieved from shelves, packed into
containers for transport and delivered. After the books are used the they need
to be returned to storage and re-shelved. Delivery needs to be handled by the
library or contracted out. All of this takes significant staffing and money.
The value that storage facilities provide is that they
allow the library to continue to grow its print collection to meet the
scholarship and teaching needs of the institution. It does behoove the library
to think carefully about the catalog metadata that enables better browsing and
to devote resources to enable virtual browsing of the collection.
In the “store or not to store” question, Colby decided
“to store” as its strategy to build a long-term and enduring commitment to
print books. As a result, the Colby Libraries are well positioned to face the
future. The storage facility provides enough space for another 42 years at the
current rate of acquisitions (7,000 print books per year). The storage facility
also allowed us to accept the Bangor Theological Seminary Collection (about
30,000 volumes) and to incorporate it into Colby’s collection and make it
available to Colby faculty and students, and the citizens of Maine.
In consonance with our commitment to print, phase 1 of
our $8.7 million renovations of Miller Library doubled our collection space for
Special Collections. It also provided space for a purpose built digital
production center which is being used to digitize and showcase special
collections materials and to draw faculty, students, and researchers in to our
library to use our physical collections.
Saturday,
January 4, 2014
A Swimming Pool
in the Library - Drowning in Data
Few of us
would seriously entertain a swimming pool in the library- well the thought did
cross my mind last summer when the temperature in my office hit 90 degrees. The
sheer amount of water, mess, humidity, and chlorine would probably send most of
us a bit over the edge. Some of our patrons on the other hand are certainly
more tolerant of messiness but perhaps they shouldn’t be.
So where am I going with this swimming pool idea. Swimming pools, like research
data, comes in various sizes with various levels of complexity, dirt, and
messiness. I think libraries can and should play a number or roles in the
swimming pool of research data and many libraries have already stepped into
this arena.
I see four areas where libraries and librarians might play a role.
Advice
Librarians typically have a broad view of the world and feel comfortable across
a wide variety of knowledge domains. The "data intensive” world that we
live in is present in almost every discipline and certainly is not limited to
faculty/researchers who are dealing with data management mandates from NSF, NIH
or other funding agencies.
Librarians as information professionals have a broad and deep understanding of
data, data issues, and stewardship of information for the long-term. They are
very good at looking at a research proposal and asking important questions
around data issues. Libraries are increasingly hiring librarians with advanced
data management and data curation skills to help faculty deal with data.
Librarians are also poised to help researchers work through the various
intellectual property issues surrounding data. If data is to be managed for
long term then questions of ownership, use and reuse need to be decided and
encoded so that everyone who sees the data can tell who owns the data and how
it can be used. While librarians do not give legal advice they are versed in
copyright and intellectual property issues and can provide faculty with options
to consider in providing long-term stewardship of their data.
Metadata/documentation/discoverability
Because librarians are very interested in others being able to find and use
data across all knowledge domains, they have developed interest and expertise
around metadata, documentation, and discoverability. Metadata refers to the
terminology that we use to describe the data. It may include things like,
variable names and descriptions, file types, definitions, classifications
schemes, etc.
Librarians are also interested in users being able to find data and build, buy,
and install systems that integrate metadata from data repositories into a
"discovery layer" that allows students and faculty to search across
knowledge domains and find data that are included in journals, institutional
repositories, and subject based data repositories such as the Social Science
Research Network (SSRN) or the InterUniversity Consortium of Political and
Social Research (ICPSR).
Storage/migration/archiving
Most research is small scale. By that I mean most research is not on the scale
of the Sloan Sky Survey or the Human Genome Project. Most research data is on a
local hard drive, thumb drive, or network drive, often without plans for
long-term storage or archiving. Increasingly journals, and funding agencies are
requiring access to data for the long-term. Librarians and IT professionals
have the expertise to provide advice and solutions for long-term storage,
migration, and archiving. Some of these solutions will be local to a campus but
increasingly they will be multi-university systems that are built to easily scale
in terms of size but also will have built in long-term digital preservation
capabilities.
Visualization
Data, especially at a large scale, might be hard to work with. Larger libraries
are installing data visualization rooms with very large screens (millions of
pixels) and sophisticated software that allow faculty and students to do
complex data visualizations/ data simulations and to draw results from the data
that would be difficult if not impossible on typical small screens. Librarians
with data expertise usually work as consultants with faculty and students.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Through the
"Treasure Lens" ; Library as Treasure Chest
As children, we grew up with stories of treasure. It might have been the
treasures of a king or queen, or pirate treasure replete with a treasure map
and X marks the spot. As we have aged, our interest in treasures haven't
lessened but have likely transformed. For many of us treasure is still equated
with abundant riches though upon reflection we realize that some
treasures are "priceless", MasterCard ad not withstanding.
Libraries have long been in the treasure business; be it a Pulitzer Prize
winning novel or a Shakespeare folio. Today, however, we live in a "throw
away" culture and the virtual culture is so ephemeral that our
understanding of treasure is often trashed and at other times
surprisingly heightened. Treasure is usually equated with money and
artifacts are often stripped of their intrinsic value. We often think that a
digital surrogate can substitute for the original.
I want to argue for the physical treasure and the role it can play in helping
us understand and appreciate culture and how it can inform our understanding
and use of digital surrogates.
In the past year I've made two visits to the British Library. On one visit I
was able to see an exhibit of 400 illuminated manuscripts from the Royal
Library. These were exceptionally rich manuscripts with hand painted
illuminations - many with gold and silver embossing. The manuscript were
produced by hand between 800 and 1400. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/london/8865233/Exhibition-in-focus-Royal-Manuscripts-British-Library.html)
On the second visit I took in the Jack Kerouac exhibit, including the famous
scroll of "On the Road". Both of these are treasures - part of
our cultural heritage. (http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/The-British-Library-exhibits-Jack-Kerouac-s-120-foot-long-On-the-Road-manuscript-scroll-in-London-for-the-first-time-5cc.aspx)
In a previous visit to London I visited with Paul Ayris, Director of University
College London Library Services. He related an interesting story of how his
librarians are taking the library treasures out of the Special Collections to
the classroom. In a daring move, one of his librarians took an original
Newtons' Principia to an introductory Physics class. It created a
sensation. Students wanted to have their picture taken with it. It also
opened up a host of questions about the book and its influence - if Newton was
English why was the book in Latin?, Why was it so influential?,
etc. Yes a digital copy was available but the "treasure effect"
is not the same.
Seeing the physical treasures connects the patron with the hand of the
craftsman- the writer, the printer, the painter, etc. It gives a sense of
context that seems to be absent even in a high quality digital surrogate.
Allowing, encouraging, cajoling our students and faculty into Special
Collections is critical in helping provide this rich contextual thought
that can then be transferred to the use of the digital. Seeing an handling an
original Civil War diary, for example, allows me to look at a collection
of digitized Civil War diaries in a new way. It opens up new questions- new
avenues of research. I see the digital through the physical "treasure
lens".
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The
Treasure Room (now Robinson Room) - Colby Libraries
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At the Colby
Libraries our Special Collections has a room originally called the
"Treasure Room" . It's purpose was to both house and showcase
treasures. In a renovation of the library in the early 1980's Special
Collections became hidden, and while Special Collections didn't physically
move, it did become a hidden vault. Yes it was still full of treasure but
virtually undiscoverable. Our Special Collections staff are working to change
the hiddenness and to get students and faculty into see, touch, use, and write
about the treasures. Renovations scheduled for summer 2014 will lift the veil
and make Special Collection visible again.
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Special
Collections Gallery - Ohio State Thompson Library
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As I have traveled throughout the world
looking at libraries and how they are transforming themselves, I can see a
clear trend in moving Special Collections to a more front and center part of
the operations and facilitating direct access to the "treasures".
Special Collections reading rooms are often large glass fronted rooms where you
can see scholars (students, faculty, external researchers) working with original
treasures. I have also seen a strong move towards large scale displays (cases,
spaces, whole rooms) in very busy public thorough fares in libraries that are
bringing the treasures to the people. For a striking example, check out the
Special Collections gallery space and Ohio State
The next time you visit a library ask them about their treasures- you will be
surprised by what you find.
Tuesday,
July 16, 2013
Starbucks,
chocolate and Libraries
I'm a Starbucks aficionado. I like the coffee
and the feel of a Starbucks shop. It 's always a mix of solitude
and community. I like the friendly banter of the baristas. I spend
a few hours each week at my local Starbucks doing email and other library work.
If you are a coffee lover you understand that a truly great cup of coffee can
nourish the soul.
Recently in a Facebook exchange with my daughter Rachel who is spending
eight weeks in Aix en Provence, France, we talked about pan au chocolate. Pan
au chocolate is a flaky croissant like pastry filled with chocolate . It
truly is a wonderful and a soul nurturing experience -especially if you get to
eat it in France.
You might ask what is the connection between Starbucks, chocolate, and
libraries. The connection is more than might come from a library which
has a cafe.
For me the connection comes from the idea of nurturing the soul. Perhaps this
is not what we think about when we think of libraries but for me one of the
roles of the library is to provide intellectual nourishment.
This intellectual nourishment might come from a good novel that speaks to the
human condition; it might come from an essay on human rights or a an article
that opened up your understanding of a physics problem. It might also come from
writing a poem or sitting in a quiet contemplative space.
Libraries today are pretty frenetic. It is really easy to see libraries only as
the information super highway - a bundle of digital signals. This might
be seen as the fast food mode of nutrition or eating on the run.
As with much of nourishment, the effects are both immediate and not
always immediately obvious. The library experience can be both
immediately rewarding and have long-term effects that change our lives over
time.
When you have a chance, grab a good cup of coffee, the New York Times, and a
good pastry - all in your local library and give your soul a boost
Sunday,
March 27, 2016
I
fly fairly often for work, usually at least once a month. I love window seats,
even though they often have less legroom than other seats. The window offers a
perspective on the world outside and below the plane. Whether the view is clear
or totally obscured by clouds, or by night, the perspective is different. I may
see the flat fields of Kansas, each marked in their square quarter sections,
with fields beginning to green, others brown rounds, waiting for the sprinklers
to do their magic. I may see the mountains, desert, or the large cities of the
east coast. When clouds completely blanket the landscape, the perspective
changes to one of mystery and intrigue. Sometimes the clouds are spotty and I
can see glimpses of landscape – small insights into the world. At night, the
lights break up the darkness. Each view offers a perspective, an opportunity to
think about the world we inhabit.
I
find that stepping away from the office, from an important project, and sometimes
even a deadline can be both healthy and productive. It provides a time to gain
perspective, to be self-reflective, to breathe. While this is
something I try to do and encourage my staff to do, it is really
hard. We all have heavy workloads with too many projects, too much
email, too many people to talk to. We all know that we are not always being
productive as we could be but it is difficult to step out of the rat race and
to pause and gain perspective and perhaps take a different approach to our work,
our project, our lives.
People
that know me know that I am a big Starbucks fan. Not only do I love the variety
of dark roast coffees they serve, I love the ambiance and the vibe of the
various Starbucks that I frequent. What people many not realize is that there
is another reason that I go to Starbucks, especially the one in my home town. I
go to get a different perspective from my office. My office is
small, stark, in the basement with a narrow window that looks out on a drainage
grate. My Starbucks has the dark rich wood coffee house feel. However, its all
glass front is where I sit, gaining a new perspective on the day and on the
work that I do.
We
are just wrapping up Spring Break and I am just back from a 1,600 mile round
trip to London, Ontario, Canada. My daughter Rachel is applying to grad school
at Western University in London, with the goal of getting a Masters in Library
and Information Science. Naturally, she wanted to see the University first and
I wanted to return to the university where I did by graduate library degree
more than 30 years ago. We were both looking for perspective.
The
trip to London and back, via car, was also a form of perspective, a break from
the office, a chance to think, to observe, and to relax. The time at the
University was a chance to see the perspective of a very vibrant and very
diverse campus; so many people who look different from me, yet in many ways are
the same.
Perspective has power but
only so if we are observant and take the time to reflect on what we see. As we
head into the very busy time of the academic year, I’m hoping that I can be
more self-reflective and use the power of perspective to make me more productive,
more aware, and more a part of the global world.
sunday, May 15, 2016
Wake Up and
Smell the Inspiration
It’s
been a long and busy week. As the week has wound down, there has been a theme
of “making a difference” prevalent on campus. On Wednesday we celebrated the
retirement of Ray Phillips, the only director of campus IT that Colby has had.
The party was both a celebration of his making a difference in the life of the
college and the life of individuals at Colby and in the community. I know my
life has been enriched by knowing him. This coming week we will celebrate Suzi
Cole, our Science librarian for 39 years and the difference she has made for
faculty and students.
The
Community Digest of Civil Discourse, one of the campus email forums, has seen a
series of long and poignant posts by students and faculty about the need to
make a difference in the Colby community and that racism, homophobia,
intolerance, and just plain bad behavior are not something we want to be part
of our community. We can and should be better than this and these
posts have challenged us to do so.
I
was particularly challenged and impressed by one of the student posts because
it echoed what I’ve increasingly come to believe. We need to build
relationships and community with one another. It is difficult, if not
impossible to hate a group of people that contain people we love. He
puts it best in this statement – “By fully and legitimately befriending people
who are different from ourselves, we all can be activists”. This is
a powerful statement which could transform the world if we really took it to
heart.
Last
weekend I was in San Diego for my daughter Errinn’s graduation from Point Loma
Nazarene University. We were blessed with the typical paradise weather of San
Diego – 72 degrees, sun, and a light ocean breeze. As we sat in the
Greek amphitheater waiting for the ceremony I was struck by the wonderful
diversity of people in the audience, all there to celebrate the graduation of
someone they loved. It may, for some, seem strange that I was struck with the
diversity of the audience. It was southern California after
all. Having spent so many years in central Maine, I am always struck
by diversity when I go somewhere else. I am also delighted by the diversity –
so many languages and cultures, both similar and different to my
own.
Every
week or so I get an email from the Ford Foundation and I’m always impressed and
usually challenged by it. The Ford Foundation is focusing its
funding and programs on addressing inequality and that certainly is a big
task. Those of us who are in a majority in most aspects of our lives
often don’t think about inequality in productive ways. It can be easy to ignore
inequality unless it slaps us upside the head. The transgender
bathroom issue is one that many want to ignore because it makes them
uncomfortable and the way we often deal with our discomfort is by demonizing
those people that make us feel that way. If you never felt uncomfortable in
choosing which bathroom to use, you may choose to feel that no one feels
uncomfortable choosing. We may find it difficult to parse out our feelings on
gender because it has become so ingrained as a binary option. However, our
inability or unwillingness to parse out our feelings does not excuse us from
learning to understand what it is like not to fit into our often binary
world. Transgender bathrooms won’t be the death of civilization as
we know it, nor will it corrupt our youth, or lead to massive inappropriate or
dangerous behavior in bathrooms. It might lead to more productive and better
lives for those who are often misunderstood, dismissed, and made to feel
unworthy.
While
I don’t want to get into a religious discussion, religion is
often construed as “black and white” and any middle ground is “grey”
and therefore less, or perhaps even immoral. While I can only speak from
the Christian tradition in which I was raised, I do think that Jesus more often
than not identified with the “other”, the non-majority, non-dominant group. He
certainly assembled what many today would have described as a less than
respectable crowd; tax collectors, prostitutes, fisherman, and others – no
lawyers, no doctors, preachers, etc. I say this to say that “grace
and mercy” are two concepts that might serve those of us in the majority quite
well. Extend to others grace and mercy, not in a demeaning or
condescending way that elevates our status but to fully embrace the humanity of
those not like us; to treat others like we would really like to be treated.
Tomorrow, wake up and
smell the inspiration. Be an agent for change.
Friday, July 29, 2016
In
mid-July I attended the Digital Humanities 2016 conference in Krakow, Polandhttp://dh2016.adho.org/ Under
the auspices of the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations, this
annual conference brings together DH scholars, librarians, software engineers,
and other interested individuals to discuss, share, and further the work of
Digital Humanities. This year’s conference brought together 900 individuals
from 48 countries. With approximately 400 presentations and posters,
it showed the richness and complexity of digital humanities. The conference was
hosted by Jagiellonian University and the Pedagogical University of Krakow.
What
then is Digital Humanities? Digital Humanities, in its most simple
definition is the convergence of computing technology with
Humanities. In a more nuanced idea it is the use of computer
technology to ask and answer questions, and create new forms of scholarship and
scholarly output in the Humanities that could not be done without computing
technology.
As
Digital Humanities is gaining interest at Colby, my take on the conference was
to explore, sample, engage with areas of scholarship that are likely to happen
at Colby. Here are a few of the scholarly tools and ideas that
I picked up. They certainly piqued my interest, and this is only the tip of the
iceberg on the types of scholarly work that is being done.
Stylometry: Stylometry is a
form of scholarly activity that uses the power of computing to examine
stylistic and linguistic aspects of text and is often used to determine
authorship of texts whose authorship is uncertain. It is also used to compare
narrative and linguistic styles across authors or time periods. An example is
the work of trying to solve the authorship of Lazarillo de Tormes, an anonymous
novel of the Spanish Golden Age and a subject of 400 years of
scholarship. http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/326.
While stylometry cannot be used to definitively determine authorship, it can with
the right tools significantly focus the discussion down to one or two authors
who are the likely authors by comparing the grammar, syntax, style, vocabulary
of the work in question against a vast corpus of the complete works of the
possible authors.
Pedagogy: An umber of
sessions related specifically to pedagogical interests in the classroom on how
digital humanities could be incorporated into full or partial course settings
and on issues of how to engage students in new types of research. A noted example
was the use of Sherlock Holmes stories as a means of multidisciplinary
engagement. Assignments included the use of digital archives, GIS mapping,
Google’s Ngram viewer, using and creating digital editions, word trees, etc.
More information on “Read, Play, Build: Teaching Sherlock Holmes through
Digital Humanities” can be found athttp://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/431
Close
and Distant Reading: Humanities scholars are quite familiar with close
reading, the technique of carefully examining a single novel, poem, essay, etc.
Close reading may examine literary characteristics, grammatical and syntactical
style, as well as plot, characterization, etc. On the other hand
“distant reading” is a computer based analysis that compares a large corpus of
text looking for textual patterns, grammar and syntax, or other elements of the
text that may be of interest of the scholar. This technique may be
used by scholars to ask and answer questions when the corpus of texts is too
large to read and analyze in the conventional way. An example might
be when a scholar wants to examine all novels written by women in English in
the 19th century and perhaps look at their use of a particular
literary style. Using a technique developed by Stanford scholar
Franco Moretti, a large corpus of digitized texts can be analyzed with
computers to surface answers to such questions. It may also be used to look at
and visualize relationships between people, ideas, and locations from a large
corpus of materials that would be impossible to map in a manual way. An example
can be seen in “Mapping the League of Nations Intellectual Cooperation,
1919-1927” which analyzed thousands of documents to map the relationship
between more than 3,200 individuals and the restructuring of knowledge
circulation in post war Europehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/305302861_Archives_Distant_Reading_DH2016_slides
Mapping: Mapping and the use
of GIS and geolocation technology is quite prevalent in the social sciences and
is making its way into the humanistic disciplines in a big way. Geographic
locations often play a prominent role in literature, biography, art, music, cultural
studies, and other humanistic disciplines. The ability to geolocate
digitized historic maps, overlay them with modern maps, and also to connect
geolocations to literary text, photographs, digitized three-dimensional
artifacts opens up new ways of exploring the role of location, space, and
geography. An example here is “Digitally mapping romantic literature
and culture” http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/47.
These 3 papers “explore how linking and juxtaposing different types of data can
enhance the study of how places mediate the writing, reading, and critical
reception of literary works”.
Word
analysis/word frequency: Scholars have used a variety of word analysis and
word frequency tools over time. Concordances, which show ever
instance of a word in a text, are common in printed texts. However,
the ability to do word analysis/word frequency study over time requires large
scale textual databases and software that can examine usage and make the
requisite comparisons. Google’s Ngram Viewer was one of the early tools and
often used to measure word change over time, often connected to frequency of
use. An example is “Measuring the Dynamics of Lexico-Semantic Change
Since the German Romantic Period” http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/2498.
This methodology can also be used to map word use/frequency with events in
history. An interesting example is an analysis of a corpus of 60,000 books from
the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and
mapped the frequency of mention of various diseases to actual disease incidents
– “Enabling Complex Analysis of Large-Scale Digital Collections: Humanities
Research, High Performance Computing, and transforming access to British
Library Digital Collections”http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/230
While this is just a
sample of the many papers, projects, and posters from the conference, it does
provide an idea of the types of scholarship that “digital humanities”
involve. More information on other papers and posters from the
conference can be found at http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/
