Marcus' World

Praise and Quibbles--The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

Last week brought word of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA.

DORA comprises a wide range of publishers, transcending the usual lines between subscription and open access publishers.  Everyone who supports DORA believes that the impact factor has become a pernicious force in research evaluation, with the power to influence tenure decisions and to affect the trajectory of an entire research career.

To quote the DORA declaration on this point: "A number of themes run through these recommendations:

• the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations;
• the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; and
• the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact)."

All in all, good news. Our means of evaluating research are finally catching up with our means of producing it. Technology always outpaces policy change, in some cases for many years but never forever.

I especially liked this recommendation to institutions: "For the purposes of research assessment, consider the value and impact of all research outputs (including datasets and software) in addition to research publications, and consider a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice." The bold is mine, as that clause alone effectively douses the belief that universities should be ivory towers.

Of course, there is room for improvement. To wit: "Outputs other than research articles will grow in importance in assessing research effectiveness in the future, but the peer reviewed research paper will remain a central research output that informs research assessment. Our recommendations therefore focus primarily on practices relating to research articles published in peer reviewed journals but can and should be extended by recognizing additional products, such as datasets, as important research outputs." 

I've got nothing against peer review, but the output of that review does not have to be a journal article.  Why not a peer reviewed podcast or web site?  We can't forget that leading journal editors are a key constituency of DORA, and that bias is plain here.  I'd like to see the philosophy of DORA extended by analogy to many and sundry forms of scholarship....not just datasets.

Then again, we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That's when paralysis sets in and nothing changes at all. It is exciting to live in a world in which DORA now exists.

 

Bill Hader on Fresk Air--Life Lessons

This morning I caught some of Bill Hader's Fresh Air interview from last August.  Hader is leaving Saturday Night Live this week, after seven seasons.

Hader joined SNL at the same time as Andy Samberg. They auditioned on the same day.  I laughed out loud when Hader described running into Samberg in the audition area.  Hader had no props, Samberg brought lots of props.  Hader thought to himself, "Oh no...I'm so unprepared! This guy brought props!"  Meanwhile, Samberg was thinking (as he later recounted to Hader), "Oh no! That guy is so much better than me. He doesn't need props!"

In th end they both got the job, props or not. There is no right answer, except this one: to thine own self be true.

The Bell Rang Twice

This week's free-write [10 minutes of free-writing based on a prompt] from my writing worskhop in Sausalito. Enjoy!

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The Bell Rang Twice

"Ding! Ding!" The bell rang twice, signaling the end of class, with five minutes to get to the next.

 

It was the first day of the new school year at Endangered Sequoia Tree High School. Biff Spilkerton glanced at his schedule--he was in Rm. 218 now, his next class was in Rm. 412. Biff was in tenth grade already, he knew the lay of the land at this place. From 218 to 412 was almost as far as you could walk at E.S.T. High.

 

Biff, ever punctual, plotted his options for reaching 412 before the bell rang just once, signaling the new period's beginning. Should he walk two long hallways, bursting into 412 right as the bell tolled? That was longer than cutting across the school library, which lay squarely between 218 and 412. But the library spelled chaos--kids milling about, talking, wasting precious seconds. His first option seemed safest--longer in distance, but less prone to headaches en route.

 

Biff never stopped thinking this way. Twenty years later, when E.S.T. High had long since been razed to its stumps, Biff was the kind of driver who preferred the local routes to the highway. Yes, the highway was faster...usually. But what a headache. Tail gaters, speeders, lanes that suddenly ended. Better to cruise the boulevards, stop at crosswalks, see what's playing at the movie theater, discover what's on sale. Biff never stopped believing that short cuts usually take longer. 

 

 

The purpose and future of academic research libraries

On Friday afternoon I attended a seminar presentation by Tom Leonard, University Librarian at the University of California Berkeley. Leonard has a doctorate in history and has been on the faculty of Cal's journalism school since 1976. He's also been the University Librarian since 2001.

Ever the historian, Leonard began with an illuminating historical overview of academic libraries in the US. He divided academic libraries pre-Web into two broad phases: the "slacker phase" and the "overachiever phase."

Slacker phase (late 1800s): In this period students and faculty viewed the campus library as irrelevant, removed from the realities and heart of campus life. Hours were terrible, since the library closed at sundown.  So at the exact time students could most easily go to the library, after the end of the class day, it was closed. And collections decisions had no bearing upon what students learned in the curriculum. What was this library thing anyway?

Overachiever phase (turn of the century up until dawn of the digital age): The big turn happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s--first on the East Coast, then spreading to the West Coast. As doctoral programs blossomed, so too did collections budgets and the desire to tie collection decisions with the curriculum. Academic libraries transitioned from peripheral entities into the "heart of the campus." The stated desire was to collect "everything," which in its way was Google-esque (Google's mission, after all, is to "organize the world's information.") 

Leonard pointed out that "everything," in practice, meant much deeper collections in German and French than in Chinese or Korean. There was no attempt to collect with true comprehensiveness, despite rhetoric to the contrary. As he spoke, I remembered an analogy from the Dewey Decimal System. Melvil Dewey's treatment of Christianity in the Religion bin is fine-grained, while all the rest of the world's religions are dumped at the end of the line.

Although the great academic library collections were not truly comprehensive, they did become massive. As the 20th century continued, the key metric of an academic library's prowess was its "number of volumes held." Leonard referred to this competition between libraries as an "imperial" "arms race." I recall that "x million volumes" figure bandied about on my tour of the Northwestern campus as a prospective student, and this metric is very much with us today as we go ever deeper into the digital age.

The trouble is that this concept--"millions of volumes held"--is more about keeping up with the Joneses than anything else. How much difference does it really make that Cal has twelve copies of a book while Harvard has eleven? The more rational thing to do, way back when, would have been for the elite academic libraries to coordinate their collection decisions to ensure true comprehensiveness and to stretch dollars the furthest. Alas, human nature tends to be more narrow and competitive than this.  And so, over a century we built up impressive collections that are now very expensive to maintain and to a large extent seldom used.

Today: After outlining this history, Leonard spoke about the challenges of making substantial changes within a large bureaucracy that rewards settled habits. Even if organizations know they need to change, it is very hard to do so when there is no shared language available to define what those changes should be. This is the current state of academic libraries.

Leonard described the work of a new Commission which will soon make changes about how the UC Berkeley Libraries should operate in the coming years, given budget cuts and the continued evolution of digital scholarship. Even humanities scholars, long-perceived as monograph fetishists, are now building Centers for Digital Humanities.  In theory, this confluence of new modes of scholarship and budget strains will lead to bold thinking about how the Libraries should operate. But I suspect the Commission will offer a modest set of recommendations, locating operational effiiciencies that preserve the core function of collection development, and the core metaphor of the library as a keeper of books.

I could be wrong. We will have to await the Commission's forthcoming report.  My prediction about the Commission's likely modestness is because most of its members are UC Berkeley faculty members.  For at least a decade librarians have been grappling with the challenges of preserving "born digital" materials, and creatively re-purposing library space.  But the deeply ingrained notion that the library is a warehouse for printed work has not yet budged very far in faculty consciousness, and I suspect it will carry the day. Arguments about the "imperial" over-reach of 20th century collection practices probably do not mean much to the Chair of the History department who is counting on an ample monograph collection next year.

The Future: So, where are we headed?  Assuming that established notions of what an academic library should be remain in force, I'd like to see a bifurcated organizational structure evolve.  The apparatus for physical collections and preservations would remain in place; alongside it, a skunkworks devoted to facilitating and preserving new modes of scholarship would be established. What's a skunkworks? A "project developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation."

Bethany Nowviskie has already developed one such skunkworks with some success at UVa. Other ideas are available in the "Libraries" section of "Hacking the Academy."  The goal of these projects is to inspire and facilitate impactful projects in libraries that position us to thrive in the 21st century.

Perhaps these skunkworks would need to be funded by soft money first to prove their worth, and then later be added to the main library budget (at which point--when money's on the table--the real battles about the library's purpose would commence.) Or perhaps faculty members called to serve on the next library Commission in 15 years will demand serious treatment for digital scholarship, finally severing the tie to those imperial 20th century collection development practices. If that happens, these skunkworks will have been proving grounds.

"You Never Told Me"

Right now I'm taking a writing workshop in Sausalito on Monday nights.  We always begin with a 10 minute free-writing exercise, based on a prompt. 

Last night's prompt: You never told me."  Here's my effort, hope you enjoy it!

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"You never told me!" Henry screamed.

"I thought everyone knew how to tie their shoes!" Alison responded.

"Not me! You never told me!" Henry bellowed again, before dissolving into tears and banging his fists against the playground turf. You know, that soft plastic stuff meant to protect kids from injuries. No more pure concrete like we had growing up. No, no, no -- in this helicopter parent era, everything must be "safe."

 

Henry Lucas, age 4, sits down crying his eyes out. Big sister Alison, wise old 6, feels badly for him but annoyed too. All he'd had to do was ask for help tying his shoes. She would have double-knotted them, even. But no, no, no -- Henry thinks he's a big boy these days.

 

Henry pounds the plastic pavement. His face reddens, his eyes swell. Why had his sister - his own flesh and blood! - let him walk down the street with shoes on the very precipice of untying? Big kids should protect the little ones, yes? Guess not. No, no, no -- it's a heartless world out there.

 

Yes, the world will throw slings and arrows at little Henry and Alison. You know, it's a good thing that at least their playground is safe.

Social Media and Established Media: The News from Boston

In 2000, the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and awarded the Presidency to George W. Bush. I read the complete text of that decision, in print, in the New York Times.

On September 11, 2001 the Chicago Tribune rushed an evening paper to subscribers, long after the time in which evening papers had become extinct. There was something tactile and substantial about reading a physical paper on such a momentous day.

This Monday, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, killing three and maiming almost 200. I learned about this atrocity from NPR, only because I was in Sacramento for work that day and so had access to the car radio. On any other day my first word would have come from Facebook, and then I would have gone to the Times web site.  Since the event I've kept tabs on the investigation via the Times and Politico apps on my phone. I never considered reading the story in print, and I toggled between social media and more established sources.

So, yes, times have changed. Now there is--or should be--a symbiotic relationship between the immediacy of social media (which did not exist in 2000 or 2001) and the in-depth reporting of full-time journalists.  It's not an either/or, zero-sum game, as Molly Redden argues in a great piece in the New Republic.  After Monday's bombing social media sites broke the story first, and then later the Boston Globe and Boston Herald synthesized the flood of data into an understandable whole.

See--that's symbiosis between old and new.  But it takes something like Boston to bring it about.  Usually the established media feels the anxiety of new media nipping at its heels, and new media types crow about demolishing the old with too little regard for what would be lost.

As Frank Rich sagaciously notes in the latest issue of New York, the established media has its own flaws and always has.  We shouldn't romanticize the days of ink and printing presses just because we're annoyed at BuzzFeed.  The media's tectonic plates are shifting, and nobody knows where they will settle. We should ensure that this settling allow for deep investigative reporting, which doesn't have to be printed on paper but does need to be valued.  I love Facebook and I respect Twitter, but that's not enough to understand the news.

At the Movies: "No"

Last Thursday afternoon, still quite jetlagged, I watched a matinee screening of No.

It's a fictionalized account of the 1988 election in Chile that ousted Augusto Pinochet after 15 years of autocratic rule.  Pinochet only called the election due to international pressure, without believing he would lose.  Thanks to a clever advertising campaign that gave Chileans a sense of optimism again--or so the story goes in the film--Pinochet loses the election, shocking Chile and the world. 

The critics have been kind. On the other hand, many people who were involved in the campaign against Pinochet have objected strongly that the film is riddled with errors and simplifications.

I don't know, wasn't there.  In 1988 I thought chili was something you ate.

Times have changed.  In 2013, as the person responsible for library and instructional technology at Samuel Merritt University, watching this film was fascinating.  The activists opposed to Pinochet debate fiercely about means vs. ends, and I've been part of many formulations of this age-old debate. 

The debate in No runs thusly: "Sure, catchy ad jingles are cute and everything.  But people are dying on the streets of Santiago, this is no laughing matter."  "Do you want to win this thing or not? You have to make people happy to get them to pay attention."  And so on, and so forth.  Insert whatever specifics you know about the unresolved tensions in your workplace, and No will resonate. 

Had I seen this in 1988, while eating my chili, I would have sided wholely with the idealists.  Back then (at the ripe old age of 11) fashion was shallow and advertising was evil.  In college, I was already much more pragmatic...taking the advertising man's point of view during a similar debate in a social justice course. 

When I became a librarian, my zeal for open access was initially idealistic all the way--who cares about tenure and rewards?? Information should be free!! I still think that's true, but have accepted that tenure/rewards are here to stay. The name of the game is to change the reward system rather than shouting from the soapbox. I still like my line from that college debate: "Do you want to make noise or do want to make change?"

So yes. Go see No.

Singapore Signage

We arrived home from Malaysia and Singapore Wednesday evening. I'm still working through jet lag, hence the decision to draft this blog post at 5 AM!

In my last note I'd promised this next post would be about Singapore's signage. We were in Singapore for three days of our trip, out of 13 total.  During that time I kept snapping pictures of signs, as I was fascinated by what might seem paternalistic to US eyes but is not perceived this way--I presume--by Singaporeans. 

In particular, the many admonishments to drive safely and courteously struck me. In the US we don't want bad driving, of course...but we also don't make such a point to encourage safe driving.  Pi Wen pointed out that there are similar messages in Malaysia, which I can't read since they are in Malay. Singapore's signs are in English. Pi Wen's cousin Ron, who lives in Singapore, pointed out that the signs are needed because Signaporeans drive crazily.  Maybe so. For my money Singaporean roads are much more orderly than those in Kuala Lumpur, where I always feared for my life even though Pi Wen was driving expertly.

Another segment of Singapore's signs are about the "commonweal" or "public good."  This is related to the road signs, in a way, as the overall thrust is about concern for others. But the road signs are about a specific situation, other signs are about the citizen spirit more generally.

Pi Wen attended the National University of Singapore before coming to the US. She found living in a tiny city-state in which the chief activity was shopping to be "oppressive."  Maybe all this public-minded signage has a downside, a certain micromanaging quality.  Even if so, it is refreshing compared to the "winner take all" ethos of the United States. The grass is always greener, of course, so take this commentary with a grain of salt.

Below are four pictures of Singaporean signs.  The first is a road sign, "Be considerate/Signal early." It's somewhat blurry, captured by my iPhone on the bridge between the Gardens by the Bay and the Marina Sands (two Singaporean landmarks). The Singapore Flyer, "the world's largest observation wheel," is in the background.

The other three pictures are examples of more general public-spiritedness. I hope you enjoy them all.

Thirty-Six

Greetings from Singapore. I have a particularly strong attachment to this city-state's many forms of signage.  While being driven by Pi Wen's relatives yesterday, we passed an electronic road sign that advised, "Be considerate/Signal early."

Thoughtfulness! Paternalism! Whatever you might think of it, it was not something I've ever seen in the US.  I need to do an entire post on Singaporean signage, which I'll do next week.

Last week I turned thirty-six. The day before we enjoyed a delectable feast at Oakland's own Commis. On the day of, my staff treated me to yummy cupcakes.  On the day after, our anniversary, Pi Wen and I flew to Malaysia. Yesterday we took the bus to Singapore, and will head back to Kuala Lumpur Wednesday.

So it's been busy. Several times on this trip I've been offered a fork and spoon while everyone else just uses chopsticks.  I can handle chopsticks, not in the classical style but enough to get by. Offering me the "Western" implements used to annoy me. I'd fume (to myself at first and later to Pi Wen) about being singled out, set apart, as if my whitness weren't different enough.

During this trip all that's chnaged. I see the gesture as what it's intended to be: thoughtful. Courteous. Maybe a bit paternalistic, ok.  But just like I appreciate that road sign (which would have elicited eye rolls at certain stages of my youth), I now see the upside of the good ol' fork and spoon treatment too. I'll chalk it up to reaching thirty-six, still far from wise but at least less uptight than I used to be.

Old Wine in New Bottles: Lorcan Dempsey in EDUCAUSE Review

Thanks to the member of my staff who pointed me to Lorcan Dempsey's excellent piece in the December 2012 EDUCAUSE Review, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention."  In this piece Dempsey, who now works for OCLC and used to work for JISC, synthesizes many ideas that he's previously developed on his blog.  He also weaves in work from elsewhere, all in an effort to better understand the current status and potential evolution of the library catalog.

It's a meaty piece, best read closely to allow time for Dempsey's many ideas to germinate.  The gestalt of the piece is a call to place old wine in new bottles.  One fundamental contribution of librarianship is to provide the means of organizing and retrieving information objects--books, serials, maps, DVDs. etc. This has required classification schemes, union catalogs, MARC records...the entire cataloging apparatus. 

All of that intellectual work is still valid and useful and important--this is the "old wine."  But we haven't yet figured out to graft these principles onto the "new bottles" of born-digital objects.  Library cataloging rules date from a time when you had to physically publish or manufacture a work.

Cataloging protocols evolved over centuries, so it will take a while to make a fundamental transition toward describing digital objects. (Just linking to web sites from within the catalog doesn't count.)  This transition will only occur if librarians acknowledge the fundamental shift that Dempsey describes--that the library catalog, as a record of a locally selected and managed collection, will represent an ever-decreasing share of the user's information base.

Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, iTunes, Pandora--these are all information sources that library patrons have access to without any need to use the library.  If we keep perfecting the catalog as we currently understand it, we'll eventually have a perfect catalog that nobody uses.  It's better to embrace the world entire, both in and outside our walls, and give what's floating online the organization and curation it so desperately needs.