Marcus' World

The Value of In Person Conferences

Today Medical Library Association (MLA) President Mark Funk sent a note to members of the planning committee for the 2008 National Conference in Chicago. I've been honored to serve on this committee for the past two years.

Mark referred us to a recent blog post that encourages the American Library Association (ALA) to support "virtual meetings" for those members who cannot afford to attend an in-person meeting, or  simply do not enjoy the meetings. This was the third of three blog posts in 24 hours that encouraged ALA to facilitate virtual meetings.  Mark is very interested in making MLA more accessible to the members who do not attend the annual meeting (which happens to be the majority.) So naturally these posts from ALA members caught his eye.

I have great sympathy for librarians who cannot afford to attend conferences. Hotel rooms alone can cost a fortune, and without institutional support an in-person meeting is simply out of reach for many modestly paid librarians. For these reasons, MLA, ALA and other library associations should find ways to encourage more members to participate online. Conference blogs are routine now, and people should be able to pay a modest fee to get online access to key events as they happen.

Another thread in the ALA posts, however, is that the face-to-face meetings are a waste of time. For example, there's this sentence: "Think out of the box and stop torturing us with F2F meetings that are unnecessary, not to mention personally, blindingly expensive." 

"Torture." "Unnecessary." Strong language, and perhaps written in the heat of the moment and not worth parsing. But if this does represent genuine feelings, I must stand up for the value of face-to-face meetings. The informal opportunities that conferences present to chat with old friends, and to make new ones, simply cannot be duplicated online. 

We should find ways to include more members in the annual meetings; everyone can contribute to the success of a conference, whether in person or virtually. But let's not go too far and equate virtual attendance with being there in person. Those of us fortunate enough to attend personally should count our blessings.

Helen's Off to London Next Fall

One of the most rewarding aspects of being part of the Haas Business School community is the opportunity to mingle with people from around the world, both here in Berkeley and across the globe.  Next fall Helen will make the most of that opportunity, by spending a semester abroad at the London Business School.  Helen considered applying to LBS, but ultimately chose not to. This way she can have the best of both worlds--some international experience, and the Haas degree.

At different times in our relationship the prospect of living apart loomed, for various reasons. Very early on (1999) I went to Turkmenistan as a Peace Corps volunteer, but was not emotionally ready for a 2 year separation and came back after just a few days. It's a funny story now, but was traumatic at the time.

Much more recently I applied to be a writing fellow at the American Prospect magazine, during a two year period that would have overlapped with Helen's business school years. The magazine is in Washington DC,  and none of the school's on Helen's list were there. Had I become a writing fellow, we would have lived apart for a long time.

In that light, a 3.5 month separation for a business school semester--especially since I will be sure to visit London at one point--is not so long.  But it still feels that way now, since we've never actually lived apart (although Helen traveled a lot as a consultant, we always saw each other on the weekends). It will feel strange, and lonely, but be worth it in the long run. I'm very happy for Helen.

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping

Tonight Helen, Mom, Bob and I saw the new docu-comedy What Would Jesus Buy?, produced by Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame).  It was most appropriate to watch this on "Black Friday," America's sacred day of post-Thanksgiving binge shopping. (While I've been writing, the late local news has shown footage of people barreling over each other to get into a store in San Francisco in the pitch darkness early today.) The film chronicles a 2005 cross-country trip by "Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping"  that encouraged Americans to abandon the shopping mall in favor of more heartfelt Christmas gifts. 

The Reverend Billy is Bill Talen, a street performer who become horrified by the increasing commercialization of Times Square in 1999. He started out by "preaching" against excess shopping in Times Square, sometimes getting arrested.  Six years later he had a full choir behind him, and was ready to take his message  across the land, in a bio-diesel fueled bus. The choir performs at real churches, where the Reverend preaches passionately and occasionally starts speaking in tongues.  They disrupt the proceedings at the Mall of America, and attempt to exorcise demons at WalMart headquarters.  They re-write the words to Christmas carols in amusing ways. The good reverend even sets up a confessional for people to unburden themselves of their shopping sins.

Much of the theatrics are flamboyant and over the top; Helen thinks Reverend Billy is "crazy."  But it's hard to deny the message beneath all his bombast: that Americans buy many things we don't really need, either to impress others or to feel good about ourselves.  The holiday season--nominally a time for reconnecting with friends and loved ones--has become one big stress-ball focused on buying frivolous things.

Like many documentary film-makers, Spurlock takes on too many issues.  He blasts WalMart for destroying small town America (something Reverend Billy also believes); there is some merit to this argument, but it's also true that WalMart's low prices are a lifeline for low income shoppers.  Spurlock also presents several horrifying stories about the harms that workers (often children) in the developing world suffer to bring us those low-priced goods--broken fingers on a routine basis, and sometimes busted kneecaps when workers attempt to assert their rights.  These are outrages, without question.  But the lesser-discussed question is, "what would these people do if WalMart didn't exist?"  It wasn't all sweetness and light in Bangladesh 35 years ago.

So let's get back to the film's core message: We shop too much, and should find more meaningful ways to express our appreciation for others. That seems hard to dispute, even if Reverend Billy is sometimes hard to take.

Helen is Famous

After letting Two Way Streets languish for over a month--because she was "busy"--yesterday Helen wrote a fascinating post about the hidden costs of buying generics.

It's so fascinating that today the Wall Street Journal linked to it from an article about a similar topic.  If you scroll down to "Related Articles and Blogs," and click "More related content," you'll find Helen's post. Earlier tonight she was linked directly below the article, and somebody clicked to it from the WSJ.

Pretty cool!

How Would Jesus Kiss?

I found this Facebook ad for the Christian Singles web site very amusing. The look on that  guy's face  is not very Christ-like, if you ask me.

Read this Post When You're Finally Not Too Busy

Jane continues the excellent commentary about a paper that has recently stirred some buzz, "Librarianship and the Culture of Busy." In two pages that you can probably find time to read even though you're extremely busy, authors Pam Ryan and Denise Koufogiannakis lament the competition among librarians to prove that they are busier than their colleagues. It's a jockeying for martyrdom, library style.

But as Jane points out, this is a human tendency, not just something that librarians do.   Scott has made a similar observation when young librarians lament the slow rate at which senior administrators adopt new technologies; resistance to change is everywhere, not just in library administrative suites.

Given that it's human nature, is it even possible to combat the "culture of busy" in libraries? I think so.

Here's a very rough approach, which anyone who is not too busy is welcome to comment about:

1. First, acknowledge that it's right for people to feel busy and stretched thin. This is the easy step.
2. Second, point out that much of what we do is because it's how we've always done it, and because it's easy to measure things like the number of classes taught; number of volumes owned, etc. (Jane makes this point about measurement). Here, expect some indignation...of course we should measure these things! How else can we complete the AAHSL stats every year?!
3. Third, soothe the hard feelings caused by step 2.
4. Fourth,  ask the big question: What can we let go of that we've always done, while still furthering the overall mission of our institutions? This is the "soul searching" step, and it might take a long time.
5. Fifth, actually try to let go of whatever is making us busy without making us any more productive.
6. Sixth, really let it go.
7. I meant really...let it go.  Doesn't it feel great to be less busy but still just as effective?
8. Now that we're only doing things that have a deep impact on our institution, how can we add new projects or services without merely becoming too busy again? What's our method for determining how best to spend our newly found time?
9. Repeat steps 1-8.

Free Rice

I just discovered the Free Rice site on a friend's  Facebook page.  It's a vocabulary quiz with a purpose--for every word you guess correctly, Free Rice donates 1o grains of rice through the UN.

Or at least they say they do; there's no way to check.

The site is fun if nothing else. I figure that the worst that happens is that "contestants" learn some new words. And if hungry people really get food because of someone's intellectual prowess, that's all the better.  But we should guard against the tendency to opt for "easy charity" in all cases; making transformative changes in the world will never be easy.

Oil Spill in San Francisco Bay

The Bay Area is in a funk right now, but soon it will have its groove back.

On Wednesday morning a container ship hit the Bay Bridge--which connects the East Bay (where Berkeley is) to San Francisco. The Coast Guard warned the ship's pilot of the impending collision but he said he had things under control.  The spill dumped 58,000 gallons of "bunker oil" into the San Francisco Bay. That's much more than the 140 gallons initially reported. Local officials are trying to discover why the initial estimate was so inaccurate.

Bunker oil is gross stuff--thick , oozy, very unrefined. It's probably what the Beverly Hillbillies stumbled upon when they made their TV millions forty years ago.  This year's bunker oil is collecting on duck beaks and sandy shores all around the Bay. Per Governor Schwarzenegger's declaration, the Bay is officially in a state of emergency.

The spill is nowhere near the dimensions of the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades ago. But it's bad enough, and a reminder of just how intricately  everything is connected.   A trivial example: because the ship's pilot had a lapse of judgment, kids in Albany, CA can't walk on the beach this weekend.  The kids are bummed out, but their parents are glad that the spill wasn't worse.

"Digitization and Its Discontents"

Anthony Grafton, a professor of European history at Princeton, has an interesting piece in the latest New Yorker, "Future Reading: Digitization and its discontents". Grafton casts a skeptical eye on digital utopians who argue that book digitization projects--whether from Google, Microsoft, or the Open Content Alliance--will eventually produce an online record of all human history.

Some of Grafton's objections to this view are practical: for starters, truly preserving a record of all human knowledge--including "archival documents never meant for publication"--is next to impossible. Furthermore, there are so many competing online digitization projects right now that we are building a balky mishmash rather than a seamless web.

His more interesting objections are philosophical: Context defines how you perceive a document or artifact (as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid argue in The Social Life of Information.)  There are some elements of print that cannot be duplicated online.  You can smell a book; you can shake out the dust; you can thumb through its jagged edges.  None of this is possible online, which is why both modes of access--physical and digital--will be important into the distant future.

Grafton offers a strong and eloquent defense of the importance of the material world in an era that is striving to become all digital. But he neglects to acknowledge the very real hurdles that most people have in visiting the world's great libraries.

Grafton's archetypal example of a great library is the main branch of the New York Public Library. Indeed, the NYPL has an absolutely amazing collection; if you live in New York, or are wealthy enough to visit, you can go to the corner of 42nd/5th and stay as long as you'd like.

But if you're like the vast majority of the world's people, this option is not available to you. However, many people around the globe might find themselves in a cyber-cafe with an Internet connection that is strong enough to read a book. 

Of course it would be better if people could hold that book in their hands.  But being able to read it at all sure is better than nothing.

Talk at the Public Library of Science

This morning I gave a talk at a Public Library of Science (PLoS) staff meeting, to express my concern about some of the rhetorical strategies used to support open access publishing. [A link to the presentation is at the end of this post.] PLoS is one of the world's great open access publishers--all articles are available for free online, and are preserved for permanent use (or, at least, as permanently as we know how to preserve any digital content by this point.)

Health sciences librarians have been among the strongest supporters of open access publishing. Traditional, subscription based journals are increasingly unaffordable. Plus, in many cases public funds have supported the research that appears  in scholarly journals--to the extent that this is true, the research is a public good that should be available for everyone.

These arguments for open access still resonate with me, but over the years I've grown weary of rhetoric that tars all traditional publishers--even scholarly societies operating on tight budgets, for whom journal subscriptions are a key source of revenue--as being on the wrong side of scientific progress.  What seemed so simple and right when I was a PLoS booster in 2004 feels complicated in 2007.

But even so, I still support the mission of PLoS; I hope that people perceived my talk as a way to have an honest discussion among friends.

There were two central points, related to each other: 1. that the rhetoric on behalf of open access can be too simplistic; 2. and that this rhetorical battle with traditional publishers is unnecessary because we are moving into a future in which scholars will publish more than just papers. It  is possible that interactive publications which contain multimedia and 3D elements will become the norm.

As defined by the National Library of Medicine, an interactive publication is a  "self-contained multimedia document that enables reader control over media objects and reuse of media content for further analysis." Assuming that publishing an old-fashioned paper becomes passe, I argued for focusing instead  on shaping a future that contains maximum access to such publications.

PLoS staff members (both in person in San Francisco and over the phone from the UK) asked some tough questions.  Several people pointed out that if the rhetoric opposed to traditional publishing becomes too tame, we could set ourselves up for never achieving full open access.  At one point a staff member presented a fully fleshed out theory of rhetoric--that it's OK to praise tentative steps towards open access (such as a scholarly society publisher might take) in private, while pushing hard in public for full open access immediately. The logic is that a tough public line is one means of setting the terms of debate. My response was that pushing too hard could stimulate a well-organized (and funded) response from publishers, so that it's best to be cautious.

Regarding my future predictions about a "post-paper world," people were concerned that without aggressive action now other publishing interests would strive to develop a closed system analogous to what exists for subscription journals. Copyright law is the key here--if somebody besides an author controls access to an interactive publication, it may be less interactive than it could have been. I agreed with this clarification; I had not addressed the legal implications in my talk, so I am glad they came up during the discussion.

Other questions revolved around the role of what librarians and how PLoS could help us. I said that librarians should keep educating faculty members about the current limitations of copyright law and the benefits of open access; and start talking with faculty about the possibilities of interactive publications.  I  advocated a stealthy, grass roots approach about these issues...building a movement rather than storming whatever publishing citadels exists now. PLoS's staff members were more than willing to help with such grass roots efforts.

In the end this debate is about means and not ends; of course I didn't convince everyone, but I hope I provided something to think about. The questions I received made me aware that I have much more thinking to do myself. It's an exciting new era in the history of scholarly publishing, and nobody knows what the future holds.

Download plos_presentation_oct_29_2007.ppt