Marcus' World

Facebook and Connections

Scott is becoming more active on Facebook, but is unsure of what exactly it will do for him.  Meanwhile, I'll happily admit that I passed into the realm of Facebook addiction long ago (well, at least six months ago).

I'm now a fan of two libraries on Facebook, and I recently downloaded the PubMed search application.  That seems handy for sharing articles, but for a "real" PubMed search it still makes sense to go straight to PubMed.  This could change, of course, and it will be fun to keep up with how librarians utilize Facebook to build new services and reach more people. Many bloggers do this now, but I tend to dip in and out of the comment stream.

So at the moment I have no idea how librarianship will change because of Facebook.  But I do know how my personal relationships have changed, and this is why I keep going back to it.

On Facebook I can play Scrabulous (and lose)...or decide not to play Scrabulous when I get multiple requests in one day.  I can see that one friend just wrote a review of a new cafe on Yelp; I can discover that another friend going through a difficult time could really use a hug.  Or I chuckle at the funny status updates (Helen  is great at those).  Perhaps I'll find out that someone 3,000 miles away is getting a new drivers license, and I wholeheartedly empathize with what is probably an interminable wait at the DMV.

At the UCSF Library more and more people are getting Facebook accounts. Sometimes you learn things about people that they feel comfortable broadcasting on the web, but would never say in person. But because it's "out there" now, you have a new avenue of conversation and a new way to get to know your colleagues.  Or, if you're like me you announce that you're looking forward to San Francisco Restaurant Week on Facebook--and then forget that you said anything to anybody. Then, when a colleague asks where you plan to go for dinner, you have no idea how they knew your plans!

Is Facebook essential to  any of this? No; all of what I described above could easily be communicated in myriad other ways.  But--for some mysterious reason--the linking agent of Facebook makes certain information shareable that would otherwise not be shared.  Nobody would email that they're going to get their drivers license renewed, and most people would only send a text message to close friends while they are waiting at the DMV.  But in the context of Facebook such a tiny tidbit is easy to share, and easy for others to relate with. 

Concerns about people being sucked into the machine are severely overblown; online connections are a natural complement and stimulus to more meaningful in-person ties.  This is what all social networking sites (not just Facebook) have to offer.

The Anna Kushnir Controversy (a Bit Late)

Whenever a juicy controversy breaks out in library-land, I always feel a day late and a dollar short.  I dip into and out of the great librarian blogs sporadically, and hardly ever read MEDLIB-L.  Those are lame excuses, but they're true.  And recently I had the additional (glorious) distraction of a wonderful vacation in Tokyo with Helen.

So all my librarian friends are already well acquainted with Harvard PhD student Anna Kushnir's famous "rant" (both her word and a word used by others) about how much she loathes searching PubMed.  There are already posts about this throughout the biblioblogosphere. Nevertheless I've been so fascinated by the controversy that I can't resist adding my own voice to the fray.

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Some choice quotes from Kushnir's original post:  "I have spent an absurd amount of time on PubMed recently and can say in no uncertain terms that it is making my dissertation writing way more painful than it needs to be"..."I can hold a paper in my hands, search for two authors’ last names and have PubMed come up with nothing"..."Science cannot proceed at a decent clip if researchers cannot find the most basic necessary information."

From this post it is clear that Kushnir doesn't know many handy PubMed tricks, and wants it to be completely intuitive and easy to search.  So do I.  In a perfect world PubMed would have the simplicity of Google searching, with the rigor that comes from executing an extremely sophisticated search that involves many MeSH terms.  It's not a crazy pipe dream to wish for a Google-like front end with a strong MeSH backbone.

So I see where Kushnir is coming from.  Many librarians generously offered to help Kushnir in her PubMed searching needs--librarians who didn't even know her, throughout North America.  This was the absolute best of librarianship, but it also proved Kushnir's point: Why should such a core database be so complex that it requires this level of intervention?

The other type of reaction, as exemplified by David Rothman, is that the user--in this case Anna Kushnir--is broken.  (To be fair, David also built a Google Custom Search Engine that allows Kushnir to search PubMed via Google.) David rails against Kushnir's refusal to seek a librarian's assistance or to read PubMed's help documentation. He even runs that documentation through a Google Docs analysis to show that it is easy to understand.

In all due respect, I think David is missing the point.  For starters, Kushnir was very grateful for all the offers of assistance from librarians following her post--she said so repeatedly.  Her point holds nevertheless, and she explained it well in the excellent interview Dean posted with her yesterday.

To quote Kushnir at length (italics mine):

"Feel free to consider what I am about to say as ignorant or naive but keep in mind that I am a trained researcher. I have worked in labs for the last 12 years and until this "incident", I was not aware that I needed to use the expertise of medical librarians as intermediaries between myself and PubMed. Knowing this, I feel that the need for assistance in my searches defeats the purpose of an *online* search engine. Again, this is a comment only on the design of PubMed as a website not on the services available to me at the library."

Kushnir exhibits an awareness of the potential limitations on her thinking; restates her thesis; and  re-emphasizes that she is not talking about  librarians but rather the design of PubMed. There's no reason to be upset with her.

What is the role of librarians? To fiercely defend systems that we understand well, even if they don't meet a patron's needs? Or to seek new and better ways to meet those needs? David's post would have been a lot more congenial if he'd simply linked to the Google/PubMed custom search engine and made it available for Kushnir's use. His listing of alternate PubMed interfaces is also quite helpful.

Contrast David's reaction to that of (also David) Lipman, the director of NCBI (which makes PubMed). Lipman never criticizes Kushnir, but instead acknowledges the validity of her complaints and explains how NCBI is seeking to address them.

Again, to quote at length (this time of Lipman, and with italics for emphasis):

"Although the current engine works well for some users and some queries, I understand Anna’s frustration and we are in the midst of a number of changes that will make PubMed work better for her and many other users. One type of query she is doing – essentially a form a targeted search/citation matching – will be handled much better within the next couple of weeks. We’re putting in a CitationSensor approach that will run the default search (but one which is itself somewhat improved) but have a separate set of heuristics for picking up Anna’s type of query.

"Especially for someone writing a thesis or paper, they are often simply trying to find a particular paper, perhaps using author names, or terms from a title, or even just cutting & pasting a reference from another online paper. So this will be a big improvement for them...

"A number of these complaints are fair and we'll be doing our best to address them."

Hear hear.

Wikipedia's Growing Pains

Nicholson Baker--the bane of librarians everywhere ever since his assault on microfilm in Doublefold (2001)--has turned in a fascinating status report about Wikipedia in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books.

It's very much worth reading to enjoy Baker's inimitable prose--you don't often come across a word like "panjundrum."  But here's a comparatively straight-laced summary:

Baker becomes obsessed with the ease of editing Wikipedia articles, and so he starts to edit articles himself (under the user name "Wageless.")  Eventually he takes up the cause of rescuing articles slated for deletion by zealous volunteer editors--just like he sought to save the books and newsprint that librarians wanted to microfilm.

Baker goes into depth about the evolution of Wikipedia: from an anarchic place in which all articles were welcome, into a more regulated domain in which the "deletionists" and "inclusionists" do battle. (The Economist has a starchier take on this same debate in the most recent "Technology Quarterly.")  Of course some rules are necessary to give structure to the Wikipedia, but in Baker's view--and mine--the numerous regulations now threaten to strangle the spirit of innovation that launched Wikipedia in the first place.  One chilling example: "Notability purges," in which zealous volunteers peg articles for deletion because they aren't deemed to be about worthy topics.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.  There are no page or length restrictions in the Wikipedia (obviously), so who am I to judge what should matter to you?

The healthy side of Wikipedia regulation manifests itself whenever people delete silly or unfactual edits within individual articles. Several years ago I inserted a nonsense sentence into an article (can't remember which one), and was pleased to see it gone by dawn.  But the mood these days is much more sinister. Baker quotes Andrew Lih:  "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."

There is a bright side, thank goodness.  Those worried about the Wikipedia censors can join the awkwardly named Wikiproject Proposed Deletion Patrolling project.  This is a splinter faction within the Wikipedia community; anyone can resist the notability purges and spur the Wikipedia to hew closer to its original spirit.

To the cyber-barricades, I say--the more articles about Pokemon, the better!

Public Health/Health Administration Section Research Award--Applications Due April 1

Anyone who has published a paper in the field of public health/health sciences librarianship within the past three years is welcome to apply for the Public Health/Health Administration section's research award.  We made our first award last year, and hope to make this an annual tradition. Full application details are available here.

The original deadline was March 1, but we have extended it to April 1.  Hope to see your application very soon!

Journals to Blogs, Cont.

Thanks to David Rothman for rounding up the reactions to my call for librarian journals to evolve into blogs.  Thanks also to commenters here; and for those who follow the action over on T. Scott, he and I had a pretty good discussion about this last week.

A fair criticism of my idea is that it is too binary and absolutist. Why can't we have journals and blogs? Or journals for some purposes and blogs for others?

So, a refinement: I'm not so much concerned with the vehicle (journal or blog) for sharing research or hypotheses in library and information science.  What I care the most about is putting our ideas into circulation more quickly than we do currently. I believe that in the high majority of cases quality peer review could happen after an early version of an article appears.

In this context there must be an incentive to make constructive peer reviews, rather than leaving brief and/or inflammatory comments in reaction to article postings.  Authors would need to be comfortable  with posting less than fully vetted ideas.  And there would have to be solid management so that postings like "This is a cool article!!" don't appear on any reputable web site.

I don't have a very good handle on how to operationalize these ideas.  Anything close to what I am describing will be a distant development. Conceptually, though, the idea is sitting pretty well (for me at least!). I look forward to the continued discussion. 

Last Post--Blog Readers Survey

In my recent survey of health sciences librarian blog readers, people stated their primary job responsibilities (and in many cases used comments to tell me about additional categories that I had not included--public librarian, corporate librarian, government librarian, etc.)  People also identified how long they had worked as librarians. During my presentation about the survey, I didn't address these variables.  So below are a few observations about how job responsibility and years of experience affected people's responses. Below all that is the presentation, for those who haven't seen it.

I learned a lot about the challenges of good survey design; short of an exhaustive vetting process, it's very hard to identify categories and answers that will appeal to all (or at least most) respondents.

The discrepancy between the primary goals of blog authors and readers--stimulating discussion (authors) and keeping current  (readers)--is very interesting to me. Also, it's not yet clear what people mean by "acting" on what they read in a blog post. Is forwarding information about a post acting on it? Or should this designation be reserved for more substantial work that attempts to utilize the information in a blog post? There's a lot more to be discovered in this area (as always).

Without further ado, some final observations:

A. Respondents by category:
Reference librarians:  120 people
One person librarians: 52 people
Administrators: 42 people
Catalogers: 7 people
Other categories (public, government, corporate): 54 people [some of whom also identified themselves in one of the above categories]

Compared to one person librarians and administrators, reference librarians were apt to say that they were would act on the information in blogs more than listservs.  This was still a minority of reference librarians--40%. But one person librarians and administrators were both under 20%.  The "other" group was around 27%.  Catalogers were over 50%--but that sample of 7 people is very small.

B. Everybody answered the question about years of experience, and there is a good distribution:

0 to 3 years: 62 people
4 to 6 years: 32 people
7 to 10 years: 31 people
11 to 20 years: 73 people
20+ years: 68 people

Of these groups, librarians at 4-6 years and 11-20 years disproportionately stated that they act on what they read in blogs "somewhat frequently."  People above 20 years were the most likely to answer in the cluster "somewhat frequently/frequently/very frequently."

As I type this up I see just how many more data trends it is possible to follow! But I must be moving on (for now)...if any reader would like to see all the raw data to make your own analysis, please let me know. 

Blog Authors and Readers Survey Presentation--Please Review, Respond, and Reuse

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my recent surveys about health sciences librarian blogs--both authors and readers.   I reported the results on Friday, and the presentation generated a fascinating question about the potential of blogs as vehicles for serious scholarship.  Hopefully I've effectively conveyed my opinion on this issue in my previous post.

Some interesting results: most people saw no difference between blogs and email lists as a source of information; hospital librarians are less likely to attempt to act on what they read in blogs than academic librarians (of course, "act" could be defined much more rigorously); and blog authors value the potential of blogs to stimulate discussion more than readers--readers generally look to the blogs as a source of news. Another thread that emerged in my research (not from the surveys per se) is of the potential of blogs to become a new source of professional networking and community.

All of this is very preliminary data. Hopefully one of my loyal readers is willing  to take the next step of examining these issues more rigorously! I certainly maintain my interest...

Please view the full presentation slides on Slideshare, and fellow bloggers are most welcome to quote from any part of the presentation in their own writings. 

[A Slideshare viewing tip: To see the presentation on your entire computer screen, click the "Full" icon at the bottom right corner of the presentation.]

Why Professional Librarian Journals Should Evolve into Blogs

In the last few months I've attempted to lead the transition of the journal Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL) from publication on BioMed Central to publication via the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. The critical difference now is that prospective authors owe no author fees. In its four years of existence BDL has published several articles that received buzz among people interested in digital libraries. It felt good to be part of reviving the flagging fortunes of BDL.

But something funny happened on the way to OJS: I became firmly convinced that the traditional journal model is antiquated for sharing research and knowledge among librarians.  A better course is to develop and nurture excellent blogs, with multimedia capabilities and guaranteed preservation of the postings. This could be an entirely new blog that starts from scratch, or an established journal that evolves into a blog. 

Once this belief sunk in, I didn't have the same passion for reviving BDL that I used to. As one of my goals for the upcoming Medical Library Association meeting in May, I hope to identify a new leader for BDL who will give it the attention and energy that it deserves.  My own energy will shift towards getting this blog project off the ground--it could take years, but I think it's worth it.

My arguments:

1. As respected library commentator Walt Crawford notes, blogs are among the most vibrant library literature today.  I agree with Crawford, and believe there is no reason why all of the rigor traditionally associated with journals could not be maintained on a blog contributed to by multiple authors.

2. Peer review should be a post-publication process, rather than a pre-publication process that sometimes drags out for many months.  If physicists can post pre-prints that get discussions flowing quickly, why can't librarians?

The argument for pre-publication peer review is that it filters out poor research. This is a legitimate concern when the research in question is about a new and potentially deadly medical intervention. Library research is not like this; peer review can occur via community conversation.

Counter-arguments:

1. Most people will prefer to publish in established journals rather than an unestablished blog.  Of course this is true, which is why the evolution to a blog paradigm would take a long time.

2. All of the supporting structures--from PubMed citations to tenure requirements--favor the traditional journal. Blogs are still too new to be taken seriously as a venue for enduring research.

Rebuttal: This is certainly true now, but--ultimately--what is a scholarly journal but a means of communication among people of similar interests and backgrounds? Why can't blogs achieve the same goals?

3. Blogs are ephemeral; they come and go at the speed of light. In some cases, good journals have existed for hundreds of years.

Response: The proof of the viability of a scholarly blog will be in how long it lasts. But even if the blog failed, that would be a function of a lack of commitment among the people involved.  There is no intrinsic reason why all of the functions served by a quality journal cannot be served just as well by a carefully designed and managed blog. 

Why Librarians Have the Blues

Throughout large swaths of library-land, there is angst.

"Will people even go to libraries in ten years?" "People think everything should be online, and if it's not in Google after two seconds of searching they give up."  "If we put up a page in Facebook, won't the kids think that's super lame of the library?"

Etc., etc.,  etc.

Recently I've had something of an epiphany about these issues--not really a revelation, but rather a new way of thinking that made the stakes more clear to me.

Premises:

1. Everyone must develop information-seeking skills to function; even illiterate people discover how to find out what they need to know.  People's information-seeking is  often wildly inefficient, and on countless times per day individuals fail to discover something that is exactly on target and extremely useful to them.  But they find enough to soldier on, and they do it by themselves. Autonomy is highly important, to librarians too--I certainly never ask for help when I enter a new library.

2. Librarians seek to help people doing research, and can do great things whenever they establish a relationship with someone.  But people generally don't ask for help because they don't know what they don't know, and even without the help of a librarian they often earn great esteem in their chosen professions.

3. Other fields--teaching, electrical engineering, whatever--require developing a set of skills that are less fundamental to human functioning. So these fields garner respect because they seem "unique." 

But because the librarian is an expert in something that everyone knows how to do to some extent--finding and organizing information--this expertise is harder to appreciate.

Conclusion:

These are not hopeless days to be a librarian. It's actually very exciting, because we have an opportunity to re-shape a profession that doesn't come along very often. But we won't get there by telling people we can do a better search than they can--that may be true, but it's not persuasive. We have to find better ways of demonstrating real and unique value.

Your ideas are welcome.   

Blog Readers Survey--Erratum

Sorry for a bit of mis-reporting on the blog reader survey results.   You are about to read a blog version of an erratum statement.

Apparently Survey Monkey only counts responses when people select one of the options I provided. For example, in question # 2 220 people answered that they either worked in hospitals or academic health sciences libraries.

This meant that 46 people skipped the question, officially. But there were many comments--50 in fact, presumably to offer another option.  So the total number of inputs to the question was 270 (for 266 responses); some people offered clarifying comments, some only comments, and some people truly skipped the question.

So it's not true--as I claimed in my previous post--that you had to pick a pre-set option in order to make a comment. You could make a comment on its own, but SurveyMonkey doesn't capture that scenario very cleanly.