Student Leadership: Actually Getting People on Board

Photo public domain, copied from Wikipedia

Two days ago, Steve Ammidown over at Hack Library School wrote a great post about how great student organizations are in library school, the great skills you can pick up from them, but also the difficulty they often have keeping enough people involved. I know the struggle. I'm heavily involved with two of our organizations, our graduate student group LISGSA and our chapter of Progressive Librarians Guild. And it has often been a struggle keeping people involved with these two. I cannot talk about other programs, though they probably have similarities, but I can speak to why I think it's difficult to get people involved where I go to school and what can be done about it. 

So, why don't people get involved? A lot of us are working 1-2 part-time library jobs trying to cultivate experience, and many students who are transitioning to librarianship from other careers are still working full-time in those other careers while they get the degree. When we have free time, we don't all have it at the same time, so scheduling face to face (or even synchronous online) meetings can be a chore. So we have a time issue. 

We also have a place issue. Oh, do we have that. Our program has multiple campuses across the state, and since most of the classes are either hybrid or entirely online, even those who are technically on my campus may live an hour or so away and only visit it a few times a semester. So, in addition to having a distinct lack of free time overlap, when we can all meet a lot of people would need to travel to meet up, and some are just too far away to make that possible. So, out of all the people in the program, the actual recruiting pool for our organizations is just a fraction: people who are in-town, and usually only full-time students who only have, say, one part-time job. There are exceptions, but that's most of those involved, including me (okay, I have two part-time jobs, but one is very, very part-time).

How does an organization survive and get people involved in such a context? People need to take it upon themselves to be recruiters. When getting involved takes a lot of scarce time and doesn't, at first glance, seem to be so high a priority, it takes people who are willing to, again and again, make the hard sell for why it's important. It's how I got involved. I, traditionally, have not been a joiner. At all. But when I moved to a new town knowing zero people to start the program during Spring of 2012, I was kind of hurting for friends, so I started going to the LISGSA Happy Hours. There, among other great friends, I met Kyle, who was then LISGSA President. Without Kyle's recruitment, I would probably have stayed only "guy who goes to Happy Hours." But he encouraged me to do more, talked about the cool stuff they were doing, explained the personal and professional benefits I'd get by being a joiner for once, and got me involved. With his encouragement, I even ran for president for the 2012-2013 year.¹ 

Because of how important Kyle's recruiting was for me, I took it upon myself to pay the favor forward. Conveniently, as Programming Coordinator last school year, my job for LISGSA was basically "create events, make sure people show up." We held our first-ever conference this past spring, and one of my jobs was encouraging people to be presenters. Of the six executive board members serving this school year, I was heavily involved with recruiting² four of them to serve. This year, our PLG chapter is a bit on the ropes, so when the treasurer position became empty, I signed up to serve for this semester (my last), setting myself the goal of recruiting³ a replacement by spring, along with convincing others to get involved with PLG long-term. Oh, I've also targeted a couple students I think should be LISGSA Exec Board members next school year. Hopefully, some of those I've got involved previously are also doing the same, taking on the recruiting role. These organizations would die without it.

1) I lost, but thanks to the difficulties of getting people involved, the Programming Coordinator position was empty so I was slotted in there.  
2) They may say that more accurate terms would be "cajoling," "badgering," "brow beating," etc.
3) See 2) above.

The Power of Literacy

I got to a bit of a late start on R. David Lankes's New Librarianship MOOC, so I missed participating in a lot of the initial conversation, such as the Twitter arguments on the validity of conversation theory. However, I haven't seen anyone on Twitter (I'm not even attempting the discussion posts) really dig into the parts about power, so I'd like to. Starting at about 5:30 in the Facilitation: Knowledge/Training video, as well as in the book starting p74, Lankes makes the claim that literacy is about power. We read not necessarily because it's fun, but because it gives us the power to do things and get what we want. New Librarianship, in its promotion of literacy  should be increasing the power members in our community, especially those without power. Now, Lankes also includes fiction reading as power enabling. His examples in the book, however, are a little weak, with talk of what characteristics books cultivate and how reading Danielle Steele teaches us about ourselves. In the video he talks about learning to question authority with fiction without really getting into it. It leaves him open to critiques like Lane Wilkinson's on the issue of fiction in New Librarianship. Wilkinson points out, almost assuredly correctly, that most people don't read fiction to gain knowledge. We do it for enjoyment, culture, aesthetics maybe, but rarely explicitly to learn. Wilkinson doesn't really get into it, but if Lankes's point about fiction reading being empowering is based on fiction reading as knowledge creation, and Wilkinson is right that usually fiction reading isn't about knowledge creation, then fiction reading doesn't fit into New Librarianship's focus on facilitating power.

However, just because Lankes doesn't do a great job on explaining how fiction, literacy, and power go together doesn't mean they don't. You could argue it multiple ways, but luckily on my part, I ran into this TED Talk¹ today on the importance of stories and power that tackles it from one perspective:




Clearly you should watch the whole thing, but just in case you don't I want to try to summarize Adichie's basic point, which is about the danger of the single story and why having multiple stories is important. It's something she ran into as a child, where all of the books available to her for a long time were American and British, with white skinned children playing in the snow and talking about how nice it is when the sun comes out. As a result, when she as a child started writing, she thought all stories were about white skinned children playing in the snow and talking about how nice it is when the sun comes out, so that's what she wrote. Access to only a single story left her for a time without the power to tell her own, because she didn't see her story as the type of story that fiction tells. It comes up again and again, where only having access to a single perspective, through both fiction and non-fiction, convinces her roommate that no Africans could speak English or use a stove, convinces Adichie before a trip there that Mexico is a place where everyone is unhappy and destitute, convinces a student all Nigerian men were abusive because the only perspective she had was one of Adichie's novels where one of the men is abusive, and so on. Having access to only one story about a people flattens them into a stereotype and robs them of their power. In response to the student, Adichie drolly points out that reading American Psycho didn't convince her that all American men are serial killers, since she had access to many stories about American men. At 17:40, she really drives the importance of stories and power:²

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to disposes and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of people, but stories can also begin to heal that broken dignity. 

I think it also begins to address Wilkinson's critique. I think he's right that most of us do not read fiction first and foremost for creating knowledge. Yet, whether we want to or not, our fiction reading creates knowledge (or in some cases "knowledge") that we rely on. I don't disagree with him that I'd like to see "aesthetic enjoyment, cultural enrichment, or emotional connection" talked about. But what we read, or don't read, creates knowledge that we will either use to see people as the flattened stereotypes of a single story or humanize through many stories.Therefore, a librarian should be concerned with facilitating power through literacy by selecting diverse collections,³ providing safe spaces to discuss multiple perspectives, and creating a compelling case to read fiction that provides a fuller picture of people and cultures. Those that are not are instead help to teach people the knowledge of the single story, even though they are probably not doing this consciously. Either way, like it or not, fiction is part of the knowledge business. Which, to be fair to Lankes, he hints at in the video around 6:35 when talking about pushing "proper" books and removing the banned books, but that's not something we needed New Librarianship to push against. 

1) I know, I know, but this isn't the TED Talk stereotype.
2) By "stories" she means more than fiction, but, since fiction is unquestionably included and she repeatedly using it as an example, I think "fiction" can be safely subbed in.
3) Yes, access to outside things is deemphasized in New Librarianship, but I believe that, though we talk a great deal about it, libraries really aren't yet truly great at offering diverse collections.

Party Hard. Make It Happen. Scream at Each Other.

It's said that when you don't have anything nice to say you shouldn't say anything at all. But when you just have to say something negative, perhaps it's best to do so on your blog which gets maybe two dozen readers per post.

Over the past few months, my opinion of the the library profession, of which I'm not even a member yet, has sunk a lot. Now, I'll admit I joined library school with a naive image of librarians, but I think that was mostly sorted out in my first year. So this is not that. This, I think, comes almost entirely from the flame wars that erupt on the ALA Think Tank Facebook group. I joined because I expected a lot of great conversations about libraries, and there still are plenty of these. I learned so much after I asked people about their weeding policies following the Urbana Free Library weeding disaster. But there are an increasingly number of threads that devolve into screaming matches that make me hate both sides. It's gotten to the point where, in spite of all I've learned there, the toxic environment is making me hate librarians. Considering 99.99% of librarians are not people who are posting on these threads on ALATT, this is unfair, and I think the only way to get myself back on balance is to get the hell away from that place.

Shall I Keep Blogging?

I've had a blog for almost a semester now. It's been class-mandated, and soon we'll see if I keep it up. Would it be worth it? What do I get out of blogging? Luckily, at the end of said class we had a few articles on scholarly blogging, and there was one in particular that had good framework for me to use when reflecting on the future of my blog. Which I will do now. In blog form.

Sara Kjellberg (2010) interviewed 11 blogging researchers on why they maintained blogs. These people ranged from humanists to natural scientists, and ranked anywhere from PhD. student to professors. Not librarians, but I think what she found holds well enough. She identified six functions of scholarly blogs in their responses: disseminate content, express opinions, keep up-to-date on material in their fields, write, interact, and build networks of relationships. So, which of these am I getting out of my blog? 

I don't particularly pass along much I'm doing in my blog in terms of content I've created, whether it be research or library practice, though perhaps that will change at some point. I do like showing things I've read that I've found worth engaging. Right now, these things are often article read in this class, though I'll often pull in other things I've found interesting, such as my last post where I brought in a great blog post from Scholarly Communications @ Duke. I imagine what I pass along will grow in breadth of both form and topic if I keep the blog going after this class. As for expressing opinions, well, I have them, I like using the blog for it (see my attack on Google Scholar or totally non-expert opinion on the White House OA policy), and I definitely would keep using the blog for it. So, big check mark here.

The "keeping up-to-date" function was that some of the bloggers would pay more attention to developments in and related to their field in order to have something to blog about. I'm an info addict, so I really don't need my blog to motivate me to read constantly. Though, for the few weeks I did The Best Things I was much better at keeping track of what I read. This fits well with Kjellberg's sub-function of the blog as a notebook. Also, if I ever did want to go back and see what I thought was so import that I had to blog about, it's all there. 

Many of the researchers blogged to practice their writing skills and work on articulating their ideas. I love blogging for this. I don't have the worse writing, but I also don't think it's great, nor do I feel I've really cultivated my own distinct writing style, so I really appreciate the practice. I can't say it has always improved my writing (I still overuse parentheses [PARENTHESES!]), but I appreciate the practice all the same.

Interaction and relationship-building are very entwined. I also don't see much of them happening with my blog. I don't get many comments. Most of them are Joe, who is forced to comment on my blog until this class is over, though there was that one time Walt Crawford dismantled a number of my presumptions about APCs. I also don't see many comments on library blogs that have many more followers than me, so I don't see a lot more interaction in the future. I can't say this blog has built any new relationships will others in the library world, though this could partially be because I'm terrible at promoting this thing. Still, having a blog really hasn't changed much in the two virtual places I make connections with other librarians: Twitter and ALA Think Tank.

I do think I'll keep my blog, in spite of the name I gave it and now find to be annoyingly twee. I get a lot out of it, and I think I could get a lot more the more I use it. Of course, I say all this, but it wouldn't be the first time I've flaked at keeping a blog going when not forced to...

Kjellberg, S. (2010). I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday, 15(8). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2962/2580

It's My Fault (At Least Partially)

I want to talk game theory. Specifically, coordination games. Carl T. and Theodore C. Bergstrom (2006) identify the scholarly publication business as a coordination game. In such a game, there is an existing convention, a way of doing things, that is practiced by a large group. While that convention may no longer be the ideal way of doing things, no one individual can move away from the convention and benefit, because unless everyone else does. So, to steal their example, suppose we have three scholars in a field. There is the legacy journal, with publishing practices no one likes, and a new journal appears. The new journal is cheaper and it has the potential for more circulation, so one author considers publishing in it. However, if the other two stick with the legacy, the legacy will still be preferred by most readers, academic libraries will only buy the legacy if they have to make a choice, and that first scholar's work will actually receive less attention. All three would have to jump ship. Now change 3 to however many scholars there are in a given field, and you see how difficult this can be.

So, I bring all that up to give some context to my interpretation of this blog post, detailing how Keven Smith accidentally published an article at a Taylor & Francis journal, whose author's rights policies he disapproves of.  Smith, as the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke, is exactly the sort of person you expect to be making careful, informed decisions on what publishers he chooses to publish with, and no doubt he usually does. The story he spins on how this publication came to be is not, I think, the standard method one usually goes about getting something published. Still, he draws many good lessons from this experience, one that really stuck out to me: "authors choose journals, not publishers."

Scholars, when determining where to publish, don't think about who the publisher is but whether the topic they are writing about fits the journal they are writing for, and this is what Smith considered when he signed. He thought his work would be a good fit for the journal. He's almost certainly right, as well: Serials Librarian, T&F journal in question, probably is "a proper venue" for a write-up of the talk he gave. Why? It's where there are readers interested in these topics. Which makes me think, why do authors choose journals, not publishers? Probably because readers choose journals, not publishers. Bergstrom and Bergstrom stated that readers choose journals because quality scholars publish there, but I think it's also true that quality scholars choose journals because there are many readers. It's mutually reinforcing.

If I am honest about my own inchoate practices as a scholar, as I determine what I should be reading to keep track of my interests I don't consider who is actually publishing these journals. I care about what is in them. I am an OA advocate and talk a big game about it, but it in no way changes my research practice. I don't prioritize finding information in an OA journal. I prioritize finding information in the best journal, and OA doesn't factor into my definition of "best." As a budding librarian I care about publishing practice, but as a budding scholar I really only care about best information,* and sometimes (often) that information is in journals with publishing practices I don't approve of. In thinking this way, I'm helping to keep the convention of the coordination game stable. As long as I, and my fellow readers, keep reading journals without interest in how they publish, what incentive is there for authors to try to disrupt the convention?

* Actually, as a librarian I only care about publishing practice when advocating for new publishing practices. When doing reference or information literacy instruction, I don't care about publishing practice when I guide patrons and students towards resources. I don't think I'm unusual in this. The only one of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards that could be used for considering publication practices is Standard Five, maybe, if you squint at it and turn your head sideways a little bit.

Bibliography:
Bergstrom, C. T., & Bergstron, T. C. (2006). The economics of ecology journals. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 4(9), 488-495. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3868823

Google Scholar

This whole Google Reader thing is why I should probably second guess giving my entire life to Google.
— Carl Hess (@CarlSHess) March 14, 2013

I was reading a 2010 article from Brian D. Edgar and John Willinsky surveying journals published on the Open Journals System. These in many ways are the sorts of journals that the new, digital, OA order makes possible: small, non-commercial, run by dedicated scholars, international, interdisciplinary, investigating new areas of inquiry. It was interesting stuff, but one quote, basically made offhandedly, stuck out to me:

These journals owe a debt, if perhaps more so than other journals, to the indirect support of Google Scholar for indexing the contents of these journals on publication, making them open to discovery on the same grounds as other journals, while providing readers with a degree of quality control, through Google’s page ranking and the citation counts it provides in its search results.

This is not the first time I've seen this sentiment come up. Actually, over the course of my scholarly communications class, it has been brought up in article after article how OA journals and IRs get most of their traffic from GS. This...may not be a good thing. First, is GS really going to be around in a few years? GS is currently not providing ads, and I'm presuming that the information Google learns about its users from GS are not really helping it all that much with its main money-makers, ads for the finance & insurance industries, retail, and tourism. Perhaps it's not surprising that after they announced Google Reader was dead, there was a fair amount of speculation that Google Scholar was next.

Still, let's assume that Google feels like keeping GS around for a while. Should the scholarly community, from scholars to librarians, really be content with reliance on GS? I do not think so, and I think why is well summed up by Charles Potter (2008): "We should not be fooled that any technology used by Google (or any search technology, really) is a neutral force in the information seeking process." (10)

Potter then goes on to lay out multiple ways in which Google Scholar is influencing the search process in ways that we, as librarians, generally do not approve of. Google is, of course, an advertising company, not an information company (that Venture Beat article linked above notes that Google makes 96% of its revenue from ads). To sell these ads, Google data mines, and then it keeps its information about you basically forever. Librarians would probably consider many of Google's practices to be in violation of our Core Value of Privacy/Confidentiality if we were doing them, and yet so many of our libraries link to GS. Google, whether through the main page or GS, is also dependent on a mass-model view of information in order to mass advertise. The single search bar is built on the idea that our information needs are homogeneous, that you can just passively put in a couple keywords, and that Google, through its algorithm, can find your information for you (Go ahead, try to find the Advanced Search). This is anathema to what librarians do: we try to meet the specific needs of our users, and we empower them to control and adjust their search results. 

In addition to Potter's reasons, there is also, of course, the infamous filter bubble. For those unaware, the filter bubble is the idea that Google (and other online services) are personalizing the information they deliver to you by your biases, so that potentially a searcher would never find information that they disagree with. The actual extent of Google's personalization is debated, but that actually helps the argument: Google is a black box. Nobody knows what they are doing, what they are planning to do, and what they could do in the future. Do we really trust them to do the right thing? 

I don't think so. We need a DPLA for Open Access materials. The White House OA memo is going to put a lot more OA material out there. Let's not make it a trade from the monopoly of the current scholarly commercial giants to a monopoly of Google.

Bibliography:
Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010). A survey of scholarly journals using open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, 1(2). Retrieved from http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/24/41

Potter, C. (2008). Standing on the shoulders of libraries: A holistic and rhetorical approach to teaching Google Scholar. Journal of Library Administration, 47(1/2), 5-28. doi:10.1080/01930820802110563

Institutional Repositories: What Are They Good For?

Edit: all of the following presumes that we define success of IRs in terms of holding peer-reviewed scholarly works, as Steve Harnad does. Whether that is a good idea or not is its own argument.

Discussing institutional repositories yesterday in my scholarly communications class and how to convince faculty to archive in them, a question was posed: how do you convince a faculty member that submits their work to gold OA publications that participate in CLOCKSS to self-archive in the IR? Is there a good reason for them to?

Well, to answer that question, we need to look at the benefits of a IR versus that of said publication. Cullen and Chawner (2011) identify four key aspects of scholarly communication: registration (who  does this belong to?)*, certification (is this any good?), awareness (how do we let others know about this?), and archiving (how to we ensure this is always available in the future?). A traditional publication does all four of these things to varying degrees of success: they identify the author, they certify the work through peer review, they raise awareness through marketing the publication, and they keep back-copies, though they really rely a lot on research libraries for archiving. When librarians and others who promote and maintain IRs stress the value of them, we generally focus on awareness and archiving. We increase awareness of the publication through making it freely accessible in the IR with a permanent link and searchable online, through standards such as OAI-PMH, and build trust among scholars that we will maintain those documents online (Kim 2011).

But, Cullen and Chawner (2011) find in their research that scholars are considered more with registration and certification than awareness and archiving, which are two things that IRs do not do at this moment. Now, let's compare it to that gold OA publication: it has the registration and certification (peer-review) part down, and it compares favorably with the IR on awareness and archiving. Like the IR, it's online, for free, with a stable link, and is indexed by search engines, making it findable and accessible by more than the traditional article. Additionally, with CLOCKSS it ensures that even if the publisher goes under the article is preserved. It does it all in one. How can the IR compete with that, especially long-term?   

Well, we could draw on the idea of the decoupled journal championed by Priem and Hemminger (2012). Putting aside the good objections with their ideas on implementation and looking at the idea in the abstract, they identify functions of scholarly communication nearly identical to Cullen and Chawner: archiving, registration, dissemination, and certification. IRs have the archiving down, as well as part of the dissemination through their metadata. Now, why would a scholar want to disengage their certification from archiving and dissemination?** Priem and Hemminger hope for an increased diversity of certification/assessment under a decoupled system, and I agree that there is a lot of potential benefit here. A multidisciplinary work could be certified by groups in multiple disciplines. There could be certification as to how well the work follows accepted research practice, as well as those for "significance." Those representing traditionally disadvantaged perspectives could have certifications for disciplines, so a mainstream economics paper could be evaluated by feminist economics as to how well is avoids andocentric ideas. There can be anonymous and open review. Some of these the author would submit to, while others may take the Journal of the Digital Humanities model and go looking for things to certify. Thus, the object could investigated and certified from a variety of perspectives, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of quality than now (where something is either accepted or rejected). The object in the IR could display the varied certifications that the scholarly work received with it, perhaps using an open badge framework, so while the IR does not certify, it archives certifications.

Cullen, R. and Chawner, B. (2011). ' Institutional Repositories, Open Access, and Scholarly Communication: A Study of Conflicting Paradigms.' The Journal of ACademic Librarianship 37:6, 460-470. DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2011.07.002

Kim, J. (2011). 'Motivations of Faculty Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories.'The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37:3, 246-254. DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2011.02.017

Priem, J. and Hemminger, B.M. (2012). 'Decoupling the Scholarly Journal.' Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 6, 1-13. DOI:10.3389/fncom.2012.00019

*Cullen and Chawner, as well as Roosendaal and Geurts, whom they borrow this framework from, never do a particularly good job of explaining what they mean by registration, other than in involves intellectual property and copyright, so I'm going to focus less on it.
**Remember, I'm still not touching registration.