DIY Librarian

Gina Barreca writes about bad books about writing, and generates some discussion of good books in the comments at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm. Not just for professional or aspiring writers, the list includes a wide variety of books, from those focusing on fiction to grammar and punctuation. Useful for all of us who write, whether poetry or library blogs.

This is a revision of an earlier announcement - note that there is now a prize for the best poster! (You maybe wondering, what is a poster session?)

The Social Science Division and the Museum, Arts, & Humanities Division invite proposals for a poster session to be held during the DSOC & MAHD Joint Open House at SLA 2008 in Seattle, Washington. DSOC and MAHD will award a one-year SLA membership to the first author of the best poster.

In keeping with the SLA 2008 conference theme, “Breaking Rules, Building Bridges,” the theme for the poster session is “Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools.” Proposals should focus on the use of collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in libraries or information work. Posters may include examples of collaboration tools in use, innovative ideas for future uses, comparisons of available tools, or any other idea relevant to the theme.

The poster session will be a relaxed and informal time to share ideas with your colleagues. We welcome proposals from any SLA member, new or experienced, and especially from students. In the event we receive more qualified submissions than we can accommodate, members of the two sponsoring divisions and student members will be given priority.

Proposals should be submitted by March 1, 2008 via e-mail to murray@pop.psu.edu or mail to Tara Murray, Population Research Institute, Penn State, 601 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802. Please include a title and description of about 250 words, and your name, institution, e-mail address, and address. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee for relevance to the theme and quality. We will notify applicants of our decision by April 1, 2008.

The Open House and Poster Session will be held on Sunday, June 15 from 8:00-10:00 p.m.

Wondering what a poster session is? I like this definite from the University at Buffalo Libraries:

Poster sessions are frequently used as a means to convey information in a brief format (typically 4′ x 8′) in classrooms, conferences and symposia, and workshops. Designing effective poster presentations is an art unto itself.

Well, someone is paying attention to the problem of data preservation, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog: Academic Group Convenes to Tackle Archiving of Digital Data.

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I tend to be skeptical of futurists, but I enjoyed Andy Hines‘ keynote at the SLA Leadership Summit. He began by talking about the techniques employed by futurists, and applications for their work. He noted that futurists do not predict the future, but give a “sense of the possibilities” and indicators that will tell us where we’re headed. Hines ended his talk by noting some values trends. Here are a few of them with my comments:

Personalization and co-creation. Hines pointed out that there are “identity purchases” and “whatever purchases”. I think “just Google it” is the information-seeking equivalent of a whatever purchase. It’s what we turn to when we need something quickly. I know I do - there is almost always a recent search query in the Google search box in my browser. But for some kinds of information, when accuracy or depth is critical, we turn to other, more specialized sources.

Simplicity and “decomplexificationizing”. Again, people will read a manual or take training, but only when there is a big payoff. Is being able to find a book in your library catalog a big payoff?

Ethical consumption. Hines talked about the “stampede of the ‘footprints’”, and noted that ethical consumption is complex and often contradictory. I noted this in the discussions about SLA going green. Sure, it would be great if everyone brought their own coffee mug and carried it with them during the conference and we didn’t have to throw away all those paper cups. But it might mean that all the vendors give away travel mugs instead of keychains, and harried conference attendees leave them behind where they get thrown away.

Time pressure. Hines said that the average workweek has actually gone down, which brought forth audible surprise from the audience. We aren’t working harder, Hines said, but we are filling our free time, and we are sleeping less. Hines believes sleep is “on the rising curve” and I think he’s right. Last week I listened to an NPR story about how people brag about not sleeping, and the rising awareness about the importance of sleep for productivity and health.

Transparency. Hines says “we all live in glass houses” now. The library world has picked up on this - Library Journal has a Transparent Library column.

Restructuring of work. Hines says we are moving to smaller core organizations with more partners and outsourcing. I couldn’t help but wonder (and I don’t think I was alone) if librarians and other information professionals are part of what is being outsourced (or worse). During the Q&A, an audience member asked Hines if his company employs information professionals. His reply was that, “In a sense, we are all information professionals,” and that his company doesn’t have an information department. You would think that information would be an “identity purchase” for a futurist…

More coverage of Hines’ talk at Library Buzz, Blogging Section of SLA-IT, and SLA Information Technology Division Blog.

In my post about Google hosting scientific data, I mentioned that the first obstacle to any data-sharing project is to getting researchers to want to share their data.

Yes, there are many proponents of open source and open access in the scientific community - but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to share. Biostatistician Andrew Vickers writes in the New York Times that many cancer researchers refuse to share their data, even when sharing it could potentially save lives.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) request that researchers they fund share their data:

The NIH expects and supports the timely release and sharing of final research data from NIH-supported studies for use by other researchers. Starting with the October 1, 2003 receipt date, investigators submitting an NIH application seeking $500,000 or more in direct costs in any single year are expected to include a plan for data sharing or state why data sharing is not possible. (NIH Data Sharing Policy)

However, I do not think they are enforcing this policy, which has been in place much longer than the Public Access Policy mandating public access to peer-reviewed publications resulting from NIH-funded studies.

A communication scholar and his book editor are testing out a model for using blog comments as peer review, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the experiment, the book will be simultaneously reviewed by blog commenters and by a traditional peer review process.

Google plans to host open access scientific data, according to a blog post at Wired Science.

I work with social science data sets, which are generally not as large as hard science data sets can be, but there are some similar issues.

First among them is getting the researchers who are collecting the data excited about sharing that data. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate data sharing for research projects they fund, but this is often the last step of the research process, conducted when funds are running out or have been exhausted.

Even if the researcher is interested in sharing his or her data, it is not a simple process. Just putting raw data online doesn’t do any good without appropriate documentation, description, and access tools. In addition, social science datasets usually involve human participants, so any identifying information must be stripped from the data, or the data must be restricted to researchers who have signed usage agreements and put appropriate security measures in place to protect participants’ personal information. Google does not exactly have a spotless record when it comes to privacy protection.

Archiving and preservation, however, is where I’m really not sure I trust Google. As I mentioned, data dissemination often comes at a stage in the research when funding has run out, so free looks good. But will Google’s free service continue to exist if Google someday decides that it is not a good business investment? Or what happens if (gasp!) Google goes out of business, or is sold to another company?

Libraries and institutional archives have a good track record on privacy and on long-term preservation. Google may provide increased open access, but I don’t think it can eliminate the need for solid, continually funded institutional data archiving.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports on a concrete example of scholarly collaboration formed through blogging, presented at ALA midwinter. I wasn’t at ALA for the presentation, but it’s interesting to see an example of scholarly blogs at work, after alluding to their growing impact in my discussion of the popularization of science.

A commenter notes that this kind of informal communication is nothing that hasn’t been happening in other forms for years - but the public nature of blogs brings a new dimension to such communication.

When big corporations produce content (or more likely, package and market content), that content is clearly under copyright and must be protected by heavy-handed measures from “pirates”.

But when the public, perhaps embracing marketing for digital cameras and web photo services that tells them to unleash their creativity, decides to produce and disseminate their own content, corporations turn around and snap up that content. To use in ad campaigns selling the “real” and “genuine”, no less.

That’s what is happening, according to an article in the Washington Post:

Under the banner of “intellectual property,” record labels warn you not to bootleg their songs. Hollywood studios warn you not to download their movies. Intellectual property has lately seemed the concern of corporations trying to protect the artist from the grabby public.

But in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it’s the big boys who get grabby. And the questions that arise are about ownership, but they are also about fairness, and changing culture, and ultimately, the search for authenticity.

I just hope that these stories don’t scare people away from Creative Commons licenses. While some of the content used without permission was posted with a CC license, other content was not and thus “all rights reserved” by default. The corporations ignored both CC licenses and traditional copyright.

A CC license doesn’t mean you don’t have any rights to your content. It means you have decided to allow certain uses, as defined in the license. For example, DIY Librarian uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. You are welcome to republish my content as long as I get credit, you don’t alter it, and you’re not making money off of it. It’s win-win: you get to use my content, I get recognition and a wider audience. You want to use something I made in an ad campaign, you need to talk to me. I want to make sure anything I create is used appropriately and that I am fairly compensated, and I have the right to refuse other uses.

Yesterday I wrote about the popularization of science and the role it plays in scholarly communication. Technology can make popularization easier than ever. One example is the proliferation of academic lectures on YouTube, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education (free online article).

Easier does not mean easy. The article quotes Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, on making online videos:

The thought process is very different, which I actually think can be very valuable. I mean we think a lot about how to present our work in writing, and I think when you shift into thinking about how to present this work visually, it actually forces you to think through things in new ways.