Review of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

I learned about this book (Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by. Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick) from the LSW (of course) and it was a joy to read. Below are some of the best parts.  Note that the quoted parts are from the preprint electronic version of the book. (The copyright notice is way at the bottom of the post.)  Some of the text in the printed book may be slightly different from the online version.  And, there were complete sentences and paragraphs that were in the book, but were not on the website.

Most of her work focuses on the scholarly book publishing industry in the humanities, but in order to explain some of the problems with the scholarly publishing book business, she had to examine how STEM journal budgets have eaten up academic library budgets.  She does a great job of explain much of the scholarly communications crisis as the whole. She would like to save university presses by having their services merged with university library publication services.  In doing this, university administrators will need to rethink the whole scholarly communication ecosystem within universities and with the rest of the world.  She points out that technological change can be quick, but that cultural change can be slow to glacial in the academy.

This bit does a good job of explaining the serials crisis. (page 3.)

Though the notion of a crisis in scholarly publishing was first aired well over a decade ago (one might see Sanford Thatcher’s 1995 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Crisis in Scholarly Communication”), things suddenly got much, much worse after the first dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in the stock market, when numerous university endowments went into free fall (a moment that, in retrospect, seems like mere foreshadowing), two academic units whose budgets took among the hardest hits were university presses and university libraries. And the cuts in funding for libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of monographs they purchased. The result for library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating.

The scholarly communication system is broken (page 7.)

"But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered” (Kirschenbaum).

 Administrators should evaluate the work of scholars while being format agnostic (page 8.)

Many of the recommendations put forward by the MLA task force (which were of course later expanded upon in the task force’s final report, published in December 2006) were long in coming, and many stand to change tenure processes for the better; these recommendations include calls for departments:
...
* to acknowledge that scholarship of many different varieties is taking place online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related bias.

and

These were extremely important recommendations, but there was a significant degree of “easier said than done” in the responses that these recommendations, and particularly the last one, received, and for no small reason: these recommendations require a substantive rethinking not simply of the processes through which the academy tenures its faculty, but of the ways those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. Those changes cannot simply be technological; they must be both social and institutional.

She then discusses the MediaCommons project and the rate of social change within the academy. (pages 8-10.)

No matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison.

 and

Those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the extant [higher education] system are often reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Changing our technologies, changing our ways of doing research, changing our modes of production and distribution of the results of that research, are all crucial to the continued vitality of the academy – and yet none of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print – and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too – few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal and undervalued.

She advocates for a huge change in the peer-review system of scholarship. (page 10.)

In what follows, then, I focus not just on the technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but on the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are necessary to pave the way for such flourishing. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work....

And it’s the structures of peer review that I argue in chapter 1 we need to begin with, not least because of the persistence of the problem that peer review presents for digital scholarship, and the degree to which our values (not to mention our value) as scholars are determined by it. Peer review is at the heart of everything we do – writing, applying for grants, seeking jobs, obtaining promotions; its presence is arguably that which makes the academy the academy. But I want to suggest that the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken, part of what’s made a vibrant mode of scholarly communication undead.

 We need new ways to cite works. (page 12.)

We may instead need to develop new citational practices that acknowledge the participation of our peers in the development of our work.

 And, we need to figure out ways to encourage administrators to accurately evaluate different modes of scholarly communication. (pages 12-13.)

We must find ways for the new modes of authorship that digital networks will no doubt facilitate – process-focused, collaborative, remix-oriented – to “count” within our systems of valuation and priority.

Publishers will continue to experiment with different business models. (page 13.)

Publishers, for instance, will need to think differently about their business models (which may need to focus more on services and less on objects), about their editorial practices (which may require a greater role in developing and shepherding projects), about the structures of texts, about their ownership of copyright, and about their role in facilitating conversation.

Chapter 1 is all about the peer review system.  She touches on some library things. (page 17.)

As one librarian frames the issue, “Banning a source like Wikipedia (rather than teaching how to use it wisely) simply tells students that the academic world is divorced from real-world practices” (Badke, qtd in Regalado). The production of knowledge is of course the academy’s very reason for being, and if we cling to an outdated system for the establishment and measurement of authority at the very same time that the nature of authority is shifting around us, we run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the dominant ways of knowing of contemporary culture.

In the course of changing the peer review system, this may entail the loss of "power and prestige" for the academics involved. (page 19.)

She has good overviews of the history and possible future of peer-review.  She also provides touches on the aspects of anonymity, credentialing, the reputation economy of academics, and more.   There is a good quote in the book that is not in the online version. (page 31.)  Junior scholars are advised to

focus not on the important but on the publishable, avoiding risk-taking in the interest of passing the next review.

The scholars who have achieved status in the prior system would like to keep the status quo. (page 31.)

The result, conventionally, has been the dismissal by many faculty and administrators of all electronically published texts as inferior to those that appear in print, or, where those authority figures are sufficiently forward-looking as to argue for the potential value of electronic publishing, the insistence that the new forms adhere to older models of authorization — and thus the reinforcement of “the way things have always been done” at the expense of experimental modes that might produce new possibilities. Such conservatism shouldn’t come as much surprise, of course; those faculty and administrators who are in the position of performing assessments of the careers of other, usually younger, faculty are of necessity those who have sufficiently benefitted (sic)  from the current credentialing system as to rise to that position.

She touches on the scarcity of information vs abundance. (page 37.)

Print-based publishing operates within an economics of scarcity, with its systems determined in large part by the fact that there are a limited number of pages, a limited number of journals, a limited number of books that can be produced; the competition among scholars for those limited resources requires pre-publication review, to make sure that the material being published is of sufficient quality as to be worthy of the resources it consumes. Electronic publishing faces no such material scarcity; there is no upper limit on the number of pages a manuscript can contain or the number of manuscripts that can be published, or at least none determined by available resources, as the internet operates within an economics of abundance.

She also cites Clay Shirky (page 38) on the scholars' ability to "publish-then-filter," instead of filtering (peer-review and rejection) before publication. 

She introduces a concept called peer-to-peer review, which she describes as a "review of the reviewers." (page 43.)

Chapter 2 covers authorship.

In what follows, I argue that we all need — myself not least among us – to rethink our authorship practices and our relationships to ourselves and our colleagues as authors, not only because the new digital technologies becoming dominant within the academy are rapidly facilitating new ways of working and new ways of imagining ourselves as we work, but also because such reconsidered writing practices might help many of us find more pleasure, and less anxiety, in the act of writing itself. This is of course not to suggest that digital publishing networks will miraculously solve all of the difficulties that we face as writers; rather, it is to say that network technologies might help us feel less alone and less lost in the writing process.

Concerning the remixing of content... (page 79.)

We might, for instance, find our values shifting away from a sole focus on the production of unique, original new arguments and texts to consider instead curation as a valid form of scholarly activity, in which the work of authorship lies in the imaginative bringing together of multiple threads of discourse that originate elsewhere, a potentially energizing form of argument via juxtaposition. Such a practice of scholarly remixing might look a bit like blogging, in its original sense: finding the best of what has been published in the digital network and bringing it together, with commentary, for one’s readership. But it might also resemble a post-hoc mode of journal or volume editing, creating playlists, of sorts, that bring together texts available on the web in ways that produce new kinds of interrelationships and analyses among them.

Chapter 3 covers texts and CommentPress.

Chapter 4 is about digital preservation including bits about standards, metadata, LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, and the economics of preservation.

Chapter 5 covers the University.  She envisions great changes for the future of university presses.

Page 159 has a quote that is not in the online version.  The university press system exerts "a conservative influence over scholarship, as genuinely new ideas would present concrete financial risks" when they consider publishing the first work of a junior faculty member.

Here is another big blockquote on the serials crisis. (page 159.)

In fact, the degree to which the largest commercial scholarly publishers have put the bite on universities (by obtaining the products of scholarship, most of which were produced through university, foundation, and government funding, without compensation to authors or their institutions — indeed, at times even demanding payment from them — and then selling those products back to universities via obscenely expensive journal subscriptions) might encourage us to rethink the profit-model of scholarly publishing altogether, to consider whether there’s another option through which universities can reclaim the core of the publishing endeavor from the commercial presses. The commercial presses can’t be beaten at their own game, as the large commercial publishing conglomerates will always be able to conduct such business more efficiently, and more ruthlessly, than the university should want to do. But nor can we simply abandon the business of scholarly publishing to them; as Thompson notes, in times of economic slowdown “commercial logic would tend to override any obligation they might feel to the scholarly community” (98), leaving nothing to stop them from eliminating monograph publishing entirely. We can’t beat them, and we can’t join them; what we can do is change the game entirely.

 Ahhhh, here is where she goes into the benefits of Open Access. (page 160.)

One clear way of changing the game, dramatically and unequivocally, is a move toward the full embrace of open-access modes of digital publishing. While the notion of open access has generated a great deal of controversy among presses, who given current financial realities declare its proponents naive and its ideals untenable, we need to understand, as John Willinsky has argued, that “open access is not free access… the open access movement is not operating in denial of economic realities. Rather, it is concerned with increasing access to more of the research literature for more people, with that increase measured over what is currently available in print and electronic formats” (Willinsky xii).

But, the roots for open-access publishing models lie not in the "subversion of market forces in the distribution of scholarship" but it is

the ethical desire to break down the barrier between the information “haves” and “have-nots” of the twentieth-century university structure, enabling institutions without substantive endowments, institutions in less-wealthy states, institutions in developing nations, to have access to the most important new developments in scholarly research.

On page 165, she recommends that universities consider locally produced publications and journals (eg. university presses) be

considered to be fully part of the core research mission of the Institute... in the same way that an experimental laboratory is considered part of the core research mission in the sciences, employing both graduate students and technical professionals working on an ongoing program of research — would it be funded differently? Would we begin to understand publishing ventures not as revenue centers nor as idiosyncratic one-off experiments, but rather as part of the infrastructure of the institution, as key an element in its research mission as is, for instance, the library?

She argues for greater collaboration between the university press and the university library system. (page 166.)

If such publishing ventures are understood as part of the core mission of the university, and thus become funded as part of the university’s infrastructure, however, there are some potentially fruitful avenues through which we can think about streamlining the labor that must take place, about finding ways to avoid the reduplication of efforts, and ways to bring together work already being done in disparate administrative units in order to expand their potential. For instance, new scholarly publishing initiatives will require significant new resources for programming, design, and distribution, but will presses or libraries need their own teams of programmers, or can a fruitful partnership be developed with the programmers located elsewhere in the institution? Do presses need metadata specialists, when this is one of the key aspects of contemporary library and information science programs? While the library, the press, and the information technology center all currently serve different aspects of the university’s communication needs, and while all are often stretched to their limits in meeting the full range of those needs, joint experimentation amongst these three units might enable fruitful reimaginations of the university as a center of communication, with a reduced need for perpetual reinvention of the wheel.

But, this would be an interesting challenge. University presses and libraries have different thoughts on experimentation. (page 169.)

Such new partnerships, however, present challenges for institutions, and even many of the institutions that are working to build such strategic relationships encounter difficulties in the process. These difficulties are less due to any dearth of administrative imagination than to the real, material differences between these various academic units. As Brown et al point out, for instance, libraries (as well as, I’d argue, information technology centers) often have resources for experimentation available, but their positions within the institution do not serve to provide them with a broad sense of the fields in which such experiments might operate (what audiences, for instance, the experiments might address, and how they might fold into ongoing projects within the disciplines).  Presses, on the other hand, have a clear sense of their markets, but often lack the resources with which to experiment, as well as the mandate for that experimentation.

More and more scholars are getting recognition for the work that is online and at the leading edge. (page 170.)  She noted that "at this point very few scholars have been hired, granted tenure, or promoted primarily based on this kind of open online work, there are a few, and there will be more in the years ahead.  More and more scholars are rejecting publication venues that don't provide open access."

Concerning the publication of knowledge, she cited David Perry--"Knowledge which is not public is not knowledge."  She goes on to say that if faculty research is not public, then the "university has not completed its job." (page 173)

This seems to be the basic thesis for the book, that universities should merge the functions of the university press with the university library. (page 180.)

What if the press were reimagined, in parallel with the library, as another point of pivot between the institution and the broader scholarly community — if, as the library brings the world to the university, the press brought the university to the world? What if, rather than serving particular scholarly fields through the current list-based model, the press instead focused its attention on the need to publish the work produced within the university, making it available for dissemination around the world?

However, she recommends that the university press publish the works of the faculty at the university instead of publishing the works of those outside of the university. (page 181.)

The changes I’m proposing here thus have broad implications for every academic institution, and not just for those relatively few institutions that currently house university presses, as shifting the focus of the press’s publishing efforts from the list model to publishing the work of its own faculty will require every institution to take on this publishing mission, to invest in bringing the work of its own faculty into public discourse.

This requires university administrators to think of university presses in a different way.  The proposal "requires a radical reexamination of the funding model under which scholarly publishing operates, moving the press from being a revenue center within the university toward being a part of a broader service unit within the institution." (page 186.)

In the conclusion of the book, she notes that this is an "extraordinary challenge that change presents for the academy--the degree to which 'We Have Never Done It That Way Before' has become our motto--we might do well to ask how much of what I propose in this volume is really feasible....  I do believe, however, that change is coming, and coming more quickly than we imagine." (page 194.)

Lastly, she said that "Change is coming to scholarly publishing, one way or another--but what form that change will take, ans whether it will work for or against us, remains to be seen." (page 195.)

---------------------

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, published by NYU Press. Copyright (c) 2009 New York University. This text may be distributed in part or in whole on condition that (1) distributed text is not sold, whether or not such sale is "for profit" and (2) distributed text bears this notice in full. Except as permitted by law, all other uses are prohibited without written permission of the publisher.

Yet another great review of Reinventing Discovery

The book, Reinventing Discovery, is amazing!  Go out and buy yourself a copy RIGHT NOW!  Really, it is that good.

Considering how much this book covers the issues and problems of the modern scholarly communication industry, I was surprised to see that the term libraries only shows up once in the index of the book.  Even then, libraries are only mentioned in the notes section of the book.  He notes that academic libraries and publishers are not institutions that will be developing the new tools for the construction of knowledge in the future.  He says that "the right place for such tools to originate is with scientists themselves." He also noted that "libraries and scientific publishers are not, for the most part, set up to work on such risky and radical innovations."  For the most part, I agree with the statement that many librarians and library systems are risk averse, but there are many librarians (and some publishers) who have great ideas, insights and will provide innovative solutions for the long term advancement of scientific communication.

I know that Michael received a lot of advice and communication from members of the library and open science community, so I am a little surprised that libraries were not mentioned more often in the book.

The best chapter for me was Chapter 9: The Open Science Imperative.  Much of the book and much of the chapter is available online at Google Books, so go read some of it there.

I wish Michael would have talked a little more about some of the cultural issues that are holding scientists back from doing more open science. There are some positive financial and social incentives to encourage more scientists to do open science, but academic department administrators and deans still tell junior faculty that they have to publish in the closed access Journal of X, the limited access Journal of Y and/or the Transactions of Z in order to get tenure.  The academic bean counters may find it easier to evaluate a researcher based on the supposed quality of journal title containers, than it is to evaluate the quality of specific articles within those journals.  Mike Taylor noted that:

Because of the stupid way researchers are usually evaluated (and this is another whole issue), the intrinsic quality of our work matters less than the brand name of the journal it’s published in. So we have strong selfish reasons for wanting to get our work into the “best” journals, even if it is at the cost of effective communication.

and

Happily, there are signs of movement in this direction: for example, The Wellcome Trust says “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions.” We need more funding and hiring bodies to make such declarations. Only then will researchers will be free of the need (real or apparent) to prop up parasitic publishers by sending their best work to big-name, barrier-based journals.

More change needs to take place within the hundreds of academic departments.  But, if the major funders such as the NIH and the Wellcome Trust (and many other funding organizations) can continue to provide money as the carrot for positive open science innovation, then we have a bright future ahead.  This is why I support the Federal Research Public Access Act. When this passes, this will encourage more scientists to do science in the open.

More on the book, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

Here are some interesting passages...

Chris Anderson, "The Rediscovery of Fire."
"Before Gutenberg, we had a different technology for communicating ideas and information. It was called talking."  And then, "Read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and you may nod in agreement.  But then track down a video of the man in action, delivering those same words in from of an energized crowd.  It's a wholly different experience."  I think this is part of the reason that YouTube is so popular.  Seeing a presentation or a demonstration is much more powerful than just trying to read about how to do something.

Eric Drexler, "The Web Helps Us See What Isn't There."
This deals with absence detection.  This "could help societies blunder toward somewhat better decisions about those questions."  Identifying what is absent by observation is much more difficult than identifying what is there.  Reference librarians get these kinds of questions every once in a while.  A student wants to see if anyone has done research on a niche topic.  One could search and search and search and search and not find anything.  This is what the person wants, because he or she wants to identify a unique area where the person can perform novel research.

Martin Rees, "A Level Playing Field."
He discusses the arXiv.org as the preferred mechanism for reading research in physics.  He notes that "far fewer people today read traditional journals.  These have so far survived as guarantors of quality."  He sees that other less formal methods of publication will survive, such as blogs, and that quality control will be controlled by mechanisms of restaurant-like grading or Amazon style reviews.

Seth Lloyd, "Move Aside, Sex."
Why trek over to the library, when Wikipedia is 99.44% correct?  The 0.56% can burn you.  In mathematics, "an approximate theorem is typically an untrue theorem."  What is the sex part?  He goes on to explain that sex is a good way to share DNA information with others, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

John Tooby, "RIvaling Gutenberg."
He talks about the huge impact that Gutenberg had on the transmission of information and knowledge.  Not really new news here.  But, I like his note about William Tyndale who dared to translate the Bible into English, because that is what, you know, everybody read in England. He wanted lowly farmers to be able to read the scriptures and the supposed word of God. He was executed for doing such a foolish thing.

More to come.

Thoughts on Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

I am a very slow reader.  I got this book (HarperCollins, Ha) several weeks ago, but I haven't read much of it.  In the past, I would do whole book reviews on here, but in this case, I think I will chunk it out, and do reviews of sections of the book.  It is derived from an edge.org project.  They have about 150 2-4 page essays from prominent scientists and artists.  The book is an edited version of the essays on the edge.org site.  For example, Clay Shirky talks about the invisible college. 

Concerning the old publishing and mass media system:

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity--academics, politicians, reporters, doctors--will compain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past.  The real action is elsewhere. [Preprint of the essay is here.]

I hear some things like this from my faculty.  I need them to wake up and see that the old publishing system is dying, and that they need to support new methods of publishing and peer-review. The Administrators need to figure out new ways to award tenure based on the different publishing systems. The architecture of access to scientific knowledge is just plain messed up.  We can't go back to the good ol' days.


Hopefully, I will be able to blog about many more sections of this book.

Sort of a review of Cognitive Surplus

Finally finished Cognitive Surplus the other day. Took me a little while to read it. I had to renew it twice... I guess I was using my cognitive surplus on other things besides reading that book.

The word library shows up once I think. I can't find it again. Anyway, there are a number of things that Clay Shirky talks about in the book that is pretty relevant to libraries. Such as:

Clay said on page 17:

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to. Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things. You don't need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough.... Once you have figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.

This is what hit me with the Library Camp and Unconference model for meetings and conferences. That is why I helped to organize the STELLA Unconference. We don't always need big organizations like the ALA or SLA or State Library Associations to hold meetings of like-minded (or unlike-minded) librarians anymore. [Note: I am the Chair-Elect of the Sci-Tech Division of SLA, and I still find the SLA conference to be worthwhile.] If anything, a lot of work and discussion can get done over discussion lists and other social networking sites. The difficulty is figuring out how to tap that surplus in a way that people care about. I hope others will continue to replicate the unconference model (very low cost aspects) for other meetings and gatherings.

Page 50:

When publication--the act of making something public--goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently serious activity.... An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed.

Open Access publishing is continuing to gain steam. People are starting to realize that it does not take a behemoth to publish high quality articles. I hope that the journal I am involved with, Collaborative Librarianship, fits this description.

Page 98:

No one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things that e-mail enables--news from home, pictures of the kids, discussion, arguments, flirtation, gossip, and all the mess of the human condition.

As a librarian, I need to remember to focus on how the technology can enhance the human condition (and how our students can use the technology to learn stuff and gain knowledge and pass their classes and get good jobs after they graduate, etc.), and not on the technology itself. I have a tendency to do that, I know...

Page 162:

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.

Librarians from lots of various organizations can work together just fine without having managerial overhead. The Library Society of the World is a good example. While the LSW may experience some growing pains every once in a while, it is a working example of a group of people that can be organized without the organization.

Page 189:

The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the 20th century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead. A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers.

I am not quite sure I agree with his "everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere" bit. There is still quite a big problem with the information haves and have nots here in the US, and lots of people in China or Nigeria or Romania have information access problems. But, we are heading towards greater information access for all. In any case, our society is going to see great changes in the way our patrons view the media and publishing in general. The upheaval has just begun.

Page 192:

Users never behave exactly as the designers of the system expect or want them to.

As librarians, we know that this is sooooo true. Patrons never use the databases the way that the computer programmers expected. The patrons try to extract information in ways that are not expected. The patron wants to sort by the first name instead of last? The patron wants to search by the city of publication, and not just the publisher name? The patron wants to get a list of sales by longitude instead of by zipcode or some other geographic data?

Page 194:

It is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.

Another truism in library systems and databases. I'd rather have patrons use a smaller clean database with good indexing and good links than a huge database that has lots of errors, comes back with strange results and leads the patron to dead ends.

Page 196:

If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities.

In other words, the patrons will respond to how the database and the interface is designed. If your catalog is set up so that patrons can tag items, but only after they jump through some hoops to login to the system, then they are not going to use that feature. If a patron has to click three or four times to get to an advanced search screen, they are not going to use that, even if that is what they need to find the kinds of articles they are looking for.

Page 203:

Twitter was created for use on mobile phones, then retooled itself for more web use..... Instead, the imperative is to learn from failure, adapt, and learn again.

This section deals with adaptation. Of course libraries and librarians need to adapt, but I think we could learn from our mistakes faster and adapt a bit quicker. I work in an academic library, and some of the decisions can be made verrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy sloooooooowwwwlllllllyyyyyyyyy. Lots of decisions are made by committee, and if you don't have a consensus on something, it can be death by committee. Sometimes it can be easier to just do something based on your gut feeling and knowledge of something, and if it was the wrong decision, own up to the mistake and admit it. Sometimes, it is easier to ask for forgiveness after the fact, than it is to ask for approval from a group of people to do something before the fact. If you want some examples, let me know.

Page 205:

As a general rule, it is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something new without having any problems.

Some librarians can be quite risk averse. They don't want to start a new service or program without figuring out how to solve all of the possible problems ahead of time. How should we respond if someone asks a question like this? What if we get a line of people at the service point? What if the patrons want to use the equipment under water? What if patron doesn't recharge the battery? Well, I say we should just start the service and see how they use it. There is no way we are going to know how people are going to use the service or the equipment until we make it available.

Page 209:

Biases in favor of existing systems is good, as least in periods of technological stability. When someone runs a bookstore, or a newspaper, or a tv station, it's advantageous to have those people think of their work as being critical for society.

This is a section of the book where Clay is arguing that we should have as much chaos as we can stand during this media transition. We are going to see massive change in the culture of information use. Of course, librarians want libraries to exist [and thrive and prosper] because we are critical to the underpinnings of an educated populace, and to a well-oiled and smoothly running society. (Well, relatively smooth running society...) But, journalists see themselves in a similar role, and so do people who work in the telecommunications industry. When people can get news from non-journalists, or communicate with friends on Twitter or Skype or IM, then those industries are going to contract with some of the professionals in those industries crying about the lack of services that the non-professionals provide.

Libraries are going to continue to see contraction because some of the funders and decision makers do not see the value of services and information we provide. We have to do a better job of marketing what we do to more of the higher ups.

Page 210:

People committed to solving a particular problem also commit themselves to maintaining that problem in order to keep their solution viable.

This has huge implications for libraries. The good news is that as the information universe continues to get more complex, we are going to continue to have patrons who need our help in navigating that universe. As new information gets published, we will have to continue to purchase or lease or subscribe to it. We need to keep track of the electronic resources and books we have, and we also have to let our patrons know about all of that stuff and all of the services we provide to our patrons.

But, do we have to worry about doing too good of a job? Can we ever teach them so well, that they will no longer need to ask us how to use information products? Could a search engine do such a good job that it can do a true reference interview? I think computer software will get better, particularly with the semantic web, but I don't think it will be able to have a conversation with the patron. If someone knows what they are looking for, they might be able to get a good answer. What about the patron that needs advice on how to narrow it down? Can a computer respond with--have you tried looking at this problem in a completely different way? The computer might be able to recommend other search terms, but it won't be able to see the facial expression of the students when they are confused or happy, and know how to ask that next question.

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Well, that is it for me. Did you read the book?