Academic Libraries can have it both ways

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the future of academic libraries and libraries in general.  These posts do a good job responding to the well-known marketer's post, Seth Godin.

He doesn't really address academic or special libraries in the post. These libraries provide access to content that is scholarly or business information or things that are not mostly mass-market material (or kids books or $20 DVDs, etc.) This morning, I got a request for us to purchase a book on urban transport in the developing world by Edward Elgar [Regular Price $280.00 Web Price $252.00]. Good luck finding that for $10 on your kindle. (It is available online through different sources and for well over $200, but I don't see it for sale at Google Books like they say it is.) This is why we spend millions of dollars to get about 25,000 books a year. They average well over $40/book. They are not going down in price.

What do I mean by having it both ways?

The library can have print books and transition to electronic resources at the same time.  It shouldn't be an either/or discussion.  We have been doing that for years, and we have been doing a great job building a fantastic electronic collection of resources. (And, we have been providing great services with a small faculty and staff.)  There should be no reason to keep most of our print materials in off-site storage about 10 miles away.  My university administration wants to put most of the collection into storage to make more room for seating.  We were going to do that with the compact storage so we could open up most of the third level.  I feel this is defeating some of our core purposes. (Particularly "save the time of the user" when they have to wait 3-4 hours for a delivery and "every book its reader" and the need for open shelving for browsing.)

Without a good-sized collection on the campus, the library may not be as much of a draw, and the need for seating may become mute.  Seth notes that we are "defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario."  Just because we are arguing to keep print books on campus does not mean that we can't fight for the future--as the producer, connector and teacher of information.  Seth's logic is simply flawed.

We often use physical print books to help our students learn, in addition to teaching our students how to use and find all of the ebooks and databases and ejournals and websites and such.  We do know that more and more people are using electronic resources, and we also know that people still use traditional books and printed media.  This is a collection that I have been building for the last 13 years, and that librarians here have been building for the last 147 years.  Yes, much academic content is not popular, and the books are not checked out very often, but it is important and useful for scholarly research.  To send much of it off campus because some of the material has not been checked out more than X times is painful for me to watch.  (I can understand sending off material that has not been checked out at all since 1997.)

What am I going to do?  I am still going to do my best to provide the best service for our students and faculty, that is for sure, but it will be more challenging in the new environment.

The Internet and higher ed.

A couple of days ago, I listed to this February "On the Media" Podcast concerning the Internet.  It was good.

On another note... Philo A. Hutcheson, associate professor of educational-policy studies at Georgia State University, said

“As the breadth and volume of search engines’ results increase, providing a source of certainty for those building an argument,” he writes, “… the validity of academics’ knowledge, the fundamental assumption of academic freedom, becomes problematic.”

I don't buy it.  Professors and faculty can help their students learn how to filter out and synthesize the good stuff from the Internet.  There is a lot of crap out there.  Some people may think that all of knowledge is on the Internet, but it isn't.

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.

Some thoughts on #TEDxMileHigh

I was able to go to TEDxMileHigh last week, and I had a great time.  I tweeted some of the sessions and I had one with a typo for the hashtag.  I really liked the presentations by Bernard Amadei (talked about http://www.ewbdenver.org/), Gov. Hickenlooper, Dr. Paul Polak and Allen Lim.

I was able to volunteer for the event, so I was able to get some videos of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House before the event began.  And, here they are:

My tweets from the Provost Lunch #provostlunch

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Here are my tweets from the Provost Lunch by Susan Schulten on "The Meaning of Maps in American History." They are in reverse chronological order.

• Can maps be used for ill? #provostlunch walker was head of census and Indian affairs at same time at age of 27! View Tweet
• Some countries and people are not very spacially oriented. #provostlunch ?not sure how to answer. View Tweet
• Cholera map the blank map was an invitation for more new info. #provostlunch View Tweet
• Brothers among nations book. #provostlunch View Tweet
• The yellow fever maps didn't work. #provostlunch View Tweet
• Who have helped her incl @dupenrose faculty and staff. #provostlunch View Tweet
• Betty Meagher is cataloging lots of the digital maps #provostlunch rich and varied cartograhic history. Thanks all of the people ... View Tweet
• Allow the nation to coallesce in a certain way. #provostlunch very complicated, detailed and beautiful. Alex has helped to digitize them. View Tweet
• Early form of gis. Not 1960s but 1800s. #provostlunch forign parentage map translate info into knowledge. View Tweet
• Walker census data map. Colored, density, wealth, poverty, disease and ethnicity. #provostlunch convince congress to fund various things. View Tweet
• Map of ratio of slave pop to non slave pop. "Went viral" back then. #provostlunch became import to Lincoln. Map in a painting. View Tweet
• Map of slave pop in VA done by the Coast survey? #provostlunch Shows big diff between west Virginia and VA. View Tweet
• Map productivity of cotton production and slaves together on same map in blue red and yellow colors. #provostlunch View Tweet
• Mid 1800 maps became tools to map social and human data. #provostlunch census map of cotton kingdom Olmsted View Tweet
• amyewest: RT @jokrausdu: "the map made the difference" even though the data was publicly avail. #provostlunch #data #visualization View Tweet
• Blodget isothermal map of whole us. Seasonal, too. #provostlunch based on several decades and 100K+ data points. View Tweet
• Military asks soldiers to collect weather. This data turned into weather maps, temperature. #provostlunch and usno and smithsonian. View Tweet
• Science of weather meteorology, climate plays a crucial role. #provostlunch Barton did the New Orleans map. Race to map the weather. View Tweet
• Map as a tool of investigation of yellow fever, not just for showing places. #provostlunch Analytical instrument. View Tweet
• Sanitary map of New Orleans. #provostlunch Era before knowledge of microbiology. Salubrity is a new word for me. View Tweet

• I think we just got a book on van humboldt.... #provostlunch View Tweet
• "the map made the difference" even though the data was publicly avail. #provostlunch View Tweet
• Goes over prop 8 maps #provostlunch Mashup at google maps. View Tweet
• Read the nytimes article, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/how-the-west-was-won/ #provostlunch View Tweet
• #provostlunch intro to Susan Schulten Dissert at UPenn Book Geographical Imagination View Tweet

Open Attribute, what it does...

It took me a while to figure out what adding the Open Attribute browser add-on actually did. I thought it would add a popup or something like that to pages that were CC licensed. It adds a little CC license image to the browser bar, and it is clickable. See the image below.

When you click on the CC in the circle, it will tell you more about the license for that content.

Renovation Plan Demonstration at #scio11

Here is what I presented at the Science Online Unconference, Sunday at 11:30am-12:30pm.

Scio11 demonstration

View more presentations from Joseph Kraus.

Some of the feedback that I received was:

• Students still need to have lots of physical books available to them on-site.
• The library should scan as many books as possible to make ebooks.
• Need to advertise just how many ebooks we already have available.
• Advertise all of our electronic resources, not just ebooks.
• Loan out Kindles (or other ebook devices).
  
• Let people know that our document delivery services are free to them.
• Spread the librarians throughout campus to create a more decentralized library. This will force faculty to think more outside the box.
• Create more embedded librarian positions.
• Better advertise that the library (and hence the university) pays for access to all of these journals, databases and ebooks, and that the information is not free.
• Let the patrons know that we keep track of download data. Let them know some of that usage data. [That may or may not be allowable by the vendors.]
  
• Should consider doing a before and after survey, so that we can see how much electronic use increases after the renovation has begun. This would be a good article opportunity.
• Brand the golf cart as the "Library on the Go" cart.
• Display the blue prints. Need to let them know what the place is going to look like and get them excited about the new facility.
• This is an opportunity for the library to foster stronger connections to the students and faculty who already use the library, and an opportunity to create new connections with people who don't use the library as much now.
  

Some of my videos at the #scio11 Conference

Here are some videos.

We got to see some of the internal sections of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.



There are about 11 other videos of "Behind the scenes" at:

http://friendfeed.com/jokrausdu/583d84e8/made-videos-of-behinds-scenes-at-north-carolina

Prezi session at #scio11

Here are my quick notes of Prezi... I'm giving it a try right now. If you are an educator, make sure you sign up for the educational account.

• Overlap elements when you give a prezi
• Don’t spin too much – don’t make your audience sea sick.
• No way to embed a prezi within another prezi.
• They have a good “learn” system and tips.
• Prezi meeting can hold up to 10 people who can work on the same presentation.
• For a good prezi, one should think in frames with multiple objects, not linear slides.
• Instead of having to go forwards or go backwards to a specific slide, you just pull back, and then you can go wherever you want.
• Think of prezi more like a concept map or a mind map – not just linear thinking.
• Make the details small.
• It has circle, square, and rectangle frames. Frames within frames, use as many frames as you need.
• Take a look at some of her examples. Here is a group made one.
  
• Make your CV as a prezi. Huh, that sounds like a good idea
• Easier to get small than to get bigger. Start big, then scale down when you need to.
• Use PDFs.
  
• Use higher image quality in the upload. Zooming in will be granulated otherwise.
• OverLAP, Shift DRAG, SURPRISE your audience.
• It doesn't seem like prezis can be embedded into a blog, though.