RBMS Plenary Session 1: The Big Picture

I had the good fortune to attend the RBMS (Rare Books and Manuscripts) pre-conference in Los Angeles, followed by the ALA (American Library Association) conference in Anaheim, California. I was able to take notes for some sessions, which I'll publish here in a series of blog posts, along with my impressions. Please note: These are my notes, and I take full responsibility for misconstruing of any statements made by the various speakers. I suspect some of these talks will eventually be published, either in RBM or other journals.

RBMS Plenary Session 1 (Wednesday morning, June 25, 2008): The Big Picture

Opening remarks by Christian Dupont, Aeon Program Director at Atlas Systems, Inc.

Special Collections sections of libraries have entered the digital age. New issues are facing rare books and special collections. We are learning to work and adapt together to a new and rapidly changing environment.

Let's consider how things have changed in last 50 years (since RBMS is now 50 years old). Let's celebrate the vitality of the organization. Let's witness its impact and how the section (of ACRL) has grown. We are currently seeking ways to accommodate the growth and interest in special collections. One way to achieve this is through our scholarship program. We know that scholarship recipients may remain members and become active on committees. Today, there are 22 scholarship attendees. These new attendees feed the interests of the organization.

Next year there will be even more scholarships. In honor of the section's 50th meeting, the location will be Charlottesville, VA - the location of first conference.

There is fundraising at RBMS and it is a part of what goes on. There is ABAA; the Booksellers' showcase (which looks more like a book fair). This year there are 24 booksellers in LA, the most we've had in recent years, and perhaps we'll have as many or more in Charlottesville, VA next year. Let these sponsors know they have your support and appreciation.

Remarks by Kris Kieseling, Director of Archives Special Collections at the University of Minnesota.
This year, the RBMS pre-conference took only 4 weeks to sell out, a good sign of the demand/vitality of the field. There are many angles with which to approach digitization in special collections. Alice Prohaska will outline big picture in her talk.

This years there will be no paper forms, but totally online evaluations for the preconference -- expect it in your email after the pre-conference.

Commercial plug: The sponsor of the morning plenary is the Bibliographic Society of America. It is a society which encourages study and research. Their members are librarians, dealers, collectors, students, etc. Please visit their homepage.

Alice Prochaska, University Library at Yale University.
(Her remarks are based in part on her observation of Yale's digitization of special collections.)

I'm concerned about generalities: How can one present the big picture of digitization? So I'll talk as one library director with just one perspective. This is a good time to be talking about special collections in the digital environment.

Special Collections librarians have a problem: there is a morass of unknowns. Some libraries have been digitizing, others have been evangelizing. Alice thought she used to have a clear picture of the world of special collections. So she asked some pertinent questions on her slide show:

• What are special collections?
• What will we mean by special collections in the future?
• In considering the environment in which digitization operates, the current range and scope of digitization in research libraries: where do special collections fit?
• The future: are we going to predict it, or invent it?

The future is about collaboration and discussing what we want and what is our future. But there's always been complications due to bureaucracy of many parties. Ownership in the digitial environment is no easier than in non-digital environment.

What ARE Special collections?

The words we use in addressing access to our collections are: discover, expose, disclose, unlock (etc.) -- as if each word holds the key to explaining what we do.
Preliminary record, collection level record, item level record, catalog, etc.
unit, group, class, piece, box, bundle

("It's easy to misunderstand words" and quotes Obama, and mentions Miss Malaprop.)

There is an ARL Working Group on Special Collections set up in 2007, pursuing the "hidden collections" agenda (of finding ways of bringing these collections to greater attention). Their report is due in October 2008.

Their Priorities:
1. encourage concerted action for collecting and exposing 19th and 20th century materials
2. identify criteria and strategies for collecting digital and other new media that currently lack a recognized and responsible structure for stewardship.

"These issues are closely linked. An enormous amount of valuable material in all formats remains uncollected and risks being permanently lost."

The focus of the ARL group is not meant to demean earlier items. It's just a pragmatic attempt to give the group a manageable task. There are already international efforts to digitize newspapers and books. A strong attempt has been made to encourage these items. Techniques include collections analysis, identification of gaps, make accessible otherwise hidden collections.

Discovery of material can occur in response to new scholarship. For example, the attention to e.g. printed ephemera is a relatively new exploration. Libraries used to eschew collecting this material. Just hobbyists would collect it and insist on its importance. There is still a hierarchy of materials: Materials relating to books and book arts will be more highly regarded, whereas playbills, posters, etc. will not be. But even philatelic collections pose research value. No two people will define ephemera in same way - we all have our own collections that require greater attention. The task of selection and preservation doesn't disappear in digital world, it just changes. Think of the issues with borne-digital items: digitized slides, or email correspondence -- what about legal implications of email? We need a concerted effort to find out about this material.

In speaking of digitization, we're mostly talking about taking analog materials and digitizing them. The activity of digitization frequently linked to the preservation of items.

The environment of digitization:

• collect carefully
• advocate against restrictions on access
• transparency over provenance and source of aquisition
• good practices in records management
• ensure discoverability and access
• address the hidden collections problem
• meet the digital challenge

For the digital environment, RBMS and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) are unique organizations for advice in these issues. As librarians, we can be effective only with the support of the community comprised of these and similar organizations.

Preservation issues form part of context; staff skills matter. Large institutions can handle big projects, but small institutions can't, so that means greater collaboration is necessary.

There are areas of growth in the need for Special Collections:

• The growth in teaching with primary sources and undergraduate research;
• local and family historical research. (don't underestimate needs of local communities)
  

But there are obstacles:

• political pressures to ends access to unique assets
• increased visibility and scrutiny
• nightmare digital challenge:
• intellectual property,
• increased visibility brings greater scrutiny,
• contested interpretations,
• packaging material to make it comprehensible out of context

Don't underestimate cultural patrimony issues which receives higher notice in the digital world. Greater exposure requires greater sensitivity to cultural issues.

Current range and scope of digital projects.
Local initiatives exists to support teaching, and collaboratie digitization programs in museums, galleries, and archives. For example:

See: Documents of the American South -- it's a good example of how digitization in a deliberate manner can be unusually beneficial.
There is mass digitization (e.g. the Google project) - whose impact is enormous. Formerly Google had contracts with just 6 libraries; now they use 40 libraries.
(See current issue of the Journal of Library Administration.)

Finally Google and mass digitization is beginning to move into the area of Special Collections. Quality of output is a concern: Google books is not always well presented and the metadata is inconsistent.

Even with copyrighted materials presenting only small snippet of a work is a concern about the presentation of books. To what extent does Google books skew our notion of a book? Their contracts prevent the library community from discussing the Google project among participants. But Google's influence is large.

Other examples of mass digitization: The Open Content Alliance - it's not as rich as Google, but still provides good products, since it has metadata which is better than Google. THe now-defunct Microsoft Live Book Search leaves a legacy of expectations. Yale had valued closer cooperation with Microsoft. Maybe soon we (not just Yale) can move into the regular scanning of Special Collections items in a mechanized fashion, with robotic machines (that won't harm the materials).

Scholars have increased appetites for digitized material and desire greater ability to search across collections. This impacts libraries' directions. Pay more attention to collection development issues. People will be more interested in unique holdings.

Issues for the future:

• translating a traditional mission into a digital environment
• there is no digitization without metadata - (this is part of the "hidden collections" agenda)
• access begets access (more staff should be devoted to digital work)
  
• more collection analysis
• more sharing among institutions
  

What is the future for born-digital items and collections?

• need for digital curation
• there are new relationships to users - how to connect to them
  
• new ways of working with users
• mirroring traditional fucntions in online(?) models
• coping with increasing volume
• identify digitization partners
  
• librarians should be prepared to wait for new technologies to help achieve more

Conclusion: Bringing Special Collections to the public will never cease to be a work in progress

That was the end of Alice Prochaska's speech, followed by questions, among them:

Q. Special Collections have been strong advocates for preservation of materials. What about preservation of born-digital items?
A. There is an ACRL working group concerning with this issue. Watch for upcoming report.

Q. What should we do with born-digital materials that are constantly changing (such as wikis or blogs)?
A. The recommendations of the working group (mentioned in the first question above) will be generic. They will point to need of development of expertise. Regarding the constantly changing nature of born-digital materials, yes, this is an area that is hugely challenging.

How a library can become a part of the community

I came across a nice site devoted to the history of Long Island's South Shore. Knowing a number of towns on Long Island, I know there are some places where families have lived for centuries, so one can't underestimate what a community can contribute to documenting itself.

What's so intriguing about the site is that it's not static. Instead, it's a wiki (using PmWiki software), enabling residents, historians and other interested parties to participate in sharing its knowledge of the history of the community. I believe that is going to be the future of the best websites (i.e. the ones that get the most hits) - their ability to be interactive, to enable participation, and their ability to change.

If that were not enough, I then realized the sponsor of the site: not some association, but the Dowling College Library Archives and Special Collections! Here is a library which takes an active role in fostering the community it serves (or at least offers a community project).

It's probably too much to ask most librarians (especially those with large collections) to assume such active roles in communities. But it does suggest the possibilities than can occur when librarians find a niche not covered by others.

Why I joined SLA

Trained as a musician, I always thought I was going to be an academic. Once I decided to be a librarian, I worked (and still work) in a public library. So why did I recently join SLA - the Special Libraries Association? I'm sure I'll develop more as time goes on, but for now, in no particular order:

1. I wanted to take advantage of their Leadership & Management library of 998 (count 'em - 998) ebooks.
2. I wanted to network with an incredibly wide variety of individuals
3. In this ever-shrinking world, I wanted to get a view of how libraries function in a for-profit environment
4. I want to learn more about how special librarians are able to deliver product to their customers
5. I want to see what is Knowledge Management for myself
   
6. Finally: I don't want to feel guilty the next time I hear Stephen Abram speak.
   

Harvard gets it right

I'm sure many people saw the article "At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on The Web" from the New York Times. What I found particularly interesting was the idea that the division responsible for managing and granting access to all these faculty (and maybe student) publications was the library.

I've been thinking this for years now, thanks to Library 2.0 and Stephen Abram. Libraries across the board should be proactive and solicit information such as reports and papers from their communities. By assembling websites where such information is assembled, scholars and interested people would know where to go - they would look to the library to be the source of the latest publications. In that way, libraries would be the equivalent of a scholarly Craigslist.

I wonder if any of the librarians at Harvard thought of this. :)

Rating an important skill in today's world

In my formative years, typing was taught in the first year of high school, when I was 15 years old. That's way too late in today's Internet-occupied world. Unfortunately, I note that many young kids don't care about correct typing but use only their two index fingers. Hopefully, ratings such as these might encourage people to see typing as a skill to be acquired for benefit of communication.

Who knows, maybe it might make it into the Olympics someday.

86 words

free Touch typing

Stephen Abram talk before NYC chapter of SLA, January 10, 2008

I attended Stephen Abram's talk before the New York City chapter of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) on January 10, 2008. Always a dynamic speaker, his themes were familiar, promoting librarianship in a world swimming in information on the Internet, and promoting SLA.

Please recognize these are just my discursive notes and should not be taken as a literal transcription of Stephen Abram's remarks.

I've removed the frequent appeals to become members of SLA (but his pitches worked: I think I'll probably become a member next month).

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

As librarians, we need to communicate the passion we feel for our work. We need to communicate it to prove our value. We need to be more assertive about what we do. Fact: Of the top 10 donors to the American elections, 9 are foreign copyright holders, and 1 American. With that state of things, do we really think that the way the advertisers manipulate the search results on Google are the right way to get information on the important decisions concerning life and culture? We don’t often talk about these issues enough. If we lose this battle (i.e. by not pre-empting Google), this is not a good thing. How do we get better at communicating what we do?

We can do it with stories of what we do. (Stephen recounts a personal incident showing the effect librarians can have.) He was at the desk when a young man returned a book. Steve said “Oh, if you’ve read that, you’ve got to read this book before you die.” A month later, the individual returned and revealed the story behind his previous visit. He had come in to return a book so his parents wouldn’t have to pay a library fine when he killed himself. But the book he was handed made him reconsider and changed him around. Therefore: You never know what effect the information you give will have on people.

The generation of baby boomers is probably the whiniest – the most resistant to change. We’ve just been through 20 years of the highest economic growth in the history of the world. What’s real change? Real change is what our grandparents went through – a period of time in which they experienced: the telephone, airplanes, radio, television, indoor pluming, the depression – an amazing amount of change. And they weren’t whining.We’re about to enter a similar period of change—a period of the most amazing change ever. If you can’t handle the last 20 years, you’re in for a big ride. It will be a challenge.

How are we going to deal with this change in our libraries? What will you do when every single book is online? We’ve already gone to an article-based economy: How many of you value your bound periodicals over the online ones?What does it mean when Google digitizes tons of material? What does it mean when we’ve integrated articles and chapters with websites, podcasts, etc.? Have we talked about information overload? Look at what it means when Bush & Co. are able to subpoena every search history from every vendor (except from Google, who refused). And they subpoenaed every phone call. How many of you knew that every search, every phone call was kept in a single database?

We have some very interesting issues that matter to us. Where will SLA be in this future?

Google and others have already learned how to optimize search results for local communities. If you perform a search from work, they know your IP address and will give you one set of results, whereas if you search from, say, Albany, NY, you’ll get another set of results.

It’s up to us to teach end users to critical thinking skills. It’s essential that we don’t have organizations saying “We don’t need a library – everything is free on the Internet.” Our sound bite should be: “Explain to me exactly how a search result that is more or less the same every where gives us a competitive advantage?” “Explain to me how competitive an advantage it is to have exactly the same search result as everyone else?

Assertiveness is generally not a trait seen in librarians. What level of assertiveness will it take for our colleagues and customers to recognize what we do as librarians? We have to be confident of what we’re saying, and know why we’re saying it. We know (from statistics) that people die less in hosptials equipped with libraries, and that kids do better in school when those schools have libraries. How much does it take to prove our value?

What is the librarians’ stock in trade? Is it the collection, or is it the librarians? What should we be promoting? You can’t sit back and say “I don’t want to be involved in social networking.” 85% of people from Toronto have Facebook accounts. One thing that isn’t going to change is that “libraries” require social skills. Our relationship skills trump all of our content and databases. The problem when you have too much information isn’t finding information, it’s knowing someone who can assist you in selecting content. Our core skill is improving the quality of the question. How do we shift from an information economy to a question-oriented economy? How do we make our customers understand that knowledge is the question, not the content? And how do we make sure we are communicate that?

How much money did you spend on Google last month? What is Google’s number one client? YOU! Google nets a billion dollars profit every three months from you. If I’m giving you a billion dollars in profit every three months, to whose needs am I going to give priority? Priority will go to advertisers. Take Google Scholar - the one with no advertising – how much did it grow last year? Not at all, but saw a 27% drop in users. Other of their products went up over 700%. They haven’t updated the Google Librarian blog in six months! They have agreements with over 10,000 publishers. They’re adding new libraries all the time to their Google Books project. Their stock has gone past $700 a share. They are rumored to be buying Sprint.

MySpace has made overtures to Dow Jones. Why? Millenials are the largest generation, and they have disposable cash. (Boomers are constrained by support for their kids and parents.) 85% of all English-speaking kids are on MySpace – they trust each other before they trust you. They do all their financial transactions online.

Gardner Research predicts that by 2012, 85% of all searching will be done through your personal avatar. Engineers are building a portable avatar that can be carried from one website to another. Already Google and MySpace agreed to share information with regards to portability. MySpace, Facebook, and Google are cooperating on identity. They’ve introduced the Open Handset Alliance because this is the dominant device.To see a movie: are you going to get into your car, spending $4 a gallon to get to your library, when you can rent it via Google for 99 cents? (25% of television in Europe is watched on a laptop.)

The University of Arizona is equipping 10,000 students with a phone that records every conversation that you have. They’re all coded to the students’ identity because the phones “talk” to each other.There is software planned that will aggregate articles and actually write your homework for you. This is happening in the business world with products such as Alacra. It’s brilliant: it assembles in 15 minutes what it would take us weeks to do. We need to understand the kind of threat this represents. It’s a brilliant strategy for us to adapt.

Second Life, online content, etc. – we need to be aware of these shifts.
We have privacy emerging as a balanced issue: how are we going to deal with opening up our privacy so that we get better results, and at the same time not having our privacy destroyed?

According to a new study, 46% of all the information on the web concerning health and nutrition is wrong. How do we make sure we have a conversation with the public where we say “Do you want your doctor killing people beecause they have too much unsifted information?

If we lose the battle of getting the right information to people – we’re lost, not just for us, but for everyone. So we have to find our voices. We have to make sure we’re out there talking confidently about the value we deliver. And then we can put some truth in it: yes, we’re really good.

We’ve got to do this because we’re entering a global phase of the biggest transformation of the web experience. E-mail is changing communication. Instant messaging is doing similarly. You’re communicating, clarifying through IM at the same time you’re getting recommendations from your friends on Facebook about anything from movies to politics. When a 21-year-old runs an election, you’ve seen a shift. This is not unique – it’s NORMAL for a typical inner-city kid.

We’re also seeing something we’re entirely uncomfortable with: radical trust. It's a term first coined by Tim O’Reilly and popularized by Darlene Fichter (U of Saskatchewan). How do we make sure that those holding the conversations represent diversity so that the decisions are informed by different life experiences? How do we make sure that it’s not just the text-based thinkers in librarianship who bring something to the paper when there are image and moving picture (i.e. YouTube) experiences? How do we take different learning experiences on a global scale and make that happen? Who’s in a position to do that?

In my opinion SLA is positioned to do that. We’re going global.

Radical trust is an evolution we need to make. Our (baby boomers) generation sees weaknesses in the current generation, and that generation that sees weaknesses in us. How do we partner with each other so that we are collaboratively and reciprocally moving together? It’s not going to happen until we respect each other.

SLA has to deal with a new world order, and that new order is already here. The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. How do we deal with it, how do we adapt to it, how do we not be in denial of it?

[Riff on a traffic sign in London:] “Changed Priorities Ahead.” It’s true of the world we face today. What matters now? I like the sign underneath: “No Stopping At Any Time.”

The nature of professional relationships has been through associations. But there’s a shift occurring: When you get 1,500 librarians interested in Library 2.0 joining a Ning group within its first four weeks (there are now close to 2,700) – if they can collaborate without benefit of an association, do you need the association?. If they can put all their YouTube videos, all their blog postings, all their pictures, into a single site – what does that mean about SLA and professional associations? How are you collaborating that puts people together? SLA does have an internal profile. But you don’t look like you’re integrating with the organization, if you’ve not put your presence online and be present for your users to discover you. Expectations 1.0: Search, Retrieve, View, Print, Link, Navigate, Read

The relationship of individuals to assocations used to be an exchange: give me benefits, and I’ll volunteer time to help the organization. That’s so last century. Today it’s about ME. Only about ME. You don’t matter, the association doesn’t matter, because it’s all about ME. It’s about what my needs are. Can you be there when I need you, and not interrupt or annoy me when I don’t need you?We see tools that are me-based tools. People criticize blogging. People say I’m an egomaniac because they think I have something to say. No, I don’t. I use my blog to keep what I think is interesting and other people think what I’m thinking is interesting is also interesting to them.

RSS, Wikis, Blogs, etc. etc. The underlying theme in all these Library 2.0 tools is social contact. What are the social professions? Librarians, teachers, sociologists, psychologists – people who interact with other people predominantly to make a difference in the interpersonal reactions of other people. Can you do that with email? No. Ever try to do email reference? It sucks. How many days does it take to bounce emails back and forth just to clarify the question? Ever try instant messaging? What about this video camera on my cellphone? The Buddhists say “one word is spoken and a thousand things are understood.”

Compare: a college student who approaches the reference desk asking about “divorce” and a 32-year old woman, who quietly asks for materials on “divorce.” How much would you like to bet that she’s not doing a paper on the subject? That’s something you can only get a clear idea from the live interpersonal interaction.

How do we reposition the human role in making this work? Do you want to be the kind of library where everyone has to come to you, or do you want to be where everyone of your users are? In the five Ps of marketing it’s called: Positioning. You want everyone one of your customers to know what you are.

Of the top 100 magazines, 50% have social tools built into them. If content is not social, then we have to be. 90% of newspapers have gone social. If you’re in scholarly work, look at the interdisciplinary tagging that happens among the ISI social indicators. Everyone’s gone social!We know from Forrester Research that people under 30 are showing up in our profession. They have a different level of expectations. These are people who have spent their entire lives blogging, building web sites, uploading videos, etc.

We need to move to Expectations 2.0: Understand the power of the landscape (the Internet) and it's opportunities.

What are the psychological preferences of people being influenced? and how do we craft a language so that we can speak to them? We need to have the tools to change the way we communicate to make a difference.

For SLA: How do we build a culture of continuous learning so that we know the answers to what people want to ask.

What the Getty sale means to libraries

Today's New York Times includes an article concerning how Getty Images wants to sell itself to the highest bidder, hopefully at $1.5 billion. But tucked away within the article is a significant mention of the competition. Not Corbis, or other photo archives, but rather everyone with a cellphone or digital camera. Although Getty Images (apparently) licenses images from news photographers, many media outlets find low-quality-but-cheap images to be sufficient.

In other words, the proliferation of images on the Internet through Flickr--and maybe digital library archives--has the effect of lowering the price of the product. Now images are not just the domain of specialized archives, but everyone. It's the democritization of photography on the Internet.

This goes in line with the Library of Congress's Flickr pilot project. It also suggests that libraries should continue to put whatever images they have on the Internet, to let others know that such media also comes from libraries, so that the general public will recognize ordinary (and some not-so-ordinary) libraries have this material that anyone can use.

Not everyone has access to blogs

Today I received a reference email in which a person asked:

I tried to check your blog but access to your site was blocked by one of our courts in [...]. Do you have any other blog for i can access without being blocked?

It's flattering to think that my blog warrents some kind of government review. But isn't this a sad testimony for both the individual and the government of the country who's doing the blocking?

Searching Google: Objective?

On Dec. 15, the New York Times's business/technology section carried an article about Google's project "Knol" - which they portrayed as a competitor to Wikipedia. Possibly the NYT's article was based on a blog entry from Google itself.

While Knol interests me, I find these two sentences from the NYT article - particularly the latter - even more amazing:

If it attracts a following, the service could accelerate Google’s transformation from a search engine into a company that helps create and publish Web content. Some critics said that shift could compromise Google’s objectivity in presenting search results.

Come now, is there anyone left who believes that Google's results are objective? Why else do Wikipedia entries often come up near the top?! It's been confirmed to me by two separate people, working for two separate companies that in order to receive better rankings in Google - they pay them. Google then tweaks their algorithm, and voila! Results of their clients get higher on to the list.

Google has been doing this for years. As others have pointed out, the more they do this (and they engage in it whenever a government doesn't want certain things showing up in search results -- think China), the more they stray away from their original mission. In this way, they cease becoming a search engine, and are just another for-profit tool.

If they intend to continue making money, they probably can't ever go back to an objective search result because they have too many customers's expectations to handle.

But it might take a while before the people of the world realize this.

9/11/2007

From Sept. 11, 2004.