A Few Thoughts on The Information

I'm midway through a fascinating rip through the history of information as told by James Gleick in The Information (2011). What has absolutely blown me away in his account is the extent to which ICT change is accelerating as is evident in early telecommunication technologies. Likewise, the rate of ICT adoption is speeding up at phenomenal rates. Exponential change is hard to grasp beyond a few factors; so, too, is the rate of technology acceleration and adoption. For instance, the telegraph took years to catch on as a useful technology and decades passed before it was surpassed by the telephone. Yet the telephone caught on in a matter of months and required an astounding amount of behind-the-scenes technological advancement over the ensuing decades that helped drive in turn numerous other discoveries in telecommunications.

That I'm only now to the heart of the story (Claude Shannon at Bell Labs) gives me an opportunity to reflect on my favorite passage to date:

"Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself" (12).

The great "demise" of libraries has been that their History-long redeeming value is challenged by the World Wide Web, which, with its hundreds of billions of webpages, has long since contained more bits of data than the world's largest libraries put together. Or at least that's the upshot of the story we tell ourselves about what an earth-shattering transformation like an interconnected and networked world brings about. That we're threatened, that we might be going away, that our situation is deteriorating.

And, indeed, it may well be. Throughout all of this, somehow, our role here is still the same in this slightly paranoid narrative: we're still preservers of information doing our longstanding jobs of preservation and access This necessarily includes instructing students on how to access our resources. And these are still important and wonderful things. But I wonder whether we're not ignoring a painful reality that we're loath to confront. That reality is, in Gleick's words, that human thought has clearly changed. Since that's the case, then the very nature of librarianship should change accordingly.

Where students used to be trained and educated in traditional scholarship with its linear, narrative formats long ago in the days before No Child Left Behind, they are now focused on capillary, dynamic, and attenuated formats that run in different directions than the courses of scholarship. I'm sure even seasoned academics who spend parts of their days reading news, blogs, and updates online feel the pull of, in Richard A O'Connor's terms, a "paradynamic" world that feeds, through RSS, XML, Java, AJAX, and a million other tools, a constant supply of barely filtered zeros and ones.

This is the very shift in human thought that we must contend with as it contends first with us. In a world crying out about everything, few are capable of crying out about something. What librarians, as educators, can offer students is coherence between multiple points of input that align in one point of output. We must and we are exchanging our lineal counts of books for lineal ways of thinking. Not to sound a Luddite note, but perhaps librarians should be championing Information Literacy even louder to the possible exclusion of our technological solutions and services.

Our contribution as educators is essential to the main selling points of small, liberal arts colleges: coherence, engagement, and true learning as defined by immersion in another worldview/way of thinking. In one sense, perhaps, if nothing else, MOOCs will throw into sharp relief the value of the schools that get it right: simply that we get it right. As we move forward with the rest of the academic term, I can be proud I'm at an institution that gets it right and it's literally mind blowing!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love MOOCs (for at least a day)

I think I'm not alone in feeling ambivalence towards MOOCs. On the one hand, MOOCs could easily threaten smaller institutions of higher education once they solve the obvious problems they're working on: cheating, credit/certification, and possibly personalization at scale. On the other hand, they have amazing potential that should make all of us in higher ed feel hopeful about the future. Namely, they could lower the barrier to entrance that colleges and universities present to those without the means (whether because of financial, geographic, personal, or visa-related problems) to attend traditional institutions.

On a blistery Friday that marks the first of February, I find myself hopeful that, once the potentials of MOOCs are made clear, they will ultimately prove to be a force for good. For instance, those of us at smaller colleges like Northwestern are acutely aware that we need to contain or lower costs. Yet we find ourselves trapped in a precarious discount rate situation with our peer institutions that leaves us insufficient leverage to address as an individual institution the larger problems we, along with our peers, are all facing. If nothing else, should MOOCs find a valid business model, it will certainly include economy of scale that small undergraduate institutions could only dream of. I would be surprised if these winds of change didn't have some impact on small players like us. As a proponent of regional collaboration among libraries (e.g. IPAL), perhaps it is this type of pressure that will leave no alternative to us and our peers to find ways of collectively addressing the problems that are affecting all of our bottom lines. 

As for libraries and librarians, I'm even more hopeful that we have a central role to play in the learning process. "Embedded librarian" would take on a whole new meaning at such scale. If, as this NYT piece on MOOCs suggests, MOOCs will have unprecedented global reach, then the vast electronic information resources assembled over the past two decades would suddenly become available to anyone with a university login through their MOOC. Overnight, a country without rich traditions of public libraries would have citizens with access to far more information than ever before. To date, information vendors like EBSCO haven't had much incentive to promote their products in impoverished regions of the world. Think of what social entrepreneurs, the kinds of people who will be taking these classes in far flung parts of the globe, could do with access to peer-reviewed literature that addresses the problems they seek to solve. PBS has a special on how social entrepreneurs are using rice husks to provide low-cost electricity in places far removed from the grid. As they seek western investment, what better information to include in a business proposal than industry and country data from business research tools?

As a closing aside, it will be interesting to see the approach taken by the first vendor to realize that MOOCs represent an opportunity to substantially increase prices given the amount of students who would be accessing their databases. Even if a MOOC only has each student logging into a database once to download one item, 100,000 students accessing the same resource represents a complete departure from the typical database pay model that accounts for much of library budgets. I'm sure EBSCO is watching closely. 

Librarians and Personal Branding

The American Libraries Magazine's blog section has a post by Karen Schneider on the pros and cons of personal branding in the world of libraries. The thrust of the piece is spot on: branding is about more than just controlling your online image, it's about crafting your entire career, persona, and public self as a product that can be reduced to a sentence and then replicated throughout your entire outwardly visible life. The article underscores the importance of it but stop shorts of a full-throated endorsement.

What is missing, however, from Schneider's ideas is a recommendation that all job seekers would do well to consider. While personal branding may be a comprehensive activity for those who choose to make it so, it need not be for everyone. Emphasizing the freedom to chose the level of one's engagement in branding may make it a more palatable topic for those, like myself, who think it is more hassle than it's worth.

My concern on this score is that I should be comfortable with the top Google results that come up for my name. This requires neither a well thought out personal brand nor a conscious strategy to make sure that the online me matches up with the in-person me. Rather, I trust that the digital residuals from my life that appear most prominently online are things that grow out of the activities with which I am or have been actively engaged. These include scholarship, work related projects, and, from time to time, personal activities.

I think of this approach as a low-key strategy that amounts to a passable personal brand (at least in library circles) and that acts as a guarantee that I am not associated as strongly with the random things that are online about me as I am with the things I care about most. At least that's my $0.02.

It's worth mentioning that almost all employers will invariably run the names of any top candidate through a search engine looking for obvious reasons to exclude someone. I think of this practice as the sixth reference (NWC requires five references for most positions) and wouldn't consider hiring someone to represent the library if they can't be bothered to represent themselves professionally online.

S. Polanka's "eBook Licensing and Access: Now and the Future"

I'm currently sitting in a webinar by S. Polanka entitled "eBook Licensing and Access: Now and the Future." Hers is the last presentation in today's ebooks: Benefits, Challenges, and the Future webinar, September 21, 2012. As it's football season, I thought I'd blog it like a football game.

Whew! Compared to tweeting this kind of this, this was an exercise in old school communications. 

2:42 PM: Models for the future, consortial purchasing would be smart; hosting content, promoting access, etc. 

2:41 PM: Multiple Platform Challenges, too many players for what is essentially at this point the same thing: a marked up book. 

2:37 PM: Archiving/Perpetual Access questions, as we are licensing we have little options to archive materials should the content vendor go out of business or the publisher/rights holder back out. The vendor is licensing access and negotiating on behalf of the publisher, so they are our link. 

2:31 PM: ereader accessibility: audio control of menu is necessary for ereader. Numerous lawsuits from NFB and others. Basically, it sounds like a bad idea to offer ereader devices that are not Apple products (iPad, which offers both voice menus and text to speech). See No Shelf Required for more. 

2:29 PM: Accessibility: HTML is the most accessible ebook format. 

2:26 PM: Budgeting practices. Pilot projects first.

2:23 PM: Many people think we own ebooks but the fine print indicates otherwise. We know this now because Amazon has pulled purchased (licensed) content away from users. Libraries don't own the material either. Personal note: in fact, we commit our budgets to certain platforms (ebrary in our case) for the long term by purchasing content from certain vendors. Just like your Kindle books work best on the Kindle, our ebrary books work best on ebrary. In fact, they only work on ebrary and that's why we would have to pay them hundreds of dollars a year simply to maintain access to the ~40 titles we have purchased in the past six months through their PDA program. 

2:22 PM: DRM is a layer of control. 

2:16 PM: Challenges for Libraries. Owning vs. renting. Publishers not selling to libraries. Some even impose limitations. Copyright: right of first sale in US, ILL provisioned through US copyright law, licenses strip us of these rights, lease and not own, substantial limits on circulation. Personal note: close parallel with licensed music. See Bruce Willis's legal disupte with iTunes. 

2:14 PM: Studies on STL point to possible cost savings (University of Denver, Grand Valley State University). Personal note: measuring these savings depends on the perspective on ownership that the library subscribes to. 

2:12 PM: Short term loan. Based on PDA, usually 10-15% of list cost of book. Usually for 24 hours access. Cost per use proposition actually depends on subsequent use. Thus, later trigger options beyond second or third use that result in purchase but overall higher costs to buy book. Consider ILL alternative as well. 

2:10 PM: Sampling of other free ebook sites. Google Books, HathiTrust, Many Books, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive.

2:08 PM: Sue mentioned resources for free ebooks. Internet Archives, Hosted on Open Library, Pool of 200K ebooks, 1000 libraries worldwide, 20th Century titles.

2:07 PM: Access ebook levels, public domain to short term loan/rentals. Depends of permanence and openness of access. Libraries have an increased risk of not having access to content down the line and we are more likely to encounter DRM. 

2:05 PM: What is your intention: build content for the long-term or provide as much access as we can without concern for ownership questions (leasing).  Depending on your response, this will dictate the purchase model you pursue. "The content you want determines the vendor, business model, license, and format you will get."

2:00 PM: Now when we license content, we also license the container it comes in (DRM, relationships that come with vendors, platforms, etc.). 

Lawrence Lessig Could Take Bruce Willis

At least in a copyright argument, that is. Bruce Willis, threatening legal action against Apple over the latter's refusal to allow him to bequeath his extensive music library to his daughters, appears to know little about the ins and outs of copyright law. Nonetheless, I give him credit for pestering Apple and challenging what any reasonable person weaned on analog might assume are restrictive licensing practices. Perhaps he's thinking to himself: "9 million songs in the world and I have to download them from Apple."

Library Security - From the Inside Out

An article in ARS Technica entitled "Why passwords have never been weaker - and crackers have never been stronger" had me thinking today not only about the vulnerability we all assume with each new online account created, but the risk that we run as organizations if we don't follow good practices regarding internet log in security.

In fact, I don't know that we've ever even considered a unified approach to managing our passwords to various sites. Without going into compromising detail, suffice it to say that we likely have dozens upon dozens of log ins in various states, conditions, and places. Some of these are to important things like sites that have to do with services, others are to the many random Web 2.0 technologies we explore and decide not to pursue. Yet each account represents a risk in its own way. Each account can result in a cracked hash tag that can in turn furnish information that will make the next attack easier for the cracker.

What caught my attention in all of this is that the typical steps that experts had been recommending are no longer as effective as they had been. The password security rating system that many accounts employ has become no more than a cute javascript icon. Certainly, we need long passwords. But the details of this article indicate to me that some of what it has been calling strong passwords are, in fact, now easy to compromise.

 I think it's time that we as a group of people claiming to know something about data and information to assess our own practices and see if there's not a safer and easier alternative. It seems the most responsible thing we can do now is to take this issue seriously. The consequences of not doing so may make the start-of-term headaches that pop up with systems failing to interact look like child's play.

Google Chrome now has a master password add-in that looks promising. It's called My LastPass Vault and it appears to be highly rated.

Leadership Books and Hollywood Endings: The Saccharin Side of Reading about Leading

During a job candidate's interview, I recently learned of Bill George's True North : Discover Your Authentic Leadership (2007). As I hadn't read a book that would be shelved on Barnes & Noble's "Leadership" section in quite a while, I thought I would return to this peculiar genre of inspirational/self-help literature that seems as endless as Asimov's Foundation series.

Without recounting the specifics of the book (Amazon has ample glowing reviews to tell you why you should buy this book), I'd like to offer my own critique of why these types of books are inadequate for librarians, those working in higher education in general, and pretty much anyone who cares to read this blog. Allow me to focus on the reasons these books fail to speak to my circumstances:

1) These types of books are written for those working in a for-profit business setting by authors who have seen all that that world has to offer. Their first piece of advice is usually "be nice" or "be true to yourself." Judging by these pieces of advice, I gather that the business world is full of nasty, self-serving, duplicitous leaders focused solely on the next quarter. I doubt this is true and wonder whether readers from the business world often don't find such advice patronizing. Having just paid $20, a money-wise businesswoman might think she overpaid for what should be perceived for what it is: common sense. But I guess the endowment effect might override any sense of objectivity. As I order many of these books via InterLibrary Loan, my personal investment in them is minimal so I like to think I'm closer to objectivity. 

2) The authors of these books feel the need to share the lessons they've learned the hard way in rising to the top. They have arrived at a point at which they feel they have figured out which behaviors and activities are helpful and which are not. No doubt they experienced some rough and tumble days that tested their mettle and resolve. The winners came through and lived to tell about their successes. The losers found other jobs, new industries, or retired and no publisher wants to tell their story and lessons learned. So clearly there is a fair amount of survivor bias going on here. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't learn from those who persevered and won out, either through luck or determination. But those who did survive and arrived at the top are likely outnumbered by those who didn't. A genre that is so deplete of the perspective of those who didn't succeed is hardly balanced. The image of the valedictorian lecturing those earning their GED on how to succeed comes to mind. 

3) This might be wild speculation, but I feel that many of these books are intended to hold the hand of the reader as he or she goes through a career midlife crisis. Carl Jung wrote of midlife crises:

"Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life [...] we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve as before. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning - for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie." (The Jung Reader)

Worse still, I wonder whether these books don't have the effect of replicating that kind of crisis where none exists. We talk about these books all the time. We blog about them. Speakers who write them are brought in to speak as experts. We're frequently exposed to this way of thinking. And the problem I have with them is that  these books implicitly assume that we are doing something wrong to begin with. While that's likely true in the world of the big banks, I am not comfortable having my motives to lead and my approach to leadership questioned by every book on leadership I pick up. Even books on servant leadership begin with the assumption that the reader got into a leadership position for self-serving reasons. Don't worry, the author's latest book will cure you of that and make you a selfless leader in service to others. Basically, they're rehashing Jung and offering the latest leadership dogma as the script that will get you through the second half and up the precipice. George's True North calls this shift the move from "I to We." But what about those of us who began this journey oriented north, those of us who seek to be a servant first, and for whom leadership never was about the individual? Perhaps we need less guidance on aspirational leadership and more on the political side of things. I've found Dave Logan's blog "CultureSync" to be useful as an introduction to the dark arts of leadership. It's sort of like reading a self-help leadership book in reverse. 

4) And from my own personal experience, I find that I learn from my failures as much or more than I learn from my successes. The problem with this genre is that all failures are funneled through an Enlightenment narrative whereby the author or the many individuals who provide the case studies all find redemption through their travails. What we're left with are Hollywood bildingsroman lessons that are slapped together in comic-book fashion and given a pithy title (no offense to comic books and their readers). 

5) They're formulaic! Here's my formula for how to construct a bestseller in the mass market leadership book niche: 

• Think of a pithy title of three to four words that encapsulate the central theme;
• Make sure the central idea is common sense enough that it resonates with the reader;
• Have the publisher arrange a hastily written introduction that lays out the urgent need for such a book but really just rehashes the conditions that would have been prevented had people followed common sense;
• Introduce the topic but obfuscate the idea enough by throwing in lots of sloppy metaphors, hackneyed expressions about how you too can learn to be a better leader, and sprinkle the words "leader" and "leadership" throughout.
• Chunk the basic idea into four or five segments. It's okay if a few are nothing but attempts at rewording the second chapter. 
• Write two to three pages for each chapter then provide numerous case studies.
• Recap it all in a conclusion.
• Make sure your publisher gets authors of similar works to praise your book so your back cover is its own "who's who." At least one of these needs to proclaim in bold text "Here is a book that stands out from all the others."

Enough sarcasm and criticism. I could go on but I think I've made my point.

-Darryl, your working boy.