In an article in the Harvard Crimson about recent budget cuts, Harvard Business School spokesman Brian C. Kenny:
said the staff cuts were made strategically and that they came mainly from areas that do not directly affect students, such as alumni relations, fundraising, libraries, and IT.
“The guiding principle for the dean and school leadership throughout the year has been that we need to take every measure to preserve the core work of the School—teaching and faculty scholarship,” Kenny said.
Wow. Just wow.
I wonder if anyone asked students if libraries affect them? Our business school library is chock full of students every time I stop by.
How exactly do you “preserve faculty scholarship” without access to existing scholarship? And once those faculty publish their scholarship, does Kenny expect them to collect and preserve it themselves?
I get that libraries have to take their fair share of cuts in these tough times. Stanford libraries certainly took our share.
But to suggest that libraries don’t directly affect students? Again — just wow.
It seems to have become conventional wisdom that library reference is dying, or already dead. Conventional wisdom says that we are wasting valuable resources staffing anachronistic desks with professional librarians who do nothing but tell people where the bathroom is.
Well, conventional wisdom doesn’t match up with our statistics for the past year (June 2008 – June 2009):
- 63% of the questions we answered at the reference desk were Reference questions
- 6% were technical (and no, we do not count adding paper to printers as a technical question–we don’t count those at all)
- Only 31% were directional
Statistics from June 2007 to June 2008 show the same breakdown of questions.
And we are not talking about small numbers: We answered 20,758 total questions at the desk last year; 13,052 Reference questions. For us that comes out to 9 total questions an hour, more than 5 Reference questions an hour. I can’t speak for other reference desks, but at Stanford’s Green Library, we are definitely not sitting at the desk knitting and occasionally telling kids where the bathroom is. We are doing real reference, lots of it, and it is paying off.
This cool infographic from Visual Economics shows that the average U.S. consumer unit spends $118 a year on reading.
I’m not sure whether to be happy that reading made the graph, or sad that spending on reading lags behind both tobacco ($323) and alcohol ($457).
Awful Library Books is a newish blog that’s been getting a bit of attention. I really hate to sound like a humorless, old-school librarian (especially since I am most definitely not one), but I’m a little troubled by the tone of Awful Library Books. Sure, some/most of the titles mentioned are pretty amusing, but do we really want to be getting rid of books once they are outdated?
According to the About page:
The items featured here are so old, obsolete, awful or just plain stupid that we are horrified that people might be actually checking these items out and depending on the information.
As far as I can tell, most of the books identified are “awful” simply by virtue of being old (and not really that old, at that).
I understand that most libraries need to weed collections to make room for new books, but I’m just a bit troubled by the message of Awful Library Books, which seems to be that libraries should only keep the most up-to-date books with wide appeal. The problem is that somebody has to keep the old books, so that we have a record of our cultural history. Moreover, I’m troubled by the general notion that books that seem frivolous or out-dated aren’t worth the shelf-space. That’s a kind of censorship that libraries usually rally against.
Highlights from our end-of-quarter survey of 1st year Stanford students in Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) courses. The Program in Writing and Rhetoric is Stanford’s version of freshman writing, and 90% of Stanford freshmen take one of these courses in their 1st year:
- 99% of students used the Library catalog
- The Library catalog and the Library databases were rated most useful (ahead of Google and Wikipedia)
- Nearly 40% of students consulted a librarian about their research paper
- Students who consulted a librarian were more likely to use Library databases and the online Research Guides, and rated the Library databases more useful than those who did not consult a librarian
- The more useful students find Library databases, the less useful they find Google.
On to the details:
Stanford Libraries’ Information Center staff provide dedicated support to every PWR class in the form of an assigned librarian, an online class research guide, and a library workshop. We surveyed students at the end of each quarter this year, after they finished their final assignment, a Research Based Argument (RBA)–essentially a research paper.
We had a response rate of over 30%, for a total of 423 respondents.
Percent of students who used the following research tools to find resources for their RBA
99% Socrates (Stanford Library catalog)
93% Library Databases
93% Google
73% Wikipedia
71% Online Class Research Guide
67% Bibliography, Works Cited, or notes page of a journal article or book
57% Google Book Search
51% Google Scholar
25% PWR Boost display books (a special table we set up w/ relevant reference books)
How useful were the following research tools for finding resources for your RBA? (1=Not very useful, 2=A little useful, 3=Useful, 4=Very useful
Socrates (Stanford Library catalog) = 3.3
Library Databases = 3.3
Google = 3.1
Google Scholar = 2.9
Google Book Search = 2.8
Online Class Research Guide = 2.7
Wikipedia = 2.4
PWR Boost display books = 2.0
Consulting a librarian for help
39% Consulted a librarian (any means)
25% Visited Reference Desk in person
14% Consulted assigned librarian directly
6% Used IM to consult librarian
3% Sent email to generic library/reference email
More findings (only statistically significant results reported):
- Students who consulted a librarian were more likely to use Library Databases (96%) than students who did not consult a librarian (91%).
- Students who consulted a librarian were more likely to use Online Class Research Guide (77%) than students who did not consult a librarian (68%).
- Students who consulted a librarian rated Library Databases more useful (3.44) than students who did not consult a librarian (3.22).
- Students who consulted a librarian rated Class Research Guide more useful (2.8) than students who did not consult a librarian (2.65).
- Student ratings of the usefulness of Google are positively correlated with their ratings of the usefulness of Wikipedia and Google Scholar. In other words, the more useful a student found Google to be, the more useful they also found Wikipedia and Google Scholar.
- Student ratings of the usefulness of Library Databases are positively correlated with their ratings of the usefulness of the Library Catalog, Online Class Research Guides, and Google Book Search. In other words, the more useful they found Library Databases, the more useful they also found the Library Catalog, Online Class Research Guides, and Google Book Search.
- And my favorite finding–the more useful they found Library Databases, the less useful they found Google. Google is useful, until they find something (like Library Databases!) that is more useful.
From OCLC news release:
“OCLC has formally withdrawn the proposed policy. A new group will soon be assembled to begin work to draft a new policy with more input and participation from the OCLC membership.”
The withdrawal of the proposed policy, and reaffirmation of the 1987 Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records, was based on the recommendations of The Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship.
Jay Jordon, President & CEO of OCLC promises the new group will develp “a record use policy that reflects both the rights of individual libraries and the needs of the cooperative to sustain and grow WorldCat for future generations.”
Sounds good to me.
In a letter to fellow authors, Roy Blount, President of the Authors Guild, defends the Google Books settlement. He directly addresses the concern that the settlement will give Google a monopoly over “orphan works”:
Let’s examine the dissenters’ concern. This alleged monopoly will be of a special kind of book. The book will be out of print, that is, it will already have been deemed unfit for continued commerce by traditional print publishers. No one currently has a monopoly on the book, because there is no market for the book: no one can get it, except at the library or in a used book store. So Google is essentially being accused of cornering the market on the unmarketable.
Blount goes on to note that orphan works make up only a subset of the market, and then argues that finding authors/rightsholders for out-of-print works is typically not so difficult.
He also claims that Google’s monopoly on orphan works will diminish every year, as the Books Rights Registry locates authors and starts sending royalty checks:
As the Registry starts sending out checks, books will exit the orphanage in a rush. Nothing gets an author’s attention like a royalty check. It’s not an orphan books problem that this settlement presents, it’s an orphan books solution.
Finally, he also accuses the GBS dissenters of a willingness to throw out many other benefits of the GBS settlement in an attempt to prevent an ostensible orphan monopoly.
What follows are some of my developing ideas on browsing and serendipity. I’m not really convinced of any of it, but it helps my own thinking to write it down, and hopefully get feedback …
The OED defines serendipity as “The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.”
To me, this implies that instances of serendipity vary along at least 2 dimensions — How happy they make you, and how unexpected they are. If we limit the discussion to serendipity in the service of research, then we can think of “how happy they make you” as “how useful they are.” So, two essential qualities of serendipity are usefulness and unexpectedness. The holy grail of serendipity is the essential, but wholly unexpected discovery. Most of our serendipitous discoveries fall somewhere short of that on one or both dimensions.
Since social scientists love 2 x 2 tables, I think one is called for here:
| Low Usefulness | High Usefulness | |
| Low Unexpectedness | Why Bother? | Only slightly off the beaten path but essential to your research agenda |
| High Unexpectedness | Nice reference to show you are thinking broadly, but not essential to your main research agenda | Holy Grail of Serendipity |
Thinking about serendipity in this way helps me get past the simplistic debate over whether print browsing or online browsing is better for serendipity.
The more interesting question for me is: What conditions are likely to produce what kinds of serendipity?
If we think about the relationship between browsing and serendipity, one reasonable set of hypotheses might be:
H1: The larger the body of materials being browsed, the higher the degree of unexpectedness.
H2: The more ordered/organized the body of materials being browsed, the lower the degree of unexpectedness.
H3: The larger the body of materials being browsed, the higher the likelihood of discoveries with low usefulness.
H4: The more ordered/organized the body of materials being browsed, the higher the likelihood of discoveries with high usefulness.
I also think that organization trumps size, in that organization can mitigate the effect of size on degree of usefulness. Thus, browsing a very large, highly organized collection is likely to produce highly unexpected and highly useful serendipity.
Of course, another critical part of the relationship between browsing and serendipity is the browser herself. As Pasteur said “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.”
Based on what I said above, I might expand/revise this to say: “Serendipity favors a highly prepared mind, browsing a large, well-ordered collection.”
Stay tuned … more later.
Mark Gimein at Slate takes on “some of the myths that have been propagated about Book Search” in In Defense of Google Books. It is a decidedly one-sided article, but probably a needed counter-balance to the slew of anti Google Books pieces out there (see this one, this one, and this one).
Now, I’m a pretty big fan of Google Books (see here, here, and here), and have defended them from time to time, but I think Gimein is mistaken if he really thinks Google is the answer to his rhetorical question: “In the past decade, who has done more for public access to knowledge. Harvard? Google?”
No doubt, providing full-text searching over a corpus of millions of books is a boon to public access to knowledge. But Google did not do this alone — the project absolutely relies on the cumulative work that participating libraries have done in selecting and preserving their collections. Google’s contribution to public knowledge is based on the content that libraries like Harvard (and Stanford) have acquired and cared for over many, many years.
Even if you think that the Google Books project is the greatest boon to public knowledge in the last decade, credit would still have to be shared with the participating libraries who provided the content.
If serendipity really is about finding the unexpected, then online browsing might be more likely to facilitate the truly unlikely findings than print browsing, simply because the set of possible discoveries is much less limited in the online world than in the physical. If I am browsing in a library or a bookstore, I am limited to what is in the physical building. If I am browsing through a physical newspaper, I can only discover what is in the issue I happen to have at hand. When I am browsing online, I frequently end up far afield from where I started.
The xkcd folks illustrate this best:
My personal experience is that I am much more likely to make fruitful, serendipitous discoveries through online browsing and social media connections than I am when I browse print materials or collections. I “wander” more when I am online, willingly following links that lead me in unexpected directions. I am a bit less likely to wander around bookstores or libraries, and I often recycle certain sections of the newspaper without even looking at them. I am much less patient and less adventurous in the print/physical world. Perhaps it is because the effort involved in following a link seems to be much lower than in wandering down the next aisle in a bookstore, or even flipping through a usually neglected section of the paper. Abbot argues that efficiency is the enemy of serendipity, but I am not convinced. YMMV, but I stick by my assertion that serendipity can and does occur in online environments.
And another thing-since I am online nearly 24/7, with Tweetdeck open and checking Google Reader and Facebook frequently, I am browsing and discovering new information constantly in the online world. In the physical world, I browse the newspaper once a day, and browse in a library or bookstore once a week or less.
Couching a defense of print collections on a fear of losing serendipity just doesn’t strike me as a very convincing argument. Serendipity happens online. If there is a particular kind or quality of serendipity that happens only in the print world, we need to be specific about it so we can either replicate (or even enhance it) online, or so that we at least know what it is we might be losing.
