Why I’m Leaning In with library colleagues

We started a Lean In Circle at Stanford Libraries recently, and while I am very excited about it, I am well aware that the whole Lean In thing has its critics. Some of the most compelling criticisms of Lean In I’ve read to date are:

• that it is “a manifesto for corporatist feminism, career advice for the distaff side of the 1%”, with zero to say to the 99% and nothing to offer in terms of tactics for dismantling the structural barriers to gender equality.
• that it “assumes that the feminist question is simply, how can I be a more successful worker?“
• that it is only for women who can cry at work (i.e. white women).

Even though Sandberg goes to great lengths in both the book and in her talks to add all the right caveats about how not everyone wants it all and that’s OK, and to applaud those who are working on the structural side of the problem; I feel that her rhetoric often displays a kind of tone-deafness to those with different goals and values, and/or those who lack the privileges of class, race, and sexual orientation that she enjoys.

So why am I so excited to have started a Lean In Circle at Stanford that I even agreed to gush about it to the San Jose Mercury News? Well, some of the answers to that are in our Stanford Libraries news article about it:

Although librarianship is a female-dominated profession, women are still under-represented in leadership positions relative to their numbers in the profession. This is especially true in senior leadership roles at top research libraries. Moreover, as libraries become more digital and more reliant on technology expertise, our organizations are affected by the well-documented problems of gender inequality in the technology industry.

We at the Stanford University Libraries believe that our organization and the library profession at large are most effective when all of us are able and encouraged to contribute based on our skills, talents, passions and ideas, not based on our gender. Providing opportunities like the Leaning In @ Stanford Libraries Circle is one way we are activating that belief: by empowering and equipping our staff to talk about and overcome the obstacles we all face in the workplace and at home.

Lean In circles are kinda like a book club, but with a focus on equipping and empowering people to combat gender inequality and bias as they encounter it. They can be mixed gender groups, but we decided that our pilot group might work best as an all-female group. Our group decided to meet on a monthly basis, alternating between Educational meetings and Exploration meetings. At the Educational meetings, we will employ a flipped classroom approach. Before the meeting, each of us will watch one of the 20 minute videos from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research’s Voice & Influence curriculum. We will then use our meeting time to discuss the topic raised in the video and practice putting what we have learned into action. At the Exploration meetings, group members will share real-life challenges with each other, providing us all the opportunity to learn from our diverse experiences and insights.

I get that branding our Circle with the Lean In brand implies a certain level of agreement with Sandberg’s perspective; but I can tell you from our experience so far that the women in our group are too smart to buy into anything so uncritically. We’ve already had some great discussions of the many criticisms of Lean In, and I am certain we will continue to explore a wide range of perspectives on the issues. While we certainly could have started such a group before Sandberg came along, the sad fact is that we didn’t. The whole Lean In phenomena provided not only the impetus for the group, but also a layer of legitimacy that forestalls any open questioning of why we’re even talking about gender.

Sandberg’s book tells her story and provides her advice. Our Lean In Circle allows all of us to tell our own stories, so that each of us can take what we want from each others’ experiences. But more than just providing a forum for women to support and validate one another, it provides a space where we can learn together what social science research has to say about how gender and gender bias affect individuals and organizations, and what we can do about it individually and as leaders in our organizations.

Do I think Lean In circles are the answer to sexism and gender bias in the workplace? Nope. But I do know that for the women in my Lean In circle, having a supportive network where we can discuss our own diverse goals and how gender affects our ability to reach them is very much appreciated. And having the enthusiastic support of senior leadership to do this is incredibly powerful.

We have 14 women in our initial group, and every one of them is excited and grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of this. We also have dozens more men and women who want to participate in subsequent groups. Sheryl Sandberg certainly didn’t invent the idea of women and our male allies forming supportive networks, but at this moment in time she has sparked a renewed interest in it and support for it. And despite (or maybe because of) my concerns that Lean In misses lots of marks; I’m not willing to pass up this chance to facilitate just such a group with some of the awesome colleagues I have at the Stanford Libraries. And that is why, with all kinds of conflicting, complicated thoughts and feelings about it, I’m willing to Lean In with my colleagues and see what we can accomplish.

No streaking in the library

Last month, Stanford Libraries and Stanford’s Department of Public Safety stopped members of the Columbae co-op from walking naked through the library during finals week. Predictably, many disagree with our actions and think the Columbae run is a tradition worth keeping.

I am on record as being a fan of many of the ways in which the Library is seen as a social icon on campus, and the nude run fits that notion in some ways. But I think we made the right, though unpopular, decision in this case.

We put up with some student traditions and pranks in the library — the book-slamming exercise that was part of New Student Orientation this year, for example — but we draw the line at activities that cause damage (Band Run) and activities that violate the Fundamental Standard.  The Columbae nude run is problematic for the simple reason that some patrons and some library staff are uncomfortable with being approached by nude students. We have a responsibility to provide a safe environment for all students, and to make sure that our staff and our patrons are not placed in a situation that creates a hostile environment. The rights of students and staff to not be approached by nude strangers outweighs the dubious rights of the Columbae residents to streak thru the library.

If an individual slammed a book in the Lane room, we would simply ask them not to, but we wouldn’t throw them out of the library. If an individual stripped in the library and then started handing out candy to patrons, we would certainly ask them to leave. In fact, we have over the years responded to complaints from students of other patrons in various states of undress, and we have responded appropriately to protect the right of our patrons to study in an environment free of harassment. And although it may sound prude, it is not such a stretch to say that being offered candy by a naked stranger is a form of harassment. The fact that the Columbae run is a tradition that consists of a group of students rather than a single patron makes little difference in our responsibility to our staff and our other patrons.

My suggestion to the Columbae co-op is that they find a way to keep their tradition alive in a space where others are free to choose whether they want to be a part of it. The library is not that place.

Feminism, queer theory, and the future of library discovery

Last week, I riffed a bit on Bess Sadler’s talk Brain Injuries, Science Fiction, and Library Discovery. Bess and I continued our conversation (on and off-line), and we rode the wave of great feedback and our own naive enthusiasm right into submitting a presentation proposal for the 2013 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. Whether our proposal gets accepted or not, we’re going to keep wrestling with these ideas and see what we come up with, so stay tuned.
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Feminism and the future of library discovery
Proposal submitted for Feminisms & Rhetorics 2013

Chris Bourg, Stanford University
Bess Sadler, Stanford University

Debates over the roles of technology in higher education frequently include conversations about the effects of technology on the future of reading, books, and libraries.  Rhetoric surrounding physical browsing and print books tends to focus on physical and emotional responses to print, while discussions about ebooks and online discovery tend to emphasize the gains in efficiency afforded by technology.  In this way, debates about the future of books and of libraries tend to reflect the classic gendered differentiation between emotion and reason that feminist epistemology debunks so well (see Jaggar, 2008).

These debates also tend to be incredibly a-theoretical, as few scholars have engaged in any serious theoretical consideration of the effect of new technologies on library-based research.  While Hope Olson’s work on exposing the impact of western patriarchal biases on the organization of knowledge brings a much-needed critical feminist perspective to key library issues (Olson, 2002), little work has been done to expand that perspective to online environments. Queer theory scholars, such as Jack Halberstam, who calls for “counter-intuitive ways of thinking, anti-disciplinary forms of knowledge production, uncanonical archives and queer modes of address”, likewise have much to offer these debates (Halberstam, 2011; Halberstam 2012).

In our presentation, we imagine a future for libraries and their readers – from searching, browsing, and reading, to knowledge organization and relevancy ranking in online discovery environments – that is fully informed by queer theory and a critical feminist perspective.

Works Cited:

Jaggar, Alison M. Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Print.

Halberstam, Jack.  “Bullybloggers on Failure and the Future of Queer Studies.” Weblog entry. Bullybloggers. April 2, 2012. Accessed February 4, 2013.

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham [NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.

Olson, Hope A. The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Print.

Books (all kinds) and ejournals are important to Faculty: Stanford survey results

mmmm … books!
Faculty office, photo by Chris Bourg

In late December, we surveyed Stanford faculty in the Schools of Humanities & Sciences, Engineering, Education, and Earth Sciences about the “many kinds of resources that might be important to your research”. We still have loads of work to do on analyzing the data, but I wanted to go ahead and start sharing some results. The first set of questions asked faculty “How important are the following types of scholarly materials for your research?”, followed by a list of the usual suspects in terms of types of resources. Response choices were: Very Important, Important, Somewhat Important, Not Important.

For me, the big take-away from the details below is that large majorities of faculty across all disciplines rate Print Books, Electronic Books, and Ejournals as Important or Very Important. The fact that both print and electronic books are important to all faculty is more evidence to me that the easy stereotypes that scientists don’t need print and humanists resist digital are just wrong.

• 90% of faculty say Print Books are Important or Very Important to their research. Faculty in the Humanities and Arts are most enamored of Print Books, with 96% rating them as Important or Very Important. Large majorities of Social Scientists (90%) and Science & Engineering (79%) faculty also rate Print Books as Important or Very Important.
• E-Books are also Important or Very Important to a majority of faculty in all disciplines: 75% in Humanities & Arts, 65% in Social Sciences, 68% in Science & Engineering. Note that Humanities and Arts faculty are the most likely to embrace E-books (so much for the stereotype of the luddite humanists). Note also that most faculty rate both print and E-books as Important or Very Important — we are clearly still in a hybrid world with respect to scholarly books.
• Journals are another story. Everyone (over 94% across all disciplines) says E-Journals are Important or Very Important; but Print Journals are Important or Very Important primarly to those in Humanities and the Arts (76%). Only 36% of Science and Engineering faculty, and only 28% of Social Sciences faculty rate Print Journals as Important or Very Important.
• Textual Data are important to a good chunk of Humanities (44%) and Social Science (38%) faculty, but much less so to Science & Engineering folks (9%). Maps and Geospatial data are important to 25% of faculty overall, with slightly more interest from Social Scientists than from Humanists or Science & Engineering folks.
• For all the other kinds of resources we asked about, the differences between disciplines are big and just what you would expect. Numeric data is important to more Social Science (62%) and Science & Engineering faculty (55%) than Humanities faculty (19%). Archival materials, non-English language materials, reference works, images, film, video and audio are all important to much larger percentages of Humanists than to Social Scientists and Science & Engineering faculty.
• Response rates: Our overall response rate was a rather poor 17%, with Humanities & Arts faculty twice as likely (N=68, 29%) as Social Sciences (N=32, 15%) or Science & Engineering faculty (N=57, 13%) to respond.

We also asked some great open-ended questions about how faculty accessed resources and what would improve that access. We asked similar questions about a bunch of tools (e.g. the library website, SearchWorks, bibliographic management software), and expertise (e.g. subject librarians, data specialists). I’ll blog about some of the findings from these other questions later, so stay tuned.

(A less editorial version of this appears on our Stanford Libraries Blog, which we will use to officially communicate results to the Stanford community.)

How ROI killed the academic library

Edited to add: @jacobsberg makes the excellent point that this talk might better be titled “How ROI fails the academic library”. Despite the fact that it means giving up the allusion to this classic, I think he’s right.

I gave this talk at the ABLD/EBSLG/APBSLG Joint Meeting at Stanford University back in April and wrote about it in I think I’ve become a Feral Humanist. The theme of that conference was “Business Library ROI: Measuring Usage and Identifying Value”, so I gave an opening talk called “How ROI killed the academic library: A cautionary tale.” Barbara Fister’s recent column Let’s (Not) Do the Numbers inspired me to publish the text of the talk here. I think it is important that we take a serious, critical look at the movement towards reducing the value of academic libraries (and higher education, more generally) to a numbers game.
The talk was about 30 minutes long, so I’ve cut some stuff here; including the part where I explain why a Stanford librarian goes by “mchris4duke” on twitter.

How ROI killed the academic library: A cautionary tale

My current job with the Stanford libraries is Assistant University Librarian for Public Services – I am responsible for all the Social Sciences & Humanities libraries and librarians and for our Special Collections and University Archives. Let me tell you – that’s a lot of humanities responsibilities for a Sociologist. Especially a Sociologist from from one of the most quantitatively rigorous sociology programs in the nation at that. What I have learned from my amazing colleagues about the humanities, about humanities research, and about library support for the humanities has very much informed my evolving perspective on the future of academic libraries.

So, as you might gather from the title of my presentation, I want to talk today about my concerns about the ROI (Return on Investment) framework – especially as it applies to large academic libraries like Stanford.
For me, an ROI framework is dangerous for academic libraries for 2 big reasons:

1. ROI tends to focus on the short-term & quantitative; and real impact of academic libraries tends to be long-term & qualitative.
2. An ROI framework doesn’t account very well for “rare events”. And I think Academic Libraries are about, at least in part, facilitating rare events.

Let’s start with the short-term versus long-term tension.  When we talk about ROI for higher education, especially for research universities, we really aren’t talking about economic returns – at least not in any straightforward money-in, money-out kind of way– at least I hope we aren’t. Academic Libraries in the US are non-profits, so strict financial returns are not really our thing.  To understand and assess the value academic libraries bring to universities, I think you have to look at the mission of the university– which is not about making money.

Let’s look at Stanford’s mission – with the caveat that Stanford doesn’t actually have a current, officially labeled Mission Statement document. So we have to do a little archival research and look at our Founding Grant:

Founding Grant, Stanford University

From our Founding Grant 1891, we get this nugget about the original mission of Stanford University:

Its object, to qualify its students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life;

And its purposes, to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization, teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law, and inculcating love and reverence for the great principles of government as derived from the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Well that should be fairly straightforward to measure, right? We just need to see if the investments we make in library services are contributing to students’ “personal success and usefulness” and whether our collection development work and our digital library infrastructure development “promote public welfare”.  That sounds easy enough, right?

I’m clearly being more than a bit facetious, but the truth is that deep down I do think that the investments we are making – in research services to students and scholars, in building deep collections, and in the development of next generation digital library tools and infrastructure do advance those original aims of the university, just not necessarily in tidy yearly increments that can be measured and reported as metrics used to gauge Return on our Investments.

But let’s see if we can find something more recent, to see if the current university administration here at Stanford give us some more measurable goals to work toward.  In kicking off the recently concluded Stanford Challenge, Pres. Hennessey articulated some goals:

“Our goal for The Stanford Challenge is nothing short of building a university for the 21^st century and beyond: A university that will better serve the world through the quality, impact, and vision of its research, and through the new generation of leaders it will produce.”

We’re still talking about some really long-term and lofty goals here. Basically, we want to produce great leaders, and solve world problems. Stanford’s true purpose (and I would argue the purpose of most major research universities) is not higher graduation rates, good retention rates, or even higher employment rates for our graduates. So the returns on Stanford’s investments, or even the return on any given students’ investment in Stanford, can’t be measured that way.  Those measures won’t tell you much about how well we accomplish our actual goals – which are lofty and inspiring and long-term.

So you see, I have concerns about the ROI focus on higher education generally as well.  And as I said, a big part of my concern about the increased emphasis on ROI and Assessment in higher education is that an ROI framework tends to encourage a focus on short-term outcomes, when higher education in general; and academic libraries specifically, are in the business of pursuing and producing long-term outcomes.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t expect a return on our investment – only that it may take a very long time for those returns to be realized; and those that want us to prove our value by showing adequate returns on their/our investments must be very patient.

Academic libraries, of course, exist to further the goals of their parent institutions.  At Stanford Libraries, we support Stanford’s goals and missions by doing what libraries do – we collect, describe, interpret, share, and preserve information.

We do that in all the old traditional ways — for example, we still purchase about 120,000 physical books each year; and we logged over 628 thousand circulation transactions last year. We answer nearly 154 thousand reference questions and conduct 1000 workshops every year.

We also protect, collect and provide access to information in many new ways; as information production, discovery, use, re-use and consumption is happening in all kinds of new and innovative ways. Ways that our traditional measures of usage may not capture very well.

One example of Stanford Libraries’ innovative spirit is our involvement in the Google Books project. In 2005, we took a leap of faith as one of the original 5 libraries, agreeing to let Google digitize our collections. We did this in the hopes that getting the words inside our books indexed and therefore searchable would enhance discovery and would open up the treasures of our collection to a broader audience.  While we are disappointed in the lack of a settlement agreement, we remain pleased at the positive impact the Google Books project has had on discoverability and use of collections.

It is important to remember that the text-mining research made possible because of the enormous corpus of digital texts depended on us collecting and retaining a whole lot of books over time — and lots of those books never circulated.  Many of the kinds of research questions that can now be asked because the words in the books have now become data, can only be answered because of the sheer size and comprehensiveness of the corpus.

For example, there is a graduate student here at Stanford using both Google Books and HathiTrust files of Portugese language publications as a means of tracing the evolution of Brazilian Portugese.  I suspect many of the books that make up the data for this project  have rather dismal circulation histories.  If libraries like Stanford had only collected and preserved books with immediate and measurable use, the ever growing corpus of digitized texts would be even more skewed and biased than it already is.

In addition, I’m certain that the librarians who selected the titles that are now part of this scholar’s data never anticipated this sort of use for their selections. We need to be very cognizant of the fact that the objects we collect today (physical or digital) will almost certainly be used in ways we cannot yet anticipate. Or, as Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation says “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else” Or, as Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University likes to say: “scholars have uses for archives that archivists cannot anticipate.”

OK – so any assessment of the ROI on the collections of a large academic library has to account for long-term impacts. Perhaps that is not particularly controversial to this audience, but I do hope you are all preaching this story to your university administrators.

What about library services? Surely we can apply ROI to assess the effectiveness of our reference and instruction efforts. Of course we can, but again I caution against relying on simple use statistics and short-term returns.

That said, I have already bragged about the fact that we continue to answer over 150 thousand reference questions a year, and that number is actually up from last year. But before you let me celebrate that figure – and believe me I want to and I have – let’s stop and think about what it really means?

How do the number of reference questions asked and answered help us understand our impact? Is the number of reference questions a good proxy for the effectiveness of our reference program at contributing to teaching, learning and research at Stanford? Probably a better measure than some, but still not a very direct measure. After all – one could argue that lots of reference questions just means our online tools are too confusing (they are), that our website is not particularly user-centered (it is now) or that it is hard to negotiate our stacks (it is).

Instruction is an area where I think we are doing a pretty good job at assessing our effectiveness. Here at Stanford, we have partnered closely with the Freshman writing program for many, many years – providing a designated librarian and a library tour & workshop for every first year  writing class.

When I first took responsibility for the instruction program, our only assessment of this rather significant investment of librarian time was a survey we asked the students to complete at the end of their workshop. Those surveys were nice – we usually got high marks, and most of the  librarians could use the results to learn how to improve their presentation styles (lots of us talk too fast, apparently); but those surveys told us nothing about how the workshops, and the availability of an assigned librarian, contributed to the goals of the first year writing program, or to our goals of developing students’ enthusiasm for and skill in finding and using scholarly resources.

So, we added a survey at the end of each quarter, after students have submitted their research papers. And the results are quite encouraging:

• 99% of students use the library catalog; and although we don’t have any comparative data – we don’t withhold the workshop from a random sample of students in order to have a control group – I feel pretty confident that 99% is a much higher percentage than we would get w/o our workshops
• 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

To my mind, this is good data to show that our investment in instruction is paying off in terms of use of library resources and an appreciation of the value of library resources – including the librarians themselves.

The next logical step for us would be to conduct even longer term assessments – it would be great to know if the work we are doing with the freshman pays off throughout four years and beyond.

So, by now you can see that I’m not categorically opposed to library assessment or to the practice of calculating the returns on our investment. I am merely cautious about it, especially when an ROI approach leads us to focus on short-term outcomes that might be very far removed from the long-term goals we have of supporting research and learning in the service of developing educated citizens who will solve world problems. I think we need to really think carefully about the statistics that we collect and the metrics that we use, lest we start to mistake circulation or reference traffic as the goals.

This is the philosophy, in part, that drives our investments in areas like digital preservation, Digital Forensics and web archiving.

This is long-term stuff … where we are preserving and collecting “just in case”.  Digital forensics and web archiving are exercises in both digital collecting and digital preservation – both of which are long-term investments.  An example is our web archiving of Middle Eastern political sites and Iranian blogs – we happen to have researchers at Stanford using these now; but even if we didn’t, we still think there is long-term value in archiving these bits of world history.

As we continue to collect archival materials – based on our judgment about what and whose archives will have long-term value to scholars and to society – we are increasingly collecting items that are born-digital.  Email archives and drafts of articles and papers often come to the archives on hard drives or computer discs only.  And here is the key difference in investment in digital archiving and paper archiving – with fairly minimal intervention, we can take a box of letters or paper manuscripts and put them in appropriate storage conditions and trust that when we get around to processing them, they will still be usable.  This is sometimes referred to as preservation by benign neglect.

Digital preservation is hard

Not so with digital archives – those floppy discs we got from a Nobel laureate in physics that contain his email archives and some other “stuff” he assures us might be interesting, have to be dealt with quickly, before the data deteriorates to an unusable state. A coffee stain on a paper manuscript is unfortunate, but with the right treatment, the manuscript is still “available”, and still readable. In the case of bit rot on a digital manuscript –we are often looking at complete file loss.  So the investment in extracting, preserving, and reformatting born digital materials is often considerable.

And for much of what we collect and preserve, that investment represents a leap of faith. We are making our best guesses (as librarians and archivists always have) at what is valuable to scholars today and what will be valuable to future generations. And in the case of digital preservation, we are making our best guesses at what formats will work in the future, with the full realization that continual integrity checking and reformatting are part of the new responsibilities of digital archivists.

In addition to a willingness to patiently focus on long-term returns when assessing value of academic libraries investments, I would argue that we also need to recognize the qualitative rather than merely the quantitative nature of our contributions.

Circulation is one of the quantitative measures that I fear is way over-emphasized in many libraries and by many university administrators.

Lord of the Rings trilogy

When we look at Stanford Libraries’ circulation numbers, the Lord of the Rings DVDs would seem to yield the highest return on our collection investments – since it is our most heavily circulated item in the last 5 years.  Now, as perhaps the only American librarian who has actually never seen nor read Lord of the Rings; I feel that I must pause here and note that I am not saying we shouldn’t have the  Lord of the Rings DVD, or that we shouldn’t be quite happy that it circulates.  I’m sure it is a fine movie,with considerable academic value. But I do have an issue with using circulation as a key measure of value, if for no other reason than it would lead us to over-value  Lord of the Rings and undervalue collections like our historical newspapers. After all,  Lord of the Rings is our most heavily circulated item, and the microfilm reels that contain the text and images from 100s of years of historic US newspapers are much less frequently used.

Railroaded by Richard White

But if we care about actual impact on research, we might want to look at historian Richard White’s recent book Railroaded, which provides a new and controversial vision of the so-called Gilded Age in the US, and the impact of the Transcontinental railroads on the making of modern America.  White relied heavily on archival materials rarely used by others, and on dusty reels on microfilm that he may well have been the first to pull out of the file cabinets.   The centrality of the archives to White’s research is acknowledged, quite literally, in the acknowledgements section:

“the legendary Margaret Kimball helped me go through the holdings and find what I needed. Jim Kent, who runs the media and microfilm room at Green Library, and his staff helped me in ways probably best kept between us…”

I like this example for at least 2 other reasons:

1. It highlights again the long-term nature of library work – as we all know, books take a long time to write. The time between research and eventual publication is usually many years. In this case, the librarians Richard White acknowledges had both long since retired before the publication of Railroaded.
2. I think acknowledgments of libraries, archives, librarians, and archivists in published materials constitute a direct and real measure of our impact on scholarship. I don’t know of any academic library that measures and tracks acknowledgements systematically; and I’m not even sure how it might be done. But I think it is an idea with considerable potential. Of course, it works best for book based disciplines, as journal authors rarely acknowledge the library work involved in providing them access to all those prior works they read and cited.

Books still matter

I also want to emphasize the value of simply having a large collection of books—even if some, maybe many of them, don’t circulate.  Students and scholars benefit from being surrounded by lots of books.  Writer, editor, book reviewer Kristy Logan wrote recently about the impact of the 800 unread books on her shelves:

Sometimes I hold these books in my hands and imagine what I will learn from them. These books have affected my writing, and I haven’t even read them. Maybe we can learn as much from our expectations of a story as we can from the actual words on the page.

In the chapter titled “Library Life” in the book “Stop what you’re doing and Read this”, Zadie Smith writes of the the influential role studying in her local library had on her development as a scholar:

It was a community of individuals, working to individual goals, in a public space. It’s short-sighted to think all our goals were bookish ones. I happened to be in the library in the hope it would lead to me to other libraries, but my fellow students were seeking all kinds of futures: in dentistry, in social work, in education, in catering, in engineering, in management. We all learned a lot of things in Willesden Green Library, and we learned how to learn things, which is more important…
But I know I never would have seen a single university library if I had not grown up living a hundred yards from that library in Willesden Green.

Let me stop here and say that if you have not yet read “Stop what your’re doing and read this”, well … you should stop what you’re doing and read it.

And if these qualitative testaments don’t convince you, there is data!

The results of a 2010 cross-national study of family scholarly culture and children’s educational attainment showed that:
“Children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class.”

My point is this – there is value to libraries and to collections that are no less real and no less impactful for the fact that they can’t really be measured. That is a hard truth for a quantitatively trained sociologist to admit, but I have come to believe it. So, yes, we should practice continual assessment and we should gather as much evidence as we can that shows the impact of our collections and services on the goals of our institutions – but we should do so with an eye towards the long-term and the big picture; lest we fall prey to measuring (and therefore doing and funding) only what is quick and easy.

So now let me turn to my real, real concern with ROI –which is that quantitative assessments will always miss one of the most important functions of an academic library – which is to facilitate the rare event. Yes, I know, how novel—a librarian talking about serendipity. But remember, I’m not a real librarian, and my belief in serendipity has developed slowly and skeptically – but I am a convert. I have come to believe that it is absolutely the responsibility of libraries to encourage, support and in all ways make possible the unanticipated discoveries that lead to new knowledge, new ways of thinking and new contributions to the cultural and scholarly record. In fact, I think providing the context in which new, unanticipated, unique discoveries, thoughts, connections, and inspirations are sparked may be the most important value-added contribution that libraries make.

Allow me to share a couple of fairly recent examples of the kind of serendipity made possible by the careful work of libraries.

In 1989, in honor of Condoleeza Rice, Walter Hewlett gifted to Stanford an autographed fragment of a musical score from German composer Robert Schumman. Some 20 years later, Frederick Moyer, a concert pianist, and his uncle, Paul Green, an engineer; tracked the score down in the Stanford Libraries, requested and received via InterLibrary Borrowing a digital scan of the score, and created the first ever playable version of Robert Schumman’s hitherto unfinished 4th sonata.

In 2010, two Harvard professors “discovered”, by scouring newspaper microfilm in the basement of the Widener Library at Harvard, two new short stories by famed Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston. These two stories were never listed in any of the published collected works of Hurston and had not yet been studied or analyzed by other scholars.

US release date for Super Mario Bros. remains a mystery

And here’s an example of the failure of the archives (archives writ large, not any particular archive). One of the great unknowns in video game history is the U.S. release date for Super Mario Brothers. We take video game history rather seriously here at Stanford, in fact we hold one of the largest historical collections of video games in the world. The lack of careful documentation and archiving of that documentation actually represents a fairly substantial gap in the history of video gaming, as Super Mario Brothers is one of the most successful, iconic and influential video games in the history of the industry. But it is hard to confidently trace its influence on the development of the industry when historians can’t yet agree even on the year of its US release.

I’m sure many of you could provide other powerful examples of the same sorts of serendipitous discoveries of and rare uses of materials hiding in libraries. Or of missing archives that hinder scholarly progress.

And yet — in the back of my head (and perhaps in the mutterings of this very audience), I hear a little voice reminding me that “the plural of anecdote is not data”.
But let’s all remember that the fact that these accounts are merely anecdotal does not render them any less true. These stories, and countless others, represent real contributions to scholarship and to our understanding and appreciation of the world.

Serendipity by definition is a rare, unexpected, and unanticipated occurrence. But it is still real. One of the most well-known quotes about serendipity comes from the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who claimed that “in the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind”. Surely that is true — but allow me to offer the librarian addendum that “chance also favors those with access to great libraries.”

Perhaps I have presented an overly romantic, even mystical portrait of academic libraries – and at a time when libraries and higher education are under the gun to get practical. But I guess what I am suggesting is that if we don’t defend the hard to define and even harder to measure qualitative importance of libraries, who will?

And, I suspect that many of you probably agree with me, at least in principle, that universities ought to have great libraries, with expert staff and large collections and a range of services in support of teaching and research. But of course, we all face constraints in the forms of budgets, space, and competing priorities.

So, yes, by all means find good ways to measure our contributions to the aims of higher education. But also, please, take opportunities to evangelize on behalf of the non-measurable impact of libraries – make sure your administration knows that there is value in books that aren’t read, in data that hasn’t been used yet, in archives yet to be discovered, and in the mere fact of great libraries.

My final slide. Pretty hokey, huh?

Stanford announces prize for innovation in research libraries

Today Stanford University Libraries announces the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries – SPIRL, an award that is intended to recognize and celebrate individual research libraries for sustained and significant innovation in any operational area. Nominations with documentation may be made by institutions or individuals and are due by 15 January 2013.
I often brag about all the awesome innovative things my colleagues here at Stanford Libraries make happen, but I/we are well aware that research libraries and librarians across the world are doing amazing things. I’m thrilled that we will be identifying and celebrating the innovative programs happening in other research libraries. The prize is open to any and all areas of research library operations, including (but not limited to):

discovery & navigation; reader & research services; publishing; metadata development, adaptation, sharing, and harvesting; acquisition and processing of library materials in any/all formats, digital and physical; collection development and management including various forms of efficient storage & retrieval; preservation and archiving, digital and physical; marketing and public relations; staff training & development; fund-raising and asset acquisition; organizational development; assessment and re-engineering of practices; standards development; digitization and provision for user adaptation of digital information objects; course and learning management systems/services; knowledge management; outreach, bibliographic instruction, information heuristic instruction; and reader/user assessments and surveys.

Rare book digitization at Stanford Libraries, photo courtesy of Stanford Digital Production Group

You get the idea … we really are looking for nominations from all corners of the research library world. Basically any significant innovations that “have measurable impact on the library’s own clientele as well as the potential for influencing the practices and/or standards of research librarianship generally.” Note that while appropriate use of technology is assumed, the prize is not inherently about technology. For example, if Stanford Libraries’ programs were eligible (we are not, for obvious reasons), our Concierge Project would be just as competitive a nomination as our rare books digitization program.

Nomination are due on January 15 — please help us spread the word. I can’t wait to see what sorts of innovative stuff comes our way.

How to throw an awesome work retreat

We took our leadership team to Asilomar State Beach and Conference Center for a 2 night retreat recently. Our overarching goal was to develop a shared understand of how we define ourselves as an organization; especially in the context of the changing landscape of higher education. The retreat was quite simply awesome. We have already gotten tons of feedback (solicited and unsolicited) indicating that the retreat was inspiring, fun, and “the best retreat ever!”. My own impression is that it was all of that … and productive to boot!

So how did we pull it off? What are the key ingredients? I suspect that the 2 most important ingredients are a good location and awesome staff. I’m convinced that a location that incorporates natural beauty in a casual setting is most effective. I just think we are more creative, more open-minded, and more collegial when we’re wearing jeans and walking on the beach together (or watching the Giants win 2 games on their way to a World Series championship in the small coffee shop that is home to the only TV). And I simply can’t say enough good things about our staff — we have really smart people who care deeply about the future of libraries and of higher education. To a person, they were fully engaged in this retreat — taking the exercises seriously, and making a point of connecting with colleagues they don’t usually interact with.

Looking at our agenda and how we organized things, a few things stand out:

1. For the formal parts of the retreat, we had people sitting at tables of 7-8. We were very careful in setting up the table groups to make sure that the groups represented a good mix of units, but also that no one was at a table with their boss.
2. We limited the amount of time spent passively listening to presentations and maximized active participation and discussion.
3. The group activities that we used were fun, were open-ended, and were meaningful and realistic (at least for us).
4. Even the first night ice-breaker question (“What is your best Halloween memory?”) worked well, as we all learned about a colleague’s clown pajama costume and another colleague’s “underwear on the outside” party.

My favorite group activities were:

1. “The library just received a $5 million increase in our budget. What would you do with the new funding? Put together a proposal.”
2. “Come up with a marketing and outreach campaign for the library, complete with slogans,logos, etc.”

Both these exercises capitalized on the amazing creativity of our staff, and helped us clarify our vision as an organization.

Brainstorming at Table X

Our challenge now is to keep the excitement, the relationships, and the ideas that were generated at the retreat alive and to spread them to the rest of the organization.

Google Books settles with AAP. Yawn.

Google and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) reached a settlement ending the lawsuit filed by the AAP in 2005 alleging that the Google Books project violated copyright by scanning books without permission. The gist of the agreement, from the New York Times Technology section:

The deal allows publishers to choose whether to allow Google to digitize their out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection. If Google does so, it will also provide them with a digital copy for their own use, perhaps to sell on their Web sites.

For books that it has digitized, Google allows people to read 20 percent of them online and purchase the entire books from the Google Play store, and it shares revenue with the publishers. The two parties did not disclose additional financial terms of the agreement, but the publishers had not asked for monetary damages.

Google has been offering publishers the opportunity to sell digital books for years, and digitizing new books has become routine for publishers. But under the settlement, publishers get the benefit of Google digitizing out-of-print books that they might not otherwise have turned into e-books. Meanwhile, Google can expand the library of e-books it sells to consumers.

According to Jiffy, there’s nothing to get excited about in latest settlement in Google Books case.

It is not at all clear how this settlement (which is not a class action settlement, therefore the terms are private) affects the kinds of issues most of us in library-land care most about. This settlement doesn’t address Google’s claim that creating digital copies of copyrighted works represents Fair Use. There is also no mention of institutional licenses for access to Google Books like the one described in the original proposed settlement with both the Authors Guild and the AAP. Of course, that settlement was rejected by the courts, and this recent settlement does not affect the Authors’ Guild’s ongoing class action suitagainst Google. This settlement is all about selling digital versions of books.

In an ARS Technica article, copyright expert James Grimmelmann suggests that although the settlement may exacerbate tensions between authors and publishers, the bottom line for him is “I can’t imagine there’s anything interesting in there.”

The always smart, and often acerbic, Peter Brantley sums up his thoughts on the settlement:

At the end of the day, the publisher litigation with Google feels like the remnant of a bad dream fading in the early morning hours. We are where we must be, except that a small number of authors and their lawyers are still clearly motivated to obtain their own payout for the purported harm done them by the hasty presumptions of networked culture. Hopefully, the absence of a falling sky will spur the minds of judges, lawyers, and juries that our conceptions of rights have evolved over the last 100 years.

I honestly don’t know where this settlement leaves us in terms of achieving the original high hopes many of us had when the Google Books project started back in 2005. The Fair Use question remains to be addressed, the availability of Orphan Works remains iffy, and the vision of a universal digital library available to all remains unrealized. All that said, the very fact that Google has scanned more than 20 million books has increased discoverability on a scale that was nearly unimaginable just a decade ago, and has provided scholars with text-mining possibilities that will surely continue to increase our understandings of human language, culture and literature.
And let’s not forget that without Google Books, there would not be a HathiTrust.

So, the while the recent settlement reached by Google with the AAP seems to have little direct impact on libraries’ interests and Google Books has not yet turned out to be all that we might have hoped for, I still think the benefits to scholars and to the public at large outweigh the disappointments.

Edited to add links to what others have to say about the impact of the settlement on university libraries:

• Peter Hirtle, Cornell University Library: AAP and Google Books Settle
• Kevin Smith, Duke University Library: Questions about the AAP Google settlement
• ACRL Insider: AAP and Google settle … questions remain

Awesome Library Website, Part 4: Reviews are in!

If you are tired of hearing me brag about our Awesome Library Website, here is a sampling of what others are saying:

Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC does a fantastic job of describing 2 main goals of our site:

1. Highlighting Library space as a service
2. Providing “full library discovery

Thanks for the excellent and insightful review, Lorcan!

We have also been getting plenty of feedback via our Feedback link/email:

• Kudos to the team. This is an enormous project and your dedication and diligence has produced a vastly superior site that all of us can be proud of and on which our patrons can find what they need.
• New site looks great!
• Subject: The new website… Tell us: …is great!
• I think my first favorite feature of the new site is the single search box, and its common-sense display of results from a variety of sources.  Because I’m vain, I just searched some words from the title of my one-and-only academic publication, and loved seeing SearchWorks results alongside site-search results (from my Person page).  I can imagine an actual patron doing this with an actual search, and stumbling upon an actual subject specialist with common research interests.  Very cool!
• I like it, although I haven’t put it to too much use yet. I look forward to becoming more familiar with its features.
• i love your site
• I actually love a lot about your site – kudos!

From Twitter:

• @calfano27: Congrats to all who put together the awesome new Stanford libraries website :) Super shiny
• @pantheon_drupal: That’s one fine lookin’ library site! Congratz to @chapter_three and SULAIR on an amazing launch – http://t.co/z0cwHMze
• @miriamkp: Nice. Nothing extraneous. RT @StanfordLibs: Our new website is live today — check it out and send your feedback: http://t.co/3pGP2Uv8
• @erikoomen: checking the new Stanford Universitiy Library website http://t.co/7EtqSk92 #nicework #goodpractice
• @ccthompson: I love the Stanford University website. happily taking notes on the user interface! ‪http://library.stanford.edu
• Plus loads of tweets and Re-Tweets linking to the new homepage and/or to specific pages within the new site, including tweets in Japanese, French, and Spanish.

From Facebook:

Here’s one of my favorite new links from the new website: Places to study - http://library.stanford.edu/using/study Brilliant idea to include this!

Awesome Library Website, Pt. 3: Lift-off!

Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Today we officially launched our new library website. The approximately 10,000 visitors to our old site are now being automatically redirected to our new site.
I fully expect that most of them will be thrilled with the updated look, clear navigation, improved searching, and richer content. I also expect that we will get a few emails from regular users who can’t find something in it’s new spot, but we should be able to handle those fairly quickly.

I have already bragged about how awesome our new site is in general, and specifically about our cool central ribbon feature.

There is so much more to brag about, I hardly know where to start — but let’s go with 2 pieces of functionality and content that grew directly out of our user feedback: hours and places to study. All of our interviews with patrons, our usability tests, and our guerilla testing indicated that patrons consistently ranked finding out when libraries are open, and where they could study (with a group, in a quiet area, with computers, near coffee, etc.) as top reasons they go to a library website.

Visitors to our new site can see today’s hours for all libraries on the homepage, this week’s hours for all libraries on the hours page, and can click on Show full calendar on any specific library page (for example, see our Biology Library page) to see hours for that library for the month.

Our Places to Study list includes awesome photos of study spaces across the libraries, and allows students to filter the list by commonly requested attributes (e.g. absolute quiet, coffee nearby, open late).

I can’t wait to start getting feedback and use statistics on the whole site, but especially these 2 features. I guess the only drawback might be that some of our previously “secret” study rooms could start to get pretty crowded.