lots of folks like to discover

Modified Text of talk I gave at Ivy Plus Discovery Day at MIT. 

(Note that I tidied up this text while watching the DNC last night, so blame Pat Spearman, the Collins brothers, and Michelle Obama for any errors.)

I love that this gathering is Discovery Day, not search day, and not find day. Because, to paraphrase that sort of famous Roy Tennant quote from way back in 2001 “Only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find … and lots of folks like to discover”.

And that’s where the title for this talk comes from, so thanks Roy!

Lots of folks like especially to discover things they didn’t know they were searching for and didn’t know they wanted to find.

I know it isn’t cool for librarians to talk about serendipity anymore; but I think it might be time for librarians to make serendipity cool again. More importantly, I think it is time for librarians to take serendipity seriously.

I want us to take serendipity seriously for at least 3 reasons:

1. Because some scholars really think it is important to their work
2. Because facilitating real serendipity through and in our discovery environments, is one way we could actually contributing to more equitable and open access to information and to learning and research
3. Because serendipity is fun

Some other time, I’ll unpack and explain what I mean about # 2 there – the equitable open access part of discovery.  For this talk, I want to concentrate on the  that discovery and serendipity are important and fun.

I’m going to assume you know what fun is, and what important means,  and what discovery is; but let’s define serendipity, or better yet, let’s just let the OED do so (I would link, but paywall):

From Oxford English Dictionary: Serendipity = The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.

And of course, you can’t talk about serendipity without talking about browsing. Over and over, we hear faculty –usually but not always, humanities faculty — talk about the importance of browsing precisely because of the sense that browsing facilitates serendipity. Often these defenses of browsing and serendipity seem to be part and parcel of a concern over the loss of space for physical collections and the lamentable fact that on every college and university campus I know of, a higher percentage of physical library collections are in off-campus, non-browsable storage every year.

But I find that when we really listen to faculty talk about the value of serendipity and browsing to their work, it really is not just nostalgic luddite longing for a mythically comprehensive physical library of yore.

What I’m increasingly hearing, especially here at MIT and in the context of the conversations we have had as part of our Task Force on the Future of Libraries, is an excitement about and a yearning for a new kind of online discovery environment that does more than replicate physical browsing but actually capitalizes on the promises and affordances of technology to facilitate even greater serendipity and to make browsing even more productive and even more fun.

[Interesting side-note: the faculty I’m hearing from at MIT don’t actually use the terms browsing or serendipity. They talk instead very explicitly about wanting tools that will point them to things they don’t know that they don’t know.]

What we are hearing are scholars who want us to build tools, or facilitate the building or deployment of tools, that will allow them to see connections to their work and their teaching and their interests that they cannot see now. They want to discover articles and books and data and images and maps and primary sources and teaching objects and people on the fringes of their own areas of focus, but that are otherwise kind of in their blindspots. They want to make happy & unexpected discoveries; and they want it not to be by accident, but to be because the library has provided the tools, the data, and the metadata to make it so. [One of the many things I love about MIT is how many faculty and students really do seem to get the important role the libraries play in creating and maintaining metadata and infrastructures to provide discovery and access to content.]

And it is important to note, that these are faculty and researchers at MIT we are hearing from; and they are mostly NOT humanists – they are primarily engineers and scientists.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of developing and/or deploying and supporting discovery environments and tools that create and inspire entirely new kinds of serendipity and browsing sounds pretty exciting and fun.

And, it sometimes feels like it is way past time to do it.
When I talked about this to a group of women alumni from MIT, one woman in the audience was quick to tell me about work done 20 years ago at MIT on this very topic. (Yes, that was a bit of serendipity for me, brought about not by technology but by in person interaction.)

In 1994, the famed designer and scholar of design Muriel Cooper, who founded the MIT Media Lab’s Visual Language Workshop, gave a presentation at something called TED5 – which may have been the precursor to what we now know as TED talks, I haven’t verified that yet – but anyway at this talk in 1994, Muriel Cooper wowed the audience with her concept of “information landscapes”.

And here I’ll quote from a 2007 text titled “This stands as a sketch for the future: MURIEL COOPER and the VISIBLE LANGUAGE WORKSHOP”.

In that text, David Reinfurt describes Cooper’s information landscapes as

immersive three-dimensional environments populated not by buildings but by information… In an information landscape, the user appears to fly effortlessly through the infinite zoom of a textual space, reading along the way, creating connections and making meaning.

Unfortunately, there is no video of the 1994 talk, but after Cooper’s death some of her students made a video about the Information Landscapes concept, and I want to show you a bit of it.

(I only showed a few minutes of the video at the talk – I started it at about the 5:00 mark. You should watch the whole thing, and definitely stick around to the very end for a delightful bit of Muriel herself).

I love the contrast between the dated feel and sound of the voiceover and the truly prescient ideas about a 3-D information space full of advanced, user-controlled data visualizations and multiple ways to link and organize concepts. Muriel Cooper sadly passed away less than a year after presenting these ideas at TED5 in Monterey; and while her students and others have continued to do amazing work on immersive technology and data visualizations, Muriel’s vision of an information landscape hasn’t really penetrated the way we search for, find, and discover information and knowledge.
I have to say it is a little sad to me that 2 decades later, our best library search environments look like this:

The rest of the search world, even best in class like Google and Amazon, aren’t really that different:

 

 

The library search community went through its phase of trying to be more like Google and Amazon – for good reasons, our patrons wondered impatiently why we weren’t more like them– and now I’d say we are mostly pretty close.  At least in all the basic structural and conceptual ways:

• one search box to rule them all
• results displayed in a linear list that is ranked on some meaningful dimension
• the goal is to find items, 1 at a time; not concepts, not relationships

Why is that? Why are we still searching in 2-D, linear interfaces for items rather than for concepts?

I think a big part of the reason is because it works well enough. And in fact, it works really well for finding stuff we know we want.

And here is where it is really important to point out that what the Task Force on the Future of Libraries heard from library staff about discovery was very different from what faculty and students told us. The MIT Libraries staff made it abundantly clear that the most common struggle our patrons have is with finding a known item – that is the most common kind of question we get and I’m pretty sure it is what our data tell us is the most common kind of search in our catalog.

So how do we reconcile this seeming contradiction?

People want to find what they want and they expect library search tools to be just as good as Google at helping them do that.

But/and, when asked to describe an ideal discovery environment of the future, scholars – at least the MIT folks we have heard from (and folks I talked to while I was at Stanford) – imagine something much more exploratory, more relational, more immersive, more inspiring, and more playful than what any of us have right now. It is as if they trust that the tools that allow them to find what they know they want are good enough and will always be good enough; so when they think of a future they want something they can’t do now (to be fair, that is what we asked them to think about).

To be clear, I don’t think they want this hypothetical immersive and playful and serendipitious environment to completely replace the utilitarian search tools they have at their disposal right now. They are happy to keep using the combination of tools they use now when they need to find what they need to find.

But that means that we in libraries have I think felt kind of compelled to keep trying to give them what they want right now, while not really having the resources to try to develop the kind of information landscapes Muriel Cooper imagined more than 20 years ago.

It is a difficult dilemma, with no easy answers. And it is even more complicated by the fact that the corpus of stuff we in academic libraries are trying to help people discover and access is part of a scholarly communication landscape that is far more complicated than it needs to be and that is, in large, shaped the way it is because so much of it is controlled and disseminated by commercial players whose interest aren’t always aligned with the mission-driven interests of academia (I digress — that’s actually a whole other talk I should give sometime).

And to highlight something we all know — we in academia and in libraries don’t have unlimited resources. So I think we need to be smart about partnering with those commercial players whose visions do align with ours and whose resources and partnerships can help us move closer to a new kind of discovery without having to abandon what works well enough right now.

Back in the early 2000s, I was involved in a project at Stanford Libraries, where we partnered with a start-up called Groxis on developing a visual search tool called Grokker.

It was a really fun project and a promising tool that generated a fair amount of buzz in the library world and in the search world. Grokker basically organized your search results into circles or bubbles by concept; so if you searched for “jaguar”, for example, you would get a bubble with items about the luxury car; another bubble with items related to the animal; and another with stuff related to the English heavy metal band Jaguar – which is a great example of how tools like this can help you discover things you didn’t know you didn’t know. I had never heard of the heavy metal band Jaguar until I got involved with the Grokker project.

Unfortunately, this is the best image for Grokker I can find – from a 2004 Stanford Libraries newsletter. And I can’t demo it; because the company and the product pretty much disappeared after a hostile take over of the board by members who apparently wanted the company to abandon the education market in favor of a seemingly more lucrative corporate focus. That didn’t work out so well for them, and searching for any evidence of Grokker or Groxis now leads to a few articles and blog posts (mostly by librarians) and lots of dead links.

But – working on Grokker and testing it with faculty and students at Stanford gave us/me a sense of the possibilities of new ways to search. There were, of course, the usual concerns with new things like this – if the content included isn’t “comprehensive” in a way that matches the user’s expectations, then they tend to think it doesn’t work.

BUT – lo these many years later, I still remember that nearly every person I talked to who tried Grokker described it as fun and spent considerable time playing with it.

Fast forward over a decade later, and we at MIT Libraries are poised to give our community the chance to play with something that looks a bit like Grokker but is actually even more intriguing – and that’s Yewno.

Yewno’s ‘search’ is powered by machine learning, computational linguistics, and semantic analysis; and its interface combines data visualization and concepts from neural networks to create a discovery experience that is closer than most to the way the human mind actually works. It doesn’t quite achieve the fully immersion landscape feel of Muriel Cooper’s vision, but it goes beyond what Grokker did to provide a more interactive visual journey through information about a concept. At the risk of sounding like a Yewno commercial, I’ll quote from their promotional material:

Unlike traditional search, which strives to provide the singular correct answer as quickly as possible, Yewno enables the connection of multiple concepts and information.

This is a tool that aims not to be better at search, or to help people find what they are looking for more efficiently. This is an environment that aims to help people discover and to learn about what they don’t know they want to learn.

I think we will learn a lot about discovery and about new ways of navigating information from Yewno. My secret hope is that some really brilliant MIT student or faculty member will play with Yewno, be captivated by the idea, decide that the interface is lame, and build something based on the same idea but better.

My dream discovery environment is one that provides the experience of browsing and interacting with books and articles in print and online simultaneously – I don’t know what it looks like exactly, but I imagine a virtual or augmented reality environment that simulates the best tactile (and emotional) experiences of browsing in a physical library with the vast resources and accessibility of digital resources and the efficiency of online browsing. Imagine if you really could browse the collections of all the great libraries at once  – their physical books, their electronic resources, even the books that are currently checked out – from wherever you are; and your mind and body would feel like you were “in a library”.

And my dream discovery environment is playful and fun. Discovering something you didn’t know you wanted is fun. Finding what we are looking for is certainly satisfying (and not finding it is frustrating), but realizing some new connection you hadn’t thought to eplore, stumbling on some piece of information that adds a new dimension to your research or takes you down an unplanned but totally productive path – those kinds of discoveries are fun. There is joy in that kind of learning while researching.

I guess the big take away for me is that what I have heard from our community compels me to try to shift my focus from satisfying immediate user needs by continually improving the tools at hand to making progress and supporting progress towards a discovery environment we can’t yet imagine (because most of us are not Muriel Cooper) but which provides fun, intuitive, maybe immersive opportunities for discovery.

Some closing provocations:

Let’s consider what we might do, even in and with our current tools, if we took seriously the faculty who say they want to make happy and unexpected discoveries in the library – even, especially, in a library that is primarily digital.

What if we decided that the set of current tools for searching and finding are just fine, and we freed ourselves up to work on discovery?

Are there ways we can do that by promoting and supporting and partnering with organizations and people who are trying to create entirely new information systems and landscapes?

Are there ways we can do it by promoting fun and serendipity in our own existing tools and environments?

What can we do to learn more about what works and to spur our own and our communities’ collective imaginations about what discovery could be?

A queer, feminist agenda for libraries: Significance, relevance and power

Bess Sadler and I are slated to present a paper on Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference here at Stanford next month. It has been really interesting to think about how to present these ideas to a primarily non-librarian crowd. Bess is doing most of the real work, but I promised to try my hand at providing some context in an introduction. This is super drafty, so comments very welcome.

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Libraries have never been neutral repositories of knowledge. This will likely strike many, particularly scholars working in feminist and/or queer theory traditions, as a not particularly novel or insightful claim. I expect that most will readily concede that libraries surely reflect the inequalities, biases, ethnocentrism, and power imbalances that exist throughout the academic enterprise. What may not be as obvious is the degree to which libraries contribute to bias and inequality in scholarship; and conversely the amount of power and responsibility libraries and librarians have to promote a more inclusive version of the scholarly record.

Libraries exercise considerable influence over the diversity (or lack thereof) of scholarship primarily through choices we make in fulfilling our primary missions of collecting, preserving, and providing access to information.

Collection development decisions have profound impacts on who and what is represented in the scholarly and cultural record. The decisions we make about whose archives to collect and preserve, and what books and journals to buy, are inevitably biased, based as they are on some combination of the judgements and interests of individual libraries and librarians, and on those same librarians’ sense of the tastes and needs of our patrons. Besides the obvious impact on the kinds of resources available to current scholars, our collection development decisions also impact the marketplace for scholarly publications. Libraries have historically represented a significant market for scholarly books coming out of university and academic presses, so budget-based decisions that reduce the numbers and types of monographs we purchase are likely to influence the kinds of authors and topics that presses are willing to publish.

Libraries collect — and therefore publishers publish — books by authors and about topics that are deemed to be novel and important, and that are expected to be heavily used by others. But those evaluations don’t happen in a vacuum. Like nearly every evaluative decision humans make, decisions about the quality and value of research and writing are riddled with biases and are made through lenses of power. These decisions then become self-perpetuating through a vicious cycle by which publications are judged by the reputation of the publisher and by how many major research libraries hold a copy of the publication. But conscious attention to collecting more diverse literatures, authors, topics and archives will only get us so far towards a more inclusive and feminist agenda for libraries.

As Hope Olsen’s work on critical feminist approaches to knowledge organization demonstrates, libraries also exert tremendous control over how books and other scholarly items are organized and therefore how, when, and by whom they are discoverable. As an example, librarians determine the primary subject classification of a book, which in turn determines the book’s call number and physical placement in the library stacks. Hierarchical classification schemas marginalize certain kinds of knowledge and certain topics by creating separate sub-classifications for topics such as “women and computers” or “black literature”.

Shelved together in Green Library. One of these things is not like the others

The power of library classification systems is such that a scholar browsing the shelves for books on military history is unlikely to encounter Randy Shilts’ seminal work Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the US Military, because that book is sub-classified under the subject “Minorities, women, etc. in armed forces”.  In my own library, that means the definitive work on the history of gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces is literally shelved between Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star and Military Trade, “an edgy, enlightening, and richly entertaining collection of voices with a passion for servicemen”.  Over in the military history section of the stacks, you won’t find any books devoted to the service of gays and lesbians. You will however, find exactly 4 pages on “gays in the military” in A People’s History of the U.S. Military: Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (emphasis mine). The scant 4 pages on gay military service literally starts at 1993, as if gays didn’t serve until Bill Clinton noticed them.

In our presentation, we argue that without an explicit feminist and queer agenda, these same processes of exclusion and marginalization will play out in our digital library and online discovery environments.   A queer feminist rhetoric and agenda for the future of library discovery would leverage technology to promote the feminist and queer values of plurality, participation, advocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure. These qualities are described in Shaowen Bardzell’s “Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design”.
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This is where Bess will take over and actually talk about things like hacker rhetoric, online archives and discovery tools, assumptions of neutrality in relevance algorithms, the importance of having diversity in the coding community, etc.

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.

A feminist defense of browsing

I’ve thought and written about browsing before, but ever since reading Bess Sadler’s Brain Injuries, Science Fiction, and Library Discovery talk, I’ve been thinking about browsing from a feminist perspective. My thoughts are nascent and scattered at this point — in other words, perfect blogging fodder.

In Bess’ fantastic talk she talks about the emotional aspect of physical browsing and wonders how we might recreate the joy of browsing and serendipity in our online discovery environments. I wrote about that once, but far less thoughtfully, and certainly not as eloquently.

When I read Bess’ talk, I immediately wrote to tell her how great it was, and that I thought there was room to move some of the underlying feminist epistemology of it to the foreground. I sent her a copy of Jagger’s 1989 article “Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology” (pay wall, sorry). Next thing I know she’s reading Women’s ways of Knowing, and I’m seeing gender everywhere (like I used to, before the everyday work of managing smudged my theoretical lens).

There is something about the way feminist epistemology debunks the myth of dispassionate rationality and highlights the crucial role of emotion in the pursuit and construction of knowledge that is very relevant to the work we are all doing in building new discovery environments (heck, as we build new libraries writ large). It might be as simple as remembering to build joy (or at least the opportunities for joy and delight) into our environments, but I think it is more than that.

Browsing: Not just for women!
(Courtesy of bighappyfunhouse, Creative Commons License 2.5)

The same week that Bess and I were exchanging emails about this, I ran into a female faculty member in the library. I’m a lousy conversationalist, so I said something stupid like “What brings you in here?” And this brilliant, confident, accomplished humanities faculty member sheepishly replied “I was actually checking out a real book.” She went on to apologize for her love of physical books. I reassured her that I loved print books too, and that there was nothing to be ashamed of. We then had a good chat about how much you can learn, quickly (dare I say – efficiently), from browsing within a print book.

I have no data except my own observations, but it sure seems to me that there is a real gender difference in how scholars talk about physical browsing and the value of print collections — especially among those who defend it. It is my observation that men tend to defend physical browsing in terms of its utility, usually based on some interplay between the arrangements of collections and their own knowledge and ability to make connections. My favorite example of this comes from Andrew Abbott’s article The Traditional Future: A computational theory of library research. Abbott argues that traditional library research is “actually a quite high-tech computational architecture that relies quite heavily on well-trained individuals.” It is as if (some) men must defend their reliance on physical browsing by constructing arguments about how it really is a “technological” approach to research. In other words, using the library is just as “manly” as using technology.

Women, on the other hand, seem much more willing to talk about how they feel about physical browsing and print books — but only after apologizing in some way, as if they know that browsing is sort of old-fashioned. Women tend to talk about the joys of browsing, the pleasure in the feel of physical books, and the delight in finding unexpected treasures in the stacks.

All of this has me troubled by our tendency (yep, I’ve been guilty myself) to dismiss talk about the value of physical browsing as merely wistful or nostalgic. There is something very real and important there, and I think shining a feminist lens on the issues is likely to help us see what it is, so that the libraries we are building for the future are inclusive of all kinds of learners, scholars, and readers; and so that our discovery environments (online and physical) are built to accommodate not just efficiency, but also joy.

(Note: And once I get around to reading it, I feel pretty certain that J. Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure will have some insights relevant to what libraries are trying to do. I’m just hoping people smarter than me will take up the cause of writing and propagating a queer, feminist theory of libraries.)

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?

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

Stanford already thinks like a startup

On Saturday morning, I’ll be part of a panel discussion at ALA discussing Brian Mathews’ white paper “Think like a Startup: A white paper to inspire library entrepreneurialism.” (pdf) It’s a very good paper, full of fresh thinking and great ideas and examples about how to encourage innovation in libraries. I decided to jot my pre-discussion notes down here.

My first thought (and I’ve struggled with how to say this without sounding like an arrogant jerk), was “Great ideas .. but we’ve been thinking like a startup here at Stanford for years now.” My second thought was that I’m proud to work at a university described as “the germplasm for innovation”, and in a library described as having been “a juggernaut of innovation over the last 20 years”. So I’ve decided that I can take the panel as an opportunity to share with others what has worked for us at Stanford and what lessons we have learned along the way; and hopefully I won’t sound like an arrogant jerk while doing so.

I think Stanford’s success in producing innovation is a great example of Mathews’ assertion that real innovation requires a “strategic culture instead of a strategic plan”. Mathews rightly emphasizes the role of library administrators in fostering and inspiring an entrepreneurial spirit. I would add to that the fact that the Stanford Libraries have benefitted from a university administration and a general university culture that encourages and supports strategic innovation.

One major factor that supports innovative thinking and action at Stanford is the fact that we have the resources to innovate while also maintaining excellence in core services and resources. For example, although we deployed SearchWorks, our next generation discovery environment based on the open-source platform Blacklight out of UVa, in Fall of 2009; we have continued to maintain our legacy catalog, Socrates. Because we have the resources to maintain both systems, we can add innovative features (like the ability to load non-MARC metadata for digital objects and an image view for example) more quickly in SearchWorks, while not worrying (yet) about making sure that SearchWorks replicates essential functionality in Socrates.

Another lesson we have learned is that innovation has to be context-specific. For example, Stanford isn’t likely to adopt demand-driven acquisition models anytime soon (if ever); not because we aren’t innovative, but because we’re committed to collecting and preserving the scholarly record as broadly and deeply as possible. And 3d Printing isn’t something we are likely to start doing at the library, because Stanford has an innovative Product Realization Lab that has that covered. On the other hand, we’ve been doing visualization services for a while now, in part because we have faculty across many disciplines doing ground-breaking research with visual components.

I like what my boss says in the American Libraries article about why we innovate:

“The big idea isn’t innovation for its own sake, but rather, the question that we ask ourselves everyday is: ‘What opportunities and assets do we have that can make scholarship and learning better?’”

The focus on leveraging our assets is really key. When we make choices about what ideas to pursue, we look for places where we have unique talents and resources to offer. Rather than shifting away from what we have always done well, we build and expand on our traditional strengths in ways that support new research efforts. The Super Enlightenment Project is a great example of an innovative project that tapped curatorial expertise, traditional collections, technical expertise, and faculty interest.

When you have been thinking (and acting) like a start-up for as long as we have, you also have to find ways to sustain those innovations that continue to support research and teaching. One key aspect to that is making sure that our efforts are integrated, coordinated, and complementary. We are a big complex organization, with innovations happening in all corners, so making sure we build on each others’ successes rather than reinventing wheels is important. Making sure that we innovate openly helps, and our Library Concierge Project is definitely designed to promote collaborative innovation across the organization.

Hope to see y’all at the Think like a startup panel.

An adventure in blended serendipity

I subscribe to over 60 blogs via Google Reader, and I try to scan through the headlines a few times a day. Dan Cohen’s blog is one I almost always stop to read in full. Yesterday, I read his post Reading and Believing, and immediately went searching for the 2 books he mentions: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and Thinking, Fast and Slow.

My first stop was SearchWorks, where I found an available copy of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction in the stacks just two floors up from my office. (Alas, Thinking, Fast and Slow is on reserve at the Law Library, and on order for the Business Library, so I might decide to download the Kindle edition).

I texted myself the call number from SearchWorks, and headed upstairs to get my book and start reading. As I was heading back down to my office, I start to skim the Introduction (only later realizing that reading and walking at the same time — on stairs no less — could have ended badly).

Right there on the first page, Jacobs mentions the Mortimer Adler classic How to Read a Book. I haven’t read Adler since my first year of teaching at USMA in 1994, so I immediately decided I wanted to re-read it.

SearchWorks results on iPhone

I stopped halfway down the stairs, pulled out my iPhone, opened up iStanford, clicked on the Library app, found the record for How to Read a Book, and headed back to the stacks to retrieve it.

I was not planning on checking out any books yesterday, but a combination of RSS feeds, blogs, iPhone apps, and words in a printed book led me to two books to take home, and one to download.

For me, yesterday’s adventure in blended serendipity is a very good reminder not to get sucked into the either/or debates about serendipity and online vs. physical browsing/discovery. It doesn’t have to be just one or the other … in this case a nice combination of tools and methods worked just fine.

A pair of interviews

I was interviewed by Naomi House at INALJ.COM as part of the In Six (interviews) series. My interview, which includes references to sports, Willie Nelson and bel hooks, is up today.

My colleague Tom Cramer (Associate Director, Digital Library Systems and Services) and I were interviewed by the Stanford Daily for a Feature article about SearchWorks, our next generation discovery environment. It is a nice article, and the student journalist who wrote it really did his homework before talking to us.  Unfortunately, a transition paragraph got left out of the online article, so my initial quote seems a bit out of place. Apparently, that section should read:

SearchWorks debuted in the fall of 2010. It took three years and a team of about 16 people to produce a replacement for the previous catalog, Socrates. While developing SearchWorks, the team made a special effort to consider the unique needs of the Stanford community. For example, Chris Bourg, assistant University librarian for public services, drew from her experience working with undergraduates while a graduate student at Stanford.

“I represent the scholar’s point of view, the student’s point of view,” Bourg M.A. ’98 Ph.D. ’03 said.

What could we do in a month?

A regular non-librarian reader (and author of the always interesting and sometimes controversial Butch Wonders blog) suggested some topics in a comment on my 2011 in Review post, and I thought I should try to tackle some of them.
The suggestion that has me pretty well stumped is to write about “what changes you would make to the library if you had one month and an unlimited budget”. I can think of plenty of things I would do with unlimited budget, but none of them could be done in a month.
Off the top of my head, some challenges that we might be able to solve with unlimited resources (time AND money) would be (in no particular order):

1. Develop and deploy the killer app for Federated Searching — something that would allow for search and retrieval across all the various silos of content (Library Catalog, licensed databases, e-book packages, digitized collections, etc., etc.); AND would have an awesome interface that would make sorting through the inevitable massive results lists intuitive and intelligent. (Note: I think there is tremendous potential for Linked Data to eliminate the need for federated searching; but that is a very, very, long term project.)
2. Work through our cataloging and processing backlogs, so that all the awesome resources we have acquired over the years are discoverable and available for use. Like most major libraries, we have plenty of foreign language materials, rare books, special collections, and other non-standard materials that require individual cataloging by an expert. If I had the funding, I’d hire every out-of-work cataloger I could find, and have them catalog the heck out of everything we have. Heck, if I really had unlimited funding, I’d pay for everyone else’s backlogs to get cataloged too.  (Note that the need for support for traditional metadata work is a pretty clear theme in comments about What’s Happening at Harvard.)
3. Digitize everything–especially everything that is in the public domain or that we have rights to. Add good metadata to everything we digitize and make it discoverable and accessible through our catalog and through Google and other public search engines.
4. Do a massive lobbying campaign on behalf of Copyright reform. I wonder how much moola it would take to buy the votes needed for effective Copyright reform? (I’m kidding…about buying votes, not about copyright reform).
5. Buy up all the publishers whose outrageous pricing is decimating library collections budgets, and create a new sustainable system of scholarly publishing.

Clearly, none of the above are one month projects. Perhaps I am suffering from a failure of imagination, but I just can’t come up with anything big and exciting that we could accomplish in just 1 month … except make some ground-breaking acquisitions. And adding more awesome, rare, expensive stuff to our collections just adds to the challenges listed above.

Anyone out there got some great ideas? What do you think a large academic library should/could do in 1 month’s time, with unlimited budget? You know, just in case some donor decides to give us a bundle of cash with that kind of Project Runway like restriction on it …