In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.” – Peter Drucker

I had the pleasure to attend the launch of the iSchool Institute tonight and take in Euan Semple’s stimulating lecture. As I understand it, the Institute is part of a broader effort to change the role of the Faculty of Information and increase its impact on the public. The Institute will continue providing continuing education courses that formed the core operation of its predecessor, the Professional Learning Centre, but it will also deliver periodic public lectures such as the one I attended this evening. It was also mentioned that the Institute may develop a consulting service to provide expert advice on information issues to the broader Toronto community and beyond. These are exciting changes – I wonder if these plans were inspired by the Rotman School of Management (which is across the street from the Faculty of Information) which has had a consulting arm called Impact Consulting Group.

Public lectures by leading experts in information work is one part of the Institute’s work that I am particularly excited about. Tonight’s lecture was given by Euan Semple, formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC, on the topic, “Organised Chaos: Social Networks and Enterprise Change.” This was a wide ranging talk about how to use social media in the enterprise/business/organizational setting. As an Anglophile, I was particularly interested in Semple’s metaphor for the tension that IT policies experience when faced with social media tools; at one extreme is the highly managed traditional approach (aka the Milton Keynes style, the UK’s most infamous planned town) versus the organic and open ended approach (aka the  Cotswolds village style). One case study from the BBC was particularly interesting to me. When faced with staff blogging and other social media experimentation, the response was to create an internal wiki where interested staff collaborated and wrote the policy, BBC Guidelines on Employee Weblogs and Websites. I get the impression that engaging staff in the process ultimately made this a more relevant and successful policy. Engaging staff in the creation of an internal policy document underscores why social media and tools matter. Ultimately, social media is not about technology, it is about changing (hopefully for the better!) how people work.

Near the end of his talk, he referred to two recent articles in the British press that really underscore the fact that social media has arrived in every sense of the word. The BBC has mandated all new staff be literate and skilled in using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter (BBC tells news staff to embrace social media). Likewise, there is a similar directive for the British spy agency MI5: MI5 dumps spies who can’t use Facebook and Twitter.

From Stephen’s Lighthouse, I came across this great image and t-shirt:

And here’s the t-shirt version (it is available for purchase on Cafe Press):

Concordia University announced this week that it is adopting an open access policy for its research. According to the University’s press release, librarians played an essential leadership role in this policy:

Gerald Beasley, Concordia’s University Librarian, was instrumental in the campus-wide dialogue on open access that began more than a year ago. “I am delighted that Senate voted to support the recommendations of all four Faculty Councils and the Council of the School of Graduate Studies. There are only a handful of precedents in North America for the kind of leadership that Concordia faculty have demonstrated by their determination to make publicly-funded research available to all rather than just the minority able to afford the rapidly rising subscription costs of scholarly databases, books and journals.”

Further, the university has launched an institutional repository service called Spectrum. At present, it has approximately six thousand dissertations available. The repository is maintained and operated by the library. In reading the Spectrum Frequently Asked Questions, I also came across this statement explaining how open access improves research impact. This is an excellent point to raise as this is an important concern for many researchers.

Question: How does depositing in Spectrum increase research impact?

Research repositories benefit faculty members by bringing about broader dissemination, increased use and enhanced professional visibility of their scholarly research.

When work reaches a wider audience, it often leads to an increase in citations. According to Peter Suber, open access to research publications increases the audience for a work far beyond the audience of any priced journal, even the most prestigious or popular journal. Studies in many fields show a correlation between open access and citation-count increases from 50% to 250%. See this Open Access Citation bibliography.

Congratulations Concordia!

What an interesting announcement from the Library of Congress! I wonder if the librarians in charge of organizing this archive will make any effort to organize it geographically (e.g. US and non-US) or catalogue it in some other way. In any case, this is a great example of how cultural institutions keep up with social media. I can see value in preserving the archive in its raw form, but some kind of finding aid or navigation tool would be extremely helpful especially for those that want to conduct research using the resource.

Curious to know more? You can read more about the announcement on the Library of Congress blog and also read why the US National Archives opted not to acquire the archive (short answer: they specialize in federal government records).

Adapting the library profession, practice and buildings to become more eco-friendly is a long term challenge. Until I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on the topic last week, it was difficult to see what exactly what should do. Initially, I thought of the infrastructure: upgrading library buildings and spaces to obtain the LEED certification, the world’s best known standard for environmental architecture. But that’s only the beginning, there’s so much more librarians can do to address the world’s environmental challenges.

Fred Stoss’s presentation last week at CASLIS Toronto was a wonderful combination of inspiration and knowledge. Among other things, I learned about the history of the green library movement which can be traced back more than ten years ago when the ALA launched the “Libraries Build Sustainable Communities” project. Stoss also pointed out that libraries and librarians have played an important role as educators and supporters of activists; take the example of the Acid Rain Information Clearinghouse that Stoss helped to launch in the 1980s. He also covered some of North America’s best known cases of green library buildings: the Bronx Library in New York City (LEED Silver),  the Semiahmoo Library and RCMP District Office in Surrey, BC (LEED Silver, Canada’s first LEED library) and the Lake View Terrace Library in California (LEED Platinum).

Stoss also raised several exciting possibilities for collaborations to encourage environmental educations. Librarians can support teachers educating students about the natural world by providing books, research databases and suggesting resources such as the National Digital Science Library and answering student questions. There is also the relatively untapped frontier of working with informal educators working at museums, parks, wildlife reserves and other settings where an outdoor educator may not have established and reliable access to a library and a librarian’s advice. In addition to educators, librarians can support the green economy in their communities by helping civic leaders prepare well researched grant requests and other planning documents.

Further reading and resources:

Antonelli, Monika, The Green Library Movement: An Overview and Beyond, Electronic Green Journal, 2008

The Library Journal Design Institute (a one day workshop on design issues; the 2008 workshop focused on environmental issues)

Green Libraries. A directory of green libraries, mainly a US focus

This evening, I attended a great presentation on OPSpedia organized by Toronto Wiki Tuesdays. The presentation covered how a small team of three people built a social media space with blogging, networking and professional networking with almost no budget. Technologically, the team used a combination of MediaWiki (also used for Intellipedia and GCpedia), WordPress and BuddyPress. Socially, approximately 3900 users are registered to OSpedia (i.e. about 6% of the Ontario government’s 65,000 workers). The system, still in pilot status, looks like it has been very successful so far. The implementation was also fairly fast – some discussions started in the fall of 2008 and it was launched by the spring of 2009. The internal case for the project rested on three pillars: to better capture the knowledge of retiring/departing staff, to encourage technologically savvy staff to engage more deeply with the organization and to help staff in different units and ministries work together on problems of common interest.

Going through my notes for the event, I found a few other aspects of the project noteworthy. To address concerns about possible abuse or misuse of the system, the designers implemented a two strikes rule for news (i.e. if a news item – be it a blog post or link to a resource – received two warning/negative votes, it would disappear from public view and by reviewed in greater detail by others). The other general rule adopted for the system was called “accountability through attribution”: you have to sign your name to your contributions so that encourages people to behave well. The wiki aspect of the system currently has approximately three thousand well developed articles.

This was the first time I have attended a Toronto Wiki Tuesday event and I found it a valuable experience. I got to see how an organization has developed these tools and encouraged people to use them. It is also inspiring to see an example of a new system being built and seeing social media tools being used to serve larger goals. The casual atmosphere – good natured heckling is encouraged – also fostered an atmosphere of frank discussion and lively debate that really pulled me into the event and made me smile.

Information literacy instruction is a core responsibility of many academic librarians, but there is a structural tension. In my experience working for the AskON service, I encounter what I call the “skills vs rules” dilemma when working with student: a student over wants a ruling on an issue rather than seeking to explore the issue or learn about it. For example, a common question I encounter would be, “Is X resource peer reviewed?” The student is usually looking for a simply yes or no answer so they can move on to the next step in their work.  My general approach is to issue the ruling, explain the process I used to come to the decision and then offer to lead the student through the process.

Wikipedia poses another example of this issue in my thinking; many students like to use this resource but many instructors hate this. Why? The old, superficial way to think about this conflict is between the technologically savvy Generation Y student and the technologically unsophisticated instructor that barely tolerates technology. In my view, the real issue that professors and academic librarians have with Wikipedia is not technological, it is cultural. For some, the open nature of the editing process is a problem (though I would point out that the design of the system makes vandalism extremely easy to repair). For others, it is the lack of expert contributions. I can appreciate both those concerns, but the real problem is that the student isn’t being through enoug they’re just skimming the surface of available research and knowledge.

One of the outcomes of a proper university education should be to acquaint students with the vast universe of knowledge that exists out there and the skills to work through it. Simply telling them not to use a specific resource might help them with a specific assignment, but it does not build lasting skills. Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to provide students with a simple list of “do this” and “don’t do this”: they are capable of better. As a teacher of a friend once remarked, they should push for greater depth.

Pam Allyn, a literary expert and the author of What to Read When who runs an organization that educates teachers, agrees that the time has come to abandon the class novel – leaving it to selected high school English classes designed to teach the classics. While some teachers can be effective with the approach, she says that often students tell themselves: “I have to get through this book. I’ve got to learn to understand it the way my teacher wants me to.” That can be boring for good readers, she says, and “devastating” for struggling students.

Tina Gordon, president of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English and a resource teacher at a Winnipeg-area high school, says many teachers are trying new approaches – such as introducing one book in many different ways, or reading excerpts out loud – and seeing the value in choice in English class. She understands why many teachers still love the class novel, wanting to expose young people to the books they love. But, she says, “some of our practices we keep because they’re tradition.” And because, she adds, both teachers and parents hold on to the idea that “what makes a more educated person is if they can quote Hamlet.”

Source: Erin Anderssen, Letting students choose books could make them better readers, Globe & Mail, March 29 2010

Intuitively, the findings reported in this Globe & Mail article, Letting students choose books could make them better readers, strike me as very plausible. I remember accessing the school and public library during my elementary years with great fondness. I’ll confess that I wasn’t reading the great novels of the nineteenth century though – I wanted to read about the Cold War, World War II, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, technology and so forth. I certainly fiction as well, but I think that something like two thirds to three quarters of my reading then (and now) tends to be non-fiction.  I wonder if the unrelenting focus on reading novels is part of the problem with engaging young students. Maybe some of them want to learn about history or other non-fiction topics more than they want to read fiction? I think that Tina Gordon makes a good point in arguing that some practices in reading education is little more than traditi0n. Tradition can be a good thing (e.g. the rule of law in the West) but it shouldn’t be continued solely on the basis of it being traditional.