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.

This article – Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google – from Forbes, a US business magazine, is a great read. It is especially inspiring for librarians in schools and those working in companies. Here are some particularly good quotes:

As a former corporate lawyer, I owe much of my success to effective research skills that evolved, with the help of skilled trainers, as new tools came along. As a former executive officer at a company that had 1,200 employees in 29 countries worldwide, I know that without adequate media literacy training, kids will not succeed in a 21st-century workplace

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In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy. When my company asked 300 school students how they searched, nearly half answered: “I type a question.” When we asked how students knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were “if it sounds good” or “if it has the information I need.” Equally dismal was their widespread failure to check a source’s date, author or citations.

This is troubling for it implies that information literacy training, at least in this specific Dutch case, is failing. One possible explanation is laziness – critical evaluation of information takes longer than simply applying the first thing you find. Yet, I am reluctant to accept the suggestion that laziness is the whole explanation.

Students at many elite schools are learning critical 21st century skills while librarians are eliminated from budget-stressed school districts. The result? What a University College of London study called a “new divide,” with students who have access to librarians “taking the prize of better grades” while those who don’t have access to school librarians showing up at college beyond hope, having “already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to ‘get by’ with Google.

I’m very conflicted about this observation. On the one hand, it clearly demonstrates the critical contribution that librarians make to education. On the other hand, it highlights just how great the challenges are to bringing education to all. I do believe that everybody has the right to participate in a rich education and that librarians have an important role. Without the foundation of skills to do research, find relevant information and evaluate it, college and university study becomes close to impossible and career success is equally undermined. If you’re still coming across people that think that Internet search engines eliminate the need for librarians, here’s yet another way to show them the error of their ways.

Last week, I attended an event jointly organized by Knowledge Workers Toronto and the SLA Toronto Chapter called Dealing with Information Overload. The presenter, Karl Dawson of phiScape AG, has proposed a solution to information overload using software. The application he presented is still in the early stages but I gather that it is intended to automatically generate two types of results: summaries and indexes. I think the concept of it is that the software essentially takes a first pass at reading the text and then gives the actual human reader less to go through. I can see some potential for this kind of approach in terms of improving reader productivity.

The potential benefit of this system goes something like this.: if you could read fifty news article in an hour, maybe I could read a hundred news summaries in less time. I should reserve judgement on this approach but I’ve seen things like this before and have not found them that helpful. If you read a series of 10-50 news summaries on events around the world, how informed do you feel? It is the difference between reading the International Herald Tribune and reading the actual New York Times and Washington Post. You can cover more ground in a sense but I wonder if you get more out of it. Still, the presenter made the point that most popular reading innovations lately – such as the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader – are basically aiming to replicate the experience of reading a print book in digital form. This reminds me of the early decades after printing came to Europe; some people thought that manuscript books were far superior and some printers responded by trying to make printed books look like manuscripts (or having scribes add finishing touches to a printed book). In hindsight, that was just a sign of a transition from one technology to another.

Can you think of any technologies or tools available that actually improve on the reading experience? Make it more pleasant? Or perhaps more productive? I will happily agree that the invention of hypertext (and XML) in the 1990s was a big leap forward, but what else is happening in the reading technology world?

As one of the most heavily used public libraries in North America, the Toronto Public Library is an important institution in the library community. I often use the Library’s resources online and visit branches and always feel good about my experiences. Recently, I started following TPL’s announcements on Facebook just to see how the institution is making its presence felt in that area. It was through Facebook that I learned that TPL is launching a new website which you can know see in beta. I’ve taken a screenshot below to preserve what it looked like in March 2010:

I see several interesting contrasts with TPL’s current website. The overall size of the site is bigger; it goes “over the fold” in my browser. It strikes me as a much more intense Web experience compared with the current site, but absolutely nothing wrong with that. I also see a much greater emphasis on events; you can see that Globe & Mail writer Margaret Wente has a talk at TPL in April and that the library is participating in an event called “Keep Toronto Toronto Reading Festival.” The centre block of the site – which highlights new items in the collections including children’s fiction – reminds me of the University of Toronto Library website that also highlights recent items. Overall, the site’s design looks like it will be more dynamic and there is a higher chance of seeing new and interesting information here every time I come to visit. Access to the collections, catalogue and other library programs is still clear to me. The site is friendly and I would have to give it high marks. You can read about the planning and thinking behind the redesign on the TPL’s Web Team blog. The Web Team is to be commended for their extensive communication and efforts to consult with users in this process.

On a different note, I also came across some statistics on TPL’s performance in 2009 and the data is impressive. For anybody that thinks that public libraries are losing popularity or are failing to deliver the services and collections people want, these kind of statistics really counter that way of thinking. According to a January 19, 2010 press release, the Toronto Public Library had a record year of usage in 2009:

• The number of materials borrowed (over 31 million) jumped by 5 percent over 2008
• People visited the library’s 99 branches 17.5 million times, up 8.5% from last year
• eTitles (including eBooks, eAudiobooks and music files) were borrowed 88% more than in 2008
• In-branch computer use increased by 11.5%

After reading Thomas L Friedman’s columns in the New York Times for months and part of his earlier book on globalization, The Olive Tree and the Lexus, I decided to pick up his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century. Some of the technology aspects of the book have dated a bit since the book was first published in 2005, but other aspects of the book remain fresh and very interesting. At times, the book can be scary as Friedman lavishes page after page describing brilliant, driven and successful scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from India and China. You almost have the sense that if you make the slightest misstep, a thousand highly educated Indians will immediately take your job through outsourcing. In continuing to read through the book and critically evaluate it, I realize some of these concerns are slightly exaggerated. Still, the highly competitive nature of the global economy cannot be denied. Friedman suggests that there are some skills that remain critical in helping individuals (and organizations) thrive in an age of global competition: learning how to learn, navigation, compassion and curiousity. I think librarians exhibit and can foster all of those qualities. I’d particularly like to focus on the navigation idea since the concept of “knowledge navigators” was explored in the SLA alignment project.

Friedman writes about navigation in the seventh chapter of The World is Flat:

Second, we need to think more about how we teach navigation skills. As the world flattens out, more and more knowledge, information, news, software, commerce, and communities will reside on the World Wide Web. Out children will interact with each other, with the wider world, and with all that resides on the Web without many filters. Therefore, teaching them how to navigate that virtual world, and how to sift through it and separate the noise, the filth, and the lies from the facts, the wisdom, and the real sources of knowledge becomes more important than ever. When the Web first emerged, I used to joke that if I had one fervent wish it would be that every modem sold would come with a warning label from the surgeon general that would say: “Judgement Not Included.” (pg. 310-311)

If I ever have to explain or define what “information literacy” is again to a non-librarian, I will refer them to this quote. A high and ever increasing volume of information does not eliminate the need for librarians in any way. Formerly, librarians based their work on a scarcity of knowledge, but I’ve learned that every kind of abundance creates a different need or scarcity elsewhere. With an abundance of information, judgement and time to organize it and make use it of it is lacking. That’s one way that librarians will continue to stay relevant and valuable.

In February, the faculty of Harvard Business School voted to adopt an open access policy for its research. In terms of scholarly communication, I regard this as a significant shift. From what I understand of the progress of the open access movement, it has been adopted in the sciences (especially medical and life sciences) community to the greatest degree. In browsing the website of the Office of Scholarly Communication and the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) Repository, I found only one article from the Business School, but the policy has only been in effect a month. Many other universities that adopted open access four or five years ago are still in the process of implementing it  – open access is important but it can be time consuming to fully implement. As one of the world’s leading centres of business and management research, I expect that this will be a fascinating resource.

A portrait of contemporary librarianship told in a warm and highly engaging fashion is one way to describe this book. By any measure, I would have to say I loved this book; thanks Marilyn Johnson (I hope she goes on a book tour!). I would recommend it to any librarians out there. In fact, I’d even suggest it is a good book for librarians to give to their non-librarian friends since it explains the challenges and variety of the profession as it is now practiced. There have also been a number of reviews and comments on the book around the Web and these seem to focus mainly on Johnson’s discussion of the intersection between librarians and technology. It amuses me in some ways to see how the mainstream media is just catching up and noticing what librarians have accomplished in the past ten years. When I got to the end of the book, I wanted there to be more chapters; maybe exploring librarianship in outside the United States to a greater degree? I’d also like an index, but to be fair, many non-fiction books lack an index so I can hardly make that into a critique. I’m aiming to keep this review under a thousand words and discuss those aspects of the book which have been somewhat neglected in reviews I’ve seen elsewhere.

The chapter on archivists – “What’s Worth Saving?” – is particularly interesting for how it weaves together personal stories and the principles of archival work. Johnson attended a workshop on literary archives and leads the reader through the difficulties of working with this type of material. Johnson also grapples with the philosophy question posed by archival work; what to say and how? She does this, in part, by telling the story of a large archive of materials relating to the sport of boxing and how they came to find a safe home in an archive. Johnson also probes the question of individual digital archives – how can individual people save parts of the Web or even their own production safely so that it can be accessed in the future? I view this as an opportunity for archivists to provide advice to individuals.

As a long time fan of New York City, I was delighted to see an entire chapter (“Gotham City”) dedicated to discussing the city’s libraries. New York has the world’s largest dog library (the American Kennel Club Library) but also one of the world’s most famous and important public library systems, the New York Public Library (NYPL). I learned a lot here about the politics and problems that have been swirling around this institution lately, including the apparent shift away from research collections and librarians (e.g. no more Persian language cataloguers/librarians) toward what I might call a conventional public library model with circulating collections, Internet access terminals and the like. All those services and programs are immensely valuable and I do not mean to disparage them in any way, but I struggle to see why NYPL appears to have moved away from the collections and resources that made it unique and famous around the world. On the other hand, Johnson introduces us to Joshua Greenberg, the mastermind behind much of NYPL’s digital projects (note to self: explore the riches of NYPL.org more deeply!) which shows a vision of the institution’s future.

This review would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the chapters on blogging and Second Life which have attracted so much interest elsewhere. In reading the chapter on library bloggers (“The Blog People”), many of the writers discussed were familiar to me but I still learned something here. Sometimes, one forgets that there is something of a cleavage between the hyper-connected blogging section of librarianship and those that do not engage in such practices. That said, I think Johnson rightly points out that library bloggers interest in pursuing innovation and experimentation is preferable to simply complaining about social media and related technologies as the Annoyed Librarian does. The chapter on Second Life (“Wizards of Odd”) was a revelation in some ways. I knew that librarians use Second Life (I’ve used it a couple of times myself), but I didn’t know about the extent of librarian participation. There are whole libraries, collections and even historical towns curated and managed in Second Life by librarians. Simulated reality tools like Second Life still strike me as a bit experimental and ahead of the curve for widespread usage but this approach may ultimately prove to be very important.

If you’re looking for a book to show people what librarians actually do and the challenges they face today, this is the book to look at. For me, it was also inspiring to see the range of librarian work and activity. It is the kind of book that leaves you wanting more and I hope that Johnson considers a second, expanded edition at some point down the road. Over the coming weeks, I will be returning to the book to learn more about the profession. I’ve studied the field and worked in it for several years already and I’m always pleasantly surprised with how much there is to learn.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book.

The second day of the OLA conference had plenty of interesting sessions on all manner of topics. I attended two sessions on academic libraries and one on reference practice. That last session was particularly thought provoking as I ponder how to implement those insights in the context of virtual reference work. The conference has also been a good opportunity to meet and see librarians from across Ontario and other places including some friends from my graduate program that I haven’t seen in a few months.

The first session I attended, There’s a Library Here? Student outreach at the University of Guelph-Humber College, was a review and assessment of the marketing and outreach services recently employed at this Toronto institution. Guelph-Humber, founded in 2002,  has approximately three thousand students and faces the particular challenge of not having a dedicated library space. Nonetheless, Jennifer Easter and Caroline Stewart described Guelph-Humber’s outreach successes. One of the library’s strongest moves was to set up a student advisory committee which advises librarians on a variety of topics including how best to communicate with students. The decision to embed librarians in the institution’s Writing Centre has also been a great success as it allows for extended (30-60 minutes) consultations with students. The more I think about, the more I see a natural partnership between writing centres and librarians. The presenters also covered what didn’t succeed as well was the reference in student residence service; this came as no surprise since most library efforts to do this have not been highly successful. There was also a lively discussion of questions from those in the audience, including some from yours truly. I have written previously about marketing academic libraries; it is a topic of long standing interest for me.

During the extended lunch break, I went to see some of the poster presentations being provided. The sheer scope of projects undertaken was impressive; everything from research databases to developing cataloguing standards for video games was shown here. Of course, I went to see Meghan Eccelstone and Angela Hamilton, of York University, present on screencasting. They’ve found that videos over about five minutes tend to lose student interest. As I have something of an interest in German history and culture, it was also fun to see the German Canadiana in Ontario Bibliography project presented by Helena Calogeridis, Jane Forgay and William Oldfield of the University of Waterloo; it covers books, family histories, newspapers and other kinds of materials by and about this community. Two librarians from Queen’s University, Sylvia Andrychuk and Elizabeth Gibson, presented on some recent innovations that they have participated in. Their poster, From Annotated Bibliographies to Zines: Alternatives to the Research Paper, showed that humanities and social sciences teaching can go beyond the standard essay assignment. For example, there have been course assignments where students have been assigned the task of assessing and improving Wikipedia entries. I love the idea of actually having students improve the state of the world’s knowledge. They also told me that students tend to put more effort into their work, whether it be posters, zines or Wikipedia pages, when they knew it would be publicly displayed. The final poster I looked into was called, “Preserving PAc-Mac: Creating a Metadata Schema for Video Games,” by Max Dionisio and Sheila Mallahi Karai of the University of Toronto and it was enlightening. Unlike book cataloguing, describing and cataloguing video games is up for debate. There are many questions about what to include in catalogue records and how to organize it.

The attractions and challenges of providing 24/7 access to library services was discussed in another session I attended. Presented by Catherine Devion (University of Toronto Scarborough), Mark Robertson (York University) and Martha Whitehead (York University)) have all launched late night library programs over the last few years. In the case of York, student politicians actually campaigned for 24 hour library access and the library responded. In each case, it looks like late night library usage peaks between 11pm and 1am. From my perspective, it looks like academic libraries could justify closing from 2am-6am based on usage. In the Q&A part of the discussion, there were questions raised about whether it is wise to offer this kind of service since it may encourage students to adopt unhealthy work habits; indeed, some health staff at Queen’s expressed just this concern. From an administrative standpoint, it looks like the only real difficulty was keeping libraries clean; security was carefully thought out and there did not appear to be any problems on that front.

I ended the day by attending a stimulating session on reference called, “No Longer Just An Interview: Reference as a Relationship” given by Professor Mary Cavanagh and Luanna Freund. They both emphasized the importance of moving past the reference as transaction model that is suggested by library statistics. Indeed, Cavanagh points out that some library statistics claim that only about 20% of interactions are “real” reference questions but this is misleading. Many of the other interactions are necessary to build rapport and trust between librarian and library user in her view. Freund, who teaches aspiring librarians at UBC, approaches reference from a different angle; how can we teach a set of skills that is notoriously difficult to convey in any other way besides experience? She had some interesting ideas including encouraging people to study human-computer interaction more and learn more about information behaviour. In the Q&A portion, I asked about how one can build reference relationships using virtual reference or chat services. They both agreed it was a great challenge to do this; I think there are ways to change virtual reference technology to make it more conducive to relationships.