A Domain of my Own

So I've been reading a lot lately about people moving their webstuff from wherever it's being hosted (institutional sites, Google, WordPress) and paying for hosting their own domain, under their own name.  I've been contemplating the same thing for a variety of reasons, including wanting more flexibility to add content, and realizing that my blog title, Anthropologist in the Stacks, was not being searched for (according to my blog analytics), but my name was.

That I've reached a point in terms of visibility where people are Googling me by name is alarming and also satisfying--if I didn't want to be visible, I wouldn't be here, or on Twitter.  

But this post is to say that I'm not actually going to be here at Blogspot anymore--this blog can serve as an archive, and there are still some links to this in my site that I'm hoping to get fixed at some point.  But from now on, if you want to find me, I'll be myself, in my own Domain.

Seeya.

It was EPIC

The Ethnography Praxis in Industry conference was in NYC earlier this month, and I was delighted to have a chance to attend.  I followed the #epiconference twitterstream avidly when they were in London last year, but couldn't attend because I was busily applying for funding for the research I did in March.  

I wanted to attend for several reasons (NYC was just one of them).  Primarily, I wanted to be in a room full of people who do private-sector ethnography, because increasingly I am in contact with people, in libraries, in higher education generally, and also in architecture and computer science, who are interested in ethnography as a methodology but not necessarily in anthropology as a disciplinary frame for that method.  I need to have more familiarity with the range of ways "ethnography" is being talked about, used, justified, critiqued in practical contexts.  Industry is just one, but it's an increasingly visible one, and is one that actually inspired the creation of library ethnography jobs, starting with Nancy Fried Foster at Rochester.

You can find the history of EPIC as an org, as well as the papers from all 10 years of the meetings since they began, here.  And the draft papers from this year's meetings are here.  They are all worth reading.

 If any of you follow me on Twitter, you know that I live-tweeted nearly the whole damn thing.  I will say again that is now one of my favorite ways of experiencing a conference--there are connections you can make in Twitterspace, not just with the attendees, but with people who are not in the room with you, around the content of the discussions.  I find it stimulating and enriching.  It's like doing the reading for graduate seminars and getting to have the discussion all at the same time--I think better, IMO, in groups, I understand more, I have questions that can be thrown back at me and more interesting questions take their place.  I attend conferences alone, without Twitter, at my peril these days.

I was struck by a few things.  The first thing was how much of an anthropology conference it seemed to me.  This despite the fact that those in the room were not exclusively anthropologists, but were also designers, programmers, other kinds of social scientists, like sociologist Sam Ladner.  Perhaps I was swayed by the unapologetically anthro-centric keynote of Christian Madsbjerg of Red Associates.  Perhaps this sense varies from EPIC to EPIC.  Nonetheless, I felt very at home in the discussions about the work and its implications.  I got a lot out of (to pick just a few out of a great sea of content) Sam Ladner's discussion of embodied practice, Emilie Glazer, Anna Mieczakowski, James King, Ben Fehnert's (from Eclipse) discussion of trust as an important part of motivating people to engage with digital devices, and Kate Crawford's electric keynote about Big Data.

Part of the anthro-centricity too was the explicit contrast that EPIC-goers and presenters offered to academic work, and to anthropology in particular.  The insistence on the word "practice" in contrast to "applied" anthropological or ethnographic work was evidence of this, too.  I think I understand the reasons for it, but it was something to think about.  I still, for all of the practical work I am doing these days, identify as an academic, and I felt distinctly neither fish nor fowl in that sense while in the room at EPIC.

I loved that it was basically a plenary conference, with a few exceptions for workshops.  Everyone heard the same papers, attended the same keynotes, saw the same Pecha Kucha sessions.  I think it made for a richer conversation about the content of the conference, as people's experiences were not fragmented across several small rooms.

The Pecha Kucha sessions.  I adored them.  And Simon Roberts has already said a lot of what I was thinking.  But I would also point out that I think that as a form, as a provocation, I wish the AAAs would do Pecha Kucha sessions at least as much (if not more often ) than regular paper sessions.  They are limited in time, visually arresting, and felt like really good uses of everyone's attention.

I really enjoyed being in such a high-energy room full of people who wanted to think critically and engagingly about the practice of ethnography, and what it meant to their work, the work of the people who hired them, and to the wider world.  I may not make it to Sao Paolo in 2015, but will be happy to get to Minneapolis in 2016, to be in that room again.

#shoetweet #epiconference

Guest Blog: What the Hell is A Johari Window, and other Questions. featuring Lawrie Phipps and a little bit of Dave White.

Lawrie was on holiday when I posted this.  He got
up to donut-eating and other mischief.

This post began with Lawrie Phipps’ curiosity about an instrument called the Johari window.  It’s still mostly Lawrie’s words, with some of my (Donna’s) thoughts, and a bit here and there that is either an argument with or an agreement to something that Dave White said.

Fundamentally, we are wondering about the utility of the Johari window, and about how it might  be used to reflect and elicit feedback for individuals who see their practice as being more ‘resident’ as originally defined in the First Monday paper by Dave White and Alison Le Cornu, and more recently in the Visitors and Residents Info Kit at Jisc InfoNet.  

Readers may recall that I do go on a bit about the Visitors and Residents project.  I agree with Lawrie that the V&R model is increasingly considered a useful way of thinking about how we behave online. Recall that in its simplest form it posits that there is a continuum of users online exhibiting behaviours ranging from ‘visitor’ to ‘resident’.

I quote below from our InfoKit:

Visitors:  “When in Visitor mode, individuals decide on the task they wish to undertake. For example, discovering a particular piece of information online, completing the task and then going offline or moving on to another task...In Visitor mode individuals do not leave any social trace online.”  

Residents: “When in Resident mode the individual is going online to connect to, or to be with, other people. This mode is about social presence...Resident behaviour has a certain degree of social visibility: for example, posting to the wall in Facebook, tweeting, blogging, or posting comments on blogs. This type of online behaviour leaves a persistent social trace which could be within a closed group such as a cohort of students in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learning Management System (LMS) or on the open web.”

In Academia there are various forms of currency and value associated with practice, including publishing in peer reviewed journals, being invited to give keynotes, and a variety of metrics including those of research assessment frameworks and public engagement.  These more traditional practices are now accompanied by less well-established modes of scholarly communication and networking, via digital tools, practices, and places such as blogging and Twitter.  There is manifest  tension between the struggle to establish one’s scholarly bona-fides in traditional ways, and taking advantages of the benefits of new modes of credibility, many of which are expressed via the web, and are not universally recognized as either scholarly or valuable.  (Dave talks about shifting notions of credibility and academic currencies in the short film here.)

An emerging theme around discussions of value is the role of “presence,” especially in an academy which is being played out increasingly on a digital backdrop. Many individuals in education have changed the nature of their relationship with their host institutions or departments through stronger (and sometimes aggressive) online presences, and many others are seeking to develop in this area (Phipps, 2013). As an individual’s online catalogue of artefacts grows, such as blog posts, images and tweets, so does their network of readers, followers and where appropriate collaborators. As a direct result of their online presence the nature of building and maintaining relationships changes. In a post-digital academy, where presence may be seen as having value, understanding how an online persona is perceived is important, especially if one considers that opinions and judgments will be formed often with no direct interaction with the owner of the presence.

One method for exploring and mapping forms of presence is the Johari window.  This technique was developed by Luft and Ingham (1955) and is used to help individuals understand their relationship with self and others.

The window use four sections, shown below and in the original model it also used 57 adjectives that were used by an individual to describe themselves and by others to describe the individual.  

	Known to self	Not known to self	Adjectives used in the original model
Known to others	Open	Blind Spot	able ambivert accepting adaptable bold calm caring cheerful clever congenial complex confident dependable dignified energetic Extrovert friendly	giving happy helpful idealistic independent ingenious intelligent introvert kind knowledgeable logical loving mature modest nervous observant	optimistic organized patient powerful proud aggressive reflective relaxed religious responsive searching self-assertive self-conscious sensible sentimental shy	silly smart spontaneous sympathetic tense trustworthy warm wise
Not known to Others	Hidden	Unknown

Users of the window choose 7 or 8 of the adjectives to describe themselves. Colleagues or friends then also choose 7 or 8 to describe the user. The mapping and duplication will dictate the open, hidden and blind spot window size.  Therefore, terms that individuals come up with for themselves that are also chosen by colleagues would go in the “Open” section, which is for that area that is known to yourself and is known others. This includes behaviours, knowledge, skills, public history etc.  Terms selected by colleagues or friends but not by one’s self would go into the ‘Blind Spot’ section is that area that is known to others but not oneself. This might include very simple things, but may often bring deeper issues to the surface.  Terms picked only by the individual, but not by colleagues/friends go into the ‘Hidden’ section is that area which is known only to you.

The unknown area is that area that is neither know to yourself, or others. It may also be thought of as the area with potential.  It is left blank, to inspire discussion, encourage reflection.

The Johari window has uses in both individual development and team development.  In these contexts, many see the objective as being to enlarge the Open area.  The assumption here is that having a larger Open area means that  people know more about you, and you are self-aware, and that openness should make collaborating and effective team work easier.   This valorization of Openness asserts that teamwork requires self-disclosure, and personal give-and-take.  The more one shares about one’s self, the more the Hidden area shrinks.  In theory, more feedback can also decrease the Blind Spots.  The Johari window model posits that people with many characteristics listed in the Open area are easy to talk to, communicate effectively and may be good in group dynamics. The opposite would therefore be true of those with smaller windows.

So perhaps individuals who consider themselves at the residency end of the continuum may wish to use a process based on the Johari window as a reflective tool to understand how they are perceived by peers, how they are situated within the communities they value and areas they may wish to exploit. In a workshop context, they might also come up with additional adjectives relevant to online interactions, if they find the original list doesn't capture what they need to communicate.

I would additionally note, this model assumes benefits of openness which might bear some disentangling.  Anyone who is familiar with my Twitter presence and the content of my blog here knows that I agree with the positives around open practice on the web, but not everyone does, and there are disciplinary and individual difference of opinion about the utility and risks involved in resident-style online communication.  I have blogged before about the utility of mapping as a way of reflecting on practice. In a workshop context, people mapping their online practices with the help of a Johari window exercise could generate a potentially useful conversation about how people perceive the pros and cons of open practice on the web. Examining their personal practices via Johari mapping (and also via V&R mapping) can begin to reveal fears and ambitions individuals might have around non-traditional, web-based, resident modes of scholarly production.

References that are not online resources:

Luft, J.; Ingham, H. (1955). "The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness". Proceedings of the western training laboratory in group development

Phipps, L,. (2013) Individual as Institution. Educational Developments 14:2

Webinars, Graduate Students, Visitors and Residents

So the Visitors and Residents research team (myself, Dave White, and Lynn S. Connaway) conducted a Jisc/OCLC webinar (with the generous and effective chairing of Lorcan Dempsey) yesterday.  The purpose was to introduce people to our InfoKit, and also to have a chance to talk a bit more about research results and practical implications for transforming HE (and other) approaches to digital tools and places.

In my part of the webinar I focused on graduate students, and the story that I think is emerging from our data about the potential impact that digital places and communities can have on the relative isolation of graduate students from their peers.  I'm reproducing part of what I said here, and a link to the webinar and full powerpoint are available here. (scroll to the bottom, thanks to the capable skills of our colleagues at Netskills for making this available).  I Storified the session here.  The GoogleDoc with links to project outputs, etc. is here. 

I started off talking about sources and authority, actually, going over some of the findings that we cover in the People Trust People , Convenient Doesn't Always Mean Simple, and Assessing Non-Traditional Sources part of the InfoKit.  These pieces are important background to thinking about the experience of graduate students, because they are at a moment of transition, from being those who are expected to learn about authoritative sources and use them effectively, to those who are expected to become and produce authoritative sources of information themselves, as practitioners in their fields.  

This transition used to take place almost entirely in physical places, in seminar rooms, laboratories, academic libraries, and at face-to-face conferences.  But the Internet is a now a place where things happen, things that used to only happen face to face.  A holistic picture of academic behavior, of information seeking behavior, therefore has to include these digital places, and should pay attention to resident practices as we define them in the Visitors and Residents project.

People use social media tools and spaces like Twitter and Facebook to connect.  This is not a surprising or new thing, but needs to be kept in mind, as it's a phenomenon that is certainly not going away.  We also need to collectively keep in mind that just because these digital places exist, not everyone is excited by Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.  Awareness of these social media environments and the communities within them is not dependent on a generational identity, but is about personal preferences and individual motivations to engage.  We cannot, should not assume monolithic attitudes towards these places and tools. Digital places like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are not easily classed as only “entertainment” or “academic” in character or purpose, because of the wide range of activities that now occur in those spaces.  Knowing that someone goes to YouTube doesn’t tell you why they are there, or what they might do, or who they might seek out there.

So these graphs are interesting to me, because they seem to point to an opportunity to help graduate students.

I’ve put a red oval around the post-graduate/ grad student category, that we call Embedding.

Notice here the purple line for face to face contact, and notice in particular how low (comparatively) the mentions of face to face contact are for  grad students.  They are texting with people, making phone calls, and in particular emailing far more than engaging face to face.

Notice here who graduate students are in most contact with-professors, then peers.  For Professors, it’s the reverse order—they are in touch with peers and then with experts, mentors, and librarians at similarly low rates. Think about future of graduate students, of them as future (and current) practitioners in their fields.  Contact with professors makes sense, of course, but contact with peers seems crucial.  How else are they going to build their community, find their voice, engage in the back and forth of scholarly communication with their fellow practitioners?

The Blue line is FB, red is Twitter, purple line is Academic Libraries (physical spaces).  Graduate students narrow contact that they have with people, and are also physically isolated, working in the library, offices or labs.  I see this in the other ethnographic work that I do as well, the maps that graduate students, particularly in the sciences, produce of their learning landscapes are restricted to one or two places, in sharp contrast to the wide-ranging maps of undergraduates and professors.

But when we look at the places they do go, in addition to being present in academic libraries' physical spaces (we see a radical difference in the role of academic library spaces in our interviews with graduate students, compared to other educational stages), graduate students are present in significant rates on Facebook, and Twitter. 

We need to think about implications of online resident practices for grad students.   Their social media presence might be an opportunity for them to facilitate contact in the isolating environment of graduate school .  This is something we need to look at further—what is happening as they transition from student to practitioner in their field?  How are their experiences in physical spaces like libraries related to the academic work they do in digital places like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, etc.?  Where are they resident, where are they visitors?  If resident practices are those that facilitate the finding of voice, and the production of scholarship (in a variety of modes), what can it look like in grad school?

The Cartography of Learning

So, I've been thinking about mapping, not just because I have these maps I collected at UCL in March, but also because I've been thinking more about the utility of processes such as the V&R mapping that we have been using in our research.  What Dave White has said to me is that mapping exercises like V&R give us processes to offer people, but no answers, that in fact people use the processes to find their own answers.  It's not our job as researchers to provide answers, in this framing, but to ask effective questions that prompt people to find their own way.  As usual, my first instinct was to be annoyed by this. My annoyance stems now from thinking that Dave is probably correct.

I am often asked for Answers when I give talks about what is going on with faculty and students and libraries and education generally.  While it's tempting to try to provide Answers,  I think that I'm much better at coming up with more questions.  And ultimately, that might be more useful, as I think I'm probably not the one who should be Answering.

Cognitive mapping exercises at UNCC and UCL reveal people's learning landscapes.  Thinking about cognitive mapping in the larger context of mapping exercises  made me consider the possibility of a discussion around the cartography of learning, that is, all the different ways we try to capture and visualize what people are doing when they are learning.  We are mapping (or having people map for themselves) what they perceive to be there, and in the mapping we receive a revelation, not something predictable, or predicting.  We also do not have a precise rendering of actual practices, but an interpretation of practice.  How can we use the maps to build more deeply observed pictures of behavior?  How do we deal with the fact that maps are only ever representations of a lived reality?

If the Google Earth of Bloomsbury looks like this:

And the Google Map looks like this:

And the Tube map, itself a concept map of sorts, looks like this:

Then we have a map like this one I collected in March:

For this first year archaeology student, UCL is a series of spaces isolated from each other, but connected by the fact that he needs to do things, different academic tasks,  in each space (my favorite is the professor's office in the lower left, filled with clutter except for a small clearing in which professor and students can sit to talk).  I can see that these spaces are connected, but he does not represent them that way.

This PhD student has drawn lines indicating how connected her spaces are, the ones in Bloomsbury, and the ones that are not.  She annotated the map with notes about the technology and particulars of the work she does in each space, which places have particular resources (content and people) she cannot get anywhere else, and marks cafes with the cups of tea or coffee that she goes there for.  She has glossed her own map--I can bring my own spin to things (and I will), but there is already interpretation here.

Cognitive maps, the V&R maps, these are all contributing to a kind of cartography of practice.  In the case of the cognitive maps I've been collecting from faculty and students, the mapping is an emic process, where the the practitioners themselves represent their own practices as best they can.

 In V&R mapping workshops,  people map their own practices, but they are also asked to think about the practices of others.  We've done that in the V&R research project as well,  for example in this map, where we took practices invoked by the interviewee and plotted it in the V&R continuua:

map by Dave White and Erin Hood.

Here we engaged in the mapping of the traces of practices of others as an analytical tool, engaging in an etic process, imposing our interpretation of meaning from the outside looking in.

They map, we map, and possible meanings and definite questions can emerge from the process of mapping.

I have been working my way through Latour's Reassembling the Social with a Twitter group of colleagues, and am only part way through.  Latour invokes the "cartographies of the social" (p.34) when discussing the need for researchers to pay attention to actual practices, to the lay of the networks in play, and to de-emphasize the interpretive leap while still in the process of figuring out what it is we are looking at.  I am also struck by Latour's insistence that the best social science cannot privilege the perspective of the researcher, but must be embedded in the meanings and practices generated by the people being studied.  This, to me, is a plea for anthropology, but also for the sort of  lack of privileging that mapping exercises like these can inspire--these maps get their meaning from the intentions of the people drawing them as much if not more than from the interpretations we researchers later layer onto them.

Anthropologists are not always fantastic at not-privileging their interpretations of meaning, and I've been helped in this regard by the neo-Boasian appeal of Bunzl.  I frequently talk about being a sort of "native ethnographer," as an academic studying academia, but Bunzl's critique of the necessity of outsider status to anthropology is making me rethink that.  Our position as "outside" or "inside" is not as important as paying attention to what is present, and describing it as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible.  It is not that interpretation is impossible, but that what we think things mean can and should be informed by a variety of perspectives, including that of the people among whom we are doing our work.  

What is important about the maps, and I think about research generally, is the process, the questions and the discussions they inspire, not the end result.  Thoughts about meaning should emerge from the discussion, from the process, and should never be framed as The Answer.




References:

Bunzl, Matti (2004), Boas, Foucault, and the “Native Anthropologist”: Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 106: 435–442. 

Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford (Oxford University Press). Page numbers refer to Kindle edition.

Images:
Google Maps, Google Earth screen shots
Tube map is a crop of:  http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/large-print-tube-map.pdf

Guest Blog: Two Paths Forward, by Stanley Wilder

Big transitions happening at J. Murrey Atkins Library this summer, with the departure of my current boss Stanley Wilder for his new position as Dean of Libraries at LSU (both of my parents went to LSU, so Geaux Tigers!).  When he shared the content of the talk he gave when interviewing at LSU, I encouraged him to let me host it here.  And he agreed!  So, here is the (slightly edited) talk Stanley gave, laying out his vision for libraries.

What I appreciate about Stanley's take on the Future of Libraries is that it's not about specific solutions, but about relationships and processes.

Two paths forward

an edited version of Stanley Wilder’s candidate speech for the

Dean of Libraries position at Louisiana State University

March 30, 2014

 Images by Maggie Ngo, UNCC

Here are some things I hear: Everything I need to know is on Google. I’m a faculty member and I don’t use the library. I’m a senior in college and I’ve never been in the library. I’m a senior in college and still use my hometown public library. Hasn’t the Internet made libraries obsolete? I don’t need a library. I don’t read books. Information wants to be free. Librarians are scary people and I don’t trust book stacks!

Every one of these comments is easily and demonstrably wrong, and at the same time, each one is a gift of the first order.  Each one is the gift of attention, an invitation for us to explain who we are and why we’re here. We librarians ask for nothing more.

Oh, we get where these questions come from: In an age of dizzying change in the nature of academic work, and the shifting shape of the discourse that drives it forward, where should the library go from here? As I see it, the library has two paths forward, and I submit this vision as my response to the prompt you’ve given me.

The first path for the research library is its traditional role. A crucial aspect of the nature of learning and research is timeless, absolutely so. In this sense, if you want to know what research library will do in the future, well the answer is that it will do what it has always done.

If you’ll bear with me, I’ve drawn a picture of what I mean.

  

This is the scholarly record. It is the record of what is known or imagined about the world. Teaching and research consists of assimilating the scholarly record as it pertains to the disciplines we study, in such a way as to enable us to synthesize something new. In the case of faculty, this synthesis is the creation of new knowledge or new art that adds to the scholarly record, where the cycle starts over. This picture applies to students as well, wherein the syntheses they produce often take the form of apprenticeships for the work their faculty do.

Assimilation, synthesis, reading, writing. Here is teaching, learning, and research, as an endless, virtuous cycle around the scholarly record.

I worked for a great Dean of Libraries who came up with the beautiful aphorism:

“A library is a place where readers come to write, and writers come to read. “

I say YES to that: the core function of a research library is now and always will be to build the collections that drive this cycle. Of course it’s not enough to simply build collections, the library also has to facilitate how people interact, at both ends. For example, teaching generations of new students how to work with the literatures of their chosen disciplines. But really, all library services can be characterized in this way. They cluster at these transition points, here and here.

And with that, I’m going to stop myself because I promise you, I could go much further with this silly drawing. My point is this: the idea of the library is so embedded in the fundamental nature of learning and research that it makes no sense to ask whether you need one. The real question before us is whether you need a great library.  

That, then, is my first path. Everything about it relates to the “what” of academic work, what it is fundamentally, what it intends to do in the world.

And yet, at this very same changeless moment, we are now in a period of full-scale revolution in how academic work getsdone. Students and faculty alike are using new tools, in new ways, to produce scholarship in forms that were unimaginable just ten years ago. I used the word “dizzying” a while ago, and I meant it: in this environment, uncertainty abounds.

But here’s one thing I am sure of, and if you retain nothing else from this presentation, please let it be this: this new environment is going to allow smart research libraries to perform that ancient role in ways that produce spectacular new value. This is the library’s second path: embracing, inventing the future so as to do better what we have always done.

Like what, for example. There are so many opportunities that really, our problem is choosing from among them. I’m going to just call out some, a simple list of examples that… illustrate my point, obviously, but I’ve also taken care to choose examples that I have experience with helping produce.

           

Every item on this list is now or should be a new part of a research library portfolio. What’s more, each one relates directly to issues that faculty and institutions are wrestling with right now. In many cases, they are wrestling, but not knowing that what their library has to offer. There’s nothing dismissive or condescending about it, they just don’t know.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the biggest threat to research libraries is low expectations. Sometimes they come in thoughtlessly dismissive ways, “Aren’t libraries obsolete?” But just as often, low expectations feel warm and fuzzy, filled with nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. To my ears, both are equally toxic.  

So no, our communities can’t be expected to just know enough, say, about the dangerous instability in the scholarly communication marketplace to understand the importance of open access, or any of the other ways we librarians can make things better. No, we have to tell them, and we have to show them.

I think constantly about how the library positions itself vis-à-vis students and faculty. Imagine a continuum. At one end is library as simple service provider, and on the other end is library as full partner, contributing in a substantive fashion to any campus conversation relating to the institution’s core academic mission.  Yes services are crucially important. But make no mistake: real sustainable relevance on campus requires assertiveness, it requires visibility.Everything on this list is an invitation to do just that.

I have one more thing that I must say about the list. The work required for each is grounded, in one way or another, in traditional research library values and expertise. At the same time, every one of them is situated in an entirely new context. I feel a real sense of urgency on this point: this list is turf, and it is ours for the taking. But doing so means that as a profession, as a library, we must recognize that producing the transformational outcomes that are possible here also requires new skills that we must either learn for ourselves, or hire into our organizations. This is not a phase, it’s the new normal.

Let’s talk about students. The library’s student role is large and diverse, as it always has been, but here again we find watershed developments all around us, and once again, the new opportunities that come with.

Half of a research library’s student function is pedagogy. Instruction. The thing we do here is to increase the sophistication of students in interacting with the literatures of their chosen disciplines. Fine, but as you see from the list on the screen, that pedagogy isn’t just situated in terms of discipline, it’s also situated in a broad range of learning environments, which makes it subject to the same seismic change that is shaking teaching throughout higher education.

A quick story to illustrate: Recently, the head of our instruction programming discovered that faculty are very receptive to hearing about ways they can pare back on research paper assignments, in cases where doing so allows them to focus attention on the topic-choosing, question-framing, literature searching, basic-synthesis-forming skills. Library instruction can help with all of that, and this librarian and her staff have created web-based, interactive, and discipline-specific instruction modules that support that use case. And now Stephanie Otis has a fine trade in advising faculty with their course design.

That’s a small but significant example of what I mean by proper positioning of the library on campus. Stephanie puts us exactly where we want to be.

The second half of our student function is building-related, the spaces we provide for student academic work.  I have a missionary’s zeal as to the following idea:  research libraries can be instrumental in building the culture of study on campus. There is a powerful synergy here that only we can offer: the co-location of librarians with collections, and technologies, placed in appropriate spaces,with appropriate furnishings, long hours, and reliable security. No one else can do that!

I like to say that a good research library should be like a zoo. As you pass through it,you will see  students in the very act of learning:chemistry equations here, Chinese vocabulary there, marketing, biology and all the rest, live and happening right before your eyes.  You can even point at them, you can throw popcorn, they don’t mind, but the thing you’d be pointing at is the thing we all work every day to produce, it’s our professional reason for being. If you don’t walk through that zoo and feel energized, I suggest you may want to find another line of work. I would have all students socialized in this way, to where those zoos are just normal: long hours of intense group or individual study?

The title I’ve used for this section is “the world,” as shorthand for a whole range of externally-focused responsibilities that take the library far beyond the scholarly record drawing I talked about earlier. I might also have used the word “leadership.”

I’ve got a bit of show and tell to do for you now, a bit of bragging, maybe, but my intention is to give you a feel for this vision in action.

My story begins this time last year, at UNC Charlotte. Our library was presented with an exceedingly generous bit of one-time money in a more or less blank check fashion. At that moment in time, a number of very prestigious University Press book publishers suddenly made their current lists available, as a package, and in digital format. No limits on simultaneous users, no digital rights restrictions, and good preservation characteristics.

We jumped, bought everything of this sort that we could. We added 75,000 monograph titles last year, average price per ebook volume: about $10.

By June, everything’s in place, the community has full access to these books.

Now, our staff looked at those titles and recognized that there were many among them that were going to be assigned reading for students in the fall. If we could get the word out to faculty and students, we could save students lots of money.

With this insight, our staff flew into action, and just in time for fall semester, produced this web page, complete with links to the ebooks. They also prepared a social media campaign to alert students and faculty. Here’s what we learned: if you use Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about free textbooks? Get out! In a PR sense, nothing we’ve ever done has been so successful, so fast.

So fall semester follows, and the use data on these new ebook packages starts to roll in. Friends, I’m here to say: the scholarly monograph is NOT dead, its use in ebook format is fantastic. Quick example: we have a huge investment in Springer journals and ebooks: our book chapter downloads, from day 1, run slightly ahead of Springer article downloads. Sure, this is a bit of apples and oranges, but on the face of it, it flies against every instinct a research librarian could ever have. Kinda mind blowing.

Spring semester comes, and this time we have had more time, we’re better prepared, and come up with this web page, and associated PR. The results have been stunning, faculty and students alike galvanized around our initiative, we know of a history professor teaching graduate classes for which the students have heavy reading lists, but no books they must buy.

Now we’re up to 4 weeks ago, our staff unveiled their own invention, a database that faculty can use to “shop” for ebooks appropriate for assigning for classes. The database consists of 140,000 titles, every ebook we own, plus every ebook we can get easily get from one of about a dozen University Presses.  As you can see, if you’re a faculty member, see something you want to use for class, we buy it immediately if we don’t already own it.  

Now class, let’s review: this anecdote gives us a shiny example of both paths: path number 1: exactly what is new about a research library buying books to support curriculum and research? And then once we’ve got them, what is new about making those books available for class use? It’s reserves!  OK, there’s our ancient function, but we’ve also got path number 2: everything about how we did all this is new, not just new, it provides brilliant new value that wasn’t possible before.

One last point about that anecdote: I ask you: did the University ask the library to invent a program like this so as to lower the cost of going to college? Because that’s exactly what’s at stake here. NO! They couldn’t have, they couldn’t have known to ask! I talked about low expectations awhile back: sometimes low expectations flow from folks just not knowing what we’re capable of. But I can promise you, people will listen, and they’ll certainly notice.

At this point our staff are fielding queries from all around the country, folks wanting the code, wanting to see how we did every aspect of this. Meanwhile, back on campus, our entire community looks at the library in a different, and better way.

Here again, a well positioned library.

I should pause here to give full credit: the vision behind this anecdote owes entirely to Chuck Hamaker. Once Chuck had this idea, he had inspired help from a large number of staff across units. Oh, and here’s another point: my role in this project? I supported it. Nothing more than that!

Seeing your library also means seeing its staff. Committed professionals every single one, they possess a spectacular range of expertise.

And yet, like the books on the shelves, these people in front of us also evoke the generations of staff that preceded them.

I’d like to tell you a story from my early days at LSU. So early that I was still scrambling to remember the names of my new colleagues. One day a meeting. We were discussing the consequences of a decision made by a staff member, and, wishing to contribute, I suggested that I could meet with her to negotiate. Which prompted whoops of laughter: this person had retired sometime in the 1960s, and had long since passed.

What an epiphany in that moment, though: such a testament to the enduring quality of our work. We can only conclude that we did not build this thing. It was handed to us as a trust, a sacred trust, that through our brains and hard work, we ensure its renewal, and then hand it over in our turn. Stronger than before.