Showing posts with label libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label libraries. Show all posts

May 2, 2010

Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Nearly half of Harvard’s collection is housed at the Harvard Depository, a marvel of efficient off-campus storage. Library assistant Carl Wood reshelves books in the 30-foot-high, 200-foot-long stacks.



“Throw it in the charles,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honors a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Google’s massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform. “People want information ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’” says Helen Shenton, the former head of collection care for the British Library who is now deputy director of the Harvard University Library. Users are changing—but so, too, are libraries. The future is clearly digital.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Medical Library, sees librarians returning to a central role in medicine as curators of databases and as teachers of complex bioinformatics search techniques.

Yet if the format of the future is digital, the content remains data. And at its simplest, scholarship in any discipline is about gaining access to information and knowledge, says Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. In fields such as botany or comparative zoology, researchers need historical examples of plant and animal life, so they build collections and cooperate with others who also have collections. “We can call that a museum of comparative zoology,” he says, “but it is a form of data collection.” If you study Chinese history, as Bol does, you need access to primary sources and to the record of scholarship on human history over time. You need books. But in physics or chemistry, where the research horizon is constantly advancing, much of the knowledge created in the past has very little relevance to current understanding. In that case, he says, “you want to be riding the crest of the tidal wave of information that is coming in right now. We all want access to information, and in some cases that will involve building collections; in others, it will mean renting access to information resources that will keep us current. In some cases, these services may be provided by a library, in others by a museum or even a website.”

Meanwhile, “Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

Librarians as Information Brokers

Bol is particularly interested in the media form known as Google Book Search (GBS). The search-engine giant is systematically scanning books from libraries throughout the world in order to assemble an enormous, Internet-accessible digital library: at 12 million books, its collection is already three-quarters the size of Harvard’s. Soon it will be the largest library the world has ever known. Harvard has provided nearly a million public domain (pre-1923) books for the project; by participating, the University helped with the creation of a new tool (GBS) for locating books that is useful to people both at Harvard and around the world. And participation made the full text content of these books searchable and available to everyone in the United States for free.

GBS appeals to Bol and other scholars because it gives them quick and easy access to books that Harvard does not own (litigation over the non-public-domain works in GBS notwithstanding). For Bol, such a tool might be especially useful: Harvard acquires only 15,000 books from China each year, but he estimates that it ought to be collecting closer to 50,000. So GBS could be a boon to scholarship.

But GBS also raises all kinds of questions. If everything eventually is available at your fingertips, what will be the role of libraries and librarians?

Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”

Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. “What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,” says Hazen, “is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’” Even the act of reading for research is changed, he points out. Scholars poring through actual newspapers “could see how [an item] was presented on the page, and the prominence it had, and the flow of content throughout a series of articles that might have to do with the same thing—and then differentiate those from the books or other kinds of materials that talked about the same phenomenon. When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with.”

How does searching digitally in a book relate to the act of reading? “There may be a single fact that’s important,” Hazen explains. “Is the book’s overall argument something that’s equally important as the single fact or is it just irrelevant? When people worry about reading books online, part of the worry is that the nuances of a well-developed argument that goes on linearly for 300 pages [are missing]. That’s not the way you interact with a text online.” How the flood of information from digitized books will be integrated into libraries, which have a separate and different, though not necessarily contradictory, logic remains to be seen. “For librarians, and the library, trying to straddle these two visions of what we’re about is something that we’re still trying to figure out.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The printed book took hundreds of years to replace handwritten manuscripts, which persisted as an economical way to produce small numbers of copies into the nineteenth century, nearly 400 years after Gutenberg invented movable type. Robert Darnton, director of the University Library, shown with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, predicts great longevity for the book.

Moreover, the prospect that, increasingly, libraries will be stewards of vast quantities of data, a great deal from books, and some unique, raises very serious concerns about the long-term preservation of digital materials. “What worries us all,” says Nancy M. Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, “is that we really haven’t tested the longevity for a lot of these digital resources.” This is a universal problem and the subject of much international attention and research. “If you walk into the book stacks,” she points out, “you can simply smell in some areas the deterioration of the paper and leather. But with something that hums away on a server, we don’t have the same potential to observe” (see “Digital Preservation: An Unsolved Problem,” page 82).

Despite these caveats, Bol’s vision of future librarians as digital-information brokers rather than stewards of physical collections is already taking shape in the scientific disciplines, where the concerns raised by Hazen are less important. In fields faced with information overload—such as biology, coping with a barrage of genomic data, and astronomy, in which an all-sky survey telescope can generate a terabyte of data in a single night—the torrents of raw information are impossible to absorb and understand without computational aids.

Medicine has had to cope with this problem ever since nineteenth-century general practitioners found they could no longer keep up with the sheer quantity of published medical literature. Specialization eventually allowed doctors to focus only on the journals in their particular area of expertise. Throughout such transitions, libraries played an important role. Doctors, upon completing their rounds, would comb the stacks for records of similar cases that might help with diagnosis and treatment. Today, the amount of new information being generated in the biological sciences is prescribing another momentous shift that may provide a glimpse of the future in other disciplines. For a doctor, learning about a genetic test and then interrogating a database to understand the results could save a life. For libraries and librarians, the new premium on skills they have long cultivated as curators, preservers, and retrievers of collective knowledge puts them squarely on top of an information geyser in the sciences that could reshape medicine.

Mining the Bibliome

Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School (HMS), recently asked a pointed question on his blog: Who is the better doctor—the one who can remember more diagnostic tests or the one “who is the quickest and most savvy at online searching for the relevant tests?” He predicts that “we are going to be uncomfortable with some of the answers to these questions for many years to come” because success based not on bedside manner, but on competence interacting with a database, implies a potential devaluing of skills that society has honored. And who is pondering these issues most acutely? A blogging librarian and pediatric endocrinologist with a Ph.D. in computer science.

One hundred years ago, says Kohane, a report on medical education in the United States concluded that doctors were inadequately prepared to care for patients. Half the medical schools in the country closed. “I think we are at a similar inflection point,” he says. “If you look at bioinformatics and genetics, you see vivid examples—which can be generalized to other parts of medicine—where the system has inadequately educated and empowered its workers in the use of search, electronic resources, and automated knowledge management.” Genetic testing, he adds, offers a “prismatic example”: studies in the Netherlands and the United States have shown that “physicians are ordering genetic tests because patients are asking them to, [even though] they don’t know how to interpret the tests and are uncomfortable doing so.”

Kohane sees similar problems when making the rounds with medical students, fellows, and residents: “When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ‘Google reflex,’ which is to go to the right databases to look things up.” The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, “the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.”

The journals themselves have grown in number and quantity of articles, but “the amount of data being produced and analyzed in large, curated databases,” Kohane says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude what appears in printed publications.” The fact that students and doctors don’t think to use this digital material is an international problem. “Even at Harvard,” where “we spend millions of dollars” annually for access to the databases, “many of the medical staff, graduate students, and residents don’t know how to use…,” he pauses. “Well, it’s worse than that. They don’t know that they exist.”

But in this lamentable situation Kohane sees an opportunity for medical libraries, whose role, he believes, had faded for a while. “It is becoming so clear that medicine and medical research are an information-processing enterprise, that there’s an opportunity for a library that would embrace that as a mission…to be again a center of the medical enterprise.”

Kohane has sought to do just that by creating an information institute—an HMS-wide center for biomedical informatics—embedded within Countway Library. The institute offers voluntary mini-courses, invariably oversubscribed, explaining what the relevant databases are, how to plumb them, and how to analyze the data they produce. A parallel effort under his supervision seeks to “mine the bibliome”—the totality of the electronically published medical literature—by allowing researchers to track down relationships between genes and diseases in the published literature that would not be apparent when searching one reference at a time. Librarians in the institute also comb databases for contradictions, and find references to sites in the genome that can’t possibly exist because the coordinates are wrong. In making sure that information is good, the library is “returning to its original mission of curation,” says Kohane, “but in a genomic era and around bioinformatics.” This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information.

Such skills-based teaching, learning, and data curation depend on finding individuals who are trained in medicine and also have the public-minded qualities of a librarian—rare indeed, as Kohane readily acknowledges. And even though the cost of such bioinformatics education is small relative to the millions of dollars spent on subscription fees for electronic periodicals (the price of which doubled between 2000 and 2010, says Kohane; see “Open Access,” May-June 2008, page 61 for more on the crisis in scholarly communication), the resources to provide more educational support for complex types of database search training are insufficient across the University. “That’s because we are trying to bolt on a solution to a problem that probably should be addressed foursquare within the core educational process,” he says.

There is growing awareness of the need to have an “information-processing approach to medicine baked into the core education of doctoral and medical students.” Otherwise, Kohane says, “we’re condemning them to perpetual partial ignorance.” Already, a few lectures on the topic are being introduced into the medical-school curriculum, making HMS a pioneer in this area. Discussions about bringing more of the biological/biomedical informatics agenda to the undergraduate campus are also under way.

Even in the relatively tradition-bound profession of law, digitization cuts so deeply that when Ess librarian and professor of law John G. Palfrey VII restructured the Law School library last year, he says he thought about the mission less as “How do we build the greatest collection of books in law?” and more as “How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?”

This focus on information services within a community guided both personnel decisions and collections strategies. “We scrapped the entire organizational structure,” reports Palfrey (whose digital genes can be traced back to his former position as executive director of the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Last June 30, all the librarians handed in resignations for the jobs they had held and received new assignments. There is now a librarian who works with faculty members, teaching empirical research methods, and another who helps students and faculty conduct empirical research. The collection development group includes “a lab for hacking a library”: a member of that team is working on an idea called “Stack View” that would allow the re-creation of serendipitous browsing in a digital format. Technology “allows you to reorganize information and present it in a totally different way,” Palfrey points out.

The law library’s new collection-development policy is organized along a continuum of materials for which the library takes increasing responsibility. These range from resources in the public domain that aren’t collected, but to which the library provides access; to materials accessed under license; and all the way up to unique holdings of an historic or special nature that the library archives, preserves, and may one day digitize in order to provide online access. The fact that the library no longer buys everything published in the law has been made explicit. “It is no longer possible financially, nor is it desirable—not all of it is useful,” Palfrey says bluntly. Only a third of newly purchased books are initially bound. “We’ll put a barcode on it, put it on the shelf, and see if people use it,” he explains. “If they do, and the book starts to wear, then we’ll send it to the bindery.”

Even though these changes may seem like cutbacks (they were in fact planned and in process before the University’s financial crisis became apparent), he believes skilled librarians are in no danger of becoming obsolete: “The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before.” Good lawyers need to be good at information processing, and Palfrey found in research for his book Born Digital that students today are not very good at using complex legal databases. “They try to use the same natural-language search techniques” they learned from using Google, he says, rather than thinking about research as “a series of structured queries. It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”

Mary Lee Kennedy, executive director of knowledge and library services at Harvard Business School, whose very title suggests a new kind of approach, agrees with Palfrey. “The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.”

Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book,” said Samuel Johnson. Nancy Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, displays a manuscript letter from the Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson; all its Johnson letters are available online as part of the University Library’s open-collections program.

“Just in Time” Libraries

All this is not to suggest that the traditional role of libraries as collections where objects are stored, preserved, and retrieved on request is going away. But it is certainly changing. Two facilities—one digital, the other analog—suggest a bifurcated future. The two could not be more different, though their mandates are identical.

In Cambridge, the Digital Repository Service (DRS) is a rapidly growing, 109-terabyte online library of 14 million files representing books, daguerreotypes, maps, music, images, and manuscripts, among other things, all owned by Harvard. In a facility that also serves other parts of the University, a two-person command center monitors more than a hundred servers. Green lights indicate all is well; red flashes when environmental conditions such as temperature or humidity exceed designated parameters. In a nearby room, warm and alive with the whirr of hundreds of cooling fans, their cumulative sound resembling the roar of a giant waterfall, a handful of servers hold the library’s entire digital collection. Other servers are dedicated to “discovery,” the technical term for the searchable online catalog, or “delivery,” the act of providing a file to an end user.

There are at least three copies of the entire repository—one in, and two outside of, Cambridge. One of them, secured by thumbprint access, is constantly being read by machines at the disk level to ensure the integrity of the data, a process that takes a full month to complete. “Several times a year,” says Tracey Robinson, who heads the library’s office for information systems, “we detect data that have become corrupted. We engage in a constant process of refreshing and making sure that everything is readable.” Any damaged material is quickly replaced with another copy from the backup.

The analog counterpart to the DRS is the Harvard Depository (HD), located in the countryside about 45 minutes from Boston. A low, modular building with loading dock bays, it resembles a warehouse more than anything else. In many ways, that is precisely what it is. Just two librarians oversee 7.5 million books held in an energy-efficient, climate-controlled environment—more than twice as many as are held at Widener, which is three times as large. “The libraries based in the city are among the most expensive in terms of linear capacity,” says Nancy Cline. “The Depository as a concept is absolutely essential for us.” A number of other libraries in the Boston area, including MIT, use the HD. The facility absorbs half a million new books each year, circulates 220,000, and boasts a 100 percent retrieval rate. (In 24 years, just two books could not be found for delivery; in a typical library, one study showed, patrons find what they are looking for only 50 percent of the time.)

The secret to the HD’s extraordinary density and retrieval rate is simple: here, a book is not a book. Titles, subjects, authors—none of this so-called “metadata,” the information people typically use to find things, matters. “We know how many books we get in,” says assistant director of the University Library for the Harvard Depository Tom Schneiter, who directs the facility, “but we don’t know what they are. To us, they are just barcodes. It makes our work much more efficient.” A staff of dedicated workers, who rotate through different tasks in order to break up the routine, can check in as many as 800 barcodes an hour. All the items are sorted and shelved according to size in bins that are themselves barcoded. This allows the height of the shelves to be perfectly calibrated to the height of the books; no wasted airspace. Place a request for one of the books in the HD and it will be delivered the next business day to the campus library of your choosing.

Originally, the HD was intended to store only low-circulation items. But because the libraries of the Cambridge campus are “full to bursting,” says Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University library, “doing triage” on thousands of little-used books from the shelves each year to make room for new ones proved impractical. Now, most new books are simply sent to the HD. Although some professors lament the death of shelf-browsing, others are grateful when a book they love is sent off, because they know that when next they want it, not only will it be found, it will be well-preserved: time essentially stands still for the books at the HD, where an environment set at 50 degrees and 35 percent relative humidity is expected to maintain a book in the condition in which it arrived for 244 years.

The price of such longevity and retrievability is about 30 cents per stored volume per year, which compares favorably to the cost of digital storage; expense estimates from the HathiTrust (a national group of research libraries that have created a joint repository for digital collections) for storing a digital book scanned by Google range from 15 cents for black and white to 40 cents for color annually. Actually delivering a physical book from the HD, on the other hand, costs $2.15—much more than the delivery of a digital book to a computer screen.

But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days.

One can imagine a not too radically different future in which patronless libraries such as the DRS and the HD would hold almost everything, supplying materials on request to their on-campus counterparts. Print on demand technology (POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)

Indeed, the HD might one day play a role as the fulcrum for “radical collaboration” with the five other law libraries in the Boston area, says Palfrey. “We’re asking, ‘Could we imagine deciding, as a group of six, that we’re actually going to buy something and put it in the Harvard Depository,’” a central location from which the physical book could be delivered to any institution? “It would cost us a sixth as much.” Other Harvard libraries could explore the same strategy.

That doesn’t mean Harvard’s campus libraries would become less important. Because they are embedded in the residential academic community, they remain integral to University life. Students (and faculty members) are big users of the physical spaces in libraries, though they are using them differently than in the past.

“Libraries are not conservative places anymore,” says Cline. “From the user perspective, it is an interesting time. Some people still want the quiet, elegant reading room. Others would be frustrated if they had to be quiet in every part of the buildings, in part because their work requires that they talk, that they work in collaborative teams, that they share some of their research strategies. We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.”

Libraries are also being used as social spaces, adds Helen Shenton, where people can “get a cup of coffee, connect to WiFi, and meet their friends” outside their living space. In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian. “The flip side,” Shenton continues, “is that some places are embedding their library and information specialists within disciplines and within faculties. So I think the whole model is like one of those snow globes. You pick it up and shake it around and all the pieces will settle in a different way, which is incredibly exciting.”

A Future for Books

“A big misconception is that digital information and analog information are incompatible,” says Darnton, himself an historian of the book. “On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.” Manuscript publishing survived Gutenberg, continuing into the nineteenth century. “It was often cheaper to publish a book of under a hundred copies by hiring scribes,” he says, than it was to set the type and hire people to run the press. Likewise, horsepower increased in the age of railroads. “There were more horses hauling passengers in the second half of the nineteenth century than there were in the first half. And there is good evidence that now, if a book appears electronically on your computer screen, and it’s available for free, it will stimulate sales of the printed version.”

Jeffrey Hamburger—a scholar of an even earlier medium, the medieval manuscript—who was recently named chair of a library advisory group, says that “the notion that we are going to abandon the codex as we have known it—the traditional book—and go digital overnight is very misguided. It is going to be a much longer transition than anyone suspects, just as the transition in the past between the oral tradition of literature in antiquity and silent reading as we’ve known it for almost two millennia was a long transition, taking the better part of a millennium itself.”

Hamburger, the Francke professor of German art and culture, has worked extensively here and in Germany on projects involving the application of new media to the study of medieval manuscripts, but he says there are “still many, many things that new media cannot do as effectively as a good old-fashioned book”: for example, combining text and an associated image on opposing pages. “It’s instructive how many of the words we use to describe computer interfaces—tabs, bookmarks, scrolling—are derived from our experience with the book, and that’s not just because of experience or familiarity,” he adds. “It’s because they have a certain practicality, and all of those, it so happens, are inventions of the Middle Ages.” Computers, in reverting to scrolling, have “gone back to a much older technology, which had its merits but was deficient in its own ways, which is why it was replaced.”

In advocating for the continued importance of books, and raising his concern that this could become the “lost decade” for acquisitions to Harvard’s library collections, Hamburger emphasizes that he is not framing the University’s current crisis in terms of books versus new media. “We need both, and we’ll continue to need both. I think we have to take as a premise that the library is a vast, far-flung, varied institution, as varied and diverse as the intellectual community of the University itself, working for a range of constituents almost impossible to conceive of, and it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”

It would be a terrible mistake, Hamburger continues, “if different factions within the faculty, be it scientists and humanists, be it Western- or non-Western-focused scholars, started squabbling over resources. As a university, we have by definition a catholic, all-embracing mission, and the question is how to coordinate resources, not compete for them. The greatness of this university in the past and in the future rests on the greatness of our library. Without the library—old, new, digital, printed—this institution wouldn’t be what it is.”

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Jan 30, 2010

Endangered Species

Librarians - The thin blue line between you an...Image by Travelin' Librarian via Flickr
News librarians are a dying breed

When it comes to the layoffs and buyouts that have hit newspapers over the last couple of years, copy editors seem to be the most at risk of losing their jobs. So it wasn’t too much of a shock when Leslie Norman’s husband was laid off from his copy editing position at The Wall Street Journal.
But then last year she was let go from her job as a news librarian at the Journal, and suddenly it seemed as though they were both working in at-risk, or perhaps even endangered, roles. (Her husband has since been brought back to work on contract for the paper.)
“We didn’t [think that way] until we were laid off,” she said. “I never saw my layoff coming—it was a total surprise.”
The loss of copy editors has been the subject of much lament and debate in this corner, as in other places. But the plight of librarians seems to attract less fanfare and hand wringing, as if we’ve all been shushed from saying something.
Norman doesn’t think things will ever be the same for news librarians.
“I see the news library as it once existed as probably dying,” she said. “But in many newspapers, it’s evolved into something else.”
According to data collected by Michelle Quigley, a researcher at the Palm Beach Post, over 250 news librarians (sometimes called news researchers) lost their jobs in the U.S. since 2007. Membership in the Special Libraries Association News Division, an organization for news librarians, has fallen to below 400 from over 1,000 in the 1990s. Entire news libraries have been shuttered and replaced by consultants or outside vendors.
Last year, the Detroit Free Press got rid of its last three librarians, eliminating the department entirely. Also in 2009, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution let go of fifteen librarians, which also resulted in the closure of its research department.
It’s not hard to see why newsroom budgeters cast an eye towards the library when cuts have to be made. Most news librarians are never given a byline, though some receive research credit at the bottom of articles. The perception is that they mostly help archive a paper, a task that can, to a certain degree, be automated. Just as copy editors get the hook because they don’t generate content and therefore can’t fill space or generate pageviews, news librarians are shown the door because they’re seen as a holdover from a time when newspapers kept detailed clipping files on major topics and personalities, and when the “morgue” was a critical part of a paper’s operations.
Now that every reporter and editor has access to Google and a wide range of search technologies and online databases, the thinking is that they don’t need to call upon the Boolean expertise of librarians. You can see how it makes sense—except then the facts start to get in the way. In fact, the modern news librarian seems in many ways more important than ever. Even those old clipping files still come in handy.
When I spoke with Amy Disch, chair of the Special Libraries Association News Division and library director of the Columbus Dispatch, she said her team had accessed clipping files and hard copy photo archives more than ten times that day alone. But that’s the least of what they do at the paper. In addition to providing research services to support reporters, the library runs a newsroom intranet and wiki, provides data analysis for investigations, and offers a range of other useful services.
Then there’s the reality that just because reporters can access Google or search Nexis and other databases, it doesn’t mean they know how to use them properly.
“Reporters are on deadline and they want to do things as quickly as possible,” Norman said. “Over years, they’ve come to feel, ‘I can do my own research, I don’t need an intermediary anymore.’ Some of the problem with that is they don’t have time to get the best research if they do it themselves. Also, because of the amount of information out there, they may not have the understanding or wherewithal to go through and filter out what’s good and what isn’t.”
True, reporters and editors often make mistakes because they couldn’t find the best information, or because they went with whatever came back on the first page of a Google query. At a time of information abundance, it’s essential that newsrooms have information experts on staff. That’s what news librarians are.
“We can find the information in a lot less time because we know how to drill down in a database,” Disch said. “We know good sources to go to where you can quickly find information, so we can cut a lot of time for [reporters] and leave them to do what they do best, which is interviewing and writing. I have my specialty, and they have theirs.”
Members of Disch’s four-person team are embedded within the newsroom. They sit with reporters and editors and take part in meetings and discussions. If someone needs to find a particular kind of information, they can do it right away. They also fill another increasingly important role: training.
“The paper holds a yearly editorial clinic, and this year our department is getting a featured spot,” she said. “We decided to call our presentation ‘Keeping Current and Paying it Forward’.”
The session will focus on “using RSS feeds and Web monitoring tools, and sharing content via Facebook and Twitter.” The librarians have also given seminars about using Excel, Facebook, and Twitter, and on how to create alerts in Nexis.
That’s not what they were trained to do—and all four Dispatch librarians have masters degrees in library sciences—but Disch said it’s essential they evolve their skills and knowledge to meet the needs of a modern newsroom. That’s true for every position in journalism: evolve or prepare to move on.
Disch makes an effort to keep her team front and center within the organization, rather than hiding away in a musty library. Recently, for the first time, librarian Julie Albert received a full byline in a major front page story about domestic violence. (Albert performed data analysis of court cases.)
The most famous story about a news librarian didn’t involve a full byline. Liz Donovan was working as a librarian at The Washington Post when two young reporters were hunting down a story about a burglary. Yes, I’m talking about that burglary.
At one point, later dramatized in All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein were trying to track down information about a specific person. Off they went to the paper’s library to ask for the clipping file on one Kenneth Dahlberg. Here’s how the scene unfolded, according to a post on NPR’s As A Matter of Fact blog:
The long-haired librarian tells him they don’t have a clip file for Dahlberg. OK. But I checked the photo file, she said, and we do have a picture of him. The photo identified Dahlberg as a Republican fundraiser, and was an important early clue in the unraveling of the Watergate plot. Woodward didn’t ask her to check the photo file; but librarians don’t wait to be asked!
Donovan died in December, at the end of one of the worst years ever for news librarians. The tributes to her, relatively few though they were, reminded me of the obituaries for one of the last great newspaper proofreaders, Audrey Stubbart of the Examiner in Missouri. (Unlike today’s copy editors who often have to perform with pagination and other tasks, her role was to check grammar, spelling, and facts in every part of the paper.) She retired in 2000, and died not long after at the age of 105. Here’s an anecdote from a story about her retirement:
“When we first got computers in the newsroom, it was suggested that we wouldn’t need a copy editor,” said [former sports editor Tom] Dickson, now a professor of journalism at Southwest Missouri State University.

“Well, the first issue came out after that and we found out we needed one. It was a mess,” Dickson said with a chuckle. “Audrey was again asked to read stories.”
Desktop publishing and computers vanquished the newspaper proofreader. Let’s hope news librarians can evolve so they aren’t felled by the Internet and digital archives.

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Jan 13, 2010

New ALA report details economic trends in libraries and 2010 outlook

ALA SealImage via Wikipedia

CHICAGO – At every turn, news reports and research indicate fairly dramatic changes in U.S. library funding, services and staffing – most occurring in the last 18 months. According to a new report prepared by the American Library Association (ALA), libraries of all types are feeling the pinch of the economic downturn while managing sky-high use.

Compiled from a broad range of available sources, The Condition of Libraries: 1999-2009 presents U.S. economic trends (2009), and summarizes trends in public, school and academic libraries across several library measures, including expenditures, staffing and services. The report also highlights trends in services provided to libraries by library cooperatives and consortia.

“This report was prepared to inform and assist library leaders as they plan in these very difficult times,” said ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. “It succinctly brings together diverse strands of data from the past decade to provide a useful benchmark for the library community and its advocates.”

As communities and academic campuses develop future fiscal plans, it is clear that all types of libraries are visibly hard hit. In a fall 2009 report prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 34 states had reported cuts to higher education, which impacts academic libraries; and 25 states had cut funding to K-12, which impacts school libraries. Total state budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2010 are $178 billion, and FY2011 are estimated to be roughly the same.

Public libraries also have been affected. While the full impact of the economic downturn remains fluid and the data challenging to assemble, what is known is that flat funding has been an obstacle – perhaps even a chronic problem - for many libraries this entire decade. Confirming evidence from a 2006 ALA study of public library funding, a 2009 survey conducted as part of the Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study revealed a worsening of funding – about 20 percent reported flat funding continuing in FY2010 and a majority reported budget reductions. Of those with budget cuts, about 20 percent reported 5-to-10 percent reductions in FY2010 from FY2009.

Library trends include:

School Library Media Centers

  • At a time when school enrollment (K-12) is growing, almost all schools reported in 2009 a decrease in funding for information resources, with a median per-student expenditure of just over $12; and
  • Fewer school libraries served more students in the 2006-2007 school year compared with the 2002-2003 school year; and
  • Total SLMC staff grew slightly, then declined in the 2006-2007 school year compared with 1999-2000.

College and University Libraries

  • While student enrollment at colleges and universities has declined since 2004, library use continues to increase. During a typical week in 2008, academic libraries reported more than 20.3 million visits, up from 18.7 million in 2006. They also provided more than 498,000 informational services to groups attended by more than 8.9 million students and faculty, up from 471,000 sessions attended by 8.3 million in 2006;
  • In fall 2008, 72 percent of academic libraries reported providing library reference service by e-mail or the Web, about the same as in 2006; and
  • Operating expenditures rose modestly during the period 2002 to 2008.

Public libraries

  • Total public library circulation and circulation of children’s materials continue to rise. Circulation of children’s materials has accounted for between 32.9 and 35 percent of total circulation between FY2002 and FY2007. Total circulation of public library materials has grown each year – up to 7.4 items per capita from about 6.8 items in FY2002;
  • Most public library Internet services have grown between 2006 and 2008, most notably audio and video content; and
  • Total public library operating expenditures have varied little year-to-year and typically align with inflation rates. Staff account for the largest portion of expenditures, followed by “other” expenditures (technology, utilities, programming, etc.) and collections.

The full report is available at http://www.ala.org/ala/research/initiatives/Condition_of_Libraries_1999.20.pdf. Individual reports by type of library are available at http://www.ala.org/ala/research/index.cfm.

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Oct 15, 2009

Off the Shelf, Onto the Laptop - Libraries Try Digital Books - NYTimes.com

e-books EPUBImage by ceslava.com via Flickr

Kate Lambert recalls using her library card just once or twice throughout her childhood. Now, she uses it several times a month.

The lure? Electronic books she can download to her laptop. Beginning earlier this year, Ms. Lambert, a 19-year-old community college student in New Port Richey, Fla., borrowed volumes in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold and a vampire novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, without ever visiting an actual branch.

“I can just go online and type my library card number in and look through all the books that they have,” said Ms. Lambert, who usually downloads from the comfort of her bedroom. And, she added, “It’s all for free.”

Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.

The idea is to capture borrowers who might not otherwise use the library, as well as to give existing customers the opportunity to try new formats.

“People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it’s a perception we’re always trying to fight,” said Michael Colford, director of information technology at the Boston Public Library. “If we don’t provide this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library altogether.”

About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally downloadable audio books. The collections are still tiny compared with print troves. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-book titles, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of digital books represent less than 1 percent of the library’s overall acquisition budget.

But circulation is expanding quickly. The number of checkouts has grown to more than 1 million so far this year from 607,275 in all of 2007, according to OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries. NetLibrary, another provider of e-books to about 5,000 public libraries and a division of OCLC, a nonprofit library service organization, has seen circulation of e-books and digital audio books rise 21 percent over the past year.

Together with the Google books settlement — which the parties are modifying to satisfy the objections of the Department of Justice and others — the expansion of e-books into libraries heralds a future in which more reading will be done digitally.

“As young people become used to reading virtually everything online,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, “that is going to propel a change in terms of readership of e-books rather than readership of physical books.”

For now, the expansion will be slowed partly because, with few exceptions, e-books in libraries cannot be read on Amazon’s Kindle, the best-selling electronic reader, or on Apple’s iPhone, which has rapidly become a popular device for reading e-books. Most library editions are compatible with the Sony Reader, computers and a handful of other mobile devices.

Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.

But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.

“I don’t have to get in my car, go to the library, look at the book, check it out,” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, which publishes authors like Janet Evanovich, Augusten Burroughs and Jeffrey Eugenides. “Instead, I’m sitting in the comfort of my living room and can say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting’ and download it.”

As digital collections grow, Mr. Sargent said he feared a world in which “pretty soon you’re not paying for anything.” Partly because of such concerns, Macmillan does not allow its e-books to be offered in public libraries.

Simon & Schuster, whose authors include Stephen King and Bob Woodward, has also refrained from distributing its e-books to public libraries. “We have not found a business model that works for us and our authors,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman.

For now, the advent of e-book borrowing has not threatened physical libraries by siphoning away visitors because the recession has driven so many new users seeking free resources through library doors. And in some cases, few library patrons seem to know that e-book collections even exist.

In the Brooklyn Public Library system recently, eight people were waiting for three digital copies of “The Lost Symbol,” Dan Brown’s follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” while 715 people were waiting for 526 print copies.

Some librarians suggest that because digital books never wear out, take up no shelf space and could, in theory, be read by multiple people at the same time, the purchasing model for e-books should be different than it is for print.

Pam Sandlian Smith, library director of the Rangeview Library District, which serves a suburban community north of Denver, said that instead of purchasing a set number of digital copies of a book, she would prefer to buy one copy and pay a nominal licensing fee each time a patron downloaded it.

Publishers, inevitably, are nervous about allowing too much of their intellectual property to be offered free. Brian Murray, the chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said Ms. Smith’s proposal was “not a sustainable model for publishers or authors.”

Some librarians object to the current pricing model because they often pay more for e-books than do consumers who buy them on Amazon or in Sony’s online store. Publishers generally charge the same price for e-books as they do for print editions, but online retailers subsidize the sale price of best sellers by marking them down to $9.99.

“ ‘The Lost Symbol’ is $9.99 on the Sony Reader book page, and I just paid $29.99 for that for the library,” said Robin Bradford, the collection development librarian at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library. Ms. Bradford said she would consider buying additional digital copies if the price were lower. But “to buy nonphysical copies at the same price,” she said, “I just won’t do it.”

Academic publishers have been more willing to experiment with subscription models, inviting libraries to pay an annual fee for unlimited access to certain books. Scholastic Inc., the children’s book publisher, also offers library subscriptions to BookFlix, a collection of picture books that children can read online.

Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, said publishers should regard library e-books as a form of marketing. Many people who browse a library’s online catalog end up buying the books, he said, although he could provide no evidence of that.

Some publishers agree that library e-books, like print versions, can attract new customers. “We’ve always strongly believed that there is a conversion point where they do start to buy their own,” said Malle Vallik, the director of digital content at Harlequin Enterprises, the romance publisher.

In libraries, readers are attracted to free material. Nancy Gobel, a dental hygienist who already downloads digital audio books from her library in Indianapolis, said she currently buys print books. But she is considering purchasing an electronic reader so she can borrow them for free. “I would still continue to buy, but I would download as much as I can,” she said. In many cases, she said, buying “doesn’t make sense.”
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Sep 4, 2009

Archives in Timor-Leste, 2009: Summary update - Timor Archives

Municipal flag of Dili during the Portuguese rule.Image via Wikipedia

My brief on-the-ground exploration of archival developments in Timor-Leste during August leaves me both encouraged and bewildered.

Encouraged because the interest in archival matters I found in Dili in 2003 continues, unabated, to drive several interesting institutional developments and encouraged by the very strong interest in Timor archival materials being held in Australia.

Bewildered by the funding, building, training and personnel difficulties that all archives in Timor face, the uncertainties of government decision-making processes and what seems, in part, a rather negative competitiveness between some developing archival projects.

More on all that later. For now, here is a taste of what Cecily Gilbert and I managed to learn in a few short days in the very busy run-up to the 10th anniversary of the decisive independence ballot of 30 August 1999.

Arquivo Nacional
The National Archive, created to hold past and current government records, was established in the early years after independence. Since 2003 the Arquivo has been allocated a building, but does not yet appear to be a major government priority. A sizeable collection of Portuguese-era administrative records are held in reasonable storage conditions but the Arquivo does not have sufficient storage space to properly house a large volume of seemingly unexamined Indonesia-era administrative records. Transfers of independence-era government records have just begun. There does not appear to be any available listings of collection holdings and public access to the collection remains in planning stages. A detailed legislative basis for the Arquivo Nacional’s existence and function, in draft form in 2003, has yet to be adopted. It’s too early to know the likely outcome of internal government discussion about possibly co-locating the Arquivo Nacional with the planned National Library; the current Director of the Arquivo doesn’t think much of this idea.

CAVR
Materials collected in Timor as evidence for the monumental ‘Chega’ report form the centre-piece of the archives of East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR). Since CAVR’s wind-up in 2005, the Post-CAVR Secretariat has managed the archive, notably conducting a copy program funded under the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme whereby digital copies of original materials are held in London for preservation and (later) access purposes. Both paper and audio-visual materials are currently housed in reasonable archival conditions. Preservation copying of a large collection of audio-tapes of victim statements and other interviews is an important future task which will require significant resources. Access to the archives is possible with applications considered on a case by case basis but is somewhat hampered by incomplete documentation on collection content. Planning for a successor institution is well-developed but currently stalled by Parliament’s continued delay in formally considering the recommendations of Chega. The proposed institution includes a human rights documentation centre based on the existing archive and acquisition of related material from abroad.

Centro Audiovisual Max Stahl Timor Leste (CAMSTL)
Currently housed in part of the Independence Memorial Hall in Farol and directed by the inimitable Max Stahl. In addition to holding historical footage from the occupation years, CAMSTL maintains an active program of recording, for the historical record, video of current events and interviews on Timorese experience of occupation. Timorese employees are trained in camera work, editing and archival procedures and work with volunteers to transcribe all spoken words in footage held. CAMSTL has created a number of films for sale on DVD. Max Stahl has recently concluded an agreement with INA, the French national audiovisual institute, to house archival copies of Timor footage for long term preservation and access. Detailed public listings of the content of CAMSTL are not yet available. We did not have time to learn more about the funding structure and long-term administrative and viability planning for CAMSTL.

National Library
The ‘new kid on the block’ in archival terms, a National Library is under very active consideration at the highest levels. Part-funded by an international donor, a building site has been allocated (but not yet made public), books and temporary storage space have been acquired, plans for appointing an international advisor, beginning staff training and conducting an international design competition are in progress. Planning is the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Virgilio Smith. It remains unclear to us what the final form of the National Library will be. The archival aspect arises from a declared interest by ministerial advisers to acquire for the Library Australian and other Timor solidarity archival materials from abroad and discussion about the possible co-location of the Arquivo Nacional (and other smaller archives mentioned here) with the new National Library. We found considerable resistance to this idea from some of the smaller archives.

Timorese Resistance Archive and Museum
Opened in 2005, the Timorese Resistance Archive and Museum (AMRT) is located near the current (temporary) National Parliament building and the National University. The building houses a selection of Falintil weapons, radios and other equipment along with informational posters and displays of resistance documents (copies). The archival centrepiece of the AMRT is a large collection of documents gathered from resistance figures and supporters inside East Timor from 2002 to the present. Many of the collected documents are currently held in Lisbon at the Mario Soares Foundation (FMS) which has digitised the materials. With the exception of some politically sensitive materials, the digitised copies are available internationally on the internet through the AMRT website (managed by FMS) and a dedicated standalone computer in the Museum building in Dili. Aware of some questions in Dili about the ownership and management of the AMRT, along with some disquiet about documents being kept in Lisbon, a Timorese representative board of management is under construction. Also under construction is an imminent expansion of the existing building to add secure, archival standard storage and work areas and commercial seminar, bookshop and cafe facilities to assist AMRT funding for the longer term.

There’s more, much more, to say about these and other archival matters inside Timor-Leste today. Keep an eye on the ‘Timorese Archives’ section of this blog over the coming month.

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