Aunt Gladys

My grandmother was named for her father's younger sister, Aunt Gladys. In 1972, my grandparents visited my family and a plan was hatched to visit Aunt Gladys. We piled into my grandfather's Lincoln and were off to visit Aunt Gladys in Florida. I remember visiting a very old woman who was too sick to get out of bed. The mosquitoes in the everglades, the rides at Disney World, and the Spanish fort at Saint Augustine.

Recently, I decided to see what I could find out about Aunt Gladys. First, I found out she was married to a cover artist for magazines  - she was his model for some covers. Paintings of her are kept in art galleries. And she was a pin up girl during the teens and twenties. I discovered she was an actress - she appeared in plays on Broadway, and Silent films. Her mother was also on Broadway. Who knew?

She has connected me socially to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For example, I am separated from the Civil War by two degrees because I met her - her father was a Civil War veteran. There are only two degrees to Rudyard Kipling - she appeared in a play he wrote. What else will I find looking at old newspapers from New York?

Cheers!

The Data Driven Librarian

I am a spreadsheet junkie. I like data. I also subscribe to the paradigm that data isn't information until it has context. Information isn't knowledge until it can be used for something. In that light all the data cleaning, analysis, and charting is really an attempt to make information out of data. Once the data is information, it can be used to make decisions and take actions.

Using data in this way sits well with my constituents - mostly Engineers and Scientists. I want to know what people are using, what is costs. I want to know what people want. I want to know what is being taught and what is being research and what is interesting. Ultimately, I'm trying to make the best decisions I can.

Payola, Anyone?

I have been attending a lot about "Open Access" lately. Between attending Open Science: Driving Forces and Practical Realities and Eileen Joy's Freedom, Responsibility, E-Publishing, and Building New Cultural-Intellectual Publics, my brain in still processing Green Open Access, Gold Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, Self Archiving, et al.

Open Science forum two things stood out to me. Dr. John King, from the University of Michigan, made the observation that tenure would end. He didn't know when. He didn't favor it. He was seeing signs that it was ending, a increasing percentage of professors and teachers were holding non tenure track positions. In the afternoon session, The Future of Open Science, one of the state roadblocks is no one wants to pay for Open Science. Everyone likes the idea of freely available peer reviewed papers, but no one is willing to pay for it. Each organization looks to someone else to provide the infrastructure. Publishers don't want to reduce profits for Open Science. Schools see Open Science as an added cost. Agencies don't think they can sell the costs to the public.

The marginal cost of information is extremely low.₁ Many would insist information should be free. It is not. It is like a free lunch. Even if you're not paying for it someone is. Usually they expect something in return. People who create and disseminate information need to have access to broadcast information. That costs something. They like to eat. That costs something. There needs to be freedom to broadcast information and appropriate limits to vet information that could be harmful to others. Enforcement and protection cost money. Sometimes these costs are born by a publisher. Sometimes they are born by the author, sometimes they are born by someone else, usually a government, or an advertiser.

I see a potentially bad scenario: a young researcher is trying to get tenure. The requirements are publication and citation. A paper is accepted at a high impact open access journal. The researcher can choose to pay to have the article open and more likely to be cited, or behind a pay wall. The University does not pay publishing fees for non-tenure researchers. We have a classic catch-22 - if you're tenured you are printed in open journals and cited. In order to be tenured you need to be cited. In order to be cited you need to be in an open access journal. In order to be open in an open access journal you need to pay, but the University doesn't pay publication costs for non-tenured researchers. The problem has an eerie resemblance to payola schemes.

There are a host of things to keep this from happening, not the least of which is funding agencies may allow portions of a grant to go to publication costs. Right now, most publishers wave the price for open access if the researcher can't pay. It will be interesting to see where this all goes.

¹ I would like to see someone actually sit down and figure out the cost of a page of internet information. Not how much does it cost me the user, but how much did it cost. You know, it takes three hours to type and edit one page of 500 words on a computer, assuming a wage of $X per hour, prorated cost of computer equipement/cell phone/tablet, cost of internet connection, server costs to host for a year, etc. what does information actually cost?

Deer in the Headlights at Postdam

Thirty years ago, I woke up early, got into my little red truck and started down US 30 to get to a job. I needed to be there at 5:30 to be ready for the day's round of testing and would be traveling rural roads. Somewhere, in Norwin, I spotted a doe running across the freeway. I didn't spot the buck following her. He saw me and froze.

Jenica Rogers gave the opening remarks at yesterday's session of the Charleston Conference. She likened librarians to the deer in the headlight, unable to move out of the way of the oncoming danger. In her analogy the danger is the ever increasing abusive nature of publisher "deals" for electronic subscriptions and price increases that exceed inflation.

I collided with the deer. The front end of my truck was pushed into the engine. The buck died. The truck died. I didn't work that day. I didn't get paid, and I spent time and a lot of money getting the truck moving again. 

My concern is academic publishing could be like music publishing with the advent of the xerox copier. Musicians upset with the price of sheet music circumvented copyright. Publishers increase prices in an attempt to regain lost revenue. A vicious cycle of price increases and copying ensued leaving fewer music publishers and less available sheet music. Academic publishers are consolidating into relatively large for profit corporations. Technology and changes in laws and regulations are potentially creating environments that are hostile to some business models.

I believe the on-coming lights are a rapidly moving train. The train is the changing information environment. To avoid the on-coming train, libraries and publishers will need to work together to get out of the way. The current apparent hostilities between academic libraries and some publishers could be analogous to labor relations that exacerbated situations like the decline of the steel industry and the collapse of the American automotive industry. Generally, labor and owners lost. Replicating this experience in academic publishing could result in a situation where we all lose.

I would propose a detente of sorts. Both sides would need to make concessions. Publishers need to avoid killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Libraries have budgets, increasing prices, especially subscription prices make this a zero sum game. Solving for this quarter's profits will ultimately end with subscription cuts as libraries look for other ways to provide access to information sources. Librarians will, as Jenica Rogers did, say no when terms become too onerous. Discontinuing packages, requiring long term contracts, and tiered pricing all put pressure on budgets that may result in the hard decision coming sooner rather than later.

Publishers need to look long and hard at the services they provide. It is important to do those services well and to highlight subscriptions are for those services. As long as academic institutions provide the content for free, it is important to make sure the editorial, archiving, and indexing services are truly top notch and justify the cost. High impact factor is not a justification for price. High editorial standards with rapid publication and good findability are.

Librarians need to lose the hostility. Remembering past transgressions doesn't improve the situation today. If you don't like a publisher, don't do business with them. For some academic uses journals are fungible. Often, a researcher needs an article not the article. Librarians should recognize the publishers are providing services. Publishers should be paid for providing those services. Information is not free, it takes  human effort to create and distribute.

I believe publishers and libraries need each other. We need good relations. We need fair pricing. We need a long view to stay ahead of changes. If we don't we may all be looking for a new profession.

Lean, Demand Driven Acquisition, and the Library

I am currently working with a variation of Lean for libraries - it's called demand driven or patron driven acquisition. The assumptions for demand driven acquisition are

• If one patron uses an item, it is much more likely someone else will use the item
• If patrons can find items, they will choose to use items

So, generally demand driven acquisition adds electronic items to a catalog and when the item is request the library purchases the item for the patron's use.

Is this Lean approach really good for libraries? Context matters for Lean. Think about Lean in the context of food supply for hunter-gathers. If you live in a tropical garden of Eden with a fairly constant food supply, storage is nonsensical. Gather, cook, and eat when you are hungry - there will be more later. However, if you live closer to the poles with wide seasonal variation, the equation changes - there will be lean times when little or no food is available. People have developed options to deal with this -

• Gather food when it is plentiful and preserve it for later use
• Migrate to areas with different seasonal patterns
• Ship food from areas with different season patterns

Each of these solutions involves one or more forms of wasted identified by Lean. And that doesn't mean those aren't the right solutions for those situations.

The Library context is an interesting challenge - Libraries have been traditionally been places that bought, stored, loaned, and sold physical items.¹ Many of the costs of libraries still revolve around storing, shipping and processing items. Open stacks make it possible for patrons to sample inventory and make borrowing decisions based on more than the entries in the catalog. Patrons may judge books by information conveyed on covers, surrounding items, and random samples pulled out of the text.

As we move to an electronic era with eBooks, streaming music, and streaming video the context has changed. Items can be purchased and delivered seamlessly to the patron. The supplier takes on the electronic storage costs. The library takes the responsibility to provide a communication connection to the supplier. In the context of reliable high speed internet, limited space, and limited budgets, this feels like the right solution.

As a librarian, I provide access to materials. Sometimes that means, I buy books. Sometimes it means adding a record to the catalog and buying the book when some patron wants it. And at some level I need to replicate the experience of wandering open stacks. And that is post for another day.

1. The separation between bookstores and libraries appears to  be fairly recent. The french cognate for library, librarie is translated as bookstore.

Google and the death of Serendipity

Serendipity : the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/serendipity

I've been thinking about serendipity. Mostly, about whether serendipity can survive the age of search engines. Don't get me wrong - there is power in being able to find something when you seek it. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing something is out there and not being able to find it. But how do you find something you don't know exists?

At least since the practice of open stacks became available, individuals have been able to randomly walk into the stacks and pull any book off the shelf. For past generations this was allowed them to learn beyond a specialize domain. In some sense, it created the continual learning associated with being educated. You could find almost anything and potentially draw influence from something unrelated.

Paper - because it is not easily queried to the word, lends itself to serendipity. A book is pulled from a shelf cracked and assessed - a magazine's contents are scanned. Something unexpected, but interesting enters into an unintended audience with unintended wonderful consequences: something new is created. Some new perspective is gained. Innovation takes place.

How do you preserve serendipity when content is recorded in bits? Web surfing - the now dead practice of following links between sites, is almost extinct. With the rise of search engines it is far easier to look for something and trust the search engine tuners.

It is inevitable; we are moving from the bulk of paper to the access of electrons. The mass of information being produced would overwhelm any attempt to store it in paper. We have more available, but it is better? Are people able to learn from the random? Are there still meaningful joyous surprises happening? How do you preserve serendipity?

Managing Documents

Three things have come together in the last six weeks that have reminded me of the importance of document management:

• I ran a mini-financial audit for a non-profit to prepare for a more formal audit.
• I prepared my personal income taxes.
• I reviewed database usage to assessing which subscriptions to renew.

Each is in a different knowledge domain. Each has multiple dimensions that need to be considered. Each requires deciding when to keep records. 

The first two cases are relatively easy. Financial rules are fairly well defined by accounting principles and various laws and regulations. It is easy to sit down with an accountant, bookkeeper, or lawyer and review the record keeping requirements. In the case of the audit, I was looking for a list of defined records that were need to back specific transactions. The organization has guidelines for the types of receipts and other documents that need to be kept and how to handle exceptions. The organization has guidelines for how long records need to be kept. Similarly, with taxes there are regulations for how long you need to keep records based on how long the IRS or state taxing authority can audit for supporting documents - I am certain the organizational guidelines are governed by these regulations. The database subscriptions are a bit more tricky. There are no clear regulations. Instead there is an organizational need to support organizational goals. In this case, the goals are teaching and research. 

I'm trying to put together questions, I can use to decide when to keep and when to discard documents in a collection. This is my tentative list, and I would think in any organization could create a similar list with the help of financial, IT, and legal departments.

1. Will the documents be used? Are the documents being used?
2. How much does it cost to create and retain documents?
3. Is a document or collection available from somewhere else? What will it cost me to get it?
4. What does it cost to discard or discontinue a document?
5. How long should a document be kept? How long will it have value?

Keep in mind cost in my list is not necessarily just a financial cost, you might also need to consider good-will, convenience, or risk as costs. Is there a better way to think about and manage information?