As the title suggests, there was a lot going on in this session.  The three speakers included a library dean (Paula Kaufman), a digital humanities director (Laura Mandell), and a digital humanities librarian (Glen Worthey).  Although, as Glen Worthey pointed out, the title of the session doesn’t mention digital humanities anywhere, the session was largely about digital humanities, which is not something that is currently relevant to my job. However, I find it very interesting and am trying to keep up with things for the time when it may become relevant.  The other theme of the session had to do with collaboration, especially interdepartmental collaboration, and I enjoyed that the speakers dealt with that in a thoughtful way.

Paula Kaufman, Dean of Libraries, UIUC

“Let’s Get Cozy: Evolving Collaborations in the 21^st Century”

Kaufman mostly focused on collaborations and the requirements for collaborating well.  She talked about why we collaborate (to do things we can’t do well alone, to create tools, to share resources) and how to collaborate.  She cited an author named Cantor who had done studies on collaboration, who set out this process for collaboration:

1.  Find collaborators based on self-analysis, good chemistry and compatibility
2. Explicitly set the rules of engagement.  Set boundaries.  Try to articulate exactly what the responsibilities of each collaborator will be.
3. Articulate goals and visions, while identifying governance and legal issues
4. Plan for the end of the collaboration.

She discussed interdepartmental and state/regional collaborative efforts, and pointed out that some of them, like the Hathi Trust and the Digital Preservation Network are collaborative efforts among librarians, technologists, subject faculty and administrators.

One thing Kaufman has learned from all this collaborative work is that, as she put it, you need to build your own table. You don’t want to go to someone else’s table, because there you are an invitee. You want to be a collaborator rather than a guest.  To make this possible you need administrative support.  We can’t do most of our work alone anymore, so we need to work together in new ways at new tables.

How do you build a table? You need to work with your director, who, in most cases, works directly under the provost and often meets with deans.  This can help you to establish these relationships.  You need to ask for committee charges, too—another way to build the table.  We also need to respect our own knowledge. Librarians should not take the servant-like attitude that faculty members need to come to us and ask us to do things for them.  We have a lot of knowledge and should approach faculty colleagues the same way we approach library colleagues.  This has always been a symbiotic relationship, but we haven’t always approached it that way.

***

Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media and Culture at Texas A&M

From a humanities faculty perspective, there is a divide between research and service: service is not research. Digital humanities proves that this is wrong. We had this idea that librarians create the infrastructure and humanities faculty provide the meaning, but infrastructure is not separate from meaning. We know print books so well that it’s easy for us to overlook how they are designed, but new formats clarify this for us.

Mandell argued that research is a design problem, and cited some prominent digital humanities projects as evidence:

• The Rossetti Archive
• The William Blake Archive
• The 19^th-Century Concord Digital Archive
• The Poetess Archive

These projects help us to put texts side by side in a way that wasn’t possible before.  This is a design problem.

Bigger projects, like the Hathi Trust and the DPLA, bring infrastructure and research closer together by creating opportunities for toward network-scale scholarship and curation.  We can have tech-oriented librarians working with faculty who care about big data sets.

Other digital humanities projects show that things that would traditionally be considered service, like teaching semantic searching or doing TEI-encoding of poetry, can be research.  The Collected Letters of Robert Southey pull out all the names of Southey’s correspondents, and distinguish between those names and the names he’s writing about.  This requires a lot of knowledge both of Southey and of the math on which all this is built. In fact, it doesn’t end at the metadata; it’s data structures all the way down. We’ve eliminated the boundaries between the cover and the book.  The Early Modern OCR Project, which is developing better OCR, is another good example; it needs to be done by people who can accurately read the original texts.  They’re building partnerships with vendors, submitting projects for peer review at NINES, and getting them approved by MLA.  This is scholarly work that requires collaboration among librarians, literature specialists, and technologists.

***

Glen Worthey, Head of the Digital Information Service at Stanford.

“How Library DH Is Made”

Worthey began by noting the absence of the term “digital humanities” in the title of the panel and a certain weariness toward this term in general.  It sounds like a tech buzzword, but his talk explored the origins of digital humanities.  He referred to an important article by Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is Made.”  This article analyzed Gogol’s short story, “The Overcoat,” in terms of its skaz, or stylized voice, which represents a form of orality. It focuses on tone and style, showing that the narrative voice is really gestural.  By focusing on the story’s formal elements, which at the time was a new mode of analysis, this article marked the beginning of Russian Formalism.  Later formalists developed this idea further.  Shklovsky introduced the idea that art is a device for making things strange.  Tynianov advocated for the study of noncanonical writing.

Now we have digital humanists like Franco Moretti, who wants to map the style of the entire literary landscape through distant reading, and Matt Jockers uses network graphs to show stylistic similarities among authors.  These projects focus on the formal, stylistic aspects of literature, much like the formalists.  Jockers’s work with graphs defamiliarizes the texts by visualizing them.  In fact, the Literary Lab’s first pamphlet was titled “Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment.”   Digital humanities is a way of looking at how literature is made.

Libraries provide the raw material for this work.  We select procure, and curate the raw materials.  Library digital humanities is done by recognizing that DH has been around for a long time.  It’s serious scholarship, not to be accomplished by slapping on a title.  We need to commit to supporting digital humanities structurally.  We have to become makers and collaborators, because even faculty who won’t approach us as collaborators can’t do it by themselves.

I am writing up my notes from ALA 2013 and thought it might be nice to post some of them here where people can see them.  I’m doing this one session at a time, and I’ll start with the Unconference; stay tuned for more posts!

The ALA Unconference this year was different from unconferences I’ve attended in the past.  The room was perhaps half the size it should have been; it was very crowded, too many people were forced to squeeze in at each table, and several folks tried to get in but ended up standing at the door or sitting along the wall, which didn’t exactly facilitate discussion.

Since there was no room for people to move from one table to the next, the format was also a little different from what I’m used to seeing.  Traditionally, unconference participants propose topic, vote on them, and then self-assign themselves to tables at which the topic most interesting to them is being discussed. Often, there is a second session for which the participants switch tables.  However, in this case, we voted on several topics which we then discussed as a group, one by one.  I was a few minutes late, so I’m not sure exactly how the decision to change formats was made, but I think that the tiny space had something to do with it.  It was interesting getting to hear from more people and cover more topics, but the discussion had far less depth.

The first topic was “Changing Roles,” but it veered almost immediately into a discussion of the change in user expectations and meeting users’ needs online.  Some participants felt that users now value convenience over privacy, are less willing to wait, and want customized recommendations.  Patrons want information about their prior activity, which libraries do not retain for privacy reasons, although some catalogs allow opting in to this data.  The problem is allowing patrons access to their own data while keeping it private from everyone else. One participant suggested that it may be technically possible to design a system that does something like this, but because librarians and ALA value privacy so highly, it is unlikely that such a system will be made available.  One librarian suggested that patrons’ desire for such a system may open up some good opportunities for talking about privacy and what they are giving up, which many in our society are not considering deeply.  Another librarian pointed out that there are many patrons who do appreciate the privacy of their data.

A few other topics related to changing roles were also discussed, including many comments on reference.  One librarian noted that there are no more middle of the road questions, only directional questions and serious, complex research questions.  Some library users aren’t aware that we answer these questions or seem to feel guilty about asking them, which shows that more outreach is needed. One participant suggested that we need to do more promote all the services that are available in libraries, but also pointed out that there is no budget for this.

The second topic was about new metrics.  Two of the participants were using interesting new assessment tools: Gimlet which compiles more complete reference statistics, and SUMA ,which assesses the use of space. Another participant had recently participated in LibQual and had found that the qualitative comments were the most useful part, although they had to be carefully coded.  There was an interesting discussion about comments generally and how seriously to take them. One participant said that he takes the comments most seriously when they reference something that happened one time, because they are more trustworthy than comments that say things like “usually” or “sometimes.” Others said they trust negative feedback more than positive feedback, and noted that there’s usually more of it, because when people are angry, they write things down.  It’s also important to know who is commenting; comments made online are often taken less seriously because they may not be from a patron.  What is difficult is getting feedback from non-users or feedback about things we don’t have.

There was a brief discussion about why and how we use metrics. Are they for accreditation, assessment, or for learning outcomes? Are we using them to learn more about our services or to get something out of our respective administrations?  The answers to these questions should tell us something about the kind of data we need.

Finally, a few other ways of assessing were mentioned. Taking pictures can be very powerful; one library used pictures showing trip hazards to apply for a grant to put in more power outlets. Others were interested in gathering feedback via social media.  The most old-fashioned of metrics, money, was also mentioned; it’s important to assess the budget to see whether it aligns with library goals.  Of course, assessment itself also costs money.

The third topic was “Enhancing Customer Experience.”  Personally, I have a particular aversion to referring to library users as “customers” and also to the sort of business jargon used here.  However, that was what was used. What’s interesting is that throughout the discussion, the moderator and others tended to shy away from it.

This is also the part of the unconference during which the weaknesses of this discussion format were most apparent; many issues with little relationship to each other were brought up and acknowledged, but then the discussion moved on.  There was very brief discussion of very disparate topics.  For instance, the question of homeless patrons was considered, as were food and noise in the library. One participant suggested candy and puzzles as a way of being more inviting and hospitable, while another talked about her experience in a one-room library where there is not enough space to have both quiet and noisy areas.  There was also some discussion of design aesthetics for both digital and physical spaces, including talk of coffee shops and why people choose them, and the use of patron participation. One library was renovating and had made some flyers on the temporary wall available for kids to decorate.

The final topic was collaboration and resource sharing.  Many librarians shared stories of outreach and collaborative projects.  There is no way of consolidating these examples, so I’ll just mention a few of my favorites.

One participant, a public librarian, spoke about collaborating with the local university and public schools through the One Book, One Community program.  This allows the community to engage with students. They use a parallel program wherein they use a children’s book that has a theme or element similar to a book for adults. Teachers incorporate it into their curricula.  This unites academic, public and school libraries.

There is a collaboration effort among the University of Illinois, Fab Lab and the public library called the Teen OpenLab.  Creating a community FabLab for teens.  They have all kinds of tech stuff so they can all come together for youth-oriented education program.

A librarian from a Minneapolis/St. Paul nontraditional college works with the community branch of the public library in a campus building.  The collaboration goes both ways; it encourages students to go back to school and there is a shared book club.

There was also some discussion of the challenges with collaboration; these include license agreements but have more to do with finding good partners.  A school librarian pointed  out that school librarians are very busy because they essentially have two jobs, so a better way of framing a proposed collaboration is to show that you are offering something useful rather than bringing them a new project.

Ultimately, I’d have to say that the strange format and the small space of the unconference hurt its usefulness.  Unconferences are often better at identifying problems than solving them, but this tendency was even more extreme under the circumstances, because there was little opportunity for real discussion.  I understand that there have been some complaints and expect a more typical unconference next time.  However, I hope that my summary has show that it was at least of some use.

I appear to be a bad blogger, or at least, not a very prolific one.   Hmm. Perhaps I can do better.

There’s a post that I began writing late last semester and never finished, after seeing Lane Wilkinson’s presentation on libraries and transliteracy. It’s a very interesting presentation and I recommend following the link to check it out.

For those who don’t like to follow links, however, I’ll summarize.  Wilkinson gives several definitions and a very clear overview of the concept of transliteracy, which many in the library world have been promoting as a new way of thinking about how students use information. It’s distinct from information literacy because rather than emphasizing the formal organization of information and the steps that one might take in order to use it well, it describes the practice of navigating among several different kinds of media in order to create/access information.  Wilkinson connects this concept to information literacy by arguing that information literacy can give students transferable skills that they can use in whatever medium they are operating. The need to access, evaluate, and integrate information doesn’t go away just because students may be reading an article and integrating what they find into a presentation that they subsequently turn into a video and put online with commentary. Wilkinson suggests that librarians need to focus on the skills that students can use in all of these situations and avoid what is specific to particular types of resources.  Instead, we can show similarities among many kinds of resources.

My reaction to this was simultaneously strong and ambivalent.

I have a bit of a composition background—certainly not as strong as some folks, but I’ve studied enough of its theory to become immediately suspicious whenever I hear the term “transferrable skills.” I encountered it in a department in which we were very carefully taught that writing is a deeply context-dependent activity which depends heavily on understanding the accepted practices of the community in which one operates and the expectations of whatever genre one is attempting. At the same time, we were cautioned that writing is often thought about as a transferrable skill—that there is an unreasonable expectation that we can put students in a first-year composition class and prepare them to write well in business, nursing, sociology, philosophy, whatever.  It doesn’t quite work that way.  Obviously, it does not follow that no skills whatsoever are transferrable, but as I hadn’t thought carefully about whether that might be the case with research and information, I felt very cautious about the assertion that it involves such skills. Research is a different domain, but a related one, and I wanted to think about this.

In my library, we have subject specialists, who liaise with different departments, with the idea that some of us are more familiar with how information in each field is organized, what sorts of keywords one might use, what kinds of resources are most appropriate to particular inquiries, and so on.  This is a fairly common system, and of course it doesn’t always work perfectly—I know that in many libraries, librarians with little expertise in a subject may nevertheless be assigned to it—but the premise is that there are differences in different types of information. My experience suggests that there is truth to this, and actually, it seems to follow naturally from the idea that the writing is different in each of these disciplines, because different types of materials will have different rules and knowing those rules is very helpful when it comes to searching. This is a matter of subject content, of course; does format work the same way?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  I know I use different strategies when I am looking for articles than I do when I am looking for books. I look in different places and I use different keywords (broader for books, because books are broader in scope).  I take into account whether I am searching full text or whether there is some kind of indexing.  When I’m searching the Web, I’ve noticed that Google (and perhaps other search engines as well?) actively encourages what I would consider “bad” searches in another context—for instance, searches that use full sentences or ask questions—and they often seem to actually work!  Video searching is very limited and is something I don’t know as much about as I’d like.  So there are different rules when it comes to the technical aspects of searching.  The more conceptual stuff may be different too.  For instance, we know a lot about evaluating sources based on their scholarliness or other closely related attributes—but a student who is doing an intensive multi-media presentation may have other criteria in mind.  Maybe such a student is looking at images and needs them to be visually compelling and available under a Creative Commons license that would allow re-use.  Do we teach that? Do we even think about this sort of thing when we talk with students about evaluating sources?

Wilkinson recommends starting from the similarities and teaching by analogy. This is a really interesting idea, but I think we have to carefully think through what the similarities are and understanding where the analogies break down.  I am wary of teaching students that an unfamiliar kind of research is just like a familiar kind of research, except for X, Y and Z because I fear that it may set up unrealistic expectations and cause frustration down the road—especially since many of them already feel they know more than they really do.

However.  It is interesting and, I think, useful, to see the relationships among different types of research activities. The way you get around the non-transferability of writing which I described above is to help students understand what the landscape is and where the differences come in.  Beginning writers are taught to understand unfamiliar genres by looking for good examples of that genre, to try to understand what the community expects, and in general by becoming good at figuring out what the rules are.  Maybe it would be useful to think about research in a similar way.

So that was my sticking point. The other point that caught my interest, though, had nothing to do with that.   I was astonished and, actually, delighted to hear the description of transliteracy, because I had heard of transliteracy before, but I hadn’t realized that it was actually what I was working on! At the moment, I’m very interested in the rise of e-books and am trying to figure out whether they will be useful, will continue to grow in popularity, and so on.  Currently, I’m trying to see how these different reading media—print books, e-books, online articles, things students print out—all fit into students’ lives and how and when students decide to use one instead of another.  This is one kind of transliteracy, and I’m happy to be able to put a name to it, even if it’s sometimes considered a rather silly one.

(Note: I’m not a copyright expert.  If I’ve made any factual errors here, please feel free to point them out. )

Last month, I spent a lot of time putting together an exhibit on the public domain.   It was a very interesting process for many reasons.

I’d initially planned to organize it based on date. I wanted to show what had fallen into the public domain at different periods of history, in order to make a strong visual point about the end of the twentieth century, which has been characterized by no new materials entering the public domain.  In the end, this was a bit too difficult and precise, so I organized it by medium instead, but as I was doing the research for this exhibit, I found myself thinking about it from a slightly different angle.

Since the 1978 copyright act worked retroactively to extend the length of copyright on everything that wasn’t already in the public domain, nothing has entered the public domain since it passed.  Curiously, we have had another copyright extension between then and now, so we’ve pushed it back even further without allowing enough time for works to expire under the previous law.  There’s plenty of commentary out there about the problems with extending it so far, but the problem that I think hasn’t been sufficiently discussed is the increased difficulty of identifying public domain material under the current term.

This is a serious problem with basing copyright terms on the life of the author rather than the date of publication.  Prior to 1978, works would remain under copyright for a specified amount of time, with one extension allowed.  The 1910 law allowed for a 28 year term with a possible extension for another 28. It’s possible to debate about whether that was long enough, too long, or whatever, but at least it was a known fact that after 56 years, a work would be in the public domain.

The 1978 law changed this certainty by basing copyright on the length of the author’s life.  It said that copyright would last until the author had been dead for 50 years; in the 1990s, this was extended to 70 years.  This means that an additional piece of information is needed to determine the copyright status of a work.  In 1955, it was absolutely certain that every work published in 1899 or earlier was in the public domain.  A person wanting to create interesting derivative works without a license could easily compile a list of works that had been published by that date and choose among them.  After all, publication date is one of a few pieces of basic bibliographic information that is attached to everything that is published and can be easily searched.  Works that had been published from 1927 onward might have been in the public domain, but it depended on whether they’d been renewed, so those works would have had to have been evaluated one by one (and finding out whether a copyright was renewed is not as easy as one might hope).

Right now, our situation is fairly similar, except that the dates in question are much more distant. The magic date is 1923; almost anything published before that is public domain (with some weird exceptions for GATT and music recordings, but let’s not get into that now).  Works published between then and 1950 may be in the public domain if their copyright was not renewed.  However, these works require additional labor to identify and so they get less attention.  In general, 1923 is treated as the magic date because it’s a clear line and it’s relatively easy to work with.  HathiTrust is trying to do some of this important identification work, but it’s a major undertaking to do anything like this on a major scale.

So, the practical public domain tends to end at the end of what can be easily and clearly identified—in this case, at the magic date of 1923.  What does this mean in the future?

In 2019, barring any further copyright extensions, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, giving us a new magic date. (Works that were already under copyright when the 1978 act was passed were granted a 95-year term.)  This will carry us through to 2072, when the new magic date becomes 1977—and that will be the new magic date.  By then, some works will also have entered the public domain under the new rule—that is, all the work of any author who died in 2002 or earlier.  So, a work published in 1979 would still be under copyright if its author had lived beyond that date, but a work published in 2001 by an author who died the following year would be copyright-free.  This is odd, but what is more troubling to me is that the latter work would be unlikely to be treated as a public domain work.  What’s more likely is that those looking for works in the public domain will focus their efforts on looking through works from the middle of the twentieth century. Works between 1977 and 70 years before the current year will fall into a zone of uncertainty where additional effort is needed to figure out what can and can’t be done.  In my example this gap is only thirty years, it’s not a huge problem, but after this point, the magic date will no longer advance, so the gap will only grow.

Now, finding out who the author of a work is and when that person died isn’t a very difficult problem for an individual work.  It’s certainly much easier than trying to figure out whether a copyright was renewed.  My concern here has more to do with identifying many items at once.  Suppose, for instance, that one wanted to engage in large scale digitization projects. With a date-based system, it is very simple to search for a particular date. On the other hand, the date of an author’s death is not immediately considered basic bibliographic information, and it’s quite difficult to get it included, since when a work is published, we do not usually know when the author will die—so the only way to do this is to find out, every time anybody dies, whether he or she had written, painted or recorded anything and then add that information to every record that exists.  I’m not sure who is supposed to be responsible for keeping track of that.  Even on a smaller scale, it’s not going to be easy to identify items that aren’t already known to be public domain, especially if they are not famous already.

Yes, this is a long term concern, it’s too late to worry about it anyway, and it’s not nearly as pernicious as some other disturbing things that have been happening in the realm of copyright lately, but I do think it’s something that wasn’t adequately considered when these laws were passed.



In another lifetime, I was a writing teacher.  I taught first-year composition, and, before that, I worked in a writing center. In fact, a writing center is where I really started to learn about teaching.  This means that I still think of learning through a writing-centric lens at many times, and that I have high expectations of writing centers and very specific ideas about what I think they do there that may not actually apply to any particular writing center.

So, when I am working on the reference desk, I often end up doing things that could very easily be described as writing instruction. I don’t usually look at drafts, but I help students interpret assignments. I work with them on their topics to help them figure out what is feasible and to determine the appropriate breadth of a paper topic.  I talk with them about how sources can be used.  Sometimes we talk about scholarly discourse, though I don’t use these words explicitly. Some of this probably comes from the background I’ve described, and some of it is just the nature of the reference desk. Students who come to the reference desk are often writing papers, and their struggles are sometimes related to sources and sometimes stem from an unclear idea of exactly what is expected of them or exactly what they want to do.

When I worked in a writing center, we were committed to working with students at all stages of the writing process. We often talked about research—it’s part of writing, after all—and we were very conscious of figuring out where students were in the process.  We were pretty explicit when talking with them about this process and what we thought the next steps were, and we were realistic about not being able to take the paper all the way to where it needed to be in a single session. It was important to give some thought to exactly what could be done at that particular moment and to be aware that there are other stages and other relationships involved in students’ writing.

I think this is a good model.  I think librarians do a lot of these things instinctively; at least, I hope we do, because we don’t spend a lot of time talking about it.  We talk about the reference interview and finding out what a student’s needs are, but not about identifying what stage the student is stuck at, and certainly not to make these connections to writing.  The ACRL information literacy standards appear to describe a (simplified, idealized) linear research process, and we don’t always complicate it by talking about how messy research can be in real life—and if research is complicated, teaching research certainly isn’t simple! But our models tend to simplify.  I have often encountered an assumption that we intervene at a very particular part of the writing/research process and that the help we provide to students is very specific—that we help them to identify useful resources and demonstrate how they may do so for themselves.  In reality, though, sometimes helping the students to understand what they need involves delving into this writing process.

But it can be overwhelming to encounter a student who needs serious writing help at the reference desk.  Such students may well see my writing advice as peripheral to their question, since after all, they don’t expect writing help from a librarian.

I talked with some librarians at ACRL who were presenting posters on writing center/library collaborations; it seemed at the time like such an obvious, brilliant thing to do, and it still seems that way. I wonder if there are other ways to build up relationships with the writing folks on my campus.