I spent the weekend in Norman, OK, serving as a guest speaker at the SLIS annual alumni event there (nice idea!). I used the occasion to present the case for moving beyond the fault lines of typical LIS discourse (you know, paper versus digital, the traditional versus the technological etc.) so that LIS educators and professionals might actually engage with the big questions facing us in society (the emerging cyberinfrastructure, challenges to access, disintermediation, the imminent arrival of the rest of the world onto ‘our’ Internet etc.). I enjoyed the event and received enough push back from questions and comments to know that there are others out there who feel something similar. I enjoyed the trip and met lots of smart, motivated students which gives me confidence in the future. I was also (almost) convinced by Suliman Hawamdeh, a faculty member at OU, that I was really talking about Knowledge Management. Since I’ve always struggled to understand KM, it’s engaging to think that I’ve been doing it all along 🙂 I am heading to the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ conference next week, mostly to try and understand better how this group deals with information, and am getting a similar response from these people, namely, the ideas and views I push about LIS education happen to be central to their world too. Now that’s refreshing — outsiders welcomed into the field with encouragement to share ideas. Nobody in KN or CI seems to care too much about my credentials, my accreditation or my commitment to certain words. Now try that on some of the LIS discussion lists.
CLIR workshop on Future of Academic Libraries
Am just back from a very interesting workshop at CLIR where a group of about 20 people discussed the future of academic libraries, launching the discussion with a set of prepared essays from eight of us. Too much was discussed across the day to cover here, and there will be a summary of the event produced by CLIR, but here’s some of what I took away:
1) All academic libraries are facing tremendous change and there is concern with the role and mission of such entities in a world where the myths of everything being available on the web drive the understandings of university administrations and students.
2) While everything will likely be digitized in a decade or so, the provision and preservation of high quality curated collections remains a great unknown. The question of controlling the preserved collection (in house or outsourced?) was thought to be crucial to ensuring longevity of access and quality.
3) The staff needed for the transformations and challenges ahead are not likely to be supplied by typical ALA-accredited programs — indeed a show of hands among the library directors in attendance suggested that none thought the accreditated degree mattered when seeking intelligent and able employees for academic libraries.
4) The Library as Laboratory metaphor was used to convey how academic libraries might better fit with the mission of the 21st century university. This points to the library partnering with faculty and academic computing on experimental projects aimed at delivering cutting-edge services to the academic community. Yes, the term ‘libratory’ was coined (mea culpa, but I could not resist).
5) Better determining the boundaries and possibilities of relationships with the commercial sector (this was a contentious one)
6) The need for collective action (more than collaboration) was deemed vital, meaning that several leading academic libraries would need to find constructive ways of working serioulsy together on more than isolated projects to advance the concerns of academic libraries going forward.
7) Libraries are caught up too much in concerns with products when they should be concerned with processes. For example, there is the danger that emphases on repositories will result in a new emphasis on this as a ‘collection’ instead of on the act of curating digital resources into the future. Our own discussions of the process often seemed to end up with products, emphasizing the difficulties we all face in breaking out of this track.
There was much more and Chuck Henry and colleagues are to be congratulated on facilitating this event. I learned a lot but was also delighted to find so many like-minded people seeing the same problems and opportunities. More to follow, surely.
The poverty of user-centered design
In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there are many examples of designs that really need to revisit their ideas about users, I find the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore. It is not just the case that everyone claims this label as representative, after all, who in their right mind would ever declare their work as not user-centered and still expect to have an audience? It is more a case that truly understanding the user seems beyond both established methods and established practices.
I will leave aside there any argument about the term ‘user’. Some people have made careers out of disimissing that term and proposing the apparently richer ‘person’ or ‘human’, but the end result is the same (though I prefer to talk of human-centered than user-centered myself). The real issue is methodological.
First, claiming adherence to user-centered methods and philosophies is too easy; anyone can do it. Ask people what they would like to see in a re-design and you have ‘established’ user-requirements. Stick a few people in front of your design at the end and you have ‘conducted’ a usability test. Hey presto, instant user-centered design process. If only!
Second, and more pernicious, the set of methods employed by most user-centered professionals fails to deliver truly user-centric insights. The so called ‘science’ of usability which underlies user-centeredness leaves much to be desired. It rests too much on anecdote, assumed truths about human behavior and an emphasis on performance metrics that serve the perspective of people other than the user. ISO-defined usability metrics refer to ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ and ‘satisfaction’. These do not correlate so one needs to capture all three. But who gets to determine what constitutes effective and efficient anyhow? In many test scenarios this is a determination of the organization employing the user, or the thoughts of the design team on what people should do, not the user herself. Maybe this should be called organizational-centric or work-centric design. If I wanted to start a new trend I could probably push this idea into an article and someone might think I was serious.
What is often overlooked is that the quality of any method is determined far too much by the quality of the evaluator who employs it.. Evaluation methods are all flawed, that much is a given, but it is the unwillingness of many people to recognize these shortcomings that should give us all real concern. Here’s but one example. The early Nielsen work on heuristic evaluation has given rise to the ‘fact’ that evaluators find about 35% of usability problems following his method, and if you pool several reviewers you can get a better hit rate. What many people overlook in this is that the 35% figure is not calibrated with real user problems but is based on Nielsen’s own interpretation of the problems users will face. So the 35% claim is really a claim that following his method, you will probably find a third of the problems that Nielsen himself estimates are real problems for users. This is a very different thing. It is interesting that in my own tests with students, this 35% figure holds pretty firm, which is impressive, but you cannot lose sight of what that percentage relates to or you will misunderstand what is going on.
Now of course, there are great evaluators out there but even if all evaluators were great, that would not change the problem with user-centeredness as it currently exists. Too much evaluation occurs too late to matter. OK, this is an old story but what’s changed since this story was first heard? Not enough. If user-centered design really is limited to evaluating and designing for a narrowly construed definition of usability then there is little prospect of change. For a limited range of tasks where I want to be efficient (finding a number in my cell-phone, for example, then current practices are fine, as long as I can prototype quickly) but for the type of deeply interactive tasks that I might spend large parts of my day engaged in (reading, communicating, exploring data etc.) then talk of ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ rings more hollow. But it is preciely this next generation of application opportunity that we need to explore if we are to augment human capabilities. The old usability approach is fine for applications where we are making digital that which used to be performed with physical resources (text editing, mailing, phoning, calculating) but it’s not a great source of help for imagining new uses.
If we could de-couple user-centered design and usability then there might be some benefit but I don’t think this is as important as it might first appear. More important is the very conception we have of users and uses for which we wish to derive technologies and information resources. Designing for augmentation is a very real problem and a great challenge for our field theoretically and practically.
Info careers make the US News Top Job list for 2008
US News put out another list of top careers this week. Apparently they determined there are 31 careers with exciting futures. Among those listed were:
The say average librarians make over $50k a year and are steeped in technology and research activities. If you get into usability (and Library Science is listed under that description as a relevant qualification) you can expect an average salary of over $90k and a warm glow from watching people happily interact with your products. I would not get too excited by this list (or any list, really); they also think hairstylists and locksmiths are top careers too. By your equals, ye shall be known. That said, it’s certainly encouraging to see these types of positions actually considered futuristic and rewarding. More importantly, it’s encouraging that the compilers notices that a degree in LIS might actually set you up for more than one great career.
Future of academic libraries, again
The Council for Library and Information Resources is organizing a one day workshop on this topic next month in DC. I was asked to prepare a white paper of no more than 3000 words dealing with how education for LIS professionals might be impacted. You can now read a draft: Accelerating Learning & Discovery, comments welcome.
The use of technology in schools to be studied (at last?)
Indiana University’s School of Education has received a federal grant of $3m to study how technology is used in the classroom and to what effect. Am pleased there will be more data on this since some of us have conducted significant reviews over the last decade that raised serious doubts about the claims made for improved learning through hypermedia tools. What’s surprising with this latest award are the comments to the effect that this is the first national study of the topic. According to an investigator leading the project “No national study has ever been undertaken to figure out how teachers use technology in lessons and how students learn from that technology” Can it be so? After decades of proclaiming the benefits, of pushing a technological agenda for classrooms, of soliciting millions of grant dollars to support new learning environments, of gaining tenure on the basis of papers and books espousing the power of hypermedia to enhance the construction of meaning, educational researchers are now saying there’s never been a national study of this? And are we to presume that a national study is somehow better or more authoritative than well-designed studies on a class, state or multi-state level? Or is it the case, as some of us pointed out a decade ago, that any well-controlled studies of the effects of technology on learning are pretty scarce in the trendy world of educational research.
Academic Library futures (redux)
I am working on a paper for CLIR that speculates (briefly) on the future of academic libraries. It will form one part of a six-paper presentation for them that aims to stimulate discussion. This has me examining many of the assumptions we make about these libraries and it is obvious many people are thinking similarly. I was pointed towards the Taiga Forum who issued in 2006 a set of ‘provocative statements’ about the future of academic libraries (no longer accessible from their site), and provocative they are e.g., that within five years (i.e., by 2011) we shall witness the following:
– a 50% reduction in the physical size of collections in libraries
– the merger of academic computing and libraries
– no more librarians as we know them (and the new average age to be 28!)
– no more library web sites as we know them (can you resist saying “thank goodness”? Clearly I can’t)
Given that most academic libraries are in universities, I would not get too concerned at the pace of change but the ideas are certainly intriguing. I tend to view libraries more through the lens of socio-technical theory, which makes me view the ongoing shifts as an essential tension between technological advances and social forces that pull, mould, shape and modify these advances in multiple directions at the same time. Given the law of unintended consequences that applies to all new technologies, prediction is a bit of a mug’s game but we can be sure that the basic human drives and interests won’t shift radically in the short term. The purpose of that information space we term ‘academic library’ is not questioned as much as revealed by this tension; the view of libraries as central storehouses of approved documents is already overshadowed by the library as research space and technology hub, though one might not recognize this so easily in the curriculum. But repositorial concerns are born anew in the digital era of resource aggregation and distributed research work. No, it’s not old wine in new bottles, as the cynics would have us believe; there are genuinely new problems for which we have some limited guides from historical practices, but the challenges ahead are great. It seems the people who bemoan these changes and who seek to maintain the academic library as it was, are the people who usually don’t use one for research.
One last provocative statement from Tiaga: “all information discovery (by 2011) will begin at Google, including discovery of library resources”. Must have sounded radical last year, it’s probably true enough by now.
Thoughts?
Aaron Marcus at the iSchool, ASIST 2007, it’s culture time
Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, but he presented an interesting mapping of the general characteristics of cultures (too often for my taste reduced to ‘nationality’) and sample web sites one finds in government, university and large company websites that represent said culture. Fascinating work, but more needs to be done.
The ASIST 2007 conference in Milwaukee this week was also a relatively lively affair. Keynoter Anthea Stratigos from Outsell presented a fast paced look at the world and I believe surprised many of us with the statement that China was fast becoming the leading English-speaking nation in the world. No reference provided but if it is even close to being true, what are the cultural implications? If nothing else, why do relatively recent listings of countries where English is spoken, even if not recognized as an official language, seem to make no mention of this? The best I can do to track this comment is back to the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who apparently predicted that Chinese speakers of English would outnumber all other English-language speakers in the world by 2025. Sound bite as science?
I also had a chance to talk with Tefko Saracevic and Don Kraft about changes they had seen in submissions to their respective journals (Information Processing and Management and JASIST). Tefko noted that he witnessed as many submissions in the last few years as he had received in the 15 preceding years, a fact he attributes to the emergence of information research in China and India. Could the day come when American and European scholars will compete to submit to Asian journals? If it happens it will seem inevitable and obvious with hindsight, but will it happen? One suspects there are many forces at work here, only some of which we recognize. In the meantime, this submission glut has pushed up the rejection rates for these journals to record highs.
I took part in a panel on Digital Genres that, despite its theme, drew a large and very lively audience at 8.30 am Tuesday morning. This really was a panel (not an attempt to sneak papers past reviewers) to which each presenter was limited to 3 minutes and then had to answer questions. Before we knew it, the audience got stuck in and took us on a tour of the problems with definition, the lack of appreciation in the field for earlier work, the absence of a well-informed archival perspective, the value of genre in searching and the emergence of genre in the digital realm. This was the hightlight of my conference sessions but of course, I am biased.
Tired of physically going to a university?
Then check this out – get your real accredited degree through second life. As one of the instructors put it, without a hint of sarcasm, some people are not very comfortable with their first life so……
ALA special task force on education
Outgoing ALA president Leslie Burger announced a new presidential task force this summer to synthesize the ongoing efforts by ALA to advance LIS education (I am choosing my words carefully here). Its workings are somewhat mysterious but presumably we will be told more when it reports next year. It’s membership includes former presidents Michael Gorman, Leslie Burger herself, and Carla Hayden (as chair), but it lacks the present president, Loriene Roy, which is most unfortunate since she alone among these is a tenured faculty member currently working in LIS education.
Of course, like everyone, I want to see improved standards of education but unlike some, I don’t actually believe that rewording the existing standards is the way to go when there are so many other problems that need fixing first. The language used in the former ALA-president’s April 2007 column in American Libraries makes me worry about how this committee views education and libraries. Its traditionalist tone implies more prescription of education by outside constituencies and a narrowing of perspective that could drive quality out of our programs. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe they will take a hard line on the diploma mills. Maybe they will argue for LIS extending beyond narrow interpretations of librarianship. Maybe the committee will recommend that accreditation actually does more than ask people to swear allegiance to libraries and to complete endless self-assessments. Maybe they will use data to inform their opinions. Maybe they will actually listen to the schools and not confuse education with adherence to canon. Let’s see. But it’s been a long time since ALA was led by an academic. What a pity the opportunity provided by this rare co-occurence of leadership bridging the profession and the academy was not seized for the benefit of both.