Interesting piece the other morning on NPR about tomb raiders who plunder historical treasures and sell them. Nothing new here but one aspect of the story really jarred. Seems an international treaty set up in 1970 forms the dividing line between what is acceptable for museums and rich collectors to purchase and what is not. Case in point was a Guatamalan treasure on display in the a Texas museum. The item was stolen but purchased prior to the treaty, so it is ‘legally’ owned by the museum though naturally the Guatamalan authorities feel it is rightfully theirs. The settlement offered by the museum is to create a replica for the Guatamalans to display on site while the museum keeps the original. And apparently this is far more than most museums will offer. The problem is complicated by the arguments made by the collector community that rests on their love of the objects and their willingness to save and keep safe treasures that would otherwise be pilfered, destroyed or ruined. You can read/hear the story at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10457558. The parallels with events in Iraq, one of the birthplaces of civilization, where the state archives have been looted and offered back to the authorities for a ransom hardly warrant further comment. This raises very interesting questions about how we teach information to the next generation of professionals.
NexD Journal on IA and iSchools
The latest issue contains an interesting conversation between various design thinkers and practitioners that makes reference to the emergence of information architecture as a field (http://nextd.org/02/10/2/index.html). I love this quote from Peter Jones:
“Information architecture was more of an activity before 2000, now it’s a well-defined field of practice making aggressive inroads into i-schools, (if not yet the d-schools)”.
Of course, from my perspective it is more that the iSchools are making the inroads into the IA profession but interestingly, the notion of an iSchool seems to have wider currency than some might imagine.
Computer science seeks sex appeal (part II)
Last year I wrote about the search for a sexier topics among computer science types that it was hoped would renew student interest in the field. The latest data indicates that interest in CS as a major appears to have dropped 70% in recent years. Data to be released March 1st by CRA will reveal “a second year of double digit declines” in the number of enrolled CS students: http://www.cra.org/wp/index.php?p=104.
The peak years of interest for the field were the early 1980s and the late 1990s, which may point to a cyclical process (just like the cyclical warming of our atmosphere!) but the current interest levels are equivalent to those reported for the the mid-1970s. No equivalent data exists for information schools or LIS programs but most that I know are informally reporting very healthy enrollments. Of course, most iSchools are graduate programs so the comparison is not entirely fair. That said, computer science graduate programs are reporting declines also but the numbers are still up over their recent lows of 2000-2001. In absolute terms, there are still roughly 50,000 CS graduate students in the US each year, which swamps the number of information program grads by about a factor of 10. Still, these metrics are only part of the story. Our school graduates about 100 people per year and we have no plans to grow this number although there is healthy demand from applicants. A fuller picture also would have to look at the employment patterns of graduates and this is a complicated picture. CS grads generally do earn better than average wages but there are serious declines in employment prospects for programmers and database administrators. Similarly, our grads tend to get jobs pretty quickly (half are employed before they graduate) but the variability in salary is quite significant, depending on where grads ply their trade. As a senior professional told my intro class this week, there will be no jobs for them as traditional catalogers, but plenty of opportunities for them to help implement better information systems and services. Regardless, in the sex appeal stakes, we all know information trumps computation.
iSchool Caucus Panel at ASIST
I moderated a panel of deans at ASIST 2006, all there to discuss the iSchool movement (formerly ‘project’, now ‘caucus’). Panelists were Ray von Dran of Syracuse, Olivia Frost of Michigan, Jim Thomas of PSU, Michelle Cloonan of Simmons, and Linda Smith of Illinois. Almost 100 people turned up at 8am Monday morning to engage and we went to the floor pretty quickly after some introductory remarks from all to learn what people thought. There were more comments and questions than we could get to (and one or two speeches from people who probably wanted to be on the panel) but generally there seemed to be a pattern to the questions.
Many wanted to know what we thought we were up to creating a caucus of schools (the question was phrased many ways but this was the gist). The answer, of course, was ‘to create a new field’. This answer seemed to convince most but not all, and it was with some relief on my part that Marcia Bates stood up and asked if it wasn’t about time that we stopped saying this and actually told people what we thought the new field was. Amen sister! When the ‘new’ answer starts to get old, as it has, it might be time for another one. I have a view but I’ll save that for another entry.
Quite rightly, some seasoned faculty members pointed out that the gathering of deans to talk about a new field was hardly going to be very exciting. We all agreed, that is why there has been an iSchool conference for the last two years to which doctoral students and faculty have flocked. Cue mumbles about how another conference based on this was bad for ASIST and why hadn’t the iSchool deans worked more with ASIST, which led to handwringing from all concerned but the truth is that the iSchool caucus is wary of affiliating with any professional society at this time so as to avoid alienating anyone. Fortunately nobody mentioned the links with CRA (oops). More directly, the caucus is not intended to be another professional society and it may even be only a temporary organization aimed at advancing the ‘new field’ (TM) before riding off into the sunset once it becomes clear that people respond to the term ‘Information School’ with something other than a blank stare. At least, this is my dream — let’s get the field understood a bit better and then move on (and please, no jokes about how many deans does it take to make a field understood?)
There were a number of comments about where the idea for an ischool movement orginated and the history of various developments at schools such as Pitt and Syracuse were outlined. Clearly this is not an overnight development but has been brewing for years, maybe decades. This led to discussion of how being ‘in’ the iSchool consortium could or might benefit our various programs locally and nationally. There is no doubt that many schools feel they should be included and, as a result, feel excluded by the requirements to have a doctoral program, sufficient external grants, and a direct report to the campus provost or chancellor. Naturally these criteria for membership were discussed and I believe most people were happy to learn that the iSchool Caucus has agreed to make affiliation a much more open affair going forward. Stay tuned but you can watch for updates at http://www.ischools.org/oc/
There is no major conspiracy afoot (sorry!). Rather there is a genuine attempt being made here by a group of schools to place the information field on a more stable and yes, visible platform. The schools involved are united by a dream of the future more than an identification with the past and it is possible that with this group taking the lead, many more schools involved in the human and social aspects of information across its lifecycle will benefit. Or we can just argue amongst ourselves, right?
Future of academic libraries symposium
I attended a closed-shop symposium at UT this week on the future of the academic library (http://www.utexas.edu/president/symposium/index.html). The two opening addresses, by James Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan) and Clifford Lynch (of CNI) were models of insightful, powerpoint-free talks that took us through a range of future scenarios (definitely plural!) suggesting major challenges ahead. Duderstadt pointed to the growing need for libraries as learning spaces, not as repositories, and made a case for a world of life-long learners who would engage with universities remotely and repeatedly. I was a little concerned about the presentation of dramatic scenarios for a new cyberinfrastructure of open access without clear examples of real human activities that we could consider, the talk certainly raised the collective sights of the attendees. Clifford Lynch noted specifically that the humanities have thoroughly embraced digital technologies, with new research enabled through text mining, remote access to collections and e-publishing, but he argued convincingly that easy predictions of what lies ahead for scholarship in the digital realm are inevitably wrong.
With only 60 attendees present it was easy to engage and lively discussions were common. I chaired a panel consisting of Dan Connolly (of W3C), Kevin Guthrie (Ithaka) and Alice Proschaka (Yale) on the future of access and preservation which got the crowd going when Dan stated there was no real preservation problem since 95% of clicks on links resulted in the desired result, and Kevin argued that access suffered greater impermanence than preservation in the digital realm. Much depends on how you interpret these points, and we spent much time trying to clarify just what Dan was measuring, but he argued strongly that this is not the same as claiming 95% of sites are permanent, and indeed on the web there is a good reason why we might want and expect some sights to be very transient. The facts need to be established more clearly here and there is certainly a study waiting to happen.
The final session after 1.5 days was an open discussion which led to some interesting summary statements. While it is clear that no university or publisher has the answers, there is real concern that the world is changing and we are not ready. Personally, I think the missing piece is a better understanding of human behavior since scholarship, learning, education etc. reside at the human not the artifact or collection level. The media will always change, but the human need to communicate, share and engage with data can be undertood better and designed for accordingly.
One interesting side-discussion involved the fate of LIS education for this new world of open access, networked and aggregated, personal digital spaces. Jim Neal (Columbia) suggested that the current masters programs in LIS were not really meeting the needs of academic libraries, and this was interpreted by one attendee from another program as deeming them irrelevant (a charge Jim denied). Oddly, nobody here mentioned ‘crisis’, or a failure to teach cataloging as the problem, but the feeling seemed to be that the futures facing academic libraries will not be shaped by graduates of many current LIS programs. No comment from me required!
Update — audio files (mixed quality) of the symposium are available at: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/symposium/
New IA conf
First it was a one-off hot topic meeting organized by ASIST. Then is became a regular conference. Last year the first European IA Summit was launched with a second to follow this year. The IA world expands further with another new conference, OzIA 2006, to be held Sept 30th/Oct 1st in Sydney, Australia. Why Australia you ask? Well the conference organizers can answer that: “There has been ongoing demand for Information Architects in the Australian web industry, a demand which hasn’t ceased, while at the same time there is scant support for professional development and community development”. Learn more at: http://www.oz-ia.org/2006/index.shtml. Thanks to Eric Scheid for the news.
Computer science seeks sex appeal
There is much interest in attracting new students, especially female, to computer science and it has not gone unnoticed by some in that discipline that there is a real image problem. The Computer Research Association, a grouping of some 200 academic departments in computer science and engineering, is doing its best to put the sex appeal back in CS (you mean it was once there?) by inviting anthropologists to give keynotes at their conference (the wonderful Genevieve Bell of INTEL (http://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/people/bios/bell_g.htm) who spoke here at the iSchool two years ago) and trying to sell the message that not only can CS give you a high paying job but it really does deal with exciting ideas. Check out the reports from this year’s CRA gathering at: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/, particularly the accounts of Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research’s address where he argued that there was much excitement still awaiting the CS profession.
I don’t dispute any of this but I would note that the three projects listed as exemplars of wonder are:
–Using any surface as a computing interface
–Human scale storage, where all one’s actions and conversations can be recorded
–Terra scale applications such as mapping the sky and giving multiple attributes to each object
These have real potential for excitement but how much of that stems from the computational aspects that must be solved or from the human and social factors that such innovations might invoke. Unless CS incorporates the necessary methods and theories to handle those aspects then it’s hard for me to get terribly excited. And if CS did incorporate these, then would it still be computer science (and no jokes please about any discipline with ‘science’ in its name not being a real science)?
The serious point here (other than growing the recruitment of more and better balanced student cohorts) is what type of knowledge does it take to deliver successful outcomes for such projects? In my view there is no single discipline that could really tackle one of these three wonder projects successfully, only a multi-disciplinary approach could work. Since we tend to divide up universities into discrete disciplines and put buildings around them to keep outsiders from infiltrating their ranks, there seems to be a problem here. What would it take to create a truly new intellectual space to end the isolation at universities? I think the answer to that is far more important to think about than any specific wonder project and the information school movement might be the appropriate vehicle for trying out potential solutions.
Informatics program at Buffalo disbanded
While iSchools are springing up all over the place, it is not all sweetness and light for this emerging discipline. News from SUNY Buffalo is that their program, formed from the merger of LIS and Communications seven years ago, is now being ‘realigned’. LIS will become part of Education while Communications will join the College of Arts and Sciences. Ostensibly this will enable greater collaboration. The official line is somewhat at odds with the reported comments of others as you can read here: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060620/1006816.asp?PFVer=Story.
There are many reasons why schools and mergers work and do not work so I suspect we will not know the full story here for awhile. The school’s website suggests that original affiliations of faculty lived on with each member still being seen as a professor in LIS or in Communications, and the divisions between these two seem fairly established in the curricular and degree offerings of this program. The provost estimates that the impact on students will be minimal and perhaps that’s the key — there may not really be an informatics program here, just an administrative umbrella under which two quite independent programs reside. Clearly something is not right in such a set up and it’s worth comparing this type of school with others, such as the greenfield program at Penn State which grew from the ground up and has avoided departmentalization.
Are there lessons here for other schools? I would not draw too many conclusions from this example but no doubt others will use this as an dire warning against changing existing disciplinary identities. Stay tuned.
You can read a blog offering the views of a faculty member involved at: http://alex.halavais.net/?p=1457
IA spreading as a discipline
It may not be the first, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an academic position for Information Architecture in a British university. The University of the West of England announced this in Guardian recently: http://info.uwe.ac.uk/vacancies/job_details.asp?ref=L10690/RWS. The position is based in the Dept. of Computing, Engineering and Math Sciences, and asks for experience in librarianship and information science. Glad to see some other people treating intellectual boundaries between disciplines in the information realm as fluid.
The crisis continues
The May 2006 President’s Message in American Libraries, entitled “More on Library Education” presents further thoughts from Michael Gorman on the apparent crisis in library education. He doesn’t mention any names in particular but he argues that the claim made by some (myself included) that there is an agreed core curriculum delivered by most ALA-accredited programs is not supported by the data. At least, I think that is what he says. He then turns this around and argues that if it were true, what is the problem with having ALA ‘enforce its accredidation standards and insist that the programs they accredit both teach and do research in a prescribed set of subjects’.
Surely I am not the only one who sees a slight problem here, am I? Please tell me an external professional society, one committed to open access to information and the free exchange of ideas, would never chose to dictate what is and what is not acceptable research to the academic community. Maybe it’s just the tone and the language, but when words like ‘insist’ and ‘enforce’ are used, it hardly encourages open discussion between the various parties.
Of course this also leaves aside the rather thorny problem of where the lines are drawn. Just what is ‘research in a prescribed set of subjects’, to use his words? At what point is work on reading, comprehension, management, design, evaluation, categorization etc. relevent to and part of LIS and when is it not? I really would hate to have to draw such boundaries, but I would hate more for those with no direct connection to the culture of universities to attempt it on our behalf. Good research is often so because of the implications and lessons others can draw from it. To that end, for a field like LIS there is really no fixed boundary outside of which research is irrelevant since even the most obscure work can provide theoretical or conceptual insights to the right faculty. But I digress……the real issue is who gets to define a faculty member’s and a field’s research agenda? It’s clear that some outside of academia feel that this is their right and they are not shy about saying so. Accreditation as cookie-cutter? Enforced standardization of research and teaching agenda? Welcome to the brave new world of library education.