Infomatters

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The true cost of knowledge: Elsevier boycott grows

A campaign organized under The Cost of Knowledge banner has thousands of scholars agreeing to boycott Elsevier publications by refusing to submit or to review articles for any of their journals. Since Jan 21, when Tim Gowers at Cambridge University blogged about what he saw as the unfair economic practices of the publisher, the campaign has grown quickly. In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education the publisher argues that they really add value to the whole knowledge distribution chain but it’s hard to have sympathy when they acknowledge indulging in price gouging during for a couple of decades before claiming “we got it wrong then…but we’ve become good citizens”.

Blaming library budgets for not keeping up is a curious tactic here but the reality is that academics are slow to organize alternative publishing options. Yes, scholars provide the raw material of research and reviewing, and are ultimately the arbiters of quality, but the record needs to be managed, maintained and organized for use if it is to work. I think someone should create a new role for people who do that 🙂

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Accreditation and lip service

“In the drive of an occupation toward professional status a substantial amount of attention is devoted to education and the establishment of professional schools, and accrediting bodies are created to watch over standards of educational performance. Too frequently these standards are more concerned with the outward manifestations of academic achievement than with the intellectual content of the discipline to be taught: the amount of study required beyond the baccalaureate degree, the number of faculty who hold the doctorate, the extent of ‘research’ activity as indicated by faculty publication, and other considerations that can be reduced to statistical quantification. Lip service is given to creativity and innovation but excessive departure from traditional course content may well be regarded with considerable suspicion.”

The words above came to mind when I listened to the latest news on accreditation at ALISE where the deans and directors were all informed, to our surprise, that more stringent reporting of student learning outcomes would be part of future accreditation exercises. These insightful words are from Jesse Shera, then dean of the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University, writing in 1967 for Science.  It seems from comments from others in Dallas that there is little real input ever from the academic side on accreditation and we are left subject to the whims of the year (currently learning outcomes but these are just added to previous years’ whims as additional burdens) in an endless compliance exercise. Isn’t it about time schools stopped ceding education standards to groups who neither understand universities very well nor seem particularly well-informed on learning theory (and show no interest in correcting their deficits)?  Check back in another 45 years….

  1.  Ref: Shera, J. (1967) Librarians against Machines, Science, May 12, Vol 156, 746-750.
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ALISE 2012 done and dusted

I spent the week in Dallas at the ALISE conference which I co-chaired with the irrepressible Toni Carbo this year. Despite what people might tell you, chairing takes its toll but I was pleased with the results. I led the portfolio review section on Tuesday pm which involved meeting with (mostly) soon-to-be doctoral graduates who wanted to discuss their resume and interview tactics. I was ably assisted by a team of fellow academics and I believe we advised more than 20 interested participants in three hours. The process is rewarding even if neither group entirely understood in advance what the session would entail. That needs improving next year but the quality of resumes I reviewed was impressive.

Opening keynote speaker was David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, who gave a very engaging and direct explanation of NARA and the changes he was leading within that organization. I smiled when he reported that upon his appointment he was met with minor outcry in some quarters that he was not an archivist really but a librarian! I smiled further at his conviction to break down the barriers between libraries, archives and museums so as to focus each community on the essential similarities of their roles. Music to many of our ears I am sure. A lively Q&A followed and David was not shy about expressing his views on most issues (except SOPA!).

This year we imposed stricter review standards on papers and while most people seemed to think this improved the conference there were, as expected, some dissatisfied folks who did not get their work included. Not sure how people can expect us to have a vibrant program and more open acceptance but the number of opportunities for poster presentations means there is a way of enabling participation by those who otherwise could not get funded to come. Have to say, I have never been a fan of poster sessions though. I appreciate the opportunity for inclusion but I really dislike the dynamics which puts pressure on everyone to speak or listen in such a structured manner even when it is clear that mutual interest is limited. Variants that include 1-minute madness sessions are useful here as then every presenter gets a moment but when room layout dictates floor traffic, you know some folks are going to have a less than productive experience.

For the final session I led an interactive (and it was) session examining how ALISE, ASIST and the iConf might work better together. The idea was to engage the three main conferences where faculty and deans of LIS programs engage each other in research and education discussions but naturally I offended some other organizations by leaving them out. The general feeling I left with suggested there is some mileage now in our thinking collectively about reducing overlap, bringing relevant events together and even, given a suggestion by Marcia Bates (star of ALISE 2012 in my view) rethinking our various groups into a collective within an umbrella organization not unlike the structure of ACM. Time for an International Association of Information Societies anyone?

Downsides were few – but heaven help us, conference hotels on the side of the interstate that require you to find a cab just to get dinner should be blocked at the building approval stage. Yes, I know it’s Texas, and conference hotels are booked years in advance but if you’re spending more on cab fares than anything else, something’s wrong with the location. As always, you can’t be in two places at one time so no doubt I missed something or someone I should have seen but that’s life at a conference.

 

 

 

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Aesthetics no match for logistics: experiencing a phone as a system

Hard to know if Steve Jobs ever experienced customer service from AT&T but if he did, one imagines he got more out of them than the rest of us. In trying to activate my new iPhone 4s I received the standard delays from AT&T that many have reported but with a few more wrinkles along the way that speak loudly to the poor user experience design underlying that company’s service operation.

First, the instructions I received were wrong. My phone, ordered through the mail, arrived supposedly set up for me but the screen I was directed to online for activation seemed to imagine something else entirely. It asked me to enter two multi-digit ICCID and IMIE numbers, one of which I was advised to locate by sliding open the “back of the phone to reveal it”….huh? I’ve seen people do some awful things to phones but sliding the back off an iphone is not one of them. Never fear, there was a sticker on the box with the relevant codes, but somehow that innovation never made it to the web design team. Heaven help anyone who tried to follow those instructions.

Number entered (spacing and layout could be improved here), I got the standard “we will send you an email when your phone is activated” msg along with the advise to continue using my old one until then. They also listed a number to call if I had not been activated within 4 hours. The trouble with this was that after 4 hours, the hotline for help would not be open according to their listed hours. Oops. Turns out, I was in good company, there’s a gaziilion videos on YouTube and posters on various forums complaining about waits up to 30 hours (who’s got that kind of time?) to receive activation.

12 hours later, still unactivated, I decided to call the hotline only for that number to have disappeared from my laptop screen, replaced by a generic ‘waiting’ message and spinning icon. No problem, I logged into my ATT account for live chat assistance whereupon I was led to a screen that told me to click a link “below” to start the chat. Oddly, there was no link, neither below nor above, and random clicking around the screen like one of Seligman’s chickens in a learned helplessness experiment gave me no joy, but it did confirm Seligman was onto something!

OK, desperation drove me to call the helpline (I hate calling some disembodied voice from who-knows-where anytime, never mind when in need) but wait, my older iPhone was now deactivated (because I had initiated activation of my new one, naturally).  Quaint as it might be, I have a land line so after giving the same identification details several times over first to the voice menu and then a real live human (I think)  I was told to hold on, they would be activating my phone “right now”. Now I can’t speak for everyone but that phrase means something specific to me. 10 mins later, old-fashioned phone pressed to ear, still no activation of sleek new one I mutter my dissatisfaction. The clearly frustrated voice at the other end disappeared to ask some other “expert” for help only to return and suggest I take the SIM card from my old 3 and put it into the new phone. Why would that work? Don’t ask. My protestations that these cards were different sizes and would not fit fell on deaf ears and I was told if that was my attitude (not quite those words but you get my meaning) I should just go to a store for assistance!  Ah yes, the very store experience I had eschewed when purchasing due to the promise of easy home delivery and set up.

It being 8.30am, no store was open (and did I mention no iphone was working either?)  but I called on the stroke of 9am and the first voice that answered told me “we’ve been hearing this problem a lot” and recommended I check that the new SIM card’s number really was the same as the number on card installed. Apparently it ain’t always so and you can imagine the confusion that causes. Cut to the chase — I checked, it was, but re-seating the SIM card anew, magic happened and activation was ensured (Oh Seligman, so this is how superstitions really get ingrained).

So what can we conclude from all this. Dodgy card fitting? Unlikely. Coincidence in timing? Even less so. A satisfied AT&T customer? No.   Pity the person without a spare phone and time in the morning to get it all going. Yes the new iPhone design is great, yes it is popular, but an information artifact is meaningful only in use, not in some abstract physical aesthetic category that wins awards. As a system, the iPhone/AT&T experience is a painful reminder of how easily interaction breaks down and how little some companies really think of their customers when trying to repair them. Apple, you are not blameless here.  Is there an award for that?

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Ninja librarians own the intelligence world

NPR ran a piece this week with Kimberly Dozier, intelligence correspondent for the AP,  talking about the use of social media to gather open source information for intelligence. As Dozier notes, most of these professionals have ‘masters of librarian science’ (!) which enables them to find material ordinary folks never could, earning the title ‘ninja’ for their skills.  The story even made Forbes. Few seemed to suspect anything really worrying in this or in the potential for such work to extend into our discomfort zones though there are some who are thinking a little more deeply about this (thank you, Kris Kotarski of the Montreal Gazette) I suspect we will be seeing more educational opportunities like our own certificate in Global Media and Research which aims to educate  information professionals for intelligence work. Yes, there really is an art and science to mining information from open data sources and the intelligence community is very aware of it. As I blogged earlier on my experience at the IAFIE conference this year, there is a significant gap between existing intelligence education programs and the information educators that each group could usefully try to bridge.

[that ‘masters’ title mistake apparently irked some listeners and forced NPR to run a follow up explaining the correct form of degree for aspiring LIS folks. Can I suggest “Ninjomatics”?  Ah, too late, it’s taken ]
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Employment prospects by major

The Wall St Journal published a new analysis of employment rates, median salaries and popularity of multiple majors which makes for interesting reading. If you want the best pay, try Petroleum Engineering. If you want to ensure you get a job, try Actuarial Science, Pharmacology or, get this, Educational Administration (is this confirmation that we really do have an education crisis?). Sadly for some, the unemployment rates are high. Clinical Psychology majors face a problem that they won’t be able to treat themselves with over 19% of them not employed, and it’s sadly not much better for various Fine Arts graduates or, tragically, Library Science grads who hover around the 15% unemployment rate. Interestingly, things look much better if your degree is Information Science, which not only gives you a greater chance of being employed (with a 6% unemployment rate) but the median salary is higher too.

The data does not entirely square with Library Journal’s own survey of ALA-accredited program graduates which suggests an average starting salary of over $42k and only a 6.2% unemployment rate. However, comparisons are not helped by the fact that the data sets are not easily reconciled. LJ takes data from program regardless of the name of the major (our graduates earn a Masters of Science in Information Studies), and it’s less clear exactly what WSJ includes under each of their major categories (one suspects these are undergraduate data which really make no real sense for this major). One lesson WSJ can provide though is how to make searching the data easier as their interactive table allows for far more convenient searching than the published tables on the LJ site.

The bigger picture here is what the WSJ survey tells us about what our employment sector values in education. It’s not all obvious as teachers, nurses, and science majors all seem to find work. And even when it’s bad (as in clinical psychology) the reality is that the vast majority of graduates end up employed, regardless of major. Further proof perhaps that education really pays off?

 

 

 

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Melting those metatheoretical boundaries

I enjoyed participating in the Metatheoretical Snowmen panel at ASIST 2011 in New Orleans organized excellently by Jenna Hartel. My role was to listen to the five minute presentations of others and then to react. The basic idea is that each panelist explains why one particular approach to explaining the information life of a snowman might offer  useful insights, and as a process it is an entertaining exercise in which underlying theoretical stances are articulated. The usual suspects were presented: analytical-philosophic, cognitivism, critical studies etc. But I was surprised to see user-centered design proposed as a metatheory too.

The format is engaging but like many such carvings of the world, I find such presentations unnecessarily divisive and exclusive. I am not sure anyone really lives within one metatheoretical framework (though I should say that invoking the analytic-philosophical approach as a means to question everything tends to cross discourse levels in a way that ensures a certain ‘win’) but even if they do, the existence of one need not preclude the value of another. Yet in education and ongoing arguments about theory, we tend to set these approaches in opposition as if this is the only way they can be examined.

Try thinking about theoretical approaches another way. Do humans perceive? Yes, within pretty well defined principles of psychophysics.  OK, so tick that box, the laws of perception apply to most of us. Are individuals susceptible to reward, reinforcement and punishment. Yep, those behaviorist rules apply to most of us too. Do humans think? Let’s hope so, and we can actually demonstrate this in most instances, so we are cognitive beings. Do we exist in a context of relationships with other people? Yes, we are social beings and we are part of a complex process of inter-related engagements and communications that shape our understandings and actions. Are their power relationships in society? I really have to answer that?

So, all of these perspectives apply to all of us some of the time — this is the beauty of existence. Choosing the level at which you decide to slice through the information life of people will reveal particular phenomena which are susceptible to analysis through some methods rather than others. What it won’t do is tell you all you need to know if you want to know it all. To really make progress, we need to make a vertical slice across these levels, examining the same human information actions at the physical,  perceptual, cognitive, organizational, and social levels. That’s hard, but if you want to at least make progress, stop acting like one theoretical position can do it better than another, unless you want to bound and qualify the ‘it’ considerably.

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New book series on Information

It’s been a busy summer requiring lots of work other than blogging (!) but I am pleased to announce that I’ve reached an agreement with UT Press to edit a new book series on Information. Here’s the official blurb, I’ll be looking for authors.

 

Announcing a New Series in Information Studies

The University of Texas School of Information and the University of Texas Press are pleased to announce an unprecedented partnership to produce a series of cutting-edge books that will chart and shape the rapidly changing landscape of information technology. Planned to launch in Fall 2013, these books will provide essential and accessible reading for both producers and consumers of information.

Our information age is not a story of incremental progress—this is a new Gutenberg era that is changing the world quickly, permanently, and in ways that that we cannot easily control. The series explores and explains the emergence of the new socio-technical infrastructure in which we all now routinely live and work, make purchases and perform services, learn and communicate, create and share, without pause or concern for distance.

The creation of this new series dedicated to information reflects the need to understand our times from the perspectives of multiple disciplines and perspectives. Placing emphasis on human and social concerns, the book series will serve as a focal point for intellectually deep and vital work that addresses the most pressing information issues of our time.  We seek authors who can bring scholarship and perspective to bear in the creation of thoughtful and highly readable manuscripts that examine closely the forces shaping the information worlds in which we reside.

The following are potential topics that are relevant to this series:

  • Information work, practices, and organizational forms
  • Digital records, archives, and curation across disciplines and collections
  • Design and use of new products and services
  • Scholarly practices and communication
  • Health informatics
  • The nature of creativity and intellectual work
  • Intellectual property and law
  • Intelligence, data mining, and cybersecurity
  • Knowledge and literacy in a digital age

Series Editor:

Andrew Dillon is Dean of the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also the Louis T. Yule Regents Professor of Information, Professor of Psychology, and Information, Risk & Operations Management.

 

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Information is intelligence

I enjoyed the IAFIE conference this week where educators in the field of intelligence gathered to discuss their work. In so many ways, the parallels to information conferences were uncanny. At a workshop on curriculum I was surprised to hear calls for greater standards and the value of accreditation through ABET or CHEA being discussed by the group. The general concern seemed to be that intelligence education was in danger of being overrun by diploma mills and that the relatively small number of serious programs needed to ensure quality control. I argued that there seemed too few schools in the intelligence arena to warrant heavy investment of time and resources in establishing accreditation standards when we stood to make more progress at this point sharing curricular ideas and experiences, and working on articulating the nature of intelligence work that we could support through education. A vote on the group’s plan was taken at the end but the results were not tabulated until later so we shall see.

Surprised as I was by the nature of the discussion in the opening workshop, I should have been better prepared for the experience over the next few days when presentation after presentation spoke of information collection and organization, analysis and mining etc without once mentioning librarianship or archival practice. A highly engaging keynote by Brigadier General Vincent Stewart raised the need for better evaluation of open source materials, less emphasis on tools and IT infrastructure and better means of identifying  skilled intelligence practitioners in advance. He quickly listed 19 countries that are viewed as failing or failed states which he monitors daily, many of whom are allies of the US. Some of the variables they measure are wealth distribution, political stability, youth demographics, corruption, internet usage etc to gain an index of a nation’s likely stability. Pointing to the harrowing cost of intelligence mistakes in his world, he made a compelling case for improving the education of future practitioners that struck me as a natural charge for some iSchools.

An interesting group of papers explored the predictive accuracy of individual analysts or the use of supplementary models to enhance predictive power. In much the same way as we might model medical predictions by doctors, intelligence researchers are trying to determine the accuracy, biases, and shortcomings of analysts’ processing of intelligence data so as to improve outcomes. There were also many papers outlining specific programs at universities across Europe, North America and Australia, and one pertinent paper from Canada pointing to the lessons learned from competitive intelligence.  All in all, this is an emerging area that is seeking some improved collective identity and structure but there is no doubt that this is potentially fertile ground for graduates of information programs.