Infomatters

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NY Times takes a swipe at Yahoo

The sunday edition this week carried an interesting op-ed on Yahoo and co for their willingness to do whatever the Chinese government asks of them when it comes to denying privacy. The article, entitled Yahoo Betrays Free Speech represents a long-overdue comment from the mainstream media on the hold US information companies to account for participation in the repression of freedom of speech. As the author notes:

Last January, Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey reintroduced the Global Online Freedom Act in the House. It would fine American companies that hand over information about their customers to foreign governments that suppress online dissent. The bill would at least give American companies a solid reason to decline requests for data, but the big Internet companies do not support it. That shows how much they care about the power of information to liberate the world.

Plus ca change?

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New NEA study suggests further declines in reading

A couple of years ago the NEA produced a study entitled Reading at Risk which suggested literary reading among the US adult population was diminishing at a worrying rate. Last week they released a follow-up, entitled To Read or Not to Read; A Matter of National Consequence which suggests that not only is reading continuing to decline but that reading levels and abilities are following suit. I’m struggling to digest the 90-page report filled with tables and summary data but the claims being made for national consequences hinge on academic achievement, employability,and civic engagement.

I do wonder how accurately anyone answers questions about reading, it’s a form of automatic behavior many of us engage in without consideration of time costs so we might treat some of these data points with caution. However, the social desirability of reading might also inflate responses to some questions. Further, measures of reading ability are less prone to this type of error (though they have their own specific types) so it’s not easy to dismiss the final results, even if the tone of the report is somewhat sensational. But here’s some data points reported that are noteworthy:

-Percentage of adults read a work of literature (a novel, short story, playor poem) within the past year= 47%
-Literary reading declined in both genders, across all education levels, and all age groups, with declines steepest in young adults, and first year college students report extremely low levels of reading for pleasure (no mention of reading lists here!)
-More than half 17th-12th graders multitask while reading. The report calls them Generation M.

There’s a few hoary old chestnuts in the report, such as the suggestion that there are no studies yet which show if following hyperlinked information on screen has cognitive impact (hello! there’s 20 years of study on this!) but in general this is an exhaustive (and exhausting) effort. I’m not entirely comfortable with the links made between being a good reader and being a model citizen, attending jazz concerts, visiting museums and having a great job, but there is no doubt that reading is a profoundly important part of the human condition and we would do well to take note of the trends reported here. But, one must wonder, is literary reading (as defined by NEA) the real yardstick?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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CoLIS papers published

The special issue of Information Research with the Proceedings of the CoLIS 2007 conference in Sweden has now been published. There’s a lot of interesting reading here but let me point to a couple of papers I like. The Talja and Hartel piece examining the concept of user-centeredness in the information literature is a worthy contribution and should be required reading for those who wish to understand the emergence of this defining orientation within our field. Also, David Bawden’s paper, Information as self-organized complexity, provoked a lot of discussion at the conference itself and is now available to all.

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Working hard to say no!

I’ve been saying ‘no’ to an invitation from a journal to handle a paper review for a couple of weeks but it seems you just can’t say ‘no’ to Elsevier. It’s not that I don’t review, I do, and often, but I do so for the four journals I’ve committed to work with and they keep my inbox pretty full. Let’s not forget, reviewing is time-intensive, effortful and yes, completely voluntary — free labor that keeps the process moving as it compunds the free labor authors put in creating the documents. Applied Ergonomics, a journal that might claim to represent good design practice, has taken it upon itself to invite reviewers by sending an automated email which requires the recipient to register with them in order to view and handle the manuscript. This makes a lot of sense for reviewers – the papers are in one locatable place, reviews can be submitted there, no need for the old fashioned paper and envelope stage, and let’s face it, once you’ve registered, you’ve put yourself on their list of available reviewers for the future. The trouble with Applied Ergonomics (and most of these systems) is that you cannot say ‘no’ to a request without registering. It’s clear something is wrong in the world when you have to make an effort to decline an invitation you do not want and did not seek — merely ignoring it only results in pesky automated reminders. I told the editorial office I would not handle the MS, and I would not register in their system to tell them so. One week later I get a letter asking me to review the same manuscript and a reminder to register if I wanted to decline. And so it goes on. Applied Ergonomics describes itself as “aimed at all those interested in applying ergonomics/human factors in the design, planning and management of technical and social systems at work or leisure”. Irony is a lost art.

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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.