Tuesday, December 7, 2010
interim blogging assignment: liberal arts library
Since I'm serving as interim director of Watzek Library this year, I decided to start a new blog about liberal arts college libraries cleverly entitled liberal arts library. I wasn't sure if I'd have time for this, but I've managed to get a few posts up so far. I'm going to take a hiatus from posting on ssm for awhile.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Power of Pull and liberal education
I read through most of The Power of Pull (Economist review) earlier this summer and have been thinking through the implications of the book's ideas for higher ed and libraries. The book contrasts the old way of doing business or getting where an agenda is "pushed" down from above to "pull", which the authors define as “the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.”
The idea is that in today's network world, innovation can happen much more quickly when people at the cutting edge of a field collaborate with others that share their same passions.
In one sense, this book is advocating that business innovation happen more like innovation in the academy: sharing knowledge is the way. On the other hand, they are very critical of education that is programmed or 'pushed' from above.
The book also emphasizes the importance of geography and the serendipitous encounters that can happen with those in close proximity. Even in this networked world, they argue that living among those with similar passions is highly beneficial. Perhaps the intellectual connections and community of the liberal arts campus can model this phenomenon. The authors argue that networked technology can enrich our connections to people in a certain place: one might maintain meaningful connections in a handful of cities and better coordinate in-person meet-ups with mobile tech.
They argue that "knowledge flows" have overtaken "knowledge stocks" in importance. Big repositories of knowledge don't give a business (or perhaps a university) a major advantage anymore. It's having access to the knowledge flowing at the cutting edge that really enables innovation. They emphasize the importance of transferring tacit knowledge between individuals at the edge of a field. Another argument for the opportunities that the liberal arts provide for close encounters with experts in a field. At a presentation the other day at the Lewis & Clark Fall Retreat on faculty/student research, a biologist said that once a student begins working at the cutting edge of knowledge, a switch is flipped and their passion for learning changes in a dramatic way.
Towards the end of the book, they talk a lot about "shaping strategies" and "shaping platforms": Shaping strategies being a way of moving an entire industry or community to a new model, and the platform being some system put in place to do so. In the library context, this made me think that a big platform like WorldCat could have a bolder shaping aspiration behind it. Project Bamboo seems like an attempt at a shaping platform.
I was excited to see that one of the book's authors, John Seely Brown, is a NITLE fellow. Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for pointing this book out at an Orbis Cascade presentation in July (see also his blog post on the book).
The idea is that in today's network world, innovation can happen much more quickly when people at the cutting edge of a field collaborate with others that share their same passions.
In one sense, this book is advocating that business innovation happen more like innovation in the academy: sharing knowledge is the way. On the other hand, they are very critical of education that is programmed or 'pushed' from above.
The book also emphasizes the importance of geography and the serendipitous encounters that can happen with those in close proximity. Even in this networked world, they argue that living among those with similar passions is highly beneficial. Perhaps the intellectual connections and community of the liberal arts campus can model this phenomenon. The authors argue that networked technology can enrich our connections to people in a certain place: one might maintain meaningful connections in a handful of cities and better coordinate in-person meet-ups with mobile tech.
They argue that "knowledge flows" have overtaken "knowledge stocks" in importance. Big repositories of knowledge don't give a business (or perhaps a university) a major advantage anymore. It's having access to the knowledge flowing at the cutting edge that really enables innovation. They emphasize the importance of transferring tacit knowledge between individuals at the edge of a field. Another argument for the opportunities that the liberal arts provide for close encounters with experts in a field. At a presentation the other day at the Lewis & Clark Fall Retreat on faculty/student research, a biologist said that once a student begins working at the cutting edge of knowledge, a switch is flipped and their passion for learning changes in a dramatic way.
Towards the end of the book, they talk a lot about "shaping strategies" and "shaping platforms": Shaping strategies being a way of moving an entire industry or community to a new model, and the platform being some system put in place to do so. In the library context, this made me think that a big platform like WorldCat could have a bolder shaping aspiration behind it. Project Bamboo seems like an attempt at a shaping platform.
I was excited to see that one of the book's authors, John Seely Brown, is a NITLE fellow. Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for pointing this book out at an Orbis Cascade presentation in July (see also his blog post on the book).
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Jim Kopp
As some of you may have heard, my boss at Lewis & Clark, Jim Kopp died August 5th after a struggle with a rare and complex medical condition. Jim was a big part of my life over the last decade, bringing me over to Portland from Bend to work at Lewis & Clark in 2001. As a boss and mentor, he gave me the support, freedom, and encouragement to grow in my career.
One of a now nearly extinct breed of librarian/scholars, Jim had a restless sort of ambition and an appetite for new challenges. He worked at the libraries of Columbia, Washington State, University of Portland, and the NLM; he was a VP at a startup library automation company, a head of a library consortium, and finally, a liberal arts college library director. A librarian, technologist, historian, and book collector, Jim's eclecticism in a way suited him perfectly for the liberal arts. He was never totally content where he was, however, and perhaps the utopian in him always kept his eyes open for greener pastures.
Like me, Jim cut his teeth in the library world as a technologist. He was of an earlier generation of systems librarians than me and by the time he brought me on staff this aspect of his career was done. What he retained from it was an ability to recognized innovative work and find ways of supporting it, and Jim did this in many areas of the library including those affiliated with technology.
As a manager, Jim understood something that I'm just coming to understand: your top priority to create the support system needed for your employees to perform in their positions. Jim was a hands off manager but he made sure that everyone on his team had the resources needed to do their jobs. He cared about his employees as people and understood that doing so was not only right, it also made for a stronger organization. Watzek's excellence owes much to Jim's wisdom here.
If you worked with Jim, you got to know his affection for writing. He favored longish memoranda written in a learned sort of prose. Even when writing something like a performance evaluation, Jim wrote elegantly and played with words. He was also a smart ass and often had fun lampooning those absurd obstacles and circumstances that would sometimes frustrate our work at Watzek.
I still can't believe Jim is gone. On any given day, I feel like I'll turn the corner in the library and see him or that an email will come through from him somewhere in the ether. Though he lived a full, rich life, I believe that he still had much work left to do in this world.
I will miss him.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
digital projects from class
Just wanted to share the excellent student projects from the Digital Initiatives class that I taught for Emporia State University this summer. Working in groups, students were asked to identify and organize a set of digital assets in a way that created some new value.
In particular I would note that the 'Amusing Atheneaum' project made very creative use of the Blogger platform and the 'Artistic Reflections on Deepwater Horizon' project took an ambitious approach to collecting digital objects around a contemporary theme using Omeka. Enjoy!
- Amusing Athenaeum
- Artistic Reflections on Deepwater Horizon
- The Digital Trail Project [licensed for non-commercial use only] / The Digital Trails Project
- Time-Based Media: A Focus on Preservation
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
code4lib NW: Developing a Digital Initiatives Program at a Liberal Arts College
code4lib NW was a great time yesterday. The location at U of O's Portland campus in the White Stag building made for a nice bike ride in from my house, and there were a bunch of interesting presentations. I especially enjoyed the ones on Needlebase, NoSQL databases, and the challenges of managing U of O's outgoing president's electronic papers. And, I was lucky enough to win a brand new Netbook. (I got a hard time about it because I was complaining about how much I've grown to hate typing on Watzek Library's netbook earlier in the day). This netbook does have a nicer keyboard, though.
The only thing missing from the day, of course, was the presence of Terry Reese, who's bike accident a couple weeks back has him taking some time off.
Here are my presentation slides:
I noticed last night that Lorcan Dempsey was kind enough to reference the blog post on the presentation the other day.
The only thing missing from the day, of course, was the presence of Terry Reese, who's bike accident a couple weeks back has him taking some time off.
Here are my presentation slides:
I noticed last night that Lorcan Dempsey was kind enough to reference the blog post on the presentation the other day.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
code4lib NW: digital initiatives presentation
I'm going to be giving a talk at the code4lib Northwest conference on Monday and I thought that I'd put together my thoughts for it here. The theme is creating a digital initiatives program at a liberal arts college.
I believe that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift for academic libraries. As content shifts to the network and as discovery is disintermediated from the library, the work needed to support the library's traditional roles as buyer, archiver, and gateway to information is slowly diminishing. Concurrent with this trend is the rise of potential opportunities for new roles. The new roles that we hear most about, perhaps, are instruction in information literacy/fluency and the management of digital assets.
Within the digital assets area, I think that the development of thematic digital projects is a particularly fertile area. When faculty approach teaching, their own research or a collaborative research project, they now have opportunities to do sophisticated things with information resources. Some examples include:
But I think there are more interesting opportunities when we actually wade out into the messy world of teaching and research and offer up our expertise at organizing information. A way of doing this is to establish some kind of a digital initiatives program that faculty can engage with directly. We see this at large institutions such as University of Virginia and Columbia, but also now increasingly at liberal arts colleges like Hamilton, The University of Richmond, and Kenyon. The programs at these institutions in one way or another offer support to faculty for teaching or research related digital projects.
At Lewis & Clark, it is my goal to develop a digital initiatives program from the library that provides support for academic projects that involve sophisticated information management problems. Our library has been ramping up support for digital initiatives for the last seven years or so. We began with initiatives to digitize student theses and put some of our archival collections online. We also developed a digital image collection to support arts and humanities instruction. As a side project a few years ago we started working with an studio art professor to develop a collection of images of contemporary ceramics: accessCeramics. The project has involved all sorts of interesting technical and organizational challenges. Above all, it has been a a truly collaborative effort between several library staff and the faculty.
The success of this project made me want to expand the library's digital initiatives to include more collaborative academic projects. However, I wasn't really sure if demand existed for these kinds of projects. To find out, I made an effort this spring to speak with at least one faculty member in each department at Lewis & Clark about potential digital collaborations with the library.
After talking to about 15 faculty, I have a good handful of ideas for projects, some more imminent than others. They include: web mapping wine and foi gras regions in Oregon and France for an anthropologist, digitizing, translating, and annotating collection of published documents from an early 20th century Moroccon Jewish community for another anthropologist, creating an online map to accompany a book about Mount Fuji by a historian of modern Japan, developing an online archive of historical depictions of Lewis & Clark's slave York for a communications scholar, building maps and phylogenetic tree of various spider species for a biologist, developing an archiving system for recitals for the Music department.
A few trends emerged in my conversations. Even though I unearthed some real cool ideas for projects, traditional scholarly communication methods still seemed to dominate faculty thinking when discussing their academic work. Digital work in non traditional forms is bonus work in their eyes and those working for tenure are hard pressed to find the time for it. Geocoding and web mapping were popular projects. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for assistance with generic web design, development, and upkeep by faculty for their personal pages and pages related to their research and other academic endeavors like conferences. Among the handful of scientists I spoke with, I had been expecting to find a need for long term preservation and access of scientific data, but I found that most of these researchers had disciplinary level destinations on the internet for the research data that they believed was critical to preserve and disseminate. The scientists' interests were in making their scientific work more accessible to a broader audience via the web rather than than data preservation.
Right now, I'm still in the process of talking to more faculty to get a feel for the types of projects that might be useful for their teaching/research. My goal is to come up with a digital initiatives program that offers certain services based on what faculty want and what we can do. As of now, I'm thinking that our digital initiatives program should prioritize projects that involve a sophisticated information management problem and provide a relatively broad impact, especially among students of our institution.
I'm hoping that we can provide a couple different levels of support: one level would be consulting. We would offer our expertise to jump start someone on an information management project: building a Google map, organizing a wiki or a database, teaching a class about mashups. A second level of support would be project based: we would take responsibility for a finite project: developing part of a website, a database etc. The top level of support would involve making a long term commitment to a digital resource or collection, the kind of commitment we now have to accessCeramics.
The other critical aspect of this initiative is to find the human resources internal to the library to support it. To do so, we need staff with expertise in a few key areas:
Nevertheless, to expand further, we'll need to find more time and expertise among our staff in a budget neutral environment. As manager of our cataloging/acquisitions (Collection Management Services) operations, I'm looking hard to find ways that we can save time on things like copy cataloging, serials checkin, and govt. docs. Even if we can free up time, developing the skills among staff in areas needed to support digital projects remains a challenge. Making the switch from traditional cataloging to digital project metadata work isn't a huge leap. But finding staff who can do work like web design and web programming is a bigger shift. As a manager, if there are any signs of that kind of aptitude in existing employees, I'm looking to foster it.
There are some potential pitfalls to a digital initatives program like this. The first one is overloading library staff: we have a lot to do just keeping our own house in order, and my faith in network level services lightening that load may be a bit naive. Many institutions would view this kind of function as more appropriately filled by a unit independent from the library, perhaps in IT or instructional technology. In our case, I want to keep IT in the loop at all stages, make sure that we don't overlap our services, and partner when possible. Another criticism is that the services provided by this program could represent a very uneven distribution of library resources to support the interests of particular faculty. As a library, we're used to providing relatively broad based transactional services like checking out books and answering reference questions that benefit a wide swath of the institution. This is something to be conscious of when designing this type of program. The other side of it is that these projects are often immediately beneficial to current students and faculty whereas many library-centered or institutionally-oriented digitization projects have somewhat diffuse, long term benefits.
I think developing this kind of program has some compelling advantages. These kinds of services can really advance faculty research and teaching and help assure the continued relevance of the library. If we help faculty do the heavy lifting needed to do more advanced projects and get more grants and recognition, they will back the library that much more. Administrators like deans and presidents love to see this kind of innovation as it can truly advance an institution's core mission, and in fact many of the centers I mentioned above have been started in top-down fashion by such officials.
This kind of creative work can help energize a library and connect library staff to the academic mission of the institution. I also think there is a tie in with library liaison work and library instruction. Collaborative work with faculty on collection development, instruction sessions, and information literacy can foster connections that lead to some of these digital projects. I'm hoping that reference/instruction librarians can be partners in this endeavor as well, especially when it comes to recruiting interested faculty.
To put this in perhaps more tangible terms for the code4lib crowd: starting this type of program can lead to more cool projects. I think the code4lib phenomenon is about the library becoming that much more of a creative organization, and starting a digital initiatives program will move it further in that direction.
I believe that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift for academic libraries. As content shifts to the network and as discovery is disintermediated from the library, the work needed to support the library's traditional roles as buyer, archiver, and gateway to information is slowly diminishing. Concurrent with this trend is the rise of potential opportunities for new roles. The new roles that we hear most about, perhaps, are instruction in information literacy/fluency and the management of digital assets.
Within the digital assets area, I think that the development of thematic digital projects is a particularly fertile area. When faculty approach teaching, their own research or a collaborative research project, they now have opportunities to do sophisticated things with information resources. Some examples include:
- a ceramics professor uses his connection with hundreds of artists around the world to create digital collection of ceramic art images (accessCeramics)
- an environmental studies program uses social bookmarking software to develop a virtual library of research resources on environmental issues at various geographic sites (L&C Environmental Studies)
- using an online digital collection, students observe the process of writing a poem by viewing its evolution from an initial draft through various stages of revision and eventual publication (William Stafford Archive)
- students do primary historical research on a topic and contribute their work to a publicly available online collection of historical research (History Engine)
- a biology professor studying hundreds of different spider species wants displays her findings geographically on Google Earth and Google Maps
But I think there are more interesting opportunities when we actually wade out into the messy world of teaching and research and offer up our expertise at organizing information. A way of doing this is to establish some kind of a digital initiatives program that faculty can engage with directly. We see this at large institutions such as University of Virginia and Columbia, but also now increasingly at liberal arts colleges like Hamilton, The University of Richmond, and Kenyon. The programs at these institutions in one way or another offer support to faculty for teaching or research related digital projects.
At Lewis & Clark, it is my goal to develop a digital initiatives program from the library that provides support for academic projects that involve sophisticated information management problems. Our library has been ramping up support for digital initiatives for the last seven years or so. We began with initiatives to digitize student theses and put some of our archival collections online. We also developed a digital image collection to support arts and humanities instruction. As a side project a few years ago we started working with an studio art professor to develop a collection of images of contemporary ceramics: accessCeramics. The project has involved all sorts of interesting technical and organizational challenges. Above all, it has been a a truly collaborative effort between several library staff and the faculty.
The success of this project made me want to expand the library's digital initiatives to include more collaborative academic projects. However, I wasn't really sure if demand existed for these kinds of projects. To find out, I made an effort this spring to speak with at least one faculty member in each department at Lewis & Clark about potential digital collaborations with the library.
After talking to about 15 faculty, I have a good handful of ideas for projects, some more imminent than others. They include: web mapping wine and foi gras regions in Oregon and France for an anthropologist, digitizing, translating, and annotating collection of published documents from an early 20th century Moroccon Jewish community for another anthropologist, creating an online map to accompany a book about Mount Fuji by a historian of modern Japan, developing an online archive of historical depictions of Lewis & Clark's slave York for a communications scholar, building maps and phylogenetic tree of various spider species for a biologist, developing an archiving system for recitals for the Music department.
A few trends emerged in my conversations. Even though I unearthed some real cool ideas for projects, traditional scholarly communication methods still seemed to dominate faculty thinking when discussing their academic work. Digital work in non traditional forms is bonus work in their eyes and those working for tenure are hard pressed to find the time for it. Geocoding and web mapping were popular projects. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for assistance with generic web design, development, and upkeep by faculty for their personal pages and pages related to their research and other academic endeavors like conferences. Among the handful of scientists I spoke with, I had been expecting to find a need for long term preservation and access of scientific data, but I found that most of these researchers had disciplinary level destinations on the internet for the research data that they believed was critical to preserve and disseminate. The scientists' interests were in making their scientific work more accessible to a broader audience via the web rather than than data preservation.
Right now, I'm still in the process of talking to more faculty to get a feel for the types of projects that might be useful for their teaching/research. My goal is to come up with a digital initiatives program that offers certain services based on what faculty want and what we can do. As of now, I'm thinking that our digital initiatives program should prioritize projects that involve a sophisticated information management problem and provide a relatively broad impact, especially among students of our institution.
I'm hoping that we can provide a couple different levels of support: one level would be consulting. We would offer our expertise to jump start someone on an information management project: building a Google map, organizing a wiki or a database, teaching a class about mashups. A second level of support would be project based: we would take responsibility for a finite project: developing part of a website, a database etc. The top level of support would involve making a long term commitment to a digital resource or collection, the kind of commitment we now have to accessCeramics.
The other critical aspect of this initiative is to find the human resources internal to the library to support it. To do so, we need staff with expertise in a few key areas:
- metadata profiling
- metadata assignment
- information architecture
- web design
- web programming
- project management
- grant writing
Nevertheless, to expand further, we'll need to find more time and expertise among our staff in a budget neutral environment. As manager of our cataloging/acquisitions (Collection Management Services) operations, I'm looking hard to find ways that we can save time on things like copy cataloging, serials checkin, and govt. docs. Even if we can free up time, developing the skills among staff in areas needed to support digital projects remains a challenge. Making the switch from traditional cataloging to digital project metadata work isn't a huge leap. But finding staff who can do work like web design and web programming is a bigger shift. As a manager, if there are any signs of that kind of aptitude in existing employees, I'm looking to foster it.
There are some potential pitfalls to a digital initatives program like this. The first one is overloading library staff: we have a lot to do just keeping our own house in order, and my faith in network level services lightening that load may be a bit naive. Many institutions would view this kind of function as more appropriately filled by a unit independent from the library, perhaps in IT or instructional technology. In our case, I want to keep IT in the loop at all stages, make sure that we don't overlap our services, and partner when possible. Another criticism is that the services provided by this program could represent a very uneven distribution of library resources to support the interests of particular faculty. As a library, we're used to providing relatively broad based transactional services like checking out books and answering reference questions that benefit a wide swath of the institution. This is something to be conscious of when designing this type of program. The other side of it is that these projects are often immediately beneficial to current students and faculty whereas many library-centered or institutionally-oriented digitization projects have somewhat diffuse, long term benefits.
I think developing this kind of program has some compelling advantages. These kinds of services can really advance faculty research and teaching and help assure the continued relevance of the library. If we help faculty do the heavy lifting needed to do more advanced projects and get more grants and recognition, they will back the library that much more. Administrators like deans and presidents love to see this kind of innovation as it can truly advance an institution's core mission, and in fact many of the centers I mentioned above have been started in top-down fashion by such officials.
This kind of creative work can help energize a library and connect library staff to the academic mission of the institution. I also think there is a tie in with library liaison work and library instruction. Collaborative work with faculty on collection development, instruction sessions, and information literacy can foster connections that lead to some of these digital projects. I'm hoping that reference/instruction librarians can be partners in this endeavor as well, especially when it comes to recruiting interested faculty.
To put this in perhaps more tangible terms for the code4lib crowd: starting this type of program can lead to more cool projects. I think the code4lib phenomenon is about the library becoming that much more of a creative organization, and starting a digital initiatives program will move it further in that direction.
debt and for profit colleges
At the Frye Institute and in EDUCAUSE circles, I've often heard a lot about how we should be keeping our eye on the for-profit higher education sector. This speech (referenced in IHE), given by Steven Eisman, an investor who was profiled in The Big Short, is pretty interesting.
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