My summary of the Politics of Libraries 2018 Conference

There are many controversial topics in the profession of librarianship. Some topics more than others are uncomfortable, very sensitive, and professionally difficult to discuss for librarians. But one conference tackled many of these themes. In this post, I share about the inaugural Politics of Libraries conference 2018 at the University of Alberta. Themes covered included:
•      Critiquing librarianship for trying to be value neutral by promoting intellectual freedom over assuming social responsibility
•     The problem of monopoly in library technology services via the case of OCLC
•      studying the discourse that librarians, library users and authors/publishers use to represent or misrepresent fair dealing/fair use in copyright law
•      how language, and particularly English global dominance, inhibits linguistic diversity and negatively affects library services and users
•     provisions for academic librarians for academic/intellectual freedom
•      assessment of how many library science journals are open access versus commercially published
•      the problem of librarians using the concept of the "market place of ideas"

In the break out discussions, I got the opportunity to lead the discussion of the theme of colonialism in libraries and how librarians can attempt to resist and move forward. This discussion raised three main points:
•      that colonialism manifests differently in different spaces and requires different approaches to address based on the particular case of colonialism that manifested itself. Caribbean colonialism was more exploitative than Canadian colonialism, where in the Caribbean, the colonizers created Caribbean society to serve European needs with Europeans who were looking to establish temporary homes versus Canada being a society absorbing French and Englishmen looking for permanent new homes and opportunities.
•      Colonialism continues to manifest itself in language assimilation and domination in both print and online technologies.
•      Librarians need to recognize indigenous epistemology and different knowledge or information perspectives other than those of the West which dominates library science.

The other breakout discussion groups shared on Language/Terminology, which I felt was also related to the theme of colonialism and to Caribbean society with the current struggle in recognizing indigenous Creole languages. Some of the points mentioned were:
•      Language barriers are represented in library signage. Public libraries should use the languages of the communities they serve in their signage, while academic libraries should use such languages in library instruction
•      Multimedia technology can better address language barriers as they provide more than just text
•      Librarians need to recognize the value of other languages and not just English as well as to recognize our own problematic use of languages which can offend, included, exclude or "other" people.
This summary only represents a few of the issues discussed, some of which deserve a full post's discussion.

Distilling the career wisdom and stories of SLA 2015

So I am gratefully to have attended SLA 2015 in Boston and in this post, I want to share some of the career wisdom and stories shared on June 14, 2015 from the opening  and general session.

For this session, as I listened to the career stories of the SLA awardees, I was impressed at the diversity of awardees featured. I saw international awardees from Asia and the Middle East, awardees that recently graduated as students and were newly active in the profession, and awardees that were faculty of library schools.

In particular, I listened to two speakers. The first was the awardee, Marjorie Hlava, who received the John Cotton Dana award. Her career gems to me were:

• Employers allow us to learn their business and give us the opportunities to serve their needs. Hence we are indebted to employers who give us opportunities to learn, grow and give back. They provide us with the opportunity to develop new skills and expertise, and to get experience and practice in serving the needs of others.
• Since what we do in our daily jobs have changed, but the principles remain the same, we must test assumptions to see if they are still relevant or not. After doing this, we must remove barriers, give access to all members and remove unnecessary rules and regulation.

Marjorie Hlava

The next speaker that I documented career gems and wisdom from was the SLA 2015 conference keynote speaker, Leigh Gallagher . Gallagher is a Fortune Magazine editor and journalist, and author of the book The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving. Gallagher was a useful speaker because she spoke about herself as a user of libraries and librarians as well as provided some advice for how librarians can better advocate for their value in business organizations.

Gem #1: The process of planning is more important than the plan itself
Gallagher first described her job as being paid to become an expert on any topic by doing research.
She spoke about how she always over-researched a topic just to be over-prepared. In this discussion Gallagher made the statement that plans are not really as important as the planning process. The planning process is more important than the document or plan itself.

Gem #2: Librarians need to develop and write business cases
Gallagher also talked about the need for information professionals to document case studies when information helped a company to make a better decision. She described such case writing as a "show- don't tell- cases of how information provided helped a company make a crucial or critical decision.

Gem # 3: New names suggested for libraries
Gallagher also suggested that information professionals consider alternate names to libraries such as the "Wisdom lab" or the "Wisdom Vault".

Coming up in future posts: Tips that I gathered from other speakers and also a post on my own conference presentation with a link and embedded slide presentation .

Re-positioning libraries as safe spaces for answering career-related queries

I came across this news article about a young engineer who got two job offers (McGregor, 2015). He took to Quora, an online question-and-answer website, to ask for advice about which company's offer to accept. Representatives from both companies responded with one rescinding the job offer.

This caused me to reflect on my first publication (Scale, 2008) that compared how libraries matched up to Facebook as a "social search engine". While I will not go into a detailed summary of the journal article, I just wanted to make a few points about how this young engineer's problem highlight a missed opportunity for the positioning of libraries and highlight what I think libraries can do to change this.

Let me begin by mentioning that "social search" can be defined as the use of online platforms for locating individuals with the expertise to answer one's query (people search) or for locating information from search results informed by a community of users that input data into the online platform (human intermediary search) (Scale, 2008). Social search comes as a development of the Social Web or Web 2.0 era, where search engines and algorithms no longer dominate how users find relevant information online. Instead, human beings are now connecting online to retrieve information from online personal sources rather than documents.

This brings me to the points I wish to make in this post. How do libraries position themselves in this era?

1. Libraries need to position themselves as social search engines which preserve privacy, contain little to no advertising and maintain the confidentiality of queries.

2. Learn from Apple's Siri for i-Phone & i-Pad. Promote and provide a listing of the types of questions that we librarians can answer or are good at answering. 

Point 1

Librarians need to promote to library users the benefits of getting their answers from us as opposed to the online competition. Sure enough, online sources can get an individual quicker access to people sources and information, but online also leaves a trail and the Internet does not forget. Librarians though will forget.

We could even make this optional where users can be taken into a closed room, read a confidential non-disclosure agreement form to be signed by both the librarian and the library user, before the individual divulges their query.

This brings me to a concern about virtual reference, which keeps a virtual memory of queries and does not forget. Luckily, virtual reference services can do so with the removal of personal identifying information. Nonetheless, I find it on the side of caution that such system by requiring authentic users to login can still keep track of where queries are coming from. So I am still kind of wondering about this and need to research this some more.

Nonetheless, I would advocate for librarians to be selective of which technology or technical solutions are used for the purposes of virtual reference. Even when we use online platforms, ours must be distinctive from our competitors that collect personal information and maintain a public record of such information.

Point 2
I refer here to the experience of using Apple's Siri for i-Phone and i-Pad. Sometimes after using Siri, Apple's artificial intelligent virtual agent, I find that she presents a listing of some of the questions that she can answer and some of the information that she can provide.

How do library users know what questions to bring to the library reference desk? In my experience, as a library user, users coming to the reference desk get varied levels of service and do not know with certainty if a competent staff member will be on hand to handle their queries. One unhelpful experience is sufficient to prevent a user from being a return client.

Hence, it is necessary to reduce the chances of this uneven service delivery from happening in the first instance by highlighting what we are competent at answering. We must provide a way of assuring our patrons or users about the types of questions we can answer or provide information for and what they can expect us to answer or find answers for.

Even if we do not have the sources to answer all our users query, we should be able know where we can refer users and provide a list of questions for which we can refer users if we do not have the answers. That is, librarians should also know what areas we can competently advise users so that even if we do not have the answers in our library, we can advise users about where to go next and explain the pros and cons of getting the answers from the sources we refer them to. (In a way, this points to a need for deep subject expertise).

Some of the challenges

I do acknowledge that one of the challenges of doing this type of reference work is reduced library budgets and problematic staff shortages. In some libraries, the staff does not have the time to walk the users through a long decision-making process but stop short at just pointing them to the sources. This process makes the library little different from Google or original Web search that just directs users to the highest ranked or used sources that possess possible answers. This forces users to still have the work to determine the relevance and pros and cons of the sources retrieved. This is why I like the special library environment where librarians can provide a framework for extracting relevant and useful information and coming to a decision about which sources to use.

A possible way forward
For me, the young engineer's question could be viewed as a missed opportunity to re-position libraries to the wider public as safe spaces to ask questions and conduct inquiry, especially about career and entrepreneurial information. I for one believe that a dedicated career information resource librarian should be in every public library. This person would specialize in helping users answer career related queries and help them locate career-related information for all stages of an individual's career journey. These librarians should be dedicated to answering reference queries related to career, business or entrepreneurship questions ad questions about choosing educational programs.

Nonetheless, every public library should know its users and the questions that users are most likely to need answers for and provide a dedicated subject librarian to address those questions. Again I realize that this is an ideal in the present time of austerity and economic uncertainty. As such, I lament that we need greater advocacy to let politicians, economists and other authorities that make funding decisions know that the quality of library services depend on the type of deep expertise that we provide in areas that are important to communities. For example, seeing that current authorities are interested in job creation, we can advocate that libraries can provide value to the labour market and the economy if given sufficient funding and staff to provide a dedicated librarian for career and business related questions. Of course, I realize that this means focusing on priorities that fit into the neo-liberal paradigm in which libraries are now working.


Reference:

McGregor, J. (2015, May 7). A young engineer asked for career advice online. Big mistake. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/05/07/a-young-engineer-asked-for-career-advice-online-big-mistake/?wprss=rss_business

Scale, M. (2008). Facebook as a social search engine and the implications for libraries in the twenty-first century. Library Hi Tech, 26, (4), p. 540-56.

Narrative information sources for medicinal care and the implications for LIS

For those who have been following up on my blog for some time, you might already be aware that I am interested in narrative research. Well recently, my university staged a lecture where an author, Dr. Vincent Lam, presented on the topic "Narrative in Medicine – Why We Need Stories in an Age of Evidence". The event was held in the University Hospital | Auditorium A, Room B3-246.

So I attended the lecture by Dr. Vincent Lam staged at my university's hospital. Unfortunately, due to my mix up with the time, I arrived when the lecture was already in progress. Nevertheless, I was still able to get what I needed to hear and even got the opportunity ask Dr. Lam a question. In the next few paragraphs, I outline some of my take away points from Dr. Lam's talk. 

Before outlining what I got from the talk, it is important to indicate my particular interest in the narrative turn in patient care and medicine. I particularly see this new emphasis on narrative based information sources as being important to libraries and information science. This narrative turn in the medical sciences has implications for librarianship, especially in terms of how we go about serving health related information sources. I also see the importance in this for those working as hospital librarians, as they too need to consider supplying biographical or narrative sources to health care providers. (Now back to Dr. Lam's talk.)

Dr Lam indicated that during the encounter between a patient and a health practitioner, the patient brings a story. Usually, the story is "something happened to me". Lam suggests that the health practitioner is then expected to hear and listen carefully to the client's story, and then to use his or her special knowledge and tools to explain the story. Lam also suggests that the health provider is also expected to tell the patient "what will happen next". As such, Lam suggests that doctors and health practitioners have a role to play as story interpreters as well as storytellers. In his words, "doctors are story interpreters" and "third party storytellers", offering story interpretations and storytelling to patients like the shamans and spiritual doctors of the age before modern medicine.

Dr. Lam also argued that health care providers can also benefit from being educated in the literary arts. He cited a study that indicates that reading literary fiction promoted empathy. In general, Lam stated that reading tough, difficult and challenging books was good for medical professionals as it would enable them to become more empathetic. This is needed as medical professionals tend to rely a lot on statistics and hard scientific numerical facts that make them less empathetic and understanding of their clients' needs. 

He said that sometimes doctors need to put down their scientific spectacles in treating patients, and see the world through a different set of eyes. Lam suggests that it is really "easy to miss something about your tools because that is what you work with". It is always good to get outsider perspectives. And narrative information from patients who experience illness are as important as the scholarly or evidence based medical literature for this.

Lam also makes the point that patients rarely present information about what is happening to them in an easy form for doctors to use to make a diagnosis. Patients often do not use the medical terms and jargon when presenting their health problem. Instead, doctors have to collect, interpret and put the fragments of information presented by the patient together into a medical narrative, in order to make sense of it and to arrive at a diagnosis. Hence, in this regard, doctors also need the skill of understanding patient narratives and being able to convert such narratives into a medical narrative.

At the end of his talk, I asked him about his position on doctors reading autobiographies,watching YouTube videos and reading blogs of those who experience illness. His response was "very valuable" and that doctors should read these to supplement their scholarly readings.

My question was motivated from my recent discovery of a Masters thesis in the University of Western Ontario's institutional repository entitled:

Women's Stories of Breast Cancer: Sharing Information Through YouTube Video Blogs  - Jenna Kressler, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, MSc http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2095/

This interesting thesis title seems to suggest that a blog is not a medium,but a way of presenting information (genre). Hence YouTube Video blogs! (Or vlogs). The article also touches on the storytelling idea for sharing health-related information. The author also used narrative analysis to conduct her research, similar to the type of analysis that I am doing for my research on blogs and tweets. Finally, she conducted her analysis on the personal narratives of women victims and/or survivors of breast cancer.

Conclusion:

The narrative turn in medicine could spell hope for the value of the humanities in academia, Medicine is realizing and awakening to the idea that narrative and storytelling skills are important to its practice. Further, librarians have a role to play in serving medical practitioners with not just scholarly and scientific literature, but also biographies and other personal narratives of the persons that experience illness. Finally, librarians also have a role in not just providing the published sources of narratives, but also considering social media sources such as blogs and YouTube videos. Curating these may also be valuable to medical practitioners who need to supplement their professional understanding of illness with a deeper understanding of the patient's side of the story.

How can librarians make use of animation? Here are a few YouTube examples

Recently, an online conversation with one of my librarian colleagues got me thinking about how libraries can use animation. So I decided to do a preliminary search of YouTube to see what examples I could find on the subject. In this blog post, I report briefly on some of what I have discovered.


First is an animation (seemingly not from a librarian) that shows a 3D walk-through animation of a library (uploaded by Chris Collins). Definitely good for library design and space planning.





The second video is entitled 'Daring School Library Media Orientation Animation'. This is a good example of how libraries can use animation for giving students an orientation to the library space and resources. (Uploaded to YouTube in 2012 by Gwyneth Jones using GoAnimate software).






I also found this third YouTube video of animation teaching library etiquette. This one also uses GoAnimate online animation software. (Uploaded to YouTube by  MsBookDiva in 2011).

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Finally, I showcase another animation video entitled: "Library Rules Pirate Style". This one also uses Go Animate platform. (Uploaded in 2012 by YouTube user by chasulee).




References:

chasulee. (2011, Sep 15). Library rules pirate style. [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywxsywgw_cA

Collins, C. (2012, May 17). 3D walk-through animation of a library - 123Dview.com [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yH5w6D0abbY

Jones, G. (2011, Sep 7). Daring school library media orientation animation. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR3_5EfGxEs

MsBookDiva. (2011, Jan 6). Library etiquette. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4vXVRg7kO4

Thoughts about librarians as publishers

This blog post is partially a reaction to a webinar I attended recently on the topic of librarians as publishers. The webinar, put on by the Ontario Council of University Libraries and the Public Knowledge Project featured three university librarians sharing their experience and knowledge from being responsible or library projects in hosting journals (See description of webinar at http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/6518).

While the webinar got me thinking more deeply about the topic of the roles that libraries currently play and can play in the future as publishers, I must mention however, that I have been thinking about this topic prior to 2013. However this event has motivated me to express some of my preliminary thought here in writing. As such, below I will outline five (5) current and future roles for libraries as publishers based on what I have observed and know about libraries:

1. Journal hosting - was the one role that the webinar focused on. his include hosting journals for faculty, academic societies and even for student societies. I especially liked the idea of the library hosting graduate and undergraduate student academic journals.
2. Monograph hosting - This too was mentioned in the webinar as a logical extension of journal hosting and possible future expansion opportunity for the university library with experience in journal hosting.
3. Bibliographies of a university's research - This one comes from my own observation of the research and development bibliography developed by the University of the West Indies Mona Campus Library entitled Research for Development Vols. 2: A Bibliography of Staff Publications 1998-2002. Unfortunately, I cannot find a copy on the Web to link too, but only a  catalogue entry in WorldCat. This initiative from my memory has a foreword that indicates the importance of the library as playing a role in disseminating information about university faculty's research to the wider public.
4. Bibliographic databases: This a logical extension of publishing bibliographies of a university's research. This too has been done by the University of the West Indies Mona Campus Library through the Mona Online Research Database (MORD).
5. Out-of-print books and previously unpublished historical works or manuscripts: For this, I foresee librarians especially managing special collections, getting forewords from knowledgeable faculty as well as contributing their own forewords about manuscripts or other out-of-print works that are within the library's special collection. these can be published as e-books or as print copies on demand, using print on demand technologies such as book espresso machines. Szkolar (2012)'s blog post explores this issue of book espresso machines and how libraries can use these to enter in publishing.

Discussion (or viewpoint):

Academic libraries in particular have the options of becoming publishers of e-books, e-journals, databases as well as print on demand resources. Public libraries too can extend themselves into these opportunities by courting established authors and even local authors to let the library host their works and offer print on demand with book machines. A further even radical proposal is that libraries can even bypass copyright collecting agencies in paying fees directly to the authors for the books/resources that were downloaded and printed (especially the printed ones).

Hence, libraries could naturally extend into a royalty management role, that publishers currently occupy, but as a nonprofit institution that seeks to be equitable in balancing the need for access to information with the right of the author to benefit economically from his or her intellectual work. In order words, I am radically considering the opportunity for libraries to replace publishers and copyright licensing and collecting agencies. After all, publishers and such agencies are actually middle men between libraries and the author. Why not eliminate the middle men, and allow authors to interact directly with their readers through libraries, similar to how self-publishing platforms like Amazon also allows the author to eliminate the need for working with a publisher.


Reference:

Szkolar, D. (2012, April 4). Espresso Book Machines: Should Libraries Offer On Demand Publishing?  Information Space [blog]. Syracuse iSchool. Retrieved at: http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu/2012/04/04/espresso-book-machines-should-libraries-offer-on-demand-publishing/

The curious case of Edwin Mellen Press suing a university librarian for libel

In a follow up to the blog entry on the threats to the freedom to blog, I just want to provide a bit more perspective on the curious case of Edwin Mellen Press suing a university librarian for libel (New, 2013). 

Prior to this year 2013, when faced with blogs that criticise businesses, corporations either sought to counteract those blogs by responding to them or denying the criticisms. Several of these cases are cited in Kline, Burstein, De Keijzer, and Berger (2005). However, within this year, this is the first time that I have seen where corporations faced with criticism from users of blogs go out to attack the critic by law suit. This is a very precedental law suit that has implications for blogging in general and for librarians and universities in particular.

For one, it raises the question of how much freedom do persons have to blog their criticisms and complaints, without being sued for defamation and libel? Second it raises the question of how much freedom do librarians have to blog their analysis of information sources and make it publicly accessible and available to others. Thirdly, it begs the question as to whether universities should permit staff and affiliates to blog any at all?

Unlike the regular complainers or customers, part of a librarian's work is to evaluate information sources in terms of quality and other criteria. As such, librarians in the process of engaging in their work must critically analyse information products and even technologies offered by vendors. From our evaluations, we must make recommendations. And within a university environment, we should be entitled to recommend to our users what sources they must avoid. Is it that, publishers that develop information products do not want us to put our evaluations on websites or blogs? Should publishers not act as businesses have done in the past, by spending the money to address the quality concerns of customers as posted on the Web rather than paying lawyers to sue for damages?


Finally, for universities, I can predict that policies will be put in place to prevent staff from criticising institutions and businesses in order to reduce liabilities and law suits. After all, the new capitalistic university, that has to raise much of its funding from institutions and corporations,  will need as many institutional and corporate friends as possible, and as little enemies as possible. Who else will they go to in order to "beg","solicit" or "ask for donations to their endowment fund"? Especially, if some of those leading/managing those corporations happen to be their alumni.

For librarians, the university's regulation of social media, perhaps may lead to more reliance on and preference for email or intranet as the technology to communicate, while websites and social media will be reserved for restricted and less authentic communication with those outside of one's organization. After all, we can still email our opinions to those who need to know in order keep it out of the public sphere and still have the desired effect. Until, companies and corporations decide to sue librarians and customers for defamation and libel through email.


References:

Kline, D., Burstein, D., De Keijzer, A. J., & Berger, P. (2005). Blog! :How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture. New York: CDS Books in association with Squibnocket Partners LLC.

New, J. (2013, Feb 8). Edwin Mellen Press sues university librarian for libel. The Chronicle of Higher Education Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edwin-mellen-press-sues-university-librarian-for-libel/42193