In December last year Dale Askey wrote a Code4Lib column, We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code which raised some discussion for a while.
But of course it’s not just software.
Oh, I haven’t personally experienced libraries refusing to share information. In fact when I was researching our “Library on Location” project, everyone I contacted was more than happy to give me stories, photos, even survey data. But… I did have to track them down from oblique references in old blogs and newsletters and email them, one by one.
And we put our own Library on Location reports online, which I’m glad we could do. But… we had to ask if we could do it, and only our conference paper is in any kind of official repository sort of space.
Is this consistent with our profession’s attempts to convince academics to put their research papers and data into institutional repositories?
And is it an efficient, librarian-like way of organising the accumulated knowledge within the profession?
Statistics.
User surveys.
Projects that work.
Projects that don’t work.
Projects that might work but we ran out of funding.
Projects that would work if we could share the workload with another institution.
This might have been why the Library Success wiki was created. It’s a great idea, but its contributors are individuals, not libraries, so it just doesn’t have the kind of oomph I’m thinking about.
What if…
What if every library in the world brought their anonymised circulation data, their IM reference statistics, their anonymised usability testing and survey results, their project reports, their lesson plans and handouts, and their iPhone applications out from their hard drives and their intranets and made them publically accessible?
What if they all licensed this stuff (and photos and podcasts and vidcasts and…) with a Creative Commons or GPL license?
What if they all created a single website where this stuff could be stored and searched in one place?
What if that website allowed space for libraries and librarians to comment and collaborate on and add to each other’s work?
No, seriously, I mean it
At the end of the month my library’s delegates to LIANZA2008 are going to report back to the rest of the staff about what we got out of the conference. I got 4 things out of conference, 3 of which were:
- Leadership – future taking vs future making
- Innovation – just do it
- Why are they presenting on this topic when we’ve gone further in our analogous project and have more experience of how it works in practice? Oh yes: because it never occurred to us to share.
So in my allotted 5 minutes of the reporting back, I plan to pitch the idea that we should move all our (sanitised if need be) project work from the intranet to open webspace.
What about the rest of the world?
I LOVE your idea – go for it!
I agree that the problem goes far beyond software. As you correctly point out, we advocate behavior for our faculty that we fail to live up to on our end. Librarians love to talk about data curation, but it’s always someone else’s data we want to curate. Don’t even get me started on librarianship’s view of journal publication. That’s another talk, I suppose, with the title “We Love Open Access, But Not for Our Journals.”
Hi Deborah, reading your post reminds me of the work done at IFLA Statistics and Evaluation Section. And the Metropolitan Library Section publishes an annual statistics of member libraries. But not all libraries in the world are IFLA members. I guess the “rest of the world” may not see the relevance of sharing their data. Or they might perceive that the effort to compile and share exceeds its benefits.
this is really exctining
Thanks all!
Dale, the OA for journals isn’t something I’ve paid attention to because the only journals I read are ones that not only are OA but have RSS feeds. OTOH, when I think about it, this set has no overlap with the set of Big Names that I relied on when doing my MLIS research….
Ivan, thanks for the links. Yes, aggregate statistics like that are really useful. I think there’s also a use though for library-specific statistics, or statistics specific to a new service being trialled (eg IM reference). Compiling and sharing does take effort, true; but we still collect the stats for our own use, so why not at least just upload the raw Excel sheet?
Deborah, when I wrote my posts a few weeks ago detailing my library’s chat reference statistics, I too was thinking about how great it would be to have a publicly accessible database where anyone could comb through library statistics (the kind, that is, that we don’t already report to various library organizations and government agencies). On the Dig_Ref listserv, there are periodic calls for sharing of chat reference/IM reference statistics. It would be great to capture the data shared but I wonder how we’d normalize the data. Just within the world of chat reference and IM reference, there’s a number of different ways of counting things. I wouldn’t be surprised if some folks haven’t already explored this warehousing of digital reference data before (maybe the DREW project or the NISO Question/Answer Transfer Protocol?)
Raw vs normalised data is a big question. Normalised data is extremely powerful – it makes it easy to make comparisons and benchmark and spark the question “What are they doing that’s working so well?” OTOH it takes time (=money) to develop the standards of how the data should be normalised, and time to normalise it. It might be easier to convince a library to take part in a data-sharing project if it’s as simple as just chucking up the raw data – or it might be easier to convince them if they’re going to reap the value of normalised data. (Perhaps it’d be easiest if it were as simple as chucking up the raw data so that elves could work on the normalisation overnight. =money.)
there’s a number of different ways of counting things
It probably complicates matters that there’s a number of different things to be counted. Eg there are ways in which a question re library hours on the all-staff IM chatroom is the same as a question re chemical engineering resources in my own Meebo widget – but there are also important ways in which they’re different.
Thanks for the links! I clearly need to do more exploration.