Turning knowledge into value #lianza11

Bill Macnaught – National Librarian
[ETA: Speech now online]

Huge management changes – much change in staff (including Macnaught) and National Library now also a part of the Department of Internal Affairs. Easy to contribute to the aims of government within the DIA.

Cites Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous“.

Libraries and library courses talk about organising knowledge.

Some DIA colleagues sceptical about need for libraries/librarians in the future. Can see how algorithmic tools transform how we deal with data. If you’re sceptical about the future of everything as unstructured data you’ll be scorned. May think librarians are locked into the past.

Old view of all knowledge mappable into a tree-structure. But the world can’t be organised like this – particularly obvious now with the internet.

Michael Spence: Knowledge is “the ultimate public good”. “Old knowledge has to be disseminated in every generation”. Hence education. Creation of new knowledge is costly, but incremental cost of disseminating new knowledge is low (as already disseminating old knowledge). “knowledge transfer causes the productive potential of a developing economy to increase extremely rapidly”. Development needn’t involve high levels of creation of knowledge, but high levels of sharing knowledge.

How do libraries contribute to the transfer of knowledge?
Public libraries support kids to reading, learning. School libraries do the same and support infolit skills. Academic libraries provide specialised resources to support success of teaching staff and research communities. Special libraries deliver value to support success of their organisation – which may be economic value. School and academic libraries support learning outcomes. Public libraries ‘do a bit of everything’ but customers don’t have to be a member of anything, don’t have to justify what they’re reading or do a cost/benefit analysis. Purely driven by individual curiosity.

We turn knowledge into value – not just economic value but cultural and personal value.
The National Library turns knowledge into value for New Zealand. Includes valuing our heritage. Working with Archives. Plan to move the Treaty of Waitangi. Looking at ways to share collective resources. Literacy, learning and public programmes team busy – this year much about rebuilding public schools programmes in Christchurch. (Slide of destroyed original site (probably from their Flickr site); now up and running again in Cavendish Park.)

Ultra-fast broadband in schools initiative from government. Also rural broadband initiative, working with APNK. Launch of National Library Beta.

Shoutout to Sue Sutherland and Penny Carnaby’s work; and acknowledges that much of this wouldn’t have been possible without National Library being part of DIA.

Big opportunities and challenges in shift to digital. Has led initiatives like Digital New Zealand, Kōtui etc from within NDL but can’t rest on laurels! Asking staff to think about the environment in ten years time (using new equipment: shows a slide of a crystal ball). Plan to facilitate conversations with colleagues across New Zealand and overseas to exchange ideas of the future.

No-one has a crystal ball, but as professionals it’s our responsibility to describe a desired future and persuade decision makers to support it, rather than letting the future happen to us.

Reaffirm fundamental purpose of libraries and values of librarianship. What’s our purpose, how do we add value to tools like Google, etc? We value life-long learning; equality of access; intellectual freedom; rights of users to access and publish information; linguistic diversity and cultural heritage. None of these depend on organising information and can’t be replaced by algorithms.

Challenges:

Unstructured data – metadata is essential; but it’s mostly developed automatically. Should we develop capability to do this or focus on specialised data?
Users always connected to information online
Free! or at least affordable access to libraries. How does this remain viable? Subscription vs owned?
How do we collaborate national to improve stakeholders perspective of our value?

Can’t just morph as we move with the times – transitional change isn’t enough. Need transformational change. Will build relationships – can’t do this alone.

Together we turn knowledge into value.
(Speech supported by waiata Tutira Mai Nga Iwi

Presidential Address #lianza11

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Jane Hill

LIANZA has launched its Advocacy Tools Portal.

Power in working together, connecting and using technology. Essential to build and harness expert power – we’re all leaders.

We’re well-placed to make a difference if we keep watching, listening, thinking analysing, collaborating, making mistakes, and triumphing.
Many trends already evident – we need to look at future implications.

[Speech is supported by singing of the LIANZA waiata]

Libraries: essential for learning and life #lianza11 #keynote2

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Molly Raphael 2011-2012 ALA President
Libraries: essential for learning, essential for life
(Abstract is in Sunday’s programme)

Libraries can and must play a transformative role in people’s lives. Tough economy but huge increase in demand/use of libraries.

In 1990s some thought libraries would fade away with rise of the internet. Instead libraries embraced the internet, proved adaptability. Now need to change rapidly and demonstrate we’re as essential as any other “essential services” (police, fire departments). We’re not “discretionary” or “ancillary” services though we’re not effective at making our case.

Need to transform libraries and transform how people think about us.

How do we keep our libraries moving forward?
Look for opportunities. Libraries doing pretty well at this. Not just keeping up with changes in technology but also how we communicate with public – local and broader community via online. Keeping up with demographic changes.

Excited by what she sees in libraries and library websites. Balancing demand for traditional services with demand for e-services.

Physical library vs virtual library. Most libraries are somewhere in the middle, usually towards physical. We make strategic choices re what we invest in. Shift to virtual use but still lots of demand for face-to-face.

Community library vs individual library. How do we bring people together, create spaces to make it possible – community not just individual.

Collection library vs creation library. Tend to be more focused on collection side, but some more creative esp in Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore.

Portal library vs archival library.
Research on what affects public’s likelihood to support libraries for more funding:
Library funding support is only marginally related to library visits – many highly believe in libraries even if they don’t use them. Perception of librarians is an important predictor of library funding support. Raphael’s going to stop introducing herself at community events as “Director” in favour of “Chief Librarian”.

In academic libraries, “Value of Academic Libraries“.

Used to look at inputs (how many books do we have), then outputs (how many books are borrowed), now starting to look at impact – how do we transform lives? This info is much more difficult to collect…

This is a frightening time for libraries but also opportunity to demonstrate importance of libraries in transforming lives.

Who can be the most effective in telling the library story?
If we tell it, sounds like self-interest. When members of communities tell it, that issue disappears. Power of people from the community telling the story. Raphael advocates, but notices the impact of parent, teacher, business leader, business activist in making the case for the library. Eg a father talking about a summer reading project turning his son into a reader, from struggling to doing well in school. Community in Oakland defending libraries from closures. Reads story from someone who went from being a school dropout, used library resources to self-educate, then went to community college and now has Master of Engineering.

When libraries seen as transformational source, not informational source, they get much stronger support.

“The Spokane Moms” spoke out in support of school libraries. Lost at local level and went to state level. State provided support for school libraries and school librarians.
Need to engage communities and empower them to speak.

Challenge: think about how our communities can speak in powerful ways. How can we direct this towards the people making decisions? Need to think of how we advocate. Not just when budgets get cut. Need to have communities talk about our value all the time (not necessarily about budgets, but about success linked to libraries). Need to move ourselves into the “essential services” category in preparation for tough economic times.

Need more collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Build bridges so research gets used, and need to share in accessible way to communities. Front-line staff essential in advocacy.

“Empowering Voices: Communities Speak out for Libraries” (see Raphael’s column) – building tools to engage in communities. For USA but open to anyone. Advocacy University

Questions
Q: “Raging Readers” turned around the whole issue at [missed the location] around to keep materials free – best-kept secret was the “Raging Readers” consisted of two people.
A: A small group can have a huge impact. Politicians often interested mostly in getting reelected. Libraries seen as easy target. Libraries who fight back usually regain most of what they lost – but then exhausted. So need people to see what the library of today is like. Had a meeting with Chief Operating Officer in the library space so he saw it during the day and was blown away by its usage.

Q: In a corporate library. Every dollar counts. Have to pay people to fill in surveys because their time is chargeable.
A: Once out of the public realm it’s a lot harder to get support – doesn’t really have an answer to this.

Public libraries in the UK #lianza11 #keynote1

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Martin Molloy
Public Libraries: the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
(Abstract is in Sunday’s programme)

(Slideshow of photos/paintings of Derbyshire countryside as background, from picturethepast.org.uk.)

400 out of 4600 libraries in the UK are threatened with closure. Street demonstrations, regularly featuring in media and blogosphere. In the UK culture is valued in mechanistic terms – return on investment. Elderly population to grow over the next 20 years, among many other big changes in progress. Molloy thinks libraries are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

How did we get here?
There’s no national library service in the UK. No ring-fenced funding from government – have to compete with other services for funding from local government, so have to operate within a political environment.

The best have positioned themselves in this sphere (as well as core functions) to deliver on wider agendas such as health, economic regeneration, community safety. Can’t work in isolation – need to contribute to objectives of local authority.

But too great a focus on economic benefits from local government. Some have tried to measure value, but failed to capture intrinsic value – libraries’ unique position.

Spending on libraries often at barely sustainable levels.

2009 announcement that 11 libraries to be closed. Due to controversy central government had to intervene and make them consult with relevant GLAM groups. Proposal finally withdrawn.

Free internet access across all UK libraries (People’s Network) but local government increasingly introducing charges.

Where are we going?
Some authorities cutting fairly and protecting frontline services. Other places massive cuts and joblosses. Molloy’s department needs to save 3.5 million pounds over the next few years. Molloy’s priority is to preserve the network of libraries. Have a very small backroom team. Have provided free wifi access. Share transport services. Broadest range of online resources in the region.

Derbyshire has increased business by focusing on core principles. Funds spent on materials, not initiatives. Leader in reader development.

Thinks it’s possible to meet challenging savings targets while still running services. Government would probably think they’re not radical enough. He lists some government ideas eg sharing backroom services, using volunteers, and others he’s even more sceptical about. Cambridgeshire had an idea to hand libraries over to a charitable trust – but finally realised it’d save no money. Now wanting to squeeze libraries into kiosks in business/doctor’s spaces so they can sell existing buildings….

Outsourcing to the private sector? Might work in town but not rurally – private sector would want to cherrypick. Handing over to a community group? Doesn’t recall local people being asked if they want to be responsible for running as well as using libraries…

Local campaigning has resulted in 3 local authorities being taken to judicial review. (However this can only judge on procedure, not on morality of final decision.) Something wrong when locals have to resort to the law to protect the services they value!

Who is driving?
Public Libraries Network needs shared values, support from government, and inspired leaders. The librarian was once a radical. Service managers need to understand corporate working.

How’s the map of public library provision being redrawn?
Arts Council of England will get responsibility – but they’re wrestling with gigantic budget cuts too. Starting off with a hand tied behind backs.

Have to work with government, parent organisations. Collaboration – joint procurement. National catalogue, national reading programme. New roadmap to include new ways of delivering services. Ebook loan service getting many new users. Usage of online sources almost doubling from year to year.

Increased personal support to young, elderly. More self-service can keep libraries open longer. Need to become corporate managers, not just service-based. Collaborate with broader groups.

Need to demonstrate that libraries are a life-changing service.

Are we seeing the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Many pressures – including demographic, technology. 5 years ago said libraries are as relevant as ever. Enviable usage figures and exception satisfaction levels. But confusion and lack of competence of politicians re purpose and value of libraries. Public library community also confused, lack of confidence, clarity, vision – librarians ill-equipped to defend services. “Toxic mix of short-term fixes and so-called radical solutions.”

But if smart enough and flexible enough, libraries will survive. Need new approaches to engage with communities of users. Need to operate effectively within a political environment.

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone, but what is woven into the life of others.” —Pericles

Links of Interest 19/10/2011 – infolit & student success; serials; conferences

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The Swiss Army Librarian posts a regular “Reference Question of the Week”. One of the latest covers using file conversion websites to help a desperate patron who needs to print out a file in a format that the library doesn’t support.

Sense and Reference discusses three recent blogposts on libraries getting rid of books to create spaces.

The effect of library instruction on student success
Three C&RL papers:

The Academic Library Impact on Student Persistence: “a change in the ratio of library professional staff to students predicts a statistically significant positive relationship with both retention and graduation rates.” (Note that they show correlation, not causation; in their discussion they’re inclined to suspect that the effect of more library professional staff is an indirect one.)
Measuring Association between Library Instruction and Graduation GPA: “if more than one or two library workshops were offered to students within the course of their program, there was a higher tendency of workshop attendance having a positive impact on final GPA. The results indicate that library instruction has a direct correlation with student performance, but only if a certain minimum amount of instruction is provided.”
Why One-shot Information Literacy Sessions Are Not the Future of Instruction: A Case for Online Credit Courses: “Researchers analyzed the pre- and post-test scores of students who received different types of instruction including a traditional one-shot library session and an online course. Results show that students who participated in the online course demonstrated significant improvement in their test scores compared to the other students. This study shows freshman students’ needs for more comprehensive information literacy instruction.”

Serials

Jenica Rogers names names of vendors with annoying practices. Some vendors responded well; some badly. Jenica posted another followup on Vendors that delight me.
SCOAP3 is an initiative to set up a consortium that redirects library funds from paying for closed access High Energy Physics journal subscriptions to funding these journals to be made open access. The FAQ goes into more detail about how the model will work.

Conferences

LIANZA 2011 starts on Sunday – #lianza11 tweets from all attendees will be captured in a set of CoverItLive sessions and I’ll be liveblogging as much as my wrists allow
the worldwide online Library 2.011 conference will follow, running from November 2 – 4, with sessions held in multiple timezones.

Thoughts on "Cheat’s Guide to Project Management"

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Sally Pewhairangi’s workshop “Cheat’s Guide to Project Management” covered the planning stages of managing a project in a way that made it clear why the planning is so vital.

We started by discussing reasons projects fail — one of those brainstorming sessions everyone always has plenty of material for and which can get downheartening. But Sally concluded this section by saying that while we can’t always make these problems disappear, we can manage them; and looking back at my notes now I can see that the vast majority of the problems we talked about would be much alleviated by the process the rest of the session modelled.

This, much abbreviated and paraphrased, was:

Find out/figure out how the project fits into the institution’s goals. A project to merge serials into the main collection will go differently if the aim is to free up space or to aid findability. If push comes to shove, which consideration will win?
Define the heck out the project. Make sure everyone’s on the same page about exactly what is to be achieved, by when, and with what resources. What’s included/excluded? Get it in writing and signed off by everyone to prevent confusion, co-option, mission creep, the sudden discovery that you have no budget, etc.
Break the project down into tasks and subtasks so you know everything that has to be done and don’t get surprised.
Work out who’s doing which subtasks by which dates.

For someone like me who just wants to achieve something, this often seems like a nuisance, and during the session my group was constantly having to rein ourselves back from rushing ahead to the what when we hadn’t sorted out the why. But when we did plan it all, it became much easier to come up with a much more innovative and relevant approach to solving the problem.

One of the other fascinating things came during the “silent brainstorm” section that is, everyone scribbling out all the tasks they could think of in silence. No talking meant no-one dominating or being shy, and no derailing into knocking ideas prematurely. And this really brought out the different strengths of different team members – when we categorised the tasks as a team we could see one person focusing more on communicating with stakeholders, one person on technical aspects of the project. Come to think about it, this could be a good way of deciding who should be responsible for managing what.

In short, a fantastic workshop which has given me a whole new perspective on planning and, more practically, the tools to do it systematically.

Plus, the template we worked through was so useful in breaking things down, guiding us through, and giving a real sense of accomplishment at the end, that I’m now pondering how something similar might work in an infolit class: guiding students through thinking about what information they need and where to find it. I’m thinking something like:

Plan your search

1. What’s your topic?

2. What kind of information do you need?

Well-tested research <-----------------------------------------------------------> Cutting-edge knowledge

Summarised information <------------------------------------------------------------> Detailed information

Layman’s level <---------------------------------------------------------------------------> Research level

Other:

3. Who would have written about it? When? Where would they have published?

Kinds of people	Date-range published	Kind of publication

4. What words would they have used to talk about it?

Keywords	Synonyms – any other words that mean the same

5. What sources would hold the publications from #3? What search features are available?

Database or other source	Available search features

and then some stuff on analysing results, facets, pearl-growing, etc. (I may abbreviate the above to try and fit the whole thing to a single A4 sheet for a one-hour class; or may leave it at two sides for the class I get two hours with.) I won’t have a chance to test this out probably until next year so would be happy to hear any ideas in the meantime!

The death of organised data

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I’ve been hearing rumours that the big IT companies may be giving up on organised data. Which is kind of a big thing for the same reason that it makes perfect sense: there are terabytes upon terabytes of data pouring onto computers and servers all the time, and organising all of that into a useful format takes a heck of a lot of time.

Especially because data organised to suit one need isn’t necessarily going to suit most actual needs. If you’re a reference librarian (either academic or, I suspect, public) you’ll have had the student coming to your desk who can’t quite understand why typing their assignment topic into a database doesn’t return the single perfect article that explicitly answers all their questions.

So I think there’s two ways of organising data:

“pre-organising” it – eg a dictionary, which is organised alphabetically, assuming you want to find out about a given word. It has information about which are nouns and what dates they derive from (to a best guess, obviously) but there’s no way to search for nouns that were used in the 16th century because the dictionary creator never imagined someone might want to know such a thing.
organising it at point of need – eg a database which had all this same information but allowed you to tell it you want only nouns deriving from the 16th century or earlier; or only pronunciations that end in a certain phonetic pattern; or only words that include a certain other word in the definition.

Organising data at point of need solves one problem (it’s much more flexible) but it doesn’t actually save time on the organising end. In fact, it’s likely to take quite a lot more time.

So is humanity doomed to be swimming in yottabytes of undifferentiated, unorganised, and thus useless data? I frowned over this for a while, and after some time I remembered the alternative to organising data: parsing it. (This is just what humans do when we skim a text looking for the information we want.) So, for example, a computer could take an existing dictionary as input and look for the pattern of a line which includes “n.” (or s.b. or however the dictionary indicates a noun), and a date matching certain criteria, and returns to the user all the lines that match what was asked for.

Parsing is hard, and computers have historically been bad at it. (Bear in mind though that for a long time humans beat computers at chess.) This is not because computers aren’t good at pattern-matching; it’s because humans are so good at making typos, or rephrasing things in ways that don’t fit the criteria. (One dictionary says “noun”, one says “n.”, one says “s.b.”, one uses “n.” but it refers to something else entirely…) A computer parsing data has to account for all the myriad ways something might be said, and all the myriad things a given text might mean.

But if you look around, you’ll see parsing is already emerging. One of the things the LibX plugin does is look for the pattern of an ISBN and provide a link to your library’s catalogue search. You may have an email program that, when your friend writes “Want to meet at 12:30 tomorrow at the Honeypot Cafe?”, gives you a one-click option to put this appointment into your calendar. Machine transcription from videos, recognition of subjects in images, machine translation – none of it’s anywhere near perfect, but it’s all improving, and all these are important steps in the emergence of parsing as a major player in the field of managing data.

So yes, if I was a big IT company I might want to get out of the dead-end that is organising data, too – and get into the potentially much more productive field of parsing it.

Keeping track of contacts

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Last week I put an Access database template up on my website and thought I’d better get around to actually mentioning it. What it does is keep brief notes of all my interactions (face-to-face, phone, email) with the academics, research students, and undergraduates I liaise with. (The templates actually on the website of course only have dummy data.)

My old system was handwritten notes on a copy of the welcome letter each grad student received on enrolling. This was Suboptimal for many reasons that only began with the fact that I could never decide whether to sort by first name, surname, or department… The database lets me:

sort by anything I like;
see together everything I’ve talked about with any given person, or everything I’ve talked about regarding any given course;
or my favourite (which I got the fantastic help of @dakvid for coding the SQL; also more generally I want to acknowledge my colleague Margaret Paterson for her inspiring beta-testing) – sorting all my contacts to show at the top the people I talked with the longest ago so I can be reminded to catch up with them.

As I said, I’m currently using it for liaison work but I suspect it could be used for other uses too, so if anyone wants to nab a copy, there it is.

Links of Interest 8/9/2011 – news in e-resources

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Michael S Hart, founder of Project Gutenburg, died on the 6th September – read his obituary.

JSTOR is making much of its public domain material openly accessible. (Library Journal also comments.)

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Information “is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, open-access publication for original articles, reviews and case studies that analyze or describe the strategies, partnerships and impact of library-led digital projects, online publishing and scholarly communication initiatives.” It’s put out a call for submissions for its inaugural issue in [Northern Hemisphere] Spring 2012.

Bibliographic analysis for fun and collection development

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You know how you get a brand new hammer and suddenly you notice all these nails sticking out?

So I’ve been working more with Ref2RIS. And in the meantime some of my colleagues and I were talking about analysing researchers’ bibliographies for ~~nefarious~~ purposes, and I suddenly realised that doing such a thing might also help me get the handle I desperately need on one of the subject areas I’m attempting to be a liaison librarian for without having had any handover or background in.

And then I realised that, instead of staring glumly at some PhD thesis bibliography and having my eyes glaze over, I could just run it through Ref2RIS, pull all the references into Endnote, and sort by journal title.

It did take me two hours to create the conversion file, but on the other hand I’m getting quicker at that. And then I sorted, and did a quick count, and came up with the following data:

The bibliography for this thesis contained 133 references, of which 1 was a website, 9 were books/reports/manuals, and the bulk of 123 were journal articles from 27 different journals.

16 journals were used for only 1 reference each;
2 journals for 2 references;
2 journals for 3 references;
1 journal for 4;
2 journals for 5;
1 journal for 12;
1 journal for 18;
1 journal for 19;
1 journal for 34 references (over a quarter of the entire bibliography)

I also discovered that this last journal is one that our library doesn’t hold…. (We do hold everything that was used 4 or more times; I got bored before checking the less-used journal titles.)

Obviously more research is required

to find out if this is a significant gap in our collection or a fluke of this particular thesis; and
to figure out if there are any other interesting patterns in usage;

but if the researchers have had the courtesy to all use the same citation style then it should be pretty quick research.