Monthly Archives: June 2008

GoogleWorldCat

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I thought the results of this study were interesting, though not surprising. Librarians at SUNY Buffalo compared search results from their catalog and Google Books and found that Google Books generated many more results and that “many of the Google Books results were relevant and useful.” It would probably be the case when comparing Google Books with my library’s catalog, even though we have many more books in our library than Google has yet digitized.

I would be curious to see the result of a similar comparison between Google Books and WorldCat, though. Often when looking for books on a subject, I skip my own OPAC and head for WorldCat anyway because I always come up with more results. It’s not just a matter of WorldCat having more records, though obviously it does. WorldCat also seems to have more complete records as well. Almost inevitably when I do a keyword search, WorldCat generates ten times as many records as the Princeton catalog, including records for books Princeton owns but that don’t show up with the same keyword search in our OPAC. Usually, that’s because the WorldCat record has tables of contents or additional subject headings not in our records. Though I use Google Books occasionally, I haven’t noticed it being any better than WorldCat, but that may change.

Imagine the possibilities if Google succeeds in what appears to be its endeavor to take over the information world. What kind of book searching capability would we have if Google and OCLC merged? GoogleWorldCat would probably put all the OPAC vendors out of business.

On Liberal Education

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Assaults on the liberal arts always seem to come from people who don’t understand what liberal education is about.

Being a product and proponent of liberal education, I suppose I should take issue with this article: Liberal Arts Colleges: A Dying Breed? (found via the KUAL). The gist of the story is that liberal arts colleges are dying out because they’re not practical enough. It’s odd to focus just on liberal arts colleges, since most universities and colleges have undergraduates who study the liberal arts. Perhaps all those vocational students attending the universities subsidize the liberal arts students.

However, I couldn’t take issue because I found some of the comments so irrelevant to the issue of liberal education, though perhaps relative to the financial security of some liberal arts colleges. Consider this quote:

If liberal arts colleges are a dying breed, not everyone is in mourning. Career-based education is simply more practical, some experts believe.

“First, we all need to realize that the ‘liberal arts curriculum’ has never been proven through empirical research to be superior to the ‘career college education,’ or even ‘self-teaching,’ for that matter,” says Marc Scheer, Ph.D., author of a soon-to-be-released book about higher education, No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-Off.

I’m not going to make a case for the practicality of a liberal education, though one can certainly be made. Instead, I find the entire statement bizarre, and hope it was taken out of context. What exactly would an empirical study be like that could “prove” a liberal arts curriculum is superior or inferior to vocational education, which is really what “career college education” is, though for some reason the person doesn’t want to use the term. Even vocational “education” is a euphemism for what many would prefer to call vocational training.

The only way the statement makes sense is if we add a purpose. Superior for what purpose? If the purpose is to leave four years of college and immediately be able to do some practical work, then perhaps vocational training is superior to liberal education. I’m assuming that is the context of the person’s thought, because otherwise the remark doesn’t mean much. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of a college “education” is to prepare one to immediately perform some practical job somewhere.

But of course that’s obvious, because the purpose of liberal education and the liberal arts has rarely been to prepare people to perform specific jobs. The liberal arts are liberal because the purpose is to create free human beings knowledgeable about their world, capable of critical thought and sophisticated communication, and poised to develop their human potentials. I know this makes me sound like the unrepentant humanist I am, but it doesn’t take any empirical research to show that a good liberal arts curriculum would go further toward this aim than any vocational training.

The critic of liberal education thinks the problem is the snobby professors.

“Liberal arts colleges need to add some more practical content to their coursework and encourage their instructors to do so. As it stands now, many faculty members have basic contempt for career training. They view it as beneath them. They don’t think career training is part of their job. However, it’s clear that both employers and students want more career training at all colleges. So colleges need to change their long-held contempt for this kind of training, and actively attempt to integrate practical material into their coursework.”

However, I think even here the statement is problematic because of the faulty assumptions. I’m not sure any faculty members at liberal arts colleges have any “basic contempt” for vocational training, but that’s just not what they do. I would bet that a lot of professors believe that a lot of the students that are in college now probably shouldn’t be there because they have no interest in developing their intellects and themselves as free human beings and only want to get a job. If it really is “clear that both employers and students want more career training at all colleges,” then the solution may be for liberal arts colleges to die off, though I hope that doesn’t happen. However, if that really is the case, then it shows only that employers and students don’t really want educated people, not that colleges should start offering more vocational training.

How exactly would one add “integrate practical material” into a seminar on literature, philosophy, or history? What does “practical” mean in this instance? All liberal arts classes aim to develop the critical and communication skills of students as well as understand a topic better. Are these not “practical” skills? The answer is probably in the forthcoming book, but I think I’ll be too busy reading impractical philosophy and literature this summer to have time.

Even here, though, I can’t agree based on my own work experience that vocational training is superior to a liberal arts curriculum. In my experience, those without a liberal education are perfectly capable of performing specific tasks, but often less capable of thinking about the broader context of their work as well as less capable of understanding other perspectives. This certainly isn’t always the case, because intelligence and capacity can make up for a lot, and I’ve certainly known products of liberal arts colleges who were intellectually and conceptually substandard. Still, a liberal education teaches one to examine issues past the surface, to place ideas and actions in context, and to appreciate the diversity of people and motives. These things can come without it, and may not always stem from it, but those goals are parts of the purpose of a liberal education, and are typically not part of any vocational training.

Another odd perspective is that Scheer seems to think only in financial terms. For example:

“Yes, students at liberal arts colleges may recoup their investment over their lifetime,” Scheer says. “But based on my research and the research of others, they probably won’t ‘recoup’ their investment until the age of 33. In addition, students get the same financial payoff from college, whether they spend a lot on their degrees or not.”

However, from the perspective of the liberally educated, this statement means next to nothing. How does one “recoup” an investment in reading a poem or a book or philosophy, or for that matter studying pure mathematics. The “investment” in liberal education cannot be measured in financial terms, but only the liberally educated can appreciate that. Attackers of liberal education think colleges should train employees; defenders think colleges should educate human beings. The financial interest for the individual person may dictate vocational training, but the human interest of the person as well as the social and political interest of the whole require a good dose of the liberal arts.

Learning Lessons

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Last week I wrote about an experience with a bad teacher, but I wasn’t ruminating on that just to complain. Moments like that make me reflect on my own teaching, and my own teaching makes me examine other people’s teaching more carefully than I did before.

Part of the problem of that particular professor was probably that he hadn’t been able to experiment on undergraduates while working on his PhD in library science. In other graduate programs, the graduate students gain teaching experience by making the freshmen suffer, or at least that’s how it was at UIUC. It pains me to think what the students had to put up with during my first year teaching. I was shy and quiet, and supposedly when I did speak I spoke too quickly and paced too much (at least according to my evaluations). Though I never got the abysmal evaluations some of my peers did (the best one I heard about: “This is the worst TA I’ve ever had, and he needs to wash his hair!”), they were mediocre at best that first year. The students were somewhat forgiving because they didn’t know any better. However, had those first students been 30 years old with several years of teaching experience, they would have known how pathetic I was.

Bad experiences in the audience have affected my library instruction as well, which is probably where many of us give most of our public performances. When I was boring the students that first year, there was always one day of the semester where I knew they would be even more bored–the library instruction day. We teachers were all supposed to set up an appointment with the library, and we’d spend a class period with a library graduate assistant teaching the students about the catalog and maybe a database. It’s hard to remember what was happening in the early 90s. Perhaps we got a demo of Infotrac or something. What I do remember is this library GA lecturing us for close to an hour on the catalog in a complete monotone while we just sat and stared. The only good points were that I didn’t have to teach that day and that the lights were turned off, thus making it easier to sleep. After two semesters of complaints about how boring and useless these sessions were (and they all seemed to be by the same person), I stopped taking the students and started doing the introductions myself. We were both learning to teach, and were using those poor freshmen as our guinea pigs.

Sometimes we complain that professors don’t want to let us into the classrooms to provide library instruction, but how much of that reluctance is based on bad experiences just like the one I had? We want to give the students help, but is our library instruction uniformly good? When I started teaching research sessions as a librarian, I always had in mind that poor GA from years past and how mind-numbing those sessions had been. The real benefit of those awful sessions was that I always knew at least some things to avoid.

Over the years I’ve had some great professors, and have often modeled parts of my teaching persona directly on them. As a teacher, I’ve benefited from bad teachers as well. I know not to hand out grades willy-nilly without being able to justify them, but I also learned to be honest with students when I don’t know something and not try to bluff my way out of a bad situation. Part of my anger with the bad professor was that he was trying to bluff me. He didn’t know what he was talking about, but seemed to treat me as some lesser being who could be lied to with no consequences. With him I think it was the product of nervousness and not arrogance, but still I didn’t like it. He was anxious and trying to hide his embarrassment instead of just being honest.

Other teachers do this in the classroom. I’ve seen a couple of different teachers go out of their way to mask their ignorance. (Though my favorite story was second hand, about an English professor in a seminar who spent fifteen minutes of discussion time avoiding admitting he knew nothing about Condorcet, as if this is some sort of crime.) Librarians probably do this in instruction sessions as well, but I haven’t seen as many of those. Yet I’ve never had a student who seemed to respect me less if I answered a direct question with, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you with an answer.”

This post isn’t so much about cataloging lessons learned from bad experiences as a student or audience member, but more about how I’ve tried to learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid them myself. My teaching might not be great, but I know at least some things to avoid so that it doesn’t become execrable, and for that I have even the execrable teachers in my past to thank. Thank you, execrable teachers from my past.

Rating the Professors

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I’ve been thinking about a couple of my odder experiences in library school lately, possibly because I recently read my teaching evaluations from last fall and am also working on an article on the ethics of unobtrusive reference evaluation (which has required actual research, and has thus seriously cut into my blogging time). A chain of associations carried me back to an interaction I once had with a library school professor that I can only call an obtrusive teacher evaluation.

In one of those intro classes that anyone who could read could teach but apparently not teach well, we were required to write a one-page “essay.” I can’t remember if it was supposed to have any purpose, but probably not. Regardless, I cranked it out and handed it in. It came back with a grade of B. Okay, I could live with that, though it surprised me a bit, since I’m a competent writer. I was also surprised he’d turned one of my commas into a semicolon, thus creating a fragment, and turned my one semicolon into a comma, thus creating a run-on sentence. But everyone has their bad days when basic grammar is just too much trouble. However, I then found out in discussion with other students that everyone got a B. That is, every person in a very large class got a B. Nobody got an A. Nobody got a C, D, or F (are library schools allowed to fail anyone?). This seemed peculiar.

Still, I wasn’t going to complain. What’s one B more or less? But a couple of days later I was passing by the professor’s office and decided to ask him about it. Not so much about my grade, as about the odd fact that everyone got the exact same grade. When I asked him, he said they just all seemed like B papers to him. By that time I’d been teaching and grading essays in rhetoric and literature for a few years, and I found his answer very unsatisfactory. In a slightly disingenuous manner I asked him if he could articulate his grading standards for me, so that I might be able to meet them in the future. That is, what made a paper an A or a B or a C, what did he look at when grading, etc. At that point he started giving me the runaround, and it was clear that he had no idea. He didn’t know what made a good or bad essay, other than his gut “feeling.” Lots of people think grading essays is very subjective, but that’s not true. It’s fairly easy to articulate standards, and with common standards there’s often a broad consensus on proper grades. “Feeling” like a paper is one grade or another without being able to justify a grade is a mark of a bad teacher, and also means the teacher cannot guide those students who honestly do want to know what standards they need to meet to succeed.

We discussed this and some other teaching issues. The class in general was badly run and his teaching ethos was deteriorating quickly for me. Finally, his avoidance of straight answers led me to ask the most aggressive question I’ve ever asked one of my teachers. Angry at his vague evasiveness, I asked, “Have you ever taught before?” I felt a little bad, because he was a nice guy, well meaning and seemed kind, but I resent unqualified people being my instructors. After a bit more stammering, he admitted that he hadn’t taught before. So he hadn’t taught, hadn’t graded, and frankly couldn’t lead a discussion. And yet he had the power over my grade. I went to library school for free, and in this class I was getting what I paid for, which I suppose made up for the bargains I received in a few classes with good instructors.

I left in a huff, feeling angry both at having what I considered an unqualified professor and also at myself for letting it get to me. The denouement? From then on, every assignment I turned in got an A+, and there was still no explanation why. Probably he just didn’t want to have any more exchanges with that unreasonable, angry student.

Weeding Questions

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I’ve been commanded to weed the Bs in our main reference room. The good thing is it gives me something to do at the reference desk. I’m finding it relatively easy to move out some things–e.g., the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, which I just found is digitized anyway, or the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum–that I’m pretty sure are rarely, if ever, consulted here, and are quite old for reference books. Our library has subject study rooms with reference materials, and anyone likely to consult the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum will also probably have a key to the religion study room.

My main questions are about all those specialized reference books, things like the Encyclopedia of Hell or the Historical Dictionary of Taoism. In a reference room tight on space, how specialized can a reference book be before it can safely go out to the circulating stacks. If the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism is on the shelf, can I let the Popular Dictionary of Buddhism fly and be free? Do I need ready access to four different encyclopedias of Hinduism? Or multi-volume encyclopedias of philosophy in four different languages? And if all the big sets and the main encyclopedias are available, why bother with the single volume specialized works?

Should I keep reference works that I’m almost positive no one is going to consult just because I like to have them there, even though I don’t consult them, either. Some old sets just seem like they belong, even if they’re quite dated. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics comes to mind. That could easily live elsewhere, but it just feels right on the shelf to me. My feelings on the matter, may, as usual, have to be sacrificed.

Oh well, no time to ponder further. I’ve been asked if I can get this done before ALA. I should have asked whether she meant Annual or next Midwinter.

Collecting Hard Drives?

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Libraries often acquire the papers of famous writers, and these sometimes have drafts of stories, poems, or novels, so that interested scholars can see the process of writerly creation. Are those days dying? Most writers write on computers, I assume, and plenty probably don’t even print out drafts as they go along. Maybe they save them as separate drafts, but unless they’re thinking specifically of scholarly posterity everything might just be one Word file. Maybe one could examine the writing process by hitting Control-Z a million times.

Are there libraries or archives out there that are trying to acquire not just authors’ papers, but perhaps their hard drives as well? Instead of boxes upon boxes of paper, the entire creative life of a typical writer could probably be stored on a flash drive. Even without public digitization, such drives would be useful to study some writers. It’s just something I’ve been wondering about lately, but don’t know of any examples.

The Future in the Past

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I finally got around to reading Robert Darnton’s essay on the Library in the New Age in the New York Review of Books, and was pleased with the conclusion both reaffirming the traditional importance of the research library and expressing some enthusiasm for the abilities of digitization projects such as Google Books to further scholarly research. He notes in the essay that words printed on paper is the best known long term storage medium, and that’s something for us to consider for the future as well as the past.

A month ago I read a post at Gypsy Librarian summarizing an article speculating about how much would be lost for libraries if some sort of disaster wiped out our electricity. (The article is also discussed at Logical Operator.) Given a sufficient enough world energy crisis and I suppose that future is plausible even if improbable, though if we enter some sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic world we’ll probably all be too busy defending our desert fortresses against roving bands of toughs to worry much about research. Still, the point is an interesting one. The pre-microfilm research library was impervious to this sort of disaster. Books printed on non-acidic paper last a long time, and that fact has been proven with time. They don’t even need the exquisite care they sometimes get now. When weeding the philosophy collection in the open stacks, I several times came across sound copies of two and even three hundred year old books just sitting there.

While I’m a big supporter of digitization projects and like the ease of use and power of search that digital texts give us, I still worry about the future. Sometimes those of us who like printed books and are skeptical of some technological claims for future information bliss are accused of being too traditional, too rooted in the past. We must look to the future. See what the exciting tools are doing for us! I can see what the exciting tools are doing for us, and in many cases I heartily approve. However, it seems to me that some techno-thrill is centered merely on the present, not on the future. Traditional research libraries have always shown a concern for the future. The collections we have now that allow historical research are there because someone in the past collected them for future use. Darnton’s example of the Folger collection is an excellent example of this.

I found his discussion of the multiple Folios had some personal relevance because of a discussion I once had with someone from Project Gutenberg. I was working in a used bookstore at the time and during a slow period we were arguing about the future of books. He was convinced that the future of books was electronic, while I was making the self-serving case that print books would be around for a long time to come. Though he was in fact haunting a used bookstore, he said he could read any book he wanted on his Newton (this will date the conversation somewhat). Anyway, the discussion got on to scholarly editions of Shakespeare, a topic I have a bit of knowledge about. He informed me that scholarly editions were irrelevant, and that any old text could be put online and everyone would be happy with it. In other words, he was assuming that the works of Shakespeare were stable texts, that there’s just, for example, an unproblematic text of King Lear. For the sake of argument, I’d be willing to admit that the general reader of Shakespeare probably doesn’t care about the details, but that unconcern is built on the foundation of texts created by scholars working with multiple texts of Shakespeare to try to create a best text for the general reader. It’s just not true that there is a single, stable Shakespeare just as it isn’t true there’s a single stable text of the Bible, to name another book that the general reader often assumes is unproblematic. Editions matter to the scholar, and they should matter to everyone. Do all digitization projects consider this?

A concern for the future is a concern that what is being collected will be available for future use. Unfortunately, in many respects libraries are thinking less of the future and more of the present. Consider the example of scholarly journals. Until relatively recently, journals were purchased and that was that. The publisher could fold. The journal could dissolve. It didn’t matter. The journal issues that had been purchased were still there in perpetuity. Now, however, libraries routinely aren’t purchasing journals, they’re purchasing access to journals, which is very different. Though all would be lost if we lost electricity, less dire circumstances could still lead to the loss of said access. If libraries stop subscribing, sometimes they might lose access to back issues that they had once been able to get. The stability of online collections differs, of course. JSTOR seems to me about as stable as can be, though I don’t think research libraries should discard all their old copies of JSTOR journals. A research library would be quite foolish to start canceling subscriptions to necessary journals because they’re now in ProQuest, though, as good as ProQuest is at providing a lot of content.

All is subject to uncertainty, and no individual library of the past could be sure that their collections wouldn’t be destroyed by fire or natural disaster (though rarely has this occurred on a grand scale). Had that happened, though, the results would be disastrous for the individual institution and its scholars, but less so for everyone else unless the collection was very unique, because there are so many research libraries. Could we be so sanguine about the future? If publishers of the future started collapsing in some economic meltdown and their online offerings disappeared, would we still have what we had at one time purchased, or would then be reliant once more upon the pre-electronic collections?

I’m not trying to paint some gloomy picture of the future of research libraries or attempting to manufacture a crisis, because I don’t feel gloomy about that future and I don’t think a crisis exists. I don’t think libraries are dying. But I find it odd that most of the time I see projections and prophesies about the future of libraries, they all concern the way some technological contrivance is going to affect the way we deliver content and services, but rarely on what that content will actually be. We’re told, for example, that mobile devices are ever more common and that we will have to adapt to them. That’s fine for some things. I have a mobile device of my own and use it all the time, but I think they’re only useful in their place. I don’t think people will be reading scholarly monographs on their smartphone. With DRM and copyright being what it is, I can’t even see much of a future for reading scholarly monographs from libraries on dedicated ebook readers, which is too bad because that’s a future I’d like to see. However, a concern for the future is a concern for preserving the past. The future of a research collection is its past, in what it has preserved and made available. If we abandon the known, stable good of print, can we be sure that what we collect now will still be available 100 years from now?

I don’t know the answer to that question, and I’m not especially alarmed, but it’s a question well worth addressing. If the collections of the future are just the things we managed to digitize, then they might be relatively more impoverished than our print collections are compared to all that has been printed. If the digital versions don’t survive, we will have lost a lot. Right now we can’t address the problem because we are too concerned with the flux of the present to think much of the future and because there’s no way we can answer the problem of longevity and preservation without a lot of time passing by to prove the point one way or another. We take our multiple leaps of faith and hope for the best, because that’s the best we can do right now. Regardless, we must always be concerned not just with present flux, but with future stability. The research library always shows concern for the past and hope for the future.

Some librarians are criticized for resisting “change.” I put the term in quotes because it’s used so often in the library literature but is an almost contentless word. Change has no concrete meaning; everything depends on the specific change. Is it a change for the better or worse? Can we tell? What are the reasons for change? Are they good ones? A concern for “change” is usually poised as a concern for the future, but there doesn’t seem to be much agreement on what that future might be. This makes perfect sense, and I’d be very skeptical indeed of librarians who claimed with certainty to know exactly what libraries and library users would be like in twenty years. What bothers me about so much change rhetoric is its reactive nature, though. Instead, I prefer those librarians who change because they want to create a certain type of future, not because they think if a contemporary fad isn’t exploited that libraries will become irrelevant. For research libraries, that future seems clear. We want to create a future where the human record of the past will be widely and indefinitely accessible. The future of research is in the past and its preservation (and by past, I include the very recent past as well, so in a sense almost anything is the past, including those statistics from last year you’re using to make arguments about the present). How we go about preserving this past will determine the possibilities of future research, and for now the best bet might be to take the piecemeal approach suggested by Darnton. Digitize, but don’t forget to buy the books. Print isn’t dead, and it lives a long time. Insisting on buying print books isn’t a reactionary resistance to change, but instead a cautious consideration of future needs in a time of uncertainty.