(Digital) Word

I’m in awe of the way this video takes years of web development and breaks it down into concepts whose relevance to our daily use of language and information is immediately clear and compelling. Plus, that cool synthesizer soundtrack makes everything sound more important.

Flock to it

Come Flock with me, in my Mozilla-powered social web browser. It took me about 10 minutes to get it all set up. And you can blog straight from the browser, to multiple blog accounts. Fun.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

First draft of my thesis in cloud form

I’ve been thinking about how my thesis would look as a world cloud for a long time… and along came Wordle to make it happen! Cool!

Open Access and MFA theses

UPDATE: After conferring w/ my boss here in the digital library division, I have learned that my school’s institutional repository does have this scenario covered–MFA students will be granted an automatic waiver from global access, other students w/ patents pending on their material will also be after the patent process is confirmed (eg Engineering students). So, our TDs will be accessible on-campus but not on the open web. UMI’s copy will still be available for anyone who can their hands on it. Works for me.

I think that the the open access publishing model (where the academic community takes control of scholarly publishing using web-based journal tools and institutional repository space that individual universities own) is crucial to the future of academic work. Why? 1) The ballooning costs of buying access (not even ownership in the case of online journals) to scholarly work are crippling academic collection building and will continue to do so as the market is basically built on monopolies and 2) as the publication of scholarly work depends on publishers who are 100% for-profit entities, it is going to become harder and harder to gain rights to republish scholarly material of any kind. These publishers are not built to recognize the intellectual value of the material they own–they increasingly want large sums for anthologies and other reprints that cannot be paid by the authors and UPs who want to publish the work and never expect to see any kind of profit based on doing so. We must take ownership of our work, or we will lose it in a more permanent way than ever before. It won’t be free to do this, but it won’t cost as much as what we currently pay to rent access to scholarly work.

One wing of open access publishing is the use of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). This, eventually, could mean no more waiting for to get a physical copy of someone’s dissertation mailed to you–you can click and open any time. (BTW, this is already true for more recent TD’s if your institution has access to Proquest TDs.)

Of course, there are numerous implications to this model which, even in my most librarian mode, I am not blind to. Which leads to

Exhibit I: The U of Iowa recently instituted mandatory electronic deposit of all graduate theses and dissertations henceforth. Again, I am generally in favor of this, and newsflash, this is the way the academic world is heading. My own U is trying to go 100% digital for graduate T&D’s starting this fall. These documents will be made publicly available in our institutional repository.

The U of Iowa, of course, is home to the most famous MFA program in the country, the Writer’s Workshop. As the MFA is currently structured, it is considered the terminal academic degree in the field. As such, the final product of the degree is considered an academic work, created w/in the academy for academic purposes.

Only, that’s not really how it works. Although it may look like and academic degree and act like one in the job market (after you have a publishing career anyway), students in MFA programs think of themselves as writers, not academics, and the MFA is usually a period of intense, focused work geared toward the production of a saleable manuscript. I think it even says that in a lot of MFA descriptions–you need a booklength manuscript to graduate. That’s a measure that reflects the demands of the marketplace, even if the degree is earned in the academy.

So you know where this is headed. U of Iowa MFAs don’t want their TD’s electronically accessible. They are afraid that having a clickable version online will disqualify that work from consideration by publishers. They might be right–we don’t know yet, although there has been no trouble for writers of more obviously academic work getting their stuff published once it has been made electronically available. It also remains to be seen just how visible these ETDs will really become. Institutional repositories are not indexed by Google or any other web search engine. They are stuck underneath layers and layers of library gateways. To find one, first you would have to know it existed. Of course, you could just make a habit of frequenting the IR’s of schools whose ETDs you wanted to keep abreast of… it would be possible to find them, but it’s not like you could just type it into Google and wham. At least not yet.

This is a quandary for me, as both an MFA student and an MLIS student. I resent the attitude of exceptionality displayed by the departments in question at Iowa–the idea that their work should be exempt from a policy geared toward the general good, not toward any kind of desire on the University’s part to make money from their creations. That’s paranoid, but also a sign that the academics and librarians who support open access are not getting the message across (although Peter Suber always tries). Getting control is not the point behind this, the point is maintaining access. If your work is different from other products of the university academic community, then maybe you ought not do it within the academy. Letting you off the hook (which is exactly what the Dean eventually did) sets a precedent that could allow departments to beg off and defeat the whole… well, movement sounds a bit ideological, but a movement it is.

On the other hand, well, if having my MFA thesis online means I can’t publish it, that sucks. And I’ll have to raise a fuss about it when the time comes for me to upload, although I kind of doubt that the Deans at my school will take my concerns as seriously as Dean Lopes at Iowa. In fact, I should probably start raising this issue now if I have any hope of getting around it…

The only real solution, I think, would be to require some kind of critical piece or let the artists’ statement alone count for the actual “thesis” in question and make the manuscript of creative work part of an unpublished defense process, b/c simply letting MFA’s off the hook is problematic both to the status of the program w/in the academy and to the process of gaining control of academic work.

[Probably going to be cross-posted at my library blog.]

Okay, maybe I do twitter

If someone this smart likes Twitter, maybe I can like it too. But it still won’t be any fun unless I can get some buddies.

Or, we could all live our fake lives via Twitter. B/c Twitter lets you change your name whenever you want to. It could be where all of our pseudonyms have lunch with Barack Obama, save the world, and climb Mt. Everest.

A little bird told me

that Twitter is for losers. But then another bird told me that Twitter was going to be huge during the conventions this summer. So, now I twitter. If you twitter, please tell me so that I can stop having zero Twitter buddies. I feel so under-surveilled without you by my virtual side.

PS I also now Last FM and 30 Box and My Blog Log, so if you do those things as well let me know too. Or if you do other things that I should do.

UPDATE: I have disconnected myself from the Internet for two hours, and I no longer have any desire to do anything as nutty as twitter. That was weird. It was like the internets briefly addicted me.

If a faculty member says the same things librarians say

People listen, at last. In which I read between the lines of this NYT article on the Harvard arts & sciences faculty’s vote on open access, institutional repository publishing of completed articles.

The idea:

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs…. Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

Reading this is kind of an open access librarian’s dream come true. A lot of them (I won’t quite count myself among this crowd yet b/c I’m not an actual librarian) have been working overtime to alert anyone who will listen to the fact that the current publishing model requires scholars to turn their contributions to human knowledge over to people whose raison d’etre is to make a buck. You get tenure, and your article begins to disappear. (Of course, good articles will be cited and anthologized and possibly live on past its journal publication, but the vast majority of articles eventually end up trapped in some publisher’s copyright vault.) Of course, nobody listens to librarians, but that’s why this vote has two pieces of good news 1) faculty are doing it and 2) the faculty are at Harvard. You know, once the uber-cool kids start doing it, the other kids will catch on.

The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model.

YES. Exactly. It’s not a business model at this point, it’s a parasite. It deserves to be wrecked. But of course, the publishers want to capitalize on the fear that lurks at the heart of all faculty facing tenure, who really don’t need the rules of the game to change right when they have to play:

Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. It would also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings, they say.

That simply does not have to be true. It’s utterly misleading to say that self-archiving articles is or has to be the equivalent of putting a goofy video of your cat on YouTube. If scholars agree to support open access publishing, slightly modified peer review procedures will follow suit. Scholars and their departments already make no money off their journal publishing–most of the intellectual labor is volunteer slave labor anyway. There are multiple open access, peer-review journals already working. If departments need to begin counting self-archived publications in the tenure process, they’ll find a way to hash it out. It will eventually be impossible to avoid seeing that this is necessary, either b/c library budgets for humanities publications will become so slashed as to no longer support third party humanities publishing–

Supporters of open access say that the current system creates a different set of problems for academics. Expensive journals cut into a library’s budget for scholarly books and monographs, which hurts academic publishers, which hurts the coming generation of scholars who must publish to gain tenure.

–or b/c one of these days government funding is going to depend on making the newly-minted knowledge publicly available, as it already does for many scientific researchers. Now “eventually” could still be a long time, but one hopes, you know?

I hope Harvard prof’s do the right thing, although if they don’t I’ll at least partially understand why. Change is scary. But just having a vote is a start.

UPDATE: They voted yes! Maybe those hummingbirds are really going to meet.

1 million scanned at U Mich

The University of Michigan libraries have now scanned and placed online 1 million books. As they detail here, that’s:

One million = 361,441,145 pages
One million = 42 terabytes
One million = 750 tons
One million = 146 miles

Here the Dean of Libraries at U of M talks a bit about why this is so darned cool, and what we can expected in the future.

A couple of months after I started working at my library, we had a party to celebrate the acquisition of our millionth book.  That took us 41 years, apparently.

A word came to mind for how digitization and the Web are changing intellectual work, and the word is leapfrogging. I have to think about why that’s apt more before I can articulate it, but that’s the image I had when I read about the millionth book. We all build off the work of others, and we have access to exponentially greater amounts of it every year. (Assuming that we can keep publishers at bay or at least stay brazen enough to push the boundaries of copyright further and further.)  I’m really pumped to think about what people out there might be able to do now that they can climb directly onto the back of all the UM people’s efforts and start from there. We’ll all think of something, I’m sure.

Tag cloud lust

Have I ever told you, I’m strangely turned on by tag clouds? I just love them. I love the way information seems to be rising out of itself into some kind of topographical map of ideas that you’d never seen so clearly standing together. I think I’d love to have a tag cloud of my mind on an average day. But until the computer figures out how to scrape my brain, I’ll delight in such revealing visual representations of information as the State of the Union 2008 Tag Cloud made by Jason Griffey on the Pattern Recognition blog.

Like two hummingbirds who had also never met: IRs and humanities scholarship

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

(variously attributed)

Most of the time and to a much larger degree than I ever would have expected when I started this dual master’s program, my two worlds (library “science” and English/academic)  are parallel worlds, discovering similar things and having the same anxieties but hardly ever talking to each other. I’m not the type who thinks that this needs to change in general–faculty members do their jobs and librarians do theirs–but I often wonder if these two worlds will ever get together in time to see that they could do a lot for each other in certain, underexplored areas. And that this might actually be necessary sooner rather than later.

I started thinking about this today as I was reading this article by Mark Bauerlein on a new anthology of writing by the New Critics. The article is half an explanation of why such an  anthology is important even if much the NC’s work is seen as outdated in the contemporary academy and half an expose of just how difficult creating such anthologies is likely to become if intellectual property that was once stewarded by academic-leaning institutions becomes part of the asset package of for-profit publishers. This is hardly news, but I found this discussion of it particularly thoughtful and grounded in details that hit home w/ me, b/c this is my field. B writes that this is an anthology that:

…almost didn’t happen. And the reason why raises broad questions about how humanities fields progress, and what becomes of prior works and ideas once professors assume they have progressed beyond them.

Bauerlein names prices and names to describe what the anthology editor, Garrick Davis, had to do to secure the rights to the essays he wanted to include. A couple of the pieces were in the public domain, and many were in the hands of people who understood both their value to the anthology and their lack of commercial value to the marketplace and so let them go for reasonable, one-time fees of $50-100. And I was proud to see that the literary magazine of my own alma mater was very much among this crowd, licensing essays by Robert Penn Warren, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell for only $50 each. This is responsible stewardship of scholarly heritage.

That all changed when it came time to deal with those essays that, by a process of little publishers getting eaten by larger publishers, ended up in the hands of publishers who are grounded in a for-profit model and have neither the inclination nor the staff to recognize that they wouldn’t be losing any money by licensing out obscure essays  and that they would be doing a great disservice to the scholarly record. Davis “asked Harcourt Inc. for permission to reprint an essay by Blackmur entitled “A Critic’s Job of Work,” and Harcourt came back with the outlandish price tag of $2,350.” He wrote back to clarify that he was not expecting to make any money of of it, and asked for a lower price. A paralegal wrote back and said not only were they not lowering the price, they were closing the offer b/c he had refused it. The conclusion is predictable: no Blackmur for that anthology.

Bauerlein draws a parallel between this “disappearing” of essays under a curtain of excessive copyright and the revolutionary impulses of literary theorists who want to pretend that they arrived on the scene w/ no intellectual help from the tradition, and he concludes:

Whether the threat comes from revolutionary feelings among scholars and teachers who erase their forebears, or from business enterprises’ selling intellectual goods at exorbitant prices, professors need to stir up a counterforce. If they won’t respect their predecessors, why should anyone else?

Indeed, and you know who talks about exactly this? Librarians.

We are well aware of the consequences of letting intellectual material, created by scholars and often paid for by public funds, into the hands of people whose only interest is to make money off of it.  I could talk about this for quite a while, but I’ll use an example: the percentage of the library acquisitions budget that is devoted to paying for journals in the fields of science, technology, and medicine (STM). That percentage is huge and typically growing. It is not uncommon for the price of STM journals to jump by 20-30% in a given year, and seeing as STM departments are the darlings of the research university with all of their mad grant funding, libraries usually pay it and then cut from the humanities acquisition budget–I’m painting in broad strokes here, but that is the general idea. And of course in hard times, STM journals get cut like everyone else’s. Onward–this plays into a vicious cycle for humanities scholars, where their funding for not only journals but also for monographs gets re-directed to help pay for the STM rate hikes. Publishers in turn slash their budgets for humanities monographs, all while tenure requirements go up for new professors.

So it’s a raw deal for everyone involved. Librarians have been working on ways to get around this raw deal. We’re working to promote the open access publishing model and institutional repositories for scholars to deposit pre-prints and other forms of their work before it falls into a publisher’s copyright. Most likely, your institution already has one, it’s just underused (that link is to an article by one of my favorite library bloggers, Dorothea Salo–who, perhaps not coincidentally, also has advanced academic training in a humanities discipline).

Humanities scholars are also clearly thinking about alternatives to relying on the journal and monograph marketplace for scholarly communication. The other week I was reading a piece published a year ago about the MLA’s ongoing discussion about tenure requirements, and how eventually it might be better to base it less on what happens to get published by publishers swamped with submissions they can’t sell and more on the faculty’s assessment of the true intellectual value of the work–seeing as there might be ways for universities to take responsibility for publishing the work of their own scholars in a manner that makes it pretty powerfully accessible and relatively cheap to steward. (As an FYI, for all of their expensive journals, the STM people are way ahead of us on this. For them, an article published in a journal is an afterthought. By the time their research hits literal print, it’s been read and used and cited many times already. They stockpile all their grey literature and preprints and keep each other updated as to what they are putting in, not just via blogs but through more systematic means. It’s pretty awesome.)

What I’m trying to say here is, we’re all having the same problems and we all want things to get better. Librarians are waging a range of daily battles to get better prices on journals (it’s a bidding process–every time I find an article I need readily available to me through online databases my library pays for, I mentally thank the tough as nails librarian who likely held her ground to get a better price), to lobby our lawmakers to require publishers to allow public access to publicly funded research, to write better software for storing and retrieving scholarship. Humanities scholars are of course producing the scholarship that librarians work to steward and also becoming more engaged in what happens to that scholarship when it leaves their hands and gets them one step closer to tenure.

This is all good, and while I don’t expect two change-resistant creatures to change overnight, I do hope that eventually these two conversations spill into each other. I also hope that, wherever I end up in this spectrum of academic life, I can continue to have enough of a foot in both worlds to gently suggest that they try to at least become aware of one another’s efforts. Proselytizing isn’t really my thing–we don’t need converts, we need collaborators. If I do manage to make the switch from librarian to scholar, I like to think that I will be more open-minded than most when it comes to collaborating on projects to get control of the scholarly record b/c of my library experience. And if I stay in library world, I like to think that I will have the sensitivity to scholars’ needs necessary to be useful to them as they figure out what fits into their workflow in this area.

Until then, academics and academic librarians are usually like two hummingbirds who have also never met.