Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Zachary Crockett has written an excellent article entitled "How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain" which contains good data and visualizations to help tell the story of Mickey Mouse and the changes to U.S. Copyright Law. I'll give you this tidbit as encouragement to read the entire article. It is a quote from Paul J. Heald, a professor in the University of Illinois School of Law:
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Kathy Rosa, ALA Research and Statistics
- What are the humanities? No one definition.
- What is digital humanities? One web site serves up a variety of definitions. Digitally created as well as those converted to digital format.
- How does the NEH define it? You see some definitions in grant applications.
- Faculty want libraries to be part of digital humanities. Libraries are a central place for research. Libraries have or can develop the needed skills.
- Faculty though do not see that libraries can totally meet their needs. Faculty want help with project management, for example.
- Librarians want to be partners of digital humanities projects.
- For some libraries, involvement in digital humanities is on an ad hoc basis.
- There overall assessment of current services is quite low.
- How does this affect the students? Yes, faculty do give assignments that rely on digital humanity resources.
- The full survey results are online at americanlibraries.org
David Seaman, Syracuse University
- While digital humanities is an imprecise term, that's note a bad thing.
- We've been doing it for a long time. It is a collaborative process. It requires a bundle of skills. It is a natural interest for academic research libraries.
- For the humanities, the libraries is their laboratory.
- We have a lot of skills in this area and the ability to acquire additional skills.
- We are challenged in understanding how to keep older projects in a useful state, especially when the owners have left.
- It is getting easier to raise resources for projects, including from alumni.
- Seeing faculty and staff hires related to digital humanities.
- There are space implications.
- This is an area of research. Can the library be a collaborator on a digital humanities research project?
- How do we evaluate and value digital humanities work in tenure and promotion cases?
Thomas Padilla, @thomaspadilla, Michigan State University
- Terms of possibility
- Hack vs. yack
- Two definitions of digital humanities:
- Arguments made using digital methods, tools and sources
- Arguments about digital methods, tools and sources
Stephanie Orphan, Portico
- Portico is committed to the preservation of scholarly literature published in electronic form to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future generations of scholars, researchers, and students.
- Why use a third party? Scale and complexity
- They currently have three services; one that has Gale as a client/partner.
- Leveraging preservation infrastructure and experience to benefit the community.
- Potential assistance with text and data mining.
Jon Cawthorne, West Virginia University
- Talked about the three-legged stool that will allow digital humanities to blossom in an academic library.
Friday, January 08, 2016
ALISE16 : How do we help students to understand the distinction between personal values & professional values?
Moderator: Seamus Ross
Panelists: David Lankes, Wendy Newman, and Twyla Gibson
The Ethics and Values of Our Profession
How do we know that our students have grasped the ethics and values that are important to us and our profession?
Gibson - How do people learn ethics? She began by quoting Plato.
In the western tradition there are three frameworks for ethics: virtue ethics (and professional ethics), deontology, and consequentialism. Deontology is "ethics, especially that branch dealing with duty, moral obligation, and right action." She believes that ethics can be learned and taught. They can learned through examples and modeling.
Newman - Values are the connective tissue in our schools. How do students understand values and ethics? People tend to choose LIS because it aligns with their values. What are the barriers to those students then acting ethically or exerting their values? Students may have insecurity to their own leadership role and capacity. They may then not see themselves to exert ethics and values. Students may use conflict avoidance.
What should we do as instructors to help them understand the values and use them? We can use assignments and group work to help students understand their values, be able to discuss them, and learn how to navigate conflict. We can use guest speakers to help students see how values play out in the workplace. Finally, for their entire lives, students are part of a profession that has values and which can mentor students with their values.
Lankes - Ethics are alive. Our profession and our culture has changed. Our communities have changed norms, which have then impacted our profession. Our students are stewards of our principles and values. They need to be ethicists and not just ethical. They need to be able to talk about values like privacy and security, and other current issues. We as faculty need to provide platforms for large scale social actions for our students, but doing it in a way that does not threaten the future of the students. We need to provide an intellectually safe place for this exploration.
Our table question was: How do we help students to understand the distinction between personal values and professional values?
Students need to be exposed to ethics across a number of courses and also learn how to apply it in their work. Some students may be working in libraries already and can bring in their own practical experiences. Students also need to learn how to create policies - ethical policies (moral principles and codes of conduct).
Summary from our table:
- Ethics may depend on context and policy
- Ethics needs to be integrated into all courses
- We need to be reflective practitioners
- Students can learn from one another
Notes from some of the other tables:
- Many of our students are conflict avoidance
- Students need to assert self-authority
- Teach them how not to treat ethics as a "cookbook"
- There is some ambiguity in how we think about ethics
- Teach through the use of video clips
- The context of business and medical context around ethics
- Use classic debate techniques, where students are assigned a side or point of view to defend
- We assume that we do talk about ethics in our classes
- Need to teach how to negotiate conflicting values
Keren Dali and Nadia Caidi
Different kind of diversity: rumination so nice the (un)attractiveness of th LIS programs to culturally diverse students
Why do people who are culturally diverse come to LIS programs? They ha e four research questions.
They are not looking at the statistics but at the perception of the students themselves.
They looked at North America,including aboriginal people and immigrants.
They sent their survey to the 57 LIS programs (Sept. 2014) and received 118 usable responses.
Unexpected finding - "The most striking experience for us was the intensity and the volume of the emotional response generated by the factual, neutrally worded and deliberately balanced questions of the survey, when it came to addressing diveristym participants' descriptions and perceptions were alarmingly and overwhelmingly negative."
What does diversity mean to you? People felt outnumbered and a sense of isolation. Questions of whether LIS is a diversity friendly profession. There is a lack of more global content and approaches in the material.
What is the role of th diversity or lack thereof in students liking or disliking of the LIS program? Diversity was not mentioned as part of the liking. It was mentioned though when people were asked what they did not liked. But it was not a major factor in how people think about their programs.
What are some support mechanisms available to culturally and linguistically diverse students? 55% answer none,not sure, unaware or don't need any. Noted a subjective meaning of "diversity."
Students talked about value-based diversity which includes life experiences and world views.
Connecting with others on a personal level and being able to dialogue made things better.
Where do we go from here?
Philosophical shift - values-based diversity; not only inclusiveness but also competitiveness and survival of the field.
Practical argument - outreach and promotion, recruitment and retention, open and multi-sided dialogue.
Getting personal in systemic changes.
What motivates future information professionals? (It's probably not what you think)
Based on class discussions of a blended versions of a required management course. 98 students in total. Four cohorts.
Employee disengagement Is a problem. Gallup poll ~70% are not motivates.
Motivations is the force that initiatives and guides behavior. There are many factors that impact employee motivation. There have been many theories about it in the last 100+ years.
He collected information from their in-class discussion
Engagement in the work - 34%
Culture of respect and rapport - 22%
Money - 11%
Autonomy - 12%
Recognition - 21%
We need to teach our students about intrinsic factors for motivation, so they know how to use them.
Wooseob Jeong and Laura Ridenour
Fostering diversity in LIS Education: FEAL project - an IMLS grant
FEAL - Fostering East Asian Librarianship. The grant was in 2013.
East Asian backgrounds who have East Asian language skills
Project supported 12 students who are paraprofesionals to pursue the MSLIS degree. They received mentors. Majority of students are under the supervision of Council of East Asian Libraries members.
Only US residents or permanent residents were eligible. They disseminated information through specialized email lists.
There group has done targeted travel, including the ALA conference and the CEAL annual meeting.
Students took a diversified curriculum. Students found and advocated for taking a relevant class through University of Hawaii.
Student Feedback and overall been incredibly positive. The classes are asynchronous online.
Difficulty meeting admission requirements
Difficult to maintain work and family balance
Thursday, January 07, 2016
Sheila Corrall, Univ. of Pittsburgh
- Turning Professional Education Inside Out
- Will focus on the extent of our need to make radical change.
- Radical change is transformative. It has great magnitude and takes a long time.
- There are a number of well-known general trends that are impacting LIS education, including the "open" movement. Libraries are now a more complex landscape.
- Corrall explained people who have multidisciplinary skills as T-shaped people. I-shaped people have deep skills in one domain. T-shaped can go deep in one domain, but also have skills that cross domains.
- Context, conduit and content experts, as well as people who intersect those areas.
- What are the competencies that will be required in 2020?
- What subject matter should form the core curriculum?
- How long should the program be?
- How big should the core be?
- To what extent should real world projects be part of the learning experience?
- What should be the mode of delivery?
- The practicum is one way of gaining experiential learning. Pittsburgh is putting experiential learning in specific classes. They also have a partners program which provides a quality assured partner site placement with a schedule of reflection and evaluation.
Rachel Ivy Clarke
- Designing the future of librarianship
- In the 20th century, librarianship was a social science. Clarke believes it should be reimagined as a design discipline.
- Science is a way of looking at the natural world. Observation.
- Humanities re about rhe human experience. Interpretation.
- Design is concerned with the artificial world. Problem solving, artifact creation. An artifact could be physical or digital or an event.
- "Designerly ways of knowing"
- Creation of problem solutions - wicked problems have more than one correct solution. In fact a solution could create more problems.
- Generation of knowledge through making. This requires iteration and reflection. There should be reflection in action...constant reflection, which might not all be conscious. Future design solutions require having a repertoire of past experiences and knowledge. There is a relevant quote from Smith.
- Design evaluation methods - you need to understand the rationale for what was done, in order to know how it should be evaluated. Critique is a strong evaluative component.
- In design, the creation of the artifact also creates new knowledge. It is not just about numbers but about the artifacts and our experience with those artifacts. Could we foster critique sessions at conferences as a way of providing feedback?
- Univ. of Washington is developing a course on design for its LIS students. Elements of design should also be in other classes.
- Should we have teaching libraries, similar to teaching hospitals?
Lisa Zach and Prudence Dalrymple
- Reaching across boundaries: A longitudinal look at how LIS faculty collaborate
- What motivates faculty in times of collaboration? What inhibits them?
- Did a survey in 2010 and 2015.
- What are people collaborating on?
- What are the type of collaborations?
- Type of communication across collaborators?
- What factors affect collaboration?
- What motivates people to collaborate?
- What are the enablers, inhibitors and barriers to collaboration?
- Collaborative research projects and writing have increased by 45% over the last five years.
- Our collaboration can help us understand the collaborative effects of our students, including where those efforts go well and where they don't.
Chovanec - Filling in the Spaces (FiTS)
Sullivan - GSLIS Speaks
Sarah Crissinger and Sveta Stoytcheva - 2015 Symposium on LIS Education
- Kathleen McDowell, faculty at Univ. of Illinois
- Anna Chovanec, graduate of SU 2015
- Madison Sullivan, graduate of UIUC, 2015
- Sarah Crissinger, graduate of UIUC, 2015
- Sveta Stoytcheva, graduate of UIUC, 2015
Chovanec - Filling in the Spaces (FiTS)
- Treats the MSLIS experience as a human library.
- Focuses on student needs and gaps in the curriculum
- Began in 2010 by Chris Turner, who was then a student. Could the students be resources for each other?
- Leveraging the knowledge and expertise of our student community
- New librarian based model focused around membership. Students as members of the academic community.
- On-site events that are streamed and archived.
- How we do FiTS?
- Run by the LIS Student Assembly
- FiTS coordinator
- Tools - Google Drive, Adobe Connect
- Support from the school
- Connections between students
- Administrative - workflow and policies
- Valuing student input
- Day of FiTS - first attempt to scale FiTS
- Future of FiTS
- Can it be scaled even further?
- Alumni outreach
- Issues of ownership and privacy
- What we have learned
- Classmates to colleagues
- Online student participation
- Value of informality
- Value of continuity - in partnership with the school
Sullivan - GSLIS Speaks
- Gather opinions, etc., from students about the program
- There is information on this in the blog Hack Library School
- The survey had 69 respondents
- Information was anonymized before being presented to faculty
- How did students rank the program? 3.8/5
- Asked for information on improvements that students wanted.
- Asked some opinion questions. Some questions could be answered in long form.
- Also had a student led town hall. This was a safe space for discussing opinions openly. Both on campus and online. Collaborative note taking.
- Students want to provide more input to faculty and faculty committees.
- Some conversations are privileged. GSLIS Speaks tried to pull the curtain back on the conversations.
- Students fear retribution from open conversations.
- Presented comments at two different faculty meetings.
- Would like to see the survey done on a regular basis.
- Clear that students want to be involved in the decision making process. Involving them needs to be in time and genuine.
Sarah Crissinger and Sveta Stoytcheva - 2015 Symposium on LIS Education
- Held two days on site and virtually
- Both unconference and accepted presentations
- Had keynotes including people from Hack Library School
- Conference registration was free
- Has a code of conduct
- Work to meet any accommodations needed
- Unconference themes were developed from an upfront survey. Info is on the web site.
- Logistics - ask for help, not for permission.
- Used existing infrastructure.
- There was a lot of uncompensated time put into the event
- How can something like this be available to more students?
- Results and outcomes:
- No easy solutions, but many conversations
- On-going peer network
- Informs our professional practice
- Non-students were welcome but were asked to listen and not talk
- What's next?
- Would like to see this happen again and at more schools
- Would like to have a national LIS student conference, perhaps as part of another conference. Would need to be affordable for students.
- Would like to see more LIS conferences made affordable for students.
Panel: Eileen Abels, Kristin Eschenfelder, Heidi Julien, Stephen Bajjaly
The panel worked through these questions:
- What was your prior professional and academic background?
- Not asked...does taking a leadership role conflict with a person's role as an instructor and researcher?
- How were you recruited? Each person's as recruited in different ways.
- One thing to consider is if you have caught the eye of a search firm. For higher leadership positions, search firms may be used and be part of the vetting process.
- If you are trying recruit a leader, you need to do a lot of outreach.
- What are the most positive/rewarding aspects of the position? Mentoring faculty, implementing new programs, ability to make positive change, ability to do things quickly, developing a high-level of self-awareness, the opportunity to put your stamp on what the school is doing, new challenges.
- What are your greatest challenges? The challenges facing higher education, cost, negotiating change/change management, people issues, you're still in a middle management position (must manage up and down), acting as the program's figure head.
- What was most surprising to you when you took your position? How embedded a workflow might be in the organization's culture. Learning a new culture. Cultural issues. Personal expectations for work habits and career are not universally shared. The difference between your "voice" as a professor versus as a chair/director. Large things sometimes are easier to implement than small things.
- What has turned out to be just as you expected? Nothing has been as one person expected. It internally changed what happens day to day. Each day is unpredictable. It impacts your research efforts.
- What advice would you give to potential candidates? Test out leadership in different ways, in order to know if it is for you. Jump in. Look for people who might be good at it and engage them. Communicate with your mentors. If you're interested, make it known that you would like to be considered. You will have to step out of our faculty role. It takes more time and you do more problem solving.
- A resource is the HERS Institute, http://hersnet.org
- How do you define success? Meeting the needs of students, student experience, faculty success, holding the socio-political mess together.
- Doing anything interesting takes at least three years.
- What changes have you observed over your time in your position? Change is a constant. The field is changing. Academia is changing. Personnel changes with faculty and staff. Less reactive as an individual. Changes in marketing and recruitment.
- How do you approach succession planning? Get people to test the waters. Get faculty tenured. Have a team. Share decision making. Recruit externally.
- What do you read on a daily basis? The Chronicle, The Department Chair, various monographs, general news, read items related to your long term projects, trend data, Inside HigherEd, news on your metropolitan area.
- How do you find shared faculty governance? It is a given. Faculty need to be engaged. Work the hallways and get people on board before the meeting.
- How do you deal with failure? Humbly. Have a thick skin. "That's life" and move on. Failing is part of taking risks.
- How do you advocate for...? By talking about results.
Wednesday, January 06, 2016
Kristen Schuster brought to the fore the importance of teaching this history of libraries (as an institution) and library science. It can make more intelligible what is going on currently in the profession. It can also demonstrate that we've never all agreed on what libraries should be. If students understand the dissonance of the past, will they better understand the dissonance of the current day? Will they have a richer and more dynamic sense of their profession's history? For me, I wonder if students will be engaged by this history, if it is in a core class? Can it be made exciting and truly relevant for this? I know that students want some of this history, but how much is enough? How much is too much?
Someone in the audience talked about the history of technology in libraries, which is a way to get students to question their assumptions.
Could this history provide a context for the changes that are occurring in libraries now?
I came in late to Deborah Turner's talk and found what I heard to be fascinating. She talked about patrons really being connected to their public libraries and the need for the library/librarians to be vocal about the changes that are occurring (or will occur). She talked to patrons who are really invested in their libraries, who need to be kept informed so that they don't see the changes as being an affront or meant to turn them away from the library. For example, when a staff member moves to a different branch, the patrons need to understand that this is not being done in order to turn them off. She told a story of one library that repainted its walls and the patrons no longer felt like it was "their" library. Communication is key and likely over-communicating.
Turner's research is on underserved populations, but it is clear that the communication skills - including skills around small talk - are needed in every type of library.
Beyond books: emerging scholars talk about new directions and radical change research
Panel developed by Don Latham (Florida State) and Annette Goldsmith (Univ. of Washington)
For information on Dr. Dresang go to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_T._Dresang
Kyungwon Koh, Univ. of Oklahoma - Radical change and young makers: Information creation, sense of agency, and community engagement.
Radical change assumptions from Dresang (1999). Key concepts: connectivity, interactivity and access. She developed radical change book typology (1999). Koh developed typology of radical change behavior.
Koh is now looking at informal learning such as makerspaces. She believes that radical change theory can be used to discuss and describe these spaces. She talked about Information-creation behavior and used the work of young people as examples.
The second behavior is identity and perspective. The third is social interaction.
Liz Mills and Katie Campana (Univ. of Washington) - VIEWS2: Eliza Dresang's radical research.
These two are completing Dresang's final research. Are public library story's times making a difference in the early literacy behaviors of the children attending? They used a quasi-experimental design for the research. They worked with 40 public libraries in the state of Washington. 240 storytimes and 2880 children.
In order to have a enough researchers, the trained masters students through a class to use the tools and to do the observation. The course was offered twice (once each year of the project).
Yes, storytime does change the children. Yes,the research activities did change how the MSLIS students thought about storytime - planning, practice, etc. The MSLIS students also wanted to continue to connect with their fellow researchers.
The final part of the research is to look at assessment in public ibraries related to storytimes.
They are changing findings with librarians through workshops as well as consulting with OCLC on "supercharged storytimes."
Part of their work demonstrates changes that have and are occurring in storytimes.
Jonathan Hollister and Jisue Lee (FSU) - Expanding radical change to digital games and social media
RC1: changing forms and formats
RC2: Changing perspectives
RC3: Changing boundaries
The average age of a gamer is 35 years old. The largest demographic of gamers is adult women. About 30% of South Koreans using social media each day.
RC1 in Digital Games:
Mindcraft - One person built a working cell phone in Minecraft.
Virtual reality- Birdly
RC2 in Digital Games:
Never Alone which was developed with Alaskan First People
This War of Mine - in this game, you are a refugee.
RC3 in Digital Games:
Papers, Please - where you work as a immigration officer
RC1 in Social Media:
Important in cultures where some conversations are not as open.
In January 2012, South Korea lifted its ban on social media.
RC2 in Social Media:
Seen where people look for a different perspective, e.g. looking for a less controlled perspective.
RC3 in Social Media:
Where non-media people become the media. These people may be netizen detectives.
Where people use social media to mobilize resources.
Harry Bruce functioned as our discussant. He had hired Dresang at the University of Washington. He talked about hiring her and the focusing more on digital youth in their program.
Bill Kules (pedagogy.com) and Elizabeth Lieutenant (http://elizabethlieutenant.com) from Catholic University
Systemic program planning is cyclical and includes planning, implementation and assessment. It is part of the ALA accreditation standards and was added in 2001. The 2015 standards makes systematic planning more explicit. There has been minimal research on this, although some on specific parts of systemic planning.
They looked across LIS programs for their research. They had four research questions. They did a content analysis of 15 Program Presentations.
What student engagement methods do programs report using? (From most popular to least):
- Course evaluations
- Program governance representatives
- Supplemental faculty evaluations
- Digital communication tools
- Focus groups
- Required assignments
- External program reviews
Changes based on student engagement:
- Curriculum: program level
- Curriculum : course level
- Student affairs and services
- Assignment/planning processes
- Physical resources
- Administration and finances
- Faculty affairs
Some programs (5) have student advisory boards. These allow students to develop leadership and develop specific skills.
Three programs have student-run meetings, where they organize, publicize, and facilitate these feedback sessions. This also distributes the work. Ditto with the three programs have student-run surveys.
One program systemically targeted surveys as a group at the beginning, middle and end of their program.
Three programs use supplementary course evaluations. Formative, summative and weekly (new courses).
Summary of findings:
- Engagement methods: Less common - focus groups, interviews, student run engagements.
- Changes and impacts: Rare - faculty affairs, administration and finance, mission, goals and objectives.
- Align methods with their purpose
- Be creative
- Adopt mixed methods
- Triangulate results
- Avoid analysis paralysis
- Improve student leadership opportunities
Questions for conversation:
- What's missing?
- Who are we responsive to?
- Are we changing?
- Are we prepared?
How effectively are MSLIS programs modeling the behaviors that they expect of their students?
- How are programs involving students at a distance? One of the programs reviewed is 100% online. One program placed both campus and online students on their governance committees.
- What other digital communications tools are being used? Emails, online discussion forums (limited to students), discussions forum that included students, alumni, and others.
- Increasing the diversity of their populations? Students are not strongly represented on divider syr committees. Only six programs had specific diversity committees.
- Who initiative student run surveys? One grew out of a student run meeting, where attendance dropped off and they began using surveys.
- Questions about survey fatigue?
Tidbit from the innovative pedagogues session - Nicole Cooke (UIUC) used the StoryCorps app for a student assignment, where students interviewed each other. Besides turning in the assignment, students were encouraged to submit their recordings to StoryCorps.
Tuesday, January 05, 2016
Http://infofuture.simmons.edu (funded in part by IMLS). Slides from this ALISE workshop and content created during the workshop will be added to that site. Our session this morning was conducted by a team, with lot so interaction and takeaways (many of which are still rumbling around my head and are not below). My hope is that these notes might prompt you to learn more about design thinking.
The workshop's main goal was to explore design thinking principles and processes that can be used for reenvisioning our courses and curriculum. We were tasked and pushed to rethink the familiar more deliberately in order to generate innovative ideas for change. We were provided a number of tools and processes, which we got to test out. All of them are guides for making observations and insights. They included:
- Journey map - where to look? The journey map (an IDEO tool) charts the experience of a user through time and across place.
- AEIOU - activities, environments, interactions, objects and users - what are you looking at?
- Look-ask-try - how to look?
- Pain points - can be explicit or latent (unrecognized by the user)
- Design principles - the attributes that a solution needs to have to respond effectively to the identified pain points.
The sweet spot for something to be innovative, it needed to get desirable, feasible and viable. (IDEO)
When we design we need to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test and repeat.
Concept poster contains:
- Background and insights - pain points, design principles
- Basic concepts - description, functional benefit, emotional benefit
- Key assumptions - desirability, feasibility, viability
Throughout the workshop, each table turned its attention to a course, including:
- Describing the anatomy of a course.
- Putting ourselves in the shoes of the student. (In the real world, we would need to take in account numerous stakeholders.)
We were asked to frame the problem - how might we...? - and then design a possible solution. We were asked to consider the design principles in relation to the problem. In addition to:
- Go far! Go for wild ideas.
- Stay close - "break fixedness" - SIT - systematic innovative thinking
There was a quick mention of the IDEO's guidelines for brainstorming from "10 Faces of Innovation"
Interesting idea of having students do their "plan of study" as part of their introductory courses, after interviewing professionals in the field and talking to their advisor? Perhaps also have them attend a career fair, where they can hear from professionals talk about their careers?
Design Thinking for Libraries, http://deaignthinkingforlibraries.com - three parts freely accessible.
Monday, January 04, 2016
The web site Law360 has a post on five copyright cases to watch in 2016. Those cases are:
- Oracle v. Google
- Capitol v. Vimeo
- 'Blurred Lines'
- Fox v. FilmOn
- Fox News v. TVEyes