Librarian Entrepreneurs: Demystifying a Professional Oxymoron: Steven J. Bell

- Bell’s Presentation – steal this ..
 

• Made Video of Question to start off presentation
• Hand drawn pictures and text

Name a Librarian who is an Entrepreneur? .. don’t now
Name any Entrepreneur? Gates, Trump .. don’t know

Confusion with “resourceful” “innovative”

7 Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneur

1. Opportunistic: Israel and waste water
2. Creative Genius (or Team) Intermittent Windshield wiper (Pixar)
3. Customer Focus (Zappos)
4. Persistence (Berners-Lee)
5. Connect the Dots (spotting trends, see same things differently)
6. Passion (Blended Librarian Online Community)
7. Risk Taking

“Sessions” – Library chat platform – North Carolina

Social Entrepreneurship: Creating Future Libraries (Aaron Schmidt – notebook)

“Design Thinking”  IDEO “Deep Dive” (Nightline episode)

The Design Approach:

• empathic thinking (experience it live .. not by survey)
• identify problem before the solution
• brainstorming process
• prototyping process
• formative summative evaluation (let people try it)

10 Tips for Aspiring Librarian Entrepreneurs

1. Listen/Observe
2. Accept Hard Work
3. Something is better than nothing
4. Break a Few Rules (not so policy driven)
5. Ask Open-Ended Questions
6. Balance Risk & Evolution (use incremental change)
7. Develop Sticky Ideas – (Made to Stick – Dan Heath Book) – elevator pitch, succinct, emotional
8. Time For Ideas : 20% time for thought and reflection (watch for Google Waves)
9. Keeping Up  (Bell’s Keeping Up Blog) – trends, next big thing, disruptive technology
10. Use the Zoom Out Lens (JCollins … when things get tough)
11. Know your Core Values

Next Steps

• Talk to Users in their Natural Habitat
• Talk About Core Values with Stakeholders
• Talk about Design Thinking
• Talk about Risk Tolerance Level

Blog: Designing Better Libraries

In Video: Jim Neal (Columbia)

• Unbundle Heirarchy
• Create New Units
• Create Maverick Unit

Comments from Audeince

.. ways around flat hierarchy .. (ie. cross functional groups)
.. too flat makes a lot of work (need some .. hmm makes me think of Monkey)

*** Bell Also Mentioned Reference desks going away ***

Conference Summary Ideas: Wake Forest Dir.

Risk Management over Risk Taking
Paying faculty to work on better library assignments
AU Libraries Professional Development Blog
NJ Inst. Tech .. Doing interesting things

Competition for Library Services  – Dr. Larry Nash White

• Not only provider
• May not be best
• Not First provider (14th in OCLC Survey)
• We compete with each other (libraries)
• Staffing: poaching & book publishing

Competitors: (Options)

• Bookstores (Physical and online)
• Mom & Pop
• LSSI – outsourcing lib services (public, small academic, special libraries and they do it well)
• E-Books
• Social Networking: .. is this replacing “library as place”
• Google: 99 cent chapters on horizon – idea maps – time maps (check out) .. also repackage existing services for new markets
• (Slide: Visual Of Hundreds of 2.0 icons)
• iTablet
• Espresso Machine: Books on Demand (500,000, Million by 2010 books on it)
• Redbox VD rental .. total automation
• Flexible flex screens

There are competitors we cant see …

• Day Care
• Lack of time to go to the library
• Entertainment
• SEE .. “The Hidden” chart in ppt

Potentials:

• Walmart sells more books than Amazon, B&N and BooksaMillion combined
• Kiosks – that print out paperbacks and provide e-copies

Competitive Responses:

• Respond like a business
• Expand performance assessment
• Include competitive scanning /and intelligence
• now service environment
• innovate
• increases access, alignment and accountability
• value assessment!

“A Flat World Library” -  Biblioteca de Santiago (Chile)
See YouTube on Biblioteca

Never had a library .. had clear set of needs .. built strictly according to need

• Everything On wheels
• Don’t Shelve – RFID Tags,
• Wireless
• Power system portal
• Customer delivery
• Art Museum
• Customized Seated
• Open 120hrs week
• 270,000 Sq Foot Bldgs
• Audio/Voice and Touch Screen Workstations
• 4000 Volunteer

Anthropologist in the Library to watch

Meeting an Unmet Need: Extending the Learning Commons Concept Through On­  Campus Partnerships and Branding – La Loria Konata; GSU Learning Commons

Georgia State University (Learning Commons) .. Outreach Efforts

Assignment Calculator (widget)

Webheat (Univ Minnesota)

Campus Collaborations: (Idea .. meet with Student Activities)

• Office of New Students
• At Risk Students Program
• McNair Scholars (Honors students) .. paired with faculty on research .. designed for them – sessions and breakout with liaison librarian
• Black Sorority Project
• Freshman Friday: Fri. before school starts. – Passport stamps (redeemable) .. food and games, movies, chill out stations.. just get them in the library .. tee shirts, coffee tickets, frisbee magnets.
• Family Weekend – leftovers from Freshman Friday
• Chillax .. during finals week .. Episodes of Family Guy and Pizza .. (announced chat service and room reservations)

Ideas:

• Facebook Page
• Learning Commons Theatre (On YouTube) .. “Ghost Book” .. “Rude Computer”
• iTunesU

Failed Attempts

• Student Advisory Group
• Mystery Shopper (for evaluation of services) work With Marketing Class
• One Six Right Screening
• “old skool gaing”
• Online Drop-in Classes

Alibris .. Sell Books

Scan ISBN .. populates record and instant website listing.  Name Price.
Incl. Subject Listing. (50 bks/hr)
Pricing tool
Generates Packing Slip
Mailing included (figure in pricing)

Mentioned “Long Tail”
Google Books .. reeducated self

Jon Obermeyer: Lunch Speaker – Stacking the Odds for Success: A Six­ Stage Process to Articulate and Promote Your  Entrepreneurial Idea.

2 kinds of Entrepreneurship
Lifestyle (small, personal) vs High Growth (corporate)

NOTES:

• Identify a VERY Large problem tht needs to be solved
• Not necessarily something nobody is doing… some competition good.. just identify weakness and make it better
• Libraries Ideal for “Ubiquitous Entrepreneurship”
• Growth the idea to be self sustaining beyond your tenure (Exit)
• People Dont like to Adopt New Things

6 Steps

Problem -> Solution -> Product
Team -> Funding -> Exit

1) Problem ..

Spend Lots of Time (most) identifying a PROBLEM

• data + Research
• articulate it succinctly
• cite credible sources

2) Solution

• Benefits?
• Why is it unique?
• Why worth investigating?

3) Product

• Tech Specs
• Scales and Scope
• Design for Future (years out) … where is the product going

4) Team

• Functional Expertise
• Domain Expertise
• Initiative Person (worker bee)
• Political Person
• Succession .. who will take over
• Then do “Gap Analysis” – who is missing
• Then .. get them on advisory board or as a vendor

5) Funding

• Entrepreneurs Embrace Risk
• Investors Reduce Risk
• Mock up Pro-forma Budget (3-5 years)
• OK to Lose $

6) Exit

• Know logical conclusion (ie. solved problem, failure, can carry on without you)
• Exits can build credibility

See Six Step Template (Business Plan on One Page) – also develop “elevator pitch” version (clear, concise, sharable)

Look into “Venture Philanthropy” – “Entrepreneurial Philanthropy”

Entrepreneurs

• Find Partners – spreads risk
• Build Teams
• Use other areas of organizations – i.e. Business school for business plan.
• Opportunity focused
• Should be small, simple and practical.. one idea at a time

Drucker: Links Entrep and Innovations

———————
Risk

• Some may chastise Libraries for taking risk (risk adverse) .. Libs have been rewarded for being conservative
• Risk Taking vs Risk Management – go for Risk Management
• Parallel to Investing
• Balancing risk, diversifying, reserves and using time

———————
Leadership

• Create culture of innovation .. hire ‘em and let ‘em go
• Some guidelines – don’t micromanage
• Instill principles and values
• Provide resources, rewards & incentives
• No perfect decisions – Take Leaps of Faith
• Resist order and completeness
• Don’t Manage for for Exceptions: Too much planning for for exceptions (policies)
• Design for typical occurances (98%) not Exceptions
• Empower people to make decisions on exceptions
• More risky when 1 person makes decisions
• Fear of Failure
• Fear of Success

———————
Organizational work (slide)

• Normal work -> R&D -> Innovation -> Transformative work
• Only funded to do “Normal work”

———————
Knowledge Management

• Open and collaborative – of interest BEYOND the institution
• Collect Institutional mission-based assets
• Proposes new discipline – “KIAS (Knowledge Information Arts & Sciences)” .. Knowledge Technology
• She says “open knowledge” will surpass published content

Re-Imagine:

• Curate .. notebooks, data, software, users are creating their own “personal knowledge systems”

———————
Opportunities:

• Open Movement  – resist control
• Social Networks: services (OCLC)
• Teaching new literacies and digitally challenged
• Leverage advantages of location and service
• Mini/Innovation Grants (Enrichment Grants) – up to $5000

Ideas:

• POD squared – Print on Demand / Purchase on Demand
• “Espresso Machine” Prints Books on Demand
• Utah – Western Soundscape Archive – cool – Funded by library & ILMS (westernsoundscape.org)

———————
Strategies:

• Fast track decision
• Be ready for opportunities
• Reinvent
• Experiment, shift, adapt
• Assume more risk
• Partner
• Plan in shorter time frames

———————
Summary Points (there is more … find .ppt)

• Stop dwelling on risk – risk is unavoidable .. live with and manage
• Small focused steps
• Not about information ..we’re about knowledge
• Spend resources to create transformative work
• Good ideas should be shared
• .. *** find .ppt for more ..

———————

• “Nothing breeds success like failure” – Kiplingers
• Just Do It!

Materials used for Bergren Forum “(R)evolutions in Scholarship: Rethinking Scholarship in the Digital Age”   Presented: April 30, 2009: Nevins Theatre, Alfred University

Presentations: Created in In Keynote (for Mac) and Exported to PowerPoint

Part I – Chad Harriss – Powerpoint

Video – “This is Scholarship“

Part 2 – Mark A. Smith – Powerpoint – Speaker Text

Video – “Open Access“

Part 3 – Ellen Bahr – Powerpoint

• Ideas that have worked or applied in real circumstances by working leaders
• Ideas that have been synthesized in relation to other works, in other contexts.
• Discussion gathered in one place
• Powerful way to leverage online content in its immediacy and unprocessed forms

Open Web (http://hblog.org/tag/the-open-web/)

“Having said all that, if I had an inch on CNN or BBC to talk about the ‘open web’, this is what I would say (based on the mapping that I’ve started here):

‘Think of a place where you and your neighbors decide what the rules are and that the only rule is that there has to be a really good reason to keep people out;
Where you’re greeted with a big welcome mat that says ‘Please come in and play’ rather than ‘Keep out until you’re invited’;
Where you can prove yourself by doing and making things and showing them to the world, rather than waiting in a line to be chosen;
Where you can talk and build with people around the world who see your difference as an asset rather than a liability;
Where the default is to share, rather than to keep hold to yourself;
And where what you read, hear and see is always an invitation to participate and create, rather than a one-way broadcast.

Around the world, people are building a new place on the web that engenders the principles of transparency, openness, sharing, collaboration and participation. The open web is a conversation about how the world can be better, and how ordinary citizens can help build it as an example for others to follow.’

- Bio: Heather Ford is a South African-born webqueen who is passionate the power of the Internet to bring people together to solve common problems.

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What is the Open Web? [Permalink]

http://blogs.concedere.net:8080/blog/discipline/web/?permalink=What-is-the-Open-Web.html

Wed Jul 23 18:59:31 UTC 2008

Even if nobody’s exactly sure what the Open Web is the phrase can still be very useful as a buzzword. But a clearer understanding of the buzzword is a worthwhile challenge (if only so that we have something to blog about). It’s easy to point to particular principles like open standards or specific examples like APIs and mashups as examples of the Open Web. The difficulty lies in tying all these different things together into a single, coherent Big Picture. And given that the web itself is so big, bigger than any single culture or government or corporation or technology or ideology, bigger, really, than anything that has ever come before, it’s unlikely that a big enough picture exists. Any attempt to “sum up” something so huge is probably doomed to fail. But of course this is no reason not to try and do it anyways. So, let’s start thinking big.

Before the web, in the desktop era, the big visionary idea was a computer on every office desktop and in every home. We could save ourselves a lot trouble by starting with this idea. It’s a great place to start because it’s so very simple. But it’s not enough. What’s missing, of course, is the network. Not just the physical realization of the network — the wifi and the HTTP and the network protocol stacks — but also the social realization of the network in the form of other people. After all, other people are the Net’s killer app. The net nothing without that crucial ingredient. If we combine Bill Gates’ vision of universal technological empowerment with Tim Berner Lee’s vision of a world wide web something pretty cool emerges: a vision of every person and every institution communicating with every other person and every other institution through a global information system. Instead of a personal computer there’ll be a browser on every desk and in every pocket and in every device. And ‘browser’ is really just shorthand for a User Agent that can send and receive over the network.

Such a formulation isn’t perfect. There are problems that crop up when words like “every” and “global” are tossed about. But it does serve our purposes well enough; it’s plenty vague but not so vague so as to be useless. We can start here and work our way towards the various bullet-points. Of course the actual derivation is left as an exercise for the reader.

More importantly the formulation also enables us to approach some of the more problematic questions concerning the Open Web. For example it suggests that the problem with technologies like Flex/Flash and Silverlight isn’t so much that they’re proprietary but that they’re controlled by a single vendor. Is it smart to allow a single vendor to control the platform? Nope. But the answer here isn’t completely cut and dry. Technologies like Silverlight and Flex could work fine on the Open Web as long as they also work with the Open Web. So long as they integrate and work well with all the other web technologies out there (and thus don’t try to dominate the ecosystem) then there’s no reason they can’t join in. The more the merrier. Integration and control seem to be much more important than matters of proprietariness and openness. A reasonable case can certainly be made that companies should be allowed (even encouraged) to innovate and do their own thing so long as they also support standardization whenever possible. This might be the Open Web version of being a “good citizen.”

So what the heck is the Open Web? The answer turns out to be surprisingly straightforward. It’s a web that’s open to everybody and everything. This answer isn’t really satisfactory. Most answers aren’t. But it’s a start.

Some interesting resources that relate to our topic of ‘strong libraries’

BUSINESS CONSIDERATIONS

Active Leadership (Manage your future, inspire your staff)

Leslie Burger, “Transforming Leadership,” American Libraries, November 2006, pg. 3.

“The challenges faced in libraries today are changing at a rapid pace and require an agile workforce of problem-solvers, team-players, leaders, and articulate spokespeople.”

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Jim Collins, Good to Great, 2001.

“We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.”

“When you conduct autopsies without blame, you go a long way toward creating a climate where the truth is heard. If you have the right people on the bus, you should almost never need to assign blame but need only to search for understanding and learning.”

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ICMA Management Perspective, October 2007. http://icma.org/documents/Final_Mgmt_Prsptv_Libraries_(gates).pdf.

“From bridging the digital divide to offering solutions to societal challenges, the public library has evolved into the essential ‘go to’ facility for young and old alike – both physically and in cyberspace.”

“Michael Bryan, director of the Seminole Community Library in Florida, describes libraries as ‘the manifestation of democracy.’”

“In short, libraries can be important partners for local governments in improving the quality of residents’ lives and increasing opportunities for all.”

“Local government managers across the United States need to have a greater awareness and understanding of the traditional, evolving, and potential role of libraries in the community.”

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Joseph R. Matthews, Strategic Planning and Management for Library Managers, 2005, pg 16.

“One of the realities for almost all libraries is that the individuals and boards responsible for the library do not dedicate much time to discussing important topics but rather seem to spend their time when they do meet on announcements, updates, and trivial matters.”

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Donna Nicely with Beth Dempsey, “Building a Culture of Leadership,” Public Libraries, September/October, 2005, pgs. 297-300.

“Public libraries operate in an exceptionally dynamic environment. We face new competition for our traditional services and new opportunities to serve our communities surface almost daily. Layer upon that an ever-evolving technological setting. Clearly we need daring, confident leaders who can navigate these waters and inspire staff to tackle new opportunities; yet, in our industry we operate with little formal leadership training.”

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Peter M. Senge, “The Leader’s New Work: Building Learning Organizations,” Sloan Management Review, 32:1 (1990:Fall) p.7.

“Few acts of leadership have a more enduring impact on an organization than building a foundation of purpose and core values…”

“Sometimes the most difficult leadership acts are to refrain from intervening through popular quick fixes and to keep the pressure on everyone to identify more enduring solutions.”

Organizational Efficacy (Reorganize every year)

Andrew Albanese, “Harvard University Announces Formation of a Library Task Force,” Library Journal, March 10, 2009.

‘Facing budget concerns that library officials have acknowledged could lead to departmental consolidations and job cuts, Harvard University provost Steven Hyman last week announced the formation of a task force charged with “developing recommendations to make the Harvard Library system stronger and more responsive to the needs of students and faculty at a time of both technological change and financial challenge.” Library officials said that the “duplication of acquisitions, and licenses, and long-term storage space” detract from library’s ability to fund critical priorities.’

http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6643228

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Mori Lou Higa, Brian Bunnett, Bill Maina, Jeff Perkins, Therona Ramos, Laurie Thompson, and Richard Wayne, “Redesigning a Library’s Organizational Structure,” College & Research Libraries, January 2005.

“As libraries struggle to define their roles for the future, they must carefully evaluate and reposition staff resources to best support changing areas of focus.”

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Lisa Richter, “Great Expectations: An Interview with Jim Collins,” Public Libraries, January / February 2007.

“There is just simply no room in key seats in a great organization for people who fail to deliver on their commitments, just no room.”

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Maureen Sullivan, “The Promise of Appreciative Inquiry in Library Organizations,” Library Trends, Summer 2004, Volume 53, Number 1, pgs. 218-229.

“Library organizations, like so many other types of organizations today, face the need for significant transformation in the way they are organized, the work they do, the ways in which they perform this work, and in how they meet the challenges of staying relevant and meeting the needs and expectations of their various constituent groups.”

Business Processes (Planning, budgeting, planning, and other business tools and processes)

Martin G. Abegg and Kalman Goldberg, “Transforming the Library: Strategic Planning at Bradley University – The University Perspective,” Journal of Library Administration, Vol. 13 No. 3-4, 1990, page 132.

“The President and his administrative team understand that the University cannot prosper in the absence of planning; but it also knows that the academy is at its best when faculty are unencumbered by rigid plans, permitting and even encouraging the idiosyncratic and the unpredictable. A contained amount of anarchy is an essential element of a vital university.”

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Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix Vice President of Innovation, “Five Big Questions to Drive Strategic Thinking,” SirsiDynix OneSource, November 2005, http://www.imakenews.com/sirsi/e_article000476128.cfm?x=b5WtfBQ,b2rphLk6.

“Each major change is an historical inflection point. You either have to adapt and evolve, exit the enterprise, or resign yourself to slow or withering decline. And you can’t wait until you see obvious signs of decline – that’s often too late.”

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ACRL, “ACRL announces the Top Ten Assumptions for the future of academic libraries,” March 31, 2007, http://www.ala.org/ala/pressreleases2007/march2007/acrlfl07.htm.

“Higher education will increasingly view the institution as a business.”

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Andrew Richard Albanese, “The Best Thing a Library Can be is Open,” Library Journal, September 15, 2005.

“Now, with the migration to digital largely complete, a new trend seems to be emerging… students are increasingly pushing for a campus library that never closes.”

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Steven J. Bell, “Design Thinking,” American Libraries, January/February 2008, pgs. 44-49.

“Can design thinking help librarians? As a profession that mediates information from source to user – not unlike newspapers and travel agents – our future challenge is avoiding marginalization.”

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Meredith Butler and Hiram Davis, “Strategic Planning as a Catalyst for Change in the 1990s”, College & Research Libraries, September 1992.

“A planning approach which reduces the influence of hierarchy and emphasizes teamwork, shared expertise, and group problem solving is not only a doable, but a necessary strategy if libraries are to be successful in the fast changing and complex environment of higher education.”

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Arie De Geus, The Living Company, 2002.

“A full one-third of the companies listed in the 1970 Fortune 500, for instance, had vanished by 1983 – acquired, merged, or broken to pieces.”

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Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, HarperBusiness, 1993, pages 59&65.

“… every organization of today has to build into its very structure the management of change. It has to build in organized abandonment of everything it does. It has to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: ‘If we did not do this already, would we go into it now, knowing what we now know?’”

“Knowledge employees cannot, in effect, be supervised. Unless they [supervisors] know more than anybody else in the organization, they are to all intents and purposes useless.”

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Thomas Frey, “The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation,” < www.daviniciinstitute.com >.

“… most libraries have the luxury of time to reinvent themselves.”

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Linda Germain, Regional Community Relations Manager, Barnes & Noble (Houston). From the Texas Library Association Annual Conference, 2008.

“Sometimes libraries give the impression that you can’t have fun or make noise.”

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Oren Harari, “The Lab Test: A Tale of Quality,” Management Review, February 1993.

“The Boston Consulting Group surveyed a diverse group of U.S. businesses and concluded that 95 percent to 99 percent of their internal activities have little or no relevance to the customer. For example, they found that it took on average 22 days to turn around a customer’s application form in the insurance industry, yet the average amount of time spent internally on attending to any given application consumed a grand total of 17 minutes. Hence, the typical organization infrastructure – with its policies, sign-offs, meetings, reports, etc. – manages to take a 17-minute task and turn it into a 22-day affair.”

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Joe Matthews, “The Library Balanced Scorecard: Is It In Your Future?,” Public Libraries, pages 64-71.

“The goal of the Library Balanced Scorecard (LBS) is to assist the public library in determining what performance measures and metrics are important within a broader context of strategic planning and management.”

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Erin McCaffrey and Martin Garnar, “Long-range planning across generational lines,” C&RL News, March 2006.

“Within the library, the generational lessons learned during the planning process led to thoughtful consideration of how the plan’s implementation group would be composed. Along with other diversity concerns, we made a conscious choice to balance the generational representation. So far, so good.”

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Henry Mintzberg, The rise and fall of strategic planning: reconceiving roles for planning, plans, planners,” The Free Press, 1994.

“We have been highly critical throughout this discussion, concerned that by trying to be everything, planning has risked being dismissed as nothing. In fact, we never had any intention of so dismissing planning, although the tone of our discussion may well have given that impression. Instead, by overstating our criticisms, we have tried to draw the debate on planning to a more viable middle ground, away from the conclusion that planning can do either everything or nothing.”

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Bob Molyneux, Ph.D., “Recent Public Library Trends,” SirsiDynix OneSources, March 27, 2006.

“Public libraries in the United States have seen usage increase and revenues decline during the past few years, and these funding facts have affected other aspects of those libraries.”

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Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS), Martha Hale, Patti Butcher, Cindi Hickey, “New Pathways to Planning,” <http://skyways.lib.ks.us/pathway/> (March 24, 2005).

The proposed planning process is not intended as a replacement for PLA’s The NEW Planning for Results: A Streamlined Approach (2001), Chicago: American Library Association, but rather as a customized alternative. Our hope is that “New Pathways” will continue to grow to include questions, answers, facilitators, discussions, archives, and links to plans created from this process.

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Norman Oder, “Study at UIUC Suggests $4.38 in Grant Income for Each Library Dollar,” Library Journal, January 22, 2009, < http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6631202 >.

While return on investment (ROI) studies have become common in the public library arena, a pioneering ROI case study involving the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) suggests that each dollar invested in the library in 2006 returns $4.38 in grant income. The study, while limited in scope and arguably in need of refinement, has spurred research at several other universities worldwide.

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Dana Rooks, “Innovate or Vegetate,” Texas Library Journal, Vol. 80, No. 4, Winter 2004, p.128.

“Library experts have been writing and talking about the rapid changes occurring in the world of scholarly research and information for a number of years now… As dramatic and as rapid as these changes have been, I contend that, in the words of an old song, ‘You ain’t seen nothin yet.’”

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Peggy Rudd, “Our Future in Customer Service,” Texas Library Journal, Winter 2007, page 142.

“If you compared your library to a customer service model like Nordstrom, how would it size up? Your library’s success may very well depend on the answer to that question.”

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Carla J. Stoffle, Robert Renaud, and Jerilyn R. Veldof, “Choosing Our Futures,” College & Research Libraries, May 1996, pages 213 – 225.

“The countervailing view of the future that the authors hold is that academic libraries must change – fundamentally and irreversibly – what they do and how they do it, and that these changes need to come quickly.”

“The choice is clear. Change now and choose our futures. Change later, or not at all, and have no future.”

ANALYSIS

Self-Analysis (What grade do you receive and can you improve?)

Katie Hafner, “Old Search Engine, the Library, Tries to Fit Into a Google World,” The New York Times, June 21, 2004, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00F12FB395D0C728EDDAF0894DC404482> (January 8, 2005).

“For the last few years, librarians have increasingly seen people use online search sites not to supplement research libraries but to replace them. Yet only recently have librarians stopped lamenting the trend and started working to close the gap between traditional scholarly research and the incomplete, of random results of a Google search.”

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Peter Lisker, “Upwelling: Getting Those Great Ideas from the Bottom Up,” Public Libraries, Vol. 44, No. 6, November/December 2005, pp. 314-316.

“Upwelling addresses the old adage that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Empowering staff members to become part of the solution requires administrators and staff members to work together, possibly in ways never done before.”

Customer Analysis (Are you connected to your customers?)

Janelle Barlow and Claus Møller, A Complaint is a Gift, 1996.

“Rather than trying to reduce the number of complaints, organizations need to encourage staff to seek out complaints because this will define what customers want.”

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Scott Carlson, “An Anthropologist in the Library,” August 17, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 50, Page A26.

‘In fact, the study also showed that students did not really want your average reference desk. “They want this generic staff person who could check out a book, answer a question, fix a computer, and brew a really good latte,” Ms. Gibbons says. “We didn’t know what to do with that.”‘

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Leigh Estabrook, Evans Witt, Lee Rainie, “Information searches that solve problems: How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help,” Pew Internet, <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/231/report_display.asp>, December 30 2007.

“Most of those who visit libraries to seek problem-solving information are very satisfied with what they find and they appreciate the resources available there, especially access to computers and the internet.”

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Alison J. Head, “Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?,” August 2007, First Monday, Volume 12, number 8, <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/head/index.html> (October 1, 2007).

“This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.”

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George Needham, “Perceptions and Realities,” Texas Library Journal, Winter 2007, page 148.

“If we can focus on the user, with an open mind and a willingness to release the bowlines to the past, we can have a strong, viable, future. If we can’t, we could be consigned to a narrowing niche market, a dwindling minority of people who seek out print, until the profession peters out once and for all.”

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Norman Oder, Library Journal, December 2, 2008.

“Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, defending proposed budget cuts in a series of town meetings, has come face to face with city residents critical of plans to close 11 of 54 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia. At a meeting last night, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nutter seemed unswayed by chants of ‘Let us read’ and ‘Save Engine 6.’”

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Mary Jane Smetanka, “Millenial students: The Millenial generation of college students,” May 7, 2004, <http://www.startribune.com/stories/1592/5174090.html> (January 8, 2005).

“At the University of Minnesota, they’re helping change the way the place does business. Students expect more as tuition rises, and the school is working to improve advising, make teaching styles more active and overhaul library services to adapt to the new generation.”

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Carie Windham, “Father Google & Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner,” September / October 2005, EDUCAUSE review, pages 43-58.

“Thanks to the marathon waiting times and the tasteful elevator music of customer service hotlines, the Net Gen would much rather log on than call to fix problems or seek advice.”

Data Analysis (What does your data tell you?)

American Library Association, “The State of America’s Libraries: A Report from the American Library Association,” Release Date: April 2007.

“Public library use continues to grow. The most recent comprehensive federal data available show that the number of visits per year to U.S. public libraries increased 61 percent in the period 1994-2004. Public library visits were up about 3 percent in 2004 from the previous year. Circulation increased 28 percent over the decade and was up 2.3 percent in 2004 from 2003, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).”

“Despite the continued (and well-publicized) growth in the number and variety of online resources for research and learning on-site, use of nation’s academic libraries and their collections grew from 880,188,296 library visits in 2002 to more than a billion (1,007,174,740) in 2004, according to the NCES – an increase of more than 14 percent. Circulation was up 6 percent, to more than 200 million items.”

“People responded that the most compelling draw to bring more public-library visits would be ‘more free classes and programs for people my age,’ followed by the library being open more hours.”

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Bonnie Burwell and Rebecca Jones, “Libraries and Their Service Portfolios,” Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals, June 2005, pp. 32-37.

“When faced with limited resources – a daily experience for us all – what can we do to ensure that we create and deliver the right services? What are the ‘right’ services? Those services, products, and programs most valuable to our client communities; those that will sustain our position within those client communities or markets; those that we can do better than any other organization; and those that make us valid, valued, and indispensable to our patrons and clients.

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The British Library and JISC, “information behaviour of the researcher of the future,” January 11, 2008, <http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf>.

“The implications of a shift from the library as a physical space to the library as a virtual digital environment are immense and truly disruptive.”

“It is self-evident that by 2017 the internet will have come of age for all ages and be completely integrated into most homes.”

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Richard K. Johnson and Judy Luther, “The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic Transition Zone,” Association of Research Libraries, http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/Electronic_Transition.pdf.

“Approximately 60% of the universe of some 20,000 active peer-reviewed journals is available in electronic form. Online journals are popular with readers; online use of library-provided journals exceeds print use by a factor of at least ten, according to a University of California study.”

INTERACTION

Creative Partnerships (Creative Ways to tap info other resources)

Leigh Parry, “Libraries close their books,” The Age, March 26, 2007.

“Mr Collins says the school will eventually create a library of sorts, but for now relies on partnerships it has forged with the State Library, City of Moreland Coburg Library and university libraries so students can have access to books.”

Competition (We can learn from them)

Stephen Abram, “30 Library Technology Predictions for 2008,” Stephen’s Lighthouse, December 30 2007, <http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com>, January 3 2008.

“Blockbuster will begin its death throes in earnest in 08. Libraries need to discuss why and what they need to to learn from this.”

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Marshall Breeding, “Plotting a New Course for Metasearch,” Computers in Libraries, Vol. 25, No 2, February 2005, p. 27.

“As large forces such as Google begin to step into the arena of scholarly information, it seems important for the library community to be proactive.”

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Roland Dietz and Carl Grant, June 15, 2005 Library Journal.

“Innovations from Google™ and Amazon® are clear wake-up calls that as a profession and an industry we need to do things differently.”

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Susan Demar Lafferty, SouthtownStar, September 21, 2008, < http://www.southtownstar.com/news/1175144,092108ditchingdewey.articleprint >.

“At 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, when most library patrons are pulling the covers over their heads, refusing to acknowledge the rising sun, two bold and daring librarians are stirring at the Franfort Public Library, shuffling books and tearing off those time-honored Dewey Decimal System numbers that no one really understood anyway.”

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Robin Sloan 2006 – Epic 2015

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Susan Wojcicki, “Straight Answers from Susan Wojcicki,” American Libraries, November 2005, pg. 31.

“[Interviewer:] What do you tell people who ask why we need libraries when “everything is on the internet.” [Susan:] The stores of knowledge inside libraries, combined with research skills offered by librarians, are an irreplaceable asset. Libraries have had an important and positive impact on my life and the lives of most people who work at Google. Google Print is designed to help users discover books, then find them through libraries or bookstores.”

Special Added Value (What are you contributing to your community?)

“Effective May 31, 2007 all branches of the Josephine County Library system will be closed due to lack of funding.” <http://www.co.josephine.or.us/SectionIndex.asp?SectionID=128>.

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Stephen Abram, Searcher, Vol. 16 No. 8, September 2008.

“We need to understand, and understand deeply, the role of the library in our end-users’ lives, work, research, and play. This is critical to our long-term success, and failure is not an option.”

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American Library Association and Florida State University, “Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study 2006-2007,” <www.ala.org/plinternetfunding/>, 2007.

“Seventy-three percent of [public] libraries report they are the only source of free public access to computers and the Internet in their communities… More than a quarter of libraries do not have upgrade or replacement schedules for their computers.”

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Michael Baldwin, Public Libraries, Vol. 45, No. 2, March/April 2006, pp. 11-14.

“The survival of American democracy may depend on the willingness of public librarians to become knowledge provocateurs that stimulate public interest in sociopolitical issues and responsible citizenship.”

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Marylaine Block, The Thriving Library: Successful Strategies for Challenging Times, 2007.

“It is the public library that now seems to me to be the last remaining place in America where all people are warmly welcomed, where they can learn at their own pace whatever they want or need to know, where they can mingle with people with wildly differing views and experiences and respectfully discuss their common issues.”

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John Buschman, “Staying Public: The Real Crisis in Librarianship,” American Libraries, Vol. 35, No. 7, August 2004, pp. 40-42.

“Without much debate, policymakers in the nation and in our own field have recast the purpose of libraries in economic instead of democratic terms.”

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Scott Carlson, “Young Librarians, Talkin’ ‘Bout Their Generation,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2007.

“Although we have been working on it for years with metasearch and federated search engines, we just have not gotten anywhere near to what Google can do… So I think what would be in our best interests is to drop the fight, to let Google take over that, and instead to focus on the value add that only we can do, which is that in-depth research that we can do with our users.”

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Council on Library and Information Resources, “No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century,” August 2008, < www.clir.org >.

“When the broad digital availability of books erodes the comparative advantage of large research collections, where will the library’s comparative advantage lie?”

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Michael Gorman, “The Greatest Challenge,” American Libraries, March 2006, pg. 5.

“…the important thing is whether we alter course or slide clicking and giggling into a post-literate world.”

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Guardian Editorial, “Writing on the wall,” The Guardian, October 20, 2008 < http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/leadersandreply-libraries-andy-burnham >.

“Libraries can be a two-way communications channel between the familiar and the new, learning from and contributing to their locality, where improving literacy sits alongside access to films, music or local history – but where the written word is still king.”

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Ross Housewright and Roger Schonfeld, Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education, August 18, 2008.

“This indicates a challenge facing libraries in the near future – as faculty needs are increasingly met without the direct intermediation of the library, the importance of the library decreases. Libraries must consider ways which they can offer new and innovative services to maintain, or in some cases recapture, the attention and support of faculty.”

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Leonard Kniffel, “Dear President Obama,” American Libraries, January / February 2009.

[American Libraries Editor-in-Chief recounts his conversation with Barack Obama prior to the ALA 2005 keynote]

“You answered that although people tend to think of libraries in terms of just being sources for reading material or research, it was a librarian at New York Public Library in Manhattan who helped you find the community organizing job you were looking for.”

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Philip J. Kroth, M.D., M.S, “Re-imagining the Role of the Health Sciences Librarian in the New Information Economy: an Informaticist’s Perspective,” The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center.

“The kinds of ‘collections’ librarians manage are virtually unlimited in form and are dynamically defined at the state of the art of science.”

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Marcy Miranda, “Libraries, the new cool hangout for kids,” Austin American-Statesman, January 16, 2007.

“‘What we’ve done is to address the problem of kids waiting around and turned it into an opportunity to introduce them to books, the Internet, and teach them computer skills,’ said Thom Barthemlmess, the youth services manager for the Austin Public Library.”

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OCLC, Libraries: How they stack up, 2003:

The Phoenix Public Library provides $10 of benefit per tax dollar.

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The Public Library Association, Libraries Prosper with Passion, Purpose and Persuasion! A PLA Toolkit for Success, 2007.

“This toolkit will allow you to showcase the value of public libraries by connecting your library directly to the things that communities value most. The templates and samples you’ll find here illustrate the value of libraries through research, stories and developed arguments that demonstrate your library’s impact in the community.”

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Eleanor Jo Rodger, “What’s a Library Worth? Piecing together the structure of value,” American Libraries, September 2007.

“Libraries rise and fall as their host systems rise and fall… If we are to thrive, it is crucial that we understand the generalization that creates our claim to being a legitimate part of our host system.”

Four Truths and Their Consequences:

1. Libraries rise and fall as their host systems rise and fall.

2. Libraries need host systems more than host systems need libraries.

3. Libraries receive resources and continuing legitimacy from host systems in return for creating value for them.

4. Value is not about the library but about its host system.

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Susan V. Wawrzaszek and David G. Wedaman, “The Academic Library in a 2.0 World,” ECAR Research Bulletin, Volume 2008, Issue 19, September 16, 2008.

“In general, library services and staff must transition from their inherited position as the mediators of a print-focused, highly controlled environment to become collaborators in a multimedia-rich, user-empowered, disintermediated free-for-all where their value will be proven only by demonstrably improving outcomes in learning, teaching, and research.”

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Stanley Wilder, “Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions,” The Chronicle Review, January 7, 2005.

“But information literacy remains the wrong solution to the wrong problem facing librarianship. It mistakes the nature of the Internet threat, and it offers a response at odds with higher education’s traditional mission. Information literacy does nothing to help libraries compete with the Internet, and it should be discarded.”

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Joan Frye Williams, “Are We Asking the Right Questions?” Texas Library Journal, Winter 2007, page 149.

“Users will choose the library only if their library experience integrates well with their own view of themselves and their priorities. They don’t want librarians to be helpers so much as catalysts or facilitators, whose primary job is to welcome, support, stimulate, delight, and inspire them.”

TRANSFORMATION

Continuous Learning (The target is moving, we need to move too)

Clara N. Bohrer, “Libraries at Risk?,” Public Libraries, Vol. 43, No. 6, November-December 2004, p. 311.

“Institutions become irrelevant if they remain static and unresponsive. Public libraries are relevant because they continue to redefine, reinvent, and reenergize their services.”

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Steve Brown, “President’s Perspective: Keep Learning, Keep Having Fun,” Texas Library Journal, Vol.83, No. 3, Fall 2007, p 96.

“Librarianship is a learning profession. We are only as good as our ability to produce results for our clients, and that ability rests on a foundation of build-up knowledge. Stop learning, and the foundation crumbles.”

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Peter Drucker, “Managing Oneself,” HBR, January 2005.

“It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction. This is as true for human beings as it is for inanimate objects.”

“Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.”

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Arie de Geus, “The Living Company, ” 2002.

“This gives us an entirely different imperative for corporate success. A successful company is one that can learn effectively.”

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John Philip Mulvaney and Dan O’Connor, “The Crux of our Crisis,” American Libraries, June/July, 2006.

“And why are LIS schools not held accountable for the state of the nation’s libraries, just as policymakers view schools of education as being responsible for the nation’s schools?”

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Connie Van Fleet and June Lester, “Is Anyone Listening?” Public Libraries, July / August 2008.

“It may seem ironic that LIS schools use competencies documents in curriculum planning as representations of priorities in practice, while those engaged in practice do not appear to use or value such statements.”

Technology (A fun tool)

Daniel Akst, “Do Libraries Still Matter,” Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2005, http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/10/books/index.html.

“In the era of the Internet, will we still go to libraries to borrow books and do research? The answer seems to be a resounding yes, because libraries are more than just a place to keep volumes on dusty shelves.”

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Marshall Breeding, “It’s Time to Break the Mold of the Original ILS,” Computers in Libraries, November / December 2007, pgs 39-41.

“Given the urgent need for interfaces that work better for library users, it makes great sense to concentrate energies on these products. But we can’t let the current focus on the front-end interfaces make us complacent about the software and systems that we use to automate routine library functions.”

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Charlie S. Feld and Donna B. Stoddard, “Getting IT Right,” Harvard Business Review, February 2005, pp. 72-79.

“It’s been 40 years since the advent of modern IT, yet few companies do it well. If you stick to three central principles, you can turn IT from a costly mess into a powerful weapon.”

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Saul Hansell, “As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind,” The New York Times, January 25, 2006.

“There is this primordial soup brewing of more bandwidth, more storage, more devices and more people creating content which is inherently digital.”

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Joseph Janes, “Being Better [Technology | Internet Librarian],” American Libraries, August 2008.

“If people are searching your catalog or asking a question via chat and they get frustrated, bored, or unhappy, Amazon or Yahoo Answers or Google is a microsecond – click away, and there’s no constraint on their going poof… So we have to be better online. Better, more compelling, more efficient, more effective, more attractive, to get ‘em and keep ‘em and serve ‘em as we know only we can.”

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Karen Harker, “Digital Infrastructure of a Library,” February 9, 2005, Presentation.

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Steve Lohr, “Libraries Wired, and Reborn,” The New York Times, April 22, 2004, <http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9C0CE4D7163AF931A15757C0A9629C8B63> (January 8, 2005).

“Today, the Terrebonne Parish main library is a year-old spacious postmodern building of red brick and skylights, built on a former sugar cane plantation. There are 81 computers linked to the Internet, all with high-speed connections, in the parish libraries. Three of the closed branches have been reopened.”

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Barbara Pitney and Nancy Slote, “Going Mobile: The KCLS Roving Reference Model,” Public Libraries, pages 54-68.

“We learned that we were not serving a significant number of patrons in our buildings, and that reference staff could identify and assist patrons by roving the public floor.”

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Stephen’s Lighthouse Blog, by Stephen Abram, Sirsi’s V.P. of Innovation. http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com/

Vision (What does your library look like in 2020, 2100?)

David W. Lewis, “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century,” https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/.

“Given the new Internet tools and the explosive growth of digital content available on the Web, it is now not entirely clear what an academic library should be.”

“It is easy to understand why at the end of the age of print academic libraries, and indeed all libraries, are dazed and confused. The technology upon which we have built our missions over the past half millennium is being usurped.”

“We have a reasonable measure of good will that we can spend down. If we do this wisely, we can successfully mange the transition we now face. However, this window will not stay open forever, so we cannot afford to wait too long.”

“While librarians were moving with caution, users were not. In most libraries the use of printed journals declined quickly and consistently. This can be tracked by looking at photocopying and reshelving statistics.”

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James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, “Building Your Company’s Vision,” Harvard Business Review, September-October 1996, pp. 65-77.

“Companies that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purpose that remain fixed while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world.”

Darwin (The man and his work)

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a Charles Darwin exhibit.

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David Quammen, “Was Darwin Wrong?,” National Geographic, November 2004, pp. 4-35. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature1/index.html

“Evolution is both a beautiful concept and an important one, more crucial nowadays to human welfare, to medical science, and to your understanding of the world than ever before. It’s also deeply persuasive – a theory you can take to the bank.”

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UT Southwestern Medical Library’s Historical Darwiniana.

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Carl Zimmer, “Testing Darwin,” Discover, February 2005, <http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/2005/articles_2005_Avida.html> (March 24, 2005).

Other Resources

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Emily Vardell’s Practicum Paper on “Information Darwinianism Explored,” August 10, 2007.

Excerpt: “Many medical librarians are working hard to ensure that libraries do not become outdated in the increasingly electronic environment of health science information. With the growing availability of information on the Internet, libraries can take the lead in making information more widely accessible in the digital world. As laypeople have greater access to information at their own convenience, libraries can provide support and guidance in finding, interpreting, and evaluating the information accessed.”

Full text available in pdf format.

My section of Bergren Forum Presentation: (R)evolutions in Scholarship Rethinking (my shot at a narrative)
Scholarship in the Digital Age – April 30, 2009
Presented by: Ellen Bahr, Mark Smith  & Chad Harriss

I am grateful for this chance to discuss a few ideas and issues in scholarship that occupy much of my thinking and work these days.  I am also grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Ellen and Chad on this presentation.  It has been quite rewarding.  We’ve learned a great deal from each other.

Ya .. know .. I almost wish we would have recorded a few of our fruitful conversations and just played them back for you all.  I think you would be very impressed.

Now that I think of it .. perhaps we could have taken some recorded excerpts from those meetings and …. maybe add some video of scholars in action .. creating or using new scholarly formats …And then.. we could have recorded a few screen shots of  some of that scholarship, and laid a running audio commentary of the top of it describing the process.

Of course.. then .. we should put it all up on a wiki and group edit the work by adding some text to give it some structure.  When we finished that, perhaps we could put it up on Chad’s blog for commentary from colleagues .. who knows maybe we’ll want to incorporate some of those peer reactions in a later version.

And, oh wait.. Ellen found that article in the online “Journal of Electronic Publishing” and that website with the animated simulation.  We could link to those as references or perhaps fit them in the body of the work.  Oh ..and then there’s Chad … you know Chad ..  he’ll want to include a “vodcast” of his hero .. MIT Professor Henry Jenkins giving that talk at that forum in Bali.  I would just add an RSS newsfeed from Jenkins blog “Confessions of an Aca-fan” ..   But nooooo, he’d want to capture the oration and the reactions of the audience.  So, we’d add that in there somewhere.  After all, the guy is a dynamic speaker and his comments are a perfect compliment to the high res graphics from van Orsdel’s PowerPoint “Anatomy of a Crisis: Dysfunction in the Scholarly Communications System”  We’ll add it ..It’ll make Chad happy .. And, ya know .. collaboration, its a good thing…

Speaking of good things.. It’s a good thing we have Ellen on our team to keep us organized and clearly focused.  She has such a way with the written word .. and a keen awareness of the power of the visuals.  If we released such a work for free in an AU institutional repository, future scholars would have an easy time finding and re-using our work.  However, our respective promotion and tenure committees may be baffled by it .. but sometimes that’s how innovation works.

Yikes .. P&T .. hmmm ..maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t do it after all.  Maybe we PowerPoint presentation is the better idea …. and everyone will be more comfortable.  Yes …. it is will better for us politically, it looks better on our CV and will conform nicely to our P&T scholarship guidelines.

You know, I do wonder when new scholarship will find its place beyond our legacy, paper-based systems.  I wonder when they’ll come a time when we can wholeheartedly encourage innovation, and value new powers of digital scholarship.  I also wonder how we will organize it, present it, evaluate it, share it and adapt policies to recognize new formats .. hmmmmmm .. perhaps we should take a closer look.  Mr. DeMille … I’m ready for my PowerPoint.

This is an extremely broad topic to discuss in a very few minutes.

Many of points we address here would benefit from their very own Bergren forum.  Indeed, several of our discussions are found as themes for entire conferences, and the discussion in the literature is overwhelming.

Out of necessity we confined our discussion to new scholarship whose content is presented electronically and is available on the Internet.  And, on that we will still only be able to scratch the surface.

We’ve had to exclude any discussion of “electronic monographs” or new formats presented in other electronic environments.

Lets see… Beyond paper .. what are some of the actual benefits electronic publication?  Why should we consider it?

What we know we can do is:

• annotate by linking within and outside our electronic documents
• make it available 24/7/365 from anywhere
• full-text search
• enlarge and enhance graphics
• link to and from citations and the scholars other works
• use formatting contexts.. so that the content is parsed and presented non-linear fashion
• solicit comments and have a dialogue with our readers
• incorporate Web 2.0 functions such as newsfeeds to blogs and websites
• appeal to multiple learning modalities, with sound and video
• create simulations
• store and archive the raw data of our research
• offer pre and post publication versions of our work for comment and discourse
• retain our rights, share our work and self publish on a blog or website
• deposit our work in an institutional repository when we can care for it and manage it and perhaps re-use it over time
• we can broadcast it over channels like iTunes or YouTubeU

We also know that ..

Scholars who have never met each other can build collaborative works like they’ve done with the : Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The list goes on. There are significant opportunities to enhance our scholarship when we are not confined by paper.

Those opportunities are fairly obvious.  But there are several other benefits of publishing online … that are Not So Obvious.  Here are a few …

When your work is online …

• It is more likely to be discovered
• and cited (and reused)
• we can also capture metrics of usage. Which is a nice measure to have
• and .. finally … online content can extend the traditional  paper bibliography into a “knowledge network” (linking content, citations, scholars & readers and truly become a scholarly exchange)

There is a lot to love about the scholarly potential of new media…

Here Clay Shirky .. Professor of Interactive Telecommunications at NYU … captures this thought quite succinctly in his book “Here Comes Everybody” 

We’re living through—in our historical generation—the largest increase in human
expressive capability in history.”

This is so well said .. However .. many of us might wish to append this statements with a slight addendum..

• First by discussing the evolving economics of scholarship, and

• Then take a look at ONE NEW, perhaps controversial, Digital publication model that is turning the process of scholarly publishing on its head.

Back in the early 90’s .. when we began to see the Internet take hold for both researchers and the common man….  The new construct of publishing scholarly texts online .. sort of crept up on us.  One day its paper journals, next day your librarian is telling you that you can get a copy of the article online in an electronic format.  Simple as that.

We were happy for the conveniences it offered .. but we likely printed them out … and it merely saved us a trip to the library.  In this context, our paper systems of scholarly publishing were not threatened by the new technology, we all saw it as a potential service enhancement.  One enterprise was particularly happy for this development…  the for-profit publisher.

So, essentially, what we saw is the “Same Old Wine in a Brand New Bottle”

Our systems didn’t change… we:

• Retained traditional distribution/economic model .. thru subscriptions, memberships, pay per article.
• The Scholar wrote, the publisher “printed” & the user paid
• The system worked without disruption & was familiar
• And … our friends the “for profit publisher” saw an opportunity to use “online copy” as a “value-added” product or “new” pay service for electronic versions

So in those early days ..we found ourselves lulled into using online text as “electronic copy” and had little reason to consider its additional potential

It was almost as though .. we had a solution, with out a problem .. or so we thought

What many of us failed to recognize at that time .. was, that when text moved from paper to electronic forms …  the whole game changed.  Working in online environments meant that our creations no longer needed to be locked away where only scholars and students with great libraries could access it and use it.

The old publishing paradigm was no longer essential … in fact, it works against encouraging innovation for scholarship in electronic forms

Here is how it goes:

• You donate your Intellectual Property to publishers in return for peer review and dissemination.
• You also donate service as reviewers and editors
• You’ve surrendered your rights to share it .. even though it has become very simple and cost effective to do so
• and you .. your colleagues .. and your institutions … are increasingly unable to buy it back!  We simply can’t afford it

Coincidentally, at this very moment in time we began to find ourselves tied to a publication model that would become unsustainable.

Just as we began to harness technology to create, publish and access in the online environment, an ongoing crisis was reaching a fever pitch.   The issue, of course, was, and remains, then skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals.

What was once regarded as the “libraries serials crisis” is now recognized by stakeholders in the academic arena  as “everybody’s serials crisis.”  To this day, Libraries worldwide continue to struggle with journal costs that have compounded at 4 times the rate of inflation since the mid-1980s.

I was watching a “vodcast” recently (yes a vodcast) … and Professor Stuart Scheiber of Harvard University recounted his institution’s attempt to keep up with these rising costs by hyper-inflating the library budget to keep pace.

In this graphic published by the Association of Research Libraries … the top dark blue line represents the average cost of journals from 1986 to 2006.   The light blue line just below it reflects the average journal expenditure in ARL libraries at that same time.  Following the parallel trajectory, it is easy to see how libraries valiantly attempted to keep up with costs.  Professor Scheiber goes on to share with his audience that the point at which the lower curve turns down, has , he says, a technical term… he tells that his technical term is called … “giving up.”  He laments that even Harvard, with its magnificent resources, found that keeping pace was simply unsustainable.

And so ….  At this time we find the convergence of new technology and failing economic model is further complicated by the growing awareness that scholars are finding other significant uses for advances in technology to enhance their work.

At the same time many of us are painfully aware that legacy institutional policies afford little or no recognition or reward for pursuing and leveraging the power of new technology for scholarship.

The primary and justifiable condition remains today…

• We need an accredited Scholarly publishing model
• We must retain and value peer review
• AND .. we need a system that supports and assures integrity.

Many institutions and scholars feel we have arrived at a breaking point.  In some scholarly circles, this tension between, cost, function, and process is becoming… something akin to “We’re Mad as Hell and We’re Not gonna take it any more!! “

As a result it has spurred some radical thinking in the scholarly community and here is one result….

[Graphic]  Open Access Movement

Yes .. parallel to many of the new services we see on the Internet… scholars and institutions are helping to create a new model where there is no cost to the end user.

This convergence of crisis and opportunity is leading to development of a robust “Open Access publication model.”

“Open-Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.   What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder”

Some advantages of OA are that it ….

• Removes barriers to access
• Re-establishes author rights
• Has Cost efficiencies & less time to ”press”
• Facilitates broad pre & post pub review
• Encourages collaboration and data sharing
• Greatly increases the visibility of a scholars work

Unfortunately .. in its infancy .. OA has suffered from some misconceptions that hampers and delays its adoption .. these include:

• The false impression that Open Access is incompatible with Peer Review
  - This is simply not true.  There are several functioning models that replicate the paper process.  Quality … and oversight … are quite separate from the “technologies” of publication.
  
• The other mistaken perception is that .. Retaining Authorship Rights is a reflection of lack of quality.
  - Again.. not true  ….  simply because an author chooses to exercise his/her rights to determine how and where their work is used .. is clearly unrelated to quality … there is no real logical connection there

Very quickly I want to tell you a little more about Open Access Models:

• They generally come in 2 flavors:  OA Jourals & Digital Repositories
• The OA Journals are Peer Reviewed or Refereed publications made freely available.
• The Number of Open Access Journal titles is growing by leaps and bounds .
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 4067 OA titles & rising
• As with paper, OA Journals are produced and delivered by independent publishers, societies, and discipline-centric online communities.

As I mentioned, the unique attribute of OA publishing is that the costs of publication are borne upfront .. often by the author,  professional society, scholar’s home institution or research sponsor

This has some scholars concerned that we are merely transferring one cost model for another.

However:

• After startup costs OA journals are significantly cheaper to produce and nearly free to distribute.
• Many OA journals that charge processing fees will waive fees in some circumstances.
• OA journals with institutional subsidies tend NOT to charge processing fees.
• Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts.
• Some OA publisher waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership

The Second flavor of Open Access content is found in Open Repositories or Digital Archives

These systems:

• Deliver & archive OA scholarship which may or may not be peer reviewed
• Often house pre-prints, post-prints, theses, images, or simply raw data
• Are hosted by universities, laboratories, or discipline-centric organizations.  (such as PLoS, BioMed, etc.)
• Repository Content conforms to the metadata standards that allow the works to be interoperable with other systems, and so enable “harvesting” and sharing between compliant archives.
• In addition, There is robust free open access software such as DSPACE, the system used by SUNY where the Scholes library has contributed selected Eng. Theses and MFA Thesis Images

As an aside:

It was recently reported in the Chronicle that nearly two-thirds of pay-access journals allow the author an archival copy for posting Institutional repositories upon request  (Suber, in Chronicle February 12, 2008)

Tipping Point:

Many consider that Open Access publishing has reached a tipping point toward broad acceptance:

Some Indicators are:

• Valid, systematic, publishing and review practices have emerged
• Strong supporting advocacy and research leadership organizations are working closely with universities & publishers (i.e. SPARC, Open Access Initiative, Public Knowledge Project, EDUCAUSE, etc.)
• And as Chad mentioned ..Influential scholarly publishing industry affiliates like “Nature Publications” are working with.. rather than against ..this movement.. and delivering a variety of content for free

We are also starting to see Academic & Government agencies jumping on the bandwagon by requiring (or strongly encouraging) faculty and researchers to retain non-exclusive rights to their work and deposit a copy of their publications in repositories for free, open distribution.

Perhaps, the most well known government policy is the recent National Institute of Health mandate that requires authors of publicly funded research to deposit a copy of their resulting publications in the BioMed Central Repository for access by all taxpayers.

And. recently several college faculties within include those at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have adopted Open Access publication mandates requiring faculty to assign non-exclusive rights where possible and to contribute a copy of their scholarship to their own institutional repository.

In addition, international economic and public policy communities are on board with multinational agreements and declarations on Access to Research Data from Public Funding

- from Timeline of the Open Access Movement – Peter Suber
Last revised, February 9, 2009.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

Conclusion:

The Open Access Movement has become a cause .. but no doubt a controversial one

However, those parties who have signed on

• demonstrate a philosophical commitment to removing barriers to access
• are committed to raising the level of understanding and conversation regarding scholarly communication
• encourage authors, to determine how their work will be used and distributed
• inspire action on policy and practice
• celebrate the value of scholarship to a home institution

By the way .. those of you who like the idea of exercising your rights to freely distributed your work for the common good may be interested in “Creative Commons Licensing”

This popular free service allows you to selectively release your exclusive rights to reuse, duplicate and distribute your work according to your wishes and without requiring permission.

I will close by restating..

• We’re heading into new territory here.
• We are in the midst of a cultural transformation whose impact on communication will be as significant as the invention of the printing press.
• We are now in a moment where we can and must reconsider and re-calibrate our work with new purpose.

Now I’ll turn the discussion over to Ellen and she will have a look under the hood and talk about how new models actually work and what we as scholars (and as an institution) can do to adapt to the new landscape.

How to Develop “Breakthrough” Products and Services

I watched the three available video lectures (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-356Spring2004/CourseHome/index.htm)  and found them fascinating – the professor is Eric von Hippel from MIT and he is talking about how breakthroughs happen.  I am still trying to figure out how to apply this to the services we provide so any insight is much appreciated.  In a nutshell, he talks about where innovations come from – usually users and not those who are satisfied by the product or service but the lead users who are making a product/service better.  I am not sure exactly if or how this would fit into this discussion but I would be willing to work with someone or a group to see if we can come up with something.  The other premise is that the questions we ask start to change as we find the lead users and that you often go outside of your field to find the answers.
Thanks!  Anne

Anne L. McFarland
Head of Bibliographic and Digital Services
B216 Milne Library
SUNY-Oneonta
Oneonta, NY 13820
607.436.2026

Open Education