Information literacy: it’s over and out

“Information literacy” was a phenomenon of the late 1990s end early 2000s and it is officially dead. Looking at the numbers, you can see that the level of interest globally in information literacy is rapidly approaching zero. Take a look at the Google-trending data for this:

Google trending data for searches for term "information literacy"

What is “information literacy”? In libraryland, it’s a specific thing (I’ll translate the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority’s definition):

Information literacy is a collection of skills that make a person able to identify when information is necessary, and which make them able to locate, evaluate and use – in an effective way – this information.[1]

This sounds reasonable, however it isn’t, it’s silly: are there any plausible instances where people who are trying to achieve something don’t know when they need information? I hope not. Note that Plinius [Norwegian] has commented (so well in fact that I translated it) that “information literacy” is not really a valid thing in the traditional library sense; an interpretation of information literacy, however, that is viable is one where it is a facet of subject-related competence.

The idea that it is possible to teach localization, evaluation and use of information without reference to a subject-specific set of skill is ridiculous; let me explain: within certain formal disciplines, intuition is a valid way of gathering data, while within others it is really not. Knowing your subject-specific ethics will help you evaluate the content you are looking at. Knowing which sources to look at will also depend heavily on the subject-specific approach you’re taking: if you’re researching language, you might be interested in grammars, but you might equally be interested in literature from medicine and neuroscience. Using information effectively is where the ABM-definition really hits ground: how can you use information effectively without understanding it?

The library really doesn’t have very much to offer in terms of subject-specific skills: yes, an academic library may have subject librarians, but “subject specific” really equates to “individual”, and the extent to which a librarian will know the individual researcher’s needs is based on a dialogue with that individual, not on an understanding of the concept “information literacy”, and whatever they impart of useful information is likely to be based on the local systems in use at that particular library.

It isn’t the case, however, that the library doesn’t have anything to offer; we have a lot of resources that are likely yet to be discovered by researchers, and a number of tips and tricks that will make the researchers’ lives a lot easier. But creating heavyweight courses in CQL and search strategy isn’t going to cut it; it’s about marketing and one-on-one contact.

The death of monolithic library teaching should be nigh, and I hope that it is.

[1] Informasjonskompetanse — ABM-utvikling – Statens senter for arkiv, bibliotek og museum. (n.d.). . Retrieved January 18, 2010, from http://www.abm-utvikling.no/bibliotek/bibliotekutvikling/kompetanseutvikling/informasjonskompetanse.html

[edited for grammar and imprecise formulation 2010-01-26]

Asking the right questions

“Ask the users what they want!” seems to be the default response to the question of how we can improve library services, but this isn’t a good response, it’s a trite, unthinking non-response that washes the library practitioner of the responsibility of knowing their trade.

There is a lot of talk about what library users want; many of these assume that there is a clearly defined scale with “asking library users what they want” and “librarians knowing best” at the two extremes. The result of this kind of thinking is that the library asks what users want, and then acts on the results, however, this results in something even worse than not asking the user what they want: “now we know the answers, lets get on with it”. Acting on a questionnaire where users are explicitly asked “what do you want”, or the comments from a user survey such as LibQual+® results in only one answer: “I want the Moon on a stick”.

The stupidity of this kind of approach is seen in the emphasis: it isn’t what is needed by everyone, just by one particular user, and of course, these opinions will be as various as the number of respondents. Even if the user responds in seemingly tangible way “the library staff are not helpful and the website is difficult to navigate”, it must be remembered that this is seen through the eyes of an individual that asks questions such as “do you have a photocopying service” and thinks that a negative response to this question equates with unhelpfulness and thinks that navigation of the website is difficult because their computer display is broken doesn’t show the colours of the links properly (an example of this is the student who complained about the library OPAC being bad, but didn’t come to the offered courses; when I finally met with the student, it turned out that they had not been using the OPAC at all, but a third-party interface based on the LMS’ Z39.50 interface). Making service decisions based on this kind of information at face value is less than worthless, it is damaging.

Knee-jerk reactions to user-dissatisfaction expressed in generalized questionnaires will always backfire, this is because user feedback needs to be feedback on a specific question, and not questions of the kind “what do you think of the website?” The questions need to be focused on specific aspects of the services provided by the library. One of the major findings of users of the LibQual+® survey is that there is a discrepancy between the expected level of service in the holdings and the actual service. To my mind, this can be seen as a result of the “me” aspect of respondents. The interpretation of the results of surveys needs to be tempered by the understanding of this being from the perspectives of a multitude of different users with differing needs, expectations and contexts. No user actually wants “the Moon on a stick”, but this is the interpretation that is most obvious when reading the generalized feedback.

When a commercial enterprise asks what their users want, they ask the question about a specific product, and elicit responses about specific aspects of the functionality of that product. A major rethink about the product and its viability may be the result. No-one approaches a potential market without some idea of what their service entails; except libraries.

The next time you hear someone say that we should pay more attention to what users want, ask yourself the following questions:

• why do we want feedback?
• what do we want feedback on?
• will the feedback be usable?

If the answers to these questions happen to be along the lines of “we want to know if users like eBooks”, “eBooks” and “yes of course”, then it’s the same old story. The answers for the questions should rather resemble “we want to know what we can do to make service X work better”, “the eBook service we provide” and “hopefully, but we need continuous feedback to make sure that we’re doing the right thing”.

The final point here is that the feedback should be something that libraries have as a strategic point, not just a one-off or occasional hit-and-miss affair. The strategic planning of this kind of thing should not be left to individuals either, it is the responsibility of management to ensure that projects, strategic areas and goals are followed up systematically by getting targeted user feedback. Another point is that this feedback should take different forms, and should in preference be interpreted and re-interpreted in light of new data.

A good example here is the notion of analysis of website traffic; in order to get anything out of the statistics, you need to know what you want to measure. An example is “do people know how to find the OPAC?”; in order to do this, a particular kind of report can be generated. But the various goals that are identified need to be identified before the reports are generated – knowing what goals and success indicators you have will ensure that you know what to measure and how to change your service in order to achieve your goals. Typically, statistics are “gathered” and then dropped as raw data – often as graphs – into the laps of the various parties at the library; the problem with this approach is that, while it’s nice to know which pages are most visited, it is difficult to read any patterns and generate meaningful goals from data presented in this way.

In the end, what the library should strive towards is “the moon on a stick with reservations”; providing everything that the user wants, just within a framework that is feasible. An example of this is ensuring that the expectations of the level of service do not outstrip the perceived level of service – clear terms of service are a good start. If a library cannot support large volumes of acquisitions, it should not attempt to, but rather focus on providing a better ILL service and make this service more available to the users.

When we’ve achieved these things, we can start asking the real question: what do users need?

Please note: registered trademarks presented in this text are used for informational purposes only and represent neither endorsement nor recommendation of these products.

Excluding self-citation in Google Scholar

It seems that it is possible (to some extent at least) to exclude self-citation in Google Scholar, this is how:

1. Search for author name in the usual way
2. Click “cited by number“
3. Identify how Google Scholar represents the name you want to exclude in the hits (typically “A Name”)
4. Add a standard Google query string which excludes the name you identified in point 3 to your current citation url in the following format &q=-”A Name”

A practical example of removing self-reference: Aspects of the theory of syntax by N Chomsky without self citation:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7563750853896762876&hl=en&as_sdt=2000&q=-”N Chomsky”

This reduces the original number of hits from “around 12,350″ to “around 11,600″.

Perhaps this is useful? Feedback?

Fagreferentkonferansen 2010

[edit: Ser at denne sida er kommet på topp i Google, bruk gjerne denne lenka hvis du vil ha tak i selve websiden for Fagreferentkonferansen.]

Universitetet i Stavanger skal arrangere Fagreferentkonferansen 2010 og de har nettopp utlyst Call for papers. Temaene: “Fagreferentens roller”, “Undervisning i biblioteket” og “E-bøker”.

Må innrømme at jeg synes at et av de nyeste universitetsbibliotekene kunne valgt mer interessante temaer.

A web page for a library

One of the heads of departments at work asked for the web committee to approve a new web-page design* that featured a single search box. Take a look at the new page.

I felt that this design didn’t add much value: a single search box does ot equate to Google, which is so much more.

As a response, I created an example that I felt adds value to the interface. Add a ?strekke to see an alternative view.

WCAG v2 AAA, Section 508, XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS3 valid (except for the media query, but it should validate – it is valid according to the BNF of css 3). It should also work on iPhone, and preferably other phones too

A final example where I just threw everything into the mix, but I didn’t correct the source for validation.

*I have now quit the web committee.

Things the “Google generation” say

1. I don’t use Firefox, it keeps updating itself [they used IE6 in 2009]
2. [On the 'phone] I’ve got a problem with Endnote on my laptop, I think that you should come to my house to fix it
3. I’ll never remember that, it’s too difficult [the url to Google Scholar]
4. Librarians don’t need to try and be so hip, no-one else uses social media
5. I think it is a kind of CD-player. [Answer to me pointing to a picture of a cassette tape and asking "what is that?"]
6. I’m only interested in articles [I was trying to explain that they needed to use the OPAC to get literature, but they associated that with "printed literature", i.e. not online articles]
7. According to the term paper instructions, I need to cite a book and two articles [I asked the question "is this for real?", unfortunately, yes.]
8. No, I only want printed articles because the lecturer said that the internet is not a good source of information [I was showing them the fulltext articles they were looking for]
9. Err… What on Earth are you doing? [I was using the command line on their PC to move files]
10. I want the library to keep printed journals so I can read the tables of contents [I gave up at this point]

BIBSYS: Anskaffelse av nytt biblioteksystem

Jeg gjetter bare, men når noen skriver at de går til innkjøp av et bibliotekssystem, så har de bestemte seg for at de vil ha et bibliotekssystem. Men når fant de ut at de trenger et slikt system? I min forsåelse har denne analysen uteblitt i det nåværende tillfellet.

Begrepet “bibliotekssystem” innebærer flere deler, økonomi, akkvisisjon, katalogisering, presentasjon til publikum, håndtering av persondata, osv. Problemet for de aller fleste BIBSYS institusjoner er at de har andre systemer for de aller meste av innkjøp, økonomi og persondata. At bibliotekssystemet legger til nye funksjoner for dette er ikke nødvendig eller ønskelig i veldig mange tilfeller. Ikke ta feil og tro at jeg vil bli kvitt systemer for bibliotek, vi trenger disse dataene, men de trengs ikke finnes i ett og samme system, særlig når dette skaper hodebry (jf. import/eksport av brukerdata ved universitetsbibliotek).

Bibliotekssystemene som finnes på markedet idag har kataloger som baserer seg på å lagre metadata om ting i MARC format, noe jeg ville påstått var ikke det lureste en kan gjøre av tre sentrale grunner:

• manglende ekstensibilitet for å dekke behov relatert til nye typer ting som skal registereres
• manglende semantikk i MARC
• et format som hemmer gjenbruk pga domene-spesifisering

I et system for organisering av kunnskap er det vanligvis slik at en vil gjerne ha dataene presentert på en måte som passer brukerene, og dette bør være uavhengig av datalagets struktur. MARC og AACR (standarden som styrer hvordan ting katalogiseres) kommer godt frem som et grunnleggende element i bibliotekskataloger, selv om disse ikke skal ha noe å si ifht. hvordan vi presenterer  ting overfor brukerne.

Når dette er sagt kan en tro at jeg dømmer MARC og AACR nord og ned, men dette er ikke tilfelle, jeg snakker utelukkende om MARC som et lagringsformat. Det er fullt mulig å katalogiser i MARC ifht. AACR og likevel lagre dataene på en forsvarlig måte. På denne måte er MARC en visning av dataene (er dette vanskelig, kan en tenke at tallene {1,2,3} kan vises som rådata, eller som søylediagram, kakediagram osv. uten å ta skade, og på samme måten kan en bok katalogiseres i en MARC skjema, for å så lagres på en annen måte).

I dagens IT-verden finnes det et stort spekter av teknologier som løser disse problemer, men de mest lovende for bibliotek, mener jeg er de som kan betegnes som “semantiske”, og det er her jeg ville hente inspirasjon for et nytt “bibliotekssystem”, ikke hos en tradisjonell, kommersiell leverandør av MARCdatasystemer.

Internet Librarian International 2009

First things first: this year’s Internet Librarian International was a much better affair than last year’s effort…in fact, it was actually worth while being there (sorry if this is negative, but I feel it needed saying).

OK, report time:

Cory Doctorow spoke about how copyright is not working on the Internet, how large corporations push for consistently stronger legislation in this area, and how this leads to nothing but criminalization of what the general public in increasingly greater numbers consider perfectly acceptable behaviour. He used the notion of how people originally had a closed network of telephones of a single make that produced good quality sound and a reliable service, but that people opted for cheaper, lower quality because it made it possible to ring more people; similarly, popular services on the Internet are not those high-quality channels pushed by the corporate media companies, but lower resolution, high-quantity channels such as YouTube. There is no way to compete in this market with pricing schemes adopted from the non-online world.

Doctorow’s commentary on the facts about international copyright and how this complicates matters in terms of a delivery via channels such as the Internet was rather saddening; the fact that search engines that show previews of content in search results are actually illegal in many countries demonstrates how out of touch some copyright law really is. At the same time, it has never been easier to break copyright law: it is now possible to knock off a few thousand copies of a film in an afternoon because of sharing technologies. Is there any reason to continue using legislation designed to prohibit copying when copying  was difficult?

Punishment for “suspected” infringement of copyright law includes cutting off internet connections, which according to Doctorow is a an abuse of human rights in a digital age; he’s probably right here too, given that I would struggle without the Net.

Doctorow argued that since copyright law is not generally created in an open process, but in a closed process controlled largely by industrial interests, it is important to lobby for change in the way such laws are created. Examples of how engaged people are in the way copyright law affects them was demonstrated by two politicians in Canada who lost their seats due to misunderstanding the electorates’ disaffection with the way copyright law was being treated.

It was pointed out that the way industry has tried to combat copying culture has largely been based on encrypting content and selling this with a built in decryption key, which is largely going to fail because the key and the encryption are provided together – making is not exactly difficult to decrypt said content. An interesting thought on the value of copying culture is that the industrial revolution was driven by copying – creating many cheap copies on looms, and creating copies of other people’s equipment.

Regarding ebooks, Doctorow contends that part of the thing that makes books so dear to people is the experience of owning the book; ebooks have largely removed this feeling causing people to not have any affection for this medium. He points out that users do not own the content – in essence they lease content (note the Amazon book recall – this would never have happened with printed books).

A final, really relevant example of copyright silliness that was outline is the obsession of UK universities with patenting research – a Thatcher invention – this intellection property protection (IPP) means that for every £1 IPP brings in, universities pay £19 for the use of other universities intellectual property. This kind of rot has to be stopped – for many years, publicly funded research was not subject to patent protection because is was deemed to be in the public domain, for the benefit of society. Because the political attitude prevailing at the time assumed that educational institutions should be self-funding, it was deemed necessary to bring in money in this way – without realizing the fact that with income comes outgoings to other institutions doing the same. I wonder if this has any current parallels in Norway?

Doctorow concluded by encouraging librarians to work for better copyright law that has been produced in an open setting, and is adjusted for current contexts.

Tony Hirst provided a short talk on providing invisible services that gave access to library information, these are the kind of thing that we used to develop at NTNU Library about two–three years ago. He is of the opinion that the library should stop buying books, and that members of faculty staff should use Library Thing to circulate the books in their offices instead.

Peter Bryant talked about next-generation library catalogues; he is of the opinion that library catalogues provide no clue to users about the quality of the information contained therein because the cataloguers have no skills to provide this information – this is subject-related competence. He talked about the creation of authentic knowledge about content in a library catalogue using Linked Data, and points out that citation numbers in ISI and Google Scholar are supposed to provide information about academic quality, but yet they do not – in fact they provide little help. The library catalogue needs to provide ways of delivering authentic knowledge about subjects by typically providing links to other sources of content and metadata.

AK Sandberg told us about Pode, a Norwegian project. They want to create a library catalogue with a better user experience by using mashups based on open standards such as Z39.50, SRU, MARC, etc. They document everything and provide source code under an open license. (I have been involved in this project, so I can say that they are doing a lot of interesting work that runs in a different but related vein to that taking place on UBiT2010.

Behrens/Larsen provided an introduction to the work that has been taking place in Denmark on Summa, which is a system for “integrated search”. The system aggregates metadata from different sources and creates a list of hits. The hits are ranked and presented in a special interface. User testing revealed that the ranking was not good enough, and that users simply did not use the facets that had been provided as a way of narrowing the search. They had a number of ideas about how to work with the interface and improve the ranking, but found that changing the placement of facets had not improved their usage statistics.

Alan Oliver from Ex Libris told us about bX – a recommendation service based on clickthroughs in SFX – and was hacked to pieces by Peter Murray-Rust because of Ex Libris’ use of the word “open” in its marketing. Murray-Rust contended – correctly to my mind – that Ex Libris’ conception of open does not match up to the rest of the world’s conception.

Brian Kelly “standards are like sausages”; this presentation was an interesting look at standards, open standards and good things that are neither open or standards. Standards were originally seen as a way of ensuring interoperability, accessibility and avoiding vendor lock-in. Open standards such as OOXML are bad because they are in essence bound to one supplier, conflict with other standards, and are in truth ODF in an uglier wrapper (my prejudices might be coming through here too ) Skype is a good non-open, non-standard, as is Google. Brian said that the 00s are characterized by an understanding that standards need to be applied sensibly, with that all-important contact with reality cf. the fact that W3Cs main page CSS does not validate properly because they want it to look right in all browsers. Standards should be written so human beings can understand them! Peter Murray-Rust: standards should be about rough consensus and running code.

The second day keynote, Peter Murray-Rust presented a set of challenges for libraries in the 21st century. I can really see a few ways of working the library into a key role at the university, if we take up some of these challenges. Especially as regards knocking the wind out of academic publishers – they are powerful, and power corrupts (Powerpoint corrupts absolutely).

I presented at a session on mobile libraries, and then had a long discussion with Patrick Danowski who presented at the same session. Following this, I attended an unconference session on the Semantic Web. This session was extremely interesting, but it somewhat difficult to relate, other than by stating that Linked Data is something that we should definitely be doing (but we know that already, yeah?)

All in all, this year’s ILI provided some food for thought, but I fear that the sessions that were most interesting for me are those that I have not really reported, such as the Semantic Web unconference and Peter Murray-Rust’s keynote. The reasons why these were so interesting were slightly different: Murray-Rust was inspirational, something that is nice to have now and again — it reminds you why you accept lower pay than you get offered by the commercial sector (oh, yes, that day is coming). The session on the Semantic Web reminded me personally why I work at NTNU Library: to be at the absolute cutting edge of academic library technology. I get the impression that we don’t generally understand this, and I get the impression that our web pages will never reflect this…as I said, that day is coming.

@ILI2009

I’m off to Internet Librarian International 2009 in London in October, I’ll be giving a session on some mobile stuff we’ve been doing at NTNU. I’m looking forward to this because I am currently passionate about two work-related things: mobile devices and linked data, and I’m getting to talk about both (the data model for our mobile platform is linked data).

There’s quite a lot of new stuff I’ll be talking about, aimed at librarians with some technical expertise (i.e. attend this if you work in a library and know what a web-browser looks like). I promise an interesting session for people who are jaded with institutional web-infrastructure management.

Hope to see you there

NTNU/SiT for students? REMA 1000 & Bunnpris for staff?

Worried about extending your meagre state wage (we’re not in it for the money)? Drop SiTs offerings and take a walk from Gløshaugen to Bunnpris, from Dragvoll to Rema 1000.

…joyous (you also get the exercise you’ll miss out on when you return your card for the Sports centres )