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What’s Wrong with Theft and Security in Special Collections? A Study of the RBMS Guidelines

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Security in special collections[1] can refer to the prevention of two separate things: the theft of rare materials and incidental damage at the hands of patrons or staff. For the purposes of this paper I will focus on the former, although accidental harm and gradual wear can at times be an even larger concern for a special collections library.

Due to a number of high-profile cases in recent years, these types of cultural thefts have been brought to the attention of the mainstream media, increasing public awareness of the value of the rare items held by special collections libraries. At the same time, the internet age has greatly changed the antiquarian book trade (Rostenberg and Stern), and the newfound ease of reaching a global marketplace can serve as a temptation for potential rare book thieves.

The response from the library community has been quite positive, as the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL has published an updated document titled Guidelines Regarding Security and Theft in Special Collections and put together a number of security resources and theft reports on its website.

Current special collections security philosophy, however, as represented in these security guidelines, does not fully address numerous issues including the realities of staffing and budget in special collections libraries, the impact of the digital age, access, and institutional culture. In this paper I will consider the cases of several recent special collections thefts in order to explore the limits of these guidelines and the continuing challenges in the area of special collections security against theft.

First, many of the RBMS security guidelines, although well-intentioned, are impractical, in both terms of available resources and their utility in the event of a real theft. The guidelines advocate the designation of a Library Security Officer (LSO) to oversee the writing of an official security policy to prevent theft as well as an action plan in the event of a theft. Many of the details, though, including increased security staff to monitor patrons, installation of security cameras, full descriptive cataloging and marking of items, are often unrealistic in many special collections due to large collections or staff and budgetary shortages.

Kovarsky points out that these types of procedures “can be a substantial chore in terms of staff time and effort, especially within a very large collection with a substantial cataloging/marking backlog.” Other suggestions, such as the installation of security cameras and other means of physical security, “can be problematic for many less affluent institutions, unable to afford the personnel, technology or physical plant required for the task.”

Other security guidelines relate to things such as the internalization of various local laws, following detailed procedures after a theft, and even having staff “request that the police officer place the suspect under arrest” if they determine there to be probable cause. Not only is a great deal of staff time required in order to get to this level of procedural and legal knowledge, which is unlikely to be prioritized by a supervisor, but during an actual emergency, it is practically impossible to recall and follow such a formal policy.

In a 2004 case at Transylvania University, for example, in which students stole a number of rare books from the special collections library, physical force was used as the special collections librarian was zapped with a stun gun. The situation led to a foot chase, “with (head librarian) Ms. (Susan) Brown and other librarians in hot pursuit” of the thieves, before they eventually escaped in a van. Later, the police were called but were unable to document the crime scene as the items taken from special collections but left in the building had already been “collected and returned to their proper places” by librarians (United States v. Allen et al).

This ugly situation raises a number of questions that cannot neatly be answered: what are librarians to do in the event of a theft-in-progress? Should they pursue an escaping suspect, even if he or she may be armed or dangerous? The guidelines only say to “follow institutional policies and applicable state laws concerning the incident,” but in the Transylvania case, the librarians were clearly shaken and acting in the heat of the moment, as is only natural in such a situation. Similarly, their decision to return the materials to their proper places was likely a result of the stress of the events, even if the “correct” response was to leave the crime scene intact for law enforcement.

This example is not meant to suggest that such thefts are typical, or that special collections librarians should fear being physically assaulted, as the use of force is extremely rare in cultural heritage thefts, but it does help demonstrate the wide-ranging techniques of thieves, which can be impossible to capture in a written security policy. In addition to the Transylvania students who used a stun pen, Daniel Spiegelman climbed up an old dumbwaiter in the stacks and unscrewed a wall in order to get into the special collections at Columbia University, where he stole rare books, maps and letters (McDade). David Breithaupt convinced Kenyon College security guards and cleaning staff to let him into the special collections where he would steal upwards of 250 rare books, manuscripts and letters (McDade 24). The suggestions for securing the facility in the guidelines—minimizing access points, designating an easily observed reading room, controlling key checkout—can always be circumvented by a dedicated enough thief. And as demonstrated in the Kenyon case, the security policy often needs to be understood by staff in other campus departments to be effective, which is not usually a realistic scenario.

So of what use, then, is an LSO and a formal security policy if it is not useful in a the event of a real theft?

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How Four Databases Index Articles (Part 2)

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This is the second part of an article about database indexing practices. View part one

Finally, the ERIC database serves a very different user group, so it features a fundamentally different indexing scheme. ERIC is the largest database of educational literature, so it focuses on issues in education research and policy instead of library and information science. It indexes many of the same journals as LISA, LISTA and Library Lit, but it often does so selectively, so as only to include articles that are specifically relevant to education. As such, the descriptors used are much different than both the library science databases and my own keyword terms. In addition to subject differences, the ERIC indexing staff has provided a much more thorough and detailed system of subject headings. Compared to LISA (3), LISTA (4) and Library Lit (2), ERIC features 18 descriptors. Interestingly, some of these keyword phrases are specific to education (class activities, teacher attitudes), but others are the same as the descriptors in the library science databases (information seeking, library instruction). This is most likely due to the overlap in education and library services and the importance that each plays in the other’s field of study.

As well as having more descriptors which lead to more subject entry points into the article, the language used in ERIC appears to correspond very well to likely user queries and some test searches helped confirmed that the system was effective for leading user s to relevant material through subject headings. A subject search for “information seeking” returned 2780 results, which is appropriate due to the broad nature of the phrase. Combining it with the subject phrase “undergraduate students” narrows the results to a very manageable 74.

All of this said, the effectiveness of any of these retrieval systems assumes a certain level of competence by the user. He or she must know the basics of how indexing works, how to search by subject headings, and what, if any, faceted search mechanisms are offered by the particular retrieval system. Any search system which features human chosen subject keywords is going to be different from all others; this is a result of both subtleties inherent in language as well as the various ways of interpreting an author’s intentions. The important part is that the retrieval systems strive to offer additional mechanisms to guide their users to the material that is most useful to them.

Works Cited

Leckie, G. J. “Desperately Seeking Citations: Uncovering Faculty Assumptions about the Undergraduate Research Process.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 22.3 (1996): 201-8. 16 Nov. 2010

An Investigation into the Indexing Practices of Four Databases: Part One

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After reading a paper by Gloria Leckie titled “Desperately Seeking Citations,” I assigned it three keyword terms I thought were representative of the subject matter. These terms were “information seeking behavior-undergraduates,” “scholarly research” and “academic libraries-role.” [1] After comparing these to four databases, LISTA, LISA, Library Lit and ERIC, results showed five very different systems of subject headings.

My own terms were most similar to those of LISA, but the simple fact that the article’s message is inexact and can be interpreted in multiple ways means that no two systems will ever be exactly the same as long as the terms are applied by human indexers. In addition, some of the differences can partially be explained by the subject coverage of the databases, while others are simply due to individual indexing behavior and preferences by the organizations. Overall, they correspond to varying levels of effectiveness for their user groups, and Library Lit and ERIC were observed to be the most useful.

First, the LISTA and LISA databases featured rather similar descriptor systems, and initially seemed to be more effective than Library Lit; however, upon further investigation, Library Lit’s mechanisms for user discovery by subject appear to be superior. LISTA’s keyword terms were “information retrieval, report writing and library orientation for college students,” while LISA featured the descriptors “libraries, undergraduates, information seeking behaviour, and Faculty.” The subject coverage of the three databases is quite similar, but LISTA’s focus on technology may be reflected in their choice of “information retrieval.” Library Lit, on the other hand, used the keyword terms “bibliographic instruction/college and university students” and “college and university libraries/relations with faculty and curriculum.”

I initially thought that these terms made Library Lit less effective because they were not likely to correspond to search terms users would actually use. For example, I found it much less likely for a user to come up with terms like “bibliographic instruction” or “libraries/relations with faculty” on their own in a subject search than “undergraduates” or “information retrieval” which I thought were quite plausible. After performing some test searches, however, I changed my opinion. Regarding the LISA descriptors, the article only comes up if “behaviour” is spelled in the British manner including the “u,” a search query which returns 1176 peer-reviewed articles. However, a search for “information seeking behavior” returns two article citations containing that descriptor. This suggests that LISA has problems with indexing inconsistencies.

Also, after a closer examination, LISTA’s keyword phrases do not appear to be very effective. Users are not likely to use the term “library orientation” to describe the research process described in the article, and it did not appear to me that “information retrieval” was as significant a part of its subject matter as “faculty” or “information seeking,” two terms which it did not include in their indexing. Also, the subject phrases included are very broad, leading the user to over 20,000 articles and there does not appear to be an effective way to narrow your results if you begin with a subject search. Because of this, the effectiveness of subject headings for resource discovery is low.

On the other hand, Library Lit’s descriptors, which initially appeared to correspond poorly with actual user queries, actually function quite effectively in the context of the content discovery keys they provide. For example, a search for “undergraduate students” a likely user query which does not appear as a descriptor in the Leckie article citation, brings up several relevant subject phrases in the left sidebar of the page. One of these is “Bibliographic instruction/College and university students” from earlier, which takes the user to a less intimidating 1301 peer-reviewed articles including the Leckie piece. Their system also allows for easy further narrowing.

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[1] For my keyword terms with dashes, I envisioned them as part of a hierarchy. In my hypothetical search system, the Leckie article would show up under a more general query for “information seeking behavior,” and users would see an option to further narrow the search.

Differences Between Library Catalogs and Amazon.com

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Introduction: Users may begin their search for information on a topic with a known item, but be interested in expanding their search to locate related material.  In a physical collection, they can do this by locating an item on the shelf and then browsing the titles in proximity to that item to look for other material of potential interest.  In catalogs, retrieval systems, and search engines, other approaches are needed to help the user locate related material once the record describing the initially sought item has been found.  In this assignment you will explore how efficient and effective various search tools are in leading you to material related to the item that is the starting point for your search.  In this case you will be looking for two books: a (non-fiction) book by Lawrence Lessig entitled Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy and a (fiction) book by Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement.

Search and Discovery: Different Methods for Finding Related Items

Three search tools, the UIUC Classic Catalog, Amazon.com and the VuFind Catalog, have disparate visual interfaces and very different mechanisms for locating related material, all with varying degrees of precision and recall. Using a non-fiction work by Lawrence Lessig and a fiction title by Richard Powers as starting points, no absolute conclusions can be made about their effectiveness, although the library catalogs tended to show better precision while Amazon.com had better recall, albeit with some cluttered results.

The Classic Catalog interface is the simplest of the three. It displays descriptive metadata including author, title, publishing information and location, and is almost exclusively plain text on a white background, with the exception of a small cover image.

The Amazon.com interface, on the other hand, immediately makes it clear that it is an exploratory search system with plenty of user interaction. Since it is commercial, price information is displayed most prominently, but there is also much more than just basic book details, including user-created lists and reviews.

Lastly, the VuFind Catalog interface attempts to combine the authority of a library catalog with the attractiveness and interactivity of Amazon.com. It includes most of the same metadata at Classic but also Web 2.0 features such as favorites, tagging and comments. None of these features appear to be frequently used, however.

The mechanisms for locating similar items in the three systems were fundamentally different. The Classic Catalog allowed the user to search by LCSH, browse the call number range and retrieve other works by the same author. The VuFind Catalog was similar but did not provide call number searching. It also featured a more precise LCSH search mechanism than Classic in which the user could browse by either a broad or specific heading to control the number of items retrieved. The interface also supports finding related items by user-supplied tags, but as previously stated, this functionality is very rarely used.

Amazon.com offered a completely different set of search mechanisms, many of which were based on community-negotiated information instead of expert-supplied controlled vocabulary. There is a system to search for similar books by user-tagged keywords; this even included a method to control relevance by allowing users to vote for or against a particular tag. There were also two mechanisms that suggested related items by displaying the titles most frequently purchased with the original. Another very exciting feature called “Inside this Book” most closely resembles full-text information retrieval. It allows the user to browse for similar titles based on whether they have certain keywords in the author’s name, title or in the body text of a growing collection of books (currently over 120,000 titles). Finally, there is a “Search by Category” function.

For non-fiction, such as the Lessig book, the controlled vocabulary in the search mechanisms of the Classic and VuFind catalogs result in a higher precision than Amazon.com. Library of Congress Subject Headings are painstakingly applied by professionals and the Dewey Classification system is well organized by classes and detailed subcategories, so only very relevant titles are returned. Actual user information seeking needs, however, do not always correspond to these subject headings or call number ranges. A related item that might be perfect for a user will not show up unless it has been catalogued with these precise headings or numbers. Therefore, while precision may be high, recall is not necessarily so.

Fiction, however, is nearly impossible to classify with any level of detail using the same controlled vocabulary, which results in poorer precision and recall. For the Powers book, for example, the corresponding LCSH keyword “Genetics – Research – Fiction” returns a low number of only 6 results. There is no guarantee of their precision, however, since with fiction it is often elements such as narrative style, form and tone of voice that make an item similar and relevant for users, not extremely broad subject matter. The other LCSH given was “College Teachers – Fiction” which returns 98 results that do not appear to be similar or of much cohesive relevance. In contrast, Amazon’s user tagging mechanism with its system of tag peer-evaluation could potentially improve precision for fiction titles, but it still has not caught on enough to be effective. The Powers book, for example, has yet to be tagged.

On the other hand, Amazon.com’s related item mechanisms generally brought lower precision and higher recall. The “Frequently Bought Together” and “Items Customers Also Bought” are based solely on purchasing patterns and not anything to do with the content of the book. While this type of algorithm is improving, at this stage they can be manipulated by too many factors to be considered reliable and as a result their precision is low. Since they lack professionally applied controlled vocabulary such as LCSH, the precision of Amazon’s mechanisms in non-fiction searches is lower than the library catalog. “Inside the Book” could also do wonders for precision and recall for more specific searches, but it will need to continue to increase the size of its index. Most of Amazon.com’s mechanisms return many more items than narrow LCSH searches, suggesting higher recall, but the user would likely be discouraged by the amount of non-relevant sources he or she would have to sift through in the recommended books and extremely broad category searches. In addition, he or she would have to look all over the page to find the different mechanisms and the category search, for example, is buried near the bottom and barely noticeable.

In conclusion, the library catalogs showed fairly good precision, but suffered with finding related items for fiction. Amazon.com’s mechanisms had better recall but tended to clutter the screen. Some of its mechanisms have the potential to significantly improve both precision and recall for both fiction and non-fiction, but they will need the support of a large community in order to do so.

An Analysis of Two Very Different Online Collections: Use, Users and More

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The two collections discussed here are the Japanese Woodblock Print collection at the University of California-San Francisco, representing a digitized version of physical holdings, and Arts Journal, a gateway to third-party public domain sources on the internet. While the collections share a few surface similarities, their intended user groups and organizational schemes have little in common. Users navigate them in very different ways, but both collections serve their intended users effectively.

The Woodblock Prints and Arts Journal both deal with themes of art and culture and they feature carefully selected collections that can be either narrowed by category or directly searched by keywords. Beyond that, major differences include scope, layout, organization and methods of accessing the collections.

The Woodblock Print collection, digitized versions of 400 seventeenth- to twentieth-century Japanese woodblock prints depicting health and its relationship with disease, religion and the West, is meant to serve a very specific user base. Intended users include researchers studying Japanese medicine, the history of Asian health practices or old Japanese art. The digitized images pertain to a narrow topic, so the collection would not likely attract many users from outside those areas. However, this unique collection is of interest to scholars worldwide, and its online presence means that researchers who are not able to travel to California are still able to benefit from it.

Arts Journal, on the other hand, appeals to a completely different type of user. The collection consists of links to articles taken from nearly 200 online newspapers that have been hand-selected by the editorial team. These articles cover a wide variety of topics in fine arts and culture in nine major categories, and new stories are posted every weekday, so the collection is constantly growing. The intended user group includes students, scholars, artists and art enthusiasts browsing for interesting and current news and commentary, most likely not trying to locate a particular article.

A scholar visiting the web site of the Woodblock Print collection would have no trouble understanding the scope of the collection and its organizational scheme, as it is all clearly laid out and well explained. Each of the 400 prints has its own page and all are accompanied by very detailed descriptive metadata. There are multiple ways to access the prints: narrowing by theme, performing a search by keywords or for an artist, or scrolling through a list of all the prints. The collection’s homepage is simple and clearly laid out with a horizontal navigation bar and a right sidebar that show the different ways the collection is arranged and the methods to search it. After browsing, the user will discover that there is some thematic overlap, but this is not problematic since they are all interrelated.

This organizational system serves the needs of the users very well. It is flexible, allowing them to retrieve and view prints using both known item searching (entering a specific artist or title) and exploratory searching (browsing a theme or entering keywords.) Right next to the search box is a link to a page with tips for Boolean and exact phrase searching and truncation. Finally, the homepage for each theme contains a helpful introductory essay describing the historical background and significance.

In contrast, the scope of the Arts Journal collection and its organization is significantly more complex. The outgoing links to the news-selected articles represent only one component, as the collection also includes about 25 in-house blogs written by staff writers and a section for a selected video of the day embedded from YouTube. Both the news articles and the blog posts can be narrowed by topic, but there is not much functionality to support known-item searches (it features only a Custom Google Search box that does not provide good precision due to the high volume of keywords on every page).

Arts Journal is also a commercial operation, so there is a separate classified section as well as banner advertisements. These resources, which include job listings and additional arts and culture websites, are often of value to users, but the fact that Arts Journal accepted money for their placement damages the credibility of their inclusion in the collection. Also, the third-party newspaper websites often have their own system of providing links to related articles. These two points reflect the idea that in this type of online gateway, the boundaries of the collection are often difficult to determine (Lee 2000).

All of Art Journal’s different elements are thrown together in a three-column layout that is almost exclusively text, so a user might initially be overwhelmed. The horizontal navigation displays the different topics of the articles, but it does not stand out. To view all the information on the homepage, the user must scroll down a long way, and certain sections including the list of blogs and the day’s headlines by topic are near the bottom.

Despite this home-page clutter, however, Arts Journal serves its users in several other important ways that make it much easier to manage. Users can sign up for an email newsletter covering all the top headlines that can be delivered either daily or in a weekly digest format. There are also various RSS subscription options. Users can sign up using the feed reader of their choice and subscribe to either all articles, articles on a particular topic or one or more of the blogs. The email subscription list boasts 30,000 subscribers, so it appears that the majority of the users are accessing the collection by means other than browsing the webpage.

Despite the major differences between the two collections, both the Woodblock Print collection and Arts Journal serve their user groups in effective ways.

 

References

Lee, Hur-Li. “What Is a Collection?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51.12 (2000): 1106-1113. Business Source Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 Sept. 2010.

Marchionini, Gary. “Exploratory Search: From Finding to Understanding.” Communications of the ACM 49.4 (2006): 41-46. Business Source Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 Sept. 2010.

Media Consolidation and Conglomeration: The LIS Consequences

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Over recent decades, consolidation has been a consistent theme in mass media and other types of information providers, with the emergence of large information empires which continuously acquire new subsidiaries. This conglomeration is a challenge to LIS because the values of these companies are directly contrary to many of the core values of librarianship. First, Nichols and McChesney recount that when media companies stepped up their consolidation back in the 1970s, they began to behave no differently than any other corporation, focusing on investors and profit margins instead of balanced, quality reporting. Alternative and minority viewpoints as well as international coverage were soon considered too expensive to produce, and newspapers and broadcasts watered down their coverage.

Consolidated media companies also strove to be the first to break a sensational headline at the expense of journalistic principles, and consequently “blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities” (Nichols and McChesney). Also, their corporate ownership lead the mass media to ignore major scandals and misrepresent important economic and financial issues. Schiller adds to this by placing these trends into a broader framework, one in which the entire domains of communication and information have come to be dominated by corporations; an overall “shift from state to private power,” which has potent consequences. Of particular interest to the LIS field is his point that information “that had been in large measure a social good has been transformed into a commodity for sale,” (46) a point which is exemplified by the profit-driven priorities of the mass media and the subsequent declining quality of journalism.

These trends along with the shifting priorities of conglomerated media is a stark contrast to the core values governing libraries, which are key in a democratic information society by providing the public with “all points of view on current and historical issues” for the “interest, information, and enlightenment” of the citizenry, as outlined in the Library Bill of Rights. Librarians go to great lengths to protect intellectual freedom and provide free and equal access to ideas across the political and social spectrum, and they actively assist patrons in the use of those resources so that they can make informed decisions.

When the media of a society share some of these ideals and provide objective coverage and a multiplicity of viewpoints, the public benefits and can form well-informed opinions much easier on their own. As we have seen, however, the current state of mega conglomeration in the United States is quite the opposite. Thus, libraries must take on a much larger information literacy role to combat these strong forces.

Libraries provide access to news in both print and online formats, but they must strive to be an active educator in lieu of a passive provider to ensure that their democratic mission is served in today’s environment. For examples, libraries can highlight alternative media such as independent news organizations, local broadcasting networks and international sources available online that will expose patrons to novel ideas and diverse viewpoints. This can be done in person directly with patrons, but to have a broader effect, libraries can create and market web-based and print handouts to serve as a guide to navigating the media landscape. As a point of comparison, academic libraries invest a lot of resources in educating students how to identify an online source as scholarly by investigating the author’s affiliation and potential biases. This model needs to be adopted by public libraries to ensure that the public is able to make the same types of judgments of corporate-backed news which comes at them on a daily basis, often masquerading as objective reporting.

Despite these possibilities, the battle is becoming increasingly difficult for libraries as the media conglomerates continue to grow in power. The Nation’s telling infographic demonstrates how six giant corporations own a staggering share of news media, ranging from TV shows to radio stations and even niche websites. Many of these subsidiaries would not instinctively seem to be part of a larger entity, and this invisibility of the conglomerates in these situations makes the public less likely to be able to identify their biases; therefore, libraries must protect their values by educating the public in the use of media in all domains.

It is also important to point out that conglomeration of media is not the only type with potent consequences to the field of LIS. In addition, private corporations such as EBSCO, ProQuest and Gale are consolidating and steadily acquiring smaller databases and other information collections. Whereas libraries used to have the power to hand select every resource in their collections, today they are increasingly relying on these third-party vendors to provide them with access to journal articles and ebooks. Similar to the case of media conglomeration, these vendors have the same profit-driven mindset, which causes them to only include resources thought to have the broadest possible appeal in their database packages (Dilevko 698-99). Naturally, these resources are the non-controversial ones and as a result, important alternative and minority points of view are often left out. And like the situation of the media corporations, these information vendor conglomerates do not hold themselves to any code of ethics or share the ALA’s commitment to represent all opinions. In some aspects, this is an even more threatening type of conglomeration for libraries, as it has a larger and more noticeable effect on the collections of resources that are made available to patrons. Abbott said of online article databases that “whoever controls them will control much about the structure of knowledge,” (436) and as libraries continue to rely on vendors more and more to provide them with serials and monographs, they are at the mercy of those companies’ priorities. The business model of a major database conglomerate will simply not have room to include a balance of viewpoints, because those uncommon opinions are not cost-efficient on a mass scale. Libraries need to work to balance out these forces by exerting their power of expert selection and principles of intellectual freedom.  They need to make it a priority to add alternative media to their collections whenever possible, for example by subscribing to databases such as the Alternative Press Index, and need to continue to find the most effective ways to educate their communities about the effects that major information conglomerates have on information.

References:

Dilevko, Juris. “An Alternative Vision of Librarianship: James Danky and the Socio-cultural Politics of Collection Development.” Library Trends, 56 (2008): 678-704.

Library Bill of Rights. American Library Association. Web. 11 May 2011. http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/index.cfm

Nichols, John, and Robert W. McChesney. “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers.” The Nation. 6 April 2009. 12 May 2011. http://www.thenation.com/article/death-and-life-great-american-newspapers.

John Stuart Mill on Intellectual Freedom: His Thoughts Applied to Today’s Information Landscape

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In his essay On Liberty, published in 1859, philosopher John Stuart Mill makes a strong case for the necessity of intellectual freedom in society, outlining four points that would have a profound effect on librarianship. He argued that any and all opinions that are not heard may in fact contain truth; that the “collision of adverse opinions” is necessary in order to clarify truth; and that truth must be contested in order to be accepted.

Mill’s points are seen as a direct influence on the Bill of Rights of the American Library Association, which charges libraries to provide materials representing all opinions and points of view, so that people are free to compare and contrast them in order to find truth. Although these undoubtedly remain the guiding principles of librarianship, a number of factors bring significant challenges in a contemporary context.

First, in today’s information landscape, several types of censorship threaten Mill’s vision. Libraries and their communities often object to and ban particular titles based on perceived “inappropriate” subject matter (Asheim, West Bend). More importantly, however, librarians themselves often find it difficult to hold true to their values of intellectual freedom when faced with extreme situations, such as holocaust denial literature (Wolkoff). It is a temptation to censor opinions which represent blatantly hurtful and harmful ideas, but Mill preaches that these obscure ideas must be heard, and even that they help readers find and clarify truth, a point strongly supported by the Library Bill of Rights.

In addition, there is a less overt form of censorship that results from the commodification of information and the increasing reliance of libraries on third-party information vendors to provide them with article databases and ebook packages. Dilevko explains how these companies operate on a profit-motive, and since the most broadly profitable opinions are common ones, they frequently exclude alternative viewpoints (698). When libraries do not have the final word on all of the individual resource in their collections, it becomes more difficult to ensure that the communities they serve have access to the wide-range of divergent opinions advocated by Mill.

Finally, Mill never could have envisioned the vast platform of the World Wide Web which today connects our global society. His points about the necessity of considering all opinions and juxtaposing them before making conclusions are based on a much smaller-scale model of the print book trade and personal debates that was all that was possible at the time. For a key political or social issue, for example, only a select group of upper-class individuals were able to publish their opinions and any debates would be limited to individuals in close geographical proximity. Today, however, any individual can publish their opinions at the push of a button using blogs and other social networking platforms, and can immediately reach a worldwide audience. Today there are over 156 million blogs in existence (Nielsen), so for an important issue with national or global importance, the sheer enormity of opinions makes it impossible to consider all of them before making conclusions. Thus, the issue instead becomes how to effectively synthesize and gauge consensus among the public.

References:

Asheim, Lester. “Selection and Censorship: A Reappraisal” Wilson Library Bulletin 58.3 (1983): 180-84.

Banned in West Bend. Web. 12 May 2011. http://www.bannedinwestbend.info/west-bend-wi

“BlogPulse”. The Nielsen Company. 16 February, 2011.

Dilevko, Juris. “An Alternative Vision of Librarianship: James Danky and the Socio-cultural Politics of Collection Development.” Library Trends, 56 (2008): 678-704.

Mill, John Stuart. ” On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion .” On Liberty. Chapter 2. Web. 11 May 2011. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

Wolkoff, Kathleen N. “The problem of holocaust denial literature in libraries.” Library Trends 45.1 (1996): 87-96.

Future of Reference in Special Libraries

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In an article about the future of reference in special libraries, Stephen Abrams posits a variety of scenarios for reference service, the most pessimistic being that special librarians will be left behind due to advances in technology. His main objective, however, is to highlight key ways special librarians can adapt to the new Web 2.0 landscape and stay relevant. Abrams stresses that those who are open to adaptation will be key in the redefinition of the profession, even going so far as to call it a “new renaissance” in libraries.

First, Abrams makes an important distinction between general reference queries and the “deeper research support that is our stock in trade,” which is becoming increasingly problematic in the age of Google. He says that search engines do a decent job for simple reference queries but librarians are needed when research questions get deeper. The problem lies in the fact that “core users don’t always know when their question is simple or more complicated,” and since more basic reference is now conducted almost exclusively on the web, they will never find out that their question is in fact more complicated.

As a result, they will end up settling for halfway decent answers to their questions, instead of the vastly superior resources they would have discovered with the aid of a librarian. This is a big issue, and it goes even deeper than Abrams suggests. Cassel and Hiremath (2009) define “ready” reference as a briefer query for factual information in which there is usually one answer, but that it is not “simple” reference as the public typically believes. They even list “the data found in a random Internet search are of dubious accuracy” as a characteristic of ready reference. Those users who conduct this type of reference online are likely coming across inaccurate information all of the time without knowing it.

Abrams also echoes the popular call to “go where the users are,” as he explains that special librarians also need to adapt to the latest in Web 2.0 technologies in order to serve their user base most effectively. He uses the example of the OPAC as a tool that was designed primarily for librarians’ needs, and while it is helpful to the general public, it does not always correspond well to the information seeking behavior of today’s Amazon.com generation.

Adams challenges librarians of all types not to radically change their core service model, but rather to continue to find ways to put their reference services into these new spaces that are popular among users. He explicitly mentions mobile devices, instant messaging and social networks as particularly important spaces.

I agree that this is crucial: while we’re not going to be able to abandon the OPAC in favor of some sort of sleek, search-engine-like interface any time soon, we are certainly able to provide multiple entry points into our content, whether it be by creating of web-based research guides or answering research questions via email and chat. At the end of his article, Abrams organizes his ideas into 8 possible scenarios for the future of the special reference librarian, ranging from “fossilization” to “embedded” and “remote” librarians. There are plenty of interesting ideas in these scenarios.

For one, Abrams argues that e-learning is becoming increasingly popular in corporate spaces, but the library is organized on the enterprise level instead of the lesson level. In order to bridge this gap, relationships must be strengthened between libraries and e-learning providers so that reference services can be better integrated into Blackboard and other intranets. This would lead to more effective learning and also higher visibility of library reference services.

Next, his idea of the “embedded” librarian is an interesting one, suggesting that librarians could become more valuable member of the team by physically (and virtually) attending important meetings and finding themselves “at the table” in more situations. Such librarians would then “not only design intranets that mirror each team’s needs but offer personalized service customized to each team member.” I am not very familiar with how prominent of a role special librarians typically have, but I agree that becoming more “embedded” would make their work much more effective and targeted to the actual user needs.

All in all, the article was very informative and written in a clear style. Adams, however, barely addressed the differences between special libraries and the more familiar public and academic venues, which was slightly confusing. I found that many points seemed to be more directed towards academic librarians, but he didn’t make this clear. Both public and academic libraries have advantages in that they can serve a role as a community resource capable of holding events, and I would be interested to hear more about the unique situation of special libraries.

The Information-Seeking Behavior of Today’s Latin American Researchers

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The article “Researching Latin America: A Survey of How the Next Generation Is Doing Its Research” by Potts and Mazurkiewicz in Latin American Research Review investigates the information-seeking behavior of a very specific population: advanced-level university students belonging to the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

In particular, the article examines how these students conducted their research, what particular tools they used in the discipline of Latin American studies and what level of bibliographic instruction they had previously received. The participants in the study were geographically dispersed across the United States and Puerto Rico and the vast majority was of Latino descent.

This user group is significant for several reasons. First, Latinos in the United States have had documented problems with using academic library resources (Haras et al. 2010, Solis and Dabbour 2010). In addition, this study’s specific population of doctoral and graduate students represents the next generation of teachers of Latin American studies. The manner in which this group conducts its research has implications for future generations of students as well.

While these advanced, graduate-level students have plenty of familiarity with using electronic resources for research, questions remain about whether they have an appropriate level of knowledge of discipline-specific databases that lead to higher quality information resources relevant to their investigations.

Potts and Mazurkiewicz’s methodology was a detailed three-part survey sent out to all 723 LASA members with postal codes in the United States and Puerto Rico, and it had a respectable return rate of 32%. The questions were mainly concerned with the students’ usage of print and electronic sources, their awareness of core Latin American information tools including a group of important subject databases and indexes (abbreviations HLAS, HAPI, LAPTOC and LANIC).

The authors found that the students did not overwhelmingly favor internet sources and that they still preferred to use traditional resources provided by the libraries. The students reported that their search strategy frequently included browsing the stacks and following journal citations to new articles.

This supports the popular viewpoint that users’ information-seeking behavior does not follow a linear pattern of a specific information query matched to an information source. Instead, the seeking process, both online and physical, is complex and evolving, and users often retrieve results one or two at a time and not all at once (Bates 1989).

The study’s findings relating to the use of discipline-specific information tools raise significant concerns, and suggest that Latin American bibliographic instruction in academic libraries, both in person and online, needs to be improved. Potts and Mazurkiewicz discovered that the students’ knowledge of the core Latin American databases was very low, as between 69 and 93 percent of respondents not only had not used the tools in the past year, but reported that they had never even heard of them.

It is troubling that such a high percentage of the next generation of Latin American studies instructors do not know of these core online resources, and the study’s findings imply that bibliographic instruction in Latin American studies needs to be improved at many institutions. 65 percent of respondents reported that they had never had an instruction session with a librarian and 55 percent said that they had not had a course or professor direct them on how to conduct their research.

The authors suggest that part of the problem is the fact that in many cases, graduate-level faculty do not provide these resources because they assume the students have already received such instruction before. This is not always the case, as the strategies needed to conduct research for undergraduate-level courses are much different than Latin American master’s and doctoral programs, and each specific discipline has its own specific tools. Faculty should work more closely with librarians to plan bibliographic instruction sessions, whether that be a class session in the library or just a short visit and lecture from the consulting librarian about how to conduct research on Latin America.

Today, bibliographic instruction does not just occur in person, and Potts and Mazurkiewicz do not address the benefits of online guides for teaching research skills. The Latin American studies programs at these institutions should be listing the core databases on their websites along with an explanation of how to find sources. Universities that subscribe to Libguides software can easily create subject specific guides that can be very helpful for students. The authors did not ask any questions about whether the students’ institutions offered any of these tools, and it is possible that the students who did not have a formal session with a librarian had indeed been using online tools created by the library. The statistics about database knowledge, however, suggest that this area of bibliographic instruction still needs great improvement.

Works Cited:

Bates, M J. “The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface.” Online Review 13.5 (1989): 407-424. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts.

Haras, Catherine, Edward M. Lopez, and Kristine Ferry. “(Generation 1.5) Latino Students and the Library: A Case Study.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 34.5 (2008): 425-433. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts.

Mazurkiewicz, Orchid, and Claude H. Potts. “Researching Latin America. A Survey of How the New Generation is Doing its Research.” Latin American Research Review 42.3 (2007): 161-182. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts.

Solis, Jacqueline, and Katherine S. Dabbour. “Latino students and libraries: a US federal grant project report.” New Library World 107.1/2 (2006): 48-56. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts.

Harper Collins’ 26 Checkout Policy Challenges Traditional Role of the Library

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Harper Collins recently released a new library ebook policy in which the licenses to its content expire after 26 uses, forcing libraries to purchase them again. This represents a very dangerous trend affecting the very role of the library, and underscores a need for library and information science professionals to take a stand against competing information organizations that seize power and control.

To place this development into an LIS context, Pawley gives of examples in the digital era of commodification of information negatively impacting libraries, calling their relationship with commercial publishers an “unequal partnership” (8809). Vaidhyanathan explains the need for a new field, Critical Information Studies, which urges an increased study of “the relationship among information control (and) property rights” and “the cultural, social and economic ramifications” of flows of information (302). Abbott, on the other hand, makes a more gripping comparison by presenting the situation in terms of an ecological battle for survival, arguing that libraries are in direct competition with other professions and must continue to adapt to a shifting information environment so as not to fall victim to its predators. This idea can be directly applied to the Harper Collins ebook case, as it transforms libraries from an institution that owns the content it provides to one that is merely leasing it from another company that retains all the power.

This type of change has already occurred with proprietary article databases, as libraries typically pay for access instead of purchasing full rights to individually selected titles. With ebooks, the implications of this loss of ownership are even more significant. Most library policies, as well as the fundamental ALA Bill of Rights, are written under the assumption that libraries will have continuing access to and control over the items that they provide. But as we have seen with ebooks-for-lease models, this is not the case, both in terms of the duration of ownership and even whether the items will continue to be available at all. Owners reserve the right to remove them at any time, as was the case in 2009 when all copies of two George Orwell books were removed from all Kindles without the knowledge of those who had “purchased” the item (Stone). How can libraries stay true to their foundational value of ensuring continued access to knowledge for all patrons when they cannot ensure that the items provided today will still be available tomorrow? Asheim argues that librarians have an ethical duty to fight censorship and fight against the removal of materials, but the ebook case complicates the argument by raising this new form of digital censorship in which materials can be removed by other parties who represent different values, all because libraries do not control the delivery platform.

The 26 checkout issue also raises other important concerns. For example, how could a library enter such an item into its OPAC and provide real-time item status as each ebook nears its expiration. It is true that print books do not stay in readable condition forever, but libraries have always had the power to utilize its resources for preservation and conservation in order to get the most value out of its investments. There is no such comparison in the digital world, and the fact that the arbitrary number of 26 was thought up by pricing consultants without any dialogue with libraries or reading communities is a disturbing fact, and a trend which will likely continue.

Returning to Abbot’s desires for libraries to adapt in order to challenge its “predators,” the library community is banding together to fight Harper Collins. A petition launched by a New Jersey librarian opposing the policy had collected over 58,000 signatures as of May 5, 2011 (Library Journal). Such movements from the library community will be crucial in the coming years as other companies try to protect their financial interests at the expense of the public. Interestingly, Abbott himself predicted just this over a decade ago:

The central challenges (for libraries) lie in embracing the various information technologies of the future and the groups that service them.  This embrace will end up redefining the profession. But that is necessary to survival.

References

Abbott, Andrew. “Professionalism and the Future of Librarianship.” Library Trends 46.3 (1998): 430-443.

Asheim, Lester. “Selection and Censorship: A Reappraisal” Wilson Library Bulletin 58.3 (1983): 180-84.

Kelley, Michael. “Petition Protesting HarperCollins’s Ebook Circulation Policy Takes Off.” Library Journal. 5 May 2011. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/890502-264/petition_protesting_harpercollinss_ebook_circulation.html.csp

Pawley, Christine. “Libraries.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier, 2001.

Stone, Brad. “Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle.” New York Times. 17 July 2009. 12 May 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Afterword: Critical Information Studies.” Cultural Studies 20.2 (2006): 292-315.