That’s how I felt when I read Xiaotian Chen’s article “Google Scholar’s Dramatic Coverage Improvement Five Years after Debut,” which appears in the December Serials Review. (It is not freely available online but can be found at DOI 10.1016/j.serrev.2010.08.002 for those with Science Direct subscriptions.) The article demonstrates that Google Scholar is providing 98 to 100 percent coverage of the databases it is allowed to crawl, either because those databases are freely available, or because Google has an agreement with that database publisher.

I first learned of Chen’s article through Peter Murray’s post to the Library Society of the World. Early in that discussion, John Dupuis called attention to the last line of the article: “The conclusion cannot be clearer: libraries can seriously consider cancelling a large number of subscription-based abstracts and indexes since their unique contents and value are rapidly evaporating.”

It’s possible that I’m missing an important piece of information that would change my mind, but I really don’t think that conclusion is clear at all.

Google Scholar doesn’t provide the full text of anything. So if libraries want readers to be able to get past the citation at JSTOR or other subscription-based databases, we can’t drop those subscriptions.

So the logical databases to drop would be the ones that provide indexing and abstracting, but not full text. But there are two problems I can see with that. One, I doubt that those databases would let Google crawl them, so they wouldn’t be duplicated in the Google Scholar database. Second, and more important, the non-full-text abstracting and indexing databases that I’m famliar with in the humanities and social sciences tend to index a lot of works that are not journal articles. And as Chen says in the article, Google Scholar doesn’t do so well with those citations:

It is always possible that a gap exists between Google Scholar and a database that does not allow Google Scholar to crawl. In the 2005 Neuhaus et al. study, databases such as ABI/INFORM, CINAHL, and Historical Abstracts all had low coverage by Google Scholar. Part of the reason was that these databases include some records that Google Scholar does not or cannot index: non-journal records and some records from journals that have ceased publication. Non-journal records include records of newspapers, magazines, trade journals, book chapters, pamphlets, reports, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations. Ceased journals may not have publicly accessible tables of contents on the Web for Google Scholar to index.

So. If we can’t cancel JSTOR and Science Direct and so on because that’s where the full text comes from, and we can’t cancel ABI/INFORM, CINAHL, and Historical Abstracts (and MLA Interntional Bibliography and Philosopher’s Index and ATLAS and so on), what is left to cut? Just the databases that do nothing but index articles that are already held in those full-text archives? I don’t know that we subscribe to anything like that.

So I can’t agree with Chen that the impact of Google Scholar on abstracting and indexing databases “cannot be clearer.” I doubt that Google Scholar is a specialty database killer. It almost certainly is a federated search killer. If a library has already decided that they are interested in sacrificing precise, predictable searching for simple searching and broad results, I’d think they’d be much better off if they foregrounded links to Google Scholar and came up with a coordinated approach to teaching it to students, rather than sinking time into customizing a vendor’s product and money into paying a vendor’s fees.

But Google Scholar as a replacement for subject-specific A&I databases doesn’t make sense to me.

So I wrote a book. The experience of writing the book–even a pretty short, straightforward book like this one–was far more difficult than I expected it would be, so you might imagine that it would make seeing it finished to be that much more rewarding.

I really don’t expect individuals to buy the book, because it’s priced for libraries. But if you have the authority to spend money on librarian’s professional development books, you could find worse uses for your money than the ten books in the series, The Tech Set. I’m happy to be listed alongside such witty, accomplished, and attractive people as the other authors on that list.

Lastly, if you are reading this blog post, there is a strong chance that I thanked you in the acknowledgements, either by name or by implication. So take a look below, and thank you again.

Libcamps Acknowledgements

A future electronic book. from F. W. Lancaster, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics, 1982 p.60.

Future terminal, from F. W. Lancaster, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics, 1982 p.81.

“Consumersole,” from F. W. Lancaster, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics, 1982 p.80.

I have been skimming over a lot of books and articles as I plan out a new project that has to do with the history of the future of libraries–that is the way library-types have written about the future over the past 100+ years.

My eventual project (I’m calling it a “project” because I don’t really have a plan as to what the product will look like. Not a book, almost certainly) will likely deal with pre-digital visions of the future. So much has been written in the last forty years about the library and the network, that I don’t really have the desire to cover it all. Besides, I’m more excited by visions of the library with an airplane landing strip on the roof and entire libraries of microcards.

But I have still pulled out a few books on the library of the future as seen from circa 1980, and I wanted to share these three illustrations from F.W. Lancaster’s 1982 book, Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics. Please click to embiggen, especially the last one, the “Consumersole.” I totally want one of those.

In this issue of the LSW zine, you will find photographs, reports from the field, research articles, found poetry, a coloring contest, and various other wonderful things. I’m indebted to all the contributors who made this a very funny and high quality issue:

• Alcorn, Louise
• Crossett, Laura
• Dettmar, Nicole S.
• Fitchett, Deborah
• “K”
• Kennedy, Marie
• Kraus, Joe
• “Meg V.”
• Neff, Joshua M.
• Puckett, Jason
• Randall, Jessy
• Rothman, David
• Steiner, Sarah
• Walker, Cecily
• Walden, Rachel
• Wylie, Nethery

To order, please use the PayPal buttons below. I have copies of Codslap!, the first LSW zine, still available as well. Zines are two dollars each, with shipping being two dollars in North America for up to five zines. If you are outside North America, if you want more than five zines, or if something PayPal-ish doesn’t seem to be working, email me at steve@stevelawson.name.

I will also gladly take cash or (if you insist) a check mailed to PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. If you do that, please don’t put the words “Librarian Bomb” on the envelope, as I don’t think the USPS has a sense of humor about bombs.

Also, let me point out that I have only one coloring contest submission so far. The field is wide open.

Order LSW Zines

Codslap! (LSW Zine #1): $2.00:

Librarian Bomb (LSW Zine #2): $2.00

Putting out Codslap! has been so much fun, I want to do it again.

So the Library Society of the World Ministry of Underground Publications is once again accepting submissions for the second ever LSW zine. I enjoyed handing them out in person at ALA Annual, so let’s make Internet Librarian our goal this time. IL2009 is October 26 through 28, or just about exactly two months from today. Deadline for submissions is October 1 and I expect I will have to be pretty strict about that in order to get everything ready in time.

I won’t be going to Internet Librarian this year, so I’ll be looking for a few people to volunteer to print 10-20 copies each to bring to Monterey. I’ll handle the mail order only this time. Internet Librarian is merely a convenient date for publication and distribution: there’s no need to make contributions that “go with” Internet Librarian.

So far I already have excellent submissions of photography and OPAC poetry (and if that doesn’t make you want a copy, I don’t know what will). I’d love to get submissions that are (1) short-to-medium length; (2) original (both in the sense of not published before and not already done-to-death); and (3) fun to read. “Fun” doesn’t have to be satirical or “humor writing”–I’d have fun publishing and reading some heartfelt stuff about working in libraries. But it does mean that I don’t want something that reads like it should be published in the Journal of Excruciating Library Minutiae. I’m the editor, my decisions are final, if you don’t like it, start your own LSW zine. (No, really. Please do start another LSW zine! That would be really cool. We could trade each other copies.)

I also hope to give the zine more of a handmade feel, and less of a desktop published feel, so original artwork, handwritten (but legible) text, photocopied collages and so on are very welcome. If you just want to send me text, that is also just fine.

For maximum confusion and uncertainty, I’m planning to change the name from Codslap! to something else. Currently, I’m thinking of It Looks Like Someone Dropped a LIBRARIAN BOMB in Here, known to its friends as Librarian Bomb. Any other suggestions?

Also, Codslap! Volume I, issue 1 is still available. Hit me on the PayPal using the button below, or send three dollars cash (or the equivalent in zines or novelty items) to Library Society of the World Clubhouse, Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. If you must write a check, make it out to Steve Lawson, please.

I thought I’d share with you the introduction that I wrote:

Thanks for picking up this, the first issue of the Library Society of the World’s zine, Codslap! If you aren’t familiar with the LSW, it’s an ad-hoc group of librarians who like to meet online (and in person when we can) to swap ideas, ask questions, and enjoy each other’s company. We believe that you don’t need a large formal organization for professional development. Josh Neff, who is the founder & sheriff of the LSW wrote a fanciful story for this zine about the founding of the LSW, but see the back cover for URLs and more if you are interested in taking part on this planet.

Shortly after I announced that I’d be compiling this zine that you hold in your hands, the following exchange took place on the December 10, 2008 episode of the (late, lamented) podcast, Uncontrolled Vocabulary:

David Rothman: You know what’s funny, Greg? As much as I love Steve Lawson, I will not and cannot support this endeavor.

UV host, Greg Schwartz: Tell me why.

David Rothman: Because it is wrong to be doing a dead tree endeavor….It’s an incredibly inefficient way of getting information out. It’s environmentally irresponsible. I mean, it might be charmingly archaic if there’s some, you know, real artisanship to the way the paper is made or used, but there’s certainly none of that, it’s going to be done on a photocopier. It’s just terribly unprofessional. Honestly, I think information professionals should be pushing everything towards the digital. I think we should be trying to abolish print journals.

First of all, I love David, too. Seriously. So I didn’t take this as a personal thing. David’s also a smart cookie, so if he thinks that putting together a paper zine isn’t just quirky, but something approaching downright immoral, then it seems like something worth looking into.

I think David is thinking of this zine as “information.” When it comes to information, I agree with David. I’m not so much into paper journals anymore. I never understand it at work when someone hands me a document they created on the computer then printed out. I don’t want a stack of paper that can’t be searched or altered. When it comes to information, I’d rather have bits than atoms, in the old Nicholas Negroponte formulation.

But I don’t think of a zine as information any more than I think of a love letter as information. If someone writes you a love letter on a scrap of notebook paper, you don’t complain that it’s not on handmade paper. You don’t ask them to scan it, OCR it, and email it to you in RTF. You don’t say “it’s not very professional of you to call me Boo-Boo.” You read it and cherish it and keep it in your sock drawer so you can pull it out years later and remember that time when you were in love.

Zines have a lot more in common with love letters than they do with journals. This zine has contributions from about a dozen people who just wanted to share something funny or thoughtful or useful with other library types. Some of them are my best friends, and some of them are people I didn’t know before they sent something in for the zine. A few are zine veterans, but I think for most of them, this is their first experience with writing for a zine. I thank them all for making this little experiment in love a success & hope I did their contributions justice.

So he came up with a little survey. If many people answer like I did (i.e., all over the map) I’m not sure that Bell will be able to draw any useful conclusions. But he’s not billing it as a big research project, but just a little questionnaire.

His overall question, though–does anyone actually read this stuff?–chimed with another blog post I had just read, Heather Morrison’s Aiming for Obscurity (definitional post) which I came to via Peter Suber’s Open Access News. Here is the nut:

[A]uthors who continue to publish in toll-access journals and do not self-archive can be said to be aiming for obscurity. In other words, an author in this position is pursuing a course of action which is very likely to decrease the probably of the author’s work being read and cited.

This is such common-sense that you’d think it needn’t be said at all, but this phrase “aiming for obscurity” wraps it up nicely. There are valid reasons for wanting to publish in a more traditional journal rather than just going straight to a blog or other unmediated publication. But if you want people to actually read it once it is published, it seems to be more and more imperative that it be freely linkable on the web somewhere. Especially in a field like librarianship, where so many practitioners are outside the academy and can’t count on their institution footing the bill for the subscriptions, we owe it to ourselves to self-archive.

Having said that, I now realize that I haven’t done so myself. I have published a few things in journals over the last couple of years, and I have mostly made sure that I’d be allowed to self-archive. Then I didn’t do it. By this time next week, there will be links available.

Some of the recommendations are pedestrian, e.g., “take inventory of the landscape of publishing activities currently taking place within your university.” But the big recommendation is indeed a big one: “develop a shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend the brand of U.S. higher education, create an interlinked environment of information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors” (32). Yeah, and do that soon, m’kay?

Dorothea Salo and K. G. Schneider have already blogged their comments on the report, and I can guarantee that each of them have spent more time thinking about these issues than I have. But here are my notes anyway (if I read something like this and don’t blog it, it kinda doesn’t count, right?):

• As the library blogosphere frets and fights about how conservative some librarians can be when it comes to technology and change, it was refreshing and encouraging to read such sentences as “the librarians consulted for this study were more enthusiastic about the potential of multimedia than other constituents,” (14) and “among the librarians consulted for this study, we perceived a high level of energy and excitement about the ‘reinvention’ of librarians’ mission, making them more relevant and reinvigorated with a better understanding of their purpose and potential” (15). To which I have three responses:
  1. Hell yeah!
  2. If the folks they surveyed—the heads of such libraries as the University of California, Yale, the University of Virginia, etc.–weren’t enthusiastic and energized, we would be in huge trouble; and
  3. Perhaps in interviewing university provosts and press directors, they found the only two groups that are even more conservative, slow-moving, and risk-averse than librarians.
• I think they did a fair job of evaluating library strengths and weaknesses in this arena (in the narrative on pp. 14-16 and in Appendix B, pp. 36-37). Yep, we have the service and collaboration pieces down to a large extent, and we have deep connections with academic departments and other units. And nope, we aren’t so hot at evaluating or creating demand for products, or working under commercial constraints (thank heavens for that last one, eh?).
• In the list of “weaknesses” for the library is this: “do not really understand faculty as authors (copyright protection and prioritization of revenue generation for royalties versus maximization of exposure from open access…)” (36). I’m certainly one of those that doesn’t understand “revenue generation for royalties” when it comes to non-textbook academic university press publications, as I was under the impression that the royalties for such works rounded down to zero.
• As the authors of the report laid out the strengths and weaknesses of university libraries and university presses, I wondered if were were in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds: a hybrid press/library organization that is compelled to act as a commercial entity, with library-style service and collaboration, resulting in costly experiments that alienate faculty and administration when they utterly fail to perform in the market.
• Even with the recommendation that presses produce a “shared electronic publishing infrastructure,” I’m depressed at the thought of another balkanized electronic environment, with some presses contributing to one online archive, some to another, and all the commercial presses setting up their own systems. Imagine a card catalog organized by publisher, and you’ll get a sense of the frustrations that users currently face with online journals and can expect to face with online books.
• MIT press rocks.
• “The fear is that when scholarly books are ‘chunked’ into smaller segments, the long argument form will disappear. We would argue that authors should continue to produce book-length arguments, but must accept that readers will not always read them end-to-end” (24). Reminds me of Radiohead’s objection to iTunes. I think those authors need to accept that readers already have a more random-access (or, perhaps, search-and-destroy) approach to academic texts than authors might wish for in a perfect world.
• This report had me thinking of how I would like a university press to treat a hypothetical publication of mine. I think I’ll have to save that for a future post.

It might be a great article, but I haven’t read it yet. I’m too busy snickering like an adolescent over the title and the pullquote.

The title is “Making OPACs Blow.”

And the pull quote is “Everyone seems to be in general agreement that OPACs suck. Because the opposite of sucking is blowing, we wanted to make OPACs blow again–for everyone.”

Didn’t anyone run this copy past a seventh grader?

In a fit of enthusiasm, I suggested that I would take this particular bull by the horns and come up with a Library 2.0 skeptic’s reading list. I’m not anti-Library 2.0. I like and respect Michael Stephens and Jenny Levine and what they seem to want to do with Library 2.0 Boot Camp. I like to think of Library 2.0 as a continuing conversation about the future of libraries, and it makes sense to me to try to round up some voices that challenge Library 2.0 conventional wisdom.

Working on this little blogliography, I can understand why people are tempted to just cite Walt’s survey and leave it at that: he did a great job of pulling in a lot of different voices on Library 2.0. While his own critical perspective shines through, it’s easy to also trace other dissenting and supporting voices. And I believe some people who are skeptical, critical, or dismissive of Library 2.0 only wrote about it because Walt put out a call for comments on Library 2.0. From what I can tell, people haven’t spilled a whole lot of electrons on anti-manifestoes (with one possible exception). That is perhaps another reason why Walt is the Library 2.0 critic poster-boy: he continues to call people out and take the bait long after other Library 2.0 skeptics have stopped.

In my list, I have tried to confine myself to posts written after (or not included in) Walt’s “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0′” survey, though one or two might have snuck in. I grouped the posts loosely by topic. Within each topic, links aren’t in any particular order (I know, I know: “No particular order? And he calls himself a librarian?!”). I have tried to be neutral: I don’t necessarily agree with all of these criticisms, though I think they are all thought-provoking.

Lots of interesting links after the jump.

Tags:
library2.0,
skeptics,
reading_list

Technology

Technology, Books, and the Librarian. Michael McGrorty, Library Dust

I already blogged about this post, so I won’t say much more here. Michael never mentions “Library 2.0,” but his ideas about librarian as “explicator” as opposed to librarian as “manager” is thought-provoking in terms of Library 2.0.

Questioning the Techie Mission. Rory Litwin, Library Juice

Not about Library 2.0 per se, but about the place of technology in the library blogosphere:

I think that there are definite assumptions involved in the technology advocacy posture, and there isn’t necessarily anything supporting those assumptions. In other words, the techie mission is irrational: there would be less emphasis on technology within the library blogosphere if the bloggers involved were more objective about technology.

the new library – can it provide new technology-based services? Richard Akerman, Science Library Pad

How many librarians have the technical understanding to bring about radical change?

But I am concerned at the gap between thought leaders, who are talking massive transformative disruption due to technology, and others who are talking safe incremental improvements to existing technology platforms (Library 2.0: it’s the OPAC, but users can leave comments!)

The “Ratcheting Up” of Technology. Steven Bell, ACRLog

Whether its “what’s the next big technology we can adopt” thinking taking hold of the organization, a belief that if your library doesn’t have programmers customizing lots of applications you’ll be at a disadvantage, or just an overwhelming sense that you ought to be doing more with blogs, wikis, tagging, podcasts and other Lib 2.0 type activity, are we driven to offer our user community more technology without really knowing if it would even benefit them?

Moving, shaking, blogging, and drudging. Dorothea Salo, Caveat Lector

This is a wide-ranging post. The part I’m interested in has to do with Dorothea’s belief that many of the most important changes to academic libraries aren’t going to be on the public services side:

Recently the spotlight has been falling on the crossroads between Web technology and public service. FRBR doesn’t get the ballyhoo because it’s not a Web technology; institutional repositories don’t because they’re not public service. Frankly, I think FRBR and the wave of libraries-as-publishers that IRs are a part of bid fair to have a greater and decidedly more disruptive impact on academic librarianship (note the adjective, please) than MySpace or IM or wikis or blogs or any of the Web/Library 2.0 stuff. Over the course of my career, I expect them to change some pretty fundamental things about what a lot of us do and how we do it. (Am meditating more posts on this subject, in fact.) So spotlight isn’t necessarily the best measure of long-term importance, and vice versa.

Privacy

The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy. Rory Litwin, Library Juice

As serious as privacy concerns may turn out to be, the features of Web 2.0 applications that make them so useful and fun all depend on users sharing private information with the owners of the site, so that it can be processed statistically or shared with others. This presents a problem for librarians who are interested in offering Library 2.0 types of services. If we value reader privacy to the extent that we always have, I think it’s clear that our experiments with Library 2.0 services will have uncomfortable limitations.

Culture and Economics

Library 2.0: A View from the Third World. Perry Joy R. Lumabao, Filipino Librarian

Considering the questions above, we must note their financial capabilities if we are indeed thinking providing for a service like Library 2.0. Not all students will be able to access an on-line type of service. Not all students will be able to fully utilize and take advantage it.

Security

Library computer security 2.0?. Thomas Brevik, Librarian 1.5

Most of the skepticism here is coming from commenter Jeremy Morrow who says:

I think it’s great that people are waving the flag for Library 2.0, but they have to start documenting the security that goes along with it or us IT people are going to take the blame for the problems that will inevitably arise.

Terminology

Why Library 2.0 is Dangerous. Jeffy Barry, Endless Hybrids

As someone who has managed a lot of library technology projects, I feel that the danger behind Library 2.0 is that the message can be obscured by the terminology. Let’s concentrate on talking about and developing those services rather than getting lost in defining versions of the library or the most appropriate rubric for describing these services.

Label 2.0. Meredith Farkas, Information Wants To Be Free

Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 don’t exist. Web 2.0 is hype. Library 2.0 is just a bunch of very good ideas that have been squished into a box with a trendy label slapped on it…. I think we’re spending way too much time defining something that has existed in one form or another for quite a long time and will exist when the meme has ended.

Exasperation

Let’s make libraries better, OK?. Meredith Farkas, Information Wants To Be Free

Meredith Farkas takes stock of the situation after reading L2/”L2″:

Maybe Library 2.0 will inspire libraries. Maybe it will lead to great things. Maybe it will create false divisions where there are none (like the librarian who isn’t a Library 2.0 proponent but is change-oriented, user-focused, and info social software). Maybe the Library 2.0 label will turn people off outside of the blogosphere. Or maybe it will just get in the way of people understanding concretely how to improve their library.

A Library 2.0 hangover by me

Please forgive the self-link. My bit is similar to Meredith’s, above.

Listen: I care a lot about many of the things that people write about under the heading of “Library 2.0.” I am caring less and less about the term itself, and am certainly not interested in (a) splitting hairs about what is and isn’t Library 2.0 or (b) participating in a “with us or against us” campaign.

Evil

Library 2.0 is evil. Brian Smith, The Laughing Librarian

How could I pass up a post with that title? It’s humorous, but not without a somewhat serious point.

So, we propose a new label: Ideas Worth Stealing. That’s what everyone’s actually talking about with this Library 2.0 crap, right? Ideas others might want to steal and use. Possibly. Depending on the library’s situation. YMMV.

[Don't miss the Library 2.0 song (MP3) linked at the end of that post.]

That’s it. This will all be on the final exam, so get cracking.