News for Library Nerds, December 13, 2013

Project Information Literacy releases their report on the research habits of college freshman. Librarians rank highly in the survey. Yay for us!

The problem with publishing in “luxury” journals according to a nobel laureate. Another scientist agrees and would even go so far as to get rid of peer review. And another nobel laureate says he wouldn’t have been able to compete in today’s publish-or-perish environment. Leaving behind high-priced journals would be nice, in my view, but it doesn't create a perfect research world. If nothing else, the complicated patchwork we have to day is one form of librarian job security.

Meanwhile, one “luxury” journal, Nature, is joining forces with reddit to post in the /r/science subreddit. 

The Education Department plans for a measure that would reduce funding to for-profit schools that produce students with high debt. 

The Chronicle profiles the Digital Public Library of America. 

Are MOOCs creating a backlash against online learning? MOOCs aren't the only big news in online learning these days (the heat for-profits have taken recently also ties in, since so many are online institutions), but I can see a bit of buyers remorse among those who saw MOOCs as revolutionary (versus those who saw them merely as a useful addition to the education landscape).

News for Library Nerds, December 6, 2013

Librarians see knowledge as things, while faculty see it as people. Every day I help students find the "things," but so many of them seem to miss the idea that it is also conversation between people. Once you have that mindset, "things" like a literature review make more sense. But in an environment where everyone is online and most interactions are procedural, how do you help students make the shift?

 What’s the safest way to store all that digital data? Old-fashioned magnetic tapes are making a comeback. 

Israel has settled their own e-reserves copyright case, on terms that are much more pro-fair use than we’re seeing in the Georgia State case. 

Scientific American outlines the benefits of paper over screens. Even Bill Gates is still in the paper realm (I share his disappointment with ebook note-taking, but I still love reading novels on my ereader). 

The Director of a library in Naples, full of priceless books, is on trial for selling them. 

A quick visual history of academic libraries as architecture (and a larger visual history of libraries published this year).

The We Are All Criminals project asks Minnesotans to confess to their uncaught crimes. Here’s a great one from a librarian (who knew that Library Club was so prestigious!?) It reminds me of the library school professor who confessed to her own library-related malfeasance. We've all got things in our pasts . . .

U Penn study finds that almost all of their MOOC students already have a degree.  You can read their study. This isn't exactly breaking news, but it does change the way we should think about MOOCs in higher education. If most MOOCers already have degrees, it's more of a way to save money on professional development than it is a game-changer for those with poor access to higher education.

Open access now coming to monographs. 

Authors try to have their names removed from research implicated in medical fraud case. 

First book printed in (what became) the U.S. sells for $14.2 Million. New owner plans to lend it to libraries.

India is planning its first liberal arts college. Not that I have anything against engineers, but there's been so much anti-liberal arts talk recently. It's nice to see someone stand up for other types of learning and thinkin.

Creative Commons announces their 4.0 license, which is designed to work better with international requirements.

News for Library Nerds, November 22, 2013

Goodbye Thomas.gov! All of the legislative information you love will now be on Congress.gov.

MOOCs as a way to get study subjects.Or qualified employees. 

Need an icon for that? Here’s an interview with the founder of the Noun Project, which aims to create simple icons for everything. I was hoping for an icon for "online library," but I guess there's just not enough call for that yet.

Just in case your family doesn’t know what to get you for the holidays, you can send them this list. 

Students do better when the instructor is organized. And what are librarians if not organized? 

News for Library Nerds, November 15, 2013

A big win for Google in their book scanning case. This is making a lot of open-access proponents very happy, but I wonder how academic book publishers will respond.

Netflix & Youtube dominate our Internet usage, and file sharing is a thing of the past. 

HBR’s extra costs making librarians hopping mad. Where the norms of academia and the norms of business collide. And Library Babel Fish just wants to say “no” to HBR and everyone else. I'd love to say no, too, but just one week of no PDF printing for HBR articles was a reference headache.

African countries pushing to create more PhDs. I find it interesting that it doesn't mention the role of PhD-granting online programs. You no longer have to leave home to get an advanced degree from an accredited American university (well, not quite totally true - our doctoral students do travel to a few residencies, but that's a few weeks versus several years.).

Update on the business side of the big names in Ed Tech. Do you hear some bubbles popping?

News for Library Nerds, October 26, 2013

This week was Open Access Week! Did you miss it? I almost did.

Why aren’t librarians making their own work open access?

More on the citation gender gap. Not only do men self-cite more than women, academics appear to prefer to cite members of their own gender.

How scientific research can often get things wrong, and then fail to correct them. For a short video showing how statistical results can fail.

And when it does fail, it’s too hard to publish criticism.

Dog gets MBA. 

Machine-generated citations just don’t cut it. 

Amazon scaling back their publishing arm. 

In 2019 we may start seeing items fall out of copyright protection - unless they extend it again. Here’s an overview of what’s happened to get copyright law where it is, and why this time it might be different.

News for Library Nerds: August 9, 2013

Congressional Hearings on Copyright issues are underway in Washington this summer. Maybe they'll do something useful, and we'll be able to get more midcentury books. Not that I don't love reading older stuff, but let's have a bit more parity, please.

Ebooks and Libraries are the conversation on Morning Edition on NPR.

University of California going open access, affecting up to 40,000 research papers a year. 

Is the ebook boom over? Sales growth of ebooks have slowed, and there are a few theories about why. I find myself agreeing. As someone who turned into an avid ebook reader on both an ereader and a tablet, it's clear that there are some drawbacks to electronic versions that the software developers still haven't addressed. It makes me wonder if the real problem with ebooks is that the software is designed by people who don't actually read books very much.

Should legal codes be behind a paywall? Or should they be free to the public? There’s a court case working on that question right now. 

Teeny tiny book is finally read. Given how hard it is to read, it's remarkable it was even produced!

If you haven’t seen them before, ACRL’s Keeping Up With... series gives short overviews of hot topics in libraries and academia. 

List of resources related to library support for MOOCs. 

Here's some interesting stuff on book covers. The difficulty of designing a cover for Lolita.

And what “gender-flipped” book covers would look like. I'm now imagining a copy of Pride and Prejudice with Darcy  and Wickham on the cover, but that may just get me lots of Twitter hate. Jane Austen seems to bring that out in some people.

Finally, a note on all the speculation about Jeff Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post. I find myself a bit skeptical, like John Cassidy. But I've always had a prejudice against anything that starts to smell like a monopoly. We'll just have to wait and see.

200 Fantastic Years of Pride and Prejudice

It's been 200 years since Pride and Prejudice was first published, and I can't let it go by without comment. I freely admit to being a huge Austen fan; she's one fantastic novelist, and Persuasion is my all-time favorite novel.

Years ago, when I'd worked through all of Austen, I decided to try reading some of the works that inspired her. This wasn't a very scientific endeavor (I started with books that are referenced in Northanger Abbey), but it was very interesting. The BBC recently posted a list of some of the novels that were popular at the time Austen was writing. Looking back I can see that I actually read a fair number of the listed works.

If all you ever read from the turn of the 19th century is Austen, you end up with a very different picture of that world than if you read more broadly. I can't say that any of the other authors have the gift of writing novels the way Austen does, but they certainly portray a wilder world. Burney, Edgeworth, and Lennox are packed with duels, cross-dressing, kidnapping, suicide, and monkey attacks. Yes, monkey attacks. And that list doesn't even include The Monk!

While Austen's work is truly wonderful, it can feel a bit sanitized. The gothic novels and picaresques of the 18th century certainly aren't any more realistic than Austen's work, but when all are read together it's easier to remember that the world wasn't actually a simpler, safer place back then. It just had less plumbing and a more complicated syntax.

First Week in a MOOC

I just finished the first set of lectures and quiz in my attempt at taking a MOOC (massive open online course). So far, so good.

We'll see how I feel at the end of this experience, but at present it feels more like independent learning than a class. This is partly due to my own decision to have limited involvement in the discussion forums. I barely have time to devote to the 3-5 hours of required work each week, and online forums can be a complete time suck. So, yes, I'm mostly avoiding them.

I'm taking Data Analysis via Coursera, which is organized as a series of short lectures each week followed by a quiz. The short lectures make it possible to stretch them over the course of several days, which is very useful since I spend every lecture frequently pausing so I can take notes and go over the content of the slide a second time. The quizzes are more like complicated homework assignments than quizzes. They are not just "open book," but actually require that you go outside the course to find information that then is used to answer the question. It's not a traditional format for a quiz, but it does fit one of the points of this course: this course won't teach you everything, and you will need to learn how find answers to your data analysis questions.

Along those lines, one of the first lectures was 10 minutes on how to ask a question. As a reference librarian, this lecture really struck a chord. There may not be any stupid questions, but there sure are a lot of questions that are worded so poorly that no one has any hope of answering them. A colleague once referred to these as "word salad" questions, and that's what a lot of them look like. My favorite slide in the lecture showed "bad" questions, which in his mind included the word "HELP" and lots of exclamation points, but not much else. I have certainly seen my share of those. There are times that I wish everyone had to take an entire course in high school about asking questions. I'm sure that many doctors, mechanics, and other professionals working with specialized knowledge wish that as well.

It feels good to have successfully completed my first quiz. I'm still not sure that I'll survive this whole course, though. It requires learning how to use the R statistical package, with all of its programming codes, along with the course content. (Thanks Code School for getting me started with R!) I've also never taken a probability or statistics course, so there's a ton of new content here. Let's hope I've picked up enough knowledge as an academic librarian to quickly fit everything together into a coherent whole. I've got seven more weeks to figure it all out.