The New York Times' Digital Strategy and "The Future of Libraries."

Last week the higher-ups at The New York Times did a bang-up job of reminding everyone that institutional sexism is real and pervasive. In addition, someone on The Times' payroll leaked a digital strategy document, titled Innovation Report 2014, to Buzzfeed that librarians would be wise to read.

To wit, The Times has a metadata problem: they lack both a controlled vocabulary and informal systems to tag stories behind the scenes, making it hard for reporters, writers, and digital content staff to make and promote connections.

“Without better tagging, we are hamstrung in our ability to allow readers to follow developing stories, discover nearby restaurants that we have reviewed or even have our photos show up on search engines.” (Page 41 of the report)

It took the Times seven years to come up with a “September 11th” tag, there's still no “Benghazi” tag (41).

“Just adding structured data, for example, immediately increased traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52 percent.” (44)

That's the price of bad, or non-existent, metadata.

There's more. The full Times report is hosted by the Neiman Journalism Lab, which also has excerpts. All images below come from that page.

Does this sound familiar, librarians? Do you think library websites are "gateways?" What is the role of content and discoverability?

The stuff that we, libraries and archives, have is valuable. But do we recognize opportunities when we see them? Gawker did. Phelps did. In reporting on the firing of executive editor Jill Abramson, The New Yorker did, scooping the Times on events that happened in the Times' own building.

Do we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? How afraid of mistakes, of failure, are we, even when we're surrounded by it?

Altmetrics: it's not just for scholarly communication.

Listen to your communities. Be responsive.

Your silos? They stink. They're often a product of organizational culture. They have implications for staff, and for communities.

The Times' Twitter account is run by its newsroom, while the business side of the Times handles its Facebook page, making for a confusing, incoherent public face for the paper.

“Because that's how we've always done it!”

Be curious. Seek continual improvement. Talk to people elsewhere, and steal their ideas. It's flattery. This is what conferences are for.

Again, it is okay to fail. I fail all the time, often in spectacular fashion. Failure is normal. Failure is natural. Try to create a culture where it is okay to take chances and okay to fail. And if something is failing, recognize it.

/Laughing
/Sobbing

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

The full report is worth a read.


Elsewhere on this site:
Glass Houses, Pots, Kettles
The End of "The End of Libraries"

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in the Academic Library

Fully 91% of Americans ages 16 and older say public libraries are important to their communities; and 76% say libraries are important to them and their families. And libraries are touchpoints in their communities for the vast majority of Americans: 84% of Americans ages 16 and older have been to a library or bookmobile at some point in their lives and 77% say they remember someone else in their family using public libraries as they were growing up. 

Still, just 22% say that they know all or most of the services their libraries offer now. Another 46% say they know some of what their libraries offer and 31% said they know not much or nothing at all of what their libraries offer. (Library Services in the Digital Age, Pew Research Center)

Ahh, libraries. Never more important, and never more irrelevant. One could be forgiven for thinking that along with declining budgets, libraries themselves, as a concept, are in decline. When faced with this perception, or perhaps the reality, librarians have three options: exit, voice, and loyalty.

Exit means leaving the profession, as at least one librarian has done rather vocally in the last week. Others are thinking about it. The specific reasons for exiting are varied, but stem from dissatisfaction. Exit need not be physical; plenty of people mentally exit their jobs.

Voice means the airing of grievances, and I suspect the majority of librarians fall into this ideal type; seeking to improve libraries and working conditions by speaking up in a variety of media.

Loyalty is the action and behavior of those relatively satisfied with their organizations. We rarely hear from them, and as a result tend to discount their numbers.

Voice takes many forms, but a recent meme is to decry the death and decline of libraries at some future date thanks to current events. Enter the "academic library at risk."

Armed with horrific data about what faculty think of us, never mind that 76% of faculty are adjuncts whose own livelihood is far more tenuous than any academic library's, the "academic library at risk" trope is for the most part unhelpful because it offers alarmist rhetoric without any solutions. To wit:

We will not survive by focusing on what we think our patrons need and ought to want, in contradiction to what our patrons say and believe they need and want. We will not survive by trying to convince them to want what we provide, but only by changing and coming up with new provisions that excite and delight them.

And

We need to change. We need to provide new and different services. We need to preserve some services, but significantly change the manner in which they are delivered.

And

And yes, that means we need to reduce and eliminate other services too. Change is hard. Yes, there are still some staff and patrons who are used to and rely on the services we’ve got now exactly how we deliver them now, and are going to be disrupted and upset by change.

Okay, so I'm cheating, because all those three quotes are from the same article. And to be fair, alarmist rhetoric is not without value. And unlike many other articles I will not link to, these are worth reading. But at what point is an academic institution going to forgo a library? When will it happen, and will it happen because the library becomes nothing more than a website with databases and a discovery service? Who among institutions of higher education is "disruptive" enough to do something truly daring and close a library?

How important are libraries? So important that as soon as opposition occupies physical space, it attempts to build one, as evidenced by recent actions in Turkey as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement. So important that 91% (!) of Americans ages 16 and older say public libraries are important to their communities. And yet, at the same time, not important enough to fully fund. Not important enough to keep people from exiting for monetary reasons.

Focusing on a decreasing percentage of tenure-track and/or full-time faculty to show an academic library's worth and to obtain funding is a fool’s errand. Budget cuts are coming regardless, and have been for some time; appealing to this shrinking group won’t be a bulwark against cuts.

Rather, these cuts originate in state and local governments, and the rise of a bloated administrative class of higher education professionals whose populations sometimes exceed the number of full-time/tenure-track professors, as is the case in the University of California system. It is telling that even climate change denier George Will recognizes this latter point. There are three ways to get tenure: teach, research, and administrate. We can infer from the rise of Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs, who is in charge and what they think of teaching.

Many academic libraries are playing a game that’s rigged. We may as well focus on what we do best, and that includes student services, whether they are appreciated or not. As a librarian and an administrator, if my library is going down regardless, it’s going to do so on my terms. The primary focus of this library, and, I suspect, most academic libraries, isn't faculty, or administrators. It's students. So I'm concerned that 18% of faculty agree with the statement "Because scholarly material is available electronically, colleges and universities should redirect the money spent on library buildings and staff to other needs," up from 8% in 2006 (Source is figure 44 below), but I'd be a lot more concerned if they came from the people who use our library the most, students.

Download Report

What else do we do best? We have values. We don't give your data away, we don't violate your privacy, and most of us will politely chuckle when you make a Dewey Decimal System joke. We are a "third place," and that includes a place for faculty. And yes, we're more than "just books."

I won’t give up on outreach to administration or faculty; I will continue to use the language of institutional mission statements and strategic planning and to collect and present data that shows what we do and how we add value, and values, but how we go about earning that data is going to be on our terms, not theirs.

The Things They Carried: Preserving User-Generated Data in Learning Management Systems.

Like many librarians, I am the product of a distance-learning Masters of Library and Information Science program, which means that I am familiar with using learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard and Moodle as media for delivering courses. Even in brick-and-mortar, face-to-face education, LMS are popular for a variety of reasons. They enable faculty to "flip" classrooms by posting lectures and notes online, serve as a forum for discussions and chats outside of scheduled class time, and are a platform to deliver quizzes and assignments, among other roles.

LMS generate a tremendous amount of data, the far majority of which does not get used again and is lost to history. While faculty can and do copy and export the skeletal structure of courses from semester to semester, the meat of what takes place in an LMS is often thrown away once a class ends. I'd like to change this.

Much of my work in a MLIS program is saved to Google Drive and/or a local hard-drive. But not all of it. I wish I had access to what I had written in discussion forums. And maybe you do, too. Even if you don't in practice, in the abstract it makes sense. Users created that data. Let them have it beyond that semester. It may come in handy later on. Or it may sit in a box like my college notes, but let the users decide. It's their information. They made it.

Though I am often a critic of MLIS programs, the discussion boards of our LMS were useful. They're gone now, which is a shame. It doesn't have to be that way. Moodle, a popular open-source LMS allows for the creation of "portfolios" for users. The sum total of a user's Moodle activity can be downloaded or exported. Here's how. Note that "Portfolios are disabled by default" in this LMS.

I do not know if this option exists in Blackboard, but entire discussion boards can be exported and saved to .zip files. Here's how.

Why MLIS programs? Because librarians, and by extension library science programs, are natural partners for this endeavor. We care about data, about information. We preserve it and make it accessible every day. Except here.

This isn't just talk. I'm working with our Director of Educational Technology to create user portfolios within Moodle that can be downloaded and exported upon graduation or transfer (or drop-out, but let's not talk about that. Yet.). I urge you to do the same. Thank you.

Dear Aspiring Librarians (On MLIS Program Rankings)

Every so often, someone comes across this space because they are interested in learning more about graduate programs in library and information science. Recent searches that led to this blog include "mlis jobs," "job market mlis," "mlis entrance essay," and "mlis graduate admissions essay," and that's just in the last week.

With that in mind, US News and World Report has released their 2013 rankings of the best programs for graduate study in library and information science. Here are the top fifteen programs:

Screenshot from here.

I'm number ten!

How did US News and World Report get these rankings? Did they toss a bunch of papers in the air and then pick them up in this order? Did they conduct a rigorous, scientific study taking into account curricula, graduation rates, job placement (wouldn't it be nice if the American Library Association made MLIS programs release those rates?), and reputation? Sadly, it appears to be the former.

The library and information studies specialty ratings are based solely on the nominations of program deans, program directors, and a senior faculty member at each program. They were asked to choose up to 10 programs noted for excellence in each specialty area. Those with the most votes are listed. (Source)

Um, yeah. That is poor social science. What we have here is a lazy, crude metric that attempts to get at something like "reputation," but the magazine's staff doesn't know how and doesn't care to know how to really do it. Those numbers on the right-hand side of the table above are based on a "peer assessment score," with 5.0 being the highest; the numerical result of asking the aforementioned small, incestuous sample. Just one more reason why there's a Wikipedia section devoted to this magazine's rankings.
Sportsball analogy alert: these rankings are to library and information science what the USA Today Coaches Poll is to college football.

You don't know about this series?  Bad librarian! Bad!

Through analyzing a Coach’s Difference Score (CDS), we found that coaches had a positive bias towards their own team. That is, they vote their own team higher than their peers. We also discovered that coaches tend to vote schools from their own conference higher than do coaches from outside that conference. Finally, we concluded that coaches from the six Automatically Qualifying (AQ) conferences were biased against schools from the smaller N-AQ conferences. (Source)

If you're going to choose an MLIS program based on these rankings, please reconsider. Don't do it. Look at course catalogs. Talk to faculty in the program. Talk to deans and administrators. Ask them about job placement rates and opportunities for real world experience in a variety of settings. Are there opportunities to publish and present at conferences? To learn marketable skills? Talk to librarians. We're a friendly bunch. Talk to students in these programs. They're training to be a friendly bunch. Find programs that feel right, that have a "fit." And take a course or two in research methodology, so you don't graduate and then publish misleading, faux-authoritative rankings like this one.

What We Mean When We Talk About Measurements and Metrics: CIL Day One

I’m on record as complaining that library schools and MLS/MLIS programs aren’t rigorous enough. It seems that anyone can get in, GRE scores aren’t required for most programs, and once you’re in, it’s hard to get less than a B (or 3.0) average. This has real world consequences.

First, much like other post-graduate programs that involve education and teaching, there’s a lack of respect when it comes to libraries and librarians that stem, in part, from this lack of rigor. We’re easy to pick on and an easy target.

A second consequence was on display at the first day of the Computers in Libraries conference, here in Washington, DC. Both sessions I attended were marred by a lack of measurement, or by a lack of anything resembling social science, in its many forms. Of the 62 ALA-accredited schools that grant MLS/MLIS degrees none require a research methodology course. Zero. None. (UPDATE on 7/6/11: take a bow, University of Washington! You require methodology coursework.) The end result is that we graduate without knowing how to know. Assuming that there is a knowable world out there, a positivist conceit on my part throughout this post, I’m dismayed by how much librarians don’t know about designing experiments and measuring their results.

Take social media as a hypothetical example. Prior to implementing a social media strategy, one should take the current state of affairs as a baseline. There are many ways to measure this, and, in fact, it should be measured in many ways because most things out there are multifaceted. So, how many unique hits does your website get per month? How about overall visitors? Are programs at the building well-attended? What qualifies as well-attended in the first place? Are patrons satisfied, based on conversations with them (something like a focus group) or surveys? This isn’t exciting, but it’s important. Next, what does success look like? We ask this question regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, and it should be asked for less serious matters as well. Once you implement a program, what do you expect to happen, and why?

Are your users on Facebook, Twitter, both, something else? Do they express a desire to “tag” the catalog via LibraryThing or something similar? How do they want to interact with your library? Implement your program based off what you've found, and compare data with the previous state of affairs. That's science.

Every single one of our daily interactions in a library is a data point. It’s a piece of information that tells us something. Leverage that. It doesn’t have to be a number. I know that math, and statistics, can be scary sometimes, and that ethnographic research can be nuanced and illuminating. There are many roads to Damascus.

So if your library wasn’t on Facebook and now it is, tell me what changed, and why. Did you get more visitors, both virtual and physical? Are the patrons more satisfied, as measured somehow? That’s science, and it’s time library schools put it back in “Library and Information Science.” It’s also time that conferences asked presenters for some rigor and analysis, instead of just telling stories (Update: I'm not anti-story; stories are emotional, I mean this in a good way, and help us connect to patrons, donors, and the outside world. They're great in annual reports, as are metrics. Stories with data are the best of both worlds). Although we’re not all academic librarians, being a librarian is an academic enterprise. Isn’t it time we acted like that?

UPDATE: 3/9/12 - a new post on a related topic, the rigor of MLIS programs.