Googling Google: Search Engines as Market Actors in Library Instruction

I wrote a lesson plan for Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy's Critical Pedagogy for Libraries Handbook, Volume 2.

The two-volume set is available for purchase at the ALA store. If you don't mind waiting, both volumes will go open access at some point in 2017 (this is very cool!), and many chapters are already available via institutional repositories and self-archiving, among other means.

My chapter (pdf) focuses on thinking critically about Google's search engine and how librarians can help foster a sense of critical inquiry around searching.

Google searches return sexist, racist, and homophobic results, which both create and reinforce dominant narratives of white supremacy and heteronormativity. That is bad; faculty, students, and librarians alike should know about it and attempt to mitigate the deleterious effects of search results.  

Did that read like a tumblr post to you? Good, because I think libraries should be about social justice (they are not neutral, never have been, nor should they be), and I try to hit that x-axis of practicing what I preach, otherwise known as praxis.

This is really really really bad. Google's algorithm is helping spread completely unfounded rumors. Net-negative for democracy. pic.twitter.com/jCwnL8TgUu

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) October 4, 2016

If you're interested in the topic, I encourage you to read the work of Dr. Safiya Noble, who teaches at UCLA, and note that library discovery systems are not free of bias. Not by a longshot.

The lesson plan is CC - BY - SA, which means you can use it, make it better, and then share it. Please do all these things. Feedback welcome, and thanks much to the editors above (buy the books!), and to the hundreds of students and handful of librarians and library staff who helped me refine the lesson.


Elsewhere on this site in me sneaking things through peer review, my ACRL 2015 paper: Faculty Perceptions of a Library: Paneling for Assessment

Why Critical Librarianship? Or, the #whyicritlib Post

Hey #critlib! I'm moderating the chat on 12/15 about #feelings, and it involves homework. https://t.co/SxN43wmvei pic.twitter.com/voZt12VOkI

— Kevin Seeber (@kevinseeber) December 3, 2015

Many moons ago, when I was pursuing a PhD in political science, a professor I looked up to told me something that's stuck with me. Marxists, he said, don't often have the right answers, but they ask the right questions.

Gif via ina.fr and gifwave.com

So why am I a critical librarian?

• Because it's important to ask "who benefits?" and I wish more of us in the library and information sciences would follow in the footsteps of Sanford Berman, E.J. Josey, Hope Olson, Rory Litwin, and others in asking these kinds of questions.
• Because critical librarianship is, in large part, what you make it. It's one of the few places where I feel like I have a significant degree of agency in librarianship. I hear the critiques of the #critlib chats being an echo chamber, and while on some level I think that opinion is a valid one (this blog post might be evidence of that), if someone wants to propose a chat on a topic they think is under- or unexplored, they can and should do so. Last June I moderated a chat, attempting to critique whatever critlib is (movement, mindset, group, place,...) from the inside, and I suspect that with his questions above, this critique is something that Kevin would like to explore as well.
• Because I'm not neutral, and neither are libraries. There are intended and unintended policies and consequences that do real harm that I think we can mitigate. But only if we ask "who benefits, how, and why?"
• Because one of the highlights of my year, or any year, really, was being in a room with Jessica Critten, Donna Witek, Kevin Seeber, and Kenny Garcia, listening, talking, and learning. I've found fellow "critlibbers" to be friendly, kind, patient, smart, and caring, among other positive traits.
• Because as a community, critical librarianship keeps me accountable to myself, my ideals, and challenges me to continue to listen and learn and refine, among other things. 
• Because before I lurked in critlib chats, I was a critical political science student. A professor introduced me to the work of Michel Foucault, and that was as close to an "a ha!" moment as I'll have (I maybe even crossed a threshold, if you will). I got to spend a day with James Scott, one of my professional heroes. And then I got to apply critical theories from the social sciences and humanities to libraries, in theory, and in practice, thanks to people like Maria Accardi. 
• Because this is my life homey you decide yours.

Why do I identify with these ideas?

• Because I've never not been critical. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s. My parents told me not to walk on Amsterdam Avenue (also called Murderdam or Cracksterdam), to take Broadway instead, and I began to ask questions. I saw how people who weren't white were treated. By police, by teachers, by peers, by the law. That was the start. It took me a while to find the theoretical frameworks to help me process what I saw, but I'm glad I did. 

Why do I participate in these chats?

• It's more often the case that I lurk, listening, liking tweets, saving things for later. I feel like I have a voice, however limited, in this profession, and I want to hear what others have to say. The last thing librarianship needs is another cis het white dude taking up space. That being said, thanks for reading, and thanks to Kevin for asking. 

The (Second) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback

Today is the last day to give feedback, in survey form, on the revised draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, available here.

Here is how I filled out the survey. Note what they are asking for feedback on, and what they are not.

1. How satisfied are you with the overall Framework?

I remain concerned about the use of the term "metaliteracy," indistinguishable from "information literacy," as I see it, and the use of threshold concepts generated by a Delphi study (see Lane Wilkinson's excellent post on this), but otherwise I like the flexibility, the way it encourages collaboration with faculty and administration, and its potential to help make information literacy a more integrated part of academic communities. I like the definition of "information literacy."

2. If you have followed the development of the Framework through the previous draft, please tell us what changes you find most helpful.

The addition of an FAQ and supporting documents further flesh out the Framework. I also find the knowledge practices and dispositions useful.

3. Does the “Suggestions on How to Use the Information Literacy Framework” section, in conjunction with the Frames, help you to engage other campus stakeholders in conversation?

I hoped this part of the Framework would detail some strategies for engaging faculty and campus administration in a variety of college and university settings, but maybe that is better suited for a supporting document, which I look forward to reading. The more granular the task force gets with this, in more settings, the better implementations will be.

4. How might the Framework affect the way you work with students?

This depends in large part on how we in the library work with faculty. Will we be able to transition from one-shot library instruction sessions to something more expansive, across the curricula? That will be key. And because of how we're staffed, a lot of information literacy instruction will fall to faculty. Do they want to do that? Do we librarians and library staff want them to?

5. What one thing do you most want the Task Force members to know about the draft Framework?

Please keep being transparent and open-minded, please do listen to critiques of metaliteracy and the threshold concepts, which I believe make up a plurality of the criticism so far.

6. Please share any additional information that would help us in understanding your perspective on the proposed Framework.

My criticism is constructive, comes from a desire to make us all the best librarians, and educators, we can be.


My thoughts on the Framework thus far:

The (Second) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: My Thoughts
Ethics, Copyright, and Information Literacy, Letters to a Young Librarian
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback 

The (Second) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: My Thoughts

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released a revised draft of their Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. What follows are my thoughts on this second draft. The full text of ACRL's hard work is available here, and I quote, cite, and excerpt it below.

The introduction has changed between drafts, as has the definition of information literacy.

First draft definition:

Information literacy combines a repertoire of abilities, practices, and dispositions focused on expanding one’s understanding of the information ecosystem, with the proficiencies of finding, using and analyzing information, scholarship, and data to answer questions, develop new ones, and create new knowledge, through ethical participation in communities of learning and scholarship. (bold is theirs, 4) 

New definition: lines 62-67

a repertoire of understandings, practices, and dispositions focused on flexible engagement with the information ecosystem, underpinned by critical self-reflection. The repertoire involves finding, evaluating, interpreting, managing, and using information to answer questions and develop new ones; and creating new knowledge through ethical participation in communities of learning, scholarship, and practice. (2)

Fair enough.




What I like:

I. Flexibility: Rather than a rigid set of standards that all ACRL member institutions should strive to meet, the framework allows for a variety of implementations, depending on the communities served and the resources at hand. Page two of the new draft Framework is particularly strong on this.

The authors of this Framework are not trying to build a monument, but rather a scaffolding. The line about the Framework as "a  set of living documents" is already more than words (page 3). A Frequently Asked Questions section was added earlier this month, which addresses the roles of critical theory and social justice, among others. It's this very flexibility that gives me the confidence to write posts like these, knowing that feedback will be heard.

II. The assault on the one-shot library instruction session.

Over the course of a student’s academic program, “one shot” sessions that address a particular need at a particular time, systematically integrated into the curriculum, can play a significant role in an information literacy program. It is important for practitioners to understand that the Framework is not designed to be implemented in one, sole information literacy session in a student’s academic career; it is intended to be developmentally and systematically integrated into the student’s academic program at a variety of levels. This may take considerable time to implement fully in many institutions. (pages 3-4)

While the one-shot has some value in terms of library instruction, "Hi, I'm Jake, this is our website, here's how to do some stuff, ask me questions, see me smiling, aren't I friendly...," it's inefficient at spreading information literacy (IL) when compared to the systematic integration laid out in the Framework. The more people on campus that know this, that care about it, and that do something about it, the better we'll all be.

Threshold concepts work better at a curricular level -- too much for one-shot instruction. Work in specific aspects in those one-shots.
— Daniel Ransom (@ThePinakes) June 29, 2014

Some of the sample assignments in the new Framework get at this, too. Many of them are hard to pull off in a one-shot. Libraries that are under-staffed and over-extended can and should initiate conversations on campuses regarding these assignments, but library staff might not be around to see those assignments carried out. Though learning and course management systems may present librarians with asynchronous opportunities, information literacy should be a community-wide responsibility that can happen with or without librarians. Indeed, librarians themselves may bear some responsibility for exiting information literacy, as Nicole Pagoswky and Erica DeFraini argue.

III. The inclusion of the word "Wikipedia" (page 7). There are faculty and administrators on every campus that don't want to hear or read that word. Well, here it is. Let's talk about it.

IV. The Information has Value frame (12). To me, this is the most interesting part of the revised draft, perhaps in large part because it has the ability to be the most contested.

as intellectual property, information sources are affected by economic, sociological, and political influences. The means of production may privilege some voices over others. Some search systems may privilege some sources over others due to economic incentive.

It's pretty cool to see that in writing, with the imprint of the ACRL. There's also some good stuff on paywalled scholarly communication, the digital divide, and online privacy and surveillance.




What I don't:

I. Staying with Information has value, I wrote a guest post for Jessica Olin's Letters to a Young Librarian on the tension between "ethical participation" as part of information literacy and the quote below from the draft Framework:

Experts understand that this value designates information as intellectual property, and therefore, recognizes three important dimensions of value. First, information can act as a commodity, and as such, creators can use their work for financial, reputational, social, or civic gains. These motivations may determine how information sources are shared whether given freely, offered for sale, or leased for temporary access. Information users have responsibilities as both consumers and creators of information based on the work of others. Academic and legal practices such as proper attribution of sources and complying with copyright are a result. (12)

As a response:

Putting information as a commodity front and center and tying it to various "gains?" Consumers listed before creators? Complying with a copyright regime that every information professional should know is broken, at odds with the common good and encouraging innovation? 

In the Knowledge Practices (Abilities) section of this frame, a threshold concept is to "Understand that intellectual property is a social construct that varies by culture," (12) but the above excerpt reifies much of what is wrong with the North American conception of intellectual property, and may be at odds with "ethical participation" mentioned elsewhere in the document. 

There's more, so please head over there, too. I'll wait. Thanks.

II. The Delphi Study (page 1, footnote 1). Though overall I'm impressed with the transparency of the Framework committee and how open they are to feedback, far too much of the heavy lifting of generating threshold concepts in information literacy comes from an ongoing research project that is a black box. There should be more transparency. People more eloquent than I feel similarly.

The threshold concepts put forth by the committee were decided upon by an anonymous group of librarians in a “Delphi study.” The task force was not privy to the names or affiliations of Delphi study participants, nor were we given any justification, evidence, research, or other reasons to accept the concepts we were given. The role of the task force was to rewrite and expand upon the concepts given by the Delphi study, not to ask for justification.

Trivia: the method used to create these concepts was developed by RAND during the Cold War to assess the effects of technology on warfare (Source).

III. Threshold Concepts (TCs). Over at Sense and Reference, Lane Wilkinson has an excellent critique of threshold concepts that every academic librarian, and maybe every educator, should read. He argues, convincingly, that

• TCs are based off of probable characteristics within disciplines, but probable is not the same as defining. 
• The authors of the Framework assume that students will be transformed and troubled by similar concepts in similar ways, but students are a diverse bunch.
• Knowledge of concepts does not imply ability(s).
• Disciplines are contested spaces, whereas TCs seek to cannonize.

Given these critiques, we could attempt to improve TCs by saying that they are like a family resemblance, per Wittgenstein. In this formulation a series over overlapping similarities could make up a group of threshold concepts for a discipline, but creating boundaries might prove difficult, as it was for Wittgenstein when he analyzed types of games. Or we could talk about a Latakosian "hard core" for each discipline and base TCs off of this, which is also problematic because of Wilkinson's fourth point above.

What if instead of threshold concepts, we used learning outcomes? For example, "An information literate learner should be able to...." or "A metaliterate learner..."? Learning outcomes are less flexible, and as the authors note in their FAQ, less focused on process, but

• there may be many roads to information literacy, some of which are under-explored and -theorized at present, and 
• if librarians, faculty, and other members of our communities can't agree on what a metaliterate or information literate learner looks like, then we need more robust definitions of those concepts.

IV. Atheory and Anti-Theory. So long as we're talking theory, there's a lot of un- and under-cited theory in these frames. Too many assumptions, some of them testable, go unexamined. In Scholarship is Conversation (page 5), there is no discussion of scientific progress, be it Kuhn, Popper, or someone else. This frame is a missed opportunity to discuss the role of blogs, zines, and other non-traditional forms of scholarship that are now easier than ever to create and disseminate, Wikipedia excepted. Moreover, that scholarship is a conversation is a tacit admission that threshold concepts are as well, meaning that they are mutable and malleable.

@librarianwilk there is a lot of scholarship that info lit isn't in conversation with. #SeeWhatIDidThere
— Lisa Hinchliffe (@lisalibrarian) June 20, 2014

Similarly, MacLuhan's "the medium is the message" is lacking in the Format as a Process frame on page 9, and the same lack of theory is true of the appendixes.

Rather than turn readers into Straussians, looking for hidden meanings in the Framework and related documents, why not show the theoretical work that goes into it?

V. Metaliteracy is back! All the baggage that term has still applies.

Metaliteracy expands the scope of traditional information skills (determine, access, locate, understand, produce, and use information) to include the collaborative production and sharing of information in participatory digital environments (collaborate, produce, and share). This approach requires an ongoing adaptation to emerging technologies and an understanding of the critical thinking and reflection required to engage in these spaces as producers, collaborators, and distributors. (Mackey and Jacobson, 2014) (pg 18)

Again, if there are differences between metaliteracy and information literacy, under the umbrella of critical thinking, they don't strike me as being major, so I find its inclusion puzzling.

Metaliteracy expands the scope of traditional information skills…to include the collaborative production and sharing of information in participatory digital environments... (slide 17 of this pdf, same original source as the above offset quote)

Yet adding knowledge creation to the definition of information literacy, above, negates any differences between these terms. One is left wondering about the motivations behind this move.

VI. Information literacy is not a discipline. At least, not in the way we tend to think of disciplines as discrete branches of knowledge in higher education. While one cannot major in it, and there's rarely more than one 3-credit semester-long course with "Information literacy" in the title, IL is an area of scholarship that is necessarily inter- and transdiscplinary.

Jan Meyer and Ray Land (2003, pdf) are explicit that threshold concepts take place within disciplines. It seems as if information literacy not a discipline, not bounded in the ways that other fields of study and programs are, thus there can be no information-literacy specific threshold concepts. Here is how the task force gets around this, emphasis mine:

Threshold concepts originated as faculty pedagogical research within disciplines; because information literacy is both a disciplinary and a transdisciplinary learning agenda, using a threshold concepts framework for information literacy program planning, librarian-faculty collaboration, and student co-curricular projects, should offer great potential for curricular transformation. (First draft Framework, page 6, pdf, second draft page 26, pdf)

In addition, committee member Troy Swanson has both anticipated and reacted to some of these arguments, calling information literacy a "conceptual terrain," noting that it, like other disciplines, is not as bounded as one might think (source). Yet terrains still have borders, and while he wants librarians to "own" information literacy, much of this draft Framework is about us giving it up, or at least sharing it. There is a fascinating discussion around IL as a discipline here.




What's next: 

At present, drafting the Framework is a conversation between and among librarians and information professionals, excepting the non-librarians on the task force. As such, we have seen one side of this document. I assume another side, aimed at how to best present this to faculty, will be a supporting document. I hope this part of the Framework will detail some strategies for engaging faculty and campus administration in a variety of college and university settings. For example,

• How much might a campus-wide information literacy initiative look like "writing across the curriculum,"  (WAC) and would it do for libraries and librarians what WAC did for composition and rhetoric?
• How might either phasing out, or re-thinking the role of, the one-shot library instruction session change the relationships between the library staff and faculty, and between library staff and administration? 
• Using threshold concepts, is there a role for librarians to play in fostering transdisciplinary, a term limited to two mentions in the appendixes of June's draft, connections between and among faculty via information literacy?

I'd also like the task force to address the tension between the stamp of authority and expertise that comes with the ACRL imprint and the flexibility of the Framework in terms of local implementations. Is there such a thing as too much leeway here?

Sources used, but not linked to above:
Mackey, T., and T. Jacobson. (2014). Metaliteracy: Redefining Information Literacies to Empower Learners. ALA Editions/Neal-Schuman.

See also, this interesting conversation on twitter.

Elsewhere on this site:
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback 

Elsewhere elsewhere:
Ethics, Copyright, and Information Literacy, Letters to a Young Librarian

Diversity Takes Work: On "Rigor" in MLIS Programs

Librarianship, as a profession, is not a very diverse place. As of 2010, there were 118,666 credentialed librarians, those with Masters degrees from American Library Association-accredited programs.

Of those:

6,160 were African-American,
3,260 were Asian-Pacific Islander,
185 were Native American,
1,008 identified as two or more races, and
3,661 as Latin@.*

The above data is from the ALA's Office of Diversity (pdf), and if you like pie charts, Chris Bourg at Stanford has you covered.

There is no reason to think that four years later, things look any better.

The pipeline isn't broken, it was never built. It was intentionally not built.

Ta-Nehisi Coates shows all the "work" that went into, and still goes into, oppression. It takes work to undo that.

And instead of doing that work, we get this (diversity and rigor are at odds). And this (derailed by Common Core, but good comments on both). Instead, what we should get is this (paywalled).

Let's leave "rigor" undefined for now. After all, it's a means to an end, and that end is employment. And rigor, however defined, is neither sufficient nor necessary for that, because of the political and economic contexts in which libraries and library staff are situated. Rigor, however defined, might lead to librarians and information professionals who are better able to navigate this environment, but it won't get anyone a job by itself.

Aside from the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that comes with the false dichotomy between rigor and diversity, we're also treated to Masters of Library and Information Science programs as places for remediation, even though there's evidence that remediation doesn't work.

The default strategy at U.T. for dealing with failing students was to funnel them into remedial programs — precalculus instead of calculus; chemistry for English majors instead of chemistry for science majors. “This, to me, was just the worst thing you could possibly imagine doing,” Laude said. “It was saying, ‘Hey, you don’t even belong.’ And when you looked at the data to see what happened to the kids who were put into precalculus or into nonmajors chemistry, they never stayed in the college. And no wonder. They were outsiders from the beginning.” 

That New York Times article quoted above, "Who Gets to Graduate," shows what does work. Let's do it, library schools.

Students in TIP [Texas Interdisciplinary Plan] were placed in their own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by [then-Chemistry professor David] Laude. But rather than dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same challenging material as the students in his larger section.

... [Laude] supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren't subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.

Library and Information Science programs can continue to admit as they see fit, but what the University of Texas at Austin is doing is also a form of rigor. There's no reason why LIS programs can't do something like this, except that it takes work, and LIS programs seem unwilling to put that work in. It's much easier to play rigor and diversity off each other.

At present, it's not as if library science programs are rejecting people en masse; a wide net has already been cast.  Schools and programs could easily cast a wider net, or continue to do so, but instead of admitting so many cis white females from History and English undergraduate programs, maybe look a bit harder. Hiring managers could and should do the same.

The Loon writes that rigor in admissions would "slam the door to librarianship in the faces of some of those who wish to open it." But look at the above data. That door is already shut. It was never open. Because of the lack of diversity in LIS professions, it probably better to discuss rigor within programs, as Becky Katz writes, which the Loon divides into technological ("librarians should know how to code!") and humanistic ("Foucault! Interrogate! Problematize!"), rather than in admissions. And UT-Austin's program gets at that kind of rigor.

Do MLIS programs want to put that kind of work in? Are there monetary or other structural factors that prevent them from doing so? We'll see.

* And yes, librarians and library staff overwhelmingly identify as female, over 80 percent of the profession. Speaking of race and gender, the twitter streams for "rigor" and either "MLIS" or "LIS" are hardly representative, but they are also not a parade of white men, (/waves to self), calling for rigor, as the Loon paints it.

Elsewhere on this site:

Dear Aspiring Librarians (On MLIS Program Placement and Salaries)
The "Digital Natives" Myth and Library Science Education
Choose Wisely
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
On Diversity in Library and Information Science Education
Guilty as Charged, Yet Another MLIS Post 
Making Masters of Library and Information Science Programs More Rigorous 
Not Another MLIS Post 
Explore the MLIS tag.

Credentialing and Devaluation: More on 'Who's a Librarian?'

If the Masters of Library and Information Science is in large part a credentialing regime that separates librarians from non-librarians, paraprofessionals, it is a regime based on time and money rather than on proficiency.

If you think the MLIS is primarily a credential for librarianship, and you think, as I do, that MLIS programs are "easy to get into, easy to get out of," then we should reexamine that role of the degree.

The barriers are cost and time, not expertise. I've yet to meet anyone who dropped out of an MLIS program because it was so challenging. If you know of anyone, please let me know (this post from Hack Library School, and its comments, comes close). My place of employment has more or less open enrollment, but it does not have open graduation. The same should be true of MLIS programs.

Rather, I know people who couldn't afford it, and/or couldn't make the time for it. Often, people in this category are paraprofessionals with many years of library experience, trying to level up, gaining access to more jobs in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Many of these paraprofessionals are also people of color.

@mchris4duke The MLS is also very important for under-represented groups entering the field who would otherwise be eternal paraprofessionals
— Bergis Jules (@BergisJules) March 26, 2014

The big tent version of librarianship I espouse does not devalue librarianship so much as it puts the MLIS in its proper context. After all, rare is the hiring manager who lauds MLIS holders with no library experience. The myriad interviews with Hiring Librarians bear this out. Feel free to ignore each of those data points, calling them anecdotal. At some point, a group of trees becomes a forest.

Instead, librarianship is devalued because of institutional sexism; it is viewed as "women's work" based on the history of the profession and current demographics.

It is devalued because of the roles of librarians in popular culture. Your Dewey Decimal System jokes? I've heard them all, please stop!



It is devalued because of the relative ease of MLIS programs.

It is devalued because at least one major political party in the United States, along with many corporate partners of both major parties, is afraid of knowledge, information, and the power of citizens.

It is devalued because of neoliberal policies and budgets that reflect antipathy towards public goods and the public good.

It is devalued because of book-centricity, presently embodied by the "little free libraries" trend, which are collections of books in public areas that are free to use. If I were to put a first aid kit on my corner, first come and first served, nobody would call it a "little free hospital" or even a "little free clinic," would they?

If your analogy is to compare librarianship to medicine, I wish you'd reconsider. Librarianship is not medical school. There is no legal need for a credentialing body. There is no library equivalent of malpractice insurance and there's (mercifully) comparatively little life and death in libraries. The people who leave library school aren't becoming whatever you think are the library version of dentists, podiatrists, nurses, and osteopathic doctors. Instead, they're remaining paraprofessionals.

Further, people's interactions with the health care system, speaking from a United States' perspective, often aren't with doctors. Much more face time for patients comes from nurses and technicians. For the far majority of people, a doctor, or a dentist, comes into a room for a brief period of time, compared to a much longer one with a non-doctor.

These non-doctors are as important to the health care system in the United States as the doctors. In some places more so. And so it is for paraprofessionals working in library and information science.

Again, the MLIS

is a "union card" for many jobs. 

socializes you into the discipline.   

offers you some theory that informs our practices.    

provides a cohort, which might prove useful in many ways.    

helps you get the word "librarian" into your job title.   

signals that you are very interested in librarianship, so interested that you might go into debt for it.  

gives you GLAM career options and helps you narrow them.

Elsewhere on this site, not linked above:
Making Masters of Library and Information Science Programs More Rigorous
Who's a Librarian?

The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback

The survey requesting feedback on the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education contains a series of opened-ended comment boxes. Here are the questions posed by the survey, and how I answered them.

My thoughts on the Framework are here. Please take the survey to leave your thoughts here.


Q2. In what ways will the focus on threshold concepts help you to generate conversations with other campus stakeholders (such as disciplinary faculty partners, members of the general education curriculum committee, and academic support services staff)?

In the Feb draft, threshold concepts aren't really fleshed out. However, I already see a tension between these concepts, which are bounded in disciplines, and the Framework's discussion of transdisciplinarity. The role of discipline-specific faculty will be very important here. Please expand on the relationship between students who are metaliterate, who think critically across disciplines and boundaries, and threshold concepts that (and faculty who) reify those boundaries.*


Q3. How do the sections for knowledge practices and assignments/assessments provide helpful guidance when considering implementing the new Framework? What else would you want to see in these sections?

I thought the Feb draft of the Framework was strong here.


Q4. We plan to include additional materials in a subsequent phase (described in the welcome message). What other elements would you find helpful that aren’t mentioned in our plans?

As presently constructed, metaliteracy is both an "anchoring element" and a desired outcome, which makes it both an independent and dependent variable. This is a tautology. Metaliteracy cannot beget metaliterate students. Please elaborate on what metaliteracy is, how it differs from "critical thinking," or "transliteracy," or just "information literacy," and place the concept in a content that is bounded by the rules of logic.


Q5. Is there anything else you would like for us to know?

The phrase "ethical participation" comes up in the Framework's definition of information literacy. As you envision it, what is ethical participation, and why?


Q6. Please share any additional information about your work that would help us in understanding your perspective on the proposed Framework.

This draft places much emphasis on collaboration between the library and its staff and other academic units. I hope your experiences in outreach to these academic units is the norm, while my experiences are those of a minority.


* People who have more knowledge of threshold concepts than I should really take their time on this question. Who determines what is a threshold concept in a given discipline? How? Why?

The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) released a Draft Framework for Information Literacy* for Higher Education (henceforth Framework), superseding the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education adopted in 2000 (henceforth Standards). Having read through the new document and attended an ACRL webinar, I have some initial thoughts on the draft, which you can view in full here.

Information Literacy Umbrella via Dana Longley on Flickr.

Welcome trends:

I. A focus on creation and collaboration that may move us away from the dominance of research papers towards something that resembles the type of work projects students may encounter in the wild. The best curricula will mix these assignments where and when appropriate, and the nod to digital humanities in the bottom two paragraphs of the first page is most welcome.

The downside of this is a focus on job training, employment, and the like. The skills outlined by this document equally apply to "knowledge for knowledge's sake," but the words "liberal arts" appear nowhere in the Framework.

II. Historicizing past information literacy efforts

The Standards... focus attention on the objects of scholarship as mostly textual ones, reflecting the time in which they were written. Although the Standards pay some regard to other modes of scholarship and learning (visual, data, multimedia), the explosion of these modes and the increasingly hybridized, multi-modal nature of learning and scholarship require an expanded conception of information literacy learning and pedagogy beyond the mostly text-based focus of the Standards. In the proposed Framework, we hope to provide spaces for creative, integrative, flexible thinking about the dynamic information ecosystem in which all students live, study, and work.
The Standards also valorize the “information literate student” as a construct of imagined accomplishment, at the endpoint of a set of learning experiences, without the involvement of peers, tutors, coaches, faculty advisors, or other collaborators. (Framework, 3)

and

Whatever form information takes, the experienced researcher looks to the underlying processes of creation in order to ask critical questions about how and why it was produced. (14)

It is impossible to write the excerpted sections above without some knowledge of critical theory. Someone has been doing their homework. Bravo to whomever wrote those sentences.

III. The new definition of information literacy from the Framework is:

Information literacy combines a repertoire of abilities, practices, and dispositions focused on expanding one’s understanding of the information ecosystem, with the proficiencies of finding, using and analyzing information, scholarship, and data to answer questions, develop new ones, and create new knowledge, through ethical participation in communities of learning and scholarship. (bold is theirs, 4)

That "ethical participation" was included here is a huge step forward. It creates a discursive space in which it is possible to turn the library into a site of resistance, a bulwark against government and corporate surveillance, as well as an entree into a discussion of the costs of knowledge that are a part of scholarly communication. I hope this section of the definition is our point of departure to tackle these and related issues.

(Then again, I'm also unclear as to how the above definition differs from that of "critical thinking.")

IV. The emphasis on student-centered outcomes is also welcome, and empowering to those we teach. Knowledge creation, the ability to generate new questions and research agendas,... these are good things.

V. Collaboration

The section titled "Stakeholders" that begins on page 8 provides librarians with a convincing argument to work with faculty and other academic units.

On the other hand, how many times must we prove ourselves? How many times must librarians attempt to partner with other academic units on campus, only to be rebuffed or ignored?

Hang on while I roll this boulder up this hill...

Is the Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education the appropriate place to fight for greater recognition and collaboration between and among librarians and faculty? Is it the best available place? The only place? The give and take that this document will provoke may lead to...

VI. Information literacy as existential crisis

Who has responsibility for teaching information literacy? Just as war is too important to leave to the generals, is information literacy too important to leave to librarians?

Information literacy has been a tremendous “win” for academic librarians. But it risks becoming, looking back, also a symbol of a great loss. If we do not refocus our efforts on the educational, cultural, and technological shifts in which “information literacy" per se becomes a somewhat arbitrary label for the very stuff of learning and information discovery in today's academic (and larger) world, we will have won the battle but lost the campaign. In other words, our potential loss may come from the need to cling to the programmatic success of information literacy as a program run from within libraries by librarians (Cowan, 28).

There is much space to negotiate here, and it's incumbent on librarians and library staff to prove themselves up to the challenge. Do we love information literacy enough to set it free? Are we confident enough in the rest of our abilities?


Unwelcome trends:

I. Jargon

"Greater need for sense-making and metacognition in a fragmented, complex information environment requires the ability to understand and navigate this environment holistically, focusing upon intersections." (Framework, 2)

That's not part of an effective elevator speech.

II. "Metaliteracy."

It's unclear to me whether metaliteracy means "information literacy," or "critical thinking," or "transliteracy," or none, or some, of the above. I'd prefer that we librarians use "critical thinking," if this is the case. Regardless, I don't like the word and I'm not alone in that. Tellingly, at least one vocal proponent of the concept doesn't think the word is appropriate to use in the Framework.

More confusing is whether the concept of metaliteracy is one of the anchors of the new framework, or if it is a desired outcome. As presently envisioned, metaliteracy is both an independent and dependent variable, which runs the risk of making the framework a tautology. I would like to see this logic cleared up, and a robust definition of metaliteracy that treats the concept as discrete, if possible.

III. Assessment über alles?


The move from a "granular, outcomes-based approach" to an "integrative, collaborative, and metacognitive model based upon threshold concepts," (8) means more assessment. How we are able to integrate that into our daily workflows goes unsaid. Maybe--wishful thinking alert!--we'll need more staff in order to implement the Framework. Might the title of "Assessment Librarian," or "Assessment Coordinator," become popular? The more likely scenario, however, is that though the assessment regime becomes more interesting, we librarians will be "doing more with less," which is a phrase that makes me

Via Reaction Gifs. Guess the movie, win a prize.

If you have thoughts on the Framework, you are more than welcome to share them here, but a better place to do so would be via the Framework survey. Note that my comments will appear in some form using that survey.

UPDATE: My survey feedback is posted.

*The term "information literacy" itself is problematic, but is also a widely-used term, so it has some intersubjective value.

Cowan, Susanna M. (2014). Information literacy: The battle we won that we lost. portal 14.1 (January). 23-32. DOI. 10.1353/pla2013.0049.


Elsewhere on this site, related to information literacy:
From Here To Discovery
Orientation: Outreach Starts Here
Vine and Web-Based Library Instruction
Copyright for Educators
Chuck Brown and Information Literacy
On Digital and More Traditional Literacy
Transliteracy and Staying Positive in the Library

Libraries as Structures, Libraries as Agents, Late Capitalism Edition

But what *is* their place within a larger socio-political and economic structure designed for inequality and oppression?
— nina de jesus (@satifice) December 27, 2013

The "their" in question above is libraries, which are a creation of the above socio-political economic system, often termed neoliberalism, "an ideology that rests on the assumption that individualized, arms-length market exchange can serve as a metaphor for all forms of human interaction," (source). How complicit are libraries in this system? Plenty, argues Nina De Jesus, convincingly. To wit:

when libraries were shifting from private institutions to institutions designed for the ‘public good,’ the notion of who, exactly, was considered part of the ‘public’ was radically different than today. Indeed, when you look into the rhetoric of why public libraries became a thing, it was a middle-to-upper class initiative enrich and ‘better’ the working class, so that they’d have something to do with their free time other than realize just how crappy this new economic system was for them. (Source)

The offset excerpt above illustrates a Gramscian take on how this is the case; libraries co-opt lower classes, staving off class consciousness. In Gramscian thought a socio-political economic system exerts influence unconsciously. The fact that it goes unnoticed, assumed, and taken for granted by most is proof of its effectiveness. The first step to challenging a hegemonic superstructure such as this is realizing that it exists.

LIS = a fine balancing act. Support the poor w/o making the erstwhile middle class feel the library's no longer all about them+their tastes.
— Myron G (@Bibliocracy) December 29, 2013

Further, De Jesus writes that, "And I've seen very few people take a critical and sincere approach to analysing how the library, as institution, is actually oppressive and designed to create and perpetuate inequity."

That is, the public library as we know it was designed in no small part to prevent revolution and class revolt. Can we measure the "success" of the library by the lack of open class warfare? Or, do libraries exist to give people a lottery ticket, a way out; and is that the best we can hope for given that we are all products of the socio-political and economic system, and even strengthen it by our participation?

Those of us w/ t/t jobs benefit from #adjunct exploitation, just like those of us w/ Macbooks benefit from sweatshops. We're implicated.
— Roger Whitson (@rogerwhitson) January 1, 2014

However, the critiques of libraries as neoliberalist institutions implicate everything, thus said critiques run the the risk of losing any explanatory power and effectiveness. They cannot be directionless, as Fredrik deBoer points out. Are libraries any more, or less, implicated that other structures, agents, and organizations, and if so, why? And and where do we librarians, archivists, and other information professionals go from here? The library, as always, is a good place to start. Chris Bourg, an Associate University Librarian at Stanford, has compiled a list of resources, with more on the way. Her twitter timeline is also a good place to start.

Love this press. 

Really, love this press. 

Per Barbara Fister, libraries, and librarianship, are both radical and conservative; simultaneously perpetuating and undermining neoliberalism. We librarians should be conscious of this, and try to do more of the latter and less of the former when and where possible.

Mostly baffled that a profession that constructs knowledge + has so little critical to say about the construction of knowledge. - Emily Drabinski, on twitter (https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/422090892733054976 and https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/422090947280003072)

Some ways that libraries can combat neoliberalism, and offer an alternative, come to mind.

First, library and information science programs can offer courses that make future LIS professionals aware of neoliberal issues they'll encounter in the workplace. As the state has abdicated and markets have failed to provide shelter, child care, and job application centers, these tasks, and others, have fallen to public libraries. LIS curricula should spend some time discussing these challenges for LIS staff. Courses on academic librarianship should discuss the political economies of higher education and publishing, and how they influences libraries and library management.

Second, the relevant bodies, comprised of LIS professionals, can rework assessment regimes, changing the conversation from return on investment and measurements of efficiency to those of values. Both Bourg and Fister are excellent resources here.

Third, when librarians are in the classroom, they can foster awareness of these issues. The same is true of the library website. More about that here.

And yet neoliberalism cannot be a deus ex machina or scapegoat for libraries, museums, and archives. Neoliberalism is not a "thing," it is not static. It is a process, an evolving and moving target that is a product of a particular place and time. Locating neoliberalism in the Enlightenment throws a very important baby out with the bathwater, though no doubt the seeds of the former are found in the latter.

Beyond the links above, the following are good reads on the effects of neoliberalism and neoliberalist practices on and in education:

On Precarity  

Vulnerability, Contingency, Advocacy 

The Neoliberal Library: Resistance is Not Futile - Bourg's talk at Duke University. (Update, 1/16/14) 

Teachers in Lee, MA Return Merit Pay - This is what resistance looks like in practice. 

Related, elsewhere on this site:
Libraries and Postmodernity: A Review of Radical Cataloging
Toward of Unifying Field Theory of Librarianship
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Academic Librarianship
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
More Thoughts on New Librarianship
Data and the Surveillance State

How #librarianfestivus explains the states of librarianship in 2013

While I was burning vacation days, use it or lose it!, Andy Woodworth went and did it again.
His post was much more of an airing of grievances than a feat of strength, and then The Chronicle of Higher Education inexplicably sent out a tweet, since deleted, with the hashtag "librarianfestivus."

Thanks to The Stacks Cat for retweeting that before it was deleted,
enabling me to screen capture it.

The outpouring that followed nicely sums up the year in libraries, both for better and for worse.

infomercials for products repackaged and marketed as 'webinars.' my spam folder loves these. #librarianfestivus
— Dale Askey (@daskey) December 21, 2013

Only librarians could whine & bitch about a holiday that's about librarian whining & bitching. #librarianfestivus
— Matthew Ciszek (@mciszek) December 20, 2013

Confession: I can never remember what the G stands for anyway.

The acronym "GLAM" #librarianfestivus
— Myron G (@Bibliocracy) December 20, 2013

On vendor relations:

referring to even the most library-hostile vendors as 'partners,' when 'horrid codependent relationship' wld fit better #librarianfestivus
— Dale Askey (@daskey) December 21, 2013

I ranted about this earlier in the year and while I suspect the "Big Deal" is going to take some hits in the next year, I also think we librarians are going to be stuck with it.

On why unpaid internships suck (tl:dr, they perpetuate inequality, are exploitative):

Don't complain about the lack of diversity in LIS if you support unpaid internships in LIS. #librarianfestivus
— Rebecca Giftman (@DerangeDescribe) December 20, 2013

And if you were wondering, "Is anyone really for diversity AND for unpaid labor?": http://t.co/9uNiQlJxKs + http://t.co/ef8mNCddk3 pg 4-5
— Rebecca Giftman (@DerangeDescribe) December 20, 2013

My Place of Work has a position titled "Library Intern." It's paid, as it should be.

MLIS bashing

iSchools. #librarianfestivus
— Myron G (@Bibliocracy) December 20, 2013

LIS programs that accept more students than there are jobs #librarianfestivus
— D. Orange (@AnAnarchivist) December 20, 2013

And of course "the graph" made an appearance.

Via Liz Lieutenant 

To make matters worse, the most popular metrics one might use to chose a school are flawed. But in 2014, maybe, just maybe, we will be in a position to do something about this.

On faculty passing the buck to libraries, giving up copyright...

No, the library will not pay $3,000 to make your article OA. #librarianfestivus
— Joshua Beatty (@beattyjf) December 20, 2013

"I don't use the library" says the prof while reading Nature on his laptop. #librarianfestivus
— Jen Ferguson (@__jasf) December 20, 2013

On the price of textbooks:

No I'm not going to buy your textbook for the library. You took the class. Buy the book. #librarianfestivus
— Kimberly Feher (@KSF1975) December 20, 2013

In 2014 I hope academic librarians work closely with faculty on open-access textbook options, and that more faculty write and unlock said texts. The wheels are already in motion here, thanks to the State Universities of New York, the University of California system, the University of Minnesota, and Rice University, among others.

There's an article for that...

No more hand-wringing over every asshole who writes an anti-libraries/librarian article. #librarianfestivus
— Michelle (@winelibrarian) December 20, 2013

And of course the Think Tank was mentioned as well. Quote Andy:

Honestly, if you can’t control your resident lunatics, please at least keep them within the confines of your posting area. When people in the position of hiring within the library start talking about membership in the group as being a liability on the resume, you might want to work on your image within the library world.

Here's what I said to Hiring Librarians about ALA Think Tank, to be published by that site shortly (UPDATE on 1/3, here it is):

Membership in the ALA Think Tank Facebook group won't hurt a candidate in my eyes, but participation is another story. Ninety-five percent of what goes on in that group is fine by me, so if you use the group to "make it happen" and get ideas/feedback/discuss the issues of the day, that's great. But the remaining five percent gives me a great deal of pause. If your participation in ALA Think Tank includes making fun of South Asians, being sexist and using the group to create gendered spaces, subtweeting and bickering with your peers as if librarianship is junior high school, and generally acting like a "drunken embarrassment," then yes, participation in the group is going to hurt a candidate's chances with me.

via Twitter

I'm heartened that in 2013 I saw much more discussion (and please do read the links therein) of diversity, gender, race, class, and I aim to further this dialogue in 2014. However, this needs to progress beyond discussion.  While I grew up in one majority minority city and now work and live in another (thus as a hiring manager I have a slate of candidates available that other hiring librarians do not), if there's anything I can do to move this topic from one of position to one of maneuvers, I will do it.

Happy New Year!

Cheers, Jake

Cease. And Desist. (A Prelude to My Year in Lists.)

Last week, I played journalist and broke a story that DC Brau, a local brewery that makes a beer called "The Citizen," had sent a cease and desist letter to a yet-to-open local brewery that wanted to call themselves Citizens Brewing Company. This after some conversations between the two parties.

I thought it newsworthy because while DC has been a nice place to drink beer for some time, we've only had production breweries for about four years, following a period of nearly sixty years without. It was our first public conflict over trademarks. It was a learning experience for brewers and consumers alike. No doubt other news outlets thought it merited articles as well, and hey, it's nice to claim "firsties."

However, I was a bit taken aback by the reaction, which, in many parts of the internet I frequent, portrayed DC Brau as bullies. All this for defending and protecting a brand they had spent four years creating and maintaining.

So I took off the journalist hat and put on the op-ed one. To wit:

Imagine walking into a bar in Silver Spring and ordering “a Citizen.” “Which one?” replies the bartender. To further complicate the matter, continue the hypothetical and say you don’t like the beer you’re handed. This being 2013, you tell your friends on social media that you didn't like said beer. Now you, dear reader, know the difference between these two brands, one the name of a brewery, the other the name of a beer made eight-and-a-half miles away. The well-trained bartender also knows the difference. But as we play the game of Telephone, things get muddled. At some point, someone will say “Oh yeah, my friend had a beer called Citizen in DC and didn't like it.” In that case, both brands, both the beer’s and the brewery’s, suffer. In a similar scenario in the craft beer alternate universe, you have a beer from Citizens and like it, and then a confused friend, one who happens to not like Belgian-style ales, orders a Brau based on that, and dislikes it. Brand confusion is the name of the game here. 

A large problem stems from the perception that though people pay for craft beer, it is somehow exempt from the forces that govern other economic transactions. Craft beer is a business.

Some of the nicest, most generous people I've met in any business are in the beer business, but it’s a business all the same. Craft beer is not a hobby. That would be homebrewing. Craft beer does not come from magic elves. It comes from businessmen and -women, with employees and bills to pay. The notion that craft breweries are somehow separate from other businesses because of the products they make is false and harmful.

For more on this, heavily excerpted above, please go here.

Let's debate!

Citizens Brewing Company is now Denizens. You can meet them here.

From Denizens, via DCBeer.

Elsewhere on this site, vaguely related: Copyright for Educators.

Fifty-Seven Channels and Nothing On: The Big Deal

Ah yes, the Big Deal, in which many many many titles are bundled and sold to libraries. Usually it's journals in databases, but sometimes it's a package of ebooks, or a suite of videos, or other multimedia project.

The Big Deal is useful; it allows overtaxed library staff to focus on something other than collection development, especially in areas s/he may not be familiar with (waves to our School of Nursing). The Big Deal puts many resources at our fingertips.

But the big deal is a product of extreme cynicism; as mentioned above, it removes collection development from the purview of library staff. And the far majority of the resources don't get used. The Big Deal is your cable television package: fifty-seven channels and nothing on. Though now it's more like nine hundred channels, tens of thousands of journals. So many options! We're adding more every day! Please pay more for them.

"Wow. Such choices. Amaze. Many research." Via Giphy/thebiggyiff

The Big Deal is patrolled, contested space, in which Harvard Business Review can police your IP addresses and servers, looking for signs of, lord forbid!, actual use while the parent institution, Harvard University, purports to be a proponent of open access.

And as of right now, the Big Deal isn't going anywhere. 

The Subtle Joys of Selecting on the Dependent Variable

Academic research in the social sciences has a variety of aims, but much of it seeks to explain or elucidate phenomena or condition(s) and the relationships therein. In research parlance, this phenomena or condition is the dependent variable. One should not select cases that satisfy the criteria of the dependent variable; doing so is called selection bias and can lead to incorrect conclusions.

To wit, here is an example of selection bias from my former field of study, political science.

Analysts trying to explain why some developing countries have grown so much more rapidly than others regularly select a few successful new industrializing countries (NICs) for study, most often Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, and Mexico. In all these countries, during the periods of most rapid growth, governments exerted extensive controls over labor and prevented most expressions of worker discontent. Having noted this similarity, analysts argue that the repression, cooptation, discipline, or quiescence of labor contributes to high growth. (Geddes, 134 pdf)

If one were to make policy recommendations based off this research, one might advocate that developing countries repress labor unions in order to get economic growth, the dependent variable.

Reaction Gifs, as always. And Clueless. 

As it turns out, Alicia Silverstone is right to be skeptical about this claim.

In order to establish the plausibility of the claim that labor repression contributes to development, it is necessary to select a sample of cases without reference to their position on the dependent variable, rate each on its level of labor repression, and show that, on average, countries with higher levels of repression grow faster. 

The two tasks crucial to testing any hypothesis are to identify the universe of cases to which the hypothesis should apply, and to find or develop measures of the variables. A sample of cases to examine then needs to be selected from the universe in such a way as to insure that the criteria for selecting cases are uncorrelated with the placement of cases on the dependent variable.(Geddes, 134-5)

A random sample from a given universe is one such way to test a hypothesis or a relationship, but selection bias is not random, and when one does this, the research findings may be biased.

However, there is a flip-side to selecting on the dependent variable: the results are often not only relevant, but highly entertaining.

To wit, James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is, in my mind, a towering achievement and an immensely absorbing piece of research. Of course, he selects on the schemes that have failed.

Via Google Books

And that brings us to library and information science.

Stanford University's Jacqueline Hettel and Chris Bourg are conducting research on "assessing library impact by text mining acknowledgements" from Google Books (Source). It is an impressive and creative way to measure how libraries can positively affect scholars, and at present it is in the "proof of concept" stage, so it is still early. Information and early data on the project is available at the following links.

http://www.linguabrarian.com/measuring-thanks/
http://www.linguabrarian.com/thanks-method-1/
http://www.linguabrarian.com/a-method-for-measuring-thanks-part-2-scraping-query-results-for-analysis-in-a-collaborative-project/

It seems that these scholars have a dependent variable robustly defined and measured in the form of acknowledgements that thank libraries and librarians for their help with research. While they have acknowledgements, proof of the impact of libraries, the dependent variable, they do not have the causes of these acknowledgements, and as a fellow librarian, the causes are what I am after. Those causes lead to a new metric of academic library success in scholarly communication. As of now, this work appears to be called "Measuring Thanks," a title that may hint at possible selection bias. I look forward to hearing more about the project, and I hope that they have not selected on the dependent variable by focusing on it at this early stage. As was the case above, a random sample of books, and the acknowledgements therein, is one way to avoid this bias.

Academic researchers are not supposed to select on the dependent variable, but doing so can lead to interesting and entertaining finds. More research that satisfies these latter conditions, please.