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 | It's Official: ALA Conference Is a Record Breaker
The official numbers are in, and the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Washington, DC, was indeed a record breaker. The show drew 28,635 people, including 21,466 registrants and 7,169 exhibitors. The previous record was 27,962, set in Chicago in 2005. The numbers represent a significant bounce from last year's conference, in post-Katrina New Orleans, which drew 16,964. Conference keynoters included U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and author and radio host Garrison Keillor as well as a host of big names for the Auditorium Speaker Series, including Ken Burns and Anthony Romero. On Tuesday, some 2000 librarians and library advocates took advantage of the conference location, advocating for libraries in the corridors of Congress while wearing in red "Support Libraries" t-shirts as part of ALA's Legislative Day.
The exhibit floor was also bustling, with publishers hosting author signings and vendors reporting good traffic. Librarians had over 300 sessions and programs from which to choose. Hot topics included everything from Web 2.0 technology to library promotional efforts to management and fundraising, along with Washington issues.
In her final report as ALA treasurer (her three-year term ends this month) Teri Switzer reported that ALA's finances were strong. Total revenue was expected to hit $47.6 million for FY 07, up slightly from $47.1 million last fiscal year, and is expected to rise to over $50 million in FY 08. In a parting message, Switzer put ALA's strength in context with its recent challenges, and urged more participation. "ALA has been able to weather SARS, Hurricane Katrina, declining markets, rising interest rates, escalating technology costs, and a whole host of other political, economic, and social events," she noted. "I believe what doesn't kill you, will make you stronger and that is exactly what has happened during the past four-plus years. ALA has become stronger because of the adversity it has faced and because its members have supported its mission and actively participated in developing its strategic plan."
The 2008 Annual Conference will be in Anaheim, CA.
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At ALA, SPARC Forum Details Economic Stability of Open Access
For roughly the past five years, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has devoted the bulk of its energies to open access (OA). So at this year's SPARC Forum, the organization offered a progress report on OA publishing efforts, specifically, the economic stability of open access. Moderated by scientist Alma Swan, the panel featured speakers from three OA publishers with different backgrounds: Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit start-up; Bryan Vickery from BioMed Central (BMC), a seven-year-old for-profit open access publisher; and Paul Peters of Hindawi, a relatively new publisher that this year transitioned from a subscription model to OA. While each publisher is at a different point on the economic stability spectrum, each reported steady, somewhat dramatic progress.
A biologist, Swan aptly quoted another biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky to set the tone for the session: "nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution." She then detailed the evolution of open access, noting that roughly 2500 journals were now OA, nearly 10 percent of all academic journals according to the Directory of Open Access Journals. While OA can be applied in many models, the $7 billion STM industry is moving from journals to databases, as researchers search for articles rather than publications, and that the momentum behind OA is also visible anecdotally. Swan noted that she sees personnel often move to OA publishers from posts at major publishers like Elsevier. "But how many do you see moving the other way?" she asked.
Patterson gave a brief overview of PLoS's efforts. PLoS has clearly succeeded in creating a brand, and that submissions were rising sharply, now numbering over 200 a month. PloS journals are peer-reviewed, can publish articles quickly, and increasingly offer a suite of community-enhancing Web 2.0 tools, he noted, which offer authors value for the author charges paid. While PloS is not yet economically sustainable, it's moving in that direction. The exception: PLoS One, the organization's general science publication, which is financed by $1250 per article author charges and is currently sustainable. The two flagship journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, which charge authors $2750 per article, are more specialized and more costly Some 90 percent of authors pay author charges, while the rest are subsidized by the publisher.
BMC's Vickery said that the seven-year-old publisher now publishes 170 OA journals, with roughly 25,000 articles, and now generates 4500 submissions per quarter. He said BMC was hoping to announce that it was profitable by the year's end. He put BMC's costs at around 47 cents per article download, which he said was well below what commercial publishers claim. He also endorsed the idea of institutional repositories as "complementary" to open access publishing.
Peters said that all 80 of Hindawi's journals are now fully OA. Hindawi, which began in 1997 as a subscription publisher, began the shift in 2004 after facing the challenge in attracting subscribers in a heavily consolidated budget-squeezed market. While panelists mainly discussed the viability of OA publishing, Peters turned the tables bluntly calling the subscription market unworkable. Authors choose where to publish, but libraries buy the bulk of the output, he noted, and that disconnect removes or obscures the authors' incentive to seek value in any publishing deal.
While challenges remain, panelists were encouraged by the progress reported. Patterson urged librarians to continue to increase awareness of OA journals as well as the need for more funding support for authors. He also hinted that research culture needed to change, citing the "tyranny of the impact factor" which, he said, has become an obstacle to innovation because it focuses on "journals rather than articles."
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| The "Google Five" Describe Progress, Challenges
Their numbers have now swelled to 25, but what's up with the five pioneering libraries that signed on with the ever-growing Google Book Search? At the American Library Association Annual Conference, panelists from each library said they were pleased with the progress, though they acknowledged continuing challenges ranging from damaged books to search quality. Google product manager Adam Smith led off by describing the new "About the Book" page under construction for titles in Google Book Search, which includes key terms and phrases, references to the book from scholarly publications or other books, chapter titles, and a list of related books—even for books that aren't digitized.
At four Harvard libraries, public domain works have been scanned and links are being put in the catalog, said Harvard University Library's Dale Flecker. "We're filtering out a lot of works that are not physically up to being scanned," he noted, citing not just brittle paper but problems with binding. "We also find that condition is a filtering factor," said John Balow of New York Public Library (NYPL). Sarah Thomas of Oxford University's Bodleian Library said that "there are many books rejected because of fragile conditions." By contrast, Catherine Tierney of Stanford University said that less than one percent of books can't be sent for scanning; however, a surprising fraction of volumes are limited because they lack bar codes. Are damaged copies, one person asked, good enough to scan elsewhere, or is any library ready to sacrifice a volume to be digitized? "The things we can't send to Google, we have in the queue," Tierney said. The accumulated texts would take 36 years, 24/7, to be digitized, she said, suggesting that the issue would be reviewed as more scans appear elsewhere.
Flecker, praised the "About this book" feature and predicted that "text mining" will be an important part of research. Tierney said that seven to ten reference questions or interlibrary loan requests a week are generated by use of Google Book Search. Dunkle added that Michigan has received more international reference questions through GBS. Thomas said that the scan plan has produced "much more detailed knowledge about our collection," including the surprise that about one percent of the Bodleian Library's books have uncut pages, meaning they've never been opened.
Challenges remain, Smith conceded, including generating better metadata. Dunkle said that librarians in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the 12-library group that recently signed a deal with Google, hope to find ways to search across the books, though "I personally think Google will get there first." Flecker said Harvard librarians also hope Google will solve some access problems. "Right now, to be frank, I don't find the retrieval in Book Search to be that impressive." Flecker said. "There's a long ways to go." NYPL's Balow said that "good, old-fashioned librarian work" will be needed to refine searches. "There's still a great deal of room for the skills we've been working on for a long time."
As for specific drawbacks Tierney said her library received email complaining that scans have thumbs visible. "It's a lot of work," conceded Flecker. "C'mon, that's it?" asked a voice from the crowd. "Are going to sing 'Kumbaya'?" Dunkle called the tension "unfortunate" over whether the scan plan is the right thing to do.
Emory University's Martin Halbert, speaking from the audience, briefly described his university's alternative plan in which libraries retain control of the digital volumes, and can focus on coherent subject areas. Google's Smith was magnanimous. "From Google's perspective," he said, "We view this as complementary."
How to measure success? "We'll define success as getting as much of our collection digitized as we can," observed Oxford's Thomas, noting that most of the collection doesn't circulate, and that digital access can transform scholarship. Stanford's Tierney said that she hoped the growth of the program would help convince publishers to release more material in copyright "available in non-snippet view." She said she hoped the "orphan works" issue, which leaves so much published material in copyright limbo, is resolved. "I would not want my physician to be using pre-'23 medical texts," she observed.
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| Do Libraries Innovate? Librarian Culture Comes in for Some Criticism
It was billed as the great debate, taking on a key question for libraries: Do libraries innovate? Sponsored by LITA (Library and Information Technology Association), the panel was moderated by Andrew Pace of North Carolina State University, and featured the University of Washington's Joe Janes, SirsiDynix's Stephen Abram, and blogger and library consultant Karen Schneider. While the panel was lively and drew its share of laughs, the serious question of whether libraries innovate drew a mixed response (with Abram saying no), and a rebuke to what the panel saw as an excessively negative librarian culture which doesn't tolerate failure or encourage experimentation.
Abram said librarians needed to have "alligator hides" to innovate, because of the sheer amount of negative feedback they will surely get. He warned of a "culture of victimization" in which librarians focus on low pay and library closings, rather than increased circulation and many well-compensated executives. Schneider pointed to the recent example in which the Maricopa County Library District, Phoenix, traded the Dewey Decimal System for more bookstore-like headings at one branch, and was roundly criticized on some electronic mailing lists. Abram called librarians' response "one of the most appalling discussions," and an example of how trying something new that might benefit users drew a massive backlash in the profession. Schneider noted that having the room to try and fail would be lovely, but that it was hard to justify failure to academic administrations, governments, and those who hold the purse strings. "We need change the terms of success," she suggested.
Janes pointed to the disparate roles graduates from UW's Information School play in nonlibrary industries, from Nordstrom to Google to Corbis. Beyond that, he said, "We need to get over the idea that the only legitimate person who can work in a library has an MLS after their name." Schneider concurred noting that those hoping to work in libraries were expected to be proficient in Java, XML, and other technologies and still be required to work the reference desk a few hours a week to stay in touch. "I want to see the reference librarian who has to reboot the servers!" she said, to laughter.
The session drew a buzz from the audience when a questioner asked whether libraries don't innovate because library schools don't teach innovation. "Yeah, probably," observed Janes. "The schools have not taken on the role they might have done." Abram pointed to innovations such as plans to teach in Second Life. "It might be a bad idea, but we have to support it," Janes said, noting that librarians were once against distance education, which is now ubiquitous. He added that he sees a shift in the personality type of applicants to the I School. "Many effectively said, 'I would like a quiet place to hide and read,'" he reported, while more recently they tend to "'I'm discovering that I'm the information person [in my organization].'" Schneider said she once aspired to a quiet career but was inspired by innovators; she quipped that she's "the world's oldest millennial."
"Our problem is not innovation," added Abram, "but the stuff doesn't diffuse." Abram pointed to innovative work by several librarians, including Michael Stephens and Michael Porter, "who started blogging lousy library signs." Schneider pointed to the need for online ALA meetings. Abram pointed out that librarians do not understand their audiences as much as they should. In the end, Janes suggested that innovation can work if "some of the people in my generation… get out of the way." Abram said he thought there was a place for "reciprocal mentoring between generations."
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| Happy Fourth of July! LJ Academic Newswire Returns July 10
We'll be on hiatus, perhaps a little vacation, too, for the Fourth of July week. We hope you have a great holiday and the LJ Academic Newswire will return to your inbox on July 10th.
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Best Sellers in Education, November 2006–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs included in brackets)
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Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students
and Researchers
Turabian, Kate L.
University of Chicago Press
2007. ISBN 0226823377 [9780226823379]. $17.00
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Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South
Fairclough, Adam
Belknap Harvard
2007. ISBN 0674023072 [9780674023079]. $29.95
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Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation
Jacoway, Elizabeth
Free Press
2007. ISBN 0743297199 [9780743297196]. $30.00
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Still Separate and Unequal: Segregation and the Future of Urban School Reform
Gold, Barry
Teachers College Press
2007. ISBN 0807747564 [9780807747568]. $26.95
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What Ever Happened To The Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher Education
Ed. by Mary Burgan
Johns Hopkins University Press
2006. ISBN 0801884616 [9780801884610]. $38.00
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Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much Of a Bad Thing
Kohn, Alfie
Da Capo
2006. ISBN 0738210854 [9780738210858]. $24.00
-
Preparing America's Teachers: A History
Fraser, James W.
Teachers College Press
2007. ISBN 0807747343 [9780807747346]. $33.95
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Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century
Zimmerman, Jonathan
Harvard University Press
2006. ISBN 0674023617 [9780674023611]. $45.00
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Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History
Evans, Stephanie Y.
University Press of Florida
2007. ISBN 0813030315 [9780813030319]. $59.95
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Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle over Early Education
Fuller, Bruce
Stanford University
2007. ISBN 0804755795 [9780804755795]. $29.95
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Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering
Campano, Gerald
Teachers College Press
2007. ISBN 0807747327 [9780807747322]. $21.95
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Urban Schools, Public Will: Making Education Work for All Our Children
Fruchter, Norm
Teachers College Press
2007. ISBN 0807747408 [9780807747407]. $21.95
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Defying the Odds: Class and the Pursuit of Higher Literacy
Ed. by Donna Dunbar-Odom
State University of New York
2007. ISBN 0791469727 [9780791469729]. $19.95
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Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
Ed. by Peter Sacks
University of California Press
2007. ISBN 0520245881 [9780520245884]. $24.95
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Educational Metamorphoses: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Culture
Martin, Jane Roland
Rowman & Littlefield
2007. ISBN 074254673X [9780742546738]. $19.95
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Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial
Eaton, Susan E.
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
2006. ISBN 156512488x [9781565124882]. $24.95
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Early Childhood Qualitative Research
Hatch, J. Amos
Routledge
2007. ISBN 0415953413 [9780415953412]. $29.95
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Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English
Ed. by Renee Hobbs
Teachers College Press
2007. ISBN 0807747386 [9780807747384]. $23.95
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John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect: A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education
David T. Hansen
State University of New York
2006. ISBN 0791469220 [9780791469224]. $24.95
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Challenges of No Child Left Behind: Understanding the Issues of Excellence, Accountability, and Choice
Irons, E. Jane
Rowman & Littlefield
2007. ISBN 1578865182 [9781578865185]. $22.95
Library Journal Academic Newswire
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