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Youth Movement: Students Recognized as SPARC "Innovators"
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized five student leaders as its latest SPARC Innovators. The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication realized by an individual, institution, or group. The students join an accomplished group of past SPARC Innovators, including Ted and Carl Bergstrom; Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute; the University of California; and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SPARC Innovators are named by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.
Billed as "Agents of Change," SPARC Innovators named this December include:
- Benjamin Mako Hill, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and currently a researcher at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, a Fellow in the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, and engineer of the 2007 "Overprice Tags" project at the MIT library.
- Gavin Baker, a Political Studies graduate of the University of Florida; Open Access Director for Students for Free Culture, and co-mastermind of the National Day of Action for Open Access, February 2007.
- Nick Shockey, an undergraduate and Student Senator at Trinity University in San Antonio and author of the second-ever student senate resolution in favor of public access to publicly funded research results.
- Elizabeth Stark, a student at Harvard University School of Law and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Stark is the founder of the advocacy group Harvard Free Culture, and architect of one of the first student free thesis repositories.
- Nelson Pavlosky, a law student at George Mason University and co-founder of Students for Free Culture. Pavlosky is also an ally of the Student Global AIDS Campaign and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.
The December SPARC Innovators is one of several recent student-centered initiatives from SPARC. In January, the SPARC-ACRL forum at ALA will explore "Working with the Facebook Generation: Student Engagement on Access to Scholarship" and will feature the winners of the first "SPARKY" awards for student videos illustrating the value of sharing. The forum also will mark the introduction of a dedicated SPARC campaign to engage students on the topic of open access. "As members of a generation raised with the Internet, sharing is second nature to them," explained SPARC Director Heather Joseph. "When it comes to open access, they just get it."
Diane Graves, university librarian at Trinity University, agreed, noting that students today share a common interest in ensuring "ease of access and use of electronic information," representing an opportunity for librarians to reach out and help shape scholars' attitudes toward information at an early age. "The more we have the opportunity to work with students, the more we see their creativity and commitment to opening access not only to research, but to textbooks, software, and information of all kinds," Graves said.
To read the December SPARC Innovator profiles, visit the SPARC Innovator page on the SPARC web site.
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RUSA Contemplates New Definition of Reference
Without question, a lot has changed since 1984, when the American Library Association first established its definition of reference service. So, maybe, in the Internet age, it's time for an update? The ALA's Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) currently solicited feedback on the definition of reference, and possible changes to that definition with the idea of presenting a new definition—or reaffirming the current one—to the RUSA board at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in January.
"The definition of reference is the basis for measuring and assessing reference services in libraries," writes Lisa Horowitz, chair of the RUSA Reference Services Section (RSS), which has been working on the task for several years. "It is critical that the 'standard' definition engender trust in order to be applied appropriately."
The current RUSA-endorsed definition of reference is "an information contact that involves the use, recommendation, interpretation, or instruction in the use of one or more information sources, or knowledge of such sources, by a member of the reference or information staff."
A redefinition proposed by the RSS group, however, would essentially break the definition into two categories: one relating to the management of information, and the other relating to the sharing of that information. Reference work is "the creation, management, and assessment of reference resources, tools, and services," while reference transactions are "information consultations in which reference or information staff recommend, interpret, evaluate, use, or teach others to use information sources."
Perhaps a new definition isn't the greatest challenge facing reference service in the digital age, nevertheless, librarians suggested that settling on a new description does go beyond semantics. "Whatever definition we end up with," noted one commenter on the RUSA blog, "I will use it for teaching reference to other librarians, conducting performance evaluations, and explaining reference services to non-librarian institutional stakeholders."
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Speaking of Reference: Slate Calls Leading "Answer" site "Librarian's Worst Nightmare"
According to Slate writer Jacob Leibenluft, 120 million users apparently can be wrong. Calling the service a "librarian's worst nightmare," Leibenluft last week raised serious questions about Yahoo! Answers, the Web's second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet after Wikipedia. "While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online," he writes, "it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information."
Anyone can post a question to Yahoo! Answers, and according to the company's own stats, the service draws 120 million users worldwide and has compiled 400 million answers, "all searchable in its archives." On the plus side, Leibenluft notes, users who post a semi-coherent question are likely to get an answer "almost instantaneously," usually within minutes, sometimes within seconds. Also, the Yahoo! Answers community does better in some academic areas, such as physics, where the author noted that the services "consistently does an impressive job of providing accurate answers and a clear explanation of how to get them."
Overall, however, Leibenluft found the service seriously unreliable. "The problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework," he observes, "It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well." Nevertheless, Yahoo! Answers, he notes, despite being "frequently sloppy and inaccurate," is still the "juggernaut" among answer-giving sites like Askville, WikiAnswers, and Ask Metafilter.
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Temple's Alford Named Chair of OCLC Board of Trustees
Larry Alford, Dean of University Libraries, Temple University, has been named Chair of the OCLC Board of Trustees. Alford replaces Betsy Wilson, Dean of University Libraries, University of Washington, who served four consecutive one-year terms as Board Chair the maximum allowed. She remains on the board and in addition to naming Alford, the board also unanimously passed a resolution recognizing Wilson's service. "OCLC, its member libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions, and, most importantly, the users of libraries and information services around the world have benefited from her leadership as OCLC Board Chair," the resolution stated.
Alford joined Temple University in 2005, after a 30-year tenure in various positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science in May 2005. He was elected to the OCLC Board of Trustees in May 2002 by the OCLC Members Council, and served as Members Council President for the 2000/2001 session.
The 15-member OCLC Board of Trustees comprises the president of OCLC and eight trustees elected by the board itself, five of whom come from fields outside librarianship. The other six members are elected by the OCLC Members Council. In a statement, Alford said he was "deeply honored to be chosen by my fellow trustees to chair the board of this remarkable collaborative."
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