Mark C. Taylor’s op-ed in the NYTimes is a real challenge to the structure of higher education…

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)……

I especially appreciated one of his suggestions:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

We’ve been imagining something like this in the Library as well. The Library’s role in learning/teaching as well as in the creation of knowledge lies in its ability to create and facilitate communities of scholarly discourse that spans traditional disciplinary boundaries. These communities engage problems as Taylor suggests in the context of the collections that embody scholarly discourse through the centuries…

As we prepare for a transition in senior leadership, I’ve been trying to carefully and concisely document the current state of the Library, particularly our planning efforts.  Throughout the fall semester, I’ve been in conversation with a variety of faculty and staff about the direction we are headed in the Library. (Garth Green and Vika Zafrin have been particularly helpful conversation partners.) I decided it was time to articulate some of the basic assumptions that are foundational for our planning.

A primary goal of my work as Head Librarian is to guide the Theology Library to develop collections and services appropriate for the 21st century. The Library was a good 20th century library, but the context in which we work has radically changed. The Library needs to change as well. Three assumptions guide our effort to refocus and restructure the Library.

The Library’s primary purposes are pedagogy and the creation of knowledge.  Collection development was our primary pedagogical tool. We collected, cataloged, and shelved those books deemed essential for student learning and scholarly research. Students and scholars read those books in the physical context of a well-focused and intellectually defined collection. We assumed that the physical collection of the Library essentially defined what information was available to students (and faculty).  That assumption is no longer valid. We continue to assume that pedagogy and the creation of knowledge remain the primary reasons the Library exists, though collection development as it has traditionally been understood is no longer the Library’s primary pedagogical tool, nor the best measure of the Library’s contribution to the learning that takes place at STH. We need to develop new means to accomplish and measure the Library’s pedagogical mission.

Knowledge is created in conversation. Traditionally, libraries have been places where people gather to engage ideas through reading and conversation. In the midst of that scholarly dialogue with past and current voices, new knowledge and understanding is developed.  Until recently, the Theology Library could rather passively provide physical space for reading and scholarly conversation, being assured that those conversations would take place. Recent trends in library use indicate that an increasing number of library users never physically come to the library, and a high percentage of those who do, come only to retrieve a book or photocopy and article that will be read outside the physical space of the Library.  We now assume that the Library’s role in facilitating scholarly dialogue requires intentional programmatic effort rather than simply addressing the task with structural solutions like providing physical space.

The environmental changes that impact the Library are largely cultural. To be sure, technology is a significant driver for these changes, but technology is simply a tool. As a culture, we are more mobile, more globally aware, immersed in a wide variety of media that connect us with more immediacy in ways that reshape our definition of community. The 20th century (and before) was a culture of information scarcity. The 21sth century is a culture of information abundance.  Cultural expectations for anytime/anywhere information and service shape the expectations of Theology Library users.  In our digital culture, information discovery and use is not segregated to specified locations or times. The Library must develop ways of providing both information and service in ways that enter the users workflow, regardless of time, location, or technological devices. However, these should not be viewed as simply technological answers. We assume that the Library must recognize and address these issues as much culturally as technologically.  This requires a change in the Library’s culture as well as active engagement in the culture of our users beyond the physical space of the Library.

Jesse Dylan’s brief video about the Science Commons raises for me a question about other disciplines. What would a Theological Commons look like?  Dylan’s video provides an easy rationale for the Science Commons. What would it be for theology and religion?

We’ve been proposing here at the Theology Library that an important part of our work is to create focused subject area portals that collect a corpus of texts or, perhaps better, data, that can sustain and draw scholarly collaboration and dialogue. Would we imagine such a portal as a “commons?”

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I’ve been thinking more about the importance of conversations in the library. For a number of years I’ve talked about our collection embodying a conversation that spans centuries and continents, but it’s been harder to think about how to facilitate an ongoing conversation with our current library users. Certainly we do so by way of reference transactions but those seem fewer than I would like.

One of the pedagogical premises behind the direction we are headed in the Theology Library is that “knowledge is created through conversation.” We are trying to find ways to facilitate an ongoing conversation among our library users. I’ve been interested in how we might imagine the online catalog facilitating conversation. A couple months ago I embedded a Scriblio interface to a small collection of digital objects into the History of Missiology Web site. The idea is that we can allow users to comment on the texts. I decided to give it a try on a little larger basis. I’ve begun loading records from our online catalog into another instance of scriblio. This may be a way of providing a forum for conversation…

http://comm745-server.bu.edu/alt_cat/

Some may know that I’ve been working on a project to develop a Web site to provide digital access to the classic writings in the history of protestant mission thought.

http://digilib.bu.edu/mission/

The project began several years ago, originally conceived as a class-oriented resource for courses in the study of the history of Christian mission. The original site included a blog and discussion forum as well as online chat for students in the class. Enough interest was generated beyond Boston University in the project that we decided to create a public version that included the biographical information as well as E-books in the collection. This week the public site makes its debut at the 2008 Costas Consultation in Global Mission. I’ll be presenting in a workshop entitled: “Technology and a Guide to Global Christianity.”

Some may be interested in a few of the technological issues. The Web site uses open source software:

• BU Linux (operating system)
• Apache (Web server)
• MySQL (database)
• Joomla 1.5(content management system)
• WordPress 2.3.3 (blog)
• Scriblio (Scriblio is a WordPress-based OPAC and CMS, which merges the concepts of “blog entry” and “catalog record”.)

We also use DSpace and Greenstone as repositories for digital content, though the Web site doesn’t actively use them.

The creation of metadata for the E-books hasn’t kept pace with the development of the Web site. In coming weeks, additional books will be added including books by and about most of the missionaries for whom biographies are available. Additional missionary biographies will be added as graduate student assistants are able.

With the completion of the redesign of the public version of the Web site, effort will turn to upgrading the design of the version designed for class use.

Some may know that EBSCO is now marketing the Christian Periodical Index. I was recently offered an opportunity to try CPI at Boston University. I won’t comment on the quality of the indexing here, but thought it helpful to identify the overlap titles that are indexed in other products we license (ATLA Religion Database, EBSCOhost Religion and Philosophy Collection, and Catholic Periodical and Literature Index.)

I gathered titles and issn from the American Theological Library Association and EBSCO web sites to use for comparison. For consistency, I tried to use figures based on currently indexed titles. Both the ATLA Religion Database and the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index include titles that are not currently indexed. For these purposes, the ATLA Religion Database claims to index 506 titles, Catholic Periodical and Literature Index claims to index 181 titles, and EBSCO includes 308 titles.

CPI indexes 133 titles according to the list published on their web site. Of those titles, 50 (38%) titles are also indexed by one of the three indexes we already license and 83 (62%) titles are unique to Christian Periodical Index.

I was also interested to know how many CPI titles not indexed by the other three indexes are held by either Boston University or one of the other libraries in the Boston Theological Institute. BTI libraries hold 40 (30%) of the 83 titles unique to CPI.

Below is a list of unique Christian Periodical Index titles:

Read the rest of this entry »

Following on an earlier post Neal Wyatt’s recent article in LJ prompted me to think of Reader Advisory services (RA) as a way to facilitate collective reading…

“Library 2.0 applied to RA means that our core service—fostering connections and discussions about items in our collections—can be enhanced and adapted by social technology. Library 2.0 tools play to the strengths of RA work and can deepen and broaden the interaction, introduce new ways of connecting books to other items, and enable librarians to enlist the entire community of readers in the collaborative creation of RA services for everyone. This is happening most quickly through a revisioning of what annotations are, where they exist, and who creates and uses them. ”
“2.0 for Readers; Online innovations reinvent how we use a classic RA tool—annotations”
by Neal Wyatt — Library Journal, 11/1/2007

Using RA could help us return to the collective reading environment described by Junot Díaz (see my previous post).

In an earlier message I mentioned Amy Jo Kim’s discussion of game mechanics. Social exchange is one of the mechanics she describes as crucial to designing a game that is “addictive.”

They are the basic, primal form of social interaction. Social exchange can be very explicit or implicit (i.e. emergent) For example eBay feedback has evolved into a tit-for-tat social game: give me a feedback, I’ll give you one.Trading is an explicit social exchange. Example: trading in World of Warcraft; trading in Mogi-Mogi (a GPS-based game in Tokyo to collect virtual objects.)

“Gifting” is an implicit social exchange, you’re not forced to do it but the system makes you do it.
Examples: NetMarble (Korea); HabboHotel (you can buy object with your points and give gifts); Helios that targets the MySpace generation, ability to give ringtones, wallpapers, etc. If you want to create interesting social dynamics you have to allow users to exchange gifts. It’s a very powerful social exchange.
MySpace has both implicit and explicit social exchanges: “add friends” is explicit but comments are implicit.

I was reminded of that by the post on if:book about the recent interview with Junot Díaz, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Nobody learns to read outside of a collective. We forget – because we read and we read alone – we forget that we learn to read collectively. We learn with our peers, and a teacher teaches us. . . . When you read a book – and especially like this book, where there’s gonna be Spanish, there’s gonna be historical references, there’s gonna be nerdish, as they say, forget the elvish, the nerdish, there’s gonna be fanboy stuff, there’s gonna be talk about Morgoth, about dark side, about John Brunner’s science fiction books, about Asimov, about Bova, about Andre Norton, about E. E. Doc Smith’s Lensman, you know all this weird esoteric stuff, amongst all these Dominican references, Caribbean references, urban black American references, all this nerd talk, all this kind of hip “we went to college” speak – the reason that’s all there in one place is the same reason that reading is a collective enterprise. When we did not know a word when we were young and learning, we would ask someone. We forgot – I think many of us forget – that praxis, that fundamental praxis. What I want is for people to read and remember that reading, while we may practice it alone, in solitude, it arose out of a collective learning and out of a collective exchange . . . .

I wonder if a return to reading as a collective enterprise might be the kind of social engagement described by Amy Jo Kim. A few weeks ago I preached a sermon in chapel about in which I talked about open source spirituality, a move toward collective spiritual practices that result in a spirituality greater than the sum of the parts. Might collective reading be such a spiritual practice?

Fred Stutzman over at Unit Structures talks about the “what’s next” problem in what he calls “ego-centric” social networks.

Of course, the problem with ego-centric networks lies in the fact network-reestablishment is the main chore. Talk to individuals joining Facebook today – what are they doing? They’re using inbox importers and searching to find their friends/ex-classmates/etc. It’s a game, it’s fun for a bit, but then (say it with me readers) “What’s next?” Yes, the what’s next moment occurs. This is not to say the network becomes useless: no, it’s very useful rolodex, and the newsfeeds introduce concepts of peripheral participation (or social surveillance), but the game is in essence over.

One of the big problems I see in trying to make the Library more “game-like” (see my earlier post) is sustaining interest, or avoiding the “what’s next” problem. Admittedly, this is a challenge not just for libraries, but for any game designer.

Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director of ShuffleBrain posted notes over at we-make-money-not-art about the “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Design to Mobile Services” session at last year’s Emerging Technology Conference in which she discusses five game mechanics that make the interactive experience more addictive:

1. Collecting: amassing and showing your stuff
2. Earning points: related but more sophisticated, its’ a very simple way to keep the interest alive.
3. Feedback but you have to use it creatively.
4. Exchanges are structured social interactions. They are the basic, primal form of social interaction. Social exchange can be very explicit or implicit (i.e. emergent)
5. Customization increases investment in the experience.

(Amy provides helpful examples of these five mechanics.)

One of the findings from the University of Rochester Study was that undergraduates want to be able to Customize the library’s web site to fit their own needs and preferences. Essentially they were describing a portal interface that allows one to Customize content in much the same way one is able to do with Google or Yahoo. While it would take a bit of effort, this could be accomplished in most libraries. UofR also discovered that students wanted to “customize” the physical library. Students wanted to move furniture, for example, to suit their needs. Students also defined some areas in the library as quiet areas and others as more collaborative areas in which a conversation and collaboration were more common. The difficult part of allowing customization of physical space, however, is that it is shared space. One can’t guarantee that it would remain the same for the next time the student came to study.

Collecting seems more difficult for me to imagine incorporating into the Library player’s experience. Amy talks about collecting friends in MySpace or Facebook, or baseball cards, or any type of collectible in the physical world. While it is a game, we want the game to focus on information, not simply gimics. One might, however, imagine a student collecting citations, even better annotated citations. Bragging rights go to those with the most citations.

And of course Points might be awarded based, at least in part, on the number of annotated citations one accumulates. One might also receive Points by means of a reputation system, a little like E-bay or Amazon. Points would be awarded not just on quantity, but quality.

Contributing these annotated citations to the social network that might grow up around a Library would be a type of social Exchange. A Library might implement a tagging or commenting facility directly into the online catalog. Penn Tags is an interesting model. Penn has implemented a tagging system for the opac that allows library users to add their own tags. (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/) “If you want to create interesting social dynamics you have to allow users to exchange gifts. It’s a very powerful social exchange.” (Amy Jo Kim)

Designing the Library game to encourage addictive library use is an interesting challenge, very focused on the user experience. Focusing on game mechanics seems like a helpful way to approach the challenge.

After the MIT Communications Forum on “gaming and civic engagement” a few weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of viewing the library as a game. Ian Bogost commented that one of the things he finds most fascinating about games is that they force the player to live in a world whose rules are constructed by someone else (see my previous posts). Librarians construct the rules (policies, procedures, physical arrangement of materials and furnishing, subject headings, indexing, etc.) and require players (those who use our libraries) to function within the world we construct to obtain the information they seek to complete their tasks. I still find this an interesting way to look at the Library. The recent University of Rochester Undergraduate Research Project suggested that students may already be interacting with the Library like a game.

Nancy Fried Foster observed about the trend toward a self-service model that we see in most young adults:

It is tempting to relate this trend to lack of time, but I think it resembles a pattern of information seeking that is evident in students’ recreational activities—gaming, for example—when time is not an issue. Video and computer games come with little by way of directions. Manuals are available but not all gamers want or use them. When a gamer gets stuck in a game, s/he commonly runs through a variety of information-seeking activities, starting with experimentation with the game itself (Gee 2003). If this fails, the gamer may seek an online site for the particular game to see whether there are any “tips” or “tricks” that solve the problem. The point is that the parsimony of the gamers’ information seeking is not related to time pressure. It is related to a view of life in which instrumentality trumps relationship.

So self-service is the preeminent model and strategy of the information-seeking student. But when the student cannot satisfy his/her own needs and turns to real-life service providers, what happens? In their drawings of ideal library spaces, students sometimes group librarians with technical support staff and baristas at service desks (see Chapter 4). When they do not differentiate between different kinds of service providers, it is in part because they do not know the service providers, having experienced few person-to-person service relationships. If they have a need, they want it filled. If they want a need filled, they want to go to a font of all sorts of service, a sort of universal service point, a physical Google. In other words, they want Mommy.
….
But “Mommy” is not the same as a real student’s real mother, a person with whom s/he has a complex and ever-changing, ever maturing relationship. When I speak of the Mommy Model of Service, I refer to a Mommy who is the provider of everything to the infant. (p75-76)

If we were to imagine making the Library more game-like, perhaps we might:

1. Make the Library’s Web site a place to go for Tips and Tricks to be used when the player gets stuck.
2. Think about creating different “levels” in the Library that can be entered when one has found the right tool or accumulated the right number of points to proceed.
3. Ensure that guides and wisdom figures (avatar-like or not) become visible to the players periodically, giving the player the visual queues necessary to them identify them as safe to approach.
4. Provide an easy way to “save the game.”
5. Develop and support remote, virtual and on-site playing areas.
6. Develop and support multi-user as well as single-user playing modes.
7. Develop and support interactive interfaces for players who play the Library remotely, virtually, as well as physically in the Library.

Foster, Nancy Fried, and Susan Gibbons. 2007. Studying students the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/downloadables/Foster-Gibbons_cmpd.pdf.