My Inspiration for the Day

I just finished a book entitled The Librarian as Information Consultant: Transforming Reference for the Information Age, and it's just about as dry as you'd expect. This page, however, captivated me.

Libraries are helpful. Libraries are necessary. Quality of information is more important than quantity. (It's a long quotation, so there's your basic take-home message.)

Although technology reveals exciting opportunities, it doesn't replace human interaction. Yes, the Internet has fundamentally changed reference librarians' work; it hasn't supplanted their value. Today if a consumer needs to translate a sentence from an unfamiliar language to English, he will use Babelfish or another freely available translation website, rather than locate a library's bilingual dictionaries. Further, why should a consumer visit the library to use a directory when phone numbers and addresses for organizations are freely available online? If a consumer needs to know the amount of soybeans produced by Ohio farmers during the last year, he'll seek this fact himself, as statistics which were once only found in libraries' print government documents collections are now almost exclusively online. As long as the consumer can verify the authenticity and quality of the information located, the Internet is a remarkable tool for straightforward, time-sensitive, factually-driven information.

But librarians understand the Internet can also seductively entice a consumer to remain trapped in a void of miscellaneous blurbs, some correct, some incorrect. With everyone as a potential author, consumers must learn to utilize the information found online with caution, and resist the temptation to rely on immediate, instantly gratifying text which can be purposefully misleading or grossly out of context. Many consumers haven't acquired this skill, getting frustrated, terrified, and confused when their serendipitous online wandering fails to satisfy their needs. They realize the Internet is a huge amoeba and find their way back to libraries, seeking the in-depth information that library collections provide. This is particularly true when consumers need to learn a new skill or understand a complex issue. The in-depth collections libraries construct are a strength, along with libraries' ability to organize information.

Learning is a social activity and libraries, museums, zoological gardens, and parks all work to inform their constituencies and stimulate personal reflection. Libraries provide an environment where consumers can slow down, locate information either in a physical or digital form, and assimilate it with their own ideas and values. Libraries contribute to a community's social capital, generating wealth and value by supporting consumers' need for personal and professional growth, providing referral to a community's agencies and organizations, empowering consumers to make informed decisions, supporting cultural awareness and diversity, and making spaces available for individuals to meet. 

Google cannot and will not replace library services. Yes, consumers can obtain factual information on their own, without library mediation. The sheer amount of information retrieved via Internet searches, however, often intimidates, rather than empowers the consumer.  The reference librarian who both functions as and promotes herself as a library and information consultant is better positioned to communicate her skills as an experienced expert who can seamlessly navigate both the Internet and the library, saving the consumer time and energy by matching him with the desired information regardless of format. Funding instead enables libraries to sustain the innovative services and programs, collections, and facilities that consumers value. In such an environment, libraries must become more consumer-focused, defining customer needs in customer terms to develop and customize services and market new and existing products. An additional challenge is overcoming our preference for forcing customers to seek our assistance only after exhausting Internet search options.

Murphy, Sarah Ann. The Librarian as Information Consultant: Transforming reference for the information age. Chicago: ALA, 2011. 

Exam Time

Note the desolate arrangement of furniture. 

Quiet stress-filled library until next Wednesday.

What the Dickens?

Which Dickens to read first? Or next? Which Dickens' novel is the most Dickens?

The Guardian is here to help. 

Access more of their fun from their 200 years of Dickens website. 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/charles-dickens-at-200

Also, check out Jasper Fforde's Eyre Affair series if you haven't yet done so. 

Happy reading.

Wikipedia and JSTOR partners

Since JSTOR chose to allow access for 100 wikipedia editors, I can guess that it was a publicity move. Even so, I'm happy to drink the kool-aid or at least stir in the powder.

Wikipedia is commonly used, and it's important that it be as accurate as possible, which means giving editors access to reputable information and scholarship. My one question involves the type of information published on JSTOR. The database is most useful for scholarly articles, while wikipedia should be focusing on general explanations. 

JSTOR provides free access to Wikipedia editors via  pilot program

Posted by Steven Walling on November 19th, 2012

Prolific Wikipedians strongly favor access to more research materials, according to our December 2011 Editor Survey

One of the challenges facing the volunteer editors of Wikipedia is finding reliable sources to use as reference material — in our last editor survey, 39 percent named this as one of the largest problems hindering their contributions. The need was especially pronounced among our most active volunteers, who make hundreds or thousands of edits per month.
To address this issue, the Wikimedia Foundation is collaborating with JSTOR, a service of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA, to provide 100 of the most active Wikipedia editors with free access to the complete archive collections on JSTOR, including more than 1,600 academic journals, primary source documents and other works. The authors who will receive accounts have collectively written more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles to date. Access to JSTOR, which is one of the most popular sources on English Wikipedia, will allow these editors to further fill in the gaps in the sum of all human knowledge.
While some Wikipedia volunteers may already receive access as part of their professional affiliations or through institutions like public libraries, this access is far from universal. This program will empower some of our most active editors to create new content on the huge variety of topics covered by the journal archives on JSTOR. Access during the pilot will be for a year, after which JSTOR and Wikimedia will collaborate on potentially expanding the program.
Wikipedia contributors beyond the pilot group can also take advantage of growing access, as can readers. JSTOR provides free access to Early Journal Content and recently introduced Register & Read, an experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. More information may be found at about.jstor.org/individuals.
While Wikipedians are volunteers, their work on the encyclopedia is most definitely of a scholarly nature. We hope that this pilot will show that amazing things can happen when you provide dedicated volunteers with access to great source material.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/19/jstor-provides-free-access-to-wikipedia-editors/

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Congratulations, Class of 2013. I'm going to miss my advisory next year when they head off to college. I think it's great that we keep the same group of students for four years.

(Eating in the library? Who me? Never.)

Brain Hive as a New Model for Libraries

I've been very curious about Brain Hive since first reading about it this summer. It provides a new model for libraries that allows them to rent books with $1 per checkout. If the book selection fits our needs, we may be seeing it at Saint Stephen's shortly. 

Brain Hive is creating buzz, and a bit of controversy, with a new business model for delivering ebooks to school libraries. The site claims that its $1-a-read rental strategy will “add thousands of titles to your collection.” Can it deliver? At first glance, I was quite skeptical: $1 a read seems rather high. After all, school libraries in New York only get $6.25 per student in materials aid. When I started doing the math, however, Brain Hive started looking like a much more interesting proposition.
Librarians build collections through art and science, but rarely through math. What if, like insurance companies, we had actuarial tables for each book we purchased? We collectively freaked out about HarperCollins and its 26-loan-per-year license, but in hindsight it is a much better deal than Random House and $84 ebooks. An $84 ebook has to get checked out over 100 times—that is, continual checkouts for four years—to be a better financial deal than HarperCollins offers. So how does the math work out on Brain Hive? Can it deliver a positive return on investment?
Let’s get the easy one out of the way. Would I rather “own” an $84 ebook that can be checked out by one person at a time, or rent a $1 ebook from Brain Hive that 84 people can borrow at once? Honestly, I like the sound of the Brain Hive model here. Buying that $84 ebook is a pretty hefty investment; you are betting that patrons will want to check out that book at least 84 times over the course of 168 weeks. So you might show a positive return on your “owning” the book as opposed to renting it from Brain Hive if a patron still wants to check out the book in February 2016. After it has been checked out continuously for the previous 39 months. Even when compared to an investment in print, Brain Hive seems to have merit. If a hardcover book is around $15 then you are still looking at 15 loans (10 months of two-week checkouts) to show a positive return versus Brain Hive’s rental model.
So, Brain Hive for everything? Absolutely not. What my simple examples above are built upon is the idea of cost per checkout. Especially for informational books, in-library use is a critical element that cannot be ignored. Brain Hive does allow limited browsing to let patrons see if they want to borrow a book; in fact a generous 25% of an ebook rented from Brain Hive is accessible before the $1 checkout kicks in. Right now, Brain Hive is a bit heavy on the nonfiction, and I see that as a weaker area of use in the long term. For me, the model shines in the realm of Big Six publisher fiction. Brain Hive already has books from Random House and Little Brown (Hachette). Not every book, of course: Brain Hive and the publishers negotiate selected-title lists. But there’s also no overhead like some other ebook aggregators charge—and no $84 ebooks.
And … no public libraries.
Brain Hive is a school library service only for now. It is actually a sister company to one of the larger independent publishers in the K–12 marketplace, Lerner Publishing Group, under the parent Lerner Universal Corporation. This has helped Bran Hive jump into the market, but I worry about the splintering of the K–12 ebook market as different independent publishers each work to create their own platforms. While publishers’ concern about buying into a competitor’s delivery technology is understandable, so is the undesirability of end users having to navigate through multiple platforms.
What we really desire is content. And Brain Hive is poised to deliver. Its model may not be everything librarians wanted in terms of perpetual ownership, but I would prefer the straight-up rental proposed by Brain Hive to wondering which definition of “own” is the flavor of the day. And I certainly love the chance to dabble in digital fiction from Big Six providers without having to make an $84, three-year investment in a single title. So I look forward to exploring Brain Hive more … as soon as it develops a consortium model.

As posted in Christopher Harris' column in American Libraries:
School Library Ebook Company Challenges Traditional Business Model | American Libraries Magazine

Books from my childhood

This year I have the opportunity to supervise a group of middle school students as they volunteer once a month at a local elementary school. I was excited from the start, but more so when I learned that my base of operations is the school library.

On the first day, I found a book I remembered from my childhood that I was searching for last spring, and because of technology, I was easily able to photograph a page to share with my mom.
(I can still hear her intonations as I look through the pages. Kids repeat stories a lot.)



Then I found this book I remember reading on vacation in Ocean City when I was going into 5th grade. The premise now makes me laugh, but at the time I assumed that things like this happened when you got to middle school. (And perhaps life was different in the 1970s because the author claims that the fictional story is based on real-life reading clubs across the country.)

The book is Sixth Grade Sleepover by Eve Bunting. The smart sixth graders are part of a secret society of readers, and the club sponsor hosts an overnight co-ed sleepover for the group. There are fears and secrets and crushes, and in the end it turns out fine. Who says that books aren't propaganda? I grew up reading lines like this and later became a vegetarian librarian. Coincidence?

I honestly don't think there's anything as cozy in the world as lying on a sleeping bag with your friends all around you, munching celery with peanut butter and reading a good book.

Afaa Weaver, Poet and Teacher Extraordinaire

Last week, Saint Stephen's brought Afaa Weaver to campus to work as a poet in residence with students in all four divisions. Weaver has worked as a poet, playwright, editor, translator, journalist and essayist. He is a professor of English at Simmons College, and before he returned to Brown University for his MFA, he worked in a factory for 15 years. He is fluent in Mandarin and has spent time over the past 11 years working in Taiwan. He is a true Renaissance man and a gifted teacher.

He started his time in the lower divisions, speaking in chapel, conducting writing workshops with the 6th grade English classes, and practicing Mandarin with the second graders. He then spent a day in the Middle School. He got the students' attention when he asked what it was like to be in eighth grade because he never went. (He skipped a grade.) He also worked with the eighth grade English classes on defining necessary qualities of poetry. Finally, he spent a day with Upper School students in the ninth grade English classes and in speaking about racial inequality in the Literature of the South senior seminar. 

In addition to all of the courses he taught, he also found time to meet individually with students and faculty members, host an evening poetry reading, lecture our faculty on the importance of creativity in the 21st century, and take part in a journalism interview. 

Throughout the week, Weaver was humble and patient. Separately, two ninth grade boys who worked with him described him as "calming." Surprising description from 14 year olds! Accurate nonetheless.

Suggestions on who we should bring to campus next year?

How did I never mention Thomas French?

How did I never mention Thomas French in my posts this fall? I just found a new article and went back through old posts to link to information about his visit to Saint Stephen's, and I was surprised to find nothing. This post is the other post I was searching for, and at least that wasn't just a post that I wrote in my head.

http://greenteamedia.blogspot.com/2011/08/aquarium-people-watching-in-greater.html

Backstory: Mr. French is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist who spoke to our students and faculty last year after all students read one of his books as part of their summer reading assignment. His background allows him to work with both AP Environmental Science students and 9th grade English classes...and many classes in between. Zoo Story narrates a half decade at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. It includes details about the lives of the keepers, the personalities of the animals, and Lex Salisbury's management (or mismanagement) of operations. It's nonfiction, and all 9th graders visited the zoo for a scavenger hunt and field trip after meeting with French. It was the first time that many of our students spoke with an author, and he was a patient teacher with them.

The Article that Reminded me of Zoo Story and French: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/why-we-love-zoos/

Humanities Class, I believe you spent the entire fall discussing what it means to be human. This is perfect ending to the article and tie-in to Mr. French...

What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity. We flock to zoos for many reasons, not least to shed some of the burden of being human.

Part Two coming soon. Another author on campus...

ebooks and copyright

There are a lot of copyright and technical issues still being discussed in relation to ebooks, but I have to admit I never thought of this one. 

I supplement my collection with family donations, and I know that many libraries support their services with book sales that sell books donated by patrons. If the ebook you buy has a shelf life of one device and no transfers, you may get a lot less use out of each book.

Christina Pommer, Internet Sleuth

One of my favorite work activities is finding answers. With Internet search options getting more intuitive, questions that I receive have gotten harder. 

I'm thrilled with the success of one particular query this week.

Mr. Whelan, the history department chair, asked if I could find more information about this picture or other pictures like it. 

A little background... This past summer, Mr. Whelan was part of a research group that visited Japan. He saw anti-smoking posters in many of the schools he visited. He took this photo of one of them, and wanted to know if I could find others. Later this month, he is bringing his AP World History students to a special exhibit at the Ringling Museum. The exhibit is titled Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945. The exhibit

“DECO JAPAN” not only provides dramatic examples of the spectacular craftsmanship and sophisticated design long associated with Japan, it conveys the complex social and cultural tensions in Japan during the Taishô and early Shôwa epochs (1912-1945). In these pre-war and war eras, artists and patrons created a Japanese modernism that signaled simultaneously the nation’s unique history and its cosmopolitanism. The vitality of the era is further expressed through the theme of the modern girl, known in Japan as the modaan gaaru or moga, for short – the emblem of contemporary urban chic that flowered along with the Art Deco style of the 1920s and 1930s. The pieces include spectacular examples of metalwork, ceramics, lacquer, glass, wood furniture, jewelry, textiles, graphic design on paper, painting and woodblock prints; they range from fine art objects made to impress the public at national art exhibitions to goods mass produced for the modern home.

 

Mr. Whelan wants his students to compare the "Westernized" female Japanese  smokers of the exhibit with modern anti-smoking images. I'm psyched about the project because I think it ties together themes of media literacy and culture. So of course I'm happy to help him find the images. 

Search one: no luck. Search two: no luck. Search eighteen...let's just say my results weren't circling any closer to the answer. I took a risk and called the Japan Information and Culture Center at the US Embassy. The worst they can do is tell me that they can't help me, right? Which they didn't or I wouldn't be writing this post. The staff member was helpful and encouraged me to send the picture along to him. 

He soon responded with information about the website of the organization which produced these posters. Mr. Whelan and I had both assumed they were the equivalent of anti-smoking PSA's, but you know what they say about assuming...

The images are part of an anti-youth smoking campaign; however, the images were created by the Tobacco Institute of Japan. What a surprise! This spurred me towards a few JSTOR searches on the history of tobacco in Japan. 

It's been years since 10 list time, but here are things I've learned about Japanese Tobacco in the last few days. 

-The Japanese government controls tobacco production and distribution. This allows the government to more easily collect taxes and gave them a monopoly that for over a century successfully limited foreign competition.

-In 2000, 53% of adult Japanese men smoked, compared with only 13.7% of women. 

-The Japanese Ministry of Finance owns 2/3 of the stock of Japan Tobacco, Inc. Almost every Japan Tobacco, Inc. executive is an amakudari, literally "descended from heaven," retiree from the Ministry of Finance.

-Many smoking campaigns in Japan revolve around manners. The Ministry of Finance and Japan Tobacco, Inc. want smokers to "smoke clean." Smokers are requested to carry portable ashtrays, throw cigarette butts in proper recepticles, and not cause fires. Non-smokers are encouraged not to be overly sensitive to the presence of some smoke.

-The tobacco industry likes to speak about anti-tobacco lobbyists using military imagery such as the words "war," "battle," "guerillas," and "brigade."

-Phillip Morris internally distributes anti-smoking resources produced by its opponents in order to craft its responses effectively. The company also worked to discredit individuals in those groups who spoke out against smoking.

-When the ban on tv advertisements for cigarettes was lifted in Japan in 1986, the number of US cigarette exports went from 9.9 billion to 32 billion in one year.

-Phillip Morris targeted the aspirations of young male Japanese smokers. Their ads featured fast cars, Hollywood celebrities, and a James Bond-type representation.

-The tobacco industry created an idustry-wide self-regulating body, the Tobacco Institute of Japan, to keep outside regulators from feeling they had to take action. The Tobacco Institute of Japan represents the industry "to ensure that the [tobacco] industry's interests are protected," including establishing and monitoring "the voluntary code on cigarette advertising." While this gives the impression of regulation, there's no means to enforce anti-smoking regulations.

-As an example of the way self-imposed regulation works, the Tobacco Institute of Japan developed their own voluntary code. The less profitable radio, internet, and movie ads were banned, while the industry could still advertise in magazines, on billboards, by sponsoring events, and by distributing samples.

The 10 list above came from the following three articles: 

How Phillip Morris Unlocked the Japanese cigarette Market: lessons for global tobacco control by A. Lambert, J. Sargent, A. Glantz, and P. Ling, published in Tobacco Control

"Asia is now the Priority Target for the World ant-tobacco Movement": Attempts by the tobacco industry to undermine the Asian anti-smoking movement by J. Knight and S. Chapman, published in Tobacco Control

The Landscape of Japanese Tobacco Policy: Law, smoking, and social change by E. Feldman, published in The American Journal of Comparative Law

And if you'd like to see more anti-smoking posters put forth by the Tobacco Institute: go here.

On the page, the blue bubbles will take you to the 2011, 2010, and 2009 campaigns. The "20" in question refers to the age when Japanese citizens are allowed to legally purchase cigarettes. 

Have a research question? Ask a librarian.