hangingtogether.org

My colleague, Lorcan Dempsey, did a very nice synthesis of “MOOCs, Libraries, OCLC” for the OCLC Board of Trustees this morning. Given the massive attention and the surge of interest in MOOCs (witness that the article – Year of the MOOC – in the New York Times has stayed on the most emailed since it was published on 2 November 2012) he was asked to provide an overview and some foundational information so the trustees could have a preliminary discussion about the implications for libraries. Perhaps he will turn this into a piece for more general publication.

One of things he drew out was the ways in which MOOCs are forcing an exploration of the scale, shape and costs of pedagogy, prompting new thinking about assessment, and creating environments that can facilitate and take advantage of predictive and adaptive analytics. In talking about the shape of pedagogy he pointed out the ways in which they were consciously capitalizing on social technologies, gamification techniques, virtual laboratories and peer learning. MOOCs might become the vehicle that institutionalized the ‘flipped classroom’ as the norm.

I wasn’t very familiar with the ‘flipped classroom’ concept. I’d only come across it in reading about the Khan Academy. Teachers were assigning the Khan modular lectures as homework and then using the classroom time for personal tutoring, independent problem solving, inquiry-based activities, project-based learning and peer interaction. I now understand that the flipped classroom concept and approach is a much more broadly-established approach and that the Khan Academy example is just a specific manifestation of the concept. I found these three brief blog posts from leading proponents of the approach in secondary education to be very helpful.

As the trustee discussion proceeded Betsy Wilson, Dean of Libraries at the University of Washington seized on the flipped classroom observation saying that this is what libraries had been doing over the last ten years.

Everybody was already operating a flipped library.

I thought it was a spot-on analogy and very descriptive of where academic libraries have been heading. Consider that the current academic library no longer requires students and faculty to come to the libraries for their information seeking and consumption. It delivers materials online to the users preferred environment when they need the information in ways that support time-shifting consumption and repeated encounters. The library building is being re-imagined around support for independent study, collaborative work, group interactions and library services are being re-invented around support for the processes of learning and research rather than collections.

The phrase ‘flipped library’ is a very nice way to capture what’s going on. I’m going to start using it. I don’t know if it will gain traction. The phrase ‘flipped classroom’ seems to have gained widespread use because it had an accompanying catch phrase – “Moving from sage on the stage to guide on the side.” What’s the equivalent catch phrase for the flipped library? If you’ve got a candidate please share.

The flipped library in the photo is the Wyoming Branch of the Free Library at 231 East Wyoming Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19120 It was opened October 30, 1930 and was the last library funded by Carnegie.

Last month we launched a new task group of OCLC Research Library Partner staff and others who are involved in uniquely identifying authors and researchers that can be shared in a linked data environment.

We were spurred by institutions’ need to uniquely identify all their researchers to measure their scholarly output, a factor in reputation and ranking. Yet national authority files cover researchers only partially. They do not include authors that write only journal articles, or researchers who don’t publish but create or contribute to data sets and other research activities.

We see a number of activities in this “name space” with potential overlap, including: the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Open Researchers & Contributor ID (ORCID), the Dutch Digital Author Identifier system (DAI), The Names Project in the UK, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s NACO program, researcher profile systems such as VIVO, and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS).

The Registering Researchers in Authority Files Task Group will document the benefits of researcher identification; significant challenges; trade-offs among the current approaches; and mechanisms for linking approaches and data. We are starting with use case scenarios, for example:

• Researchers who want to identify others in their field
• Institutions that need to collate the intellectual output of their researchers
• Funders who want to track the outputs for awarded grants
• Services providing persistent identifiers for researchers that need to disambiguate names.and ensure correct attributions.

We are hoping that our report will help address all of the above needs, and suggest approaches for linking data from different sources in a coherent way. Details on this activity and the task group roster —including experts from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are on our new Registering Researchers in Authority Files activity page on the OCLC Research website.

If there are systems or “name authority hubs” you want to make sure we look at, please let us know with a comment below.

 

I had a very enjoyable conversation today with Martyn Wade, National Librarian and Chief Executive, of the National Library of Scotland. He made me aware of the relatively new legislation that updates the purpose and functions of the National Library. The library had been operating under legislation that dated from 1925. The new legislation positions the Library to fulfill the kind of role that the citizenry and other national and higher education institutions expect in the digital age. The legislation is brief, to the point, seems actionable and aims to be ‘future-proof’. It’s worth a quick look at 20 very generously-spaced pages. I was particularly taken with a subheading under NLS Functions:

NLS is to exercise its functions with a view to—
(a)encouraging education and research,
(b)promoting understanding and enjoyment of the collections,
(c)promoting the diversity of persons accessing the collections, and
(d)contributing to understanding of Scotland’s national culture.

I’m not aware of other library mission statements that explicitly call out the need to ensure that their collections are enjoyed. I like that very much.

In passing Martyn mentioned the library exhibit called Going to the pictures: Scotland at the cinema. In connection with this exhibit on the library’s Facebook page there was an opportunity to “Scot-ify” famous lines from the movies – Scotland at the Cinema Strikes Back. It’s ongoing and has been very successful. It’s charming and funny. Worth a look. Postcards made from some of the submissions will, of course, be available for sale in the library shop.

In the three earlier posts Merrilee did a great job of summarizing the content of the three different themes – directly supporting researchers, special collections and institutional mission and space as a distinctive asset. The important things to take away were captured in those posts which reflect the attendees highlights as captured in the twitter stream (which has increasingly become the record of conference events).

For those who want a short list of action items from the conference here are mine:

Examine the full research life cycle for one or more disciplines at your institution to identify gaps and pain points where the library could be a continuing source of support. (See the DeBelder slides .pptx

Consider assessing special collections via a task force composed of individuals external to the department to look for alignment with university strategy. (See the Pyatt slides .pptx)

Create a long-term library space plan even if you don’t have current funding or immediate renovation opportunity. (See the Pritchard .pptx and Group4 .pptx slides)

For me the best frame for the event was provided by something taken from a presentation by Wendy Lougee (discussed in an earlier post) in which she characterized future library services as built around local priorities (cf. research support), local infrastructure (space and buildings) and unique institutional assets (special collections). Mixed together thoughtfully these three would result in a portfolio of distinctive services. Read the rest of this entry »

OCLC had some big announcements about linked data this past week. My colleagues, Roy Tennant and Richard Wallis, both have good blog posts (Roy’s) (Richard’s) explaining the what and the why of making WorldCat data available in a linked data format. The announcements got nice press and supportive criticism from people like Ed Chamberlain and Adrian Pohl.

It also caused folks to wonder if I could explain linked data to them.

Nope.

There are, however, some very brief, very elementary explanations out there that ought to do the job for this interested but non-nerd audience.

I recommend these brief videos which convey the rudiments about RDFa, JSON and Linked Data. The fellow who did them has a nice manner, charms with his hand-drawn flash cards and gives you enough while steering around the usual avalanche of angle brackets that characterize other explanations. Plus the videos share the same introductory stuff so you can slide forward on the subsequent videos. (↬to Bruce Washburn and Jeff Young)

For something slicker and a bit more substantial try A skim-read introduction to linked data by two of the technologists in the BBC Research and Development Group. Toggle between the slide view and the continuous scroll view if you’re impatient.

And if you need parables you could try this post Linked Data for Dummies or A dummy’s introduction to linked data (me being the dummy).

And if you insist on a use case here’s the oldest and best – Use of Semantic Web Technologies on the BBC Web Sites

The ‘enlightened non-geek reader’ phrase draws on a comment made to me by Chet Grycz when he was at the University of California Press. He used to talk about ENSORs saying that all university press people believed in these mythical creatures. Press people were confident that were lots of ENSORs out in the wild but in fact no press person had ever had a personal encounter with one. Okay, Chet, what’s an ENSOR? An Enlightened Non-Scholarly Reader.

Update 8 August 2012 OCLC just released a video explaining linked data on our YouTube channel. It’s quite good, very informative and graphically rich. If you’re motivated to understand the basics, want to know why this is important to libraries, and how linked data will make a difference then this will reward the approximately fifteen minutes it takes to view.

This week we have announced two major initiatives that are now providing significant library linked data resources to the world. First was the announcement yesterday that all of the 23rd Edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification has been released on the web as linked data. From the announcement:

All assignable classes from DDC 23, the current full edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification, have been released as Dewey linked data. As was the case for the Abridged Edition 14 data, we define “assignable” as including every schedule number that is not a span or a centered entry, bracketed or optional, with the hierarchical relationships adjusted accordingly. In short, these are numbers that you find attached to many WorldCat records as standard Dewey numbers (in 082 fields), as additional Dewey numbers (in 083 fields), or as number components (in 085 fields).

Second was today’s announcement that we have now added Schema.org descriptive markup. as well as draft set of library extensions, to all of WorldCat. From the press release:

OCLC is taking the first step toward adding linked data to WorldCat by appending Schema.org descriptive mark-up to WorldCat.org pages. WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.

For more information, see “Linked Data at OCLC”. Please keep in mind that these efforts are beginning steps. We will be reviewing the feedback we receive and likely making changes as opportunities to improve present themselves. For example, we are working to pull together a group of institutions that can collaborate on establishing a set of extensions to the Schema.org elements. A very beginning draft is available, but it will likely go through many changes as others become more closely involved. We welcome your participation.

Follow-up addendum: We’ve had several folks ask about data dumps relative to the WorldCat.org linked data announcement. Adding Schema.org linked data to WorldCat.org is, for the time being, an experiment that we’re putting out there in order to garner feedback and get some early usage results. We expect our model to change; because of that, we’re not publishing any bulk downloads of the data at this time.

In a previous blog post, Ricky explained a little about our format. I’ll now continue with more of the content of the meeting, focusing on our first panel, where we asked speakers to talk about how librarians are working directly with researchers on their information needs as they plan, carry out, and disseminate their research. I should emphasize that I’m summarizing what I think are high points. All of these talks were quite rich, and will be posted online along with the video for the sessions soon.

Kurt de Belder (Leiden University) told us that the title of his strategic plan is “partner in knowledge”–the library is striving to become library to become the “expert center” for research and teaching and has been gearing up to provide what they see as key services: virtual research environments, capacities in text and data mining, support for data curation, GIS services. Services that focus on the dissemination part of the cycle include copyright consultation and publication support. Librarians have also been given an additional role of providing ICT support. The library is conducting in-depth focus groups with faculty to see which of these services are of highest value, and where they need additional support. As librarians move to becoming service experts, they have been allocated time to developing their new skills. Early signs are that the shift has been well received, with uptake of new services, an emerging reputation of the library as a “go-to” place, and the library being included as partner in developing funding requests.

Tracy Gabridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) talked about shifting from a model where librarians acted as “loan wolves” in separate services points to a team based model, and a move from providing reactive service to being more proactive in outreach to faculty. At the core of this shift was an effort to equip liaisons with some universal structures, but at the same time allow them to draw on the unique skills required for work with a particular disciplines. For example, there is are now a shared practice for contacting new faculty, which saves each librarian the time of doing this work individually and ensures consistency. There is also dedicated time for liaisons to debrief and share with one another as a large group, and also time for work within “communities of practice” that may share more deeply. Tracy reveled that 60% of MIT liaisons have domain knowledge. She does not consider domain knowledge universally essential — what is most important is continuous learning skills. Curiosity, fearlessness, and enthusiasm were also listed as necessary qualities. A sign of success? Half of MIT reference questions now come to the research liaisons directly, rather than over the reference desk.

David Shumaker (Catholic University of America) gave a rationale for moving towards “embedded librarians” in reaction to shifts in information seeking behavior and also disruption of higher education (a topic I’ll be blogging about soon!). The mission of librarians is “to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities*” (emphasis added), then librarians need to become part of communities. Embedded librarians develop deep relationships with researchers, shared goals, and provide custom, high-value contributions as part of a research team. This is not going out for coffee or having a first date, this is marriage! However, librarians need be outgoing to build these strong relationships, which can be a problem because, according to David, librarianship is a “profession dominated by introverted. Librarians should recognize that they bring unique perspective and skills to research teams. Librarians should also seek to develop the right high value services, and expect that this is will be a moving target — you may be continually reinventing services and that’s okay.

Next was our reactor panel: Liz Chapman (London School of Economics), Chris Bourg (Stanford University), and Dana Rooks (University of Houston). We asked our reactors to be provocative and they did not disappoint! Liz questioned the concept of embedded librarianship; is this really a new thing? (This notion was met with both approval and pushback – the difference is a focus on deeper engagement and connection to both teaching and research, we are being more responsive to needs.) Chris took on education, stating that subject librarians absolutely need to have domain expertise. (This too, received both agreement and disagreement. Chris, as a good social scientist, called for evidence!) Dana Rooks talked about the importance of the library connectors and matchmakers on campus; if we leave the desk and can become engaged and active. We can put ourselves in a position to the big picture, and can help make connections (and burnish our own reputation in the process). Others in the audience both applauded and took issue with the notion of a continually evolving new services, seeing this as path where it is difficult to get ahead, and quite possible to fall off a cliff.

Some other quotable quotes:
“We should not be in the business of saving libraries, we should be serving scholarship.” – Chris Bourg
On where librarians “live” within the institution: “Work wherever you want, but get together and drink beer every once in awhile.” – David Shumaker
“We need to be comfortable with the idea of working ourselves out of a job.” Douglas Jones, U. Arizona #LibRebound

We’ll continue this series of summaries, so stay tuned! You can also take a look at Chris Bourg’s summary of the meeting here.

*attributed to David Lankes

On June 5th and 6th, 125 folks from the OCLC Research Library Partnership gathered in Philadelphia to attend Libraries Rebound: Embracing Mission, Maximizing Impact. We’ll be doing a series of blog posts to try to recap some meeting highlights, including presentations and discussion points. I’m pleased to say that the Twitterstream was particularly active during the meeting and not only captured the proceedings but also carried observations and pointed commentary. For a flavor of the meeting, you can check out #LibRebound. All of the presentations from the meeting will be posted to the event website soon, and in due course we’ll post the video from the meeting as well.

We held Libraries Rebound to foster a conversation about how academic and research libraries have an opportunity to frame the library as a set of distinctive services that better align the library with the mission of its parent institution. There were three broad themes for the meeting: creating services to more directly support researchers; aligning special collections with institutional mission; and exploiting space as a distinctive asset.

We were fortunate to have Scott Walter give our opening keynote. (Scott is University Librarian at DePaul University, where he is freshly arrived from his previous position as Associate University Librarian for Services and Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.) I’m sure I was late to the party but I first noticed Scott’s work when he wrote a guest editorial for College & Research Libraries, “Distinctive Signifiers of Excellence: Library Services and the Future of the Academic Library Subsequently, OCLC Research invited him to give an OCLC Distinguished Seminar Series lecture on the “Service Turn.” Scott’s talk was quite rich, and I’ll point to the presentation once it’s up because it has pointers to lots of resources for further reading and exploration.

“Stories,” Scott began, “are important.” And the research library story has been, traditionally “by the numbers,” largely defined by how many books and journals we have. We are largely defined by our “stuff.” Similarly, library services have traditionally been arranged around giving access to collections. This was all a very good thing when libraries were the center of resource discovery. But now, with the academic library becoming increasingly becoming disintermediated from discovery, the library’s well-defined brand should shift from being so very closely tied to collections. We should be wary of having our story so closely defined by collections, because great libraries are not only composed of wonderful things — excellence is also defined by skilled librarians. Scott encapsulated this as “The most important collection in any library is its people.”

In shifting the story, libraries have an opportunity to take a close look at their service array to see if it is meeting evolving needs on campus. Scott gave some examples of services that do not represent the traditional “collection as service” offering, such as the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Kansas.

Scott also addressed the question of “distinctive services” which he defined as a campus taking a new approach that ties to campus mission or research strength, and / or which is such a hit that others follow.

For example, the Levy Library at USC may have been the first “info commons,” which are now, well, common! He also touched on the notion of developing shared services, which seemed to muddy the waters somewhat, because how can you have a services that is distinctive, but shared? I think that a service that starts off as “distinctive,” say chat reference, can evolve into a shared service if the need is broad and if can be scaled. My take on this is that not all services will scale, or need to. And rather than striving for “distinctiveness,” we should be aiming for appropriateness.

As a side note, we met in the historic Hyatt Bellevue Hotel, which was a lovely venue for the meeting. Unlike many historic hotels, this one has not been badly remodeled, and seems to have maintained some of its charm.

Back in October we were excited to announce the final step in a project on which OCLC Research worked with the University of Cambridge – the release of their library catalog data as both MARC21 and as Linked Data. They worked with us and implemented our provisional recommendation to use an Open Data Commons Attribution license for the data release, which include data that was derived from WorldCat. While we are working to finalize and formalize that recommendation (it was a major discussion item at last week’s OCLC Global Council meeting) other institutions have been working on their own data releases.

Today the Harvard University Libraries released their library catalog of more than 12 million bibliographic records. This release furthers the mandate from their Library Board and Faculty to make as much of their metadata as possible available through open access in order to support learning and research, to disseminate knowledge and to foster innovation and aligns with the very public and established commitment that Harvard has made to open access for scholarly communication. I’m pleased to say that they worked with OCLC as they thought about the terms under which the release would be made. Although Harvard Libraries did not ultimately accept our recommendation about the ODC-BY license, the approach chosen by the Harvard Libraries takes into account some of the primary aspects of OCLC’s recommendation.

Specifically, our discussions acknowledged the Harvard mandate as well as what was most important to the OCLC cooperative – receiving attribution and making others aware of the cooperative’s norms and expectations of one another in regards to data derived from WorldCat. And again I’m pleased to say that our Harvard colleagues took the cooperative’s desires into account. The dataset is being released subject to the Creative Commons Public Domain designation (CC0) but Harvard requests that subsequent use provide attribution to Harvard, OCLC and the Library of Congress. They also request that users be aware of and act in a manner consistent with the OCLC cooperative community norms and provide a link to those norms. We think this is a well-intentioned and executed compromise.

It’s true we don’t think that public domain dedications for data derived from WorldCat are consistent with the OCLC cooperative’s norms as expressed in the WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities (WCRR) statement, particularly at Section 3.B.5. We also recognize that the WCRR statement is not a legally binding document and that interpretations of these community norms within the cooperative may differ. Releasing data is ultimately the choice of the OCLC member institution as are the terms. Would other members of the cooperative consider the release of the Harvard dataset under these terms and conditions bad acting and a risk to the long-term viability and sustainability of WorldCat? Probably not, particularly with attribution, and awareness and responsible treatment of WorldCat-derived data being requested so prominently.

Our discussions and this outcome are evidence that interpretations of community norms within the cooperative may differ. The mandates of institutional mission, the imperatives of emerging local policy, national and supra-national structures may all contribute to a differing view and legitimately demand precedence. In our discussions with Harvard we acknowledged that their direction was their choice. Their mandates took precedence. They acknowledged the cooperative’s concerns and responded as a responsible cooperative citizen by requesting attribution, and awareness of and adherence to the community norms of the OCLC cooperative. The discussion was frank and mutually supportive. After all, OCLC like its member institutions is in the early stages of large shifts in data technology and policy. There are inevitable tensions and conflicting goods that will need to be reconciled over time. The process in which we are engaged will if we continue to work together with good will, ultimately lead to a new suite of best practices that balance the common good and institutional sustainability.

Image: Member of the Charles River Basin Community Sailing Club Enjoy an Evening Sail

I’d like to put in a plug for the next event for those who are in the OCLC Research Libraries Partnership, which is
Libraries Rebound: Embracing Mission, Maximizing Impact (June 5-6, Philadelphia). We are still confirming speakers but so far we’ve got a great line up of speakers — we’re also adding reactor panels, so check out the program now and in a week or two to see how it’s shaping up.

The meeting will focus on how libraries can more closely tie services and collections to the university’s (or parent institution’s) mission. In the midst of static or decreasing budgets, being able to demonstrate impact in the pursuit of the institution’s research and teaching goals is paramount.

The day and a half meeting will focus on three themes:

How library staff are working side-by-side with researchers in specific disciplines

How institutions are adapting special collection-building to align with high priority teaching and research focus areas

How libraries are using library space to forge partnerships with other units on campus

We’re fortunate to have some smart people from forward-looking institutions who will share their knowledge and experiences with us. And the conversation and discussion will definitely spill into areas beyond the three themes I’ve outlined above. Which is where you come in — we need you to come and talk about what you have planned (as well as to learn from your peers). Register now! Always free for those in the partnership.

Questions? Let us know. We always love to hear from you.