hangingtogether.org

There are precious few library speakers upon whose every word I hang. Call me difficult to please. But one person who has achieved that status is Prof. David Lankes from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. The dude rocks. And although he is a frequent speaker, including at the upcoming ALA Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, you don’t have to wait a single minute to hear him talk about some of his most important issues.

Last week I caught up with him virtually via Skype, and recorded him for our ongoing podcast series “What keeps you awake at night?” What resulted was a rollicking 25-minute romp through some fairly important issues for us all. Central to his theme was “raising expectations” — for ourselves, for our institutions, for the clienteles we serve. He also talked about making innovation a core part of what we do. To do this, he asserts, we need to create environments where taking risks and failing is OK, and he cites Seth Godin’s definitions for “mistake” vs. “failure”:

A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

Prof. Lankes covers a lot more ground than this, including a segment on “dead wood” in the organization, and much better than I can attempt to parrot back to you. What I’m trying to do, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is to intrigue you enough that you will listen to the whole thing. It’s only 20 minutes since I sped up the recording by 20%. Yes, we know your time is valuable. After all, you have some expectation raising to do. 

The US Copyright office has recently issued a paper, Priorities and Special Projects of the United States Copyright Office. The paper outlines some areas that the office will be working in over the next two years. One of these projects has already resulted in a “white paper” on the mass digitization of copyrighted books. Although this piece of work is receiving a lot of attention, I’m more curious about another strand of planned work, a study on a “small claims solutions for copyright owners.” From the paper:

Copyright law affords a bundle of exclusive rights to authors, including the rights to
reproduce, distribute, publicly display, and publicly perform their creative works, or
license others to do so. However, these rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced.
As the ease of infringement has risen, so too has the cost of federal litigation. At the request
of Congress, the Copyright Office is conducting a study regarding alternative means of
resolving copyright infringement claims when such claims are likely to involve limited
amounts of monetary relief.

[More information here]

I worry that creating a means to more easily sue for infringement will have a negative impact on institutions who are considering digitizing materials held in special collections, using a risk management approach (as described in the Well-Intentioned Practice document). Since the study won’t be completed until 2013, it’s too early to worry. However, it’s not too early to formulate a response! Those are due January 26, 2012, which is right around the corner.

As 2010 winds down, we are reflecting on what we’ve worked on or created in a mini blog series. You can see a run down of highlights here.

Is copyright making you blue
And you don’t know what to do
Take advantage of others’ tactics
And put in place Well-Intentioned Practice!

I want to give a shout out to the National Library of Australia for what has become an annual display of talent and imagination. Each year the staff performs for their holiday party, and they share with the rest of us on YouTube. The results are funny and toe-tapping. This year’s theme was Putting on the Writs,” an homage to the trials and tribulations of adhering to copyright law.

National Library of Australia. We feel your pain. And we’ve been moved to do something about it. In the US. For unpublished materials.

Following on the heels of Shifting Gears, we began to realize what a barrier copyright law presents to those working with unpublished materials. We convened an advisory group. We held an event. Out of this came a document called Well-intentioned practice for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online (we call it WIP). WIP encourages institutions to take a risk management approach (rather than apply item by item assessment).

WIP has been a success, and has been endorsed by numerous organizations and individuals. And we’ve just learned that we’ll have a session focusing on Well intentioned practices at the Society of American Archivists meeting in 2011. While WIP is based on US copyright law, as a risk management approach it may work in other situations.

We’ve written about WIP in the past. Here are two previous posts on this topic.

And if you haven’t seen it, here’s Puttin’ on the Writs in its full glory.

If you want to see even more of our accomplishments look at this summary of our accomplishments over the last five years. Only three pages!

The classical research library is, in some senses, a central part of the identity of the university as a university. Around here at OCLC Research, we’ve been thinking about challenges that research libraries face to develop new services that continue to function as infrastructure and centers for co-creation of research within universities. A new report from RIN – companion to our report on A Slice of Research Life by Susan Kroll and Rick Forsman – comments that sometimes Research Support Services in UK Universities (like in US universities) can seem somewhat marginal to university researchers. Ouch.

Both reports are short (under 20 pages) and both have one-page summaries. One conclusion shared by both reports is the crying need for expertise in data structure, management, and preservation. For example, in her recent presentation on the Slice report at DLF, Susan offered the example of researchers who report that they will repeat a prior experiment rather than try to retrieve older data. The DLF-goers just winced, knowing what Susan would say next: that the VP of Research was apoplectic when she heard that. All that research funding to duplicate research, for lack of data management? Ouch.

Both studies report on our greatest success central to the university as a university – delivering electronic journals. In the eyes of our researchers, we have significantly transformed their work for the better. Also, both reports point to the possibility that universities and libraries may not have to spend as much time and money to develop some services that we thought we ought to. Phew.

Our own John MacColl and RIN’s Michael Jubb are collaborating on an essay that will synthesize the results from these parallel interviews with top-notch researchers and their staff in the US and the UK. I’m looking forward to seeing what John and Michael think about similarities and differences in the views of exemplary researchers in exemplary universities on both sides of The Pond. I think there’s a lot to learn on all sides about the demand-side of information-related research support services, so watch this space.

Steve Fuller, a British sociologist of science, distinguishes the creation of knowledge and innovation in universities from the creation of education and making knowledge available. The latter, in which the library has played a significant role (with, say, e-journals), Fuller calls “the creative destruction of social capital.” If I understand Fuller (and Joseph Schumpeter) at all,  “creative destruction” is an advantage to society. “Creative destruction” is what research and teaching do – create new knowledge and make it freely available. Is it possible that universities and research libraries can continue to play a role in “creative destruction” by creating useful research support services? What do our researchers use now, and what do they need?

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