Editor’s Note: A frequent source of grousing among those newer-to-the-profession academic librarians is that the “impending shortage of librarians” they heard so much about is just a myth. The shortage, no doubt, is predicated on the expectations that many senior members of the profession would soon be retiring. Someone who has closely studied employment and retirement trends among academic librarians over the years is Stanley Wilder, Associate Dean for Information Management Services at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. In this guest post Wilder shares some of his latest findings on how the economic downturn is likely to impact academic librarian retirement trends.

Can academic librarians afford to retire in the Bush recession? Already in April of 2008, the Wall Street Journal noted that declines in home values and the stock market were driving many to delay their retirements. This fall’s calamitous drop in home values and investment portfolios can only have reinforced this trend, and my informal canvass of academic library colleagues leads me to suspect that we are delaying our retirements along with everyone else.

Retirement is an unusually resilient cultural behavior, and largely impervious to routine economic fluctuations. The ARL demographic data are a case in point: the portion of the population aged 65 and older has been remarkably stable over the past 22 years (at about 3%), despite recessions in the early 1990s and early 2000s. The stability of this group is all the more remarkable in a population that has otherwise swung dramatically from young to old.

But the Bush recession is clearly not a routine economic fluctuation. What would delayed retirement mean to academic librarianship? The first to go would be the projections of the age profile of U.S. ARL librarians developed in conjunction with my two reports for ARL, which would become obsolete should retirement behavior change significantly. Next, it should be said that delayed retirements would not affect all librarians equally. For example, ARL directors may have already begun to delay: in 2000, 2% were 65 and over, jumping to 9% in 2005. In functional areas of the academic library, catalogers were not far behind at 7% but the impact is negligible on IT professionals, the youngest job category in the ARL data. And racial and ethnic sub-groups within the profession are effected differently. Delayed retirement would have less impact on African American librarians, an unusually young population, but Asian librarians are significantly high with 9% in the 65 and over category.

I have been saying that the anticipated shortage of librarians is unlikely, but a bad economy with delayed retirements would make it harder still to imagine generalized labor shortages in our profession. We are far more likely to see large applicant pools chasing a reduced number of openings. I suspect they already have. Finally it should be obvious that while retirements can be delayed, they cannot be foregone altogether, meaning that the inevitable youth movement may be more dramatic, if somewhat later than anticipated.

None of this speculation matters if academic librarians do not, in fact, delay their retirements. Until we have data to tell us what is actually happening, I would love for ACRLog readers to comment on trends they see in their own libraries or in their region. Have you heard of senior librarians planning to delay their retirements? Do libraries find themselves newly unable to fill vacancies, and has there has been a recent change in the quality and quantity of applicants for those positions they are able to post? Share your observations.

Many thanks to Stanley Wilder for sharing his observations on retirement trends in this contributed guest post!

Anne-Marie Deitering has a great post over at Infofetishist about the historical-hoax-as-pedagogy story that popped up in December. A professor at George Mason taught a course on historical hoaxes and had students create a hoax and spread it virally using social networking. It was so successful it fooled a lot of historians and got written up in USA Today before the spoof was revealed. According to the course website, “The purpose of this hoax was to spend time thinking about how easily information takes on a life of its own online, ethics in the historical profession, and the role of digital media in popular culture.”

Some people felt it was a great assignment for these reasons:

–It used social media for higher-order educational ends
–It involved students in original authorship with an audience beyond one teacher
–It asked students to be creative with their research
–It taught students to think critically about sources
–It was a lot more fun for the students than traditional research
–It got a lot of press and demonstrated the power of social networks to spread information

Others, including Dietering, were bothered by it. Here are some of those reasons:

–Putting false information on Wikipedia is vandalism and vandalism is wrong
–Deliberately creating an elaborate hoax violates established trust networks; this project gave the whole idea of trust among historians a big Bronx cheer
–It took an easy approach to inculcating skepticism. It’s not that hard to feel superior when looking at a hoax site. It’s harder (but a much more useful skill) to look at serious approaches to issues and analyze their arguments and evidence.
–It suggested that creating an elaborate lie is much more creative and engaging than historical research, which is boringly confined by facts

On the whole, I have to agree. You can be creative with history and invent events and people using historical information and learn a lot about history in the process. You can use social networks to expand your audience for your scholarship. You can learn how to be skeptical of hoaxes and appropriately critical of secondary sources. And you can do all that without concocting an elaborate “gotcha” in which the mechanisms of creative mendacity take center stage over doing history or critical thinking.

But Anne-Marie says it better than I could.

I just don’t see where the information literacy skills here translate into what most students need in their real work with online information sources. Increasingly, I just think that a focus on deliberate hoaxes isn’t a very good way to teach students how to evaluate information.

Now I get that the work done to create the hoax might give the students in this class a greater appreciation for stuff that could make them more information literate, and that knowing specifically what they did to create a fake site might give them some stuff to look for in other sites, but I don’t really see the larger benefit here beyond the reminder that stuff on the Internet can be fake and I honestly don’t think that our students don’t know that full well already.

Because here’s the first thing - helping students learn that there is stuff on the wild, wild web that was put there just to trick them, to punk them or to prank them - well, there’s not a lot of value in that. . . . Most people who put fake or wrong or misleading information out there on the Internet have an agenda beyond April Fool’s - they’re trying to do more than trick us and what our students need is help identifying those agendas. They need help identifying the information that isn’t flat out lies, but that is a particular kind of truth.

At its heart, I think information literacy is inherently linked to inquiry, and discovery. It’s about the ability to learn from information - not just to find the sources worth learning from but to use that new information to change the way you understand things, and change the way you approach the next question.

And yes, I get that she’s pretend, but the fictional process the real class came up with does suggest that historical research is difficult and tedious and one doesn’t make the great discovery by engaging with sources in an open-minded way. If the class had been engaged in a discovery-based research process I would hope that that would have come through in their fictional avatar’s narrative. It doesn’t. There is no doubt that this group of students were truly engaged - playing with history, creating a new world and the characters to fill it. . . .

If the skills they were learning were about creativity and world-building it seems like the resulting project could have taken the form of an ARG or a similar project where those creative muscles could be flexed in the service of creating a world for the rest of us to play in, too.

And that’s probably what bothers me the most. It isn’t that a fictitious version of reality was invented. It isn’t just that the implication is that history, done the way historians do it, is boring and lacks creativity, though that does bug me. It was the way it was marketed and performed, as if the real object wasn’t to learn how to be skeptical or to create something historically plausible, but rather how to pull off a kind of performative sleight-of-hand that would fool the most people and gain the biggest gotcha.

It seems to me we get a constant barrage of social media self-promotion and manipulation through the media; learning how to add to it doesn’t seem the most direct way to understand its impact, any more than doing something many would consider unethical (deliberately creating a hoax) is the best hands-on way to explore ethics.

photo courtesy of magic74

What Are the Top Academic Librarianship Strories in 2008?

We’d like to know what you think are the top news stories in academic librarianship for 2008. You can help us develop a post about 2008’s top news by taking our brief survey. There are just three questions. We’d also like to know what your crystal ball is showing for 2009.What are you hoping will happen or what would you like to see? Like all of our other surveys it’s totally anonymous, and there are no incentives or prizes. We hope you’ll complete the survey because you like us.

Any Point In Giving Directions?

Planned a library program lately in your city or region? If so, did you think it necessary to give directions to the program location? It just seems sort of pointless to give anyone directions these days - especially to librarians who ought to be super skilled at finding information on the Web. For one thing, most academic institutions - just about any organization or business these days - provides directions to their location - by car or public transportation. Even if there were no directions, you can create your own using any of several map services available on the web. And then again, GPS navigation is become more and more commonplace. Many of us have GPS on a phone or a portable device (my GPS is my favorite e-device). One scenario for when advance directions could be useful is if the program is in a hard to locate building on a large campus. For example, if I’ve never been to the Columbia University campus before, knowing how to get to the right building can be useful. Then again, is there a higher education institution without a campus map on their Website?

Did ACRL Know?

ACRL apparently showed good foresight in choosing Dan Ariely as the speaker for their President’s Program at ALA 2008. Did they know that Fortune Magazine would name Ariely as one of their “10 New Gurus You Should Know?” Ariely’s big idea is that people are predictably irrational. Thanks to ACRL we academic librarians already knew that.

Gadgetary Hopelessness

Just got my latest Time Magazine - the “List” issue - after all lists are now the great American pasttime. They are impossible to resist. I am sorry to report that I don’t own a single gadget on the top 10 gadget list. Unfortunately no GPS device made the list. Guess GPS is either too mainstream or no longer cool. And there’s no way I’m going for the 65-in. television. If I had one of those I’d probably sit in front of it and never stop watching. I’d probably never write another blog post again - no time. I know that may sound tempting to some of you, but try to resist the effort to take up a collection to get me that big screen TV.

It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in trouble. Circulation of print editions is way down. Advertising revenue is even further down. And Tribune Co. just declared bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor recently announced it would publish only one print edition a week. Nearly every newspaper is struggling to transform itself for an online world where the next generation seeks out its news. The prognosis for newspapers is not good. That’s too bad. I depend on many different newspapers (mostly the online editions) for keeping up to date with higher education. So many different newspapers around the country are constantly reporting on local and regional higher education news and events. Some report on national trends. Both the Chronicle and InsideHigherEd develop many of their articles from news originally reported in metropolitan newspapers. For example the Chronicle recently reported on faculty who were concerned about students using ChaCha’s answer service for cheating. That story first appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer (and the Chronicle’s article referenced it).

But all newspapers are not created equal. When it comes to reporting higher education news some are better than others. In the past it was not uncommon for metropolitan papers to have dedicated reporters for education or possibly just higher education. In today’s environment that would be a luxury for most daily newspapers. However, some daily papers are real standouts when it comes to reporting higher education news. In this post I share some of my top picks for reporting higher education news. My top five are:

The New York Times - Perhaps no surprise here. The NYT consistently delivers articles about higher education, from breaking news about issues such as student loans or the latest trend on campus to more unique stories about special higher education programs or institutions with unique students. Their regular Education Life supplement has no equal.

The Boston Globe - When I’m on the lookout for stories to add over at Kept-Up Academic Librarian I will always take a look at an article from the Boston Globe. This paper provides excellent coverage of the higher education industry in the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts, but it also is a great source for news about national developments and trends. This paper will have several articles about higher education in any given week. For example, it recently reported on how second-tier IHEs will be pursuing students in China to bolster their enrollment. The Globe is one paper that still has a reporter, Tracy Jan, who follows the higher education beat.

USA Today - Some of you may not equate this paper with stellar reporting but it certainly does a good job of staying on top of trends in higher education. USA Today may also be the front runner when it comes to offering a series of stories on a particular trend in higher education, and it occasionally offers some pretty decent investigative reporting. For example, USA Today recently examined institutions that improve their athletes GPAs and graduation rates by putting them into special majors populated largely with easy courses that provide the athletes with no marketable skills.

Philadelphia Inquirer - While its higher education reporting is not as strong as the above papers I think my local paper has definitely improved its higher education reporting over the last few years, especially since they eliminated their education beat reporter a few years ago. Sure, this paper tends to have a more regional focus, but occasionally it will report on a trend I haven’t seen reported elsewhere. Or it might have a series of reports that is supplemented with a variety of multimedia. One such example is a recent series about high school seniors and their college application experience.

Washington Post - The Post has been a consistent performer over the years although I have noticed a decline in the number of higher education articles being reported in the last year or so. But like the NYT, the quality of the reporting is always high, and the Post may be the best at reporting on how higher education is faring on Capitol Hill. The Post is perhaps the only other paper besides the NYT that has a higher education supplement for higher education, and their education columnist Jay Matthews will occasionally focus on higher education.

So those are my favorites. You may disagree with some of my choices. There’s no question that a few other papers also do a good job of reporting about higher education. The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor are all quite good. Even the Wall Street Journal has turned into a pretty good source for higher education news since making more of its content freely accessible. If there is any one concern I have about the ongoing availability of higher education newspaper content it is that more papers may choose to allow only their subscribers to reach full-text articles. Let’s hope the trend is towards more access to full text. But just to be on the safe side, when you find a good article you will want to visit again, consider saving it to something like FURL just for safe keeping.

If you are a regular reader of the Chronicle and InsideHigherEd that’s a good way to keep up with what’s going on in higher education - and as academic librarians shouldn’t we be well informed about the news of the day for the industry in which we are employed. Just paying attention to what’s going on at your campus without putting it into perspective of the larger picture may simply leave you with too narrow a vision of where academic librarianship fits into the overall higher education enterprise. As it was so well stated in the introduction to the recent CLIR report No Brief Candle: Reconceiving the Academic Library for the 21st Century “the future of the research library cannot be considered apart from the future of the academy as a whole.” Fortunately there are some excellent resources beyond the Chronicle and InsideHigherEd that can help you develop a regular feed of news and information about higher education developments at the national, regional and local levels.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just issued its third annual forecast of “The Future of the Internet.” It’s well worth a read. Among predictions:

–The mobile phone (or its descendant) will be the primary access point to the Internet by 2020.
–Social networking won’t increase tolerance. It might even polarize people into less tolerant camps.
–The original architecture of the Internet will not be replaced, but will be enhanced by research.
–Attempts to control access to content will continue to be challenged in an ongoing battle between intellectual property owners and users.

I’ve been thinking about this last point quite a bit since the Google settlement. I was very struck by a comment made by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, interviewed in the Mercury News after the deal was announced. He accused Google of breaking the model of the Internet, “trying to build a walled garden of content that you have to pay to see.” My first thought was “our libraries are full of enormously expensive walled gardens.” How did we let that happen?

How many of you realize that the Harvard Business Review articles that are in your databases can’t be used in course reserves or printed out and shared with a class (or even, technically, made assigned reading)? Just look at the fine print: they are licensed “for individual use” of the library’s authorized patrons and are “not intended for use as assigned course material.” You can’t link it in your syllabus or in course reserves. For that, you have to pay all over again. (Thanks to members of the Digital Copyright list for noticing this weirdness.)

I recently reread Rory Litwin’s 2004 essay on Google and the Monetization of libraries, and found it very thought-provoking. But it’s not just the Googlization of libraries that worries me. Are academic libraries building collections for the future and for all to use, or are we content to simply rent access temporarily for a limited audience? If we won’t stand up for free and equitable access, who will?

To be sure, we’ve partnered with scholars to push for open access, particularly to STM research. But I’m baffled when libraries pay money to subscribe to commercial versions of public databases like PubMed, ERIC, and NCJRS Abstracts, teaching our students to use interfaces that we think are better, but which they can’t access once they graduate. Lifelong learning? Pfui. Free to all? Feh.

When did we decide libraries are no longer a commons but a go-between that rents temporary membership in publishers’ walled gardens? Did we even notice?

Some quotes from the Pew report are worth thinking about.

“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don’t know who will win.” danah boyd

“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one’s real-world surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one’s online clan.” Jim Horning

“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting and defenseless consumer.
Governments will be strongly influenced by the business conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous rates charged by cable and phone company
TV providers and wireless phone providers today—it will only get worse.)” Steve Goldstein

“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world.” Dan Lynch

“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and manipulation will have largely disappeared.” Nicholas Carr

“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns, hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for market feedback.” Tom Jennings

If that’s the Internet in 2020 - where will libraries be? Will any of our traditional library values remain intact?

photo courtesy of expatriotact, shared via Flickr’s creative commons pool