As an aside, do publishers seriously expect people to purchase articles for $12, $25, or $35 a pop? Really? They have not met my patrons. But I digress.

I was coasting along in blissful ignorance until I got this guest post from our occasional correspondent from Bowling Green State University, Amy Fry. I have a feeling JSTOR will be getting a lot of feedback on their “improvements.” Here are some thoughts to start the conversation.

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What Were They Thinking?
Amy Fry
Electronic Resources Coordinator
Bowling Green State University

Today is the first day of the new semester at BGSU, and also the first school day of the new JSTOR interface.

What were they thinking?

JSTOR began life as a journal archive, but librarians have long treated it as an all-full-text, all-scholarly database for journal literature. While its search interface lagged, with limited options to weed out unwanted items or zero in on the most relevant results, its content was stellar, and librarians felt confident promoting it to students as a reliable place to find full-text scholarly sources. As a result, JSTOR has a strong brand not only with librarians, but with faculty and students at all kinds of institutions. Those days appear to be over, at least for now.

Last year, JSTOR embarked on a “current scholarship” endeavor, which allows libraries to use JSTOR as a portal for current subscriptions to some titles. The interface upgrade that went into effect this weekend was meant to support that program. But now that the upgraded interface is live, I can see what this means for JSTOR libraries.

JSTOR has added several confusing layers to its formerly reliable content archive that are guaranteed to confound the most experienced JSTOR user. The search screen contains two limiters – “include only content I can access” and “include links to external content.” The first is unchecked by default and the second is checked by default. This guarantees the broadest journal searching in the archive, but it also means that, after doing a search, users at many institutions will see three kinds of results – ones that are full text, ones that give citation and “access options,” and ones indicating there may be full text on an “external site.”

These last are the “current issues,” and have appeared in JSTOR search results (for titles in libraries’ subscribed JSTOR modules) since last year. Clicking on one of these in the results list shows its citation, abstract and references. Since we have enabled openURL on JSTOR, it also shows our openURL button (which will allow users to link to full text or interlibrary loan). Next to our openURL button, however, there is a box that says “you may not have access,” and to “select the ‘article on external site’ link to go to a site with the article’s full text.” Nowhere on this page do I see an “article on external site” link, but at least the openURL button is there.

The real problem is with the other articles – the ones that only offer “citations and access options.” These are articles from the modules of JSTOR to which my institution does not subscribe. Formerly, articles from non-subscribed JSTOR modules did not even appear in my institution’s JSTOR search results. This was certainly preferable to how these are handled now: now when users click on them, they see the first page of the pdf and have the option to show the citation information, but at the top of the screen is a yellow box containing the text, “You do not have access to this item. Login or check our access options.” Clicking on “login” takes users to the MyJSTOR login screen which asks for your MyJSTOR username and password or gives users the option to choose their institution from a list of Athens/Shibboleth libraries. Clicking on “access options” informs the user he or she must be a member of a participating institution, links to a list of participating institutions, then gives the user the option to purchase individual articles or subscriptions. Worse, newer articles display a price and direct link to purchase the article right next to the first page of the pdf.

Nowhere on this screen do users have the option to use openURL to link to full text or interlibrary loan. In effect, JSTOR has pre-empted library subscriptions to current content for links to purchase articles directly from publishers. For example, if I found an article from The Reading Teacher in JSTOR, I will see the option to purchase it, but be offered no other way to access the full text. If the openURL button for my library appeared there, I would know that my library has access to this article in half a dozen other databases and I would never have the need to purchase it.

Academic librarians at institutions like mine – non-Athens/Shibboleth, non-full-JSTOR-archive subscribers, can expect to get a ton of questions now from students. Expecting JSTOR to be (at least mostly) full text as it has always been, these students will log in upon accessing the database (if they are off campus). When they find one of these “access options” articles in JSTOR, they will try logging in again, then, when that doesn’t work, they will look for our institution in the list of Athens/Shibboleth institutions. Then, if it’s an article they really want, they will call or IM the library and explain that JSTOR is asking them for a login, which will be a troubleshooting struggle as this usually only happens when students try to access JSTOR from Google or Google Scholar. In the worst-case scenario, they will waste their money on content we already purchase elsewhere. In an even worse worst-case scenario, they will abandon JSTOR as another confusing and misleading library website and turn to other sources. Students are not terribly likely to purchase individual articles – they are more likely to move on and try to find something that is full text, even if it is less relevant. This may turn out to be a boon to EBSCO, but it’s going to frustrating as hell for libraries, and could turn sour for JSTOR.

JSTOR apologists will no doubt point out that individual users can change their limiter options on the initial search screen and search only content that will give them full-text results in JSTOR. But they will only do this if they understand what “include only content I can access” and “include links to external content” mean and, despite the explanatory text linked to the latter, I am not even entirely sure what these mean. Is “content I can access” just my institution’s JSTOR modules, or does it include “current issues” links for titles in my institution’s JSTOR modules, and, if so, are all of these indeed titles I have full-text access to through my institution’s current subscriptions? Good question. Do the “links to external content” mean just current issues and, if so, are they current issues for just titles in my library’s JSTOR modules, or for those in all JSTOR modules? I have made notes to ask JSTOR these questions when they get back to me about why the heck my openURL button doesn’t appear in results with the other “access options” for articles outside our JSTOR modules, but most users don’t even realize JSTOR has modules, and likely will not be able to understand what these two limiters mean, even after they’ve done a search.

So, what is JSTOR thinking? It seems like they are trying to move the archive towards being an expanded content platform in order to become an expanded platform for discovery, but have skipped some vital steps along the way. Let’s not forget, JSTOR has no administrative module, it has certainly not fully implemented openURL (as this platform upgrade shows), and though it does offer COUNTER Journal reports, it still offers no COUNTER-compliant statistics for sessions and searches.

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I think Amy has nailed it by describing this as a fundamental shift from journal archive to “discovery platform.” I don’t know how your users will respond, but I predict mine will be confused and unhappy – at least until they get the hang of manually selecting “content I can access” every time they search. (There is no option for libraries to set that as a default.) Much as I respect JSTOR, I’m not looking forward to the questions we’ll be getting.

What do you think?

Illustration courtesy of autumn_bliss.

Of the scenarios that the majority of the respondents thought were both possible and likely to happen sooner rather than later, the likelihood of disruptive cyberwar, cybercrime and cyberterrorism was among the top four. Any one of these different forms of cyber attack has the potential to cripple a largely digital academic library operation.

The same week the 2025 report was issued, MIT’s Technology Review for July/August 2010 featured an article on the dangers posed by cyber warfare:

Ingenious solutions are multiplying, but the attacks are multiplying faster still. And this year’s revelations of China-based attacks against corporate and political targets, including Google and the Dalai Lama, suggest that sophisticated electronic espionage is expanding as well. “What we’ve been seeing, over the last decade or so, is that Moore’s Law is working more for the bad guys than the good guys

So what does all of this mean for academic libraries? Clearly we are poorly positioned, as are our institutions, to have much impact on the growing possibilities for global cyberwar. Even Google, with all of its resources, was breached by cyberattacks from China. Russia lives under constant threat of cyberterrorism from its enemies. The United States is taking this so seriously that it just appointed a general who will focus entirely on preventing cyber attacks and developing a strategy for engaging in global cyber warfare.

So at best we need to be aware and alert, and add this new and challenging threat to those other ones in our disaster plans. What would we do without access to our digital resources? How would we communicate with our users and each other? How would we support both on campus and off-campus faculty and learners if there was an extended loss of connectivity, files, networks or other essentials of our digital age? Just as with all those disasters for which we prepare in our plans, be they fire, floods or worse, we all hope they never come to pass. But be prepared we must.

Finally, the threat of cyber war and terrorism should bring attention to the value academic libraries provide to their communities as stewards of the print institutional collection and experts in locating information in those collective assets. The challenge of balancing growing print collections and diminishing space already moves us toward growing our digital materials. There are many good reasons to maintain strong print collections, and the potential for a total network collapse should remind us that doing so is just one of our many important responsibilities.

Steve Jobs once famously said of new technology, “You’ve got to have a killer app to succeed.” App is short for application, but he wasn’t referring to a software program, he was referring to the laser printer, which was what he felt would help the Macintosh computer succeed by making high quality printing available at a low price.

I work at an ARL library and we are currently investigating the possibility of “going social,” that is to say, adding social tools to our web presence to see if that makes it more appealing to the wifired-iphone-mobile-kindle-geolocated-always-connected-engage-me-or-I’m-gone generation.

Social tools aren’t exactly new to me – I’ve been on Facebook and MySpace, as well as some Musician-oriented sites (I am a composer) for a couple of years, but I haven’t tried to implement them in a traditional organization.

I’ve read Seth Godin and I think he’s on to something. He gave an example of how social websites can succeed by connecting communities to each other – threadless.com, which sells T-shirts. The company has no designers. All the shirts are designed by customers. Other customers come on to the site, buy the T-shirts, do reviews of them, make comments. Customers engage with each other to create the “experience that is threadless.com”

I recently discussed threadless.com with my assistant, a library school student, and we tried to think of how the model of connecting communities might apply to our website. But what communities? Subject Specialists with Faculty? Students with Librarians? All our answers seemed boring and pointless. Why would these groups of people care to engage each other through our web site? We couldn’t answer the question.

Then my assistant made the point that what is important to identify is not the communities, but the “thing” which connects them. In the threadless model, the connector is T-shirts.People like talking to each
other about the designs. It was interesting to them. So we began looking at social sites of all sorts of different types to see if we could find the connector and determine what was interesting about it. And we found it over and over. On Couchsurfing.com, people around the world offer their couches to people who travel around the world, saving hotel costs. The site features a world map with pins in it wherever a couch may be found. Travelers and Couchsters discuss the travel and the aspects of the city the couch is in. On Flixster.com, people discuss and rate movies. On Ravelry.com, which is about knitting, the customers trade knitting patterns. On 43Things.com, people select life goals like “buy an electric car,” or “get rid of unnecessary possessions” and connect and talk to each other about them. The point we took away from this investigation was: find something that is interesting to people and they will connect to each other using it, the “Killer Connector.”

In an academic research library setting, what could this be? We first thought of books, but that felt very”1.0,” so we put that aside, at least for the moment. The ideas we came up with were – major, class, professor, location in the building, research topics. In the case of the major – would students in the same major want to connect and communicate with each other about their major? Would faculty use it to connect to students? Would a subject librarian who advises on the major be able to share research ideas or otherwise advise students through the major? Would librarian faculty liaisons connect with faculty through the major? We had similar discussions about the other ideas. One idea we dismissed was clubs – we figured the clubs would already have made use of Ning or Facebook or some other social tool and we didn’t want to compete with that. Our idea had to give our users something they couldn’t already get elsewhere and were unlikely to build on their own, a sort of “procial” network – a professional network for discussing and enhancing the academic experience, but with social aspects.

Our discussions about seeking the “Killer Connector” continue. Soon we’ll be talking to the students and seeing what they think.

Other articles we ran across in our travels which we are also considering:

http://mashable.com/2009/09/15/social-news-sites/ (strategies for maximizing visibility and usability of social tools on your site)

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/5-steps-to-building (how to build your social experience so that people will want to use it)

Special thanks to Jacqueline Carrell for her contributions to this article.

I have to admit that I’ve never been a fan of many of the generalizations about millennials and their technology skills. I’m fairly tech savvy despite being nowhere near college age, and many of my colleagues are, too. I also know many folks my age and younger who are reluctant (and less savvy) technology users. In my experience interest is a far more accurate predictor of technology adoption than age. Our students are familiar with the tech tools they use every day–cellphones, text messaging, social networking, etc.–in the same way anyone can grow comfortable with repeated use of common technologies.

However, I’m not surprised to see the reports that current college students are much less tech savvy than the digital natives moniker so often used to describe them would lead us to believe. I’m sure this is familiar to many of us from our interactions with students, whether at the reference desk, in instruction sessions or elsewhere in the library. Somewhat more disturbing (though not entirely surprising) are the results of Hargittai’s research which reveal that skillful use of the internet tracks closely to socioeconomic status.

Academic libraries have widely adopted new technologies across the spectrum of our services, and I see these reports as encouragement for us to continue along that path. For students who are tech experts, using current digital tools is a way to connect with them where they are and to make them aware of our resources and services. And for those students who are less comfortable or experienced with technology, the library can help expose them to these new technologies and the many options for their use. But I’d also caution that we can’t let the new sweep away the old quite yet. They may be old-fashioned, but there’s still a place in our libraries for posters and handouts alongside those newcomers Twitter and blogs.

Back then, I would say that Kim, who is a Senior Learning Technologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover NH, was a relative unknown to academic librarians. As we head into 2010, that may no longer be the case. In his role as the learning technology blogger over at Inside Higher Ed, Kim is becoming more familiar to the academic library community, especially after two columns that raised some questions and controversies and got quite a bit of feedback and attention from the academic library community. While Kim took a few shots from commenters who might have thought we’d all be better off if Kim stuck to what he knows best, I have to praise him for stimulating some conversation between our two camps. If anything, Kim’s posts about academic libraries show how much we still have to learn about and from each other – and that there are great ideas to be shared.

Creating better communication among and collaboration between academic librarians and instructional technologists was one of the original motivations for the Blended Librarian concept. In the original article laying out the six principles of blended librarianship, number five speaks directly to this goal:

5. Implementing adaptive, creative, proactive, and innovative change in library instruction can be enhanced by communicating and collaborating with newly created instructional technology/design librarians and existing instructional designers and technologists.

In one of his posts Kim did his part to encourage his colleagues and other academic partners to do something that librarians have had little success with – getting our non-librarian colleagues to spend more time listening to our conversations and learning about our issues. Kim recommended a number of resources to follow for keeping up with academic librarians. I hope it will create some change and encourage more interaction between librarians and educational technologists. I thought I’d return the favor by sharing some resources I find useful for keeping up with learning technology, and encouraging academic librarians to follow them:

Educational Technology is a good filter blog for keeping alert to the latest developments in the field. It provides just a few headlines each day so it certainly doesn’t overwhelm. At times more of the posts are K-12 oriented, but even those items report good new technologies.

EdTechPost is perhaps a better example in that is more like the traditional commentary style blog with a mix of pointing to new resources and practices and sharing thoughts about them.

One of the better blogs for keeping up on the latest developments in learning technology, which more opinion making if you like that sort of think, is Stephen Downes’ OLDaily.

If you like the occasional post on how technology is impacting writing rhetoric take a look at Kairosnews. I’ve been following this one for years now and it’s helped to understand some issues our writing colleagues encounter.

Sure, Campus Technology is a more commercial publication, but it’s a good way to find our who’s doing what with technology at different college campuses. You may even learn about some new technologies coming to the campus.

What else? Too many to mention. I spoke with a few other learning technologists to find out what they use to keep up. What I found interesting is that many routinely follow resources that cross boundaries – not just educational technology blogs and newsletters. Most mentioned subscribing to a variety of RSS feeds from EDUCAUSE and you could start by following a few of their blogs. Others mentioned participating in webcasts by fellow instructional technologists, vendor webcasts and following #edtech group on Twitter. While there are still a number of valuable journals in the field, such as On The Horizon (I follow TOCs for a number of these), I get the sense that our learning technologist colleagues pay less attention to them.

I think Josh Kim’s posts do help to create better bonds between academic librarians and learning technologists – or to at least get us asking each other questions. When we do get together it’s a combination that is sure to contribute to the academic and research success of our faculty and students. I’m not sure whether this post will reach many learning technologists, but perhaps ACRLog readers can share it with their colleagues at their institutions, and ask them what resources they use for keeping up with learning technology. It could be a simple way to start the conversation. If you hear of any good resources, share them in a comment.

Discovery services, as you can imagine, were a big topic at ALA Midwinter this year. EBSCO discussed their new product at both the LITA Electronic Resources Management Interest Group on Friday night and at their own Academic Lunch on Saturday; Cal State Web Services Librarian David Walker discussed them at the LITA Top Tech Trends forum on Sunday, and my own ALA committee, the RUSA MARS Local Systems & Services Committee, hosted a discussion forum about them on Sunday afternoon.

These services were born in response to librarians’ exasperation with isolated content and disappointment with federated search technology, as well as the continued realization that our students want the library to work like Google. But according to Senator Joe Lieberman, libraries are not alone: the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs not only recognizes a similar problem in intelligence databases, but is saying the same thing: Why doesn’t it work like Google?

Wednesday, January 20, 2010, on NPR’s Morning Edition, Lieberman told Renee Montagne what librarians have been telling each other about students for years. “I’m concerned that they [employees of the National Counterterrorism Center, in this case] don’t have the easy ability to draw linkages between the various databases.” He continued: “when we go into Google…Google immediately searches an enormous number of databases. It’s not clear to me that, at the National Counter Terrorism Center today, if you put in the name ‘Umar Farouk’ or even Nigerian it will automatically cross-search all the intelligence and law enforcement databases it has. I want to find out whether that exists, and I’m afraid that it doesn’t.”

Montagne couched this as a “computers” problem. “Is that computers?” she asked. “Is that, literally, you cannot go in there and put ‘Abdul Farouk, Nigerian, Yemen’ and…bring everything together?” Of course, saying it’s a problem of computers, or even one of search, simplifies it greatly. It’s a problem of not only bringing together, but accurately searching, de-duping and ranking results from databases designed on different platforms using different descriptive standards (from bare-bones MARC to full-text and everything in between) to fulfill very different information needs (think MEDLINE versus Web of Science versus MLA). It’s also a problem of getting information providers to agree to work together, especially when doing so potentially violates their core business, which is to provide value-added, premium information at a price. EBSCO’s Sam Brooks described the problem well when discussing vendor efforts to get indexing services to agree to let products like EBSCO Discovery Service and Summon (Serials Solutions) search their full files, not just the top layer of metadata. His description (which ended with, of course, his telling us how using EBSCO solves this problem) brought home the complexity of this endeavor and how far, with so many information providers working at cross purposes for profit, we probably still truly are from that one Google-like search box, despite all vendor claims.

So far, I haven’t heard anything negative from libraries about discovery services, and user testing at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and Dartmouth College (as described by our panelists, Cody Hanson, Frances McNamara and Barbara DeFelice) was, also, largely positive (while pointing towards directions for refinement). David Walker cautioned that the true measure of these products remains to be taken, but I am cautiously optimistic and very excited – as long as libraries and vendors (like our law enforcement agencies) can keep our shared goals in view.

In this respect the even more recent fallout between EBSCO and Gale over mainstream magazines is disheartening: with each telling such different stories I fear that we will never learn the whole truth. Will “one search box to rule them all” become “one vendor to rule them all”? It seems contrary to the spirit of cooperation that the library community has fostered since books were unchained centuries ago, but the true measure of this possibility, like that of discovery services, remains to be taken.

Amy Fry

While it’s only in the prototype stage I think there is some merit to Google’s “Living Stories” approach to real-time information. For now there are just a few stories that give you a feel for the design and intent of the service. In a collaboration with the New York Times and Washington Post (content providers), Living Stories provides a constantly updated news feed for a single topic. Each topic features what I’d best describe as a faceted search so that it is fairly easy to focus in on one aspect of the topic or a type of content, such as video. I don’t know where Google is headed with Live Stories, but I would certainly hope that in the future they add a category for higher education. I can visualize it as a powerful way to stay frequently updated on a particular higher education issue.

Another area in which the real-time web is creating some waves is in social networking. Mashable reported on the top five real-time web trends in 2009. Both Facebook and Twitter will be stepping up efforts to improve the delivery of real-time web content. Though folks are still trying to figure out how to use it, Google Wave brought real-time technology to our conversations. Could these various technologies will converge and bring about improvements for each service provider? Another trend that is shifting user expectations is the customizable homepage. If you use Netvibes, iGoogle or Pageflakes you know it’s easy to install any number of widgets for receiving real-time web reporting. Netvibes is taking this a step further with Wasabi, a version that delivers real-time content from any number of sources with no need to refresh. Savvy web developers are already adapting to the real-time web by creating sites that can be rapidly updated or changed to reflect current news and trends as they happen.

It’s not yet clear what advances in the real-time web are in store for 2010, but academic librarians may want to follow the developments closely for signs of how user expectations may shift in response to a growing world of real-time news and information. For more of an introduction to the real-time web concept and what it could mean for academic librarians see this ACRLog post.

Margaret Soltan, English professor and the venerable curmudgeon of University Diaries, links to a student’s blog to show how PowerPoint enables and encourages shoddy teaching.

Fellow English professor Alan Jacobs agrees, pointing to students’ sense of entitlement that results from PowerPoint.

Jonathan Rees, professor of history, puts the blame for bad presentations on textbook publishers.

Historian Timothy Burke defends the judicious use of PowerPoint, with suggestions for using it well.

Chad Orzel, a physicist, ponders how best to use PowerPoint, for both in-class lectures and later review.

Physicist Julianne Dalcanton offers a neat tip to solve Chad’s dilemma.

And English professor Scott Eric Kaufman lightheartedly warns of the dangers of putting students in charge of PowerPoint.

What are the benefits and pitfalls of using PowerPoint for library instruction?  How can you integrate it with other presentation tools?

The new ECAR study on students and technology has just come out (thanks for the tip via Collib-L, Bill Drew!) and as usual, there are interesting findings. Nearly 90% of students come to college with a laptop now, and an even higher percentage of them use the library’s Website at least once a week. That’s a higher percentage than those who download music or videos (86%). Update: Bernie Sloan at Collib-L points out an interesting tidbit from the report: “…the percentage of students who reported using the library website daily has increased from 7.1% in 2006 to 16.9% in 2009.”

Texting and use of social networks are nearly ubiquitous, but instant messaging is dropping, which has interesting reference implications. The number who report they contribute content to the Internet through videos, wikis, or blogs is under half, and when asked about their use of these technologies for academic purposes, the percents drop into the single digits. Sorry, blogs and podcasts – they’re just not that into you. But they figure they know their way around searching. Eight out of ten say they’re proficient Internet searchers; about a third say they’re experts.

One finding that hasn’t changed much over the past few years – students don’t want a whole lot of technology in their courses. About 60% prefer a “moderate” amount of technology; only a small percentage wanted no technology, but they outnumbered the even smaller percentage that wanted their courses delivered entirely through technology.

In their responses to the final open-ended question of our survey, students wrote explicitly about a preference for “real books and people” and said “shiny new tech is still no substitute for well-trained, passionate instructors.” Of the many comments expressing this sentiment, perhaps this one sums it up best: “There is still a big disparity among academic staff when it comes to use of IT in class. Some professors are obsessed with their technology and some don’t like to use it at all. There needs to be a balance between human interaction and IT-based learning.

This is one of those studies that I read each year, a useful snapshot of emerging technologies and the role they play in the lives of our student. This one makes me think about ways to add texting to our reference repertoire, and reassures me that our Website is important to students. It reminds me that students thing they’re pretty good at searching and that I will need to persuade them they could be better. But it also reminds that these “digital natives” are not full assimilated into the Borg; they still prefer face-to-face learning with some, but not too much, technology involved.

CC-licensed photo courtesy of Frank Farm (frankfarm.org)

Prof Hacker publishes at least one new post every weekday featuring news, advice, and how-tos. Posts are short and accessible, and cover a wide range of topics. Some of my favorites so far include:

• A couple of posts about using and managing course blogs, including a review of the pros and cons of group vs. individual blogs and thoughtful discussion on evaluating and grading blog posts. Great comments, too.
• A timely entry on managing stress over the course of semester (timely for me, at least, since it was published on the first day of classes at my college). Great advice that’s worth saving to reread on the first week of every semester.
• One professor’s report on using iPod Touches in a class he taught over the summer. This one seems especially relevant for librarians as we investigate ebooks and the various ways that they (and other library resources) can be accessed by students.
• And if you miss something and need to catch up, each week there’s a handy week in review post drawing together all of the previous week’s entries (the week I link to was particularly full of great posts).

Definitely a valuable addition to my feedreader. What blogs/sites are you reading this semester?