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.

What about an open academic library? That’s not “open” as in “our library is open from 8 am to 10 pm today”, but rather the library isn’t open, so the users decide to create their own library and open it others who want what the library offers when the library is closed. That sounds sort of messed up, but that’s exactly what is happening at the California State University, Los Angeles, where budget cuts have forced the academic library to close several hours earlier than in the past. According to this Los Angeles Times article, when budget cuts forced the library to begin closing at 8 pm, the students felt left out in the cold. They needed a communal space for quite study, computer access, photocopiers, and those other amenities (e.g., printers) the academic library offers – and they wanted it at least until midnight. So these enterprising students created an open library by bringing their own chairs and tables, jerry-rigging some electrical power, and they were in business – and they set it up right outside the library and appear to be attracting some crowds.

The actions of the students sends a powerful message to the campus administrators. Academic libraries are sacred campus space that provides students with the facilities and amenities they need for learning. On the other hand it does raise the question of what our role is in supporting student success. If the students can create their own open library without academic librarians, what does that say about our added value? Many academic libraries already offer 24-hour study spaces that are either unstaffed or staffed only by student workers or security personnel. Academic librarians need not always be physically present to make an impact on student learning. And you can make the case that while the students are contributing the physical elements of the library, the academic librarians designed the online research environment that the students may use at their open library. There’s clearly more to the library than chairs, tables, and computers. And while the article doesn’t comment on it, there may be CSU, LA librarians available via chat or text message to help students at the open library. Librarians or library school students could volunteer to stop by the open library and offer their services.

The open academic library at CSU, LA is more about, as one student is quoted in the article, “resistance” to an administrative decision to close early. I suspect it isn’t the start of a trend. But there’s no question that the field of higher education is ripe for open initiatives, and with respect to the academic library – at least for its most basic physical study functions (books? media? students could bring their own and share them I suppose) going “open” is a distinct possibility. I think we would certainly want to support an open academic library. If MIT can continue to function as an “admissions” only, tuition-based university at the same time it offers an entirely open campus, then it seems the traditional academic library and its open counterpart could certainly co-exist.

That seems to have changed over the last few months. The Washington Post has definitely strengthen their coverage of higher education – although there is a not-quite-unexpected focus on the DC region. Two new blog/columns are helping the Post pack a punch. Daniel DeVise’s blog “College Inc.” is about the business of higher education – and I like that – but I think you’ll like it too even if business isn’t your thing. College Inc. is just solid reporting and commentary on new developments in higher education. And you’ll probably like the variety of the coverage over at Campus Overload, Jennifer Johnson’s blog covering life on campus. Both bloggers do a good job of picking up on new reports about higher education.

You can find all of the higher education news from a dedicated page on the Washington Post website.

But why are we only considering the role of the academic library as gateway, archive and buyer? I would argue this report needs to add a new dimension for faculty to consider – the academic library’s role as learning center and instruction partner.

A comment came from none other than Roger Schonfeld, who authors these Faculty Survey reports. In response to my post he wrote:

I’ve made a note of your suggestion that we add a question about the learning partner role should we pursue a 2009 faculty survey. Through other research areas and our affiliated organization NITLE, we have an ongoing interest in the support of teaching and learning, and these surveys could do a better job of addressing these interests.

That’s certainly not a promise, but I was encouraged by the comment. So how did Schonfeld and his Ithaka colleagues do in adding some questions for faculty about the library’s instructional role? I have yet to give the report an in depth reading, but I was pleased to see one chart (figure 9 on page 13) that asked faculty to rate the role of the importance of the library for “teaching support”. They write:

Almost three-quarters of humanities faculty indicated teaching support is a very important role of the library, while a notably lower share of social scientists and scientists saw teaching support as very important. Is this role really most strongly valued by humanists and if so why? Alternatively, is there some reason that perceptions vary so significantly? As numerous libraries have invested in building information commons over the past decade, are there alterative or additional teaching roles that would be valued by social scientists and scientists?

As far as I can tell – and correct me if you find otherwise as you read the report – there is nothing else beyond this in the report about the teaching role of the librarians. But when you compare it to the 2006 report, this is a nice step forward. I can only hope that Schonfeld and colleagues will work on developing a more robust section on the teaching and learning role so that we can also learn how faculty respond to our efforts, along with those sections on materials and scholarly publishing.

So how do we respond to the news in the latest Report that in some ways the library and librarians have a diminishing role for faculty across the disciplines? I’ve been sharing my ideas since the last Report on things we can do to put less emphasis on the “gateway, archive and buyer” roles on which these Reports focus. I think we academic librarians would agree that while those roles are all essential to how we support our communities, they are the passive ways in which we do so, and there is so much more we do – in an active way that is ignored by these types of reports – which are unfortunately the ones that get the attention of academic administrators. To get a sense of what I’ve been writing in response take a look at this and this – and heck – share them with an administrator so they know that we academic librarians are thinking about these issues and have lots of ideas for how we can be much more – when it comes to faculty – than just gatekeepers, archivists and buyers. Chime in on what you think we can do – and what you are already doing – to make faculty aware of how we can contribute to student learning and their research success.

Two last items:

1) What’s with IHE and the Chronicle. I thought it rather odd that neither article about the Ithaka Faculty Survey featured comments from an academic librarian. Excepting the IHE article offering a comment from Mary Ellen Davis of ACRL, you would think we have nothing to say about the report. Now maybe both reporters did interview academic librarians and the quotes didn’t make the editor’s cut, but I suspect there is diminishing interest in what we have to say.

2) This blog is one of the only ones I came across that mentions the Ithaka Report, but perhaps others will chime in on it.

–They spend a lot of time getting a grasp of context: the big picture, the words being used to describe what they’re investigating, what they’re supposed to produce as a finished product. (This, it seems to me, is particularly true of novice researchers – or any researcher who is investigating something they know little about.)

–They don’t report using searching Google as their first step in starting a research project; they consult course readings to get their grounding. (Google and Wikipedia come first for non-classroom research needs.)

–Most of them don’t seek help from librarians. They seek it from their professors. Only about 20% consult librarians, and that is most often for help with search terms and with finding full text sources already identified.

–They consistently use a limited number of sources and strategies based on what has worked before. In large part their problem isn’t finding sources, it’s limiting the number of sources available so they can complete a project.

–putting off research because of “library anxiety” seems to have been replaced by confident procrastination.

–In addition to Google, almost all students report using library databases. Databases are useful for locating credible sources, and credibility matters to them (though brevity is also appreciated); Google is helpful in understanding context and figuring out what those sources mean.

–Most students also consult the catalog as part of their research process.

–The traditional “research strategy” still found on some library websites – moving from general to specific by means of reference books, then books, then articles,then the web – bears no relationship to student research practices. (I can’t resist adding that I thought that “research strategy” was bogus twenty years ago.)

The authors raise some thought-provoking conclusions which mirror some of my concerns. Does the kind of work these students do using library resources contribute to life-long learning, or are they preforming tasks that will get them through college and then be abandoned? If they are taking their cues from faculty, shouldn’t we be sending cues to faculty? Maybe rather than providing library services most students find unimportant to them, we should spend more time working with their research mentors: their teachers.

More will be coming from this project – including an analysis of instructor assignments. Which reminds me – I’ll bet faculty would be interested in the findings of this survey. See if you can use a few nuggets from it to start a conversation.

photo courtesy of oceandesetoile and the Flickr Creative Commons pool.

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.

Power interviewed freshmen and sophomores at a small university in Maine both individually and in focus groups to try and unpack their knowledge about plagiarism. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), they don’t know as much about plagiarism as we may think (or hope). Power acknowledges that this aligns well with the results of previous studies, but her work reveals students’ perceptions of plagiarism in their own words, with fascinating results.

Power found that student responses to her questions about plagiarism fell into two main categories: agency and externalization. Most students expressed only partial understanding about what exactly constitutes plagiarism, especially regarding paraphrasing. Yet they were dissatisfied that many of their professors warned them away from plagiarism by emphasizing the potentially harsh penalties rather than explaining the nuances of academic writing. Students also noticed that faculty responded in different ways to plagiarism, which further increased students’ confusion. Ultimately, many students that Power interviewed expressed frustration at being required to play by the rules of the scholarly communication game without having had these rules fully explained:

It seems apparent at the college level at least, students see plagiarism as a bit of a power trip. Professors and college administrators seem to often tell students not to plagiarize, and warn them of the consequences, but these students don’t believe they do as well at helping students understand why not to plagiarize, or how not to plagiarize.

The other major theme identified by Power in her student interviews was externalization. Power suggests that because undergraduates–novices in the academic world–are unfamiliar with intellectual property, they view the prohibition against plagiarism as somewhat arbitrary. They often don’t identify a moral component to plagiarism, and don’t believe that there are consequences for plagiarism in the real world. And when asked why they shouldn’t plagiarize, many students in Power’s study replied that their professors needed to know that students had learned the course material rather than copying it from someone else.

Power concludes with suggestions for addressing plagiarism with our students:

We can’t assume a one-size-fits-all approach will work in preventing plagiarism. We must open wide the dialogue about power, judgment, and student agency. We need to improve our strategies for helping our students to discover the importance of intellectual property and the sharing and ownership of ideas.

Our students may be digital natives, but most are scholarly immigrants (at least as first- and second-year students). And as academic librarians, we have much to contribute to student learning about scholarly communication, intellectual property, and plagiarism.

The authors describe the way Oregon State University has adopted Boyer’s definition of scholarship – which embraces not just discovery of new knowledge, but application, teaching, and integration. After examining what librarians have been doing, they concluded the problem isn’t being productive, it’s explaining the “breadth and impact” of librarians’ scholarly work. This includes not only traditionally-published research, but additional modes of communicating ideas.

Blogs are vehicles to teach and communicate to both broad and specific audiences. Their format precludes them being taken seriously as scholarship in current tenure review processes, but their content often demonstrates engagement and suggests impact in ways rarely seen in the print library journal. This raises questions about the concept of format and vehicle. Expanding acceptance of new forms of communication along with reconsidering what constitutes scholarship will benefit librarianship as a whole. A first step is accepting open-access, peer reviewed journals as outlets of high impact and validity. The next step will be integrating non-traditional peer reviewed work such as blogs that have an active readership and generate comments and commentary.

The outsourcing of faculty evaluation by peers – relying on university presses and journal rankings to determine whether a colleague is worthy or not – has contributed to the problem libraries find themselves in: having to somehow fund access to a bloated body of research, much of which is only produced to gain job security. (Two years ago an MLA survey found a third of institutions required progress toward publishing a second book. This, when libraries’ budgets can’t keep up with bare necessities.)

Maybe in a backhanded way the work we do, documented in a way that people in other disciplines can understand, could provide a model for sanity.

CC-licensed image courtesy of Kristina B.

So given the similarities it is likewise reasonable to question if academic libraries will survive. What do we need to do to make sure that happens? Newspapers are getting lots of advice for what they need to do to survive in the 21st century. How well might that advice work for academic libraries? I wanted to put that question to the test, and had a good opportunity to do so when Vadim Lavrusik, a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, posted an essay on the “12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive” at Mashable.com. So let’s take them one at a time and consider how well academic libraries could implement these recommendations, or whether we are already successfully evolving in the Internet Age.

1. Put the Web First: Translated to libraries this point suggests we should emphasize connecting with our user community via the Web, and de-emphasize more traditional means. Reporters are still hired to emphasize reporting in print. Academic librarians appear well adapted to working with both electronic and print media. We seem to have already caught on to the importance of operating effectively across multiple platforms and media – we’re not hanging on to print as the holy grail. Then again, we don’t depend on print advertising as our main revenue stream.

2. Go Niche: Newspapers can’t be all things to all people, and neither can your academic library. Our advantage is that we know the specialists in our communities. It allows us to target the niche groups within our institutions, and deliver personalized services to them. This strategy may work better at smaller institutions, just as a community paper can go niche more so than a large metro daily.

3. Offer Unique Content in Print: Has the time come to stop collecting the most common content in print? Why are we still putting so much effort into collecting that which is easily accessible online? Newspapers are realizing that offering the same information available everywhere else is a losing proposition. It may be time to emphasize and promote those print collections not easily accessible elsewhere – and leverage them globally through resource sharing networks. Granted, newspapers are businesses and libraries are not. Should we stop subscribing to the local paper because it’s online and print copies are available for purchase everywhere? People expect their library to have a copy of the local paper. It’s a tough call, but tradeoffs may be necessary.

4. Librarians as Curators and Contextualizers: It was interesting to see the recommendation that newspapers should “verify what is real and what is not from all the information out there”. Isn’t that what we claim to help library users do? If that’s a survival strategy we need to get better at promoting what we offer. Newspapers are finding it tough to compete with the convenience and timeliness of online news sources – and the free factor. But newspapers still continue to excel in analysis and helping to understand a situation. Librarians can’t compete with the ease, speed, convenience and cost of the web as an information source. Like newspapers we have to capitalize on our ability to get people beneath the surface of any issue.

5. Real-Time Reporting Integration: Newspapers need to move more aggressively into real-time reporting because everyone can now report and produce news as it happens. Academic libraries need to integrate into real-time information exchanges and real-time networks to establish a presence and lay the groundwork for connecting with members of the user community – and many academic libraries are already moving into the Real-Time Web.

6. Start-up vs. Corporate: Is organizational bureaucracy overwhelming your ability to innovate? If so, you have something in common with newspapers. In the corporate model bureaucratic requirements make it difficult to be agile and able to shift rapidly to meet changing expectations. Like newspapers, if we expect to have a future, we need a cultural shift so we operate more like start-ups do.

7. Encourage Innovation: That goes hand-in-hand with adopting a start-up culture. Academic libraries need to create the workplace environment that encourages innovative thinking and action. Newspapers were slow to innovate and look where it got them.

8. Charging for quotes: This really doesn’t apply to academic libraries but I thought I’d throw it in the mix because this is a strategy that might bring in some additional revenue for newspapers, but ultimately could backfire and cause a real backlash in the global web community. It’s important to innovate and try new things, but we need to be mindful of how it impacts on the user community. The last thing we want to do is alienate them.

9. Invest in Mobile Technology: Newspapers are looking at how they can increase readership by getting their content on all mobile devices. Newspaper subscriptions via e-readers is one example of that strategy. No surprises here for academic libraries. We simply can’t ignore the importance of having a mobile presence.

10. Communicate with Readers: Newspapers that want to survive are doing all they can to allow readers to get involved and interact with journalists. The online New York Times prominently features selected reader comments. This is an ongoing challenge for all libraries. We have yet to find something truly compelling for our communities that engages them and encourages their online participation. Fortunately we do have other channels of communication to reach our user communities, and perhaps those will offer some opportunities for new forms of engagement.

11. Building Community: Newspapers are realizing it takes more than quality content. By creating real communities of engaged readers they build loyal relationships. That approach should pay off for academic libraries too. We need to continue to develop and maintain our physical communities and find ways to leverage technology to extend those communities into virtual spaces.

12. Pay Wall or No Pay Wall: This is the biggest issue confronting newspapers. Should they freely give away their content or put it behind subscriber-only walls. This is less of an issue for academic libraries. We’ve already put all of our valuable content behind walls that are for affiliates only. There are issues. Is the walled garden approach sustainable? What happens as more of our subscription content becomes freely available? Will we be pressured to accept advertising as a tradeoff for keeping subscription costs manageable? Like newspapers, we may have some real dilemmas to confront in the not-too-distant future.

While the comparison between the newspaper industry and the academic library is occasionally a less than perfect match, there are definitely some areas where we face similar challenges and opportunities. That means we can find good lessons to learn and work from as we try to re-think our services and resources to meet new expectations and user behaviors. Are there other industries we should be observing and seeking new ideas from which we can improve our own practices? I believe there are, and as I come across them I’ll continue to share what I learn here at ACRLog – but I hope you will help by bringing what you learn about them to our attention.

First Mondays (an excellent and long-established open access journal) has an article by Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman on “Reinventing Academic Publishing Online.” In a nutshell, it examines the fact that the “top” academic journals remain vested in a traditional system in which maintaining barriers and exclusivity because their exclusivity is perceived as rigor and therefore value. The higher your rejection rate, the prouder you are. But there are two mistakes academic publishing can make: publishing stuff that isn’t any good and not publishing stuff that turns out to be good. It’s the cost of the latter – failing to publish something innovative and challenging for fear it might be wrong – that these authors feel is left out of the equation.

These error types trade off, so reducing one increases the other, e.g., a journal can reduce Type I errors to 0 percent by rejecting all submissions, but this also raises Type II errors to 100 percent as nothing useful is published. The commonsense principle is that to win a lottery (get value) you must buy a ticket (take risk). In academic publishing the rigor problem occurs when reducing Type I error increases Type II error more . . . Pursuing rigor alone produces rigor mortis in the theory leg of scientific progress.

The authors point to the fact that the publishing industry essentially determines who is hired and fired in universities, which flies in the face of the mission we are supposedly on and the intellectual freedom that should enable our work.

When a system becomes the mechanism for power, profit and control, idealized goals like the search for truth can easily take a back seat. Authors may not personally want their work locked away in expensive journals that only endowed western universities can afford, but business exclusivity requires it. Authors may personally see others as colleagues in a cooperative research journey, but the system frames them as competition for jobs and grants. As academia becomes a business, new ideas become threats to power rather than opportunities for knowledge growth. Journals become the gatekeepers of academic power rather than cultivators of knowledge, and theories battle weapons in promotion arenas, rather than plows in knowledge fields.

The authors suggest that under the color of “rigor” this model sustains a system in which cross-disciplinary and innovative research is unwelcome. “As more rigorous and exclusive ’specialties’ emerge, the expected trend is an academic publishing system that produces more and more about less and less.” (And hey, it’ll make the Big Bundle even bigger and more expensive, therefore more profitable.) They think instead technology could offer ways to facilitate information exchange rather than creation of further citadels of isolated specialization. Paying more attention to the mistake of failing to publish something that turns out to be worthwhile will require the creation of a democratic open knowledge exchange which can better balance the equation.

The funny thing is that this tension has existed for a long time. Well before the Internet enabled the opportunity for fundamental change in the way we share research, both Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn described the delicate tension between maintaining an agreed-upon understanding by fending off crackpot theories and the need to allow something new to challenge the dominant paradigm. Both self interest and a more idealized notion of rigor conspire against innovation. What I find interesting about this First Monday article is the idea that our current dominant publishing model has let self-interest reign supreme, and that a new open model could let the more idealized urge to preserve that which is solid and true duke it out with ideas that challenge it. It could balance the risk/reward tradeoff involved in choosing what to publish and which questions to pursue.

By the way, what is your library planning to do for Open Access Week?

(Photo courtesy of rptnorris.)