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This is my blog on library and information science.
Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
Any opinions expressed here may not even be her own and certainly do not represent those of any organization willing to be affiliated with her.
Where am I?
February 8, 2010
Category: Information Science • information policy • information retrieval
A brief note. Remember when I told you about free to you research databases? Remember when some other librarians told you about a certain company negotiating for exclusive access to certain popular magazines, choking out other aggregators? Well, now these two things have something in common. Ebsco.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 10:19 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 7, 2010
Category: Information Science • scholarly communication
At the PSP Pre-Conference (see my notes), Dr. Harley of the Higher Education in the Digital Age program reported being surprised by their finding that young scholars were unwilling or unlikely to experiment with new scholarly communication (tools/practices/channels). There was a question from the audience that showed the person's disbelief of this finding. No matter how many times this myth is debunked, it remains firmly entrenched. Here are some variations on it:
As you can probably tell, this is very frustrating to me. There are lots of articles reinforcing that it's not just a matter of time, technologies are incorporated into scholarly communication depending on the needs of the particular research area [1 is an example]. Articles on the adoption of electronic journals in science basically showed that even though these platforms have the potential to be much more, they were only accepted in some fields when they were an electronic reproduction of the print.
Likewise, as Bohlin [2] and Walsh and Bayma [3] point out, the adoption of the pre-print server only happened in fields where there already existed a culture of sharing pre-prints (Harley's study also discovered this - and I think it surprised them, but note the dates on the articles). Even though researchers in less developed countries have greater access to open access journals (presuming that bandwidth is not limiting, only money for subscriptions and also presuming that they are not taking advantage of programs to provide subsidized or free access to the least developed countries), they don't seem to publish more there nor do they seem to cite these journals more [4]. (also, universities in some countries require PhD students to publish in one of a set of journals on a list - so this may not include newer OA journals)
There are many, many, many articles describing both the diffusion of innovations in general, and the diffusion of communication technologies in particular (see my comps readings). One of the things that shows up in all of the successful theories is some version of compatibility (relative advantage is also pertinent here). The new innovation has to be compatible with the old way of doing business, or have such a great advantage that it's worth doing everything differently.
The most relevant analysis of this issue comes from Covi [5] as she debunks the myth of the Nintendo generation. Incidentally, I'm of that generation and I think people making the statements above have already written us off. She says the myth goes like this:
...electronic communication technologies will transform university research practices chiefly by the mechanism of doctoral students (presumably people of the younger generation) entering the profession who are more comfortable and skilled with technology than their advisors. This argument is based on several subclaims:
1 Doctoral students are more comfortable and have greater skills with electronic communication due to early exposure.
2 Doctoral students have a greater incentive to introduce transformative work practices because their training requires them to find and make unique contributions to their research disciplines.
3 Doctoral students have more time to experiment with electronic communication technologies and new work practices.
4 Doctoral students are less conditioned by years of working in established ways and are thus more apt to try new work practices.
5 As doctoral students graduate and move into faculty positions, their use of electronic communication will transform university research disciplines.
She interviewed doctoral students and their advisors (in 1995). A lot depends on how much the discipline is open to doctoral students trying new things. She uses the classification high/low paradigm and high/low resource. In high paradigm fields there's more of a consensus on theory and the appropriate methods for problems. Students in low paradigm, high resource fields were most free to experiment. In high resource and high paradigm fields like microbiology, students basically did what their advisors did - no stepping outside of the box. Advisors in molecular bio assumed that their students would have "greater exposure, and thus ease in using electronic communication technologies" - but they didn't. Also they tried to curb the enthusiasm of students who did want to explore new technologies. In low paradigm disciplines, some students used new technologies to differentiate their research from their advisor's.
She found that "early exposure to technology was not a sufficient condition to utilize electronic communication technologies in research work" and
"doctoral students were still beholden to the existing values of what constituted a disciplinary contribution that did not change as quickly as new technologies became available. Skilled doctoral students might develop new electronic communication resources and services for their disciplines, but they were not rewarded unless the paradigm for work in their field would recognize the activity as a unique contribution."
I recommend reading the whole article - there are lots more findings that are interesting, useful, and very much still relevant.
So, it's not just a matter of time, and it's not just a matter of those kids today. New researchers have to be conservative at least until they get tenure. Even with tenure, playing by the rules is rewarded. Old dogs do learn new tricks, and they are often the ones who bring in some of these technologies.
[1] Kling, R., & McKim, G. (2000). Not just a matter of time: Field differences and the shaping of electronic media in supporting scientific communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1306-1320. doi:10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1047>3.0.CO;2-T
[2] Bohlin, I. (2004). Communication Regimes in Competition: The Current Transition in Scholarly Communication Seen through the Lens of the Sociology of Technology. Social Studies of Science, 34(3), 365-391. DOI: 10.1177/0306312704041522
[3] Walsh, J. P., & Bayma, T. (1996). The virtual college: computer-mediated communication and scientific work. Information Society, 12(4), 343-363.
[4] Frandsen, T. F. (2009). Attracted to open access journals: A bibliometric author analysis in the field of biology. Journal of Documentation, 65(1), 58-82. doi:10.1108/00220410910926121
[5] Covi, L. M. (2000). Debunking the myth of the Nintendo generation: How doctoral students introduce new electronic communication practices into university research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1284-1294. doi:10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1045>3.0.CO;2-Z
Posted by Christina Pikas at 11:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 3, 2010
Category: Conferences • publishing • scholarly communication
These are a continuation of my notes. This portion has been transcribed from my scribble - I was sitting on stage for the second half of the day so live blogging didn't really seem appropriate :( If there is something wrong, not malicious, just bad handwriting.
Diane Harley, Senior Researcher and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project
She's an anthropologist who has long studied the issues around new technology for scholarship and teaching. She's not an advocate for any particular type of approach for integrating new technology. She looks at value systems and faculty behavior. They started this study because there was a perceived lack of willingness of faculty to change to new models. They had a planning stage and now the study. Both were qualitative, 50 interviews in 5 disciplines for planning and 166 in 7 areas of scholarship for the second. They asked questions about dissemination of research at various stages, sharing of information (in old or new media venues), public engagement, resources needs/uses... There are 12 disciplinary case studies. They studied researchers at elite institutions (all over the place, not just CA), of lots of different ranks. They also tracked online exchanges in blogs and twitter.
Nothing is free. Who pays for faculty and what is faculty delivering for the money? The salary pays for their time, grant writing, all of the things that go with research, writing (lots), dissemination, peer reviewing (internal for org, for gov't, for publishing). New media creates new costs. Access to scholarship is required, but is paid for elsewhere (by library institutional licenses). They want their stuff accessible to the right audience in the right timeframe. They want the highest prestige outlet possible (can each name the top 3-5 in their specialty) and they require peer review as a filter. They need credit and protection from being ripped off. Expect high production value, persistence, and back-end data support.
The researchers didn't bring up peer review, but the participants did. It's super important. Many worry that untested systems have inadequate peer review. On the other hand, if peer review is deeply embedded, they're willing to try new systems. They believe that new systems (with review) should go towards promotion and tenure. She was surprised that the younger scholars were conservative - not willing to experiment until they got tenure (oh, but see Covi (2000)). Reputation relies on publication but also on more informal dissemination channels like conferences and op-ed pieces.
Sharing depended a lot on the personality and traditions of the discipline. None share half-baked work with the public immediately - only with a trusted circle. The "working papers" are still read by others before being posted to Repec or Arxiv. In bio, there is no working paper culture at all (as with some other high competition and fast moving)
audience q1: conservative students? a: yep
q2: they want free? a: no, they expect it to be provided to them by libraries
q3: outreach? a: after tenure
My presentation:
Philip M. Davis, PhD Student, Cornell
He made a very complex argument using economics and the theories of intellectual property to really say that the whole metaphor of information as property doesn't work because it's not excludable, it's not scarce, it's non-rivalous (oh that's no the right word)... all that stuff. OA advocates frame their discussion in happy terms like open access whereas publishers use closed. There are 4 theories of intellectual property (I think he cited: Biagioli, M., & Galison, P. (2003). Scientific authorship: Credit and intellectual property in science. New York, NY: Routledge - but I'm not sure which chapter): utility, per(illegible - this is about creative expression), social planning, and labor. I'm going to dice this trying to summarize, but basically the information needs to be disseminated and everyone wants that, but the authors trade their effort and in return publishers provide registration - so this is really a labor argument (they should be paid for the value they add). OA proponents use utility and social planning arguments. These are really quite irreconcilable. Davis doesn't like FRPAA because it gives neither side what it's asking for. The public does not get immediate access and the publishers aren't fairly paid for their labor (if I got him right).
Kent Anderson, Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery
(boy do these folks move around)
He did a good job of summing up our talks.
One bit of discussion at the end was about publishing data and even if data that is incorporated into articles (like at OSA) needs to be peer reviewed separately and how that might be done. How publishers deal with large datasets - not as supplemental, but as embedded. Harley mentioned more about sharing data and I mentioned some things I'd heard.
Reference
Covi, L. M. (2000). Debunking the myth of the Nintendo generation: How doctoral students introduce new electronic communication practices into university research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1284-1294. doi:10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1045>3.0.CO;2-Z (wtf was wiley thinking with this crazy doi?)
Posted by Christina Pikas at 7:06 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Conferences • publishing • scholarly communication
I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010.
I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.
Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press
Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining. Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had 13k sales, but over 2900 titles had 10 or fewer sales, 940 only had 1 sale. They offer a lot of choices: hardcover, paper, pdf download, pdf chapters. Can read full text online (yes - this is much appreciated!). They've been posting images of book pages since 1994. Really helped printed book business but they were fax quality, so there were complaints.
Concern in 2001 that introduction of pdf would interfere with their requirement to be self-sustaining because the pdf could be a substitute for print. They did a study (eventual publication in Karman & Pope (2009) Pricing Digital Content Product Lines. Marketing Science 28, 620-636, winner of an INFORMS prize in 2007). How could they give stuff away. A-B groups. Give option at checkout - and then survey to see if pdf cannibalizes print or expands market. Print still strong - 58% offered free pdf took print. They modeled across everything - ended up charging for pdf. Some groups get pdfs for free (congress, their members, etc). Authors can subsidize free pdf by title (33% of potential sales - that % was developed by looking also at offline customers who might come online). They give free pdfs to developing countries.
Free pdf uptake is increasing dramatically (now at about 500k, 22k pdfs sold per year). Print is dropping, too, but that is partly due to the way their institution has changed business. They've been investing in more sophisticated online tools (some of which are really cool). They're working on more mobile formats (hopeful that newer options will be better at tables and graphs than current).
They are seeing increasing comfort with reading online.
audience q: if you're looking at giving away all pdfs, then what is your process or what have you determined about these other mobile formats?
q: how are you making up losses? a: we're cutting cost, we're not increasing revenue.
Jeff Shelstad (CEO Flatworld Knowledge)
They do higher ed - textbooks. They market to faculty - who have to, like in pharma, prescribe a particular book - and also students. First books published in March 2009 (they basically have 1 semester of results to look at). Open textbooks (attractive to faculty), student customers as king (unique), building a community around titles (social learning). He has to sign authors for new textbooks - can't bring a textbook over from another pub, they're all locked up.
Open - creative commons license (attribution - share alike - non-commercial). Open platform. Professor adopts a book, they create a unique URL for that class, and make the full book available by it. They sell students alternate formats - print is their biggest seller, it's all on demand, no warehouses, $29.95 black and white, $59.95 color (96% choose black and white). Sell print it yourself (chapter, $1.99, watermarked, not DRMd). Study aids.
(random question: I had to buy at the bookstore so NROTC contract would cover - can students who have books covered by some scholarship or other use these things? Never occurred to me before. - he did answer, they can put things in bookstores but the bookstores don't know what to do with them - need to go there for students on financial aid)
They hope they'll have sticky customers because their content will be there as they modify books to meet course needs. They do compete with free - speed of adoption, enables global spread, seems inevitable... 20 big enrollment textbooks now. 480 faculty adoptions in fall 2009. 175 new for spring 2010.
Have heard from community colleges in particular that students try to take courses without buying the books because they just can't afford them - so at least with these they have the content via online version.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 5:47 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 31, 2010
Category: librarians
There's a lot of discussion about women in STEM and business and the barriers they face (justifiably so!), but what about men in the "female professions"? Do they face the same glass ceiling?
It turns out that there's a classic paper on this that coined the term, "glass escalator." It is somewhat classic, so I briefly looked for more recent work that cited it to see if it had been debunked, but didn't find any studies that did not confirm the results*
Here's the citation:
Williams, C.L. (1992). The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the "Female" Professions. Social Problems, 39, 253-267. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3096961
In this article, Williams reports the results of a large qualitative study of men in Nursing, Librarianship, Elementary School Teaching, and Social Work. She selected a purposive sample of men (and some women who worked with the men, 99 participants total ) in four cities with contrasting proportions of men in these professions; i.e., high and low proportions. At the time this was written, the proportion of women in male-dominated professions was steadily increasing, yet, there was no increasing proportion of men in women-dominated proportions. In fact, the proportion of men in social work and librarianship was decreasing.
Prior to the writing of this article, there was this theory of tokenism: that the minority would face discrimination whether a woman in a male-dominated profession or vice-versa. Her results (and others found looking for disconfirming research) did not support this theory.
Men were given preference in hiring. Once hired, men were pushed towards administration roles, even when they stated a preference for staying in the classroom or library (children's department, especially). Being male provided an advantage in promotion. She quotes her participants:
I am extremely marketable because I am a man.
I've heard this from managers and supervisory-type people with men in pediatrics:
"It's nice to have a man because it's such a female-dominated profession." (p.256)
Occasionally there were policies against men being, say, kindergarten teachers. Also men had trouble becoming deans of social work schools, for example, because the larger institution counted on using that position to balance other departments.
A participant who was a librarian talked about a particularly close and genial relationship with the male professors at library school. Women who participated in class were excluded when the conversation continued in the office. Men get mentored more in female-dominated professions whereas women receive less mentoring in male-dominated professions. The men network better and this helps them, too.
In contrast, outside of work, the men got a lot of crap for being in these professions. There's a stigma. Men in teaching were accused of being pedophiles or that they couldn't get a "real" job.
I've noticed that there are more men in leadership positions in libraries and there are certainly more male library school professors than female. I suspect that not much has changed since this research was done. Sigh.
* That might be too many negatives - I mean that the citing articles provided confirmatory evidence. Someone who knows this body of literature might know how this study is currently viewed by experts. If you are that person, please pipe up and educate us.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 6:06 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 28, 2010
Category: librarians
I've only been a college student and grad student at one institution and I have to confess, the library treats students as second class citizens. Particularly technical services. When I mentioned in a sociology class that I am a librarian, a whole bunch of grad students piled on with complaints about interlibrary loan. One guy got only the second page of an article the first time he requested an article, then a completely illegible copy the second time, and then finally a whole copy the third time - after numerous e-mails and about 6 weeks. He kept asking because he didn't want to let them off the hook. I've had similar issues - after they send ARIST to off site storage and for other things. We were talking before class, so when the professor came in, he said how happy he was with the library and how the liaison for the department consulted with them on what to buy and so on. Sometimes the negative experience was with a student staffer and not even a librarian.
On the other hand, as a professional librarian, I have the pleasure to serve (at least) 2 engineers who got their PhDs from Virginia Tech. They showed up as power library users, asking the right questions, and giving immediate feedback when something doesn't work as expected. I've thanked librarians from Virginia Tech several times for these wonderful co-workers! I've also met scientists who immediately tell me how wonderful their liaison librarian is.
As a librarian in a special library, I work with professionals who had horrible experiences as grad students or undergrads and ones who had wonderful experiences. So winning back the first group is particularly difficult: they have no idea what we can do and they sometimes expect to be given crap for asking. if you're reading this, you probably turn out scientists and engineers in the second group, thank you1
As for the rest? Arrrrgh!
Posted by Christina Pikas at 7:32 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 26, 2010
Category: librarians • scholarly communication
Dorothea Salo reports that the scientists she spoke with at Science Online 2010 did not get why she was there or even why librarians would be interested in science communication. For some reason, I didn't get that so much, if at all, this year at this venue. Not that I haven't gotten that in the past. What happens now is a bit more interesting. Someone who doesn't know me either personally or through my blog will start down that direction, and someone else will say something along the lines: Oh, that's Christina, she's ok. This happens at work quite a bit, too. Huh.
This isn't exactly what I had in mind. I do know that people (and more so engineers and scientists) consult their friends first, then their files, then after trying everything else, consult the library. It's sort of the library/librarian as goalie metaphor (you know, 10 other people missed the ball so the goalie has to save it). Of course, many - if not most - give up before getting to the library. And then there's web search engines which may be before or after friends, I don't think the evidence has sifted up enough to determine that order (most of the studies were done prior to the ubiquitous web).
So one of my things is to try to get into the friends list. If not friend, then at least to make enough contacts so that the scientists and engineers I work with might think of me when they need information. I also hang out where they do on our intranet. I'm not concerned about the disintermediation thing - the scientists doing their own searching (Martin Fenner lists this as a threat). In my experience, there are always things that are too hard to find. There are also lots of scientists and engineers who don't have the time to keep up with the interfaces and ways to search or don't want to do their own searching and who will gladly use their money from contracts to pay my time. When they get a nicely formatted, pre-digested report back or even just an answer and a source- they're more than happy.
Unfortunately all of this didn't help at all when the leadership of my lab decided to do away with the physical library and the 30k books we had. When they cut 5 of our staff. Turns out that all of these friends and acquaintances were oscillating between being concerned about my future, concerned about who they would call if I got cut, and acting like I betrayed their trust by not successfully fighting it.
And so now that we don't have the whole library infrastructure - it's not a matter of calling the library for help, it's even more calling Christina for help. I do help, absolutely as much as possible, but this is not what I had in mind. YMMV.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 10:31 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 17, 2010
Category: Conferences • online communities
Dr Free-ride, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Isis the Scientist
SK – definition of civility at your site – if you want children to feel welcome, for example. You have to set the tone. Some topics seem more important to be civil about.
F-r - politeness or is it being a decent human – in philosophical circles someone may rip your heart out and jump on it in perfectly polite language – so it’s not just being polite. It’s more like taking each other seriously, assuming good faith, considering others feelings. Hard to engage when you don’t feel welcome.*
Hard to engage when you don’t feel welcome – language ( profane, technical, religious), composition of the community, am I being dismissed out of hand.
But respect doesn’t eliminate disagreement or hurt. Fundamental disagreements may surface, speaking up about experience may make you feel worse. Sometimes modeling good behavior is tedious – respect your own limits and interests – sometimes you just have to sit out of some
I - @sshats aren’t useful :)
Call to civility has been used to suppress/repress minority groups.
She likes definition: personal attacks, rudeness, aggression or other behaviors aimed at disrupting a community’s goals that lead to unproductive stress disorder and conflicts.
q to the audience – what stands out to you as uncivil?
difference between using naughty words within discussion vs. making a personal attack
audience – they work in Congo and civility is used as a tool of white oppression
Chafee from Duke wrote a book about the civil rights movement and about how civility was used as a tool of oppression
q: how do you control – can you control civility on your site, and what effect does that have on the discussion on the blog. F-r says she moderates all of her comments and she also sets the tone – she doesn’t seem to get the really serious trolls. Need to show your presence
S-k can’t be online all the time and there’s been a problem with commenters fighting each other and legal language ensuing.
I has some self policing among her commenters. She will ban someone who threatens physical violence.
q: what about ignoring them?
a: silence sometimes becomes assent and if you leave something unaddressed, it will scare other commenters away
q: we’ve been talking about commenters, what about blogger civility to civility
a: we conflate incivility with heated discussion.
q: if you meet each other f2f will you be more civil online
q: in the UK extremely tricky libel situation. Bloggers set policies – this is my house don’t pee on the carpet
“recreational outrage”, intimacy and distance
see the terrible bargain series of posts (here, I think) – how you can’t say things that need to be said in person because of social structures.
what if you’re not the person who can set the policies for the space? If you can’t set the policy about who can pee on the carpet. – there was then an extended discussion of the value of policies and whether they promote civil discussion or whether they are exclusionary **
from the audience – need a group of people who buy into a set of collective norms that work in that environment
* how much of SH’s comments on the OSTP blog prevented others from participating?
** there is research that shows that policies are helpful in creating successful communities – see Preece.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 2:32 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Conferences
Led by Maria Droujkova and Blake Stacey.
We started with a pretty basic discussion of how to show math on the web. I use the math sandbox on mediawiki and use a png. B recommends replacemath.js http://mathcache.appspot.com/static/docs.html – it also provides an alt tag that has the LaTeX in it. Sitmo – LaTeX equation editor is one M has had some success with.
Example – Radiometer – the very simple thing- requires very complex analysis using kinetic theory of gases… so visualization from Greg Egan.
B took a bunch of computers they bought for some unsuccessful physics education initiative and redesigned the first few courses to have a modeling and simulation problem that required the computers each week. This gives more of a real feeling for how physicists work. M makes the point that it doesn’t matter that it might be simplistic – the students make it themselves and it fascinates them. B shows an example using python which is quite easy to use (M says it’s like the new basic).
M went over her mindmap on Natural Math (see the wiki page). Need attention to how to learn math and the psychology of math, and things like science fairs for math – not with set problems to solve, but to set a problem and work it out.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 11:22 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
