The Logical Operator

The process of identifying the “right” digital repository software to implement at my university continues apace, with the most recent efforts surrounding a specs-level evaluation of six or seven systems (DSpace, Fedora, and so on) to see if we could identify showstoppers from the very start (either technical capabilities we know we want, or features “incompatible with IT,” as on might say). The evaluation was successful, in the sense that we’ve managed to narrow our pool considerably based on design, licensing, or other factors. We’re now faced with a more daunting task: we not only have to review what we can see of these systems in the wild - which amounts to little more than the front page and, if we’re fortunate, the ability to see public collections - but also dig into the systems to see how they work on the inside, and how people use them.

So, the question on my mind is: how exactly do we do that? Test installations are a must. We need to see the system in action, develop sample content to deposit therein, and see how many different ways we end up breaking the repository (or just being incredibly frustrated with it).

However, the software-technical side of the repository system is less useful for most of us than an understanding of how repositories are used, and in fact, if they are used. From the literature and from presentations, discussions, and my reading about institutional repositories, it looks like that “if” is a much larger concern than the implementation of something cool.

Of course, the larger point is that, assuming a certain level of functionality, the software really doesn’t matter (if you ask some of the experts in the field, there aren’t any good ones, anyway). We need to use something that will provide sufficient function and be acceptable to our IT services group. On the other hand, contributors to the repository may have a general interest in what it can do, but they’re only going to be interested to the extent that it does what they want it to do - as with most things, users will employ a satisficing process to evaluate this resource the same as they will any resource.

So if we are to seek out how repositories are actually used, what do we do? To whom do we speak? We hope to speak to repository coordinators / directors at other institutions, but I’d like to get into the user’s mind too, and get beyond the “obvious” use cases.

To that end, I hope that the repository coordinators at other institutions will point me toward some frequent users, but if any of my few readers do have further suggestions along those lines, I am most interested in hearing them. I have few preconceptions about this process, so I am as a blank slate.

Note: Roger Schonfeld, one of the authors of the study, commented and corrected some msiconceptions I had about the report. I’ve responded to him in the comments section - I’ll leave the original post unaltered, so you can see the context of his comments.

---

A recently released report by Ithaka - a nonprofit higher education and technology organization - discusses trends in the attitudes toward library importance, library role, resource format (electronic vs. print), and publishing method among faculty and librarians at various higher education institutions.

The report is interesting (I’m always interested in reports about how libraries are perceived), especially the section on attitudes toward library importance. The Chronicle of Higher Education, in the 8/26/08 issue, also commented on the report:

“Since 2003, faculty members across the disciplines have shown a marked decline in how devoted they are to libraries as information portals. Eighty percent of humanities scholars are still devoted to library research-although that may be not because they’re traditionalists but because they can’t yet get what they need in digital form. But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways.

That should worry librarians whose budgets are eaten up by high-priced science journals. What if the designated users of those materials are sidestepping the library altogether?”

-Howard, Jennifer. “FYI: Scholar’s view of libraries as portals shows marked decline.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/26/2008.

The comment is more interesting than the report (which is a bit dry). So, anyway, the alarms sound because the trend shows that libraries are becoming less important in as gateways to information in the eyes of faculty: they don’t come to the library anymore to begin their research; nor do they start their research in the library’s OPAC. In turn, this threatens the viability of “librarian” as an important figure on campus.

However, I don’t actually think this report actually says quite what the quote from the Chronicle claims. First of all, the questions don’t particularly focus on “devotion” to library research - I would find an unusual devotion to library research a bit odd, actually. What’s more, the Chronicle author (and the report itself) seem to use “library research” to mean “research done while sitting in the library.” It should come as no surprise that much library research is done while not at all close to the library; this remote access has been a service goal of libraries for a long time. It’s laudable that you don’t have to actually sit in the library to conduct research using its resources.

Second, if you consider Figure 5 of the Ithaka report, it illustrates that the majority (something like 70%) of research is started using library resources in one way or another. It’s simply that it is conducted remotely (in fact, the report points out that ultimately, resource access is often via the library’s license, but the search starts somewhere else) or it may not start with a “generic library resource” approach. Breaking this down by discipline provides some no-brainer info: science faculty, for instance, rarely start in the library or the OPAC when they begin research, but rather in a specific electronic database.

This is not a surprise: science research is almost entirely journal-based, and the best way to access them is by going to the specific database in which the journal is indexed. The OPAC offers little support to science research when it starts (save for, possibly, knowing what journals the library owns), and given that the resources are electronic, and online, there’s no reason to come to the library. On the other hand, humanities scholars often have a more monograph-based research mode, and so they’ll begin in the library or with the OPAC.

In any case, while I think the library may in fact be less valued as a portal to information, this does not actually make the library less of a portal. After all, as pointed out elsewhere in the report, faculty don’t want to pay for access to the resources themselves; that’s the library’s job. However, faculty do wish to enjoy library-mediated access to those resources (and they get it, often no matter where their search actually starts). To me, this blurs the (somewhat artificial) distinction between “gateway” and “purchaser.” Without the library’s license to the materials, access would need to be mediated via some other means (which the faculty are loath to do, and rightly so, because that stuff is expensive) - ergo, the library is the gateway to the resource.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they know the library is the gateway, and that is where the report, I think, is really going. I don’t dispute the report. In fact, I thoroughly believe that the perception of value is a real problem. However, I think it’s heavily related to visibility: we’ve become so very good at providing seamless remote access to resources that nobody realizes that the library makes it possible for them to use these resources.

I’ve been in the market the last few days for a web-based personal financial management tool. Managing bill dates, receipts, and so forth is an exercise in juggling and memory, and I thought a web-based solution might be optimal - my wife and I can both log in and update the accounts with our receipts, see where we are, how we’re doing compared to our budget, and all the other little things one likes to do. 

It has been an exercise in frustration, though. There are four tools I’ve looked at: ClearCheckbook, Mint, MySpendingPlan, and Wesabe. Of the four, only ClearCheckbook is a viable solution, and it is very primitive compared to the others.

This isn’t really germane to librarianship, as such, but here’s my superquick review of the systems:

1. ClearCheckbook: simple, clean, easy to use. Not particularly sophisticated. You create your accounts manually, input transactions manually. It does not connect to any banks or online services. You are required not to use any sensitive information - you call your checking account “Checking Account,” not “America Bank Account #123456789-0.” It supports expense categorization, simple budgeting, and reporting. Terms of use consist of 3 promises - they won’t sell your email (the only piece of personal info they have), and you in return won’t put any sensitive account data on their site, and you’ll use a good password. Otherwise, you’re on your own.
2. Mint: pretty, slick looking. Syncs with your bank accounts. In fact, you cannot create an account manually - you must let them sync to your bank accounts automatically. You also cannot add transactions manually - the only thing it does is pull down transactions that have cleared your bank and put them in. This means that, for instance, you can’t add a check you just wrote; you have to wait for it to clear before it shows up. Not terribly useful, in my mind. 
3. MySpendingPlan: would have been good, if not for the fact that it is absolutely littered with ads, offers, and advertising spam. Has a 7-step account setup thing (with interview questions like “when was the last time you evaluated your insurance needs?”) I wanted to use it but the sheer number of “free insurance quotes” and “looking to buy a home?” and vendor-linked shopping lists sent me on my way. It’s sponsored and paid for by the American Home Buying Association or something, so…
4. Wesabe: pretty, and has the interesting feature of building a tag-based aggregation of financial transactions (that is, you can tag a transaction with your own tags, and the amount of the transaction is aggregated with other similarly-tagged transactions from other users, which can let you know “is this amount normal” or “am I paying more than I should?”). Requires you to connect to your online banking services to upload accounts. Uploading doesn’t work - it’s clunky and broken. What’s more, there is once again no provision to enter transactions on your own - you have to wait until they’re downloaded from your bank. Not very useful. They do permit “cash” accounts to be manually created, though…I may go back and try that, because the aggregation features seemed nice.

So, enough about the tools - of the four, I choose ClearCheckbook, because banking info is sensitive, and I am in absolute control about what information I provide to the service. While I’m putting in transactions and such, I’m not required to put in passwords, expose account numbers, or anything like that. What’s more, it lets me put in transactions myself (like, say, transactions I just made). I don’t get the bizarre adherence to automation in that respect, to the extent that you are prevented from entering your own transactions.

And that made me consider an aspect of the “negative-click” repository idea that has been discussed previously. The goal was (to some extent) make repository contributions as effort-free as possible, by integrating all sorts of automated communication between various elements of the repository. However, there is likely a subset of users - or use cases - where the people making deposits to the repository want to have absolute control of what is added, how it is added, and how it is used. 

For example, if we look at it from a scholarly workbench point of view, we’re encouraging the use of the repository along the entire lifecycle of a piece of scholarly literature, including the sensitive early part where the scholar probably doesn’t want to show his or her hand about what research he or she is performing (for whatever reason: it’s sensitive, they don’t want to be scooped, whatever). For example, I’d love a tool that supported the process, but I have research papers in the works that I don’t really want to publicize quite yet. 

I see an (admittedly somewhat weak) analogy between this situation and the situation imposed by the financial management software mentioned above - if I want to add potentially sensitive or confidential data to a repository, I want to control absolutely what is added - I may not want it automatically tagged, uploaded, and connected to other similar research. I may want to simply have the data there, but avoid any really specific information associated with it - basically, make it something that only has meaning to me. 

This tends to fly in the face of some of the open-access goals of repositories, it seems to me. But if there is a goal to create a workflow-integrated repository with minimal effort, it strikes me as something that should be addressed. 

So, gentle readers - if I have any gentle readers of this post - what are your thoughts? Is this an interesting problem? Is it irrelevant to repositories? Is it simply so obvious as to not bear mentioning?

In the Journal of Academic Librarianship, v. 34, no. 2, Lyman Ross and Pongracz Sennyey write an article on the future of libraries in a changing technological milieu.

This is not a surprising topic - in fact, it’s a perennial topic in the library literature, to the extent that the first line of the article reflects that you can’t mention new or changing technology and libraries together without running afoul of somebody’s cliché. Still, this sort of article fascinates me as it falls in the realm of speaking the doom of libraries (doom here being “fate,” rather than “horrifying, fiery end” - that was handled in the last post I wrote about doomsaying).

Ross and Sennyey’s premise is to analyze libraries and their technological aspects through the lens of Richard Foster’s S-curve model (used to indicate the growth profile of new technologies, from early adoption to plateau and ultimately replacement by another “discontinuous” or disruptive technology). Foster’s theory suggests that in the face of a technology that is new and disruptive, most businesses will at first attempt to simply refine existing (and proven) methods. However, this sort of polishing only carries an organization so far, because while for a time, refined methods outperform new technologies, it’s like outrunning a toddler. Eventually, the new technology will get its feet under it and take off.

Ross and Sennyey argue that libraries are right now experiencing “diminishing returns as it continues totinker with its traditional protocols and services, while emerging technologies are improving at an exponential rate” (p. 145). I would argue that they don’t go far enough in their description of emerging technology: new technologies have surpassed traditional library methods in several areas of its mission, such as searching, resource discovery, and other areas.

Following are some of the notions in the article that I found interesting, and my thoughts. The relevant pages where these notions came from are listed as well.

1. People aren’t coming to the library to use it as a library anymore - they come for coffee, Facebook, and email. (p. 145)

I cannot argue with this; surveys here indicate that the primary reason someone crosses the gate is for the Java City coffee shop; second to that is (if I recall correctly) use of the computer labs. This may be an unavoidable consequence of offering such services, though. And, computer use for a relatively savvy user is often (from my limited, anecdotal observations) a rapid back-and-forth among multiple tools, web pages, and databases. You may Facebook or AIM, but in the moments between chat messages you’re hitting EBSCOHost or JSTOR to run a search. …Read more on S-curvy Libraries

Because my institution is somewhat of a “latecomer” to the institutional repository initiative, we have the advantage of seeing what has come before - unfortunately, much of what has come before seems to indicate that the “digital repository,” at least in its current forms (DSpace, Fedora, ePrints, and other dedicated “repository” software), simply doesn’t work.

Oh, it works in the sense that it allows individuals to upload materials to a centralized server and tag the contributions with metadata (allowing it to be searched and interrelated). But the problem - something discussed pretty much everywhere I see repositories discussed (there are many, many blogs talking about this topic: Caveat Lector, for instance; Peter Murray Rust’s blog; the Digital Curation Center) - is that these tools, despite their power, are simply extra work for the people who are supposed to feed them.

Digital repositories, ideally, are the place where university faculty, staff, and/or students can place their scholarly work so that others can find it and so the university can accumulate a large digital collection of the scholarly output of its employees. The catch is that these systems require additional work on the part of the faculty member to participate, and the consensus among those who have investigated such things seems to say that faculty researchers are willing to invest precisely zero additional work in contributing to a repository. The value proposition for the repository is simply not adequately made. The visible benefits of this outcome are many. The visible benefits of the investment are AWOL.

Recently, a couple blogs - Digital Curation’s negative-click repositories entry and Peter Murray Rust’s put it on the web discussion - addressed the fact that nobody wants to mess around with clumsy, user-surly, or work-added repository systems. The “negative-click repository” idea focuses more on the pure lack of interest in investing “clicks” in the process of contributing to a repository. Chris Rusbridge’s argument is the “negative-click” repository, a system that makes the process of getting material into the repository transparent (or nearly so) to the contributor. …Read more on More on Repositories