The long hiatus has two sources. First, it was a busy year - it was the Year of Tenure, during which my focus was on evaluation, preparation of my tenure portfolio, and deadline-meeting. Such activities occupied quite a bit of my time; time I could not spend updating the Logical Operator.

In the end, I did receive tenure. I will be a fixture ’round here for quite a while, I hope.

However, more influential in my lack of effort has been the fact that I’ve felt like I had little to say. The controlled chaos of the past year left me feeling greatly out of the loop in the field (not only had I not had time to write for my blog; I had no time to read other blogs or really much of anything), and the mechanics of the tenure process left me without focus.

So, for the…two? three? readers I may have, this isn’t an attempt to make excuses, but more of an explanation: I did not have much to say, so I chose not to say anything. Better be thought a fool, and all that.

Overall, I’m pleased. Really pleased, in fact - it’s made creating online tools for the students I teach whys and wherefores of library research dramatically easier and faster, and the fact that LibGuides handles layout and design means that I no longer have to write* CSS to make my web things pretty.

I mentioned in my last entry that the sessions I taught using LibGuides page like this one have been far more successful and engaging to students. The pattern has held - my most recent victory was for a class in research analysis and design for psychology students, and the guide is seeing a lot of hits. My Industrial Psych guide is far and away the leader, with hundreds of hits since I taught the session, and the professor there asked if he could make it a core component of the course from now until eternity (or, I suppose, until something better comes along). It’s working out nicely.

That said, LibGuides has its foibles. I wish the WYSIWYG editor was a little more robust; it tends to freak out on me every so often and dash headlong into the weeds. I wish the layout/color schemes were a bit more flexible and a bit more “aggressive” - pale, gradient fills and gentle shades are a huge Web 2.0 thing, but sometimes I like my colors not to be tentative, rounded, and weak. Sometimes I want the kind of colors that brought terror to coastal populations for centuries.

Sometimes, I want Viking colors.

But those are extremely minor quibbles. In fact, the one thing that gives me real pause as I create more LibGuides is that there is less and less original content going into them. Since LibGuides lets you link to other content you’ve created (thereby fulfilling its essential function as a content management system, of course - why write three copies of the “How to Find Journals” FAQ? ) I end up linking to guides I’ve previously created more frequently than I end up writing new sections.

In fairness, a lot of the information I impart to a psychology class about the way the library works does not change when I speak to a biology class, but after an initial barrage of content creation, each successive LibGuide becomes more an exercise in content arrangement than writing new things. Eventually, I’ll feel like there’s less of me in it, and although I’m not World’s Greatest Librarian, I do think my unique and snowflake-like viewpoint is occasionally useful.

In other news, we’re forging ahead with our Digital Repository project, comparing DSpace and Fedora in a cage match to see which one does the things we want a DR to do. The process is long. But there is progress, which is welcome.

* By “write”, I mean “hiss in frustration at”

• Who is this guy?
• What is that squirrel doing out there? It looks merry.
• When will this end? Oh god, this is never going to end.
• Where is the coffee shop again?
• Why is he still talking?

In all seriousness, the prospect of teaching a library instruction teaching fills me with the nervousness, because although I have done it many times, I remain acutely aware of two things:

1. Sometimes, you can’t make databases interesting, and
2. I have no real training in teaching, and I have bored students nearly to death in the past.

However, I have to say that this week has proven to be an excellent week for library instruction. I’ve done two sessions, which is actually a little ahead of the pace for the sciences (I advertise every semester, and the response rate is almost always great in the Fall, and weaker in the Spring; I generally do one session per week at most), and both have gone very well.*

I attribute it to changing the way I present the material (and to writing better jokes). Normally, I would handle the orientation session via a long PowerPoint slide show and some hands-on searching, but I think that PowerPoint knows how to cast Power Word: Stun ** - fire up PowerPoint, and the audience switches off.

The last two sessions, though, I’ve been playing with a new tool: LibGuides. The idea to do this was based on a discussion with JDupuis while we were at Science Online ‘09. He’d mentioned that he uses blog software to create pages for specific classes when he does library orientations, and I thought it was a great idea (and set about to ruthlessly borrow it. I feel no remorse). I used the LibGuides software because it’s designed to create resource pages, and I don’t figure reinventing the wheel is a good use of my time (besides, it probably violates a patent somewhere). So this is only an oblique advertisement for LibGuides (I may talk about what I think about it later, after I mess with it some more), but instead a reflection on the fact that this approach, for some reason, seemed to engage the students a little more readily than my standard spiel.

What I did for these to classes was to create a Library Guide for each class - they’re visible here and here - that tailored most of the details right to the course topic and classroom activities. Previously, I would hit the general area of study, and then jump into hands-on with the databases and journals the students would be likely to use. I also used to include information that I gradually realized was entirely uninteresting to the student. The life cycle of a scientific article may hold me in thrall like a viper, but I’m probably the only one. So instead of the normal stuff, I blazed through a verbal tour of the library and a brief discourse on our collections, and then jumped right to the library guide and how the students can use it.

And they liked it! I wonder if the idea that this guide was created for them, and them specifically, pulled them in little more deeply. Not to mention having an online tool that helps them penetrate the navigation scheme of the library home page and get right to the important stuff. This is not to say that the navigation scheme of our library home page is bad (it’s no worse than any other library, I suppose, which is damning with faint praise if I’ve ever heard it), but that a user still needs to turn on their library jargon filter to select the right path to the resources they need. The library guide, on the other hand, does away with some of the maze, and presents the things the student needs right up front. And it demonstrates that they have a librarian who cares enough to pull together the things they want in a format they can use easily, and wants to help them succeed.

Comments? Thoughts? Have you found ways to engage students? Do you use resource guides to guide your library instruction?

-Logical Operator

* They clapped. I was asked many questions. That is pretty rare.

** If there was any doubt that I’m a geek of the first water, I have dispelled it.

JoVE endeavors to be a peer-reviewed “journal” (those aren’t scare quotes: JoVE is very much not your grandpa’s scholarly journal), and already has a considerable number of videos. They’ve put a lot into it, too - arrangements with professional studios, assistance with scripting and storyboarding, the works. And the outcome is very professional.

Personally, I think it a rather clever idea. I’ve both used and, more painfully, written lab protocols, and for my money, I really would have rather somebody just filmed me. There are protocols that are “get it wrong until somebody shows you” difficult, and a movie might be an essential resource.

On the other hand, JoVE doesn’t look like a scholarly journal. I’m not clear (following an admittedly cursory inspection) how JoVE’s articles compare to a “traditional” article. Since there is considerable inertia (to put it mildly) in scholarly publishing - this thing doesn’t exactly stop on a dime - JoVE may face a considerable challenge in gaining acceptance if it doesn’t look like a typical journal. As mentioned by in a different session, there are places you publish and places you don’t, and your advisor’s advice may come down to the fact that they know how the system works and there is a way things are done. It doesn’t pay to underestimate “this is how it’s done” in any professional environment.

Scivee.tv tackles this from another angle - why not be the YouTube of scientific video? Conference speeches, experiments, slideshows (slidecasts, actually), spoken presentations linked to papers (nifty!), and even more things that I forget. As far as I can tell, these receive minimal review (reviewed for appropriateness and to avoid the Rickroll, but not peer-reviewed in a rigorous sense), but Scivee does provide an interesting resource of scientific information.

Scivee does not aspire to be a journal, with the scholarly cachet thereunto pertaining (and in so doing, probably dodges some of the obstacles JoVE will face). Instead, it’s much more of a social-networking, community-style resource. In it’s current incarnation, it’s essentially YouTube + Scribd + SlideShare…for SCIENCE!**

Again, I think it’s a neat idea. Not original, but in the realm of Web services, there isn’t much someone hasn’t thought of yet. My concern with Scivee lies not in the services it provides - pubcasts, slidecasts, and postercasts are neat spins on presenting scientific information - but in the business side of things. First, it is my understanding that a critical element of a web service is to target the right audience. I’m not sure who the audience for Scivee really is. “Scientists” is too broad. Second, what is their business model? How will they sustain these resources? I think it’s a good resource, but only if it sticks around.

So after all that, what do these new resources - or the idea of using video in scholarly literature - mean to libraries? Well, the use of video, sound, and images might be relatively new and contentious to the world of scientific publishing, but it’s old hat to librarians. I think we’ll take resources like these in stride.

* My goodness. Did I just reference Wikipedia? No cookie for me.

** I like to add “for SCIENCE!” to things every so often.

Okay, “barrage” is probably the wrong word. I don’t plan a Time-on-Target setup here. Let’s call it a series of posts, instead.

The premise of the session was to explore the use of science fiction in science blogs (hence the title), and it was coordinated by Stephanie Zvan. Stephanie kicked off the discussion (this is an unconference, remember!) by simply throwing out to the audience the question “so…what do you think of it? Using science fiction in your blog?”

The discussion freewheeled almost immediately, delving into such varied issue as how the change of one element of science - essentially creating an innovation via author fiat - is the key to exploring how a character develops, to the fact that much scifi that doesn’t actually have any structure, plot, or characterization, to the question of why it’s always gotta be space dolphins (or space cetaceans)*.

The freewheeling nature of the discussion left the original question quietly weeping in the corner for quite a while, until the facilitator brought the discussion back around to the central question: what about science fiction is or can be useful to scientists who blog?

When we refocused (it’s not hard to get scientists talking about sci-fi; it’s very hard getting them to stop) there were many interesting comments that came out. To list just a few (it went fast - keeping notes was not easy!):

• One ecologist said that the science in sci-fi is so bad, that the utility of it is driven to zero. There’s nothing of value in it to address their topic.
• Likewise, medicine sees so little medicine-focused sci-fi that there’s not much to go on
• Another suggested that credibility is at stake in science blogging - if you blog about science fiction, you risk looking like a lightweight.

Two comments stood out as very cogent comments on where sci-fi fits into the larger scheme of science blogging:

• One, scientists likely make allusions and references to science fiction all the time in their blogs - there is almost a cultural context that is assumed, in that you can reference Lovecraft and Heinlein and Asimov in passing**, and it is simply a subliminal nod. Science bloggers aren’t science fiction bloggers, so the science fiction that they deal with is only in the furtherance of their own point.
• Two, and this was probably the most profound statement of discussion, was that science is by its very nature an exploration of science fiction. Every single hypothesis made is, in effect, the creation of an alternative world that must then be tested.

Of course, for sci-fi authors, the testing side is not part of the process.

Other points to note:

• MIT Bookstore’s sci-fi section is not very good. What?
• If you want in to the Sci-Fi gig, and you don’t care how, shoot for a Star Wars, Halo, or Warhammer 40K gig.

* It’s because Space is an Ocean. Or maybe because space is, as they say, chock full of whales.

** Just use the words “eldritch,” “preternatural,” or “cthonic” in your post.

I plan to post a series  entries covering the sessions I attended (along with, of course, any other interesting things that popped up), and my reflections, thoughts, and mental perambulations from the point of view of a science librarian. I can’t promise that they’ll make you gasp in dawning understanding, but there’s some interesting stuff in there.

Stay tuned for more posts on Science Online ‘09!

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.

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.

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?

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.

2. The identity of “librarian” is itself in question - new technologies will require the reallocation of human resources, and in fact the authors suggest opening up the “professional ranks” to nonlibrarians, or, failing that, incorporate a range of new skills into library education (such as marketing). (p. 147)

I have my own questions about the value of calling librarianship a “profession” in the same sense that lawyers and doctors are considered “professionals,” as opposed to using the word to simply mean “job.” I don’t know what value it might add to actually being a librarian, for instance. Am I a professional? Is there an amount of magic dust embedded in my MLS degree that alters me fundamentally, so that I am a “professional?” I don’t know. I would prefer that librarians have an MLS degree, but I must admit only part of that is the fact that you do learn some useful library stuff on your way to getting that degree. The other part is selfish protection of the job market and hopes that the caché (chuckle) of the job isn’t diluted too much. I have to say, though, that adding marketing and business concepts to the MLS curriculum can only improve the quality of a librarian’s education.

3. The OPAC seems sorely lacking to users familiar with Google or Google Scholar. (p. 148) This is related to another comment about the nature of questions at the reference desk, which the authors suggest focus on the “…structural barriers that libraries themselves impose between the patron and the information, e.g., poorly designed and inconsistent computer interfaces, confusing buildings, and professional jargon…”(p. 147)

Ever since I started working at an actual library, I’ve thought that requiring a student to wade through dozens of unique (and complex) interfaces to do a thorough search of the library’s resources was tantamount to saying “we don’t care if it’s easy.” What student - with assignment deadlines, work, homework, and, frankly, a life - is going to want to sit through the painfully user-surly interfaces that so many databases provide? Especially when something like Google Scholar (for the sake of argument) exists. Scholar may not be the perfect system, but it shows it can be done. So my question is, why aren’t we doing it? I mean, let’s face it: I’m a librarian, and I don’t like using those interfaces. Why would anyone else?

4. Reference questions are decreasing in number, due to reasons such as changing curriculum (less focus on term paper, and more on group work), Web searches being easier and more convenient (though perhaps less successful), and competition from many different information sources (the library no longer being the sole, or even preferred, provider).(p. 149)

I mentioned in an entry a little while back that I thought the traditional reference desk setup was on its way out. In retrospect, I’m not positive that it really is, but I think there is so much more that can be done, reference-wise, that breaks away from the traditional mold. Of course, the fundamental aspect of reference work isn’t going to change: a patron asks a question, and the librarian answers it. But reference at a particular location or time is an artificial constraint, primarily (it seems to me) for convenience. Whither mobile reference? Reference podcasts or audio tours? RFID-based searching? (note, I’m mostly speaking in the context of my own library, as I expect some or all of those may exist at various libraries - in fact, if they do, let me know!)

I think the authors touch on but don’t examine the notion too that students are often quite savvy, and feel that they can handle anything the web throws at them without assistance. Students who are used to handling online searching all the time when they’re not in the library aren’t going to change their habits when they are, and start asking questions about manipulating our databases or other resources. They’re going to move ahead with the knowledge they already have, and if that doesn’t prove to work, then they might ask us. Or they might simply give up.

5. Competition is something to which libraries are culturally unaccustomed. (p. 146)

This is a very good and interesting point, and something I had not really ever considered. In library school, the entire focus was on the library - we did not discuss marketing or competition in any real way. It was as if such things were irrelevant or did not exist. Information vendors were generally cast in the role of providers to the library, and popular search tools were in fact sometimes demonized as inaccurate, non-authoritative, and downright dangerous for real scholarly work. Now, though, as the authors say, the library is faced with competition for attention from numerous angles, and, the authors contend, is showing somewhat poorly for it.

There are further discussions of library collections, and a suggestion that collection building was an anachronistic conceit (p. 150). The authors suggest a more dynamic digital collection, something that changes as the customer needs change, and consists of “rental” contracts that are frequently in flux. However, there is little attention paid to the question of preservation (that is, digital collections can vanish in an instant, so what means is there to have permanent information?) which I think is an oversight by the authors. As any archivist will tell you, digitization is an access mechanism, not a preservation mechanism, and Ross and Sennyey focus too much on the potential of a global digital collection approach and not enough on where the information goes when the hard drives fail.

Finally, the authors address the “library as place” question, which is fairly common in the literature as well. They challenge the accepted notion that the library’s physical presence is Important^TM (though they acknowledge cultural significance), and argue that the physical presence of the library is already changing because print collections are being used less and less, while other services: study areas, computer labs, and so forth - rise to prominence.

Overall, the article is well written, though at times it is fairly condemning of libraries (and I think a bit extreme in its assumptions that libraries have failed to embrace the new). The language is at times strong (one might say, “bracing”), and it may be somewhat too damning of the library. In large part I believe the authors have a solid point: there are a number of areas where traditional library practices are increasingly outmoded, and failure to perceive this means that disruptive technologies will put the library into a competitive tailspin from which it may not recover. Fortunately, the authors do concede that libraries doperceive the threat and are moving into the new technologies as quickly as organizational culture appears to permit.