Paid Content has an interesting post today about why Penguin might have decided to pull its ebook titles from libraries. Laura Hazard Owen speculates that Penguin is retaliating against Amazon’s Kindle deal with OverDrive, that it’s worried about people checking out ebooks from libraries not in their geographic area (she claims to have 4 valid library cards for 4 different public libraries in 4 different places), and that it’s concerned that library lending will cut into sales. The latter is absurd, as the model of the public library buying and lending out books is more than well established!

There will be a lot written about the Penguin decision, both from the publisher perspective and the library perspective. What struck me about Owen’s piece is her calm analysis. What surprised me is her possession of 4 library cards.

The Penguin dustup also gives me the opportunity to give this blog’s readers a heads up that ONLINE will have a new columnist starting with the January/February 2012 issue. It’s called EBook Buzz and will be written by Sue Polanka, an expert on ebooks and blogger at No Shelf Required. In fact, her blog post yesterday on the Penguin situation lists several URLs where other commentary on the situation can be found.

I’m very excited to have Sue as an ONLINE columnist!

File under Dangers of Statistics. A Wall Street Journal article about Generation Jobless included an interactive table listing employment rates by college major. I sorted by employment rate and the resulting table put library science third from the bottom. The source of the data is the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. This morning, that chart was mentioned on the National Public Radio program, Morning Edition, but it said the source was the Census Bureau. Now I don’t doubt that Georgetown University got its original data from the Census Bureau, but I do wish that commentators, particularly those who are librarians, would understand the data better than those who give it a cursory glance and declare they’ve always wanted to be an accountant rather than a librarian.

Didn’t anybody wonder why international business was also at the bottom of the list? That would seem a growth opportunity for employment.

Astute readers will immediately grasp that this chart reflects employment rates based on Bachelors degrees. To land a job as a qualified librarian, you need a Masters degree. I suspect that the international business jobs go to individuals who’ve earned an MBA.

So, before we all join the lemmings decrying the plight of the unemployable
library degree holder, let’s recognize the basic flaw in the data. As with many statistics, understanding the wider context is critical to interpreting the raw data.

I contributed a blog post to SLA’s Future Ready project that was published on Sunday, October 2, 2011. I’m reprinting it here, but urge you to read the other posts at the SLA blog.

As we all strive for a state of future readiness—while recognizing that the future will inevitably arrive whether we’re ready or not—let’s not forget our past. I was extraordinarily fortunate to work for BankAmerica Corporation in my first professional position after earning my MLS. I became enthralled by the story of the founding of the library in 1922 at what was then Bank of Italy. (The name changed to Bank of America in 1930.)

The first librarian, K. Dorothy Ferguson, didn’t answer a job ad. She wasn’t promoted from within. She certainly didn’t find the position through Monster.com or CraigsList. She didn’t go through traditional channels for a very good reason. There was no job. There was no library. There was no bank employee thinking, “Gee, we really need a corporate library.”

It was Ferguson herself who created the job. She approached A.P. Giannini, the legendary entrepreneur who started Bank of Italy in 1904, and said, “To be a great bank, you need a financial library. Moreover, you need me to organize it for you.” He hired her. The bank prospered. She stayed with the bank until 1943, when she resigned to establish libraries in Africa and Asia under the auspices of the British government.

A strong advocate of SLA, Ferguson was the first president of the San Francisco Chapter (1924-25) and served a second term as president in 1938-39. She became national chairman of the Financial Group, which evolved into the Business & Finance Division, in 1927. On the job, she demonstrated strong marketing skills. By 1923, she had a regular column about the library in the employee newsletter, explaining how it could benefit bank employees.

Today, as we contemplate how to prove the value of libraries and information professionals, we try not to “preach to the choir” by getting “outside the echo chamber.” Ferguson, in the 1930s, was publishing articles in journals read by bankers, not librarians. Web 2.0? Obviously, Ferguson lived in a pre-internet world. But she continually stressed that library services were not confined to the physical premises of the library. She championed information sources beyond books and beyond the library’s walls. The library’s slogan—”When in need of data, consult our library”—resonates still.

The attributes I admire in K. Dorothy Ferguson are ones that I think make modern information professionals future ready. She was fearless, with a strong belief in her own abilities and convinced of the power of information. She seized opportunities, made her own luck, and creatively transformed her professional life. Future ready? Yes, she was. Follow her example, and you can be future ready, too.
You can read a fuller account of Ferguson’s career in an article I wrote to celebrate the San Francisco Bay Region’s 75th anniversary in May 1989.

Some things never change. The general public has no idea what librarians do. Nor do they understand that everyone who works in a library isn’t a qualified librarian. Although amongst ourselves, we talk about this, we know it’s much harder to get the word out to those who aren’t librarians. This Atlantic piece should help.

The author, Derek Thompson, who is on Twitter as @DKThomp, asked librarians to submit their views on what the misconceptions are about librarians, what they “don’t get about working in a library.”

I particularly like Librarian #2, who said “I do research, I teach classes, I catalog, I develop our collection, I work on our website, I fix computers. I am an aggregator, a citation machine, a curator, a specialist in whatever it is you want to know about.” Sounds like a solo librarian.

This is a fantastic opportunity for librarians to move outside the echo chamber and explain the many facets of modern librarianship. Atlantic is really widely read. I’d like to believe that ONLINE has the same number of readers, but I know that’s not true!

Not that librarians haven’t explained to non-librarians before what we really do, but it’s an ongoing activity, if we want to bring the perceptions of our profession into the 21st century.

I’m intrigued that, of the librarians who contacted Thompson, none mentioned the idea of embedded librarians, which I think will become more key to our professional advancement than ever going forward. I’m delighted that David Shumaker, the expert on this, will be giving a pre-conference on the topic at WebSearch University. I wish I could attend, but I scheduled my business research pre-conference at the same time. Bad me.

ProQuest has just announced its acquisition of U.K.-based Expert Information, publishers of Index to Theses and Theses.com. Expert Information was founded in 1986 by Monty Hyams (founder of Derwent and “father of the patent family”) and Roger Bilboul (Chairman of the Board of Information Today).

The theses properties of Expert Information contain half a million citations and abstracts for British and Irish dissertations and master’s theses. They span 70 years and add about 20,000 records per year.

This certainly fits well with ProQuest’s dissertation publishing program. Remember, ProQuest evolved out of University Microfilms, which had dissertations as a major part of its business. ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses is designated by the Library of Congress as the official archive of American dissertations and includes almost all North American dissertations. ProQuest was already a distributor of the Expert Information databases, under the title PQDT: U.K. & Ireland.

It’s good to see positive international growth in ProQuest’s electronic dissertation publishing endeavors.

Alert Publications Inc., owned by Donna Tuke, has decided to stop publishing its two newsletters: Business Information Alert and Legal Information Alert.

Legal Information Alert was published for 30 years, Business Information Alert for 21. I’ve written for both of them and considered them important publications for information professionals. The archive will be online with HeinOnline and possibly other hosts as well.

From now on, Alert Publications will concentrate on publishing reports and books for the legal and business information professional market. We at ONLINE wish Donna and her company all the best.

This looks like fun. Wiki Loves Monuments, a photo contest organized by Wikipedia, invites people to take, upload, and share photos of monuments located in 17 European countries during the month of September 2011. Europeana has announced that is is a sponsor for one of the 12 prizes for best photo and is offering a special competition and award for a photo of an Art Nouveau monument.

I’m unclear on two points. If I’m not a resident of one of the European countries, does a photo of a monument in one of the countries still qualify? Are libraries monuments? If they’re counting parks and archaeological sites, I’m assuming libraries count.

If some good photos of libraries surface, maybe we can show them during Internet Librarian International! That would be even more fun.

Dahlia Lithwick, the keynote speaker at the 104th annual conference of the American Association of Law Librarians (AALL), explained why the Justices of the Supreme Court are conflicted about free speech issues. It goes back to their confirmation hearings, which tend to be brutal and vicious. This gives them a jaundiced view of both the press and the public. Lithwick, a journalist who covers the Supreme Court, then examined six recent free speech cases.

Her takeaways:
1. The media (and technology) can turn speech into assault. It’s no longer a situation of worrying only about yelling “Fire” in a crowded space, something not considered to be free speech. Today, whispers in one place, amplified by the internet, can have drastic consequences in other places, even if the Supreme Court thinks it’s free speech. One example: A book burning in Florida (the book being the Koran) resulted in deaths of Americans in Pakistan.

2. Technology transforms private speech into public speech. Nothing is off the record anymore. When a Justice gives a speech or shows up at a venue, that event is recorded and becomes public on websites. Some justices haven’t grasped this and don’t appreciate the attention.

3. Assaultive speech is not speech. Here her example is the violent video games, which she thinks should not be considered free speech, particularly because they require interactivity. She also asked us to think about Phelps v Snyder, where pfc Snyder’s father was viciously attacked in an epic ode published on the internet, but that was not considered by the Court. The Court did rule that the Phelps family demonstrating at military funerals was a form of protected speech.

Lithwick made an excellent case for new technologies being way ahead of the law (not that I find that a particularly new phenomenon — it’s been that way for years). She also pointed out that many of the Court’s decisions about protected free speech are not in line with how the general public thinks. She suggested it is not an accident that those most concerned about civility are those who endured the most uncivil confirmation hearings.

Her final point: When it comes to free speech and technology, the Court needs to change. She certainly wowed the AALL crowd, delivering a well-crafted, intelligent, witty, and thought-provoking talk with nary a PowerPoint slide in sight!

I’m intrigued by the recent criminal indictment of Aaron Swartz for allegedly stealing somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million records from JSTOR. This statement from JSTOR explains the facts and is remarkably restrained.

Other commentators have not been so restrained. Kevin Webb, in a Reuters blog post said, “None of us want to break the law. It’s simply that we don’t have a choice.

The mechanisms for sharing academic discourse are broken. They barely even function as systems for connecting interested parties within existing disciplines. Ask just about anyone who spends their time writing or consuming scholarly work and you will hear a litany of complaints about how poorly suited the academic publishing industry is to modern day collaboration.”

Timothy Lee, a Forbes blogger, decried Swartz’s “reckless activism” but seems to applaud the idea of making any information resulting from government-funded free, regardless of how that is accomplished. This is an extreme reading of “open access” and one that even the most fervent OA advocates would not condone stealing entire databases, particularly when it involves breaking and entering.

JSTOR even says in its statement that it willingly provides large data sets to researchers for analysis. Furthermore, why JSTOR? Already, some 14% of its customers don’t pay anything. It’s a non-profit. And it concentrates on scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. Federal dollars do not flow to these disciplines as they do to the hard sciences.

Demand Progress, the organization founded by Swartz, has a petition you can sign if you support Swartz’s activities.

In the midst of all the heated discussions, two things caught my attention. One, no one really knows what Swartz intended to do with 4.5 million JSTOR documents. Was he going to analyze them as he has done previously with law review articles and Wikipedia? Or did he intend to re-publish them on the web? Many commentators, both in mainstream media and the blogosphere, assume one or the other. The fact is, we don’t know. Would you feel differently if you knew he was attempting a scholarly analysis versus setting free millions of documents? Does it matter to a legal case?

The second thing is rather more mundane and speaks to changes in library research. There has been a cascade of commentary, again both in mainstream media and the blogosphere, that is largely repetitive. Here’s the repeat that bothers me — the assertion that he published his analysis of over 441,000 law review articles in the Stanford Law Review.

Librarians of my acquaintance immediately jumped on LexisNexis (and other legal databases) to find the exact citation. Swartz isn’t there as author. You can find the article once you realize the actual author was Shireen Barday. It was published in v. 61 #3, December 2008 of Stanford Law Review as a Note. There are many “librarianish” ways to get to the actual article. The easy way, which I hope they’re teaching in library schools these days, is to eschew traditional online databases and go direct to Aaron Swartz’s own website, where he happily gives up the exact URL to the article.

Just as the debate about what open access entails, how it should be implemented, and what the role of traditional publishing will be is convoluted and complex, so is the way in which librarians approach research projects.

As a side note, the September/October 2011 issue of ONLINE will run an article about open access and the many different methodologies and techniques of searching the web will be explored at WebSearch University early in October 2011.

I note that AllBusiness has announced a major redesign. It’s all about small business, I gather, with a new tagline of “Your Small Business Advantage.” As a D&B company, AllBusiness has had a relationship with ONLINE, but it getting weird. It does seem to have articles from the magazine but none more recent that May/June 2010. And I seriously love the bizarre indexing AllBusiness has applied to some of the articles. Case in point: Walt Crawford’s column in the September/October 2008 issue. Titled “Twitter Ate My Column,” it’s about the perils of time wasting posed by social media and what to do about it. AllBusiness has decided to index it with “Jews & Judaism” and “Religious Groups”.

Say what, AllBusiness? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, et al. are not, to the best of my knowledge, religious entities. Nor did Walt even hint that they were. And nothing about Judaism is in there either. Maybe D&B should have hired a taxomist to help with this redesign.