Gamification and library organization

May 15th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

What if, as academic library organizations, we radically empowered our employees? What if, instead of leading our organizations through individuals or select groups, we lead through the collective energy of our staff? What if we created spaces for the free flow of information where the best of ideas could quickly take shape and immediately be integrated into our service models?

These were some of the questions I asked while watching the video above by Gabe Zichermann, author, consultant, and creator in gamification studies.

I’ve been thinking more and more about ways to use technology to improve large academic library systems that, in short, allow them to function more like small libraries: to be nimble, open, and innovative (rather than sluggish, exclusive, and obstructive). Here are some of the points from Gabe’s talk that speak to that:

  1. Games and game-like systems provide a constrained system for expressing creativity, which has been shown to inspire more creativity than unconstrained systems
  2. Gamification is about creating a process and not about badges or simply turning work into a game.
  3. Feedback. Feedback should be systematic and immediate. See Gabe’s comments on improving annual reviews (15 minutes in).
  4. Friends. Adults love social activities just as much as children. See Gabe’s comments on the company gym (20 minutes in). Also, teams must be authentic to work.
  5. Fun. People will work for free (and enjoy it) given the right motivations and circumstances. Cf. the “creds” system on StackOverflow. (Me: As academics, the idea of “creds” should appeal to us!)
  6. Don’t ignore the potential for hidden creators. Cf. the tutorials developed by Codecademy users (19 minutes in)
  7. You cannot legislate game-play or simply hire people who have game-play potential. It must be inspired from the ground up.

Most importantly, the things that motivate people are:

  1. Status
  2. Access
  3. Power
  4. Stuff

… in order from most meaningful to least meaningful. Also, from least expensive to most expensive interestingly.

As organizations, we often focus our creative energies on ways to improve the library experience for our users and ultimately this is our goal. But what if we took more time to reflect upon how we run our organizations and how we can both inspire our employees to do more (and better) and how we can create spaces where that inspiration is nurtured and encouraged? My prediction is that by creating these spaces and processes, we will ultimately need to spend less time seeking out ways to improve our services, since many of the solutions will naturally present themselves through new ways of communicating and work.

I would love to hear from you, dear reader, about any libraries academic or otherwise that have used gamification models to improve professional development, communication, and/or problem solving.

Judge in GSU case declares “10% rule” for copyright

May 14th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

The judge’s ruling in the Georgia State University copyright case came down late Friday in what looks to be a win for educators and libraries. Of 99 alleged cases, only 5 were declared copyright infringements. Jennifer Howard has a write up in the Chronicle today summarizing the ruling. Of note to academic librarians:

One part of the ruling could be problematic for librarians and others trying to work out fair-use policies in academe. Judge Evans proposed a 10-percent rule to guide decisions about what constitutes fair use in an educational setting. For books without chapters or with fewer than 10 chapters, “unpaid copying of no more than 10 percent of the pages in the book is permissible under factor three,” she wrote in her ruling. For books with 10 or more chapters, “permissible fair use” would be copying up to one chapter or its equivalent.

You can read the entire 350-page ruling at Nancy Sim’s website.

Twitter as inter-library loan

May 10th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink

In my recent presentation on social networks for academics, I discussed the disintermediation of the library out of the scholarly communication process as social media tools make it easier for scholars to transfer and acquire information without consulting library services or staff. In today’s Chronicle, I came across an interesting example of this:

Thanks to Twitter, I have been sent copies of obscure articles much faster than I would have received them from an interlibrary loan. I just need to tweet “Does anyone have access to the Journal of X, 1972?” and within an hour someone will have e-mailed me the PDF. It’s tremendously useful.

A similar PDF exchange market exists on Reddit.

In some part, this relates to the concept of the “invisible college,” notably the part that encompasses the peer-to-peer transfer of research that has always existed and functioned outside library walls. In fact, I still have a drawer full of pre-prints and writer’s copies from scholars that I interacted with as part of my graduate work in medieval studies. If I needed a copy of research that my library couldn’t get due to copyright or availability (and electronic copies were not as pervasive then), I could usually contact a small handful of scholars (if not the author herself) and obtain a hard copy.

So how is this different? For one, it’s more efficient and, as the author points out, faster. But even more importantly, it reduces the need for ILL as long as (1) the need is for electronic material, (2) one’s social network includes enough cross-institutional coverage, and (3) one’s network includes at least one database-savvy person. I can only expect that these factors will increase over time thus creating an even richer environment for this type of exchange. So whither ILL?

Researcher negotiates data mining rights with Elsevier

May 7th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

In an epic win for citizen science, Heather A. Piwowar of the University of British Columbia has successfully negotiated increased access to Elsevier’s data. Of note is how this relates to the relationship between the publishing giant and librarians:

For the library, negotiating a text-mining agreement was unexplored territory. Teresa Lee, the university’s e-resource and access librarian, reviews contracts for UBC’s digital subscriptions. It’s unusual, and exciting, she says, to have a researcher so directly involved in library negotiations. She also sees this as a chance for the library to set a good precedent as it works out the details with Elsevier. “I think what we should look toward is crafting a model agreement that we could then turn around and use with other publishers,” Ms. Lee says. (via The Chronicle)

Elsevier could use the good press right now.

Parabiosis: Jim Neal and the future of the academic library

May 3rd, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

I started my morning off listening to this talk by Jim Neal, the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, about the future of the academic library and what he sees as the future needs of libraries. For the tl;dr among you: we need to invest in more collaboration. Academic libraries needlessly duplicate services that could be better managed by multi-institutional networks of library systems, like the 2CUL project at Columbia and Cornell. The individuals who lead and sustain academic library operations are smart and resourceful people (and doggone it, people like us!), but “we are a very information poor, information profession” (see Jim’s Trend #4). The potential that we have for collaboration and increased efficiency is immense if we can find ways to reach beyond our institutions.

Also, props to referencing Mel Brooks.

Niche networks in higher ed

May 1st, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking to a group of USC librarians about academic social networks and more generally about how social media has affected the scholarly communication process. It’s an informal, brief 15-20 minute talk as part of our “Brown Bag Lunch” series. The following includes my slides from the presentation, a list of websites mentioned, as well as a selected bibliography.

Social networks mentioned:

 

Tools mentioned:

 

Bibliography:

Brown, L. Griffiths, R., & Rascoff, M. (2007). University publishing in a digital age. Accessed from http://www.ithaka.org/

Campbell, J.D. (2006). Changing a cultural icon: The academic library as a virtual destination,” EDUCAUSE Review 41(1). Accessed from http://www.educause.edu/

Carpenter, M., Graybill, J., Offord, J., & Piorun, M. (2011). Envisioning the library’s role in scholarly communication in the year 2025. Portal-Libraries and the Academy, 11, 659-681.

Faculty Focus. (2010). Twitter in higher education 2010 : Usage habits and trends of today’s college faculty. Madison, WI: Magna Publications. Acessed from http://www.scribd.com/doc/37621209/2010-Twitter-Survey-Report

Gu, F., Widén-Wulff, G. (2011). Scholarly communication and possible changes in the context of social media: A Finnish case study. The Electronic Library, 29(6), 762-776.

Howard, J. (2012, February 28). Tracking scholarly influence beyond the impact factor. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/tracking-scholarly-influence-beyond-the-impact-factor/35565

Howard, J. (2012, January 29). Scholars seek better ways to track impact online. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed from http://chronicle.com/article/As-Scholarship-Goes-Digital/130482/

Howard, J. (2010). The MLA convention meets twitter: Twitter moves scholarly communication beyond annual meetings sessions and papers. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed from http://search.proquest.com/docview/214635705?accountid=14749

Macilwain, C. (2011). Facebook of science seeks to reshape peer review. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed from http://search.proquest.com/docview/849233840?accountid=14749

Maron, N.L. & Smith, K.K. (2008). Current Mmdels of digital scholarly communication. Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries. Accessed from http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/current-models-report.pdf

Nicholas, D., Watkinson, A. Rowlands, I., & Jubb, M. (2011). Social media, academic research and the role of university libraries. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(5), 373-375.

Ponte, D. & Simon, J. (2011). Scholarly communication 2.0: Exploring researchers’ opinions on Web 2.0 for scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and dissemination. Serials Review, 37(3), 149-156.

Research Information Network. (2007). Research and the scholarly communications orocess: Towards strategic goals for public policy. London: RIN. Accessed from http://www.rin.ac.uk/sc-statement

Roman, D. (2011). Scholarly publishing model needs an update. Communications of the ACM, 54(1), 16, 96.

Voss, A., & Procter, R. (2009). Virtual research environments in scholarly work and communications. Library Hi Tech, 27(2), 174-190.

Wand, X., Jiang, T., $ Ma, F. (2010). Blog-supported scientific communication: An exploratory analysis based on social hyperlinks in a Chinese blog community. Journal of Information Science, 36, 690-704.

Friday fun: Harvard debate on “Are Libraries Obsolete?”

April 27th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink

Clearly, there was not enough alcohol involved in this debate. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the following Oxford-style debate about the usefulness of libraries. Personally, I recommend skipping to 37 minutes in to watch David Lankes and John Palfrey.

Get inspired! Creating third spaces for librarians

April 26th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

I’ve been reading Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. In one chapter, he describes the campus layout of Pixar Animation Studios up north of Oakland. At the center of the facility is a vast, open space that Lehrer calls “the atrium.” It’s a place where employees come together on their way to coffee/lunch/bar/bathroom. Having the atrium (and all the connecting facilities) centrally located within the Pixar campus, employees encounter each other unexpectedly and often. As a result, these serendipitous encounters more often than not lead to creative thought and  innovative conversations (in other words, solutions).

The concept behind the atrium is related to the idea of “third space”: that place which is neither work nor home, but fluid, interactive, and energized (also, usually fueled by caffeine and alcohol; cf. the coffeehouses of France and the pubs of England in the eighteenth century). Lehrer cites the research of Tom Allen, professor of organization studies at MIT, who discovered that the highest-performing employees in an organization (i.e. “those with the most useful new ideas”) where those that had the most interactions with colleagues. Lehrer concludes:

This suggests that the most important place in every office is not the boardroom, or the lab, or the library. It’s the coffee machine.

As librarians, we know this. We’ve been talking for years about the importance of creating “third spaces,” especially in the form of Information Commons that inspire collaboration and help our users to seamlessly interact with information, technology, and each other.

But what about the librarians? Where are our third spaces?

I work for university library system that includes 14 distinct library buildings. Like many multi-branch university libraries, the division of our collections mirrors the academic structure of the university (e.g. the science library, the music library) and the needs of the collection (e.g. rare books, low-use materials, high-use materials). Accordingly, our staffing structure is predominantly based on these divisions, with some overlap for services like library IT and instruction.

Our collections (and the buildings that house them) are not going anywhere anytime soon. So where is our atrium? Where can we have the type of serendipitous run-ins that Pixar Studios has managed to facilitate? It takes me 15 minutes to walk to the closest branch from my library. I don’t exactly have the time to constantly be traveling across campus.

Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. I’ve been wondering how it might be possible in a multi-branch system to get librarians to bump into each other on a daily basis with the intent that conversations will happen, ideas will get out into the open, and the organization can begin to transform itself into a more nimble, vibrant entity.

Here are a few suggestions:

 

1) Create a Virtual Water Cooler

Librarians spend much of their time in front of a computer. But despite how easy it is to have conversations online, most employees only communicate via email. Why not create an always-open virtual space for library employees similar to IRC chat, the online classroom, or a Facebook group? Furthermore, encourage employees to stay logged in as long as their “on the clock.” All conversation would be public and open to anyone who wanted to join in. Librarians could use the virtual space to ask for help, share news, invite colleagues to events, throw out ideas, or just shoot the breeze.

2) Schedule Weekly Mobile Coffee-Breaks

Every week, one library branch sponsors a coffee break and invites all librarians to attend. The cost of coffee is minimal and if there is a concern about desk coverage, well, then have the coffee set up at the reference desk. Who knows: you may even have some students join the conversation.

3) Start a Lunch-n-Learn Series

One a month, sponsor a 1-hour bring-your-own lunch event that allows librarians to share their experiences and ideas with their colleagues. This could be set up as a formal lecture or a round-table discussion. We recently started this at MPOW and it has been a huge success.

4) Break Down Those Cubicle/Office Walls

While I recognize the need for private meetings spaces, the structure of many offices makes it too easy for librarians to huddle in their offices/cubicles. Let’s take a cue from other creative industries (this and this and this and this) and open up our work spaces to light and conversation.

 

What you can do as individual librarians:

 

1) Take it outside

As a rule, I never eat lunch at my desk. If I have to work while I eat, I either take my laptop with me or print out what I need. Nine times out of ten, I’ll run into someone I work with and start having a conversation. This usually turns out to be more beneficial than working through my lunch. ;-)

2) Make house calls

Once a week, visit a different colleague. Maybe there is someone you haven’t seen in a few days (weeks?). Maybe you heard that a colleague won an award or published a paper. Stop by just to say congrats. At worst, you’ll just be “that really nice guy who always stops by.”

3) Attend university events

Go listen to a lecture. Watch the marching band perform. Check out the unveiling of the new statue on campus. You never know who you might run into!

 

I could go on, but I want to hear from you, dear reader…

What do you do as a librarian to create spaces for conversation within your institutions? What barriers have you encountered?

What the Harvard letter to the faculty missed

April 24th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

The Faculty Advisory Council for the Libraries at Harvard recently sent out the following call to arms:

To: Faculty Members in all Schools, Faculties, and Units

RE: Periodical Subscriptions

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals…

You can read the rest of the letter here, which concludes with nine propositions that the FAC asks faculty and librarians to “please consider,” including publishing in open-access journals, working with editorial boards, and making contract terms public. The FAC’s effort to inspire change is admirable and welcomed (albeit vaguely worded) but it fails to address two important players in the scholarly communication process: the role of tenure and the university administration.

To the latter, libraries and faculty need to urge university deans, presidents, and provosts to lead their institutions toward innovative and accessible models of scholarship that utilize the speed and efficiency of new technologies. To those leaders I say, “You have the opportunity and the leverage to change the status quo. Rise above the rest and make your institution a beacon of the future!” Don’t just encourage new models and expectations of scholarly communication: insist on them. Tie them into tenure process, if necessary, but then…

To the former, we must stop thinking of scholarship in terms of how it affects tenure. Specifically, as long as publishing in a high impact journal is still considered a “better” option than publishing research in an institutional repository, open-access journal, or a personal website, then journal publishers will always have the upper hand. After all, the ultimate aim of scholarship is to advance knowledge, not to publish it (which is only the means to an end) and as at least one recent study shows (Chen, C. et al., 2009), publishing on the open web increases the chances that a work will be cited. Moreover, faculty are freely giving away their time and attention to serve as peer-reviewers, writers, and editors for journals that turn around to charge unwarranted prices for access. To those faculty I say, “Why not freely give your time and attention to publishing platforms that, in the least, make your work accessible to the widest audience possible?”

The more I think about tenure, the scholarly publishing arena, and higher education in general, the more I come to believe that we are a bloated institution. The rising cost of tuition, the exorbitant amount of spending on new facilities and star faculty, combined with the lack of public trust and disillusionment with the efficacy of “going to college” to me all point to bubble about to burst. And burst hard.

 

Chen, C. et al (2009). The impact of internet resources on scholarly communication: A citation analysis. Scientometrics, 81(2), 459-474.

Why I deleted my Facebook account

April 20th, 2012 § 9 comments § permalink

On Tuesday, I deleted my Facebook account. I’ve been on the lam for 96 hours and already I’m struggling to resist the urge to reinstate my account (Facebook gives you a 14 day “reconsideration” window). I miss the connection Facebook offers. I miss the memes. I miss the pictures of my friends’ new twin daughters. I miss ALA Think Tank. Miss it terribly.

But I also realize that Facebook offers this connection at a price and I’m not sure I want to pay that price any longer. I agree with Mark Zuckerman when he says that people instinctively want to share. It is a human act. But so is forgetting and having the ability to control how you present yourself to the world.

Thus, three reasons for why I deleted my Facebook account:

Reason #1: I am not the sum of my data.

I love data. When I read about what Stephen Wolfram has done with what he calls the personal analytics of his life, my first reaction was: “Wow! How can I do that?” Data mining has the given us the opportunity to see the world in radically new ways, confirming many long-held assumptions and overturning even more. But when it comes to my personal data, shouldn’t I have a say it how it is used?

Case in point: Back in 2005/2006, I was really into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am still a fan, although I don’t watch episodes, I don’t read up on the fan fiction or critical literature (oh yes), and I don’t talk about it all that much. But back in 2005, I posted an inordinate amount of Buffy trivia, quotes, and photos to Facebook. Yet despite not having watched a single episode since 2007, Facebook still serves me Buffy-related ads that I can only assume come from the overwhelming amount of Whedonesque data that I fed its algorithm during those years.

I want the have the option to move on to discover new things and not be constantly reminded of the media obsessions of my past (however justified and enjoyable). Unfortunately, Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to fix this, which leads me to the next reason.

Reason #2: Control over how my data is presented.

Have you ever dug deep into your Facebook Timeline? If you’re about my age, you probably signed up for Facebook when it was only open to college students. While many of the experiences that I shared on Facebook in those early years have led to the person I am today, they no longer adequately portray how I think about myself.

So I decided to clean up some of my old photos and wall posts. In the past, Facebook made it reasonably easy to do this. You could quickly restrict access to older posts and even delete large chunks of data. But with the new Timeline feature, you have to delete wall posts one at a time (plus confirm the deletion). To make it even more difficult, the Timeline gets buggy when you try to expand more than a couple month’s worth of data. I tried to manually delete some of this data, but after spending half an hour and only removing 2 months worth, I gave up.

Reason #3: Tracking.

I should not have to install a third-party plugin in my browser in order to prevent Facebook from tracking my browsing habits. Enough said.

 

 

I understand that Facebook is a free service and that, accordingly, my data is the price I pay to use it. I also understand that Facebook uses my data to improve my experience of its product. I’m fine with that. But I want the option to determine how much of my data Facebook is allowed to use. Additionally, I want the option to forget and move forward. To refashion myself continually and not be pulled back into the positive feedback loop of ads and algorithms.

In all honesty, I will probably set up a new Facebook account in a month or two once I’m confident my current account is deleted. At least it will give me the opportunity to start fresh. And with so many events and discussions happening inside Facebook’s walls, it is difficult to stay in touch with friends and colleagues otherwise.  We’ll see. If anything, it will be a fun experiment in disconnecting. Now, if only that “pull down to refresh” twitch would go away…

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