T. Scott

Living In This Moment

She says, "Can I have one of my pens, like yours?"

She means one of her fountain pens.  Last  summer I bought her a set of disposable ones in a rainbow of colors.

We're at Mikey's for the weekly family dinner.  I keep a stack of stuff on the credenza at home, and bring it along every week.  A couple of Josie's notebooks, her fountain pens, a box full of crayons and paint sticks.  A deck of cards with family table games.  (Tonight there's also a stack of circulars from the Sunday paper so that Josie can do a little Christmas shopping for her Mom -- Lynn will take her out to the stores on Saturday).

I ask her which color pen she wants and she picks the blue one.  I hand her that, and a notebook.  She writes,

Up on the House top!

 

Up on the House top Rain dear pas

Out jups goodol Santa

down thru the chipny with loss of

 

Then she stops and sings it to us before she goes on.  She knows several verses by heart.

She practices writing in cursive, although she's not supposed to do that yet, in first grade.  Her Mom wants her to do some of her homework, but for all of the writing implements that we have with us, we don't have a #2 pencil, and that's the only thing allowed for homework.  She'll have to wait until she gets home.  I make a mental note to add a couple of pencils to the box.

Later, after we finish eating, she plays games on her Mom's phone.  She sends Queenie a text.  She tell us the story of a dream she had last night in which she and her (imaginary) big brother were nearly electrocuted by an alien monster.  She draws a picture of the monster to show us his huge long creepy hands with lightning coming out of the fingers.  It's hard to tell how much she is remembering and how much she is making up on the spot.

We adults live in a linear world in which we grew up with pen and paper and printed books and now wait impatiently (eagerly or with trepidation), wondering when digital is going to replace all of that.  As if the flow is all one way and inevitable.  But Josie lives in the world of now.  In her world, people use fountain pens to write for recreation.  They use phones to talk and text and email.  They gather for family dinners and talk about their dreams and desires.  Printed books and digital books are different experiences that nestle comfortably alongside each other.  Live theater is as thrilling as a 3-D movie.   Sometimes you sing and dance and sometimes you listen to your iPod.

Josie teaches me to live in the land of Now.  To be grateful for the ways that I can reach out electronically without giving up nestling in front of the fire with a hardcover novel.  When I read the debates between Kindle lovers and the devotees of printed books, I think of Josie and think that we are being very foolish.

The restaurant starts to empty and we softly sing Christmas carols to each other as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

The Economics of Open Access

Librarians have supported the open access movement for a variety of reasons, some of them more rational than others.  The emotional motivators come from the frustration of feeling economically powerless in the face of ever escalating subscription and licensing prices and the feeling that "the publishers" are mercenary bastards who have a dual mission of gouging library budgets and attempting to prevent people from ever getting to scientific content.

I understand the frustration, and even share much of it, but it seems to me irrelevant in making decisions about what needs to be done to provide more equitable access to the results of scientific research.

At the annual meeting of the MLA Southern Chapter in Augusta last weekend, Eli Neiburger and Michael Porter spoke as if the OA movement represented an assault on the dominance of the big bad commercial publishers.  Eli & Michael come from a public library background and can perhaps be forgiven their naivete about the world of STM publishers and academic libraries, but many of my academic library colleagues seem to share that view.  But all of the evidence is that the big publishers have simply adapted OA publishing models and are as strong and dominant as ever.  Certainly the state of library budgets hasn't improved any in the last decade.

The good thing is that there is more and more content freely available from a wider variety of publishers all the time.  This is a very good thing (the rational reason to promote OA), but it has nothing to do with challenging the dominance of the commercial publishers and their ability to set the terms.

He's not a librarian, but George Monbiot's overwrought piece in the Guardian awhile back does represent the passionate views of the small coterie of OA advocates who seem to drive the discussion.  In Monbiot's telling, the publishers are "parasitic overlords" and we must "liberate the research."  Stirring words.  Silly man.

Monbiot quotes from a 2005 report from an analyst at Deutsche Bank AG who says, "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process."  I guess if an anonymous analyst for a German bank says it, then it must be true!

What I find so interesting about this viewpoint, however, is that it seems so contradictory to how OA publishers are viewed by the library community.  As David Crotty reports in an excellent post in the Scholarly Kitchen, PLoS achieved a 20% margin in 2010, and if the trends continue, could conceiveably surpass Elsevier's margin for 2011.  Springer claims "double-digit" profits from BioMed Central.  What are those librarians who've been gnashing their teeth for years over the predatory, irresponsible, evil pricing policies of the commercial publishers to make of this?

If publishers add no value, as the anonymous Deutsche Bank analyst proclaims, isn't PLoS just as immoral as Elsevier?  Shouldn't we be just as outraged?

I'm just looking for some intellectual rigor and consistency.  So let me posit this:

• If you believe that publishers add no value, then you can't support PLoS any more than you support Elsevier.
• If you believe that commercial publishers are the bane, then you should be as opposed to BioMed Central as you are to Elsevier.
• If you believe that "excess profits" (somewhat of an odd concept, since profits are excessive only when they're not your own) are the problem, then you need to recognize that OA is not the solution and be as wary of the successful gold & hybrid publishers as you are of the others.
• If you believe that the most important thing is more and more access, then you should applaud the experiments of the commercial publishers every bit as much as you applaud the others.
• If you are Steven Harnad, then everything I've said here is irrelevant and you have to point out that the only thing we should be talking about is author self-archiving.

My point is that these issues are complex and intertwined.  I believe that it's a good thing that we are groping our way toward a scholarly communication system in which an ever increasing amount of quality scholarly literature is freely available.  But it remains expensive, and the commercial publishers have contributed as much as the non-commercial folks.

To read Monbiot and his ilk when feeling oppressed and frustrated is tremendously satisfying.  It's just not the least bit helpful.

 

 

What Is Mikey Fixing?

I haven't looked at the menu in a long time. 

When Mike Lee & his sister Melissa opened up Mikey's Grill a little over a year ago, less than a mile from our house, we started going once a week with Marian & Josie.  We've known Mikey & Melissa for a very long time from the days when they were at Fox Valley. 

It wasn't too many visits before I started asking our server, "Just ask Mikey to make me whatever he wants.  I know it'll be good."  It always is. 

Mikey likes it -- gives him a chance to try out some different things.  And he knows I'll give him an honest critique.

Sometimes he'll ask me what I'm sort of generally in the mood for -- beef, fish, pasta?  Most often, though, he just tells me.  I trust him.

When I got to the restaurant he stepped out of the kitchen to say hi and said, "I've got a cold soup for you."  Now I actually don't like cold soups as a rule, but I just said, "Sounds good!"  It didn't really, but like I said, I trust him.

It turned out to be a cantaloupe cream soup.  It was fantastic.  It was sweet, but not cloying, about the thickness of a smoothie, I suppose.  A beautiful pale orange color.  You could freeze it and serve it for dessert, but after a couple of 99 degree days, it was an exceptional first course.  I just about inhaled it.

He hadn't said anything about my entree.  I never ask.  But I'd been thinking earlier in the day.  We're in the middle of Restaurant Week here, so Lynn and I have been trying new restaurants.  So I'm eating more this week than I usually do and I thought maybe I should cut it back a bit at Mikey's.  Maybe just a sandwich?  He does fantastic po' boys.  Or maybe I should just go vegetarian for a change?  He's always got great fresh local vegetables.  On the other hand, I'm going to overeat this week anyway, and he does great burgers, so maybe I should go for that!

I now know that he actually can read my mind, because what came out was a beautiful, delicious, vegetable burger.   A soft poppy seeded roll with layers of grilled onions, eggplant, zucchini, peppers, mushrooms, and some cheese.  What always impresses me the most about Mikey's cooking is the balance -- texture, tastes, all seem to lock into each other just right so that the final dish is always more than the assemblage of ingredients.  So it was with the burger.

I'd order another one next week.  But, of course, he'll have thought of something else for me by then.

 

University Library 2031

Please share your ideas about what university libraries might look like in 20 years and how we are planning and adapting to keep pace.  This information should be limited to one page...

Every summer I have a 90 minute planning meeting with the President & Provost.  It's an opportunity to talk about how the year has gone, but more importantly, to discuss the major priorities for the year to come.  I get a memo every year listing the items I'm supposed to write up (generally in no more than half a page each) to lay the ground for discussion.  Typically they include things like the university scorecards, significant achievements, top priorities, faculty & staff development and the like.  This year, there were a couple of new questions, including the one above.

I had to smile.  Five years is a long time to be planning these days in libraryland -- to predict two decades isn't science fiction, it's fantasy.  But I always enjoy these meetings and this year I've got a new boss who is really putting a lot of good thought into imagining how the libraries ought to be developing.  So I'm looking forward to the meeting, and I like the challenge of trying to distill my fantasizing into one page.

Here's what I wrote:

 

Twenty years is a long time.  In 1991, when I would try to explain the Internet to people, I would have to show them.  If you hadn’t used a browser, you didn’t have a mental map for what pointing and clicking to move from site to site was like.  The Netscape browser, which made the Internet accessible to anyone with a computer and a dial-up connection, wouldn’t be released until December, 1994.

The consequences of those developments have been huge for academic libraries, and we can expect even more of that over the next two decades.  No doubt, some of what will be the most crucial developments are literally unimaginable from this vantage point.  Nonetheless, one can make some assumptions and speculate about the nature of the academic library based on those assumptions.

• Most scholarly/educational information will be distributed electronically, although print will continue to be an important niche technology in certain disciplines
• The form and format of information containers will be radically different, incorporating multi-media and social devices.  The distinction between “e-journals” and “e-books” will have disappeared
• Much of the required content will be distributed via national or global projects similar to the Google Books project and the Digital Public Library of America
• Management of locally produced data (“data curation”) will emerge as one of the critical tasks for research universities
• The “information space” will continue to be very complex and rich, and students and faculty will require training and support in making efficient and effective use of the resources available.

Consequently:

• “Collection development” as it has been practiced in the past will disappear.  Librarians will focus on managing access to widely distributed information resources, on data curation of locally produced research information, and on organizing and making available locally produced special collections
• The library building will be student focused as an alternative site for solitary and group study, social interaction, and access to specialized tools and resources.
• Faculty librarians will spend the majority of their time outside of the library building, participating in curriculum development and teaching, and as members of research teams.

Our space planning focus continues to be making the building a hospitable environment for students.  Our focus on licensing resources is very much usage & request based, so that we can be sure that everything we pay for is being well used.  Our liaison program encourages faculty librarians to spend time interacting directly with faculty and students in the schools that they support.  We will continue to focus our future planning on these areas.

 

How much of that will actually ring true in 20 years I have no idea.  But in the summer of 2011 it's my one page best guess.

 

1st Day In 1st Grade

"What do you think you're going to like best about first grade, Bug?"

"I'm not sure, 'cause I've never been there before.  But I think it'll be reading and learning."  I like the distinction.  "I know what I'm going to miss the most, though -- nap time!"  She grins and I can't tell if she's kidding.  She insists that she's not.

That was a couple of weeks ago.

The other day I asked her how many books she's read this summer.  "Two hundred and eighty-eight," she replies, promptly.  When I suggest that she's exaggerating she gets mock-angry with me.  "No, really!" she says.

At dinner last night her Mom gave her a back to school kit -- her crayons and markers and glue and scissors.  A marker board that she can write "gymnastics" or "dance" on in the evening before bed so she knows what stuff to take with her in the morning.  And her own alarm clock, with an iPad dock.  We tease her that she'll be able to have Justin Bieber wake her up in the morning now.  This embarrasses her only a little.

Marian called this morning after getting Josie on the bus.  She showed Josie how to work her alarm clock last night before bed.  "When it goes off, you get up and turn it off, like this.  Then wash up, brush your teeth, get dressed, brush your hair, make your bed, and then make sure that I'm awake."

She listened this morning (having actually set her alarm to go off slightly before Josie's).  Heard it go off, heard Josie shuffling around, getting ready, coming in to check on her.   And when she peeked into Josie's room the bed was made!  "I wish it could be like this every morning!" said Marian.  "I know it won't be."  But we agreed that it was a great start.

Marian has responsibility for rounding up parents to help out with buses and cafeteria trays these first two weeks.  So I'll go out tomorrow afternoon to help guide the kindergarteners onto the appropriate buses.  I hope I don't scare 'em.

Sometimes you just need to talk....

It seemed as if the unstated subtext of most of the conferences & meetings I went to this spring was that the boundaries between publishers and librarians is getting increasingly porous.  Geoff Bilder made it explicit in his plenary session at the MLA meeting when he referred to a presentation that John Unsworth gave at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting several years ago titled, "Pubrarians and Liblishers: New Roles for Old Foes."   Increasingly, librarians are starting to move into the publishing space and publishers are worrying about things that used to be the exclusive domain of librarians.

Despite this, we're still too often talking past each other, or not talking at all.  We need more conversation.  Which is why one of the most enjoyable things I did was the SSP "Chat With A Librarian" roundtables.  Jean's done a good writeup of the event for the SSP website.  The room was packed and ninety minutes flew by.  We could easily have gone on longer.

Jean and I, along with Norm Frankel, will be using some of the feedback from that session to develop the Chicago Collaborative's "Libraries 101" modules, designed to present the broad array of library issues to people in publishing.  The evidence of the SSP session is that many people in publishing are very hungry for more information about how libraries really operate and what librarians really want.

Anything that can foster more conversation will help.  As those boundaries continue to become even more porous we're going to need the expertise of everybody involved in the scholarly communication chain more than ever.

 

 

It's Not About "Balance"

Jean asked if we miss the traveling when we're home for an extended stretch.

 "I'm good for about six weeks," I said.  "And then I start getting eager to go somewhere again."

 It's been an exceptionally busy spring.  Since mid-April I have been home exactly two weekends.  It hasn't all been work -- last weekend was Salt Lake City for MEY's retirement, and the weekend before was band camp in Memphis.  And I've followed my usual practice of building in an extra day on most of my work trips so that I've got a day to play and feed my head.  (Which gave me the opportunity, in one remarkable 5 week period, to get to the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, along with several other notable museums.  And some fine dive bars.)

 I still enjoy the travel experience and despite the complaints & horror stories that one hears so often about air travel, I'm rarely inconvenienced too much -- or maybe it's just that I don't spend much time dwelling on the inconveniences.

In the front of my travel journal I list the cities that I've been to while using that particular volume.  The current one starts on February 23 of this year and the list is fourteen cities long.

 I've been able to do some of those journeys bringing only the iPad and leaving the laptop at home.  Depends on how much, and what kind of work I'm planning on getting done while I'm on the road.  If it's just email (and there is always email) the iPad has turned out to be completely sufficient.  It typically takes about an hour a day for me to get email handled and I can just about always squeeze that time out of the day, no matter how hectic the schedule is.

 If I'm working on a document or a presentation, however, I'll take the laptop.  In any case, I'm always in touch.  I very rarely bother with an out-of-office message.  I can't imagine maintaining this kind of schedule if I wasn't able to keep connected in that way.

 I saw a blog post recently where someone was trying to work out the work/life balance thing.  I rejected that notion years ago.  There was a point, probably a couple of years after I moved to Birmingham, that I realized the distinction between my "work day" and the rest of my day had evaporated.  It's not that "my life is my work" or anything like that -- it's that the time that I spend doing the things that I get paid for is seamlessly interwoven with the time that I spend doing other things.  As I've said before, I'm a library director 24 hours a day, but I'm also a doting grandfather 24 hours a day, and an amateur musician and a husband and all of those other roles that I partake of -- 24 hours a day.  I don't need to balance a duality -- I need to manage my time so that all of those roles get the time that they deserve. 

Still, as much as I enjoy the traveling and am able to interweave my responsibilities and pleasures, it does get tiring, so I'm very happy to be home for a stretch now.  As luck would have it, my next flight is five weeks from tomorrow.

When The Chef Is Having Fun...

If you cook often, you come to realize how much your mood affects how your meals turn out.   I come home weary and distracted and I make a dish that I've made many times before and I am sure that I am doing it in exactly the same way that I have in the past but it ends of up tasting uninspired -- fine, but nothing special.   Three weeks later, I'm trying the same dish but I'm in a mood where I'm loving what I'm doing and taking tremendous pleasure from it.  I still don't think that I'm doing anything different in terms of ingredients and amounts and heat and time...  but the food tastes better.  And it tastes better to Lynn, too, no matter what her moods may have been.

So it's become my standard practice in a restaurant, when everything on the menu looks interesting, and I can't make up my mind what I'm in the mood for, to ask the server to bring me whatever the chef "is having the most fun with tonight."

This only works, of course, when you have a chef who really knows what he or she is doing, and that was definitely the case last week when we had dinner at Tangled Up In Blue in tiny Taylors Falls, Minnesota, about an hour or so from the Twin Cities.

We went early, since we wanted to be able to get back to the Inn in time to watch the sunset from our porch.  It's still early in the season, so we were the only people there when we arrived.  The interior is, unsurprisingly, done up in various hues of blue, dusted with sparkles.  Wine bottles, sculptural fixtures, small candles on the tables; the place calms and invites.  It is intimate and welcoming with the sense that someone has turned the front half of their house into a casual, but sophisticated, dining space.

A nicely wide-ranging menu with a variety of seafoods & meats -- including bison, which Lynn was immediately intrigued by.  Everything looked interesting, everything looked good, and I wasn't in the mood to have to make my own choices.

So when the server came, I ordered wine and we ordered appetizers, and then, after Lynn expressed interest in the bison, I said, "Whenever I'm in a place where everything on the menu looks good..." and Lynn interrupted, laughing, "I know just what you're going to say."  And so we explained, and the server grinned and said, "I may have to have the chef come out and talk to you."

A little while later, Paul appears at our table, a little quizzical.  I explain my theory about how having fun affects your cooking and he smiles and nods.  I tell him that Lynn's in the mood to try something with the bison, but I'm up for whatever he wants to do.  He sees that we've ordered a big red wine, so he suggests that if he goes with the bison for Lynn, he can do something with a filet mignon for me.  "That works,"  I say. 

As he turns to the kitchen Lynn calls out, "Oh, and with red meat we're definitely rare to medium-rare people."  He turns, with an even bigger grin, and says, "I love you guys!"

Turns out that one of the things Paul is particularly good at (at least on the evidence of this one meal) is mixing sweet and spicy in perfectly balanced but unexpected ways.  My filet (a beautiful piece of meat in and of itself) came with a semi-spicy roasted pepper and raisin risotto topped w/ toasted almonds.  There were cilantro lime carrots and the sauce was honey habanero.  Lynn's strip steak was possibly the tenderest, most flavorful piece of bison she's ever had (and she'll go for the bison whenever she sees it on a menu) with carrot potato gnocchi, wilted spinach /w tomatoes, sauteed zucchini & squash and a bleu cheese demi glaze.

We traded up a bit, just to compare, but he'd done a perfect job of picking for each of us.  I laughed when he came out to check on us -- "As far as our own cooking goes," I pointed out.  "Lynn's the one who makes gnocchi and I'm the one who does risotto."  You'd think he knew.

At the end of the meal, it's not as if we needed dessert, but they do bananas foster, flamed at the table.  Why not?  It seemed like an appropriately celebratory way to end a marvelous meal.

I hope that Paul had fun -- he was certainly carrying a big smile at the end of the night.  So did we.  We were stuffed.  We were happy.  We were hoping we can figure out a way to get back there one day.

 

 

 

Reading E

Lynn sends me an Unshelved comic that, while it may not entirely reflect my experience of reading on the iPad, sure does resonate.

I read Turkle's book on the iPad and I've started The Information (so far I'm only getting books in which the iPad itself has at least a bit part).

Here's what I like: 

I can write notes of any length (or, at least, I haven't hit a word limit yet).  Since I have to type them (which is easy enough with the wireless keyboard) they're more legible than my handwriting ever is, and I don't have to squeeze them into the margins of the page.  In a print book that is really engaging, this sometimes gets ludicrously messy.  I really like that you can then go to the front and see a list of all of the places that you've underlined or noted and go right to them.

With the case that Marian gave me, I can easily prop it up and read while I'm eating lunch.

I love that you can touch an endnote number and go right to it and come back.

What I don't like: 

Blocking the passage that I want to highlight or attach a note to is very awkward. More than half the time it takes me two or three trys to get it to stick. This interrupts the flow of the reading. Very different from just having a pen in hand to underline or annotate as you go along.

There's no variation in marks.  You can highlight or attach a note, but that's it.  When I'm reading I underline, use check marks and circles and stars and a whole iconography that I've developed over 50 years of reading and writing in books.  I feel bereft. 

I was startled, when I started The Information, at how much I didn't like the fact that it looks exactly like the Turkle book.  It's a different book.  It ought to look and feel different.

 

The technology will get better.  We are so much in the early stages of this.  No doubt a scholar in Alexandria who was used to papyrus scrolls was very frustrated the first time he came across a codex.  This'll never take off, he would've thought.

Still, it's hard for me to imagine that an electronic version could ever be better than the equivalent print book.  It can be different.  It can do different things, and be much better at those things.  Josie loves the electronic version of The Monster at the End of This Book.  But when she goes to that she's playing with a toy, she's not reading a book.  Not for a moment does she think that it's equivalent to reading the book (which she also loves).  They're different experiences.  Both worthwhile, but fundamentally different.

I'm trying to imagine the technology getting to the point where I would prefer the electronic version of a print book.  But unless the "book" does different things, I can't see why I would -- and then it's no longer a "version" of a print book.  It's something else.

I do love that endnote feature, though.

Me, Twitter?

Bart & Gabe are determined to see how far they can push the use of twitter at this year's MLA conference.  They want to use my Doe Lecture to seed some of the discussion before and during the meeting, so I just sent Bart some questions that he can use for the "Twitter Tutorial" that they're cooking up later this month.

As I understand it, they'll use the questions as the basis for generating some twitter discussion so that people can get used to re-tweeting and using hashtags and embedding stuff and whatever else it is that people do with twitter.  As someone who is pretty twitter-averse I find my participation in this to be tremendously amusing.

I have an account.  I'm following 65 people and am followed by 61.  But I almost never put anything up, other than a note when I've put up a new blog post (not that there's been much of that lately).   Since June 2008, when I signed up, I have precisely 130 tweets.

I keep an eye on it, but mostly because I find Rosanne Cash to be wonderfully hilarious.   But now, even the president of my university is trying to tweet something every day or so.

Gabe, who I actually don't follow (I probably should) and I have had a number of long talks, particularly as he's been planning for the conference, on how twitter can be used productively.  I remain agnostic about it's potential value to me, but interested.

Last year, I followed the twitter feed for the Doe Lecture from my hotel room. It didn't give me much of a sense of what Ana was actually saying, but it did give me a good feel for the emotional temperature of the room and how well-received the talk was.  (I did watch the video of it later on, which then helped to make sense of some of the tweets).

I know that what Bart & Gabe are after is real conversation -- the feel of taking half a dozen people and putting them in a bar after a good lecture and listening to them talking animatedly about it.  Can you create something like that among a much larger group of people who aren't all in the same place?

I don't know. I don't track twitter discussions enough to have examples of where I think it has really worked well.  But it's worth the experiment.  I might even pitch in.