McDonaldization and Higher Education & Academic Libraries

I've been an academic librarian for almost eight years now: how time flies.  One of my favourite writers since I was a student has been Brian Quinn, whose research focuses on the psychosocial aspects of libraries.  One of my first posts featured Quinn's article on librarians as dramaturgists.   Quinn's writing is often fresh and insightful, focusing on different angles and perspectives of librarianship.

In 2000, he put forth the idea that just as society is becoming increasingly "McDonaldized," so is higher education and by extension, academic libraries.  The argument is that we live in an age of mass higher education, in which many students attend college because they see a college education as a means to a more lucrative career, not because they love learning.   Colleges and universities are under pressure from the public and governments to "control costs and maximize efficiency."  I can feel this often in my own line of work, too.

McDonaldization and Efficiency 

Efficiency is the systematic elimination of unnecessary time or effort in the pursuit of an objective.

The fast-food concept of quick service may have had the effect of raising the expectations of library users. Users seem less content with waiting in line for reference assistance and appear less willing to tolerate delays. Some libraries have responded by giving reference staff pagers so they can be “beeped” if a line forms at the service desk. The use of pagers is another example of how services in academic libraries have become efficiently rationalized.

McDonaldization and Calculability

 Calculability is another key characteristic of McDonaldization. Ritzer defined the term calculability as the tendency to measure quality in terms of quantity.

Many college and research libraries also keep extensive statistics on everything from reference transactions, cataloging statistics, and ILL statistics to circulation statistics, entrance gate statistics, and statistics about online transactions. Often the statistics are compiled for use as evidence of the library’s performance to justify requests for budget increases.

McDonaldization and Predictability 

Another key aspect of the rationalization process that is central to McDonaldization is predictability. A rational society is one in which people know what to expect - McDonald's menu is predictable and the food is consistently mediocre no matter which outlet is visited.  A world of McDonald’s is a significantly bland world in which surprise and delight are largely absent.

The collection development process has become more and more standardized, resulting in collection content varying less from one library or type of library to another. . . Many academic libraries use the same vendors, and although particular subject profiles may vary somewhat, the differences often depend more on a particular library’s depth of collecting than on the books themselves.

McDonaldization and Control 

The fourth and final aspect of McDonaldization is control. People represent the most unpredictable aspect of rationalized, bureaucratized systems, so it is people that McDonaldized organizations attempt to control.  Technology is easier to control than humans, so the ultimate goal of McDonaldization is to replace humans with technology.

Academic librarians are typically subject to an elaborate, formalized system of bureaucratic accountability that serves as a form of control. Each librarian’s performance is carefully documented by various means, such as systematized monthly reports to supervisors, annual or semiannual evaluations recorded on standardized forms that must be signed by both librarian and supervisor, less frequent, but periodic, review by promotion and tenure committees, and, more recently, posttenure review committees.

2015:  Recruiting Un-McDonaldized Librarians?  The Response 15 Years Later

So what's a helpless librarian to do in the midst of this scientific Taylor-style Fordist machinery?   Quinn suggests one remedy to counter the alarming trend is to hire un-McDonaldized librarians which would enable an un-McDonaldized culture.  Fifteen years later, Canadian librarian Karen Nicholson furthers the argument, citing that McDonaldization of academic libraries reflects the growing influence of corporate aims and values in the public sector under the neoliberal philosophy of New Public Management (NPM) -- think competition, profitability, risk, value for money, and entrepreneurship -- increasingly buzzwords in our daily lives.  They've seeped into academic librarianship.

Under this system, society is producing "new kinds of workers"—highly flexible, empowered “portfolios” of skills and experiences ready to sacrifice in lean times, enabled through an indoctrinating culture through the use of core values, vision statements, and futurist leaders. 

The American Library Association’s work in defining and promoting “core values” and developing leaders through programs such as Emerging Leaders, a self-propagating initiative that ultimately serves the needs of the ALA itself by “put[ing] participants on the fast track to ALA committee volunteerism,” exemplifies the influence of the new capitalism within the profession of librarianship.

The number of for-profit universities is on the rise, and higher education, in partnership with the private sector, continues to pursue the “expansive markets” of distance learning and e-commerce, as seen by the ubiquity of learning management systems and recent MOOCs phenomena.  This is scary stuff: I'm even taking a sabbatical to figure this all out, too.

So we end with the question that we began with: what are we to do?  I certainly don't have an answer as I am still in the thick of this myself.  Nicholson offers wise words of advice: as a profession, perhaps we need to consider why we do things instead of measuring what we do.  That's a great start:  A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step, as the saying goes.

The Price of Admission Is a Steep One For Learning

Price of Admission, although published in 2006, still rings true in academia today.  In an age when tuition fees have continued to ballooned to the point that it has overpriced even the most middle class of students.  It has become a luxurious business.  Journalist Daniel Golden's Price of Admission offers much thought provoking. Many colleges have developed special backchannel routes to admissions for the rich.   Harvard even has what is infamously known as the "Z-list" for “late admissions” which receive the golden preferential treatment.    Of course, universities don't like to admit this, attested to by the numerous "no comments" and "would not responds" during Golden's research.  What are the five categories of that is currently soiling the reputation of academia?

The Wealthy - Money talks.   The so-called prestigious universities justify favoring children of alumni and prospective donors on the grounds that tuition doesn't cover the entire cost of education. Of course, Ivy League institutions reason that private gifts subsidize scholarships, faculty salaries and other needs.  In fact, Golden reports that a recent study of legacies at one elite university found that as a group they are more likely than their classmates to be white, Protestant, and have attended prep schools.  It's known as development preference -- students recommended by the fundraising office, because their non-alumni parents or relatives are considered in a position to help the institution with money or visibility.  These parents may be corporate tycoons, Hollywood celebrities, or politicians in a position to provide earmarked funding.  The offspring, however, often arrive with less than peak credentials.  Harvard even informally has a name for these preferential applicants: the "Z-list."

The Famous - Celebrities and the children of celebrities enhance an institution's visibility.  Brown University chose a different strategy, instead targeting the children of the famous instead of the merely rich, such as Danny DeVito, Kevin Costner, and Hollywood Michael Ovitz are all now happy alumni parents.  Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist saw his son go to Princeton, his alma mater, despite less-than-stellar credentials at the exclusive St. Albans School.  Daniel Golden entertainingly regales us with tales of Hollywood insiders who get the red carpet treatment from the Ivy Leagues, such as mogul Michael Ovitz who wanted to enroll in 1999 and still inexplicably got accepted when Brown admissions officers found the academic record of the younger Ovitz not close to what would be appropriate for an offer of admission.  Pressured to admit him anyway, top administrators looked the other way as the abilities of the elder Ovitz – to host receptions for Brown administrators to raise money, to bring movie stars to campus, and presumably to help build Brown’s endowment - were far too much to pass up.  Brown Ovitz’s son was admitted under "special status," but eventually left but Ovitz’s daughter took the torch and entered Brown.  For all that work, Ovitz reciprocated and arranged campus appearance with Hollywood A-lister Dustin Hoffman, and subsequently hosted a reception at Ovitz’s Brentwood mansion.

"The Legacies" - Nearly all selective private schools, and many public universities, give an admissions edge to legacies, largely to facilitate alumni giving. At most top schools, legacies comprise a large part of the student composition and are accepted at two or three times the rate of other applicants. Some universities accept nearly half of alumni children who apply.   How skewed are the numbers?  As journalist Max Nisen reports,  Harvard's legacy admissions rate hovers around 30% when its overall admissions rate is 5.8%.  For Princeton's class of 2015, 33% of legacy applicants were admitted where the overall admissions rate for that class was 8.5%. Yale reveals that it admits 20 to 25% of legacy applicants while it only admitted 6.7% overall.

Athletes - Although we might believe that team sports on television reflect the diversity of university campuses, we don't realize that colleges often give admissions breaks to athletes in many prep-school sports that ordinary American kids never have a chance to play: crew, horseback riding, sailing, squash, polo, the list goes on.  It essentially comes down to money again, as colleges give preferential treatment toward athletes from these "rich sports" to attract wealthy donors who rowed crew or played squash themselves, want their alma mater to have a winning team, and are eager to pay for the boathouse or the polo ponies.  As such, we are already seeing colleges fund blueblood sports like crew and equestrian events while eliminating men’s teams in "working-class" sports like wrestling and track and field.

Faculty Brats - The admissions break is a side-effect of the tuition subsidy most colleges give to not only the children of faculty, but all types of employees, including secretaries and janitors. The history of the tuition benefit harks back to a time when colleges needed to offer such perks to attract candidates to lowly paid campus jobs.  But times have changed as the benefits offered in higher education are now seen as generous when compared with those in other major industries, which cut back during the recession.

Whereas universities are lax in criteria for some, it's almost exclusive to others.  Hiding behind the guise of affirmative action, some institutions narrow its preferences to particular ethnicities.  "Asians" in the US do not qualify for affirmative action, which colleges generally limit to underrepresented minorities such as blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.  Families that cannot afford to donate to a university must have exemplary scores and grades - and often even such criteria is not enough for admissions to the more prestigious institutions.  Instead subjective factors, such as artistic talent and leadership ability which lead to the rejection of countless valedictorians and students with perfect SAT scores.

Ironically, Daniel Golden himself is from the very institution he seeks to expose - though from a different generation.  Golden was a product of the SAT generation, and was one of the thousands of bright, middle-class public high school students who were able to attend a elite college at least partly because the test helped extend the vision and reach of the Ivy Leagues beyond a cluster of old-boy prep schools.

As a product of a Canadian university, I'm fortunate that there is still a sense of egalitarianism.  Corporatization is slowly seeping into the system, but we still have some time before the resistance becomes futile.  It's said that the relatively level playing field among Canadian universities is  one reason why Canada has the largest proportion of university graduates among G7 countries and the highest percentage of university graduates in the workforce.  It attracts talent from around the world to relocate to Canada.  But how long before we go the Ivy route?   I feel privileged to be among the elite.

Smartcuts - Breaking Conventions In the Name of Innovation

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Smartcuts is an unbelievably entertaining and informative book by technology journalist Shane Snow.   It is not simply about shortcuts, but smartcuts - the ability to accomplish rapid successes and breakthrough innovation with much less that we think.   In short, it argues while incremental progress can be achieved by playing by the rules, successful innovators create transformational change by breaking conventional rules and thought.  Out of Smartcuts emerges nine themes which engages innovation.   I thought it would fun to share with you here.  I'd be interested in hearing your feedback.

1. Hacking the Ladder - We live in an age of non-traditional ladder climbing.  Not just in politics, but business and personal development and education, entertainment, and innovation.  "Paying your dues" in traditional paths are not just slow, they're no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. This leads to true meritocracy.

2. Training with Masters - Data indicates that those who train with successful people who've "been there" tend to achieve success faster.  The winning formula, therefore, is to seek out the world's best and convince them to coach us.  But that's not enough though, as history is full of people who've been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.  It's not surprising, considering the failure rates of workplace mentorship programs.  Training with masters mean developing personal relationships with mentors, asking their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand - caring about the mentors' lives, too.  It's a relationship, not a transaction.

3. Rapid Feedback - It is about asking for feedback at a rate that encourages rejection and pushing oneself to become better instead of becoming a failure.  This type of pure, unadulterated feedback mechanism is a process that helps us adapt, modify, and refine our craft in a safe space that allows for true improvement.

4. Platforms - The platform amplifies the effort and teaches skills in the process of using it.  Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish as paying dues, as Shane Snow puts it.  Innovation pays off when it is amplified by a lever, meaning platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing the wheels or repeating ourselves, so that building on top of a lot of things that exist in the world to maximize efficiency and eliminate redundancy.

5. Catching Waves - While conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike, it's akin to believing if a surfer treads water in the same spot a wave will come along.  However, it doesn't; hence, some people practicing for twenty years never become experts.  A pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot, and neither can innovation.  The secret is to watch the waves and getting into the water to experiment.  In innovation, one must watch for the trends and anticipate where it will be coming and going before it comes.

6. Superconnecting - No matter that medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.  All great innovators build their careers by collaborating with talented, fast-rising, and well-connected people and by making them look great.  But once they become superconnectors, they continue helping people.  That's how to tell if someone is a giver or a taker in giver's clothing, with the paradigmatic message: If you do it only to success, it probably won't work.  Pay it forward.

7. Momentum - The trick to harnessing momentum is to build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified.  No one is an "overnight" success - each success story had backlogs of material that became reservoirs, ready to become torrents as soon as the dam was removed.  That's what needs to happen when that big break happens.  The difference between a success and a lucky break is substance.  

8. Simplicity - It's no secret that constraints drive creativity.  Many such great innovations this world has seen have emerged from limited means.  It's important to break down complex equations down to core principles.  It's critical to instill urgency and focus on what's core.

9. 10X Thinking - Vision is what ultimately drives success.  While people are willing to support other people's small dreams with kind words, we're willing to invest lives and money into huge dreams.  The bigger the potential, the more people are willing to back it.  Big causes attract big believers, big investors, big capital, and big talent.  To become not just bigger, but truly better.  

Copyright Infingement, Intellectual Property, and Artistic Plagiarism: Do They Mix?

Canadian authors Wayson Choy, Paul Yee and Sky Lee have launched a $6 million lawsuit against Chinese author Ling Zhang, alleging copyright infringement against her book Gold Mountain Blues, a family saga about Chinese immigrants to Canada originally written in Chinese. The lawsuit not only includes Zhang, whose also the author of Aftershock,, but also Penguin Canada’s parent company, Pearson Canada Inc., and translator Nicky Harman.  The details of the case are available for all to see.

Although Zhang contends Gold Mountain Blues is the result of years of research and several field trips to China and Western Canada, the Chinese Canadian authors believe the book contains numerous elements copied from their work, including characters, plots and descriptions.  As the four Chinese Canadian authors articulate, their stories are not clichés and they are certainly are not common.

This is precisely why this case is so unique and fascinating.  According to Canadian copyright laws,  plagiarism isn't a concept that easily fits under the Copyright Act.  In Canada at least, copyright covers words of the same sequence, but does not extend to ideas.   To complicate matters, proving similarity of expression between Gold Mountain Blues and the other works may be particularly difficult since the English text is a translation of a Chinese one.

As Kate Taylor points out in the Globe and Mail

Copyright cases can be difficult to win: Infringement is a narrow legal concept that involves direct reproduction of a substantial part of the original – compared to the broader academic or journalistic notions of plagiarism that can involve unattributed borrowing of ideas or sentences.

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Points of comparison

Examples of plot and character similarities between several Chinese-Canadian novels and Zhang Ling’s Gold Mountain Blues:

1. Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990): In grave danger, a young Chinese man is rescued and then cared for by a beautiful girl, Kelora, of rare Chinese/Native heritage.

Gold Mountain Blues (2011): In grave danger, a young Chinese man is rescued and then cared for by a beautiful girl, Sundance, of rare Chinese/Native heritage.

In Disappearing Moon Cafe, Wong Gwei-chang is searching for bones, is discovered by Kelora Chen who speaks to him in Chinese, and meets her father, a Chinese man. In Gold Mountain Blues, Kam Shan runs away from Chinatown after talking to anti-Qing revolutionaries, including Sun Yat-sen . . . falls into riverbank, and is rescued by Sundance, who speaks to him in broken English. While Gwei-chang leaves Kelora on the heed of his mother, who told him to go back to China to dutifully marry, Sundance voluntarily permits Kam Shan to leave as she catches him trying to run away as her Chinese grandfather did the same thing many yrs ago (pg. 285).

• This seems to be a common theme in other artistic works. In Dances with Wolves, John Dunbar rescues Stands With Fist, and eventually falls in love. In fact, it was said that Avatar stole from Dances With Wolves as Jake Sully is rescued by Neytiri, and also falls in love, with her and the tribe. On another note, Aboriginal-Chinese relations and marriages were quite common in BC. Larry Grant, Howard Grant, Cedar and Bamboo did a whole documentary on First Nations-Chinese relations).

2. Disappearing Moon Café: The Chinese man is old now. Full of regret for his long lost love, Kelora, he dies after a visitation from her.

Gold Mountain Blues: The Chinese man is old now. After searching for his long lost love, Sundance, he dies after a visit from her.  However, in Disappearing Moon Cafe the context of the visits are quite different.  While Kelora shows up in Wong's Gwei-chang as he is in the last moments of his life; Kam-shan is visited out of the blue by Sundance, who later indirectly reveals to him that she borne him a son. When he asks her, she is annoyed, expecting that he wants to ask her out on a date.

3. Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995): Wong Suk is disfigured after working on the railway. He rescues a white foreman who becomes gratefully indebted as well as a good friend. When the foreman dies, his son passes along a precious piece of gold.

Gold Mountain Blues: Ah-Fat is disfigured in a fight while working on the railway. He saves the life of his white foreman. They become good friends over the years. When the foreman’s wife dies, her will leaves money to Ah-Fat’s son.

While Jade Peony's relationship between the white foreman was purely platonic, the relationship between Kam Shan and the foreman (Rick Henderson) and his wife are much more complex. Ah-Fat sends his son Kam Shan to work for the Hendersons upon which Kam Shan and Mrs. Henderson is bound in an illicit affair. Upon her death, she leaves him $4000, half of which was supposed to go to her daughter (which already passed away after an accident, when she runs away from her mother's affair with the boy).

4. Paul Yee’s The Bone Collector’s Son (2003): Fourteen-year-old Bing works as a houseboy for a white couple in Vancouver. He becomes a target of white bullies but his employer Mrs. Bentley rescues him.

Gold Mountain Blues: Fifteen-year-old Kam Ho works as a houseboy for a white couple in Vancouver. He becomes a target of white bullies but his employer Mrs. Henderson rescues him.

• The idea that the houseboy is saved by his master is not an unfamiliar scene. In fact, this occurred often during the pre-Civil War America. When Frederick Douglass was about twelve years old, Hugh Auld's wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet despite the fact that it was against the law to teach slaves to read. Douglass described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman, who treated Douglass like one human being ought to treat another..

5. Paul Yee’s Dead Man’s Gold (2002): Hard-working Shek buys a farm while younger brother

Ping hates farm work and goes to the city to gamble. Shek pays everyone but Ping. Ping is unhappy. Ping kills Shek.

Gold Mountain Blues: Hard-working Ah Fat buys a farm while his son Kam Shan hates farm work and goes to the city to gamble. Ah Fat pays others but not Kam Shan. Kam Shan is unhappy. He disappears.  The context is completely different. While Ping and Shek are in the same farm together, Ah Fat's two sons (Kam Shan and Kam Ho) are never physically together at one time in Vancouver although both do work for their father Ah Fat at different times. Unlike Ping's killing of Shek, Kam Shan does not kill his father, Ah Fat. Unlike Kam Shan who gambles in Chinatown with the money from his father's produce sales, Ping actually stopped gambling after working for his Shek, who never gives him any money.

• This scene of a farmer with a son who gambles his wealth away only to be forgiven by the father, is so common in literature that stretches back to the times of the bible. In fact, Luke 15:1 "Parable of the Lost Son" has been one of Christianity's most famous stories. (One which Tim Kelleher has written an entire book on, The Prodigal Son). I don't think it can be argued that this is an entirely unique scenario.

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Much has been written about the situation.  Part of the controversy stems from whether the Chinese language from Gold Mountain Blues has been plagiarized from original passages of these original Chinese Canadian English literary works. This episode highlights the transformative nature of the Internet.  A virtually unknown blogger who referred to himself simply as “Changjiang” alleged that Zhang had taken advantage of a "literary conundrum," one that Canadian Chinese writers cannot read Chinese, while Chinese readers and critics do not understand English.  So as a result, the lines are drawn and the legal and literary worlds clash intimately together over the results that will eventually set some precedents in the translation, publishing, and writing worlds.

Digital Scholarship Librarian - Simon Fraser University Library

Digital scholarship has been an emerging if not critical area in academia for the past decade.  From areas such as data management, to intellectual copyright, to digital humanities, almost every facet of intellectual inquiry has been somehow affected by the rise of digital scholarship.  It's not surprising to see academic libraries rising to the meet the needs of its users, namely that of faculty and researchers.   Simon Fraser University Library has posted a brand new position.   I'm salivating at this position - it seems to cover the gamut of what makes the new areas of librarianship so exciting.  Here are the details:

The full-time continuing position will support SFU faculty, graduate students, and other
users across the three SFU campuses and beyond.The incumbent will have the skills necessary to advance digital scholarship initiatives at Simon Fraser University by providing consultations, support, and project management for faculty, librarians, and students engaged in technology-rich scholarly projects. In conjunction with liaison librarians, Library Systems and others, he/she works directly with faculty, students, and others in identifying and facilitating the deployment of appropriate tools and technologies to meet research and/or publication needs.

The incumbent will also plan, implement, and promote scholarly communications services and increase campus awareness of author rights, Open Access, and new and existing funding mandates.  The Digital Scholarship Librarian will deliver or coordinate the delivery of individual and group instruction on scholarly communication and digital scholarship topics as a member of the Research Commons team.

This position will be attractive to adaptable individuals with excellent communication and collaborative skills and interest in developing them further. It will appeal to those who have an understanding of discipline-specific and interdisciplinary research methodology and are highly motivated to provide innovative and responsive services to faculty and students.

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ASSIGNMENT:

• Foster collaboration on the creation and curation of digital objects for research.
• Collaborate with Special Collections, University Archives, and other campus stakeholders in the access and preservation of digital assets.
• Work closely with Library Systems to scope, develop, and support digital projects
• Partner with faculty, graduate students and librarians to incorporate analytical tools, digitized and born-digital resources into research and teaching activities
• Provide project management expertise to liaison librarians, faculty, and students
• Track current issues and trends in scholarly communication
• Support the development of liaison librarians' knowledge and understanding of scholarly communication issues
• Plan, implement, promote scholarly communications services including increasing campus awareness of Author Rights, Open Access, Funding mandates/compliance, etc. with faculty, graduate students and applicable campus units (Grant facilitators, VP Research, Office of Research Services, Ethics, Teaching and Learning Centre, etc.)
• Increase campus awareness of SFU Library Digital Scholarship Services (OA Fund, Scholarly Digitization Fund, Public Knowledge Project, SFU’s research repository - Summit, and new developing services, with stakeholders).
• Manage operations of OA Fund – funding requests /criteria /eligibility
• Develop and deliver or coordinate delivery of online and in-person instruction sessions for bot students and faculty.
• Participate on Library project teams and committees.
• Develop professional knowledge and skills on a continuing basis.

Search: The Final Frontier

Search as we know it now is based on words and text, but this is limiting in many ways.  Merely searching the web of links and URLs no longer works in the sophisticated evolution of the Web.   How do we push out of those traditional boundaries of search?   Bing Director of Search at Microsoft's Bing Stefan Weitz has come out with an excellent book called simply Search predicting the world of search engines in the future, particularly when "every device, every object that surrounds us, and every person is connected and we have systems that can distinguish patterns from the noise."

Of course, when we think of  search, it is language-based.  The problem of our current search is the "low resolution" approach of describing things.  The statement a picture is worth a thousand words in this aspect is really apt: it literally takes at least a thousand words to precisely to define the attributes of even the most basic object as a table (such as dimensions, materials, country of origin, date of purchase, etc).  This is for a simple object, too!

According to Weitz, searching and describing the world required a method that both search engines and humans could process: words mapped to pages, and those same pages mapped to information.  Even audio-visual information are associated through text.  

What if search is described by very fine details not by human language but by things?  What if  sensors through a billion connected devices become an Internet representation of a physical object?  No longer do we have to rely on language as a universal descriptor, but suddenly the world can be modeled in seemingly endless detail using facets that have little relation to language.

The boundaries between digital and physical worlds blend into each other and complement one another.   In this new search world, the increasing digitization of the world means that everything can be described at higher resolutions than ever before.

Timing is everything, too, as the Web has moved away from being an information repository to a bridge that transports data and enables services to happen in real life.  Weitz likens this transformation of search from a large library into a digital proxy for the physical world.   Just as humans are unable to think about things isolation, the Web needs to perceive the world holistically, away from a Web of words to a Web of the world.  When search understands every characteristic of every object on the planet, it will be finally able to make those connections.  I've written about this in previous posts about the current evolution of the technology and how it shapes our thinking as information professionals.

These connections are called graphs.  By linking these disparate graphs, the commonalities that emerges will assemble a complete picture of the world and everything in it.  Every person and object can be described in hundreds of ways, from photos from Facebook to your personal weight when you're on a scale, to the energy consumed by your smartphone.  In this smart-world, machines build models that re-create reality, becoming aware and sensitive to our needs and inquiries.

Such machine learning - an area of artificial intelligence (AI) - allows search systems the capability to make sense of the world.  Whether we call this brave new world a Web of Things, Web 3.0, smart web, or intelligent web, is still to be determined.  But the potential for for the interconnectedness of this system that will change the way we search is almost as exciting as when the Web first became ubiquitous.  The future of search feels bright indeed.  

Class Hierarchies and the Ivy Leagues

In Excellent Sheep, the author, essayist, and literary critic Bill Deresiewicz writes about the state of American education: the the entitled and the elite.  Examining the decaying state of education in the United States, the author pulls no punches in his disparaging assessment of how Ivy Leagues have shaped American higher education for the worse.

A professor of English at Yale University, there is no other with such insider knowledge of the intellectual factory than Deresiewicz himself, who ironically is himself a product of the Ivy league privileged class (whom he comfortably acknowledges) before he decided to abandon his faculty position in favour of freelance writing.

In 2008, Deresiewicz published a controversial essay in the The American Scholar titled The Disadvantages of an Elite Education which criticizes Ivy League and elite higher education institutions for supposedly coddling their students and discouraging independent thought.  Deresiewicz asserts elite institutions ultimately produce students who are unable to communicate with people who don't have the same background as themselves.

Fast-forward to 2014 and in Excellent Sheep, he continues the argument:

. . . the problem is the Ivy League itself - the position it and other schools have been allowed to occupy.  The problem is that we have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions.  However much they claim to act, or think they're acting, for the common good, they will always place their interests first.  They will always be the creatures of the rich.  The arrangement is great for the schools, whose wealth and influence continue to increase . . .

Credentialism -  Colleges have become inundated with job fairs and the two most coveted: consulting and finance.  It seems as if the number of degrees and the most prestigious jobs have curtailed society's sense of worth - and this has crept up and in fact this mindset is being cultivated early in the student's mind.  

Corporatization - In many ways it is the fall of Humanities and the rise of a technocracy which thirsts for fame and wealth.   The results of this has been further monetization and privatization of  higher education; whatever cannot be measured as an "outcome" for the institution's bottom line is cut and slashed in the name of efficiency and global competition.  What are MOOCs but further watering down of quality instruction, less face-time with professors, and further reduction of adjunct instructors altogether?

Class Privilege - In conspiratorial fashion, the system is fixed (but not flawed) in that it's designed specifically to sustain the class hierarchy, mirroring many of current society's problematic income gaps.  Deresiewicz points out an appalling fact: the majority of American presidential candidates since 1984 had been educated from the Ivy Leagues.  On the surface it appear as if the "best of the best" rise to the top to be a nation's leaders; however, the underpinnings of how the structure of such a rigid class system sustained by the (wealthy) elite for the elite is troubling to say the least.

Cynical, you say?  The situation is more pronounced in America than it is here in Canada (although Deresiewicz praises Canada, Finland, and Singapore for their egalitarian systems not yet tainted).  However, I already do see symptoms of this higher education vortex.  Each year as funding is reduced is one year closer we move the needle to the meritocratic hierarchy that Deresiewicz so despises.   We can only hope that Deresiewicz's early warning signs are just an exaggeration.  I fear not.

Welcome to New Beginnings, and New Endings in 2015

This site started as an experiment in 2006 during a professional practicum with my now colleague and mentor Dean Giustini at the Biomedical Branch Library at the University of British Columbia.  My first assignment?  To create a blog and keep track of my experiences through concise and succinct written reflections.

An exciting time 2006 came to be -- Web 2.0 emerged as a force to be reckoned with and the possibilities and opportunities for implementing these new technologies had just begun.  New positions within organizations were ripe within a booming economy and the rise from the ashes of the dot-com crash.  It seemed like the right time for the beginning of many things.

Well, nine years later, and we find that the evolution of social media has not quite changed the world, but it's certainly made a difference.  Mobile technologies, semantic web, and Internet of Things, have all surfaced as potentially game-changing technologies that will impact the world.   My site has attempted to follow these important trends and help me keep abreast of these rapid changes.

But when does one begin to turn the corner?   I have found that a passion to connect and inform with my audience has waned at times and the quantity of posts has dipped to levels that I am not comfortable to continue the site.  Has it become a hobby or a burden?  

2015 is a new start.  A re-branding is in order.  Here are three things I pledge to work on for my resolution in this upcoming year:

1. Focus on liaison, reference, and collection building work. This site will be situated as a canvas on which to paint new ideas, experiment, and synthesize experiences together on a coherent and continual basis.  The convergence of technology and demographic shifts has brought librarianship into uncharted territory - open data, open education, digital humanities (just to name a few of many) mean the landscape of academic libraries will be shifting tectonically in the next few years.  There's much listening and watching to do.  This site will aim to follow those trends and conversations.

2.  Curriculum - speaking of which, there is also an Asian Canadian & Migration Studies program in development at UBC - a unique program that encourages students to explore the rich history, culture, and contemporary development of Asian communities in Canada by supporting co-creation of knowledge with community-based organizations.  In a multi-culturally diverse country we live in here in North America, it's one of many that are evolving in the academic ecology.  Where is the academic library's place in this knowledge creation, especially in community-based research?   I hope to add to this developing discussion with my own experiences and insight throughout the process.

3.  The Personal & the Professional - I've been asked why this site doesn't show more of me.  It doesn't, but it should.   There are book reviews to be written; film reviews to be articulated; news stories to analyze.  So onward and so forth.

Telling Everyone What A ‎Serious Attempt to Analyze What Change Really Means #Socialmedia

I've followed UBC Journalism professor Alfred Hermida, who's known as a "news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator," for a number of years.  So when his latest book Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters came out, I couldn't resist from taking a look look at this title.  Indeed, it is packed with progeny of insight about the different angles of social media.   Hermida is often quoted in the media and cited in academic circles for his research about the evolution of digital journalism.  The book certainly doesn't disappoint in its analysis of the transforming media landscape - one where citizen journalists and bloggers blur the line between what is reporting and rumour.  Audiences have become editors and emotion often drives the primeval urge to share and be social.  As Hermida puts it, social media

. . . requires a different mindset from the way we approached things like the newspaper.  The daily paper was finite.  It had a set number of pages, column inches and words.  And even then, most didn't read every single story and perhaps ignored some sections altogether.  Social media is the ambient music of the every day.  Much of what is shared consists of the mundane details of life, the small talk and casual exchanges that are important in fostering societal bonds.  It is flowing in attention.  Like ambient music, we know it is there, but it is unobtrusive.

This book is a real game changer - it's no coincidence it's on best sellers lists and at the front of bookstores.

From Crisis to "Revolution"? The new paradigm of collection management in university libraries

As a liaison librarian in Asian Studies, I'm still in the learning stages of collection development - the nuances of balancing purchases with budget constraints.  Approval plans amidst the restructuring of firm orders.  E-books versus print titles.  DDA packages that no longer seem to be to the advantageous to publishers who pass on the costs to academic libraries.  It's sometimes feels like a whirlwind tour of changes.

However, after coming across Blanca San Jose Montano's "The new paradigm of collection management in university libraries: from crisis to revolution," it helps contextualize the current chaos of collection management.  Montano positions collection management in an historic timeline, one with a very long process where "internal" and "external" factors interact to transform the collection and its management activities.  Libraries are living organisms in continuous change that adapts to the context where they exist and which is the cause of their progress. It is formed by “vital elements” such as the collection – which is its basic element and the nucleus of its activity.

We can look at then, Thomas Kuhn, whose theory of the "paradigm shift" in science views science as ultimately a product of human activity – and being a social product, it is formed by processes where internal and external factors interact - a theory that divides science evolution different (altogether five stages).  This article puts things into focus with three salient points for us academic librarian selectors who are often too steeped in our work that we can sometimes forget to take a step back and look at the greater picture.  Here are three takeaways:

1. Libraries adapt to their historical context.  Libraries live and breathe on the technological, social, cultural and political transformations that converge and interact, with a cause – effect correlation that is difficult to establish for its rapid evolution. In the past decades, the developments in the digital fields have gained momentum, the library maintains and increases the relevance of its fundamental mission to organize and preserve that has neither changed nor has been deprecated. The library is no longer a static place and becomes a space; the collection remains a tangible possession deposited in a place and becomes a material network with value-added services, and the user becomes an active element of conversation.

2. University libraries are information systems. They have transformed their aims and functions to become a unified university information system, enlarging their mission of conserving and preserving the teaching and researching collections to make them more useful and competitive. These libraries seek to facilitate learning and academic communication, adapting to the digital world, their institutions and their users.

3. The tools for conventional “collection management” have changed.  In fact, they have gone through a "revolution." The new model of “cooperative collection management” should be configured so as to provide the library and its community with a balanced, homogeneous and standardized view of its purposes, strategies and good common practices.

Thus, it is important to reflect (and breathe) when doing collection management work.  It's not easy, particularly with the barriers and constant barrage of seemingly shifting priorities and moving targets.  Collection management is a continuum - if we aren't careful to move along with the changing profession, not only will it remain stale, we risk becoming obsolete to our users.  

How Not to be a Digital Zombie

You know who I am, what I do, and more importantly, whether or not I can help you or someone you know.

Author and management consultant Bernard Marr offers excellent advice on how to introduce ourselves in the often chaotic world of small talk and cocktail party conversations.  It's not as easy as it looks - looking and sounding like an intelligent human being while not nervously cracking under the pressure.   

Asian Canadian Archives - a Window Into the Past

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I recently had the good fortune to work with a prominent community organizer in donating his archives to the UBC Library.  Wong-Chu was born in Hong Kong and described himself as nomad for many years. He didn’t settle in Vancouver until 1965 when he was an adult. A writer, photographer, historian, radio producer, community organizer, activist, editor, as well as a literary and cultural engineer, Wong-Chu kept meticulous records which include his work with:

• Canadian cultural and literary communities; 
• Asian Canadian writers; 
• social justice and historical issues related to discrimination of Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups; 
• Canada and Vancouver's Chinese and other Asian cultural communities

As Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art puts it,

 a persistent activist and cultural producer Jim co-founded the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop, Ricepaper Magazine, Pender Guy Radio, the Asian Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR), literASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Festival. With the sheer girth of his activity Jim has been instrumental in creating a cultural scene inclusive of Asian Canadian talent.

As an academic librarian, community engagement has been an important part of my role in the library.    The recent creation of a program called Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) is a new multidisciplinary initiative that provides students with the opportunity to explore the rich history, culture, and contemporary development of Asian communities in Canada. The minor will support the building of a dynamic and sustainable Asian Canadian community initiative at UBC that aspires to build strong peer-to-peer linkages between researchers and provide mentoring and training for students, in concert with supporting collaborative partnerships in the co-creation of knowledge with Asian Canadian community-based organizations.

So instead of textbook-focused program, the collection of these courses focuses on the local history, providing students opportunities to connect and learn from the pioneers that made the community the diversity it is today, and creating course materials through archival research and new documentary approaches such as oral histories - something which brings in the experiential component that academia sometimes misses the point on.

Over the next decade, it will be fascinating to see the rise of this grassroots approach to teaching and learning - the library in many ways is the focal point of this process.  I'm looking forward to reporting back on our progress.

Horizon Report 2014 - The Academic Research Library Edition

It’s that time of year when the NMC Horizon Project, a 12-year effort established in 2002, unleashes what it identifies and describes as the emerging technologies likeliest to have the largest impact over the coming five years in every sector of education around the globe. 

As I’ve written in previous postings about Horizon Report, it’s always like Christmas Eve anticipation. This year is even more exciting and interesting as this version of the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Library Edition examines six key emerging technology trends for their impact on academic and research libraries worldwide. 

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

Electronic Publishing
If the first revolution in electronic publishing was making publishing platforms accessible to anyone, the next phase is now to link these platforms together in producing new combinations and new types of content. New concepts such as responsive design and open access will allow that content to be archived as well as ported to any device, making it easier for libraries to publish resources that assist and reach people outside of the physical buildings.

• Academic and research libraries are currently focused on growing their activity around the creation of original publications through e-journals or e-books, research data, and learning content that supports their institutions
• As a growing amount of educational content becomes readily available via the Internet, libraries have a major incentive to more seamlessly connect people with their resources and scholarly information
• Well-established initiatives include the publishing of a range of scholarly content, such as conference proceedings, monographs, and theses and dissertations libraries have adapted to publishing content, rather than simply purchasing content to share with their constituents. 
• For example, University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, for example, now publishes more than 35 scholarly online journals, developed through an online workflow that enables content to be consumed by students, faculty, and researchers across a variety of devices

Mobile Apps
For several years now, a revolution has been taking place in software development that parallels similar shifts in the music, publishing, and retail industries. Mass market is giving way to niche market, and with it, the era of highly priced large suites of integrated software has shifted to a new view of what software should be. 

• Mobile apps embody the convergence of several technologies that lend themselves to use in academic and research libraries, including annotation tools, applications for creation and composition, and social networks.
• Mobile apps continue to gain traction in academic and research libraries, because they are particularly useful for learning as they enable people to experience new concepts wherever they are, often across multiple devices.
• As academic and research libraries begin to understand the potential of external apps, they are going beyond providing searching and reading tools by developing their own apps to create greater awareness of how libraries can assist students and faculty.

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

Bibliometrics and Citation Technologies
Viewed as a set of mathematical and statistical methods to quantitatively analyze citations and content of academic literature, the technology has advanced rapidly in the age of computers as new algorithms are being developed to better gauge an author or journal’s impact in the field, and help researchers efficiently filter through research databases or select the most appropriate journal for publication.

• Bibliometrics encompasses citation count, journal impact factor (JIF), and h-index, among other metrics that can be used to support grant applications, attainment of new and tenured positions, and requests for raises or promotions. 
• Bibliometrics is crucial to quantitatively demonstrating the quality of an institution’s research, and these measures
• Advances in bibliometrics are helping academic and research libraries maintain a competitive edge by maximizing the influence of their scientific outputs, and thus reinforcing their effort to gain funding.

Open Content
Open content uses open licensing schemes to encourage not only the sharing of information, but the sharing of pedagogies and experiences as well. Part of the appeal of open content is that it is a response to both the rising costs of traditionally published resources and the lack of educational resources in some regions. 

• Increased use of OER in higher education has made academic libraries the coordinators of campus units in the development of open content
• Institutions that are implementing large-scale open content initiatives are relying on their libraries to lead the charge
• OSU Libraries of Oregon State University embarked on a pilot program that manages OSU Press and OSU Extended Campus in the creation, review, and support of open textbooks
• The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way scholars in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed. 

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of connected objects that link the physical world with the world of information through the web. Embedded chips, sensors, or tiny processors attached to an object allow helpful information about the object, such as cost, age, temperature, color, pressure, or humidity to be transmitted over the Internet. 

• This simple connection allows remote management, status monitoring, tracking, and alerts if the objects they are attached to are in danger of being damaged or spoiled. Many web tools allow objects to be annotated with descriptions, photographs, connections to other objects, and other contextual information; the Internet of Things makes access to these data as easy as it is to use the web.
• Connect people’s interactions with library catalogs online with their experiences in the physical facilities. Many catalogs currently offer a “favorite” so users can easily add items to their virtual list of preferences and readings. Through an IoT-enabled app, maps and directions to each of those resources can be provided to patrons upon entering the library.

Semantic Web and Linked Data
Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned the semantic web as a natural evolution of the web. His idea is that eventually the semantic web might be able to help people solve very difficult problems by presenting connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, individuals, events, or things — connections that it would take many people many years to perceive, but that could become obvious through the kinds of associations made possible when the semantics of the data are exposed.

• Academic and research libraries are in a unique position to benefit from the increased exposure and contextualization that semantic tools can bring to their collections. 
• Library catalogs will be a more valuable information resource if their metadata is an interoperable part of the semantic web and not siloed in separate inaccessible databases. 
• It is no longer enough for libraries to have their own websites with collection data; there is growing emphasis to integrate these collection catalogs into sites and services more frequently accessed by users. Students and researchers need to be able to connect from Google, for example, back to their specific library.
• As an increasing number of librarians recognize the importance of sharing information about collections across institutions, they are forming communities of practice, such as Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LODLAM), a global network of professionals interested in working with linked open data in their institutions.

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So there you go - the Horizon Report has been accurate on a number of fronts since it was first released.

How to Be a Quitter and Still Be a Success

I recently came across Jon Acuff's Quitter. Jon Acuff is a New York Times Bestselling author of four books including his most recent, Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters.  For 16 years he’s helped some of the biggest brands in the world tell their story, including The Home Depot, Bose, Staples, and have spoken at conferences, colleges, companies and even churches.  Probably better known as the humorist who wrote Stuff Christians Like, Acuff has a witty and sharp intellect for being able to synthesize complex ideas into a highly engaging and fun read.  In my recent foray into Quitter, I realized that I stumbled across another great read - one that situates the current wave of literature around self-improvement and self-publishing guides.

Fame is a Burden - Don't be a victim of your own success - Many who go from anonymity to overnight success experience pressure to constantly keep up.  The consequences are often an afterthought when one begins the long road from creating something from scratch and watch it grow to prominence.  But the road to fame has its drawbacks, including the loss of privacy, freedom, and ultimately the chance to be able to innovate and freely fail.  Anonymity is a luxury.  Many stars yearn for the opportunity to test new ideas and experiment without consequences.  But here is the paradox: the greater the fame, the less space there is for risk whereas obscurity's greatest trade-off is the ability to try anything and do anything without much repercussions.  Fame does have its drawbacks doesn't it?

Do Not Burn Out - It's easy after a while to forget about the people around you.  The countless hours of hard work that leads to success oftentimes comes at a price - and that is usually those closest around us.  There will inevitably be a trade-off; sadly, success comes at a zero-sum game.  To achieve success in almost anything, one must dedicate time and energy for a craft - yet, this comes at a price.  Family and friends should be foremost, according to Acuff, as they are a support network in life's ecology.  We need to nurture these relationships and not forget about the bigger picture in life.  It's not all about the money.

Give for Free - Just as important to create is the necessity to give back.  Acuff encourages us that we need to share what we create with the world and give back.  Like a karmic cycle, this giving will reward ourselves further into the future.  Many have written about this concept of giving back, including self-help gurus from Robert Kawasaki to billionaires such as Richard Branson.  There's a reason it's a common theme: it works!  So will you do it?   

Big Data for Knowledge Workers, Information Professionals, Businesses, and Just About Everyone Else

The emergence of "Big data" as a field of study is a new phenomenon - one which few comprehends immediately despite a vague notion of what it stands for.  As a blanket term, big data encompasses data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process the data within a period of time.   Of course, the challenge is heavy: we need capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization of the data.

Academic libraries have only begun to open the pandora's box of creating data curation programs and initiatives to support universities.  Data curation is a term used to indicate management activities required to maintain research data long-term such that it is available for reuse and preservation. In science, data curation may indicate the process of extraction of important information from scientific texts, such as research articles by experts, to be converted into an electronic format.

Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson, as far back as 2008, boldly declared for the end of theory as we know it because big data can predict the future.  A flurry of books have come out the past few years about big data - all with different approaches and viewpoints of it - but all coming to similar conclusions about its transformative approaches.  With that said, there are some excellent published books out there which serve as an excellent prime into this important area of study which not only academics would need to learn about, but also businesses and knowledge workers that deal with the increasingly vast amounts of data captured everyday.

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Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is one of the earliest tomes that explained in laymen's language the gift and power of curating and using big data in solving problems. Now a legend, Silver first became known for building a unique system called PECOTA a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players. In addition, Silver's accuracy of the November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states as well all 35 U.S. Senate races that year—won him further attention and notoriety.

A fascinating read, the book draws on Silver's groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

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The other book worth looking at is The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?.  Patrick Tucker, Editor of Futurologist, offers a stunning yet disturbing look into how computer-aided forecasting using big data is positioned for rapid growth over the next decade. The rise of big data will enable us to predict not only events like earthquakes or epidemics, but also individual human behaviors.  We already live in such a world when we run a Google search and our results are often personalized without our even knowing it.  In the future, an app on your phone knows you're getting married before you do. Your friends' tweets can help data scientists predict your location with astounding accuracy, even if you don't use Twitter. Soon, we'll be able to know how many kids in a kindergarten class will catch a cold once the first one gets sick.  This is a hauntingly beautiful gaze into what the future of big data will mean for everyone's future.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb's writing really caught me offguard when I had first come across it but helped me appreciate big data within the randomness of this world.  The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" popularized the way in how we understand the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact, concisely chiseled for a non-academic readership. The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (called outliers) and our humans tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory, and covers both science and the arts guiding us from a tour of literary subjects in the beginning to scientific and mathematical subjects in the later portions.

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MIT Professor Sandy Pentland has often been seen as one of the foremost thinkers and researchers of the area of big data.  Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We’re social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors.

Ultimately, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science looks at organizational and human behaviours from a physics standpoint.   Pentland's book questions how can we create organizations and governments that are cooperative, productive, and creative focusing on the engine that drives social physics is big data.  Pentland argues that this newly ubiquitous digital data that is becoming available all around us can help us understand and predict almost all facets of human life. By using these data to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior we can hope to engineer better social systems.

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Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die takes us (and big data) on a whirlwind tour of the subject disciplines, and introduces us to the notion of a new term called predictive analytics, which encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from modeling, machine learning, and data mining that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future, or otherwise unknown, events.  For instance, it delves into the relatively new idea of "persuasion modeling," which predicts influence in order to do influence. Barack Obama's campaign used it to influence voters in the 2012 presidential election; marketing uses it to more adeptly persuade customers; and medicine uses it to better select per-patient treatments.

Intriguingly, the book moves beyond forecasting to a very granular level, contesting that while Nate Silver made election forecasts for each state as a whole, the Obama campaign was using predictive analytics to make per-voter prediction. Consequently, true power comes in influencing the future rather than speculating on it--the raison d'être of predictive analytics.  As author Eric Siegel argues, while Nate Silver publicly competed to win election forecasting, Obama's analytics team had quietly competed to win the election itself.