Are you listening?

I was running errands today and had the radio tuned to NPR. Dick Gordon's The Story was on and he was interviewing this amazing couple, Scott and Tiffany Smiley. Scott is a Captain in the U.S. Army who lost his eyesight to a suicide bomber in Iraq. He has continued to serve in the military, is currently pursuing an MBA at Duke, after which he will teach at West Point, his alma mater.

Scott is not an average guy. Okay, he's extraordinary. It's a wonderful interview (I tuned in late but am listening to the whole thing as I type) and I encourage you all to listen to it at http://thestory.org/. At one point Scott was talking about how he has had not trouble keeping up in his classes and, in fact, seems to be able to get the required reading done more quickly than his classmates. Scott listens to his readings and has been able to speed them up to the point where most people wouldn't be able to comprehend the material but he can. Sort of the speed listening counterpart to speed reading. He demonstrates his technique (about forty minutes into the fifty minute interview) and I was astounded by it. Television would work but there are many more distractions with video than audio. I was struck by what he does in a way that would be impossible to appreciate simply by reading about it.

Not all librarians, but the majority, concentrate on printed content in spite of using materials in other forms on a daily basis. There is a comforting elitism about print that isn't there with radio or television, unless we're talking NPR, PBS, or the British equivalents. So now you can listen to me say the same thing I've written above and reflect on whether you respond differently.

Words, words, words

Blame it on the heat - I'll come right to the point. What effect does the format of information have on the manner in which it is absorbed? Certainly high school kids understand the different impact of breaking up with someone in person, over the phone, via a Dear John letter, or, as a last resort, an email message. Even when the words are exactly the same the person on the receiving end perceives them differently.

What is the difference then if we read a book, listen to an audio version of it, or watch the film version? Do we pay better attention to one format than to another? I've been listening to Wikinomics as I drive back and forth between Evanston and Indianapolis. I knew that I didn't like the narrator but I had no idea how much until I found that after touching my iPod in an unmentionable way I repeated almost an hour of the book. Every once in a while certain sections would strike me as familiar. After a few minutes I would think that I finally had made it to new material only to hear something old again. I know I am inattentive when watching television (maybe that is why I don't do it more often) but it got me to wondering about comprehension and multitasking and lack of focus... Here I sit having a conversation with my daughter while I type (please don't tell her she doesn't have my undivided attention). Guess I better sign off before I'm revealed. Maybe I'll go read a book.

I emphasize reflection in my classes because when I was working a standard 9 to 5 library systems job I rarely took time out to think about what I was doing. I was under a lot of pressure to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. And yet it was those rare moments of reflection that were the most meaningful. It was during those times that I became concerned about equitable access to technology and information. As I think about it now, I think how straightforward life was in the early days of the Internet before the explosion of content. Now all of us, trained librarians and our patrons, are inundated by the quantity of information available to us and it's easy to lose track of what we are seeking. Fortunately, wise men like Stephen Harter remind us that when we're retrieving information the bottom line is that we want to capture the good stuff and weed out the rest.

For a long time, academics have viewed the good stuff as printed publications that have gone through the peer review process of scholarly communication. But at a time when much worthy content is created and disseminated outside this process is this a valid approach? Scholars around the world are experimenting with different forms of publication and finding that some of them engage new audiences. My blogging is an attempt to see how it works for me, to see if I can reflect on this process and emerge with a clearer understanding of where we might be heading so that I can be a better librarian and teacher of new librarians.

Moving outside our comfort zones

So what is the role of librarians in a highly but inequitably networked world? We traditionally have seen ourselves as closely tied to content, and our work as its protector, controller and disseminator. A key component of our professional identity is service to others. Still it often seems as if we only want to serve those who walk through our doors, people who already have bought into the allure of books. In a blog posting this week, Karen Coyle writes of the insularity of librarianship and “our tendency to only speak to each other.” It’s a valid point but one that probably could be made of any profession or group. The birds of a feather phenomenon…


This becomes problematic if we believe that the library plays a special role within society as an opportunity equalizer but are not actively involved in reaching out to those who could benefit most from its resources and services. What are we doing about all the people who never come into libraries and never read books? A number of my students are teen services librarians and even as they express their frustration with the limited success of their blogs, wikis, or gaming nights, I have been so proud of their courage in trying something new. It’s hard to be on the cutting edge and they are. But they are moving into this new and uncomfortable terrain because of their commitment to engage teens who normally would never come into the library; to engage teens who prefer a screen to a page.


Moving outside our comfort zone and revealing our technological shortcomings in front of others is not a strategy most people embrace. As a professor, I have had colleagues encourage me to maintain my distance and standing as an expert when in front of a class. Teaching technology, an area that undergoes continuous change, I think it would be disingenuous if not disastrous to do so. Certainly it would be transparent to my students when I did not have complete mastery of the latest tool. Again, the breakneck cycle of innovation in a Web 2.0 world would result in my regular humiliation. I find it much easier to confess my deficiencies while simultaneously accepting my students’. I try to model how to learn, how to move forward in spite of fear and discomfort. This may be the most important lesson I can teach them because it is one that they will have to repeat many times throughout their careers. It is also one that practicing librarians, even those with many years experience, must be mindful of if we are to move outside the familiar circle of traditional book lovers and library users to engage new communities and share the opportunities that our knowledge can enable.

Putting things in perspective

I just got an email from my nephew, Tim, who is just finishing up two years with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso. He cannot open this blog on the computer in his village, something he says is not surprising because "There is always something wrong with technology over here." Those of us in developed countries take so much for granted, basic services such as water, utilities, and broadband access among them. Tim used to be in a much smaller village (a two hour bike ride away) and considers himself lucky to have spent the last year where he is for many reasons, one being intermittent Internet access at a local cafe.

I lived in Korea back in the late 1970s as a Peace Corps volunteer, then a graduate student, and finally a working stiff. I taught at a university and cut my dittos and reproduced them by hand. It was easy and cheap to get a hold of printed publications and music because copyright was pretty much ignored. Libraries, when they existed at all, were pretty dreary places. Last year when I returned to give a paper at the IFLA Conference I was amazed at the transformation that had taken place in twenty-five years. Koreans have better and cheaper access to the Internet than people in the U.S. Bookstores there were filled with publications in many languages and it was easy but expensive to get more books for Laura, my voracious reader of a daughter.

At the IFLA Conference I attended a session where a number of Africans presented and spoke of libraries filled with discarded books that had no relevance to the local populations. The books were donated by westerners who were more intent on clearing off their shelves than in providing reading materials that would engage African readers. They spoke of the tremendous challenges of literacy education and inadequate Internet access.

We live in a world where information is a commodity valued in the marketplace. Companies hold on to their intellectual property and corporate intelligence tightly as they vie for a dominant market share. Yet information/content also can be magical on an individual level. Reading and access to the world of printed matter, audio and video content have the power to transform a person's life. Today that access is increasingly via the Internet. The United States Government, in an attempt to increase efficiency and reduce costs, has stopped printing many documents and only offers digital versions. We do not have to go around the world to small villages in underdeveloped countries to find inequities in information access. Citizens of the United States confront many of the same problems as Tim if they live in rural areas. It's a sad story.

Information overload and turning off on reading

Concerns about information overload are not new although in the age of the Internet people may be gaining a greater appreciation for its implications. Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune reported on the results of an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found 27% of Americans had not read one book in the past year. At this past ALA Annual meeting Eli Nieburger of the Ann Arbor District Library quoted a frightening statistic about the number of people who never read another book after high school: 58%. I tried to track down the source (in a quick Googlish way) and found it at ParaPublishing’s website, which quotes research by Jerrold Jenkins. Now, I have no idea who Jenkins is and I am much more inclined to view the AP statistic as more authoritative. Still, they are both pretty unsettling to a librarian who loves to read.

I believe it was Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, who came up with the concept of “satisficing” behavior. Basically the idea when applied to information seeking means that people stop when they find something that is good enough instead of looking for a resource with maximal value. Simon also wrote about the reality that a glut of information results in a lack of attention. Eszter Hargittai (check out her blog) teaches in Communications and Sociology at Northwestern University and has done some fascinating research in this area.

Librarians’ self-perceptions have been so tied to physical books and buildings. We need to question what that means in a world of content that is increasingly online and in multiple formats. Those working in academic libraries have to recognize that classroom instruction is changing and incorporating information technology in ways that are intended to engage students. I’m not just referring to course management systems like Sakai or BlackBoard. Professors are experimenting with using emerging technologies such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts in their classes, tools that many students already are adept at. Is the profession keeping up? If we hold service as a fundamental value of our profession, what are individual librarians doing to keep up with these new expectations?

All the News That's Fit...

I woke up this morning thinking about information overload. We have so many channels of information at our disposal and yet we use only a fraction of them. I don't watch TV much at all and have turned down my usage of the radio. I'd rather listen to what I have on my iPod. There used to be a limited number of media channels and so it was fairly safe to assume that most citizens in the United States were getting a lowest common denominator of information. Different from the single channel of information disseminated by state-controlled media but a similar idea. But now with the proliferation of channels available and the pervasiveness of the Internet (I agree, pervasive to those in highly populated areas not necessarily rural America) expectations of information consumers have changed. It seems like Chris Anderson was right with the whole Long Tail thing. This is the niche generation. More and more of us are opting for tailored news, only looking at our narrow interests. What happens to those serendipitous finds we used to come across in scanning the paper? Right, I am not a big Cubs fan but could always make conversation at the water cooler because I'd seen the headline about the previous games results.

We make assumptions about so many things and the biggest is that people are like us. Perhaps that's because we surround ourselves with like-minded folks and so that assumption is reinforced on a regular basis. We share similar interests and concerns with our friends. We read, listen to, view the same types of news and entertainment sources.

Can you believe it but I used to assume that everyone used libraries?! How could I be so naive? Anyway, one day in 1986 or so I was talking to a colleague, Bruce Foster, at Northwestern in Academic Computing. He was the man who enabled me to get every NOTIS employee an email account on Bitnet. Bruce destroyed my innocence (okay, I exaggerate!) by telling me that there was this whole group of people on campus who never darkened the doors of the library, preferring to work at their computers day and night. Now, in many ways I have become one of those people. I use the library more via the computer than in person, often grateful that I can go online and conduct a search when the library building is closed. My library school office is in the IUPUI library and so I am there at the end of each week. I also am a big user of the Evanston Public Library but more as a quiet place to write than to do research.

So what is it with control of the information I am consuming? I now have the capability to retrieve customized content on an up-to-the-minute basis but I have lost the peace and calm I used to associate with reading the paper or browsing shelves in the library. It seems as if by gaining more control over the information I consume that I have lost part of the gift that I associated with libraries and reading. This morning is just seems like All That News Is Giving Me Fits!!