Have Life Science Researchers Removed Themselves from the Mainstream Library User Population?

A report Entitled Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: Case Studies of Researchers in the Life Sciences has been released by the British Library and the Research Information Network.

The report was developed by capturing the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines. The study, undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants, concluded that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving "scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences"

Skip past all of that and jump to page 47 of the report. There, they state (I'll let the report speak for itself) :

"Conventional university library facilities rank low as a vehicle for accessing published information. The traditional role of professional information intermediaries has been largely replaced by direct access to online resources, with heavy reliance upon Google to identify them. Given the limitations of generic search engines such as Google, measures to reconnect researchers with IIS professionals could bring improvements in information retrieval, and benefits to the research process.

"Researchers also tend to use services that have been ‘proven’ by colleagues, or to interrogate websites they regard as authoritative and comprehensive in their field. When they use such services, researchers tend to take the results on trust: the specificity and the breadth of the information retrieved do not appear to require further enquiry.

"The result of all these developments is that many life science researchers have removed themselves from the mainstream library user population. They do not even use the library catalogue. Library-based services can replace the services researchers do use only by demonstrating that they can improve retrieval capability, and deliver results within a timeframe that corresponds to researchers’ own patterns of work. This is a significant challenge when researchers are driven by a desire for immediate online access to specific resources of interest, at a time convenient to them, and from a known and trusted source."

Overall they found that the groups that they studied use a narrow range of search engines and bibliographic resources, for three reasons:

• lack of awareness and time to achieve or build a broader suite
• the ‘comfort’ that comes from relying on a small set of familiar resources, usually endorsed by peers and colleagues, and
• the cost in time and effort needed to identify other resources, and to learn to use them effectively.

They detail what would appear to be emerging roles of the library in a researcher's information seeking patterns:

"The challenge for institutional information services is thus to develop and provide online services geared to the needs of their research groups and thereby to add value to the research process, facilitating the use of new tools, providing individuated professional support, as well as advice, training and documentation on a subject or discipline basis. Any such strategy would have to be proactive: as noted by our regenerative medicine group, researchers are reluctant to adopt new tools and services unless they know a colleague who can recommend or share knowledge about them."

"Library and information service providers in the higher education sector need to come to a clearer view of their structures and roles.. some of our groups expressed a desire for better portals and tools to identify the information resources relevant to researchers working in their domain. Some of the specialised repositories that are emerging (e.g. in neurophysiology) may help to develop such services."

"Re-establishing a lively and sustained dialogue with their research communities is a key challenge for the library and information services in many universities. Such dialogue is essential if libraries are to provide the publications, other information resources and services that their researchers need."

"Better engagement between information professionals and researchers could add to the efficiency and effectiveness of research, with specialist support facilitating the use of new tools, and providing individuated professional advice, training and documentation on a subject or discipline basis."

"Such a strategy would have to be proactive, for researchers are reluctant to adopt new tools and services unless they know a colleague who can recommend or share knowledge about them. And it would have to meet the challenge of delivering results that correspond to researchers’ patterns and timetables of work."

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A Need for University Branded URL Shortening Services?

Twitter users are quite familiar with URL shortening tools as a way to include web links within their 140 character limit. URL shorting is is the process of taking a long URL and turning it into, well, a short one. For example, instead of using the long URL of http://library.osu.edu/blogs/techtips/2009/09/21/techtips-augmented-reality/ one can use the shortened URL of http://tinyurl.com/ykdkmss.

Shortened URLs are extremely useful in Internet conversations such as forum threads,IM chats, etc. They are also essential in communication channels where there is a limited to specific number of characters, such as with Twitter. Shortened URLs can also be useful when reading long URLs aloud to customers over the phone, adding URLs to print materials, and when showing them on video displays or during presentations. Shortened URLs are also easier to enter into a mobile device.

There are many. many services that create shortened URLs, most notably TinyURL.com. OCLC was ahead of this game way back in 1995 with their PURL (Persistent Uniform ResourceLocators) service. The basic concept with PURL is that content providers could change the redirect as content moves from site to site. The service is not as easy to use as the current shortening services and requires registration and entering a login each time it is used.

The mechanism for resolving a shortening URLs is simple: The browser is directed to the shortened URL site. That site performs an HTTP redirect of the address and the browser is sent to the registered long URL. The URL shortening service maintains the master table of redirects.

One problem is that all the shortened links die when such free services die, as tr.im almost did in August '09. As a result, members of the academic community that rely upon such services will eventually lose access to their shortened links. This will require reentering the URLs into another service, which might also die.

Another concern with existing shortening services that the URL domain plays an important role in identifying the authority of a Web resource. Shortened URLs lose their link and organizational information. All brand/name recognition - the authority of an organization - goes away since the domain is hidden within the shortened URL. One needs to click on the shortened URL and visit the redirected site before discovering the domain's authority.

An example of where short URL branding works is with Flickr. Each photo page also get a shortened Flickr URL. The domain flic.kr is owned and operated by flickr.com so the shortening service will be as reliable as the Flickr service. When someone goes to the site flic.kr they know they will get to a Flickr photo page, not a redirect to a site containing malware.

It therefore makes a lot of sense than academic institutions consider building their own URL shortening services as a way to brand and create authority with their shortened URLs. One University that has done just that is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Wayne State University also appears to have such a service.

I would love to see a local url.osu.edu shorting service. If I had the programming chops, I would write it over the next weekend. I know. It's easier to start a shortening service than it is to maintain it in perpetuity.

Yet, creating an in-house URL shortening service not only helps to promote and support the institutional brand, it lessens the chance that the institution's carefully crafted custom links will not die if the third-party goes down, or out of business.

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Ohio State President Calls for Tenure Changes

As the Chair of of OSU's University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Committee, I say Thank You! to President Gee.

At his annual presidential address yesterday afternoon, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee thinks it's time for faculty members to be evaluated on the quality and impact of their work.

New faculty members at Ohio State University Libraries enter as assistant professors and have six years to build up their record of scholarship, teaching and service. They receive performance evaluations every year, a fourth-year comprehensive review, and in their sixth year undergo a more vigorous examination to see if they measure up to the level of performance required for tenure and a promotion to associate professor. Library faculty can then choose to undergo an additional review later in the careers to attain the rank of full professor.

President Gee said in his address that professors should be rewarded for their talents and should be encouraged to work with academic departments outside their own. Instead of using an arbitrary formula for evaluation, he would like OSU to create a system in which faculty members are judged on the quality of their work and their impact on students, their disciplines and the community.

This is exactly the position I have been advocating not only on this blog, but in discussions with my library faculty colleagues. Even though I have articulated to colleagues all the points that Gee highlighted, inertia has indeed won out.

From his prepared remarks:

Let me state this directly: We must change our recognition and reward criteria.

Since I returned to Ohio State two years ago, I have made this point a number of times. Changing the way we define scholarship, appreciate new forms of engagement, and properly reward superb teaching can be this University’s signal differential.

If we do not properly and tangibly value those activities, our efforts to extend our resources more fully into our communities will be stymied. We must take it upon ourselves to revise the centuries-old equations for promotion and tenure and develop new reward structures.

Without a doubt, this is a nettlesome issue. And I am not the first person to raise it. Ernie Boyer articulated the case nearly 20 years ago in a speech here on campus. And of course he did so very persuasively in his 1990 book, “Scholarship Reconsidered,” in which he called for “recognition that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching.”

At Ohio State, and at colleges and universities across the country, we have long had faculty committees devoted to looking at revising promotion and tenure standards. And yet, the status quo remains. Inertia is winning.

I believe we must finally speak aloud the truth: that some arbitrary volume of published papers, on some narrowly defined points of debate, is not necessarily more worthy than other activities.

Ladies and gentlemen, this University is big and strong enough to be bold enough to judge by a different standard.

We can dare to say, “No more,” to quantity over quality.

We can stop looking at the length of a vita and start measuring its true heft.

This University, finally, can be the first to say, “We judge by a different standard.” And let others follow our lead, if they wish.

I sit here thinking, what if we HAD acted a year ago and began to change our criteria? Would OSU Libraries been included in President's speech as the leaders of where the University should be heading? Would that have raised our visibility on campus? As a profession?

So, Thank You! President Gee for validating my, and several of my colleagues, position. Maybe NOW we will be able to break that inertia and finally move ahead. Sphere: Related Content

Process of Tenure and Promotion a Monster That Eats Its Young?

The approach that Kathleen Fitzpatrick has taken with her new book manuscript might be one possible path that the future of scholarly communications will take.

Ms. Fitzpatrick has made the manuscript of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy available online for open peer review. The 'book' is a part of Media Commons Press, who's tag line is "open scholarship in open formats."

While the plan is for the manuscript to go through the traditional blind peer-review process, and is forthcoming by NYU Press, Fitzpatrick plans to incorporate reader comments from the online manuscript into her revisions. She asserts:

"One of the points that this text argues hardest about is the need to reform peer review for the digital age, insisting that peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open. And so here’s the text, practicing what it preaches, available online for open review."

Not only is the process being used to write the manuscript exciting, the manuscript is as well. A couple parts of the text which relate to the academic rewards system:

"our institutional misunderstanding of peer review as a necessary prior indicator of “quality,” rather than as one means among many of assessing quality, dooms us to misunderstand the ways that scholars establish and maintain their reputations within the field."

"we need to remind ourselves, as Cathy Davidson has pointed out, that the materials used in a tenure review are meant in some sense to be metonymic, standing in for the “promise” of all the future work that a scholar will do (“Research”). We currently reduce such “promise” to the existence of a certain quantity of texts; we need instead to shift our focus to active scholarly engagement"

"Until institutional assumptions about how scholarly work should be assessed are changed — but moreover, until we come to understand peer-review as part of an ongoing conversation among scholars rather than a convenient means of determining “value” without all that inconvenient reading and discussion — the processes of evaluation for tenure and promotion are doomed to become a monster that eats its young, trapped in an early twentieth century model of scholarly production that simply no longer works."

"I want to suggest that the time has come for us to consider whether, really, we might all be better served by separating the question of credentialing from the publishing process, by allowing everything through the gate, and by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place."

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