Emeralds Library Link Workshop: IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2004
Background
The World Library and Information Congress, 70th IFLA General Conference and Council, held in Buenos Aires from 22-27 August 2004, attracted delegates from around the world. A variety of conference sessions, poster session, large exhibition hall, functions and events were on offer. One event was the Library Link Workshop hosted by Emerald Group Publishing, held annually during IFLA conferences to enable international participation. These meetings are important events, allowing participants to share ideas and information with colleagues on an international basis and in an informal and relaxed setting.
The Library Link Workshop, which was over-subscribed, took place on 24 August at the Crowne Plaza Panamericano Hotel, from 12.00 until 2.00. Emerald provided a special bus service to enable participants to travel quickly to and from the main conference venue. Participants were welcomed with a splendid luncheon and information pack on arrival.
The Library Link Workshop commenced with a presentation from Julia Gelfand of the University of California, Irvine, Co-editor of Library Hi-Tech News. The topic of her presentation was “‘Insta’ writing: one stop submissions, one stop searching and one quick read”. Julia shared with participants her ideas and current thinking about:
the publishing challenges for librarians with the journal literature in library and information science;
trends in the information and academic library profession; and
the effects on readers, collections, services and relationships that libraries and librarians must foster with content providers (meaning publishers,investors or sponsors, vendors, distributors, archival agents, etc.).
The presentation grabbed attention by opening with the words “Here we are in the land of gauchos, discussing the changing role of ’steakholders’”!,but the “stakeholders” to which she referred were authors, content providers, readers/users, libraries and new partners.
Julia’s remarks were framed in the context that all of us are living in a more competitive environment, and the information content (IC) and scholarly publishing industries and the academic library community are individually and collectively forced to explore all avenues of this competition with enormous energy. This context incorporates writers, readers and methods of content retention, of which the library is today but one method - and it is experiencing revolutionary change. The IC industry predicts different directions:
standard libraries being replaced by collaboratories and a customized portal for the organization and its content;
growth of content integration – embedding content in the workflow applications;
user-centered focus with traditional library holdings no longer the mainstream but replaced with easier information retrieval strategies and output;and
XML will be exploited more.
Julia then went on to discuss the changing positions of the “stakeholders”identified. Firstly, the future role of libraries was considered:
functions of the librarian may remain stable but the tools with which those functions are performed will change dramatically;
technology will continue to influence the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of how we function;
libraries will become even more complex and the demand for instruction will rise and more librarians will participate in some facet of this function;
demand for factual information will decrease as users depend on other sources for that;
user communities will become more diverse;
librarians will become information generators rather than merely information conservators;
the nature of publishing will change and libraries are going to play a greater part in the process; and
the role of the journal will decline as librarians introduce other means of distributing and authorizing papers produced by members of their community– librarians will have a greater role in validating authors’ works and thus creating information in addition to selecting, organizing and servicing it.
Julia outlined the factors traditionally considered by authors:
Why am I saying/writing this and to whom is it directed?
What are the expectations of my institution/organization as to where I publish?
How to penetrate the likely readership population?
Where is the journal indexed?
What is the most prestigious and highest subscription source in my subject area?
How to achieve status and get professional recognition for myself and institutional affiliation?
How easy was the submission process?
How is peer review handled?
How fast was the time to publication?
What kind of value-added services can I expect from the publisher –copy editing, layout, etc.?
She then added the following criteria arising in today’s environment:
What is the publisher’s policy for rights retention and potential derivative works?
What kind of copyright statement will an author sign?
Are there page charges and costs associated with submission and publishing?
What about simultaneous publishing in electronic formats?
The important factors for a content provider were then considered:
As a publisher how I do I attract the best contributions?
Are my journals branded to claim strength in covering a subject area?
Are my journals indexed in appropriate sources?
Do I deliver content on the dates I promise?
How do I sell the content to other providers, especially full-text, or do I assume that libraries will continue to subscribe to my journals and make links?
The contemporary extension includes:
Are there links to full-text content from the indexing database and is the citation clearly stated on each page of the output?
Are there embargoes to full-text content at the time of publication release?
What about archival copies of online content?
Am I following international standards for DOI and are we counter-compliant?
What platform will I use for online access?
Will we release article by article as it is ready or wait for a full issue to release?
Does our license allow our articles to be posted on online reserves, used in interlibrary loans, etc.?
For institutional subscribers, do we have differential charging for print and online when a library only wants one format?
Do we participate in consortial opportunities?
Do we provide our institutional subscribers with user statistics at the content level they want?
As a publisher are we currently practicing good scholarly communication principles?
Julia then pointed out that the criteria for a reader, who may also be an author, may not be far from the same considerations, and have traditionally included:
When will I go to the library and how long will this expedition take?
Can I expect help from librarians once I determine what I need?
Where are journal articles indexed?
How many articles will I have to find before I find the most relevant one for my purposes?
Do I have a copy card to copy the articles I find?
And today, the following scenario:
Am I authenticated or recognized to gain access to licensed content?
What database contains the subject of my query?
Is full-text content provided including the images and other non-text content?
How do I evaluate the source, ascertain that the content is appropriate, and ascertain that the source and author are both credible and authoritative?
Can I find the same information or content in another form other than a journal article and is it as good and relevant?
Will I enjoy the article and understand it?
With these three elements the scenario is clear that there is a grey market with obscure rules dictating changing values and behaviours but with a greater reliance on cost and convenience factors. Libraries and librarians traditionally helped reader communities with their information needs, but today they are increasingly helping authors facilitate the multiple paths of access and providing knowledge about the changing customer base.
Focusing on libraries, existing criteria include:
What is our collection development policy for journal content in a subject area?
What is the rate of increase in subscription when a trigger goes off?
Did we have to claim much for the last volume year?
Did the title experience much use - how many times was it taken off the shelf?
Did we notice changes in tracking citation patterns and impact factors?
Did users come to us for assistance in finding the title?
And today’s added criteria include:
Do we have to bundle print with online content?
When we license content do we own or lease it and what about perpetual rights?
Is online content cover-to-cover or selective elements?
What about backfiles or retrospective content?
Is the archive dim or dark; persistent or perpetual?
Is there a significant savings when we buy the big deal or subscribe to universal content from a publisher?
How does the library help users not to violate intellectual property or copyright guidelines or commit plagiarism in the digital arena?
What direction should we offer our faculty/staff in choosing where to publish?
For the new partners in the mix, who may be new academic units in higher education such as institutional repositories; investors and sponsors; and retail sales establishments; or self-publishing gurus (each speculating about what products they will create), Julia suggested that it is possible to imagine the following questions:
How can we continue to see return on our investment in product capacity, and generated income?
How can we continue to influence peer review?
How can we structure the transition from reader (subscription) charges to author or page charges?
How do we continue to see the quantity of good to best content being published in these quasi-traditional ways?
The formal institution of journal publishing and the experience of the readers has and is still moving from a “just in case” scenario to a“just in time” scenario when instead of having a large stable of journal holdings, a library may make available a host of fee-based options,where you get just what you want when you want it, instead of having it all to use at your disposal.
Transitioning from the one stop submission (and whether it will even be to a journal as we know it today) to the one stop search and now to the one quick read, it is interesting to note how libraries or subscribers are changing habits. The sometimes convincing argument that Google is both the reader’s best friend and the closest enemy is curious. However, it is the benchmark in users’ information-seeking patterns today, whether libraries want to accept that or not. When one depends on Google, one retrieves huge volumes of output,but it is harder and harder to evaluate the content and determine the good from the bad. The methods used to crawl by search engines are becoming too inclusive and not distinguishing ways that make the content relevant. Is it not better to subscribe to databases where the link is active to the full-text and making every effort to improve that interface and search structure?
Julia then went to say that she believes the real challenge to traditional journal publishing is open access (OA) content because it reduces costs and provides alternatives full of healthy scholarly communication principles.
She also stressed the need to recognize that blogging has changed the landscape and re-engineered the way readers experience the news. Bloggers are migrating to other forms of journalism and conference attendance and who is to say that they will not compete head-on with traditional publishing?
The library and the content provider have much to do with the outcome of the author’s contributions and work. Offering value-added services, such as organizing the peer review and editing processes, providing a timely publishing schedule, charging a realistic fee for content and providing appropriate answers to the questions posed earlier, should make for a positive future among commercial and scholarly journal publishers. Julia’s concluding prediction was that we must recognize that readers/scholars and libraries are empowered and prepared to challenge the scholarly publishing industry more than ever in the past if it does not compete in the kind of way that they can be good customers. She also concluded that librarians are engaged in more primary responsibilities and so less research. They need more time to write up their ideas for publication.
Workshop Round Table discussions
Following this thought provoking presentation, participants engaged in Round Table discussions on two related topics.
Topic 1. Is the traditional library journal dead? How best to get published. In the context of everyday working pressures on librarians increasing this round table discussed the challenges this poses for the traditional library journal. Questions discussed included:
Do librarians have time to write publishable papers?
What are the obstacles?
Does this have a knock-on effect for the traditional journal?
Discussion. Despite a smaller group than anticipated, this was a lively and informative international discussion with participants from New Zealand, Poland, Czech Republic, Finland, Wales and England.
The group began by looking at the pressures that librarians face in their day-to-day work that may prevent them from publishing.
The group identified the following trends in LIS and pressures on time:
It was agreed that the level of change is a major factor as much time is spent keeping in touch with changes in technology, library practices and resources.
For academic librarians, the number of students has risen dramatically over the past few years and this has had an impact on their time.
Librarians have less focus on research and more on their day-to-day tasks.
On the whole much more primary research is needed, but this again takes more time than secondary so the latter is often favoured.
In some circumstances there is a pressure to publish too much (for example,in the UK for RAE purposes). The group felt that this is an issue of quantity over quality and that, given more time and less pressure, the quality of papers produced by librarians would change significantly.
Practising librarians do not see that they gain any real/positive benefits by publishing. They do not receive funding, and feel that it takes up valuable time.
It is difficult to get practitioner librarians to publish – a particular difficulty is getting non-English authors to publish in English. Whilst academics publish in English-speaking journals (because they need to),practitioners do not do so because of lack of tangible benefits.
There seems to be an increasing divergence between theoretical research and“management stories from libraries”. There are lots of stories from libraries but not enough study that can be applied across countries and the library world. The group were conscious about the need for primary research and quality case studies.
This area of discussion reflected, to a large extent, the final presentation comment.
The group then continued to examine the opportunities:
The need to encourage more practitioner librarians to publish and share their knowledge.
The need to also encourage more subject specific librarians to publish, such as medical or law librarians. Shared experiences can help others.
The need to encourage non-English speaking librarians to publish in English-speaking journals. This could be an opportunity for publishers, such as Emerald, to help with translation services or publish special issues.
Regarding the original topic of “Is the traditional library journal dead?”, the group felt that the traditional journal is not dead, but it must evolve. For example, some quality research is now self-published on web sites in PDF format.
The group also raised some interesting questions – which would have been addressed further given more time:
Does peer review work in LIS? The group were split in their responses. Those involved editorially with the process felt that it does work, although it was recognised that it can be difficult to attract quality peer reviewers both for countries where English is not the first language and for practitioner papers.
Is the research currently being carried out in LIS bringing about sufficient change or merely repeating what is already known? This again links to the previously identified need for primary research.
It is interesting that the comments from the Round Table reflected the concluding comment from the presentation regarding librarians needing more time to write for publication.
Topic 2. The battle is on: Google versus quality library resources. This discussion debated the following context. Twenty-first century library users are a generation that has grown up with mobile phones, Internet connections and information on tap. This generation favours instant access to learning resources and information and their expectations of internet pages are high. Most of this generation believes Google, the world’s most popular internet search engine, is the easiest and best way to find information. The library needs to educate users about the inaccuracies of some Internet sources and the ease of accessing library materials electronically. But what is the best way of doing this?
This topic was the most popular of the two and resulted in two full round tables, discussions from which considered some different aspects, yet resulted in some similar conclusions.
One group began by discussing information literacy. They agreed that this was a serious issue which presented real strategic challenges for libraries in terms of how their services were viewed by users. It would be fair to say that initially the group viewed the problem primarily as one of information literacy,although the verbal formulations of this view varied from person to person. Each contributor to the round table discussion described their own favoured strategies for convincing Google-dependent students of the need to use or consult “quality library resources”.
These strategies included “showing how Google fails”. For example:
Doing a Google search for information on AIDS/HIV and then attempting to sift (unsuccessfully) through the thousands of results that overwhelm the searcher. You would need to go somewhere else to sift through this morass of evidence (for example to reviews of the medical literature).
Asking students to assemble a viewpoint on a certain subject using the results of a Google search. Then providing a greater depth of analysis on this same subject using original opinions, which are only available from “quality library resources”. It was noted that there is a disadvantage to this method – it takes time to prepare, you have to know the topic in advance,do the Google search and then see what the imitations of the information are;you then need to provide the alternative view and provide a sample of quality library resources. However, the advantage is that you do not sound like an insecure librarian who has just got a thing against Google. You are backing up what would otherwise seem to be your prejudices with objective evidence. This is hard work but effective.
Doing a Google search on corporate morality and social responsibility. The journalistic and reportage-based web sites retrieved in this way do not give much analysis to accounts of accidents or disasters that resulted as a seeming result of corporate indifference to health and safety standards. The “quality library resources” would give greater depth of analysis.
These strategies also included showing “how databases of quality-controlled resources succeed”. For example:
Explaining how intelligent use of databases of quality-controlled resources depends on understanding the underlying principles supporting these databases;and demonstrating how much better the search results are when you search with the principles in mind. Comparing and contrasting the results with Google searching then illuminates the difference between the two search methods.
The group discussed an alternative to this approach, which was to accept that the ease and availability of a “one-stop shop” tool like Google was such that a certain proportion of users would never accept any other tool,regardless of the superiority of that other tool’s content. Rather than dissuading such users from using Google, a better approach was to provide a Google-clone that had the easy usability of Google but which led to “quality library resources”, rather than the indiscriminate resources of the uncontrolled web. The promotion of a library portal seemed the obvious answer. Some uncertainty existed over the acceptability and viability of portals, but their ability to put a single front end on top of all the disparate electronic services offered by a library seemed to offer a comparable level of ease of use to Google, but with better content. However, problems with portals were also discussed – firstly, do they work technically?:
What if the best quality library resource is available only in hard copy?Reliance on portals does not promote the hybrid library approach.
Single interfaces with cross-searching facilities might promote ease of searching, but the retrieval of heterogeneous materials would not produce results that users could instantly understand and digest – information literacy is still an issue.
Are we making it too easy for students? Very powerful portals are tools only for institutions/companies with big budgets. If we are preparing students for lifelong learning and information literate behaviour in any working or real-life content, it is deeply misleading to deceive them into thinking they will always have access to a big, single portal (Google, the local portal, whatever) that will conceal the difficult mechanical and intellectual process of information literate information use by them. The government is trying to get students to be entrepreneurial and start their own firms – where does portal access come from in this model?
The discussion closed with the thought that perhaps we were not asking enough of students and were enabling them to do coursework with Google because the quality of work they had to do was insufficiently demanding. Arguably, in producing graduates who had been insulated from the challenges of information retrieval and complex intellectual demands, we may be in danger of producing students who are “over-qualified and under-educated”. Dependence on Google was only one symptom of this malaise.
The other round table group on this topic provided a variety of viewpoints,but agreed that it was not a battle between Google and quality library resources, but rather that students and librarians search in different ways, and the important role for the librarian is to teach students how to evaluate their search results – that is to evaluate good from bad. It was also not a battle because Google and quality library resources are designed to be used for different purposes. However, student users need educating on this point. The group agreed that it is easy to see why Google is attractive to students –Google is easy to use and quick to use. In the first instance, students do not have to use an Athens password to access Google – an immediate saving of time.
Two battles were identified, but not between Google and quality library resources. The first battle is generational:
Many undergraduate students have been taught the use of IT in the classroom and expect to use IT – but quickly and easily.
Many undergraduate students have little previous subject background and are not familiar with quality or subject-related resources. This position may change as information literacy is now being taught in schools (the school library) and information resources can often be available in the home. Thus this may not necessarily be a long-term situation.
The use of quality library resources does not seem to be a problem for postgraduate students, who often may have subject knowledge and generally are keen to use the best resources for their studies.
There is also the aspect reinforcing the generational battle concept –that of re-inventing and re-engineering, where older people are returning to higher education. Whilst there can be bigger gaps in their IT experience, they tend to see higher education as an opportunity and want to learn and use the best resources.
The second battle relates to the acceptance of lower standards:
A controversial viewpoint was suggested by a member of the group that students want a qualification rather than to learn.
Another aspect is that the structure and design of current higher education can facilitate a dumbing down, leading to acceptance of lower standards. The nature of courses and assignments are changing, and students are not exposed to the same need for research and writing. Plagiarism is on the increase.
However, here is another battle, which is for librarians to provide user education that works. Information literacy was identified as important, but comments were made that students demonstrated little interest. Another factor for change in approach is that firstly library collections are changing and being replaced by electronic resources, and secondly students are not visible as they were previously and may only access library resources remotely. One participant commented that, based on case study research, there was evidence that user education does not work, because it is not done properly.
The group concluded that effective user education was needed to raise awareness about resources, to motivate students to use them, to educate students in both use and evaluation, and that it is vital to influence faculty to reach students in terms of resources for teaching and assessment.
The comment in the presentation about Google being the benchmark in users’information-seeking patterns today was adopted to some extent by both round tables on the “Google battle” topic. Both groups seemed to share similar sentiments about how the changing structure and design of current higher education could impact on the nature of searching by undergraduate students, and about the need for a change in user education/ information literacy in line with changing library resources and changing user populations.
Final comment
The Round Table discussions could have continued given more time. But their discussions were presented to all participants by each round table rapporteur,so that all those present received a full flavour of the entire workshop. Bill Russell, Sales Director, Emerald, then gave some summative points, drawing the workshop to a close and thanking participants. And, as participants returned to the main conference venue, they continued to chat and network with their workshop colleagues.
Linda AshcroftReader of Information Management, School of Business Information, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
