#library theory

[gayofthefae]

No enough of us are talking about how the trailer CONFIRMED LIBRARY GATE.

THAT THE LIBRARY IS IMPORTANT BY OPENING ON A SHOT OF IT.

While we're here also reminder that in season 4 there's a shot that goes through Hawkins to show the Creel house in the upside down but for no other reason it starts on a shot directly of the library.

The library is everywhere and they CONFIRMED its weight.

[gayofthefae]

Even more that there's something up about the library. Will kept there, it being the central point of all the gates, but what's more, on the first shot we see the Creel House in the upside down in 4x03, we don't immediately cut to it. We follow a demobat flying to it. The first shot, in fact, of the upside down is of front and center - you guessed it

The library.

This is the first shot we get of the upside down.

[gayofthefae]

One of those things that's either Noah had something in his eye or really cool on a post-season 5 rewatch so I'm putting it out there.

But of course there are those library theories about Will being put there and the rift centering on it, and we know Will said he felt Vecna there, well (editing frame by frame per usual), when he's out of focus just as they're driving past the library, I noticed his eyes do something

It's slowed down a bit for emphasis but at full speed it's still more odd-flutter than blink the way his eyes don't close. Like I said, could be nothing, but in case it's something - I said it first.

[gayofthefae]

From a quick google search, the voting day in 1985 was November 4th. Making that sign outside the library inaccurate and therefore a reference to Will’s disappearance exclusively.

[decklededges]

The challenge facing libraries in an era of fake news

Since the 19th century academic librarians have helped students navigate the complex world of information. In today's unpredictable information environment, how might they rethink their role?

I know this is the hot topic right now and everyone has a hot take, but this is a pretty good (neutral-ish, I think) analysis of what’s been going on. 

I’m keen on critical theory and thinking about why we teach certain things. But if I think about it too much, it’s kind of paralyzing. This write-up does a good job of showing that:

In such an environment, how is a librarian or faculty member supposed to respond to a bright student who sincerely asks, “How can you say that a blog post attacking GMO food is less credible than some journal article supporting the safety of GMO food? What if the journal article’s research results were faked? Have the results been replicated? At the end of the day, aren’t facts a matter of context?”

I also like the opening thought experiment of how the news on smoking would’ve been received in the ‘60s if they had had the type of technology we have today. It kind of implies that it’s harder now to propagate one main narrative, even if that narrative is 99% irrefutable / true. I suppose this is good for some things and bad for other things. 

I mean, I know that when that health report on smoking came out some people didn’t care and others said it was made up. Because some people are still smoking. (Although, admittedly, they could know the health effects and not care.) But I suppose it is actually easier to make everything less believable -- when anyone these days could photoshop or video edit or fabricate documents. We all SORT OF know this, although I think everyone still gets tricked into believing falsities from time to time (e.g., forgetting that every single magazine cover is photoshopped beyond the pale).

In other real ways I also know that a lot of teachers (and, by extension, librarian instructors) don’t bother much with theory. They go into the classroom with their agenda and teaching outline and stick with it time and time again. It’s much easier that way, and inevitably part of the student population will learn something from that approach. Is it worth it to consider all the messiness that comes with teaching and learning? Does that help us reach even more students? Or should we be less concerned with how many students “get it”? More concerned with what they are getting?

[decklededges]

‘Philosopher librarians’ v. ‘Practical librarians’: anti-intellectualism? pragmatism? other?

Most of the time when I introduce myself to people I’m meeting for the first time and they inevitably ask me what work I do, I respond that I’m a librarian and they make some kind of crack about:

Working in a such a nice, quiet environment

Shushing people

Reading books

Or, ~85% of the time:

Libraries are going away, aren’t they? / Everybody just reads online, don’t they? / Your jobs are on their way out, yeah? / You should probably just go throw yourself off a cliff because nobody even goes to libraries anymore, right?

This is a mild exaggeration of actual exchanges.

But one time [and this is where I perform the bait-and-switch of this post, since I won’t be talking about any of the above -- that was just an entertaining opening to grab attention, like what happens in a Simpsons episode] when I introduced myself to an academic (some kind of economist, I think), he very sensibly and interestedly asked, “So if I go to one of your professional conferences, what are some of the main issues that are being discussed in your field?” It was such a great question that I’ve committed it to memory so I can ask others when I know nothing about what they do [if their profession has conferences].

Well, to answer that question a bit, after working in public libraries for two years I transferred to academic libraries, where the environment and work is different in so many ways. This transition took place in the middle of 2014, when the tides were starting to turn for academic / instruction librarians. This is what they were talking about at conferences:

The Association of College & Research Libraries’ [ACRL] Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

It’s a mouthful.

This document was a bit of a phoenix arising from the ashes of ACRL’s previous guiding document for the instruction aspect of our academic librarian profession, 2000′s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education -- what ACRL did was form a task force / committee / what-have-you to review the Standards and update them (consider the technological changes we had between 2000–2014 and how those impacted college students). But instead of updating the Standards, the task force just started writing new guidelines and slowly burning the old ones until they were eventually put to bed in June 2016.

As with anything anywhere that’s been around 10+ years you can probably imagine that many folks really enjoyed the old Standards and were hesitant about changing them. But there were others who embraced change! [You can imagine what happens next.]

The biggest difference between the two sets of guidelines for me -- and recall that I didn’t even really get to give the Standards a fair shake: I came into the profession assuming the Framework would be the main thing going forward -- is that the Standards were a little checklist of outcomes that everybody could feel pretty good about achieving and the Framework was a big, squishy thing that sort of threw this kind of existential doubt onto the prevailing model of education in America. Both documents attempt to address the same topics, just in a difference of educational philosophy / approach / worldview.

The Standards seems to suggest a worldview where we can deliver a set of prescribed outcomes (even the word “Standards” sounds fairly rigid and militaristic, right?) for students when we’re trying to teach them information literacy. It sort of assumes that they come in not knowing anything about the subject -- they’re just blank slates -- and we can show them everything they need to know and tick all the boxes along the way. The language that stands out to me is “The information literate student...,” as if this is some level of achievement: there are information illiterate students and then they do some stuff and then there are information literate students. It’s a transformation, an achievable level of being, a beneficial progression. This progression, and this achievement is highly measurable and it feels like it’s something we can give every student if we just do what the Standards say. And if our students are not information literate when they graduate and move on in their lives, then it’s our faults for simply not doing what the Standards told us to do. It’s like having a list of things to pack, packing those things, and checking them off the list. If you don’t bring your swimsuit then you obviously can’t swim.

The Framework seems to suggest a worldview where information literacy is a sticky business: some students will know some things, others will know others. There’s misinformation, there’s real information misconstrued. The process is not straightforward in terms of “you came to us information illiterate, we did our thing, and now you are information literate!” It’s pretty messy, recursive, hard to pin down. Like dipping into a swimming pool, getting wet, learning how to swim a few different ways, getting out of the pool, drying off, kind of remembering vaguely how to swim, but not really.

Even though they address the same topics, the Framework and Standards take fundamentally different approaches. This has created a bit of an “either this way or that way” [binarism] mentality and argument amongst academic librarians, many of whom want to hang onto the Standards since they were so invested in them and they seemed to work so well for them. [And even though the Standards have been put out to pasture -- or, in the official (?) language, sunsetted -- there is actually not much stopping people from still using them... until maybe accreditation boards move onto officially using the Framework...] These are arguments we can’t really easily dismiss. The rollout of the Framework took a while, and when it had been reviewed a few times and progressed through various drafts it was first “filed” long before it was finally accepted by ACRL. “Filed” meaning something fairly specific and bureaucratic, but essentially giving it approval without formally adopting it as the way of tackling information literacy going forward. So it felt like the Framework was a thing edging its way into our teaching terrain, hanging out in the shadows. Then, after a while, the Standards were summarily dropped and the Framework was officially adopted. There were no lessons, assessments, or other supplementary materials supporting the Framework that came with the decision.

So then there’s a backlash, of course, immediately and vehemently on email listservs, blogs, other places. Among these: “The Framework is Elitist” by Christine Bombaro and a response to it, “Is the Framework Elitist? Is ACRL?” by Meredith Farkas. Bombaro’s opinions generally represent those of the librarians who want to hang onto the Standards -- the Framework is squishy, it doesn’t provide measurable outcomes, and there has been very little support from ACRL in trying to get the Framework to be a practical tool in our academic librarian arsenal. Which is fairly true. The whole Framework approach being a step away from the “education as commodity/product” approach that the Standards basically represented -- the Framework kind of pulls the rug out from under us and expects us to gain our footing.

In my opinion, the Standards do represent the prevailing educational model in America: students are empty vessels, we fill them with knowledge, we work through a course based on a structured textbook with a structured set of learning outcomes that we can check off along the way. It’s the kind of math teaching that trains students to memorize formulas and apply them to certain problems but doesn’t explain the why of applying the formulas. I remember calculus in high school: every question that asked me to measure the flow of a liquid or something is where I just used that one formula. I couldn’t really tell you where that formula came from (other than “from my textbook”), why I would want to use that formula over any other approach to solving the problem, or really anything about the relationships that any knowns or unknowns in that formula had to each other (e.g., why are we multiplying/dividing/adding/subtracting rate of flow and whatever instead of doing some other operation?). 

I was a very good student in the standard educational model we have -- but that doesn’t automatically mean I learned a lot or I know a lot. I can memorize stuff pretty well, but then I can dump stuff pretty well, too. I figured out how to read instructors and determine what they would focus on for the tests, and I was generally able to play that game pretty well.

The Framework is a whole ‘nother ball game, I think. It sort of removes that security of “here are the 25 things we do to make someone information literate.” It kind of interrogates the notion of information literacy as a whole. It’s a scary thing because it’s different from how most of us learned and progressed through elementary, secondary, and higher education. It’s not perfect -- I still can’t really delineate “Knowledge Practices” or “Dispositions” for you, the whole thing only pays lip service / makes passing reference to technology and digital literacy (despite the widespread consumption of information online these days), the number and scope of frames doesn’t seem wholly balanced, and yeah there are no instantly recognizable ways of measuring this as a tool. But I think it’s a step in a neat direction.

What Bombaro thought was that it was a step in an elitist direction. I understand her motivation for saying this -- the Framework seems to privilege academic librarians at huge institutions who have the time/education luxury of engaging deeply with theoretical frameworks. But her tone and examples smack of anti-intellectualism. She labels pro-Frameworkers as “philosopher librarians” and pro-Standardsers as “practical librarians,” and although she qualifies these labels by saying that “any librarian can fall into either category or both depending on what day or time of year it is, or what discussion or task is at hand” she goes on to define each label as being a distinct set of librarians. She then presents quotes from listserv discussions and directly mocks one for what she considers highfalutin language. She writes:

Social Constructivism? Postmodernism? Pragmatism? Enduring Questions in upper case letters? I started feeling, frankly, stupid. Did I really need to get myself advanced training in theories related to sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism in order to adopt the Framework successfully? 

The answer to her last question is no, she doesn’t need advanced training in other fields to apply the Framework. I don’t really have any concern that she doesn’t know these terms and doesn’t feel like she can entirely understand or engage with them (immediately after the above quoted passage she writes, “When I found myself opening some online encyclopedias to try to figure out what these messages meant -- and promptly closing them, though not with as much satisfaction as would have come with slamming a paper tome -- was when my opposition to the Framework cemented and when I started thinking of it as elitist.”) My main concern is that none of these terms -- social constructivism, postmodernism -- are actual language in the Framework. These are terms coming out of a discussion of the formation of the Framework because Bombaro was calling into question the legitimacy of the Framework and the supporters of it were justifying it via theories, research, and yes, higher-level language.

Sorry, but you can’t attempt to call out the Framework for its approach and ask why it was created so differently from the Standards and then shut down when someone attempts to explain it to you. I’ll be the first to say that I think we academic librarians are sometimes puffing ourselves up in the guise of “professionalism” in order to get others to respect what work we do, but this is not an example of that. The Framework is simply a new approach to educating students on information literacy. Bombaro’s other quizzical attack on the Framework comes in the form of her showing it to an academic economist, who in turn called it “stupid” but wouldn’t (or couldn’t) explain to her why it was stupid: “When I asked him to elaborate, all he offered was that the library community’s use of the Threshold Concept theory did not conform to its original intent.” (Her point here being, “See!? One person outside of our field who knows about threshold concepts thinks it’s stupid too!”)

I think it’s entirely legitimate to petition ACRL for smoother transitions in the future, to propose developing practical applications for theoretically based documents before they’re adopted, to work to cater to the needs of all academic librarians. But there will be updates and changes in our field on a regular basis -- some that we have no control over -- and we should seek some kind of community with our peers and not foster divisiveness over these kinds of issues. I have no doubt that in the coming months a bunch of creative librarians will come up with practical applications for the Framework -- since many already have. And really, I’d rather have a fluid, guiding document [like the constitution?] that is open to being interpreted and adjusted rather than a rigid set of standards that we’ll have to see ourselves going through the process of updating every time our field changes.

[decklededges]

The Utah Library Association (ULA) dove headfirst into failure on February 19–20. Along with the Salt Lake City Public Library (SLCPL), ULA hosted Strikethrough: The Utah Library Association Failure Workshop. Billed as an interdisciplinary discussion of failure for librarians, it brought together librarians, medical doctors, and performance artists.

This is great. I’m convinced as a person with many interests, professional and creative, that failure is the only way to get better at something. And fear of failure is a big reason why people do not get better at something. It’s hard to go out there in the world and say that you tried something and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t make you feel smart or successful. But it should encourage you. The best people in any field have failed a lot -- it’s just that we see and celebrate their successes more than their failures.

[decklededges]

Why DRM is not cool and how ebooks won't ever completely take over the book market

INTRO

Intellectual property is a fascinating, book-length (at least) topic, and the protection of intellectual property rights is a very real concern for artists, agents, publishers, and businesses worldwide. Billions of dollars are at stake. Trillions? Maybe trillions.

So I, of course, can't do it justice here, but I wanted to start briefly with intellectual property to show how trying to protect it is driving much of the ebook market, for better and for worse. The attempt to preserve revenue is central to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology tactics in ebooks (and music files), but while trying to protect rights, DRM is also putting an upper limit on sales by wrecking the end user's experience.

MUSIC TECH & SALES

I think the first and best topic to present here is the link between the music industry and the book industry in terms of their adoption of technologies to control the distribution of their products — methods that try to maximize legal distribution methods and minimize illegal distribution methods. (Spoiler alert: DRM works OK at deterring illegal distribution by the masses while frustrating the heck out of honest, legal users. And the tech-savvy people who want to pirate music/ebooks still find ways to do so.)

By all accounts — but mainly from the account of this convenient PBS Frontline timelime1 — the music industry has made illegal duplication its major beef for, like, forever. Note that as early as 1900:

...the unexpected boom in pre-recorded music leads to questions over copyright infringement. Music publishers appeal to the courts when the piano roll companies refuse to pay publishers for the rights to reproduce recordings on the player piano scrolls. The U.S. Supreme Court delivers a blow to the music publishers by declaring that copyrights will only protect those songs that can be read by the human eye -- thus exempting piano rolls and other machine-produced music products.

From wax cylinders to player pianos to vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, and digital files, much of the music industry (but especially industry executives) has been concerned that the improvements in sound recording and playback technology would pose a threat to music sales. Nevermind the fact that with each technological advance, the industry has a real excuse to re-release every recording they own on a new format and thus generate new sales on basically the same source material over and over again (not to mention remasters, re-releases, compilations, boxed sets).

Remember when albums were released on CDs AND cassettes because some people didn't have CD players (or didn't have them in their cars, or didn't have portable CD players)? Now, with the resurgence of vinyl, albums are sold on record, on CD, as digital downloads, and as a stream (if you consider like I do that paying for a stream subscription is a "sale"). It's true that music sales have decreased, "from $11.8 billion in 2003 to $7.1 billion [in 2012]" according to the Recording Industry Association of America (as quoted by CNN Money2). But is this a direct result of piracy? What about songs being sold as individual tracks, untethered from the album format that had sold groups of songs as a package? Here's a neat chart from that same CNN Money report:

Look at those nice, little, uniform, satisfying waves! The picture it paints is kind of simplistic: as a new, more convenient technology is introduced, the market is slow to respond, then it adopts it wholeheartedly, then an even newer, more convenient technology comes along, and etc. But bootlegs have been around forever. People have been recording and redistributing music themselves, without permission from the music industry, since at least the beginning of this chart. (On an aside, here is a great New Yorker piece about the pirating of CDs via MP3: 3 >The Man Who Broke The Music Business.) Professionally recorded materials, live concerts, interviews and radio plays, limited releases, secret releases. It's all been bootlegged for decades. So that should be a given — there is a core set of consumers who bootleg, yet the industry continues to exist (i.e., it doesn't bankrupt the music industry). But do you really think that none of the bootleggers ever legitimately pay money into the music industry?

(Is this still a blog about libraries? Yeah, I suppose. Music can be found in libraries! But I think I'm going to get around to ebooks soon enough...)

Enter DRM: a lock-key-mechanism designed for the distributors of digital products to place a lock on their files so that only they (themselves) and their consumers (sometimes) can unlock the material. Again, the idea here is fairly simple: (A) music distributors want to sell as many products as they can (B) copying and resharing music is fairly easy for anyone with access to the right technology (C) music distributors want to shut down any copying or resharing of their products to maximize sales. The fact that the latest format/revolution in music products is digital only amplifies all of this: it is really super easy to reshare things now, around the world, nearly instantly. (Remember waiting 20 minutes to download a single song?)

The big monkey wrench thrown into the gears of the simple idea behind DRM is: sometimes (a lot of times) it messes stuff up for the person who legimately purchased the product. If you have a weak stomach you may not want to relive this moment with me:

(*despite knowing it's a screenshot on a blog post, nervously clicks "Cancel" repeatedly*)

OK. Stop. 

I'm trying to say that DRM is killing the user experience and topping out possible sales, but according to the chart above, it looks like iTunes has swooped in and dominated the music industry. iTunes IS quite a big player, but the article mentions something that the chart doesn't: iTunes has only 63% of all digital music sales4, and that doesn't include paid streaming services. (Also note that that figure is extrapolated from the 13,000 responses given in consumer surveys conducted by NPD. Be wary of consumer responses to surveys.)

So music has been pirated, continues to be pirated, and will continue to be pirated for the foreseeable future. But somehow music keeps turning a profit: maybe more for technology companies like Apple and Spotify than for labels and individual musicians, but if there continues to be a market for new music there will continue to be people who profit off that market. So why nail everything down with DRM to try to maximize profits? Like the War On Drugs, it seems more cost prohibitive (including the cost of frustrating regular, honest users, who may in fact ironically move to alternative modes of distribution to avoid DRM restrictions).

EBOOKS

I thought I had a lot to say about ebooks, but I think my descriptions and arguments from the music section carry over. So how about you head over to another blog to find out about the problems with ebooks?

Here is a great post about ebooks, how they work, how they’ve been performing, and how they will never take over market share:

What’s the matter with e-books?5

https://nvbinder.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/e-books/

by: N.V. Binder

Here are some highlights:

What functions make an e-book better than a printed book, that the open web can’t do better than both?

When you get down to the code level, an e-book (as in a .mobi or .epub format) is just a webpage. A webpage with weird formatting and restrictive DRM. A webpage that costs a lot of money. A webpage that is tied to a single device and a single user; that can’t be crawled by a normal search engine; that can’t be copied or shared or linked to; that can’t even be bought.

My hope and belief is that we will soon see “books” that take advantage of the web’s creative potential, that use the natural flow and motion of webpages to delight, charm and surprise readers. After being tremendously disrupted by digital, periodicals are nearly there. I can’t wait to see a fiction story that engages readers with the unique beauty, strengths, design and depth of the web. That day is coming, very soon, and it will be a great one for literature and culture.

---

1. "Chronology: Technology and the Music Industry," by: Callie Taintor, for: PBS, link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html 

2. "A decade of iTunes singles killed the music industry," by: Adrian Covert, for: CNN Money, link: http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/technology/itunes-music-decline/

3. "The Man Who Broke the Music Business," by: Stephen Witt, for: The New Yorker, 4/27/2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-broke-the-music-business

4. "The NPD Group — After 10 Years Apple Continues Music Download Dominance in the U.S." by: The NPD Group, for: The NPD Group, link: https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/the-npd-group-after10-years-apple-continues-music-download-dominance-in-the-u-s/

5. "What's the matter with e-books?" by: N.V. Binder, http://nvbinder.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/e-books/