Futurology II (or "How Many Students Does It Take To Change Higher Education?")

In my last post I vented about the state of the library profession in academia. Now, I try to look at it from the point of view of another interested party...

What do the students want from us?

• They want the books and articles they want/need to use.
• They want somewhere to work (both individually and in groups, with or without machinery).
• They want/need help with the resources and the work.

They don't strictly give a monkeys as to our pro or am status, or where we come on the pay spine. They just want to get their essay done.

Things like self-issue machines, which dramatically alter how staff operate, probably have less effect on the students. Some will be alienated by new technology and others will be liberated: giving the students a choice between machinery and humanity is the best possible approach in this situation.

Back-room changes like book sorting machinery and 'shelf-ready' purchasing do not have as obvious an effect on the students (moral or financial motivations notwithstanding). In some cases (where implemented wisely) they will speed up turnaround times, increasing the likelihood of stock appearing in the main stacks when the students go about their hunting. Better still, of course, is to make sure there are enough books in the first place.

Let's do some quick arithmetic. A year's worth of lecturer comes to about £35-40k, which is about four students' worth of fees. In other words, four friends could club together and buy a year's worth of dedicated lecturing. Add another friend and you have the best part of £10k to spend on books for the five of them. That should punch a reasonable hole in most reading lists.

This is crude maths. It fails to consider the expenses inevitable in upscaling that model beyond the capabilities of a small room. It fails to factor in the support structures and general perks of your average university. It fails to take account of the gobsmacking resource costs we are likely to meet as we ascend to those scales. But as a back of a weblog calculation, it is a lot for us to try to live up to.

Most students have not even remotely considered this sum. The student mortgage is just an obstacle they must surmount if they want to be a student. Most students, I suspect, will not actually question where the money is going. Most students will be happy to believe that we cannot (in all possible economies) afford to provide every student with every text on a reading list. In the current situation, at any rate, it is true. But that truth is born of priorities, and the university's priorities may differ from those of the student.

Remuneration is one obvious factor. In a nation of growing financial inequity, it is only a matter of time before students begin to look upon the pay-cheques of the university management with envious eyes. It might do us all a lot of good if that happens, particularly if some of that wealth were to be redirected to the library! Extra-curricular entertainments aside, the purchasing of educational resources must be high on a student organisation's shopping list were they redesigning the university budget from scratch. 

In the meantime we maximise those resources we can afford. It seems particularly in vogue at the moment to try tinkering with loan periods. I hope someone is doing a proper study of it all. Though by the time such a study is published, e-texts may have done for this whole area of debate! [This paragraph is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.]

Then there's the library as study space. The students can study anywhere. Especially if we rent out portable devices. They might equally try the campus bar, common room, or any other nook / cranny the local architecture has to offer. They needn't even be on university property. But a good library designs good study spaces, and good free space is increasingly at a premium. It needn't be the library's space, but it is, and that's good for all of us. The libraries of the future, from a study environment perspective, will be mad places: hanging bean-bag gardens overlooking spectacular scenery b/w cryptic candlelit carrels (budgets permitting).

 So we try to provide somewhere for the students to do their work, and we try to provide them with some resources to work with: not enough resources (probably not even enough spaces) but we try to do our best with what we've got. 

And then we have to explain to them how it all works. This is a necessary evil, but the whole university is operating on the premise of education so we might as well chip in, eh?

I don't think it's naïvety, then, to suggest that student aspirations for our service are broadly compatible with our own self-interest, without recourse to any macro-economic slights of hand (it probably helps that we aren't the best paid profession ever). It's far more naïve to anticipate any sort of student-led revolutionary re-budgeting. But to be able to argue from a position of genuine academic necessity (I opine that texts are the second most important element of higher education after the teaching staff themselves (some might even raise their level of importance a position further)) must be some sort of advantage for us. That said, rationality seldom has much of a place in economics...

Futurology (or "The Librarian Has Got Some Clothes On")

Academic libraries: what are we for?

We're here to support the educational process by providing:

• support materials (mainly, but not exclusively, texts)
• a study environment
• assistance in the sound use of both

Academic librarians: what are we for?

We're here to support the educational process by providing:

• support materials (the right ones, sourced in dialogue with the academics, and made sufficiently locatable and available)
• a study environment (properly equipped to anticipate student needs)
• assistance in the sound use of both

The role of the academic librarian, then, is to facilitate the sound function of the academic library. This is a "professional" role, by which I mean that this a role for which the incumbent has undergone some form of training and assessment accredited by a trade body. The idea behind such professionalism is to ensure certain standards: standards of capability on the behalf of the professional, which in turn suggest certain standards of remuneration.

(nowadays you need several grand to turn pro)

The precise framework of this professionalism need not be rigid, provided that sufficient rigour is applied in the determination of what constitutes an appropriate level of expertise. The important thing is that that expertise is recognised as being of sufficient value. 

There is a British Institute of Facilities Management, and an Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, not to mention the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Librarians are not the only professionals on campus. That is not to say that all cadres are valued equally. Indeed it may well be that your value is determined not by your cartel but by where your job has been pegged by the goddess HERA.

HERA and similar job evaluation schemes are an attempt to grade academic staff according to the demands inherent in their role. Anyone who has looked at the paperwork will notice that these things tend to be skewed to particular flavours of administration and that they are often just a wee bit woolly in places. Still, the consequence is that various library roles are pegged into a local framework: shelvers sit under library assistants who sit under librarians of various shades. The question for all three strata is: to what extent was my position in the grand scheme fudged, and what degree of (in)tolerance exists to threaten it?

I have seen shelvers having to be taken outside the system and treated as a special case to stop them being on the same grade as assistants, such are the limitations of role assessments (other alarming tales are heard beyond the library doors). The whole thing lands us into messy territory: any change to our role should really be met with a new assessment, although what can go up may also go down. I just did a quick back-of-a-datesheet HERA assessment of typical librarian roles and got anything from 100-300 points depending not only on how much responsibility is given to the role but also on where the limits of that responsibility are drawn. 100 points is very lowly indeed, and perhaps best serves as a cautionary exaggeration. The point is that convention and received attitudes can be as important as our actual duties when it comes to playing the role profiling game. Shift out one level of the strata that hold us in place, and the ground crumbles beneath us.

Peg a shelver on grade three, stick a library assistant on grade four, and you can start pegging senior library assistants and junior librarians at the grade five mark. But were you to remove the shelvers from the picture, replacing them with zero-hour students or trainees, the subsidence can begin to bed in. The undermining starts below us: the clue is in the name.

Self-service machines are easier to use than they once were, reducing desk traffic and with it the library assistant's communication score. Book sorters potentially de-skill the role of the shelver. Out-sourcing of processing and other back-room duties may also have a de-skilling effect, or may simply lead to redundancies. The work still exists beyond our walls, made monotonous, production-line and ill-paid, rather than as part of a varied and pleasant library job. The move to a 24-hour service may see us training up our contracted security staff (also outsourced for economy) who will happily do a lot of the work our shelvers and assistants do for none of the money, just for something to do in the small hours.

(your services are no longer required)

Outsourcing is a great way of bypassing all those expensive agreements the university has made with the unions over the years, and a brilliant way of pulling people out of the pay spine. It cheerfully disregards things like reward, happiness and work-ethic for the sake of a few quid. Councils have demonstrated that outsourcing is generally a horrible mess but this won't stop certain quarters of academia giving it a go. Mostly these will be the already well-established bad eggs, but just look at how campus security has been treated by even the nicer universities to get an idea as to what is possible. Cleaners and catering are the next obvious targets, and then they might look to the library, where outsourced staff are already keeping the place going during most of the day.

On top of all this is the concept I will now call digital slippage: as more and more of our holdings go online, they become invisible. In the past we could point to the crammed stacks and say "build us a library extension", the creaking tangibility serving as a compelling argument in our favour. Now we walk the rope in a tug-of-war between electronic and physical: our stacks can be painted as anachronisms; our digital collections, whispily drifting across campus, might equally belong to I.T. In a world where collections can be infinitely large, our powers of weeding become irrelevant and the departments might as well take over the whole stock-managing malarkey for themselves. It might even make Open Access more straightforward for everyone!

The physical collection management will remain, though it is likely to become increasingly archival in nature as current content becomes more consistently virtual (catastrophes not withstanding). The study environment could, let's face it, belong to anyone, not least I.T. We might be able to manage it better than anyone else (members of the British Institute of Facilities Management included) but space management requires less heads than stock management (nobody needs to catalogue the comfy chairs).

Which tilts the bagatelle of librarianship to information skills. Information skills are genuinely important in academia, which is why they end up being taught by librarians in brief and ill-attended induction sessions. There is more to it than teaching students how to use EBSCO: even if interfaces did become "easy" they would still inevitably bring up crap (Google is the epitome of "easy") and evaluation is just as important as Boolean logic.

(if you think The Sun's bad, you should see Page 3 of Google)

Variety is the spice of life, and academic librarianship is currently a very well spiced profession (not all of it, but some). I would like it to stay that way (it was one of the things that drew me to it in the first place): I want to be able to juggle teaching, stock-management, space-management, archiving, I.T, and all the other stuff we do: it makes for an interesting and pleasant job, and interesting and pleasant jobs make for happy and productive workers. I am worried that this interesting and pleasant job is on the verge of fragmentation: the teaching going one way, the stock management another, etc. Which bits retain the "librarian" moniker and is there any way of holding them together? Because if we don't, we run the risk of dropping down the spine: not only will our work be less varied (and hence more tedious) but it will also, as a consequence, be deskilled and therefore worth less money. As such we need to ensure that all aspects of our work are clearly and incontrovertibly associated with librarianship: all of them. Or else we must cut our losses and hitch our roles to another profession: teaching, archiving, facilities management. Either we hold together, reinforcing the core idea of the library as a centre of study support and the librarian as the agent of that support, or we let it disintegrate and throw our lot in with some other part of HE. I think the former option is still available.

The library building is still there, with both the books and the study spaces. The need for information literacy is both real and compelling. The array of products and licences, the horrors of copyright, the fog of open access, the mysteries of repositories and research data... they constitute a mess of support materials to which we can readily claim some mastery. It's easy to lose sight, from the inside, of the externally apparent mysteries of stock procurement and management (particularly digital stock). Librarians can cast and read those runes in a way that other academic staff cannot. We know what we're doing in that regard. And if we're worried that our magical capabilities might be outsourced, then we should also get our mitts on juicy research data and various repositable gubbins that might be better kept inhouse than out. We need to pull together all teh stuff and make sure everyone knows it's ours. In that regard, it is vitally important to ensure that our work is seen and valued. This is seldom easy for us: running a COUNTER report can only tell so much, and there are no truly effective ways to measure the impact of a LibGuide. So we have to talk about it. We have to show off at every convenient opportunity. We have to stick together and we have to advocate.

Which is where CILIP/ILPUK comes in. Or should come in. Unionisation also has a role (especially in terms of the undermining aspects) but the professional body is key to reinforcing the values of librarianship and of the work we do; of giving the lead and offering a sense of direction. Academia is in a very odd place at the moment, with no real sense of direction, and we could conceivably be in the middle of it, forging something wonderful. But it needs a bit of coordination and the odd gala luncheon to provide the necessary momentum to carry us forward. It needs us all mucking in and looking out for each other, and it needs a little flamboyance from our body. We should be getting out there, flapping our beautiful wings and boasting about how fantastic and essential we are, but instead we are wailing and gnashing our teeth. With a little braggadocio you can convince an emperor to parade naked, so convincing him that librarians are important (which they actually are) ought to be a doddle. If self-belief requires a name change, then (as daft as it is, and it is very very daft) let's do it so we can get stuck in to what matters.

Never a cross word...

It's the last bank holiday weekend before term, so here's an opportunity to spoil it. Your resident Saint has been slaving over a dictionary to produce the Summer 2013 AView Crossword. I'm pretty sure I've weeded out all the mistakes...

La Forza del Destino

A couple of years ago I wrote (here and here) about how I used Google Sidebar and the Opera web-browser as as my main windows on the internet. At the time I wrote those posts Google Sidebar was set to be killed off, and I was wondering what I might find to replace it. Up to that point my use of RSS feeds was primarily news-based, with a few Twitter accounts and 'blog alerts thrown into a simple index of headlines. The demise of Google Sidebar led me to Google Reader and a centralised feed reader experience with all my content delivered on a plate. No longer did I visit sites ad hoc and on the offchance: Google Reader brought the sites to me!

Opera took the burden of other aspects of my Google Sidebar: the notepad and the Twitter feed in particular. I developed and improved the lists I used in Seesmic, and this became my new source of news headlines. When Seesmic was killed off (briefly) in 2012, I jumped to the near-identical Tweetdeck and tweaked my lists some more. My first column contains news, current affairs and silliness. My second is full of librarians (now just active UK librarian individuals, to keep within Twitter's list-length limits). My third is arts and archives, plus library organisations and librarians from further afield (it lights up at night when the Americans wake up). My fourth is a digest of my favourite tweeters (with an extra-special cadre of quiet but cherished twitterers also being redirected as texts to my mobile 'phone)...

On single-monitor computers, I run Tweetdeck in Opera's side-panel, but recently I've been lucky enough to have two monitors, so Tweetdeck often gets one to itself. It has become a great big side-panel of its own.

Google Reader got axed recently, so now I'm using Old Reader, which is pretty much exactly the same. It briefly got axed too, but not for very long.

The linchpin in my internet activities remains the Opera 12 browser. I've been using Opera for over a decade (albeit with a brief Mozilla flirtation when Opera 7 was launched). It is not a browser with a huge market share, which means that some web sites don't work as well as they should, but these issues are substantially less than they were in the early days when you had to carry Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape around with you at all times. It lacks the grinding clunkiness of Firefox and the hectoring twitchiness of IE. It may have lost its speed record to Chrome, but makes up for it by being an infinitely customisable Swiss Army Knife rather than a simple plastic fork. Don't get me wrong, I think Chrome is a fine piece of kit, but it's a bit Fisher Price and it's too hard to get the back off.

The added functionality of Opera is particularly useful at work. Let's take a screengrab (this is of my home set-up, but work isn't too different):

Examining a similar image in a previous blogpost using Dragonfly

Box 1 contains some bells and whistles I use now and again.  Many of these tools have their parallels in other browsers, and most are third party extensions. At work I have less of these and I keep them in slightly different places. There's a pixel ruler (handy when making web-pages), a timer to tell me how long I've been staring at different web sites (Tweetdeck has clocked up nearly 200 hours this year at home), an image indexer (handy when looking at image galleries), a tool that lets me draw red lines about the place (very good for teaching sessions), a translator, my Pinterest pin, and the Talis reading lists bookmarklet tool. There's also an option to enforce my own style-sheet on a page, so for instance if I'm using Old Reader in a small window and want to maximise my viewing space, I have set up a hacked style-sheet that removes the top menu bars:

Box 2 contains my trusty search engines. At home these are Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps and Google (plus a host of others on a dropdown tab). At work I have Wikipedia, the library catalogue, Google Scholar and Google, (plus various specialist catalogue searches on the dropdown: I've made particular use of the "periodicals by title" search). 

Box 3 is my side-panel: very handy for keeping notes (the one depicted appears to be full of code I've been using while working on the university's LibGuides).  It can also display web-pages (usually Tweetdeck). I've dabbled with using Opera for email and RSS too, but it's a bit too basic for my tastes!

And then there's Box 4 on the screengrab: Opera Dragonfly. I've been using this a lot, lately, while I've been working on prettifying the LibGuides. Dragonfly is Opera's built-in DOM inspector, and it allows me to peel apart a web page, component by component, to see what makes it tick. If I want to know what colour this font is, for example, I can just right-click and look at the relevant code in Dragonfly (it would appear to be #B4A7D6). It's very very useful.

Google killed the Sidebar and the Reader, but at least they've not killed Opera...

And then came Opera 15. Due to reasons practical and doubtless economic, Opera have ditched their Presto engine (the gubbins inside Operas 7 to 12) in favour of Blink (the gubbins inside Google Chrome). This necessitates something of a tabula rasa at Opera, and Opera 15 is a completely new browser: a rebadged Chrome with all the simplicity that that implies. You can't alter the browser layout. You can't even bookmark properly. It is a very different sort of browser to Opera 12: from one extreme to the opposite.

A trawl of the Opera forums demonstrates a significant dismay being aired by long-term Opera users like myself. Moaning is inevitable when faced with any change: we hate our routine being disturbed. I mentioned earlier that I briefly left Opera after they launched Opera 7, and that was in part because it was different (though mainly because they were doing naughty things with their advertising). Likewise, I only came to Opera in the first place because I didn't like the look of Netscape 6. But these differences were nothing to the difference between Opera 12 and Opera 15 (Operas 13 and 14 are lost to the fevered imaginings of developers). They are completely opposed in their philosophies. Beneath all the fan dismay is a sense that perhaps even the developers are not so keen. They have been saddled with a corporate decision and would rather have been playing with their own baby than with Google's. Regardless, the consequence is that Opera 15 has none of the features that make me use Opera. None of them. This is a sad thing for me, and for many of the 1% of all web surfers whose board of choice is Opera. But perhaps Opera are thinking that this 1% of geeks and Norwegians might be traded against an as yet untapped market of people who just want a Fisher Price browser upon which to point and click (and they are probably mathematically safe in this belief). It's Windows 8 all over again...

There's obviously an appetite for simplicity. Of course there is. Most people will never right-click on the internet. It's not a question of dumbing down because they were never "up" in the first place. I accept that what I do with Opera is a very niche pursuit, and a consequence too of my age and background. But it doesn't lessen the sense of outrage when a range of possibilities get taken away from you: when freedoms are removed.

For now, Opera 12 is being kept going by a development team that realise their new product is not yet a fit successor. But I fear that this will be Eudora all over again. A web browser is the scrying glass through which you see the internet, and all glass distorts to some extent. I've always admired the clarity of Opera in spite of certain imperfections, and to be forced into a new prescription will be a terrible strain for me. I fear it will be like using the internet with blinkers.

But to return to the sentiments of the paragraph before last... to the sense of loss for something being axed: not something used by a majority of the population, but cherished by that minority who do... Only 1% of web traffic is through Opera, which pales in comparison to the 35% of the population the Society of Chief Librarians claims pop into a library once a month. By accident or design, the erosion of freedoms is very much in vogue.

I'm not quite sure where to go with the analogy between Opera 12 and libraries. It's too late on a Sunday. But for a moment there I saw something at the corner of my eye. I should make the most of such things while I can...