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A book isn't an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity.
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My prevous post took a brief look at the religious ideas that permeate not only Jaron Lanier's Who Owns The Future? (whether he explicitly acknowledges those ideas or not). This post considers what he contributes about books, and the future of books.

(Lanier, author of Who Owns The Future? appears on the SHU campus on Wednesday, October 9, 7:00 p.m. Schine Auditorium)

Books have become a cultural flash point that inspire "maniacal scheming" (see pages 352-360) --an unwitting testament to books' enduring iconic, cultural power.  What bothers Lanier is that current development of networks --the Siren Servers that seek total computational awareness and control--might lead to losing "the pattern of what a book is in the stream of human life and thought." (353)  After sketching some possible future scenarios about the fate of books, authors, and readers, Lanier offers a definition (one of the very best I have ever read):

A book isn't an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity. The economic model of our networks has to be optimized to preserve that synthesis, or it will not serve [hu]mankind.(358)

Lanier here touches upon the emotional salience and cultural power that books evoke.  The uneasiness Lanier shares with many is not just about texts (tomes, bindings), but about human lives.  "Human life is its own purpose," he continues.  "Thinking about people in terms of the components on a network is--in intellectual and spiritual terms--a slow suicide for the researchers and a slow homicide against everyone else."(360)  The ingestion of millions of e-texts into Artificial Intelligence divorces what humans write about from who they are, and what makes their lives meaningful to them.  "Whether we will destroy culture in order to save/digitize it is still unknown."(353) (Lanier references that metaphor to the Vietnam war.)

What makes a liberal education liberal--freeing--is the strong association (synthesis) of particular texts with particular people, moments, events, movements, points of view.  The real intellectual problem with Wikipedia isn't its alleged accuracy or inaccuracy. Rather, it "proposes that knowledge can be divorced from point of view." Note that Lanier writes knowledge --not data, not information, not the "flashes of thought" that might be "inserted meaningfully into a shared semantic structure" (ibid.)  Knowledge is what humans make for other humans.  Strictly speaking, computers can store, locate, index, and transform data, but can't know in the same sense.

These are my own thoughts, sourced in Lanier's text, which I found to enormously helpful in articulating the fundamentally different business model of a library from a database, even a sort of meta-database (a database of databases --a discovery service, in other words).  What libraries are about is the discovery of knowledge in human communities and continuities, in a symmetrical transaction that celebrates unanswered questions (intellectual risk) and acknowledges the presence of other sources of knowledge --whether living persons, libraries, databases, search engines, or other human syntheses of any and every kind.  

This transaction (process, pedagogy) thrusts libraries into an educational process squarely at odds with Siren Servers that are naracisstic (as though they alone collect data), risk-externalizing (questions and uncertainties never belong to the Server, always to the user), and depend upon extreme information assymetry --users can't know what the Server already knows about them, and how it seeks to modify their behavior.

Understanding the cultural term "book" a "a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity" respects authors, readers, and the economic and intellectual chain of power and responsibility that connects them.  This also illuminates why some (many?) people care so passionately about books --what they care about is human continuity, personhood, what makes a human life worth living.  What better question could a liberal arts education pursue?  What could be more "relevant" to the challenges of living in a "flat," networked world?

Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read."
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Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read." (Lanier visits SHU on October 9, 2013.)  It's a wild, occasionally bumpy ride through simultaneous developments of technology, economy, and social thinking occasioned by the massive computing power ("big data") of arrays of servers.  When such an array achieves dominance in such a manner that it can aspire to omniscience, Lanier calls it a "siren server" --a software-mediated social vision that believes it's the only game in town, marked by radical information assymetry and outsources risk as much as possible.

There are so many elements of this book that I will pick out several for consideration, but one at a time. This piece concerns the religious elements of the social vision that advanced software engineers (called by synecdoche "Silicon Valley") seek to monetize and compell social acceptance.

Lanier does take this on in his fifth interlude, "The Wise Old Man in the Clouds," with the double meaning intact. Silicon Valley (or at least, many there) anticipate The Singularity, when software comes to write itself and computers outstrip human interaction, when the memories, emotions, and thoughts of an individual can be uploaded into "the cloud" and when the body died, the person lives on --when illness, death, scarcity (want), and human limitations of every kind are overcome (p. 325-331), when robots can provide satisfying sex.  (Really! --see pages 359-360)

As a technologist Lanier (who is both a technologist and a philosopher) wants to skitter away from religious questions.  Speaking for technologists, "We serve people best when we keep our religous ideas out of our work." (p. 194) --and yet this book is shot through with religious sensibility and ideas, including non-traditional human development ideas famous in the Bay area.  The questions of limits and Ultimate Concern, of human closed-in awareness and the unexpected in-breaking of The Other, keep returning again and again.  No one has yet successfully addressed these questions as regards technologists.  (And by "successfully," I don't mean that I would agree with that writer, but that such a writer both acknowledges these questions and moves discourse forward.)

Lanier's makes frequent reference to visionaries (H.G. Wells, Alan Turning, Ted Nelson), philosophers (Aristotle, Hobbes, Malthus, Marx) and science fiction writers or characters (Philip K. Dick, Dr. Strangelove, Star Trek the TV series, especially the original series).  All of these raised questions broadly classes as theological or religious --although apparently in the Silicon Valley "religious" means such Concern as narrowly defined by California-flavored evangelicalism, western Mormon sensibilities (whether orthodox LDS or not), and the spectre of fundamentalisms of every stripe.  ("Spiritual" is a very different word, suggesting all the happy feelings of Eastern philosophies mixed in with self-affirming slogans.) No wonder Lanier wants to restrict technologists to keep religious ideas out of their work.  

But does "religion" have to be defined that way?  (The fact that violence-prone religious fundamentalists share a small bit of thinking in common with "religion" makes other religious people guilty of crimes against humanity to the same but narrowly limited extent that chemists are guilty because they share a small amount of thinking with DKFarben, makers of the poisons used by the Nazis.)  The Silicon Valley amounts to being the paradigm of, among other things, "spiritual but not religious."  But that's a feint, simply deflecting attention.

On the one hand, "what does it mean to be human" (which Lanier re-phrases as, "whether people are 'special'", p. 196) is not a technological question and can't be answered in those terms and limitations.  On the other hand, those terms and limitations beg that question.  The adjustment of software and information to reality is imperfect --reality consistently outstrips human ability to encode it.  (For all the hype that information lies at the heart of the universe --such as DNA encoding for example-- it takes humans to translate that reality into symbols or code.)  The religious and philosophical questions raised by massive "cloud" computing are inescapable, and only a resolute will to face them for what they are will sing a song over against the Sirens strong enough to modify their behavior.

Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky.
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Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky.  (See my own posts below.)

I especially appreciate how Bady's remarks about how Shirky stacks the rhetorical deck in his own favor, so that anyone inside higher education is incapable of questioning higher education.  Oh, but I'm a librarian, so I'm not capable of questioning so famous a writer. I must be part of the problem, and I'm solely hell-bent on self-preservation, apparently.

One might add, by Shirky's logic, that anyone inside capitalism is incapable of questioning capitalism --this is the classic "false consciousness" rhetoric: your consciousness is false, so you are unable to see that your consciousness is false.  This is another variety of the rhetorical move made in previous decades by Michel Foucault, for whom power was everything --and if you question Foucault, you obviously do so because you resist Foucault's power with your own.  Huh?

An academic library enacts a community of practice so that learners move beyond "standard answers" to understand the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics of their disciplines, and why they matter.
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Clayton Christiansen's impressive work on disruptive innovation (see previous post) arises from his examination of innovative developments in concrete products such as transistors, computer chips, and automobiles.  His analysis has both an intellectual plausibility and an on-ground sense of touch.  

One of the main points (to paraphrase crudely) is that the new innovation frequently is not (in fact) as good as the old, expensive, hard-to-get product, but for the innovation's users it's good enough.  

Example: the incursion of foreign automobiles into the USA market in the 1970s, in particular German and Japanese cars.  They had a reputation as not being as reliable as your grandfather's Oldsmobile or Buick (and maybe they weren't).  I owned a 1967 Volkswagon bug, and it wasn't totally reliable.  I later owned two successive Ford Pintos, the cars that exploded on rear-end impact (faulty gas tank).  They were terrible, and I've never been persuaded to own another Ford.  So while German and Japanese cars were regarded as less reliable (imagine that!), in fact the Big Three automakers were producing glitzy junk. No wonder younger drivers abandoned them in droves.

In that case, not only was the "new" product "good enough," the former product had deteriorated.  Earlier, the first transistor radios were only "good enough" (tinny sound), but they were a huge, portable improvement on the old tubes.  These products are really clear, and consumer-oriented, although Christiansen's analysis also holds ground very well in the case of computer chips, which are secondarily consumer-oriented.

So what do academic libraries produce?  --much less clear than radios and automobiles.

The old language about "the academic library supports the students and faculty" is insufficient. (See Scott Bennett's article.) The support role has been supplemented (if not replaced) by Google and other traffikers in information.  That is the true innovative disruption in the academic library --Google (Amazon, etc.) is not "as good as" but is "good enough," and the exchange is not primarily financial (dollars for support) as much as time and effort.  For many using Google (etc.) is good enough: not so much work, easy to use, and ubiquitous.  Just think about the question, "why is it so much easier to buy a book than to borrow a book?"

If the old support, service-oriented language is insufficient, what's left for academic libraries?

Real (or deep) learning happens in communities.  In a community, they internalize the implicit practices of a discipline that matter most.  That's why they are called disciplines, not just subject matter --learning puts the schaft (schaffen=create) in the Wissenschaft (wissen=to know) in German, the source of the model of the modern Ph.D. research university.

But the research university "DNA" is just what Christiansen claims innovative organizations such as BYU Idaho disruptive.  There are several levels to his claim. Consider that this organization is called BYU (Brigham Young University) Idaho for a reason --it's basically oriented to the "mother ship" BYU in Provo, Utah.  All of BYU receives a huge tuition subsidy for all LDS students who are "temple worthy" (an LDS status indicating good standing: in 2011-2012 $4,560 vs $9,120 for non-LDS).  Who teaches at BYU-Idaho?  It doesn't produce it's own faculty, but depends on other organizations (such as BYU Provo).  While traditional faculty may face disruptive innovation in time, some alternative method of demonstrating certified expertise then will have to be found --or consider that impact on medical or engineering educations.

Whether or not every college has the "DNA" of "Harvard" (roughly equals the Ph.D.-granting Carnegie Class One research university) --deep learning still occurs in communities of practice.  John Seely Brown (.pdf) writes:

Indeed, knowing only the explicit, mouthing the formulas, is exactly what gives an outsider away.  Insiders know more.  By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get to know not just the "standard" answers, but the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics, and why they matter.

Notice Brown's verb inhabit. I'm sure that such a community can be inhabited via distance education modalities, but it takes a lot of work.

Libraries and librarians come to understand how people learn as self-directed, internalizing learners --the library is a learning enterprise without the structure of the direct learning environment (classroom or course management space).  Students are intentional learners, not just users whose use of resources the librarians facilitate.

The disruptive innovation presented by all kinds of information technology, and finally by Google, Amazon, iTunesU, MOOCs, and their kindred --this disruption forces the clarification of what an academic library produces: an environment where students take responsibility for their own learning.  Librarians enact the institutional mission of the university in the context of that environment.  

An academic library enacts a community of practice so that learners move beyond "standard answers" to understand the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics of their disciplines, and why they matter.   Libraries are one of the places where disciplinary outsiders can become knowledgable, practicing insiders.  The library enacts the schaft in the Wissenschaft.

 

Disruptive innovation in academic libraries can only be understood in the context of disruptive technology and the complex variables of what academic libraries actually produce.
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"Disruptive innovation" has become such a buzz-word that it seems to have spawned a minor industry.  Disruptive innovation is "explained" in a video featuring Clayton Christiansen, the guru and (for practical purposes) the inventor of the phrase.  Let it be noted that Christiansen himself sticks to a careful, specific definition.  (The commentary spawned by this phrase, however, has taken it way beyond Christiansen's probable intentions.)  According to that video:

Disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough innovation that makes good products a lot better. . . . It transforms a product that historically was so expensive and complicated that only a few people with a lot of money and a lot of skill had access to it.  Disruptive innovation makes it so much more affordable and accessible that a much larger population have access to it.

Christiansen goes on in his writings (such as The Innovative University --which I reviewed here) to add that such new, affordable products may be (in fact) inferior to the previous, expensive products --but that doesn't matter: the new products are good enough.  Common examples that Christiansen and others cite are transistors (in particular, transistor radios for consumers), automobiles, and computer chips.

One would foolhardy --and probably wrong-- to doubt the basic wisdom of Christiansen's insights.  But how has this really played out in academic libraries?  I've read a lot about this, but in the end I use what I have read to understand my own experience.

So what is "the product" that academic libraries produce, much less that universities produce?  This is where Christiansen's concepts get stickier.

So far as disruptive technology goes, my entire career in librarianship has enacted the disruptions.

Digression: In 1981 I began work as a cataloguer's assistant in the Historical Studies Library at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton --the original think tank for Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Robert J. Oppenheimer, George A. Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, to name only a few of the true luminaries.  A great deal of everyday life the later 20th and 21st centuries is founded on the work of IAS scholars.  While I was there I encounter --and listened to-- George Kennan, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Hawking, Irving Lavin, Albert O. Hirschman, and Clifford Geertz.  For a humble cataloguer's assistant, recent M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, it was a very heady experience.  (And this after three years in Princeton, where I remember encountering John Nash, Rudolf Carnap, John Fleming, and Carl Schorske).

Anyway, what about being a cataloguer's assistant?  I actually typed cards for the catalog.  That kind of work disappeared by about 1985 (--but not before I stopped doing it in 1982).  My first professional job as a cataloger 1986-1993 disappeared after I resigned it, as did work as an Cataloging Associate at Princeton University, and Editor of a Union List of Serials for academic libraries in Rhode Island, 1996-1998.  Jobs I have held since --Head of Technical Services in what is now a constitutent library of Columbia University, and Systems and Electronic Resources Librarian at Muhlenberg College, still exist in some fashion, but actual work --what those people do everyday-- has changed dramatically.

In short, I used to do a lot of things that computers do now, mediated and supervised by human beings. Information technology in one sense disrupted that work but not completely --professional-level care for database quality and consistency (=avoiding garbage-in) is what makes the very daily world of the Internet go.  It's built on the work of many, many people long before "computers" stopped being people and started being things.  (That obscure reference explained.)

Work in libraries 1980-present has been a story of disruption, but also continuity.  Grant that the technology is disruptive, what about disruptive innovation?  What does an academic library produce?  That is less clear --and for that reason, some people argue, academic libraries shouldn't be funded.  "Show your productivity in numbers, or be gone," in effect.

The nub of the argument seems to be that books are boring --well, because they are. And boring cannot stand in the age of constant distraction. The distractions of social networks, online communities of learning, and "learning how to learn" --as opposed to learning any actual content-- demand a rejection of "static, one-way conversation" of the author to reader. What a complete misunderstanding of the role of a subtle writer to a subtle reader!
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This post refers back to the post of May 14, 2010,  the post of August 25, 2010, and the post of January 30, 2011.

In those posts, I mentioned Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) and his article Individual Knowledge and the Internet.  Sanger analyzes three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet.  "First is the idea that the instant availability of knowledge online makes memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary."  The second strand claims that "individual learning is outmoded, and that "social learning" is the cornerstone of "Learning 2.0"  The third two strand asks, "is participating in online communities via social media a replacement for reading boring old books?"

Of course this question is either ironic or prejudiced --the latter if we assume that Sanger thinks that books are truly outmoded; the former if we understand (correctly) that he does not.  The question as formulated does go to the nub of an argument by certain popular writers, however, that books are in fact outmoded, old-fashiong, and non-interactive.  Books are alleged to "constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual."  Clay Shirky, the internet theorist who always has something novel and fashionable to say, has alleged we are now experiencing a profound shift in culture in which an older "monolithic, historic, elite culture" is passing away in favor of "a diverse, contemporary, and vulgar one."  This will entail altering "our historic models for the summa bonum [sic] of educated life."

Shirky's assumptions are breathtaking in their naiveté: since when is traditional Western thinking monolithic? I seem to recall that Socrates had some remarkably sharp things to say about his rivals, as did Peter Abelard, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf and other men and women who collectively make a "canon" (not even to pass to "the canon").  Shirky truly betrays the shallowness of his thinking when he writes, "... no one reads War and Peace.  It's too long, and not so interesting."  He does admit that his observation "is no less sacrilegious for being true."

Interesting to whom?  I just spoke with a young Russian-American student who was vividly alive with reading War and Peace (in both English and Russian, his case), as well as The Brothers Karamazov --surely another book "too long, and not so interesting."  One might waspishly add that interesting is as interesting does --or does not, in Shirky's case.  His argument boils down to the Sophists' argument as presented by Socrates in various Platonic dialogues, notably Symposium, that the popular course will determine what is right.  Ah, social networking, Athenian-style.  But I suppose this is simply to appeal to "monolithic, historic, elite culture."  No age lacks those who articulate obvious wisdom, the wisdom of the crowds, and tickles those crowds with it --not ancient Athens, or 19th-century Paris, or 21st-century New York University.  Unfortunately Shirky's name always reminds me of Tolkien's Sharkey --the Shire-folks' name for Saruman, that speaker of half-truths extraordinaire.

The nub of the argument seems to be that books are boring --well, because they are.  And boring cannot stand in the age of constant distraction.  The distractions of social networks, online communities of learning, and "learning how to learn" --as opposed to learning any actual content-- demand a rejection of "static, one-way conversation" of the author to reader.

What a complete misunderstanding of the role of a subtle writer to a subtle reader!  Think of seminal works of a variety of discourses --J. S. Mill's The Subjection of Women, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Karl Marx' Das Capital, even Ayn Rand-- could anyone read those texts and not engage in response and dialogue in the course of reading?  Is the conversation really so "static" and "one-way"?  Isn't one goal of liberal learning in fact to learn how to engage a writer, how to recognize strong points, weak points, and no points at all?  Complex, dense minds require training on complex, dense texts whose meanings can be multi-layered and sometimes even self-contradictory.  So much for monoliths.

This is an advocacy piece: I am advocating liberal learning in the face of so much that seeks to depersonalize young students today.  I want my young students to learn to speak with their own voices, even when their voices profoundly disagree with my own.  I am advocating that the traditional ideals of liberal arts education --independent judgement, imagination, care with texts, the ability to doubt both the wisdom of the crowds and the wisdom of the solitary individual-- matter intensely, and are not only valuable to our future, but essential to being human in the world.

The educational goals of Internet boosters --communal learning, substitution of crowd-consciousness for individual memory, the unique roll of co-created group knowledge-- point to a future which will be profoundly illiberal.  What in such educationalist dreams might prevent the rise of another Fascism?  To be sure, German liberal education did not prevent the rise of a Fascism but at least some Germans, and many other people with them, witnessesed against it.  And ultimately it did not prevail.   The prejudices of a digital hive or tribe could be profoundly unsettling --just ask any member of any minority.   The educational methods of profound remembering --including, but not limited to, some memorization; the profound importance of individual learning with an individual voice; the importance of critical, dense, and complex texts-- this is what a liberal arts university stands for, what a library enacts, and what librarianship at its boldest embodies.  It is a noble calling in an ironic age.

Four activities --reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculating-- are crucial to liberal education. A person who can't do them can't really be called educated. Social learning is an important supplement to, but not a replacement of, individual learning.
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This post refers back to the post (below) of May 14, 2010, and the post of August 25.

In those posts, I mentioned Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) and his article Individual Knowledge and the Internet.  Sanger analyzes three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet.  "First is the idea that the instant availability of knowledge online makes memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary."  The second strand claims that "individual learning is outmoded, and that "social learning" is the cornerstone of "Learning 2.0"  (The third two strand will be examined more fully in a later post.)

Why do I return to an article published a year ago?  I believe that Sanger is on to something: a superficial, misleading articulation among certain educationists that learning has become fundamentally different with the advent of social web tools.  On the contrary, Sanger see such tools as fancy tools, but only as tool towards a very similar end: the content and method of liberal learning which remains to be done, no matter what the technological environment.  I agree with him.  I think that Sanger's argument is worth continuing, if only because, as the bloom seems to be coming off some Web tools, this is a teachable moment to ask, what does it mean to be truly educated?

But back to Sanger's critique of a second strand of thinking about learning adn the Internet: that individual patterns of learning are outmoded, and the new pattern of learning (thoroughly invested in and enabled by Web social tools) is collaborate, social group learning.  Just as some educationists' first claim that the Web has made memorization unnecessary (by in part caricaturing all remembered content as mere rote, unreflective memorization), so this strand caricatures individual learning as --well, individualistic-- as lonely, uncreative, and private to the point of solipsism.

Now group learning and social learning using social web interaction --wikis, online conversations, online fora of all sorts, can certainly be valuable.  They can also have problems, and carry costs and benefits which a wise teacher can choose to use as time, attention, and the situation suggest.  This is to say that these tools are exactly that: tools; that other tools (reading a book, an article, summarizing a paper, writing a poem, translating a passage, or other traditional activities) might also be useful, or not, as the situation suggests.

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, however, go much further (in the article cited above).  The go on to claim that "collaborative learning" is "the core model of pedagogy," and that of course digital platforms alone enable this.  Asking what is meant by social learning, they claim:

Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

In other words, social learning shifts focus from content to process, which "stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning."  This view (according to Brown and Adler) views knowledge as a kind of "substance" and that pedagogy --the art of teaching-- concerns how to transfer this substance from those who know to those who do not yet know, i.e. from teachers to students.  This "transfer" contrasts with the "constructed" knowledge students arrive at collaboratively.  How "substance" differs from "construction" is left unsaid.  As Sanger points out:

One could just as easily, and with just as much justification, assert that what is constructed in social learning is a "substance" that is socially shared. One can simply say instead that Cartesian learning involves the teacher causing the student to believe something that is true, by communicating the true thought.

In any case, Brown's and Adler's understanding of "Cartesian" (by extension, of Descartes) is laughably superficial.  "Substance" is not a prominent term for Descartes, who though that each person's mind is a substance, not knowledge itself.  Brown and Adler have simply adopted an idea from widely repeated (and vague) academic discourse that knowledge is a social construction (certainly a problematic idea --just ask a physicist).  Knowledge as a kind of "substance" is much more Aristotelian or even Thomist, but those thinkers are too intimidating to serve well as a kind of fashionable foil for social constructivists.  Thankfully Brown and Adler did not drag Kant into this.

The distinction boils down to learning with or without the presence and support of peers.  Certainly some people need peers in order to maximize their abilities to learn; others need solitude.  Isn't this obvious?   The view that social learning is therefore superior is easy to claim, but very difficult to verify in any meaningful manner, because "social learning" simply lacks the definitional heft to test rigorously.  The several tools which Brown and Adler present as examples of social learning are interesting, but cannot bear the entire weight of presenting an alternative to a straw-man "Cartesian." 

Ultimately, you have to do your own reading, no matter how the Decameron or the Divine Comedy come to you (to think of two classic texts with extensive online tools).  You may post your thoughts in essays on a blog or wiki (as I am doing), but the act of writing is still solitary, and needs practice for mastery.  (I certainly don't claim the latter!)  Discussion in any forum, whether face-to-face or online, is a great thing --but I agree with Sanger that a true scholar needs the ability to think independently.  A scholar is not automatically a member of a herd.  You might get a lot of help from peers to learn maths, science, management, economics, or a host of subjects --but if you don't master the material yourself, then you haven't learned it.  If you can't do the problems yourself, you haven't mastered them.  Your peers will not be omnipresent, whether in an examination, or on the job.

I agree with Sanger that those four activities --reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculating-- are crucial to liberal education.  A person who can't do them can't really be called educated.  Social learning is an important supplement to, but not a replacement of, individual learning.

Why does this matter to me as a librarian?  I am involved with planning a library renovation --I am making sure that there will be both group and individual spaces for study.  Part of liberal learning includes memorization, reading, writing, independent judgement, calculating --exactly the kind of independently responsible learning so much in demand by knowledge workers today and in the future.  What goes on in a library is individual learning, supplemented by group learning.  Individual knowledge is still necessary in the internet age, and "social learning" without individual knowledge is insufficient to the tasks of reading, writing, critical judgement, and calculating.  At the end of the day, you have to wipe your own nose, say your own prayers, reading your own texts, and work your own problems.

The sustainability problems for scholarly writing and publishing are very real, and remain nearly insoluable.
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Darnton-1-122310_jpg_230x1010_q85 Robert Darnton's The Library: Three Jeremiads (New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010) is a wonderfully written, rather gentle set of Jeremiads --for those of us used to reading the real Jeremiah.  He finds research libraries (and by extension, the rest of us) facing three crises, but he ends with hope, not doom.  (In that sense, he more like the original Jeremiah than many would realize.)

Darnton's three jeremiads are, in compact phrases:

  • Hard times are inflicting serious damages on scholarly publishing.  Scholarly publishers can no longer count on selling 800 copies of a monograph, and so many university presses have stopped publishing in some smaller fields (colonial Africa) altogether.  The scholarly monograph is becoming too expensive to sustain, and this back up the entire line from graduate-student research to publish-and-perish for newer faculty.  The pipeline is very seriously clogged.
  • University journals have experienced excessive pricing as control of critical scientific journals have passed to private hands.  The average price of a annual journal subscription in physics is $3,368; the average price in language and literature is $275.  Publishers impose drastic cancellation feeds, written into "bundled" journal subscriptions (sometimes hundreds) over several years.  Publishers seek to keep the terms secret, although a recent case in Washington casts doubt on that ability.  Academics devote time to research, write up the results as articles, referee the articles, serve on editorial boards, and then buy back the product of their labors at ruinous prices.  In order to break the monopologies of price-gouging empires such as Elsevier, scholarship needs open-access journals which are truly self-sustaining.  The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity attempts to create such a sustaining coalition of universities.
  • The Google books settlement offers some hope for breathing new life into monographic publishing, according to Darnton.  (I disagree -- see below.)  A Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) could succeed should Google fail, but the primary obstacles are not financial but legal.  Those works published between 1923 and 1964 are often in a copyright limbo called "orphaned works," because no one knows who actually holds copyright, if anyone.

Darnton's last Jeremiad offers hope, but is, I find, not a sustaining hope.  Recently I was helping my staff to shift part of our small collection because our shelving is at 100% of capacity and we do still desire to purchase some new monographs in print.  By chance I was shifting our modest collection of books on feminism and its development --but all the essential texts were there, starting with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (English translation 1953).  All of these titles are in print; the subject remains of great interest to many in the university; all of this material remains in copyright, but much of it is now old enough that the identities of the rights-holders can become difficult to trace.  Given the legal problems, little of this material is likely to be digitized on a large scale any time soon.

There may come a time when the sheer need for digitized texts will overwhelm the vested rights of very numerous rights holders, and society will enforce an equitable arrangement --the Google Books proposal would assign 63% of profits to authors and publishers, to be held in escrow by a trust persuant to a Book Rights Registry.  This proposal cuts the Gordian knot: the Copyright Act granted a long-term license which the government in turn never attempted to track, insofar as enforcement was to be carried out by a (presumably aggrieved) rights-holder.  This promises, however, endless litigation, and by the time that is ended, interest in almost all texts from the 1923-1964 period (or even later) will have faded further.

The sustainability problems for scholarly writing and publishing are very real, and remain.  For a smaller, teaching-oriented University, the reality that these problems are first dealt with by the Class-1 research universities is little comfort: we all live with the results of the mess society and technology has made of rights, copyrights, and the ubiquitous threat of litigation.  Predatory journal pricing structures remain, and it is little comfort for a teaching university that the prices are so far out of the realm of the possible that only a few mourn the impossibility of major scientific journal subscriptions.  The only way forward, as I see it, is to offer support to organizations such as the Public Library of Science, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), and the evolving identities and offerings of JSTOR and ITHAKA.  But this is not an answer.  It merely joins Darnton's appeal to change the system.

Google's primary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders. Libraries exist to get books to readers.
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Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library, writes in The New York Review of Books:

Like all commercial enterprises, Google's primary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders.  Libraries exist to get books to readers --books and other forms of knowledge and entertainment, provided for free.

Darnton's laser prose cuts to the heart of the mission of an academic library: to connect resources to users, period.  No shareholders, no restrictions based on an individual's ability to pay, no corporate interests to satisfy.  The academic library may be the last great commercial-free information commons, and it is endangered because it is often so misunderstood.

Academic libraries have, of course, service plans, budgets, stakeholders, access policies --and sit amidst institutions which charge tuition, often a lot of money.  But after the price of tuition, after admission to the University, after matriculation and registration --the whole of the library information commons is available to every user, individually for free.  Hardly free for the institution.

Darnton's three jeremiads survey the vicious cycle of esclation in the prices of materials followed by decline in library acquisition of those same materials; the unsustainability of commercial journal prices (written and edited by university researchers for the most part!); and the challenges of Google Books, the Google settlement with copyright holders (still not resolved), and the Digital Public Library of America.  The information commons --that bounded financial and institutional space which balances the interests of writers, readers, publishers, colleges and universities, and data bundlers (such as Ebsco)-- is up for renegotiation.  Every major avenue of library acquisitions (monographs, journals, databases, consortia) is undergoing transformation as I write, even for a modest academic library such as Sacred Heart University's.

Fr. Victor Austin of St. Thomas Church (Episcopal) in New York City once told a story --a man stopped him towards the rear of the church after a evening service led by the church's renowed Choir of Men and Boys.  "Is it free?" the man asked Fr. Austin.  Confused at first, Austin replied that you don't need a ticket to attend the service.  "But is it really free?" the man persisted --perhaps used to religious communities where one needs to be a paying member to attend high holy services.  St. Thomas' Church  --with a professional choir, much less the Zeffirellian church itself, the ornate style of worship, the public location on Fifth Avenue-- is a spectacularly expensive operation to maintain, possible only through generous gifts both past (read: endowment) and present.  "Is it really free?"  Fr. Austin responded, "No, it is infinitely expensive to provide this service.  But for you, it is free."

That is exactly the position of an academic library, a non-commercial, non-shareholder-driven information common space.  It is very, very expensive to maintain this service, this space.  Librarians can shower you with statistics.  University librarians read more spread-sheets than books on some days.  University administrators and trustees have every right to insist on a lively return on their investment, but measured in cultural, academic, intellectual terms --not expressed as net profit.  It is hugely expensive to run a library.  Academic libraries were once famously called "the bottomless pit, the library as viewed from the administration building" because of their insatiable budgetary demands (Munn, 1968).

But for the library user, it's free.  It must be.  Creative human life, the life of the mind is free.  It is not a return to the shareholders.

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader, published in May 30, 2010 New York Times, correlates some interesting insights from librarians and academics.
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Verlyn Klinkenborg's Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader, published in May 30, 2010 New York Times, correlates some interesting insights from librarians and academics.

Klinkenborg's first major point bears repeating: reading is a subtle thing.  For an intellectual activity, it does depend upon look-and-feel: book design.  The designers of books, using skills and concepts honed over decades and centuries, really do know what they're doing when they select a typeface, weight of paper, and other design elements.  "Glass and pixel's aren't the same."

His first example --that no matter the length of the book, the iPad's iBooks reader always shows six pages past and six pages ahead --correlates with the results of e-reader pilot projects summarized by the trade journal Campus Technology at three colleges: Northwest Missouri State University, Arizona State University, and Princeton University.

"Students need to be able to ... quickly skim through passages to refresh and compare information." (p. 28)  "Princeton participants, especially once finals arrived," [were frustrated by] "the inability to skim and flip through pages on the Kindle DX as quicly as they could with a traditional textbook." (p. 30)  Traditional printed book design allows quick skimming, review, and comparison, as well as easier note-taking and highlighting.

A 400-page textbook in biology or physics or economics allows a student a tactile sense of where in the book he or she is, and color-coding pages, page headers, footers, and margin colors allow quick retrieval when information or memory needs to be refreshed.  This is not a trivial requirement, and current e-book readers simply lack it.

Klinkenborg goes on to note how ugly e-book texts appear in comparison with their printed cousins.  The very ability e-reader manufacturers celebrate --you can change the font face, size, etc.-- allow us to  make "them resemble all the more our own word-processed manuscripts."  In other words, they can look simply ugly, and often do.  In the rush to promote e-books, e-publishers seem to have completely forgotten the important aesthetic and design considerations which go into a professionally-done, finished book.

The bigger problem, Klinkenborg notes, is that he grew up reading books, not texts.  A contemporary, well-done, professionally designed book, suggests an authority, intellectual and publishing market niche, and an affiliation: a book from Princeton University Press, Knopf, O'Reilly Publishing, and Alysson Publications each carries some sense of affiliation and intended audience --in crass terms, "brand." 

Many, many e-books are public-domain recycled texts that carry no sense of their own dates of publication, intended original audiences, or publishing origins.  Above all, they have no sense of place as editions --is a public-domain 19th-century translation of Dante better or worse than an in-copyright 20th-century translation?  The long and complex problem of publishing rights has high-jacked the cultural agenda of e-book purveyors, and no amount of legal muscle or sheer money from Apple, Google or Amazon is likely simply to make those problems disappear.

Finally, Klinkenborg notes that "most of the books I’ve ever read have come from lending libraries," even though he has a personal library (and probably, one guesses, extensive).  How e-books, once they have grown past their horrendous aesthetic problems and legal challenges, can interact in the common cultural "third space" known as a public or academic library really remains to be seen.

Klinkenborg's brief article --paired with the summary of e-book pilot projects in Campus Technology-- strongly suggest that when matters come to a head, e-books simply aren't there yet.  Someday they will have arrived, and libraries ignore e-books at their peril.  It behooves any academic library to build an e-book collection to anticipate this reality.  The present finding is hard to ignore, however -- currently e-books fail significantly even in their most non-aesthetic "hardest" use, the academic textbook. 

The sheer arrogance of e-book purveyors and promoters in ignoring the lessons learned by centuries of print publishers and authors will have to be mended before e-books will really move forward.