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The recent acquisition of BePress & Digital Commons by Elsevier has occasioned a snowstorm of commentary and opinion.  Some of that has not been helpful, even though well-intended.
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The recent acquisition of BePress & Digital Commons by Elsevier has occasioned a flurry snowstorm of commentary and opinion.  Some of that has not been helpful, even though well-intended.  Sacred Heart University Library belongs to a 33-member group call the Affinity Libraries Group.  We are all private, Masters-1 universities (some with several doctoral degrees), relatively mid-size between the Oberlin Group of liberal arts college libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

Much of the following is going to be discussed at a meeting alongside or outside the coming CNI meeting in December in Washington DC –but since CNI is expensive ($8,200/year), SHU is not a member, nor are I suspect other Affinity Libraries.  I am hoping that, using one technology or another, the Affinity Libraries can have a conversation as well. 

Affinity Group has changed over the years; we (or they, meaning our predecessor directors) used to meet often, sometimes in quite successful stand-alone events not connected with another event, for example, ALA Annual.  Others have said to me that in some ways the Affinity Group (as it was then) really came down to “professional and personal friends of Lew Miller” (former director at Butler), and while I’m not sure that’s fair, it is accurate in the sense that personal relationships formed a strong glue for the group. As directors retired or moved on, group adhesiveness accordingly changed. I’m avoiding the word or metaphor “decline” here because sometimes things just change, and Affinity Group has been one of them.  No one has been sitting around in the meantime.

We do share a strong commitment to the annual Affinity Group statistics. Perhaps now a discussion about institutional repositories and Digital Commons in particular could garner some interest with attention directed to issues for libraries of our size.

Some of the hoopla surrounding Elsevier’s acquisition of BePress has simply given occasion to express contributors’ intense dislike of Elsevier and its business model of maximizing profits above all else, certainly a justified objection given the state of all our budgets.

I think the anonymous Library Loon (Gavia Libraria) has pretty well summed up various points (though I don’t agree with every one of her statements), and Matt Ruen’s subsequent comment on August 9 is also helpful.  Paul Royster at University of Nebraska—Lincoln wrote on September 7 on the SPARC list:

The staff at BePress have been uniformly helpful and responsive, and there is no sign of that changing. They are the same people as before. They have never interfered with our content. I do not believe Elsevier paid $150 million in order to destroy BePress. What made it worth that figure was 1. the software, 2. the staff, and 3. the reputation and relationships.BePress became valuable by listening to their customers; Elsevier could learn a lot from them about managing relationships--and I hope they do.  BePress is also in a different division (Research) than the publications units that have treated libraries and authors so high-handedly. The stronger BePress remains, the better will be its position vis-a-vis E-corp going forward. Bashing BePress over its ownership and inciting its customers to jump ship strikes me as not in the best interests of the IRs or the faculty who use them. 

Almost every college library has relationships with Elsevier already; deserting BePress is not a moral victory of right over wrong. The moral issue here is providing wider dissemination and free access for content created by faculty scholars. No one does that better than BePress, and until that changes, I see no cause for panic. Of course there are no guarantees, and it is always wise to have a Plan B and an exit strategy. But cutting off BePress to spite their new ownership does not really help those we are trying to serve.

I share Royster’s primary commitment freely to disseminate content created by faculty scholars. Digital Commons has done that for SHU in spades, and has been a game-changer in this university and library, in my experience. I know that many share such a primary commitment; many also share enduring and well-grounded suspicion of just about anything Elsevier might do.  As a firm, their behavior often has been so downright divisive and sneaky (we can tell our stories…)  When I first read of the sale, my gut response was, “Really? Great, here’s big problem when I don’t really want another.”   Digital Commons is one of the three major applications that power my library: 1) the integrated library services platform; 2) Springshare’s suite of research & reference applications, and 3) BePress.  Exiting BePress would be distracting, distressing, and downright burdensome.  As Royster writes, “there are no guarantees.”  Now we have to have Plan B and an exit strategy, even if we never use it.

What I fear most is Gavia Libraria’s last option (in her blog post): that Elsevier will simply let “BePress languish undeveloped, with an eye to eventually shrugging and pulling the plug on it.”  I have seen similar “application decay” with ebrary, RefWorks, and (actually) SerialsSolutions, several of which have languished (or are languishing) for years before any genuine further development.  I watched their talented creators and originating staff members drift away into other ventures (e.g., ThirdIron).  Were that to happen, it would be bad news for SHU and other Affinity members.  Royster’s statement “they are the same people as before” has not always held true in the past when smaller firms become subject to hiring processes mandated by larger organizations (e.g., SerialsSolutions’ staff members now employed by ProQuest).

On SPARC’s list, there has been great discussion about cooperation & building a truly useful non-profit, open-source application suite for institutional repository, digital publishing, authors’ pages (like SelectedWorks), etc.  Everyone knows that’s a long way off, without any disrespect to Islandora, Janeway, DSpace, or any other application.  DigitalCommons and SelectedWorks is pretty well the state of the art, and its design and consequent workflow decisions have benefited the small staff of the SHU Library enormously (even with the occasional hiccups and anomalies). Digital Commons Network has placed SHU in the same orbit or gateway as far larger and frankly more prestigious colleges and universities, and I could not be happier with that.  I have my own SelectedWorks page and I like it.  I would be sorry to see all this go –unless a truly practical alternative emerges.  Who knows when that will be?

In the meantime, we will be giving attention to Plan B –until now we have not had one or felt we needed one (--probably an unfortunate oversight, but it just did not become a priority).  I really don’t yet know what our Plan B will be.

I sense that if OCLC were to develop a truly useful alternative to Digital Commons (one well beyond DSpace as it presently exists), it might have some traction in the market (despite all of our horror stories about OCLC, granted).  Open Science Framework, Islandora, or others hold promise but really probably cannot yet compete feature-by-feature with Digital Commons (at least, I have not seen anything that really even close).  If you think I’m wrong, please say so! –I will gladly accept your correction.

if you know Yewno, and if Yewno, exactly what do you know? --that "exactly what" will likely contain machine-generated replications of problematic human biases.
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This is the third of "undiscovered summer reading" posts, see also the first and second.

At the recent Association of College and Research Libraries conference Baltimore I came across Yewno, a search-engine-like discovery or exploration layer that I had heard about.  I suspect that Yewno or something like it could be the "next big thing" in library and research services.  I have served as a librarian long enough both to be very interest, and to be wary at the same time --so many promises have been made by the information technology commercial sector and the reality fallen far short --remember the hype about discovery services?

Yewno-logoYewno is a so-called search app; it "resembles as search engines --you use it to search for information, after all--but its structure is network-like rather than list-based, the way Google's is. The idea is to return search results that illustrate relationships between relevant sources" --mapping them out graphically (like a mind map). Those words are quoted from Adrienne LaFrance's Atlantic article on growing understanding of the Antikythera mechanism as an example of computer-assisted associative thinking (see, all these readings really come together).  LaFrance traces the historical connections between "undiscovered public knowledge," Vannevar Bush's Memex (machine) in the epochal As We May Think, and Yewno.  The hope is that through use of an application such as Yewno, associations could be traced between ancient time-keeping, Babylonian and Arabic mathematics, medieval calendars, astronomy, astrological studies, ancient languages, and other realms of knowledge. At any rate, that's the big idea, and it's a good one.

So who is Yewno meant for, a what's it based on?

Lafrance notes that Yewno "was built primarily for academic researchers," but I'm not sure that's true, strictly. When I visited the Yewno booth at ACRL, I thought several things at once: 1) this could be very cool; 2) this could actually be useful; 3) this is going to be expensive (though I have neither requested nor received a quote); and 4) someone will buy them, probably Google or another technology octopus. (Subsequent thought: where's Google's version of this?)  I also thought that intelligence services and corporate intelligence advisory firms would be very, very interested --and indeed they are.  Several weeks later I read Alice Meadows' post, "Do You Know About Yewno?" on the Scholarly Kitchen blog, and her comments put Yewno in clearer context. (Had I access to Yewno, I would have searched, "yewno.")

Yewno is a start-up venture by Ruggero Gramatica (if you're unclear, that's a person), a research strategist with a background in applied mathematics (Ph.D. King's College, London) and M.B.A. (University of Chicago). He is first-named author of "Graph Theory Enables Drug Repurposing," a paper (DOI) on PLOS One that introduces:

a methodology to efficiently exploit natural-language expressed biomedical knowledge for repurposing existing drugs towards diseases for which they were not initially intended. Leveraging on developments in Computational Linguistics and Graph Theory, a methodology is defined to build a graph representation of knowledge, which is automatically analysed to discover hidden relations between any drug and any disease: these relations are specific paths among the biomedical entities of the graph, representing possible Modes of Action for any given pharmacological compound. We propose a measure for the likeliness of these paths based on a stochastic process on the graph.

Yewno does the same thing in other contexts:

an inference and discovery engine that has applications in a variety of fields such as financial, economics, biotech, legal, education and general knowledge search. Yewno offers an analytics capability that delivers better information and faster by ingesting a broad set of public and private data sources and, using its unique framework, finds inferences and connections. Yewno leverages on leading edge computational semantics, graph theoretical models as well as quantitative analytics to hunt for emerging signals across domains of unstructured data sources. (source: Ruggero Gramatica's LinkedIn profile)

This leads to several versions of Yewno: Yewno Discover, Yewno Finance, Yewno Life Sciences, and Yewno Unearth.  Ruth Pickering, the companies co-founder and CEO of Business Development & Strategy Officer, comments, "each vertical uses a specific set of ad-hoc machine learning based algorithms and content. The Yewno Unearth product sits across all verticals and can be applied to any content set in any domain of information."  Don't bother calling the NSA --they already know all about it (and probably use it, as well).

Yewno Unearth is relevant to multiple functions of publishing: portfolio categorization, the ability to spot gaps in content, audience selection, editorial oversight and description, and other purposes for improving a publisher's position, both intellectually and in the information marketplace. So  Yewno Discovery is helpful for academics and researchers, but the whole of Yewno is also designed to relay more information about them to their editors, publishers, funders, and those who will in turn market publications to their libraries.  Elsevier, Ebsco, and ProQuest will undoubtedly appear soon in librarians' offices with Yewno-derived information, and that encounter likely could prove to be truly intimidating.  So Yewno might be a very good thing for a library, but not simply an unalloyed very good thing.

So what is Yewno really based on? The going gets more interesting.

Meadows notes that Yewno's underlying theory emerged from the field of complex systems at the foundational level of econophysics, an inquiry "aimed at describing economic and financial cycles utilized mathematical structures derived from physics." The mathematical framework, involving uncertainty, stochastic (random probability distribution) processes and nonlinear dynamics, came to be applied to biology and drug discovery (hello, Big Pharma). This kind of information processing is described in detail in a review article, Deep Learning in Nature (Vol. 521, 28 May 2015, doi10.1038/nature14539).  Developing machine learning, deep learning "allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction."  Such deep learning "discovers intricate structure in are data sets by using the backpropagation algorithm to indicate how a machine should change its internal parameters that are used to compute the representation in each layer from the representation in the previous layer." Such "deep convolutional nets" have brought about significant break-throughs when processing images, video, speech, and "recurrent nets" have brought new learning powers to "sequential data such as text and speech."

The article goes on in great detail, and I do not pretend I understand very much of it.  Its discussion of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), however, is highly pertinent to libraries and discovery.  The backpropagational algorithm is basically a process that adjusts the weights used in machine analysis while that analysis is taking place.  For example, RNNs "have been found to be very good at predicting the next character in the text, or next word in a sequence," and by such backpropagational adjustments, machine language translations have achieved greater levels of accuracy. (But why not complete accuracy? --read on.)  The process "is more compatible with the view that everyday reasoning involves many simultaneous analogies that each contribute plausibility to a conclusion." In their review's conclusion, the authors expect "systems that use RNNs to understand sentences or whole documents will become much better when they learn strategies for selectively attending to one part at a time."

After all this, what do you know? Yewno presents the results of deep learning through recurrent neural networks that identify nonlinear concepts in a text, a kind of "knowledge." Hence Ruth Pickering can plausibly state:

Yewno's mission is "Knowledge Singularity" and by that we mean the day when knowledge, not information, is at everyone's fingertips. In the search and discovery space the problems that people face today are the overwhelming volume of information and the fact that sources are fragmented and dispersed. There' a great T.S. Eliot quote, "Where's the knowledge we lost in information" and that sums up the problem perfectly. (source: Meadows' post)

Ms. Pickering perhaps revealed more than she intended.  Her quotation from T.S. Eliot is found in a much larger and quite different context:

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust. (Choruses from The Rock)

Eliot's interest is in the Life we have lost in living, and his religious and literary use of the word "knowledge" signals the puzzle at the very base of econophysics, machine learning, deep learning, and backpropagational algorithms.  Deep learning performed by machines mimics what humans do, their forms of life.  Pickering's "Knowledge Singularity" alludes to the semi-theological vision of the Ray Kurzweil's millennialist "Singularity;" a machine intelligence infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined.  In other words, where Eliot is ultimately concerned with Wisdom, the Knowledge Singularity is ultimately concerned with Power.  Power in the end means power over other people: otherwise it has no social meaning apart from simply more computing.  Wisdom interrogates power, and questions its ideological supremacy.

For example, three researchers at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University have shown that "applying machine learning to ordinary human language results in human-like semantic biases." ("Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases," Science 14 April 2017, Vol. 356, issue 6334: 183-186, doi 10.1126/science.aal4230). The results of their replication of a spectrum of know biases (measured by the Implicit Association Test) "indicate that text corpora contain recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as race and gender, for even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. Their approach holds "promise for identifying and addressing sources of bias in culture, including technology."  The authors laconically conclude, "caution must be used in incorporating modules constructed via unsupervised machine learning into decision-making systems."  Power resides in decisions such decisions about other people, resources, and time.

Arvind Narayanan, who published the paper with Aylin Caliskan and Joanna J. Bryson, noted that "we have a situation where these artificial-intelligence systems may be perpetuating historical patterns of bias that we might find socially unacceptable and which we might be trying to move away from."  Princeton researchers developed an experiment with a program called GloVe that replicated the Implicit Association test in machine-learning representation of co-occurent words and phrases.  Researchers at Stanford turn this loose on roughtly 840 billion words from the Web, and looked for co-occurences and associations of words such as "man, male" or "woman, female" with "programmer engineer scientist, nurse teacher, librarian."   They showed familiar biases in distributions of associations, biases that can "end up having pernicious, sexist effects."

For example, machine-learning programs can translate foreign languages into sentences taht reflect or reinforce gender stereotypes. Turkish uses a gender-neutral, third person pronoun, "o."  Plugged into the online translation service Google Translate, however, the Turkish sentence "o bir doktor" and "o bir hemşire" are translated into English as "he is a doctor" and "she is a nurse."  . . . . "The Biases that we studied in the paper are easy to overlook when designers are creating systems," Narayanan said. (Source: Princeton University, "Biased Bots" by Adam Hadhazy.)

Yewno is exactly such a system insofar as it mimics human forms of life which include, alas, the reinforcement of biases and prejudice.  So in the end, do you know Yewno, and if Yewno, exactly what do you know? --that "exactly what" will likely contain machine-generated replications of problematic human biases.  Machine translations will never offer perfect, complete translations of languages because language is never complete --humans will always use it new ways, with new shades of meaning and connotations of plausibility, because human go on living in their innumerable, linguistic forms of life.  Machines have to map language within language (here I include mathematics as kinds of languages with distinctive games and forms of life).  No "Knowledge Singularity" can occur outside of language, because it will be made of language: but the ideology of "Singularity" can conceal its origins in many forms of life, and thus appear "natural," "inevitable," and "unstoppable." 

The "Knowledge Singularity" will calcify bias and injustice in an everlasting status quo unless humans, no matter how comparatively deficient, resolve that knowledge is not a philosophical problem to be solved (such as in Karl Popper's Worlds 1, 2, and 3), but a puzzle to be wrestled with and contested in many human forms of life and language (Wittgenstein). Only by addressing human forms of life can we ever address the greater silence and the Life that we have lost in living.  What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, sentence 7 of the Tractatus) --and that silence, contra both the positivist Vienna Circle and Karl Popper (who was never part of it) is the most important part of human living.  In the Tractatus Wittengenstein dreamt, as it were, a conclusive solution to the puzzle of language --but such a solution can only be found in the silence beyond strict logical (or machine) forms: a silence of the religious quest beyond the ethical dilemma (Kierkegaard).

This journey through my "undiscovered summer reading," from the Antikythera mechanism to the alleged "Knowledge Singularity," has reinforced my daily, functional belief that knowing is truly something that humans do within language and through language, and that the quest which makes human life human is careful attention to the forms of human life, and the way that language, mathematics, and silence are woven into and through those forms. The techno-solutionism inherent in educational technology and library information technology --no matter how sophisticated-- cannot undo the basic puzzle of human life: how do we individually and social find the world? (Find: in the sense of locating, of discovering, and of characterizing.)  Yewno will not lead to a Knowledge Singularity, but to derived bias and reproduced injustice, unless we acknowledge its limitations within language. 

The promise of educational and information technology becomes more powerful when approached with modesty: there are no quick, technological solutions to puzzles of education, of finance, of information discovery, of "undiscovered public knowledge."  What those of us who are existentially involved with the much-maligned, greatly misunderstood, and routinely dismissed "liberal arts" can contribute is exactly what makes those technologies humane: a sense of modesty, proportion, generosity, and silence.  Even to remember those at this present moment is a profoundly counter-cultural act, a resistance of the techno-idology of unconscious bias and entrenched injustice.

In educational technology, we are in the presence of a powerful ideology, and an ideology of the powerful: the neoliberal state and its allies in higher education.
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(This is part two of posts of my summer reading thus far: see parts one  and three.

Another article in found in my strange cleaning mania is not so very old: George Veletsianos and Rolin Moe's The Rise of Educational Technology as a Sociocultural and Ideological Phenomenon. Published by (upper-case obligatory) EDUCAUSE, it argues that "the rise of educational technology is part of a larger shift in political thought" that favors (so-called) free-market principles to government oversight, and is also a response to the increasing costs of higher education.  Edtech proponents have (always? often?) "assumed positive impacts, promoting an optimistic rhetoric despite little empirical evidence of results --and ample documentation of failures."  In other words, we are in the presence of a powerful ideology, and an ideology of the powerful: the neoliberal state and its allies in higher education.

The authors frame their argument through assertions:  The edtech phenomenon is a response to the increasing price of higher education: seen as a way of slow, stop, or reverse prices.  The popular press questions the viability of college degrees, higher education, sometimes with familiar "bubble" language borrowed from market analyses.  Second: The edtech phenomenon reflects a shift in political thought from government to free-market oversight of education: reducing governmental involvement and funding along with increasing emphases on market forces "has provided a space and an opportunity for the edtech industry to flourish." Although set vastly to accelerate under Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, funding reductions and a turn to "private sector" responses have long been in evidence, associated with the "perspective" (the authors eschew "ideology") of neoliberalism: the ideology that the free, market competition invariably results in improved services at lower costs.  Outsourcing numerous campus services supposedly leads to lower costs, but also "will relegate power and control to non-institutional actors" (and that is what neoliberalism is all about).

The authors (thirdly) assert "the edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of a view of education as product to be package, automated, and delivered" --in other words, neoliberal service and production assumptions transferred to education.  This ideology is enabled by a "curious amnesia, forgetfulness, or even willful ignorance" (remember: we are in the presence of an ideology) "of past phases of technology development and implementation in schools."  When I was in elementary schools (late 1950s and 1960s), the phase was filmstrips, movies, and "the new math," and worked hand-in-glove with Robert McNamara's Ford Corporation, and subsequent Department of Defense, to "scale" productivity-oriented education for obedient workers and soldiers (the results of New Math, were in my case disastrous, and I am hardly alone).  The educational objectivism implicit in much of edtech sits simultaneously and oddly with tributes to professed educational constructivism --"learning by doing," which tends then to be reserved for those who can afford it in the neoliberal state.  I have bristled when hearing the cliché that the new pedagogy aims for "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage" --when my life and outlook have been changed by carefully crafted, deeply engaging lectures (but remember: we are in the presence of an ideology).

Finally, the authors assert "the edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of the technocentric belief that technology is the most efficient solution to the problems of higher education."  There is an ideological solutionism afoot here. Despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary, techno-determinism (technology shapes its emerging society autonomously) and techno-solutionism (technology will solve societal problems) assumes the power of "naturally given," a sure sign of ideology.  Ignorance of its history and impact "is illustrated by public comments arguing that the education system has remained unchanged for hundreds of years" (by edX CEO Anant Agarwal, among others), when the reality is that of academia's constant development and change of course.  Anyone who thinks otherwise should visit a really old institution such as Oxford University: older instances of architecture meant to serve medieval educational practices, retro-fitted to 19th- and early 20th-century uses, and now sometimes awkwardly retro-fitted yet again to the needs of a modern research university.  The rise and swift fall of MOOCs is another illustration of the remarkable ignorance that ideological techno-solutionism mandates in order to appear "smart" (or at least in line with Gartner's hype cycle).

The authors conclude, "unless greater collaborative efforts take place between edtech developers and the greater academic community, as well as more informed deep understandings of how learning and teaching actually occur, any efforts to make edtech education's silver bullet are doomed to fail."  They recommend that edtech developers and implementers commit to support their claims with empirical evidence "resulting from transparent and rigorous evaluation processes" (!--no "proprietary data" here); invite independent expertise; attend to discourse (at conferences and elsewhere) critical of edtech rather than merely promotional, and undertake reflection that is more than personal, situational, or reflective of one particular institutional location.  Edtech as a scholarly field and community of practice could in this was continue efforts to improve teaching and learning that will bear fruit for educators, not just for corporate technology collaborators.

How many points of their article are relevant by extension to library information technology, its implementation, and reflections on its use!  Commendably, ACRL and other professional venues have subjected library technologies to critical review and discourse (although LITA's Top Technology Trends Committee too often reverts to techno-solutionism and boosterism from the same old same old).  Veletsianos' and Moe's points are regarding the neoliberal ideological suppositions of the library information technology market, however, are well-taken --just attend a conference presentation on the exhibition floor from numerous vendors for a full demonstration.  At the recent conference of the Association of College & Research Libraries, the critical language of the Information Literacy was sometimes turned on librarianship and library technology itself ("authority is constructed and contextual"), such as critique of the term "resilient" (.pdf) and the growing usage of the term "wicked challenges" for those times we don't know what we don't know or even know how to ask what that would be.

Nevertheless, it would be equally historically ignorant to deny the considerable contributions made by information technology to contemporary librarianship, even when such contributions should be regarded cautiously.   There are still intereting new technologies which can contribute a great deal even when they are neither disruptive nor revolutionary.  The most interesting (by far) new kind of technology or process I saw at ACRL is Yewno, and I will discuss that in my third blog post.

American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters "has brought together a diverse group of scholars to write letters to [the executive and his] administration, and our elected officials in the House and Senate. These letters articulate core American values that are rooted or reflected in our various faith traditions
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American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters "has brought together a diverse group of scholars to write letters to [the executive and his] administration, and our elected officials in the House and Senate. These letters articulate core American values that are rooted or reflected in our various faith traditions."

The scholars joined the founder of this idea, Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss, Associate Professor of Bible at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City.  She felt that the words and actions of the campaign and its aftermath call into question fundamental values that has long defined this country and culture.  She and the writers are hopeful that their observations will spark ideas and insights about what it means to be an American, and to contribute to our national discourse.

The group is non-partisan, and characterized by a sense of relevancy and urgency.  The contributors show the kind of diversity that makes us who we are as a nation: religions, races, generations, genders, ages, political viewpoints, sexual orientations, and geographic location.

Join with me in subscribing to these letters (form in the footer of the campaign's home page.  As of today (January 22) three letters have been written and sent, by Rabbi Weiss, John Kutsko, Director of the Society of Biblical Literature and Professor of Biblical Studies at Emory University, and Eric Barreto, Weyerhauser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Will this campaign make any difference?  To the current incumbent, perhaps not.  It is vital for the rest of us to stand up, however, and show both the clarity and restraint that are the best values of all those who work in higher education, whether as teaching scholars or in other roles.

Please also write to express your support, to [email] -- this is a vital witness at a perilous time in our country's history, and time when we need to re-affirm the key values of religious diversity, principled argumentation, respect for facts, respect for differences of point of view, and humility.  (And see Frank Bruni in the January 22, 2017 New York Times regarding humility.)

The Hapsburg, Viennese (1900s) central problems of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression are all involved --in a remarkably similar manner-- in the political and social events that crystalized in 2016 in America.
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Events during 2016 (and not just the US election) have caused me to re-assess my work and many of the assumptions of my life, from the ground up.  What do I mean when I say I'm a Christian, and how does that really come out in my life?  What are my fundamental commitments?  How do I identify myself as a reflective, thoughtful person in a culture that has no room for reflection, thoughtfulness, and a most casual disregard for basic matters of truth?

So I began to start again, to re-examine authors and composers that have affected me the most from my beginnings: with the Greeks; the Greek New Testament; the writings of John Calvin and Karl Barth; George Herbert, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot; J. R. R. Tolkien; Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein; J. S. Bach; Johannes Brahms, to name a few.  (I am very aware that those are entirely European and male, but I have to be honest about how and what I learned, and when, and who I am.)

As regards Wittgenstein, I also have returned to renew my reading of German, with Hermann Hesse's Demian in a dual-language edition, and to the intellectual world of 19th- and early 20th-century German-language writers and thinkers, especially in Vienna.  Hence I returned to Wittgenstein's Vienna, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (Simon & Schuster, 1973), a book that still holds up well more than 40 years later.

The authors mount a multi-pronged argument, that difficulties regarding communication, language, and expression arose in late Hapsburg, fin de siècle Vienna that became ripe for philosophical investigation, and that these difficulties were shared across a wide spectrum of artists, musicians, writers, physicians (including psychoanalysts) and scholars --almost all of whom knew each other, at least socially.  The central figure is the now-not-so-well-known Karl Kraus and his scathing critique of Viennese bourgeois and aristocratic life and social realities (almost all of which were officially denied), and the loose circle of Krausians such as Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos (architecture), Artur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Robert Musil (literature), Arnold Schoenberg (music), Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoscha and Egon Schiele (art).  Musil satirically dubbed a semi-fiction empire of his fiction in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) "Kakania," a play on the  kaiserlich-königlich or kaiserlich und königlich, expressions that provided status indicators in the complicated social hierarchy of the time, and equally concealed the dishonesty and deceit at the core of the Hapsburg state.

Janik and Toulin articulate their central thesis most clearly:

We have spotlighted the problem of language in Hoffmannsthal, because this serves to introduce and illustrate our own central hypothesis about Viennese culture --namely that to be a fin de siècle Viennese artist or intellectual, conscious of the social realities of Kakania, one had to face the problem of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication. . . . . By the year 1900, the linked problems of communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression had been faced in parallel in all the major fields of thought and art. . . . So the stage was set for a philosophical critique of language, given in completely general terms. (page 117 and 119, with authors' emphasis)

Janik and Toulmin then examine how this task presented itself to thinkers such as Ernst Mach, the Kantian traditionalists, and the "anti-philosophers" following Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and (to some extent) Mauthner.  They will then place Wittgenstein (the early, of the Tractatus) in this context.

These central problems of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression are all involved --in a remarkably similar manner-- in the political and social events that crystalized in 2016, although tendencies toward strident nationalism, racism, and the remarkable coarsening of political and social communication were well apparent decades before.  Social media have created a post-factual communication of deceit which is routinely denied by the networks' owners' who benefit from the confusion and monetarized deceit.  American society faces a number of problems that simply cannot be addressed given the terms of communication and expression before and in 2016.  Like the creaking, only-semi-functional Kakanian state, the American state and culture is a shaken, badly sagging structure (and infrastructure), and it does not require unusual foresight to anticipate any number of future disasters, whether ecological, political, social, cultural, or military.

Like the blissfully ignorant inhabits of Kakania in the early 1900s, we 21st-century Americans may all have completely missed the ominous and destructive potential of our times, in large part as a function of inauthentic language, expression, and communication gone wild.  Our language and media have lost their mooring in authentic use and useful social understanding of justice.  I will be reading more Wittgenstein, and more about him, and writing here.  We may be facing, as found Karl Kraus' writings, Die Letzte Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Humanity).

The two books are Five Minds for the Future (2006) and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (2011). Rather than simply becoming out of date, if anything these books are more urgent than ever.
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During this thoroughly depressing season of American life, I have been re-reading two books by Howard Gardner, the professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. I was privileged to spend a morning with him this past March at the School’s Library Leadership for a Digital Age professional education forum. I was impressed again by his humanity, long-range vision, and insight that people are rarely either at their best or at their worst.

FiveMindsForTheFutureThe two books are Five Minds for the Future and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. Five Minds was originally published ten years ago, and Gardner added a substantial new introduction to the paperback edition of 2008. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed was published five years ago, and he added a new introduction to the paperback edition of a year later. Rather than simply becoming out of date, if anything these books are more urgent than ever.  Disciplined, respectful, creative reflection: what could be more foreign to the spirit of 2016?

Five Minds alludes to Gardner’s famous work on multiple intelligences, but takes a different approach to minds which are made up of varying mixtures of intelligences and connections. The disciplined, synthesizing, and creative minds figure most prominently in education, whether formal or informal, and form the great content of many people’s work, whether mental or physical. The respectful and ethical minds, by contrast, figure the “how” of life, both to members of a group, and to other human beings in relationship (the respectful), and in relation to the wider impact of behavior and work on society (the ethical). What makes work “good,” both in a technical sense and a moral sense? The respectful mind elucidates personal morality and reciprocity; ethical work elucidates citizenship and the “common- wealth” in an eighteenth century term. Of course this brief summary elides a great deal of content, context, and subtlety.

TruthBeautyAndGoodnessCoverTruth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed extends this work: the five minds addressing the classical virtues and their uneasy transition into a digital world.   Gardner defends these classical questions against the determinism of free market theory (in which value tends to equal price), neurobiological determinism (in which truth is a result of genetic controls), and “hard” post-modern relativism, according to which truth, beauty, and goodness are inherently unattainable, and merely cloak the acquisition and exercise of power. Gardner’s extended defence and arguments are not easy to summarize. Suffice that these are fundamental to a respectful, ethical human society and in a hyper-connected, fleeting, digital world become more important than ever as anchors for human flourishing.

In a broad sense Gardner pushes back against radically reductive economic, neuro-psychological, or radically skeptical currents that would dislodge the major claims of liberal arts education. “Liberal arts” as a term never appears in these books, and yet implicit in his convictions lies a strong claim that in fact the unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates’ foundational claim). The great peril of unreflective, technological, market-driven capitalist society is not that it does not know enough to function, but that it cannot reckon what it does not know –greatly to its undoubted, eventual undoing. A reflective mind is a necessarily modest mind.

What does this have to do with an academic library? Everything. If a neo-liberal university is exclusively driven by utility –what sells? –what do users already know they want to use? –what is the return of utilization for price? –what keeps them paying tuition so they don’t move to a cheaper competitor, or away entirely? Then the question of minds simply goes out the window. In that view, a disciplined, synthesizing, and creative mind only matters if it can make money and further the aims of the organization’s management. Respect and ethics means only doing work that is good enough, behaving in the right way, and not being too nakedly self-centered or opportunistic. In that case, the library becomes simply a managed environment for stenographic repetition of known thoughts.   Concepts of truth, beauty, goodness –however tenuously re-worked—are simply beside the point, lovely luxuries for those who can flaunt high-end educational branding.

If on the other hand a university can find a way to articulate the fundamental values of reflective thinking in an unthinkingly reactive, pompous, and dis-respectful era, then the library has a place as a center for self-directed engagement with potentially transformative truths. In such a context the library enacts the university’s mission of nurturing sound learning,  new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom by creating the physical and intellectual space where a biology student can become a biologist (just one example).  Gardner’s books have everything to do with the why of librarianship. David Lankes has been quoted that a room full of books without a librarian is just a room full of books, but an empty room with a librarian is a library. (Of course the latter case is really easier to do with at least a few books.) That focuses on the why of librarianship: it is what librarians do; the library is all the people (librarians and readers) and their thinking, not just their stuff. The librarian’s and the user’s actions can transcend their self-interests. They can create and re-create their minds for a respectful and creative future.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.
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Deep WorkDeep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. New York:  Grand Central (Hachette), 2016.  296 p.  ISBN 978-1-4555-8669-1 $28.00 list

Cal Newport became a guru of study hacks after publishing Study Hacks, two other books, a dissertation, and six articles.  Clearly “do as I say and as I do,” he knows his subject.  Deep Work extends his thinking to sharper critique of the glut of social information that distracts many people.

Newport is especially sharply critical of Facebook (including the new Facebook headquarters building), Twitter, and the well-recognized Fear of Missing Out (FOMA) that can drive compulsive distraction and seriously erode the quality and quantity of work.  His critique is well-sustained, but its claims to be counter-cultural or disruptive are overblown: numerous other writers have critiqued the culture of distraction, including Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and Sherry Turkle.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.  Deep work is “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”(p. 3)  By contrast shallow work is “noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”)(p. 6) His hypothesis: "the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare . . . [and] valuable . . . . The few who cultivate this skill with thrive."(p. 14)  His goal: to help you be one who can work deeply, a noble aim.   His examples are not always convincing, however.

His leading example (which opens the book), Carl Jung’s creation of Bollingen Tower as a retreat for his writing, is more multi-faceted than Newport suggests.  Jung retreated to his tower to write without distraction, but based in large part on his interaction with patients in Zurich.  Later Newport identifies Jung’s “bimodal” pattern, contrasting the Tower with Zurich, a “busy clinical practice,” “gave and attended many lectures,” “active participant in the Zurich coffeehouse culture,” all suggesting to Newport the hyper-connected, digital-age knowledge worker: “replace ‘Zurich’ with ‘San Francisco’ and ‘letter’ with ‘tweet’ and we could be discussing some hotshot tech CEO.” (p. 107)

I think this is a serious, ideologically-driven misunderstanding of Jung’s life in Zurich, and life's work.  Jung’s own writings are filled with episodes, instances, and cases from his practice in Zurich.  To suggest that Jung’s work in Zurich was “shallow work” devalues his clinical practice and Jung’s whole motivation for developing depth psychology and disputes with Sigmund Freud.  The ideas and art work Jung picked up in his Zurich life provided some of the critical raw material from which he fashioned his singular and valuable insights in the Tower.  Suggesting that Jung’s beautifully written letters are the work equivalent of contemporary tweets is simply preposterous and and fundamentally misconstrues Jung’s life’s work.  Valuable as Jung's deep concentration in the Tower was, it never would have amounted to much without his corresponding life in the city.

Newport's other examples (Adam Grant, Jack Dorsey for example) probably work better, but tend towards the two-dimensional.  This valuable book has to be read with caution.

Cal-newport-media-kit-smallIn the end, I am left with the uneasy sense that Newport’s beloved “deep work” is really what computer scientists do.  (He is an associate professor at Georgetown.) His concept of deep work is less applicable to those whose work is primarily leading people and organizations.  I know in my own work as a library director that sometimes I have to work on a project uninterrupted.  Some interruptions are shallow, but some definitely deep: the work I do listening to coworkers, helping them develop their ideas, skill and insights, indeed pushes my cognitive and emotional capabilities, improves my abilities, is hard to replicate mechanically, and (I hope) creates value.  Every encounter with a colleague is not deep work, but I always have to be alert to the moment when it turns deep, sometimes on a dime.

I completely accept Newport’s critique of the numerous, superficial distractions of social media, e-mail, and news, and the confusion of busyness with productivity.  But his concept of deep work needs broadening and humanizing. This seems to be the work of a very confident and highly creative young professor appropriately characterized as brilliant, creative, and important, but whose very brilliance and confidence may have drawn him towards an unnecessarily narrow conception of generosity, significance, and depth of insight.  I wonder how his ideas will change over time, work, and experience.  I would really like to find out, because it will be important.

At Sacred Heart University I have been leading the first phase of a strategic directions initiative to articulate the highest-level aspirations of the organization, and to mark ways that the Library can leverage its expertise and strengths to enhance the intellectual life of the University and advance its mission.
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At Sacred Heart University I have been leading the first phase of a strategic directions initiative to articulate the highest-level aspirations of the organization, and to mark ways that the Library can leverage its expertise and strengths to enhance the intellectual life of the University and advance its mission.

As part of listening, thinking, and planning together, we have read discussed some truly thought-provoking articles and reports. Two of these in particular are from MIT: Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms, and The Once and Future Library. These are very different documents: the first is a report of MIT’s Online Education Policy Initiative. The second is a report from the MIT News Office, and summarizes remarks by several MIT senior librarians made at (or responding to) a panel discussion concerning the future of the library.

Despite their differences in format and subject matter, the two documents converge on several questions and concerns about the changing role of the library is the quickly-evolving ecosystem of higher education.

  • Preserving the cultural record —both the “wild frontier” of digital preservation and the massive challenge of “analogue” preservation— complements the online education report’s call for fostering thinking communities that identify and develop the change agents and role models for implementing reforms. Without access to the materials, scholarly traditions of higher education, or the “thinking communities” that the report advocates, will be unable to realize the good intentions of the reformers. The past cannot constrain the future, but without it neither reforms can be adequately grounded both in prosaic institutional realities and perennial threshold questions that undergird scholarly disciplines.
  • The future of the collections (at MIT and elsewhere) will be entwined with increasing disciplinary collaborations across fields of research in higher education. Until the past few years it was common inside libraries to think about the “collections” that supported distinct fields of study: British literature, community nursing, entrepreneurship, or cellular biology, to name only a few. As the library’s role of assembling scholarly materials diminishes, however (insofar as so much is available digitally, with or without pay walls), the library’s role of publishing and codifying scholarly materials has grown. This suggests the simple question: What is the library for?  While the report may have intended “fields of research in higher education” to be those it named, from neuropsychology to meta-analysis and assessment, the importance of disciplinary collaborations and interdisciplinary conversation embraces widely disparate fields, and the library has a central publishing and fostering role as a digital and analogue commons. The threshold concepts that critically examine the interests, biases, and assumptions present in the information ecosystem suggest a unified field of varying forces that more hold the scholarly disciplines together than tear them apart --the threshold concepts that are fact "what the library is for" (both as purpose and as advocacy).
  • The Once and Future Library begins by noting how ancient libraries (such as Alexandria) held a lecture hall, refectory, and porch where scholars could talk, collaborate, read, and eat. Now the modern library —such as even Sacred Heart University Library— has versions of these facilities inside, and is far from merely a “reading room” or “book warehouse.” The Policy Initiative recognizes the numerous contributions of fields such as motivation and rewards in learning, health and nutrition, and learning spaces, and “the necessary mix of cognitive, social, and interpersonal skills needed for life and work.” (p. 18)  The library is both a literal and physical learning space.

These convergences (preservation, collaborations, and a holistic vision of learning) strongly imply a spectrum of abilities, practices, and habits of mind, that expands and deepens through engagement with the information ecosystem.  This is close to the definition of the Framework for Information Literacy published by the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2015.  Although higher education as an introduction to “life-long" learning has become a cliché, “life-long” still has great meaning to those on the receiving end of fundamental, continuing, and painful social change.  The disposition towards learning inherent in information literacy offers a pathway through the world as we are finding it.

The confluence of a kind of lazy, informal postmodernism and casual digital culture has led many to wonder whether the constitutive commitments to truth, goodness, and beauty that have characterized Western higher education for millennia have simply ceased to be relevant. Both documents from MIT suggest strongly otherwise —and coming from one of the fonts (MIT) of all things digital, constructivist, and cognitivist, this is surprising and reinvigorating at once.

The dynamic, digital scaffold proposed by the Policy Initiative could be able (or will be able to) extend the necessary mix of cognitive, social, and interpersonal skills that are thresholds to genuine engagement without limitations by the modes of pedagogy, either on-ground or online.

The Policy Initiative proposes a “learning engineer” at the center of that dynamic digital scaffold. At MIT “engineer” is a “good” word signifying “us, what we stand for,” while for those outside MIT "learning engineer" may connote “narrow, technical, and highly specialized” instead. I understand “learning engineer” to be local MIT-speak for “instructional designers,” and the “design thinking” at the heart of educational enterprise. The Policy Initiative’s strong recommendation that such individuals need far greater support and integration with subject-based academics is heartening.  Ironically, it also strongly suggests what instructional librarians have been trying to do for a long time with little fanfare, external comprehension, or support. “Design thinking” is now at the heart of librarianship, and can only strengthen on-ground, hybrid, and digital pedagogies.  In a sense a library is a perpetual "beta" of the Initiative's "dynamic digital scaffold."

At Sacred Heart University Library, our strategic directions initiative has already moved ahead with recalling and creating “the once and future library.” We are searching for an instructional design librarian, intentionally a hybrid kind of work, and we are engaging the university community in planning further library building, collections, and service renovations (re-newing, indeed!). What is most important about this initiative is not the resulting document, but the process itself of listening, thinking, and planning together.

Library work is inherently collaborative: even solo librarians aren’t really solo, but depend on the work of librarians elsewhere. The collaboration of learner and teacher can be deep work, even when that teacher is not formally a classroom instructor. Cal Newport's book pertinently describes and advocates for deep work.
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I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted Work (Grand Central/Hachette, 2016), and it is challenging and invigorating.  As a historian of Christianity, much of what he says resonates strongly with the writings from religious communities of varying types: those Benedictines who work outside the cloister, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Society of St. John the Evangelist, for example.

I realize those are all very different emphases of Christian spirituality.  In common, however, is a desire to find balance between the active and contemplative life —neither simply to leave the “shallow” world absolutely (in contrast with, for example, Carthusians), nor simply to surrender any meaningful deep work and wonder.  Newport writes (briefly) about honing a skill with craft (for example, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, coders, or teachers) and the connection of meaningful, skilled work with the sacred —the world of luminous, shining, wonderful things.  He speaks from an intellectual background formed by Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class As Soulcraft, Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, and Herbert Dreyfuss' and Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining.

I’m not yet finished with Newport’s book, but I’m an engaged reader, and with such books I take my time.  Newport has reminded me vividly of the first professional library job I had (at Drew University, 1986-1992), when computers were coming into academic libraries, but e-mail, the Internet (not yet graphical), and the culture of distracted busyness were in an early stage, compared to the present.  Working with less distraction, I did in fact get more done, and more happily —one reason that I remember that job as perhaps the most satisfactory job I have had as a librarian.

I have heard it said that as academic librarians, “our interruptions are our business,” and that may be true when fielding requests for help from our students and faculty.  But they’re asking for help less than they used to, and the days of the reference question that ends with a verification of fact are long past.  Now questions have much more to do with process: how do I use this database?  How do I cite this in APA? How can I tell if an article is really peer-reviewed? —just to cite facile examples.  Academic librarians must admit, I believe, that the principle interruptions we endure most days do in fact come from each other: the relentless stream of e-mail, and the distractions of social and news media.

In January I heard Jim Honan of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education reflect on a phrase he took from a librarian in New York State, “Our data does not do justice to our story.”  What is our story as a library, what is our value proposition: how does what we do matter, to whom, and how do we do it?  Responsible and apt answers to those questions have to go beyond the shallow work of day-to-day institutional librarianship to the deep work of the field.

Do academic librarians have “deep work” to do, or is it all in the shallows?  Newport defines deep work (page 3):

Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Do academic librarians do any of that?  I must answer yes —but in metaphors or images that differ from the kinds of deep work that Newport seems to presuppose as a computer scientist and mathematician (his work concentrates on distributed algorithms, designed to work through and among interconnected processors).

Librarians fundamentally connect learners (inquirers) to sources of information and knowledge —learners who are taking responsibility for their own learning.  As such a learning-centered library is necessarily a polymorphous, polyglot, multifocal place (physical or digital place, or both at once).  The new value that librarians create (to use Newport’s words) will reside in the minds of those inquirers with whom the librarians interact.

The value proposition of libraries ultimately lies in improving the skill of independent learners to set their own terms and extent for learning, to take responsibility for what they know, and want to know —both know cognitively, and know how to do.

The strategies librarians employ —how are they going to do this— involve both interactions with learners and intellectual resources and tools.  This is the truth behind David Lankes’ contention that “a room full of books is simply a closet, but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library.”  A library is fundamentally what librarians do more than what they have.  The academic public, of course, usually sees it the other way around.

Academic librarianship suffers in spades from the major distractions that impede deep work(pages 53 et seq.).  Newport’s “metric black hole” afflicts most of the field: not only is it nearly impossible to measure what makes an academic librarian effective or distracted, it is hard to measure the impact of this professional work in the first place.  The ACRL has undertaken significant initiatives to show the value of academic libraries, but none of the strategies or paths so far are completely persuasive.  

This difficulty with metrics leads to following the paths of least resistance: absent the clear and compelling evaluative mechanism of a bottom line (or other metric), librarians (among other workers) tend to choose the behavior that is easiest and easiest to rationalize at the time.  Being a librarian means doing what other librarians do, even if that’s not very deep, and how would you know that, anyway?

Hence, in the absence of clear indicators of what is really means to be valuable and productive, like other workers librarians can make busyness a proxy for productivity: do lots of stuff in a visible manner (hey! look at us over here in the library!).  So it has to be valuable and productive, right?

I haven’t yet finished the book, so I don’t want to give the appearance of reviewing it.  I have a question for Newport, however.  Is his operational concept of deep work in the book in fact overly determined by the kind of deep work he does as a computer scientist?  If he were a linguist, a psychologist, or a  performing artist, would he have written the book differently?

By no means to I wish to trivialize his work (either computer science, or this book).  Newport’s leading example of deep work is Carl Jung and
the tower he built near his rural house in Bollingen Tower a two-story stone house with a private study (not very far from Zurich).  Jung would go there to write undistracted, unlike his busy practice, family, and cafe life in Zurich.  Without question “the Tower” was crucial for Jung’s thinking and writing, producing the remarkable insights and books that not only took on Sigmund Freud, but changed depth psychology and real people’s lives.  His work was “deep” in every sense.

Newport tends by implication to characterize Jung’s work in Zurich, by contrast, as shallow.  Newport sympathetically  and consistently characterizes shallow work as significant and unavoidable —the everyday work of professional duties and communications that require attention, but not deep engagement.  In his several examples of Richard Feynman (physics), Adam Grant (business and work behaviors), or Rick Furrer (blacksmith), Newport associatesdeep work  strongly with isolation and often solitary craft —whether craft of steel, wood, or words (writing), and shallow work with all the other stuff.

Yet much of Jung’s work in Zurich was anything but shallow.  His numerous cases show up all over his writings, and his deep analyst-analysand encounters inform every page of his writings.  His challenge to Freud and Freudians required not only courage and persistence, but skill —a skill that cannot be characterized as “shallow” in any sense.  Newport never characterizes it as shallow explicitly, but the implication remains strong; while he writes explicitly, “don’t work alone,” he encounters conceptual and definitional difficulties when associating deep work with collaboration.  Although Newport describes Jung's pattern as "bimodal," his description cannot help but privilege the deep over the "shallow," even though without Zurich there would have been no Bollingen (and vice versa).  Is it not possible in each place Jung was engaging differing and distinct Gestalten or formulations of deep work?

How does this pertain to librarians? Library work is inherently collaborative: even solo librarians aren’t really solo, but depend on the work of librarians elsewhere.  The collaboration of learner and teacher can be deep work, even when that teacher is not formally a classroom instructor.

Newport’s concept of deep work is not flawed, but it needs to be broadened and adjusted for several lines or other metaphors of work —I’m thinking about librarians and parish clergy, lines of work that I know personally and best (there are many others, of course).  Such adjustments cannot --must not--detract from clarity or pertinence.  Librarians almost certainly do spend too much time on e-mail and connectivity of fairly trivial sorts —for example, the rush in the recent past for librarians to tweet their work even though the very medium of Twitter tends to trivialize it.  It is very easy for librarians to mistake busyness for productivity.

Telling the library’s story, showing its value proposition and strategy can be deep work.  Deep work requires librarians not to confuse busyness with productivity, and not to follow the safe paths of least resistance and sheer habit.  Librarianship is a craft, service both to the living and the dead, collaborating with both learners and resources.  It can be a variety of soulcraft.  (I never forget that I hold a degree from Columbia University’s School of Library Service.)  Clearing the mind for this deep work does in fact afford a glimpse of the sacred trust of learners, traditions, and change.  Newport’s book gives librarians' deep work a robust boost, a clarion recall to mental clarity.  I'm privileged and happy to be able to continue reading it.

Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion. I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.
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. . . Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion.  I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.

I’m a librarian and a book person (who’d have thought?) and therefore probably against the grain of American culture right now.  Books have been enormously influential in my life; they gave me an outlet, vision, and ambition when I was very young, and (some of them) have continued to challenge, delight, and astound me ever since.  Some books I count as old friends, and its a diverse lot: Lucretius, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Buechner, Karl Barth, Flannery O’Connor, Robertson Davies, Nora Ephron, Peter Brown, P.D. James — probably my educational and professional background shows there,  and some (like Brian Greene) I don’t understand very well.  I continue to read both printed books and digital texts; my current project is John Eliot Norton’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven.

To sum up a counter position: A “book person” is an anachronism: the world is digital, information moves at blazing speed, and care, nuance, and precision are luxuries of the past.  Readers have become users; teachers have become suppliers, and students have become customers.  The competition for attention drowns out the sustained attention any book requires, and the mark of the contemporary is multi-tasking, even though humans have been shown to do that very badly.  Instead of nuance, we have media scolds and bludgeons; instead of discussion we have talking points and position papers; instead of reading we have scanning or surfing.  Is it any wonder that we wind up with in a bitterly contentious, polarized society marked by increasing, sharp differences between the very rich, the poor, those caught in the diminishing middle, —where everything is on the market, and humans are either the customers or the product?  Disruption is the word of the moment, nevermind whether it is a well-establish and solidly argued social good or simple mediocrity —that it’s disrupted is enough to draw the line between the tired old and the shiny new.  Aaron Bady’s sharp questioning of Clay Shirky reveal how possible futures become taken for inevitable outcomes, and the slippery proposition that those outside any institution, profession, or work are bound to understand it better than its practitioners.  “Open is open” seems to end all discussion, period.  It is alleged, if you are part of “closed” (read “old) system, you couldn’t possibly understand.

Printed books are an “old” format bound for disruption, right?  Turns out: not so fast.  People continue to want them, and sales remain strong, despite Amazon’s assault on bookstores.  (And I do mean assault.)  The “friction” (or difficulty) of obtaining a print book —you have to go somewhere to get one: library, bookstore, or online— is also a friction for the publisher (lately restyled as the “intellectual property owner” —but that’s another blog entry).  Once published and sold, a print book can’t be disappeared in an Orwellian or Statist (Fascist) manner.  Case in point: last summer the merger of Penguin and Random House led to the disappearing of 1,400 Random House digital books from the SHU library catalog —the terms of the deal seems to have indicated that the new management (mostly from Penguin) would not continue the contracts with digital book aggregators (in our case, eBrary Academic Complete).  Suddenly links didn’t work, and a few weeks later records displaying them were deleted from our library system.  Had we purchase those 1,400 books as printed, the library would still have them available.  At least a few of them are bound to have been of enduring value and related to SHU’s curriculum (it was Random House, an “old” and “quality” publisher).  Now we have to pay more —either acquire print copies, or find where they are available digitally.

This doesn’t get at why books really matter, of course.  I’m thinking of academic books: scholarly books, and high-quality books for the wider market (such as Robert Caro’s everlasting biography of Lyndon B. Johnson).  What matters is not their format, but their content, their intellectual, nuanced exploration and exposition of a subject.  Format is not incidental, but neither is it crucial.

Books are critical to education and the life of a culture because of the sustained attention required to write and to read them.  Books are critical because they encode or contain thinking that can become part of a public discourse —can be challenged, confirmed, critiqued, welcomed, despised, all the possible outcomes of seriously considering a proposition or an argument.  A book sticks around in a stable form so that the author cannot suddenly alter  its contents to suit latter convenience, prove herself or himself right, or respond to critics.

Books are destructible, and tyrants have long sought to destroy them.  Book burnings became a badge of totalitarianism in the 20th century.  But otherwise all the copies of a book are hard to destroy.  A widely distributed supply and market system made it highly likely that somewhere, somehow, a copy might survive.  This has mattered in the face of tyrant, and it matter most during the period when so many texts went underground during the great disruptions of the early Middle Ages.  This list of ancient authors who survived to be read later on the basis of a single copy is a long list, and includes works by Aristotle, Lucretius, and Tacitus.

The idea that books as a technology of learning are obsolete takes a very short view.  To be sure: some books are obsolete: who bothers to look up past market prices for securities in a printed volume?  A much longer view sees the value in the conversations among and between generations.  Partisans of the “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution need to know what those original views are; partisans or a more evolutionist view need a sense of difference over time, of intervening realities and developments.  At the far end of this this longer horizon is the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand’s striking question: what are we doing that could make any difference 10,000 years from now?  (See The Long Now Foundation)

A neo-liberal university in which the customer (students + parents) is king may be able to “satisfice” their information needs by simply pulling random hits from a casual Google search.  That sells students and learning short, perhaps disastrously short.  Learning is more than simply a private good to be parceled out to those who can pay.  I believe in books, because books give witness to thinking that might propell such a university away from a view which spells long term disaster for learning, for universities, and for free society.