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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.

A library is probably one of the last places where one can pursue interests and information unobserved. A mere few years ago this was a sign of obsolescence rather than currency.
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In 2009 Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, was asked whether users should be willing to share information with Google as if it were a trusted friend --and Schmidt famously replied, "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."  The Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that this is very close to the famous phrase, "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about" --beloved of those who are seeking greater law-enforcement powers or processes.  It implies that people who seek to preserve privacy are doing something to worry about, not those who place them under surveillance.

That was then.  In the aftermath of Edward Snowdon's revelations --in particular those that detail the very cozy relationships between the NSA, major firms such as Google, and telecommunications giants such as Verizon-- privacy has returned as a positive right, not merely a historical left-over.

A library is probably one of the last places where one can pursue interests and information unobserved.  A mere few years ago this was a sign of obsolescence rather than currency.  Libraries made data surveillance difficult because they weren't high-tech enough.  That has changed too.  Suddenly that obsolescence has become a feature (as in, "that's not a bug, it's a feature!").

Why does it matter?  If there is one thing that Pew survey after Pew survey has found --as well as OCLC and other survey producers-- that thing surely has to be: people feel positive about the library "brand."  They want a vibrant, useful library in their academic, residential, or business community whether or not they intend to use it (or have used it).  A library is a "good thing."  People trust libraries, and trust librarians.

Trust is a huge asset, not to be thrown away or discounted casually.  Just ask General Motors, or for that matter, the NSA itself.

In general, libraries do a fairly accurate job of maintaining trust, but could do a lot better.  Circulation records of tangible items are not easily available for public discovery, depending on the laws of state and local jurisdictions.  (Connecticut has alarming little provision of the privacy of library records, for example.)  In any case, circulation records are hard to locate digitally because they are held in highly particular formats in integrated library systems, formats that don't translate readily to standards and common practices outside.  That's wasn't a bug, and now it's a feature.

Library use of external databases is a different matter.  In many systems, all traffic routed through a library proxy will be seen by parties outside the proxy as coming from one machine, one Internet Protocol address.  Separating the sessions would be far harder.  That doesn't cover all library database transactions, however, or even a large portion of them.  Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon --in French, GAFA-- can monitor a great deal of transactions on library workstations unless those are properly protected.

Eric Hellman has written persuasively (to my mind, at least) about the Library Digital Privacy Pledge here and here.  It's an interesting concept, whether or not the pledge ever receives wide adoption.  Eric's primary focus at this point is to get libraries to use the secure HTTP protocol --HTTPS-- as much as possible.  Library digital privacy has, of course, many other aspects that will need to be addressed.

Recently the small New Hampshire public library in West Lebanon (near Dartmouth College) was for the most part bullied away from using the secure browser system TOR by the NSA --although now they have recovered their courage.  TOR has been targeted in the past as the province of drug-dealers, pedophiles, and terrorists --what lovely company-- and who would want to be associated with them?  The topic invariably circles back to law enforcement: if you haven't done anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide (even when grammatically challenged!).

In the library no one ever used to track your reading, and no one should now: 3rd article of the American Library Association's Code of Ethics.  Trust is easily lost.  Privacy is easily lost.  A library is a great place to think, write, and read privately.  It's not a bug, it's a feature.

 

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.

 

 

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 library is part of the beating heart of the university—that contact of learners and teachers—when it truly enacts and exemplifies part of the University’s mission.
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First, on behalf of the entire library staff I wish to thank all those in the University and in the construction trades which made this day possible.  What a pleasure it was to work with Marc Izzo and Scott Rowland in particular.  I also want to extend my personal special thanks to Patrick Rose, our architect, who patiently listened to explanations of why the library needed one feature or another, and insights from our regular observation of how library users actually use the library.

I also wish to recognize the good work of Amanda Timolat, our Archivist, and Emily Underwood, her student library assistant, in creating the display behind the glass wall at the rear of the Chartwell's Starbucks Library Cafe.

As you may have read, or heard here today, this library was dedicated on September 28, 1968 and re-dedicated as the Ryan-Matura Library on September 11, 1993.  I want to take a moment to recall the first event, in 1968.  The speaker that day was Philip J. Scharper, and the guest of honor was our founder, the Most Reverend Walter Curtis, Bishop of Bridgeport. 

Mr. Scharper was a very active Catholic writer and publisher.  Trained at Woodstock Theological Seminary, a protégé of John Courtney Murray, he never entered the priesthood but instead taught briefly before he became associate editor of Commonweal magazine in 1955.  He was specially consulted by the Second Vatican Council on the Catholic Church’s role in the modern world.  From 1957 to 1970 he was editor in chief at Sheed & Ward before he co-founded Orbis Books in 1970.  Three years later, he edited and published Gustavo Gutierrez’ famous book A Theology of Liberation.  Mr. Scharper remained at Orbis until his death in 1985.

On that day in September 1968 Scharper held up in particular a phrase from the British writer Thomas Carlyle, that “the library is the beating heart of the University.” In 1968 that was a brave hope, as the young University was still coming together, but Scharper connected what this library represented then with the broad intellectual tradition of the Church and in particular the tradition of the love of learning and the desire for God lived out in the Benedictine tradition.  He concluded that the library is not only to be the beating heart of a community of learning, but of a community of love.

Scharper, following Carlyle before him, was attempting to give real life to a phrase that sometimes can become a tired academic cliché, that the library is the heart of the University.  Since 1968 many things in universities have changed, and I am so bold as to suggest that that familiar phrase needs to be re-positioned.   Many of the elements of this University –food service, athletic facilities, public safety officers, library, even the Chapel –could and do exist in other contexts without a University.  For example, the Town of Fairfield has a vibrant and thriving library.  

The real heart of the University is in the daily interaction of teachers and learners.  Without a faculty and without students, together, we don’t have a University.  Those teachers and learners –both faculty and students are teachers and learners in different ways—need a variety of contexts and settings to pursue their work: classrooms, laboratories, overseas locations, offices, clinics, field work, and even a library.

The library is part of the beating heart of the university—that contact of learners and teachers—when it truly enacts and exemplifies part of the University’s mission.  This is the truth that shines through this renovation, and how it shines through can be seen in library architecture. 

The original 19th-century modern academic library buildings were reader-oriented: books in the service of readers.  Large windows illuminated alcoves and bays with natural light for reading; the monastic tradition was strong in these buildings, whether James Gamble Roger’s Gothic Revival Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, or McKim, Mead and White’s Beaux-Arts Low Library at Columbia University.  These libraries featured large ceremonial entry spaces that usher a reader into an immediate connection with books.

But the tidal wave of publishing and new books in the 20th century required a new paradigm, the book-centered library.  Butler Library at Columbia University exemplifies this: a steel-framed structure of 18 levels of central stacks are surrounded by offices and seminar rooms with a ceremonial main reading room on the front end.  Essentially the book-oriented library is a warehouse, one hopes an elegant warehouse, and these buildings were progressively enlarged not to accommodate additional readers or services, but additional collections.

The original modular design of this library, designed by Val Carlson of Shelton, followed the book-centered paradigm of library design: a maximum of flexible space for a growing collection, designed to be expanded back into what is now the parking lot as necessary.  Over the decades, areas of this building have been re-purposed so many times that it is difficult to envision what this library was originally intended to be.  In any case, the advent of information technology began to put and end to book-centered library design by the 1990s.

This renovation represents a third paradigm of library design, the learning-centered library.  These spaces have been re-designed to host and facilitate learning interactions in many ways: group interaction, individual study, interaction with digital collections far away from this building, and especially interactions with every member of the library staff.  Some people look at this library and see a building, others see a collection, but I see people: students, librarians, faculty, and how they interact.  This is a learning-centered library, and all our librarians are educators in the context of the University. 

Above all, the learner here is meant to take responsibility for her or his own learning.  There is no one moment when this happens, but it happens whenever study becomes learning: how history majors become historians, how biology majors become biologists.  This library is a set of spaces, resources, and above all people that foster effective intentional learning.  We are a teaching and learning enterprise, and we join our student and faculty colleagues here as collaborators enacting the learning mission of this University.  The goal of self-directed learning is meant to become a reality here.

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.