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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darnton's three jeremiads are, in compact phrases:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libraries do not have user aggregations: we serve students, faculty, and staff. We are necessarily and properly non-commercial in a culture where commerce rules all, and in that sense we unavoidably counter-cultural.
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Are learning environments in higher education becoming commodified?  Who is in charge here?

The article The Open Ed Tech: never mind the edupunks; or, the great Web 2.0 swindle by Brian Lam and Jim Groom (Educause Review July August 2010) remembers the palmy days of "edupunks" --those Gen-Xers who wanted open educational environments fostered by open web technology.  Away with closed, tightly-controlled proprietary systems!

What happened?  The consolidation of Blackboard.  The rise of Google whatever: docs, alerts, talk, reader, YouTube, whatever.  Above all, the consolidation of cultural industries: ContentID.  Users such as Critical Commons and Lawrence Lessig --who used snippets of copyrighted works for their presentations to demonstrate examples of Fair Use-- were effectively silenced by corporate take-down orders without respect to any Fair Use guidelines.

Advertising is the point of the Google products, its YouTube, Facebook, and all their kin.  Steve Greenberg has written, "You are not Facebook's customer.  You are the product they sell to their real customers --advertisers.  Forget that at your peril."  This is the simple commercial point all the "free" capabilities.  When Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. control educational and cultural spaces, advertising is the point.  Facebook's long-standing and fundamentally deceptive bait-and-switch privacy policies are a running case in point.  GoogleAnalytics tracks searches, retrievals, and every click.  Is this desirable in a cultural space such as an academic library?

The implications for privacy, for academic freedom, and for creative re-use of cultural "properties" (rather than "resources") are very serious.  Lam and Groom note, ". . . We can expect the values associated with educators and the public interest to be of secondary importance at best.  Proprietary needs will prevail, even if we can trust that these companies set ouf to 'do no evil.'"

(As a reader of Reinhold Niebuhr, I have to add "Don't be evil" as a corporate slogan is reflects a very shallow, California-lite superficiality that either intentionally hypocritical or incredibly stupid.  Of course corporate entities sometimes do evil: see Moral Man and Immoral Society or The Nature and Destiny of Man.  Evil is unavoidable; the question is how to plan for it and limit its effects.  Google's slogan reflects exactly who they are: technologically incredibly sophisticated but philosophical and moral dwarves.)

This is not simply an anti-corporate screed.  Obviously corporations exist to make money, and will do what is necessary.  Obviously, libraries buy or lease many corporate products. But why should libraries advertise corporate products to their users?  Already Wolters-Kluwer's OvidSP defaults to search all journals@Ovid --and offers pay-per-view to those articles not covered by a library's database contract.  Is this advertising or for the convenience of the user?

The question here is whether libraries see our users as aggregatations of data useful for advertisers.  Libraries do not have user aggregations: we serve students, faculty, and staff.  We are necessarily and properly non-commercial in a culture where commerce rules all, and in that sense we unavoidably counter-cultural.  In Lam and Groom's phrase, we provide a green space for public-minded, convivial exchange online and on-ground.  We serve people first,and corporate interests second.  (--no wonder libraries are both incredibly expensive and often poorly funded!)

Alice Tear Copeland (1926-2010) was a wonderful boss.
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Alice on deck, photo for obit Alice Copeland was a wonderful boss.  I began to know her when I started my first professional position as a cataloging librarian at Drew University Library, 1986-1993.  She really taught me librarianship, and the art of academic leadership and strategy.

Granted I had been exceedingly fortunate to have experienced a tradition of excellence in librarianship at Columbia University 1985-1987 --Alice made all of that real in the workplace in a way I had not anticipated.  Her eye for cataloging detail was sharp and her attention was vigilant and yet she never succumbed to trivialization that occasionally has come to caricature catalogers.  She always sought the simplest, most elegant, and most clearly communicated information for the convenience of the user.

Over Alice's desk was a motto from Vergil Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, (Aeneid i.203) loosely "Someday perhaps it will be pleasing to remember even this" --an apt quotation during that era of retrospective conversion of cataloging records from cards to OCLC MARC records, and eventually to Drew's first generation of an integrated library system (DRA classic).  We all worked very hard, very long days to see our database go live on a day in August 1988 --and immediately thought, "is this all there is?"  Midstream in conversion OCLC or PALINET unwittingly changed settings for diacritics --and Drew held a lot of German and French texts.  Suddenly all the learned treatises which begin with "über" began with "huber" --this required additional hours of work.  One day we all might look back on it with pleasure.  Now I do.

Alice lived with the music of J.S. Bach and often brought in Bach on the radio around the holidays.  Her love for hymnology showed in her consistent attention to the Creamer collection, given to Drew in 1868 and never hitherto really cataloged or explored.  Her amazing ability to listen and discern what's important, her love for her church (Presbyterian), her family, her friends, and her alma mater (Oberlin) were all well attested at a gathering of friends and family in her memory in Madison, New Jersey on Saturday, September 18.

I can only say how profoundly thankful I am to have been able to work with Alice and all the staff of the cataloging department then --Lessie, John, Elise, Annie, Marcia, Agnes, Cheryl, Susan, and Lucy.  It was a great start in librarianship, and real bread for the journey.  In Alice's favorite words from Hamlet, "The readiness is all."

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This post refers back to the post (below) of May 14, 2010.

In that post, 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 other two strands will be examined more fully in later posts.) 

This view of memorization tends to substitute the Internet as a resource for individual learning and knowledge.  Sanger cites statements by Don Tapscott and David Dalrymple to the effect that in the future "we will be relying increasingly on the Internet as an extension or prosthesis of our memory."  His image of a "mental prosthesis" is very vivid.

Sanger counters that this claim belies "any profound grasp of the nature of knowledge."  How can one know anything unless one has remembered it, and does not memory at some point require memorization --the conscious act of committing to memory?  Educationalists are possibly referring to unnecessary, rote memorizing --dull repetition "often without experience or understanding."

But what counts as unnecessary, as trivial? (The history of the term "trivial" --from the trivium referring to the three ancient or medieval artes liberales: grammar, rhetoric, and logic--reveals an interesting story for another post).  This is both a slippery question and a deep one.  Knowledge is necessary to ask more questions: Sanger's example that the date 1066 for the Battle of Hastings means nothing to a child, who lacks any historical knowledge, and becomes memorable only as the impact of that Battle is absorbed.  "Actually having a knowledge of understanding about [a] topic will always require critical study. The Internet will never change that."

Absorbing new knowledge always relies upon previously absorbed knowledge.  There is a chicken-and-egg here: you need to know something in order to know more.  A regular trope of liberal education is that people should "learn how to learn."  Some then extend this trope to claim that since knowledge is changing so fast, and today's children will have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple time, memorizing facts and figures is a waste of time." (Don Tapscott)  This is an old and stale argument --that progress renders a knowledge of past fact and figures useless.

Tapscott's argument presupposes that new knowledge either replaces or renders pointless old knowledge.  This is occasionally the case, but rarely.  Have advances in genomics, nuclear physics, nanotechnology, or linguistics really replaced far more basic skills of careful attention to texts, and master of a vast body of essential facts and points of view that undergird new acquisition of new knowledge. 

The key here is Tapscott's dimissive adjective rote memorization --dull, pointless, and mechanical.  Perhaps Tapscott will someday be operated upon by a surgeon who has not bothered with the rote memorization of human anatomy, and in that event, I wish Tapscott well.  Just because some instances of primary-school memorization in the past has been dull, pointless, and mechanical does not mean that memorization as a skill is pointless, dull, and mechanical.  It might be vital.  There objection that there is so such thing as "the basics" is ridiculous.  If human anatomy is not basic for a surgeon, then what is?

Sanger's point: "the only way to being to know something is to have memorized it."  Perhaps not absolutely in every minor detail!  Memorization is gateway to internalizing knowledge, really making a part of one's walking-around mentality, stock of images, living performative skills.  And it is work.  And digital resources can assist but not replace it.  And the internet as a whole will not replace it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This brief video (duration: 4:18) provides a convenient introduction to the way that books are digitized, and how a very creative University Press is handling the numerous production and distribution details involved with moving from printed books to e-books.
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This brief video (duration: 4:18) provides a convenient introduction to the way that books are digitized, and how a very creative University Press is handling the numerous production and distribution details involved with moving from printed books to e-books.

Sacred Heart University Library is considering a trial of Cambridge Books Online during the summer of 2010 -- please respond to this post if you have any thoughts about this!

Two recent discussions --in very different venues-- take an interesting look at the role of reading, individual knowledge, and disciplined reflection in the Internet Age.
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Two recent discussions --in very different venues-- take an interesting look at the role of reading, individual knowledge, and disciplined reflection in the Internet Age.

The first author is Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, who has gone on to found a renowed public-interest wiki Citizendium.org and the directory of educational videos online, WatchKnow.org.  With a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Theory of Knowledge), Sanger is hardly one to down-play the role of the Internet in civil society, or to be accused of being a Luddite by the rhetorically inclined.

Sanger's article in Educause Review, Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age, can be found here (in .pdf here)

Sanger discusses in some detail the importance of individual knowledge, rooted in (but not exclusively):

  • memorization --how can you really know something that you don't remember?
  • individual learning (as differentiated from social knowledge learned in groups); and
  • books --complex, deep strands of thinking that require absorption and uninterrupted attention.

The second author is Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a long-standing, mainstream Christian publishing empire famous for devotional literature and Bibles.  Far from special pleading from a print publisher, Thomas Nelson is in fact a leader in electronic publishing, and Hyatt has led the transformation.

Hyatt writes in defense of books, of the activity of reading as a way of viewing the world --you can read his blog-post here.

Beyond (or because of) his broad and deep commitment to digital publishing, Hyatt values serious readers' "ability to follow extended arguments and enroll their imagination in
the reading experience."  What Hyatt regards in peril is the ability to engage in extended conversation with its potential for transformative exchange, replaced instead by a media-driven amusement that  "will become the ultimate value against which everything else is measured."

Libraries, like Universities (and especially University Libraries!) have a cultural agenda: that the examined life is definitely worth living, that such examination requires reflection, conversation, and an openness to the experiences of people very different from contemporaries --people of the past.  Amusement, group knowledge socially constructed in networks heedless of group and individual memory --these things are no replacement for the examined life.  In fact, Plato might suggest that they are merely the shadows upon the wall of the cave in which most people live their lives, unaware of the light and the source of the light outside the cave.

Do I cavill with a straw man?  I hope so, but fear that I do not do so.  As contemporary Americans we pride ourselves on a world-wide cultural now built especially upon science, medicine, and technology --but we also prefer the disconnected amusement the some even disparage the "old" knowledge based upon remembering, individual reflection, and reading. 

Sanger and Hyatt, from very different perspectives and social and business locations, converge on similar points.  That convergence is worth pondering.

Why collect anything locally? The answer is: here, now, and in person.
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Libraries traditional collected various materials, especially books, journals, printed material of all kinds, and sometimes art pieces or other physical items. As time went on the list expanded to sound recordings and videos, whatever the device (LP records, CDs, DVDs, etc.)

At the same time, libraries embraced cooperation: the "inter-library loan office" (resource sharing) at Sacred Heart University Library is a vital service.  "Loan" is now a misnomer: more than half of our resource sharing transactions obtain a copy (digital or photocopy) which is not to be returned --a service, not a loan.

Indeed, with such cooperation, with e-books, with digital media of all kinds and better players (iPads, Kindles, iPods, and all their kin), why bother trying to gather or collect anything?  Why not simply depend upon the network?

This is the crux of the pundits' argument that libraries will simply disappear in the brave new information world where everything is available freely and easily.  Unfortunately, that world doesn't yet exist, and is unlikely to do so.  Information will not be available freely and easily for the simple reason that a great deal of it will continue --at least for the foreseeable future-- to be controlled by for-profit corporations (e.g. Ebsco, Elsevier, ProQuest, and their kin). 

Of course, such information can be easily accessed via web browsers --but only with the right authorizations and passwords.  The proxy server makes some of this invisible, especially on campus, but those authorizations are still there.  The great information data-banks that corporations have built can exchange data but are no more likely to merge than will the great and regional banks suddenly coalesce into one financial institution.Information will remain divided into corporate silos, some openly accessible, some not.

The first thing that the library does is manage access to much of this environment of information.  All of this environment?  no --think of Google.  Even Google, however, has numerous aspects (Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Patents) which are little known to most users.  Librarians --libraries are primarily a service, not a thing-- are critical navigators in this environment.

At great length --with all this! why collect anything locally?  The answer is: here, now, and in person.  When students and faculty are in "inquiry" mode, they want resources: the old amusing saying, "librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find" is true in a way.  There is no finding without searching.  Finding can mean materials online, and materials at hand.  We still live in an  environment of mixed media.  Some people prefer printed resources for a variety of reasons: layout, familiarity, ease of use, portability.  As mentioned before, paper is (all said and done) not a bad storage medium.

So the question: why collect? is answered: to serve students and faculty here, now, and in person.  The question can't be "how many print resources do we have?," but "how good are the print resources we have?"  Who now would bother to build a library to hold all the books available?  Who is really ready --now-- to walk into a library with no printed books at all? 

The ease with which one private secondary school in Massachusetts disposed of its print collection is belied by its dependence upon other schools' print collections --resource sharing.  They simply outsourced their print needs to other schools --pleasant news to the budget officer, but with the an effect similar to living on take-out food rather than cooking your own in the kitchen.  It's not a bad thing to do for one meal or another.  But all the time?  What happens in the long run?  What happens when they lose access to critical intellectual resources because they have become unavailable due to contractual disputes between database providers?