Library Babel Fish

If you don’t have time to read this entire blog post, here’s the tl;dr version: if you think, as I do, that the investment we make in basic research should be maximized through making that research accessible to all, sign the petition.

It’s funny. Tuesday night I wrote a blog post addressed to students in a course I teach about why I find Twitter such an indispensable tool for keeping up with new developments of professional interest. They had fanned out across campus to interview faculty and pretty much determined that I’m a freak. Nobody else used Twitter for keeping up. Last night, I updated that blog post with a good example: before calling it a night, I checked my Twitter feed and learned that a decision had finally been handed down in the GSU case. This is big news.

There has been a lot of ferment about the future of information and our cultural record in recent weeks. There are signs that within our students' lifetimes our gardens will not be so walled. It makes sense to focus our teaching on the skills of joining scholarly conversations wherever they will take place, in hopes that those conversations will not always be restricted to those with temporary access to academic libraries.

Last week I felt depressed about how many automated approaches to producing and grading writing were coming on the market and I ended my gloomy thoughts with an exhortation. Think about your assignments that ask students to find sources and write about them. What are you hoping students will learn? Are they learning it? Is there a way to make the whole process less mechanical? I got an email suggesting that it would be useful if I actually tried to answer that question myself. Fair enough. I'll give it a shot.

The other day, I was nonplussed to read a recap of a study here that found human and robot graders fared equally well in assessing the work of student writers. The robo-graders, according to the study, do as good a job as humans at assessing clarity, sentence structure, and sometimes (but not always) relevant content. While my initial reaction was “huh?” it’s important to note that this study only compared processes for scoring standardized tests. It has nothing at all to do with what happens in the classroom when students are learning to write. In fact, it really has nothing to do with teaching or learning, only testing, and testing the wrong things at that.

The Supremes have agreed to hear a case that has some troubling implications for libraries. Kirtsaeng v. Wiley is not just about textbooks. It’s about whether any work that is copyrighted and produced outside the United States can be legally loaned or resold in the U.S. without the copyright owner’s permission. We’re talking about the First Sale Doctrine, which is how libraries get away with our profligate sharing.

A colleague and I are interested in finding out more about how students use library books before we invest a lot of money in ebook collections. Given the unsettled state of the ebook market, there's no telling where we're all headed.

The bizarrely ill-informed opinion piece by David Levy, “Do College Teachers Work Hard Enough?” in the Washington Post caused a lot of predictable outrage among college teachers. I was reminded of it when I read a new essay by Steve Coffman, "The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire."