My dean has promised that this blog will remain available for at least the next year. Some of my entries are still being discovered by new readers. And the year will give people plenty of time to take down any links to this blog on their own blogs or Web sites.

This blog began as an experiment during my sabbatical last year. My initial purpose had been to use it as a way to explore what Library 2.0 was all about. I guess I can say that I'm still exploring it! Blogging has turned out to be much more valuable an exercise than I could have imagined when I first started. There's nothing like the process of regular writing, especially public writing, to get a person thinking in ways that thinking alone doesn't do. And it's been interesting to join the conversation of other librarian bloggers. I have some concerns about the nature and scope of blogging about 2.0, especially in the academic library world, but I also believe that it just isn't possible to be a top-notch professional these days without reading librarian - and other - blogs.

I know that this blog has a fair number of readers. I'm really grateful that people have found it worthwhile (at least some of the time!) to read what I've had to say. Although my postings didn't generate a lot of comments here, I've appreciated the comments that did come in. I've been impressed with everyone's cordiality even when - especially when - people haven't agreed with me. It's added up to a very good show of professionalism.

I've been considering if I have anything in summary to say about academia and Library 2.0 in this final entry. I think not. I'll let my 100+ entries speak for themselves.

Will I start another blog after I retire? I haven't decided. I think it's healthy to step back and take some time away from this. Letting go is a good thing.

Best of luck, everyone. Again, thanks so much for tuning in. Later.

One of these writings is a blog posting, the other is an article in the January/February issue of American Libraries.

Let me start with the blog posting. This is John Blyberg's recent Library 2.0 Debased. John says some very smart things in this posting, but I also take issue with some of what he says.

First, John takes the 2.0 movement to task:

Then he gives us his advice:

I'll comment on this in a minute. But first, I want to refer to the other writing that caught my eye, Steven Bell's American Libraries piece "Design Thinking." Here, Steven advocates for the employment of design thinking (which he nicely describes and rationalizes) in creating "an exceptional user experience."

Steven believes that many of us are putting the cart before the horse: employing technologies before we figure out which problems they might solve:

Steven mentions the term "bandwagon" a couple of times in his piece. This term has connotations: a certain mindlessness, a lack of planning, and a submission to peer pressure, to name a few.

Believe me, I'm not here to defend every last practice of Library 2.0 as manifested in every last library, or every last conference presentation on the topic. That would be nonsense. But I think these writers - and others who have expressed similar views - give our experiments, our advances, and dare I say even our aspirations, too little credit. The truth is, there is plenty of sophistication going on within Library 2.0, in the rationale, planning, intellectual effort, and technological implementation of initiatives.

I don't know why something that is catching on in libraries is necessarily a bandwagon just because it manifests Web 2.0. Are Information Commons a bandwagon phenomenon? Group study areas? Café's in libraries? Or is the issue our concern that our 2.0 initiatives won't be used, or used wisely? John mentions the failure of user-contributed tags in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog because these tags disappoint his expectations. Believe me, I've seen some funny things go on in the group study area just outside my office. But no one is calling this area a failure.

There's no question in my mind that few libraries have done the fundamental recalibrating that John refers to. This will be the biggest challenge set out for us by the major changes in information culture happening all around us. But maybe this is a two-way street. In other words, maybe the slow build-up of new technologies and new physical environments in a library can have an effect on that library's culture. In a couple of John's responses to comments to his posting, he seems to be saying this, and I was glad to see it. I see this happening in my own institution. There are bits and pieces of recalibration going on, and these things are happening due to a variety of forces, some of them external to the library. I've been advocating for more, much more, but this place isn't ready to dig down deep. But there are ideas percolating, and initiatives emerging. I hope we don't stop moving ahead until we've met the ideal criteria for advancement.

I would love to see design thinking applied in my library. Among other things, it would represent my library's commitment to identifying and solving problems in a proven, systematic way. But I wouldn't want us to be limited by design thinking in all that we might do. This is because the introduction of a technology can evolve in unexpected, and unexpectedly useful, ways. You might carefully plan to solve one problem, and another one might be solved along the way. The ball starts rolling, ideas take root, examples emerge, small sparks of interest and even enthusiasm begin to spread. Just think about blogs. They began as "trivial" personal journals, and are now finding their way into the life cycle of serious scholarship.

I think it's important to understand that we can't expect students to envision how every new technology in the library might benefit them. The recent OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our Networked World recognized this by showing, for example, that only a small sample of college students surveyed think libraries should build social networking sites. These networks were defined by a number of different features.

Does this mean the end of the road for social networking in academic libraries? Think about it. If we allow student feedback to dictate all our innovations, then the game is over. This particular response would mean that academic librarians will play no visionary, groundbreaking role in the evolution of social scholarship.

This alone is enough to tell me that we need to look beyond student feedback and think more about leadership. No, I'm not saying we should abandon or dismiss student feedback. Of course not. But this is only part of a bigger picture that we need to consider as we recalibrate and design.

The EZproxy sale affects so many of us. Chris Zagar has been developing and supporting this product single-handedly from the start, and now it's used in over 2,400 institutions in 60 countries. I can see the benefits of putting a big organization behind the software. EZproxy has been evolving at a rapid pace in recent years in order to meet the needs of its customers in an increasingly complex world of vendor Web sites. Also, Chris has mentioned that vendors might be more cooperative with OCLC than with a single individual when authentication issues come up.

And the support! Those of us who, like myself, manage EZproxy in our libraries know that Chris has been exemplary in his tech support. "Exemplary" hardly describes Chris's responsiveness, individual attention, and relentless success in solving problems. In just my one small case, Chris wrote a couple of features into the software - and quickly - to meet a couple of my library's needs. Amazing. So it's a little nerve-wracking to imagine what's coming next, now that OCLC is taking over.

One of OCLC's plans is to create local instances of EZproxy on - you guessed it - WorldCat.org, aka Open WorldCat. This catalog has seen some really interesting developments. It's probably safe to say that its interface and features surpass what many of us offer in our libraries. And so, of course, there's Worldcat Local that's getting underway.

I could indulge in all sorts of speculations about what's happening with OCLC - how it's positioning itself, what its current interests are, what its intentions might be, and what might be the chances of success. For example, I can't help wondering if OCLC envisions that WorldCat Local will become the user interface of choice for most libraries, with EZproxy authentication built right in. Why not? Is it worthwhile for many hundreds of libraries to be customizing their own interfaces ad infinitem, especially when catalogs are not the holy grail they once were? Do these local efforts really pay off? Does Open Worldcat offer a promising alternative? These are legitimate questions.

And I wonder what OCLC might have in mind for social spaces, given its recent report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World. In the conclusion of this report, the authors state:

Those are some fighting words! I can't help wondering if they contain hints of things to come.

OCLC is active on many fronts. The products and services list on its site is a long one. There's NetLibrary, ILLiad, CONTENTdm, FirstSearch, a bunch of cataloging services, and QuestionPoint, to name a few. If OCLC does all this, and also becomes big in local catalog space, controls a primary authentication system for research materials, forges new ground in hosting/applying social space, and nabs some big library names in the process, well then: we might have a potential Google of the library world in the making.

If this is in any way on the mark, we need to be paying attention.

The Web has gotten much more complicated since the days when garden variety Web sites were the sole type of placement for content, and when many of these guides were written. So I joined with my colleague Trudi Jacobson, Head of User Education at my library, to put together a guide that targets the 2.0 environment. We collaborated on a guide ten years ago, so she was the perfect choice to work with on this new one. Our original guide is charmingly outdated. This time around, we've covered Web sites (of course!), free research sites, document repositories, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social bookmarks, and multimedia.

It was a challenging project to work on. In a way, it's fair to say that evaluative criteria don't really change based on the type of site or material encountered. While this may be true, it's also the case that students need help with looking for cues in different types of environments. In fact, some students aren't even sure what they're looking at. This is why we include a definition of each phenomenon and feature a section on how to tell the difference between a blog and a wiki. We also call atttention to such problems as content that has no verifiable authority, and RSS imports that might be undetectable. So there were new issues to address. Although Trudi and I set out to put together a guide to evaluation, we also found ourselves creating a basic teaching tool about the current state of the Web as a source of information.

Trudi and I are interested in feedback. We've shown the guide to a few colleagues, and would be happy to hear from a wider audience.

So, please take a look and tell us what you think: Evaluating Web Content.

The conclusions:

• One year or less: user-created content
• One year of less: social networking
• Two to three years: mobile phones
• Two to three years: virtual worlds
• Four to five years: new scholarship
• Four to five years: massively multiplayer educational gaming

I was especially happy to see the item about new scholarship. But the mobile phones item caught my eye because I've been frustrated over the past few years by the fact that libraries haven't put much effort into optimizing their services for mobile devices, be they phones or anything else. My own library hasn't been much inclined to take this on for our Web site, despite my proposal to focus on this need.

I was struck by this passage in the report: "The ability of almost all phones to access email, instant messaging, the web, and calendaring increases the ways in which students and instructors can communicate—and is eroding the digital divide." Just take a walk around campus and observe the cell phones in use, and you can see the potential truth in this statement.

I think libraries need to look at serving mobile users in at least two ways.

SMS reference. The library at Curtin University of Technology is one good example of an institution that offers text messaging - Short Message Service (SMS) - for receiving and answering reference questions. If users trend away from instant messaging and toward phone-based text messaging, we need to be ready for them.

You may wonder why someone would use text messaging when she could simply use her phone to call the reference desk instead. In fact, the latter would probably not even entail a fee. This strikes me as a logical but moot point. It's like asking why users sitting at workstations ten feet from the reference desk choose to use the library's IM reference service rather than get up and go to the desk. Users make choices because they have choices to make. This is the name of the game. For us to ask what is logical in our eyes is to ask useless questions. Instead, we need to be asking how we can serve those users who make these choices.

Optimizing our Web sites for mobile devices. I think that every library should include mobile access in its next Web site redesign. This might include something as simple as style sheets for mobile devices to more sophisticated programming. NYU's Bobst Library has been at it for a while with The Arch.

We ignore this opportunity at our peril. We're already worried about decreasing use of our Web sites as students look elsewhere to do their research. We may have well-thought-out plans for establishing ourselves on external sites where our users congregate, but this in no way eliminates the need for, and usefulness of, library Web sites - if we make them responsive to the needs of our users. And users may be more interested in our content if we make it available on the devices that they use.

It may be true that most of our users these days use their cell phones mainly as, well, phones - to make and receive calls. I don't have any data on this, but observation tells me that this is the case. But I also know that the use of phones to access the Web, and to send and receive text messages, is on the rise.

I'd sure love to see scholarly publishers optimize their Web sites for mobile computing. We should lobby them.

It's the mobility, stupid.

Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries has just been published by ACRL. This is the hybrid book/wiki publication that I've been editing for the past year.

You can buy the book online at the ALA Store.

Here's the official blurb.

I'm pleased about this publication for several reasons.

First of all, it's finished, always a good feeling for an author or editor.

Second, and even better, it's not finished at all because of the post-publication wiki. What I like best about this wiki - and the entire hybrid setup - is the fact that the publisher itself is hosting it. This is not something I had to go out and do on my own, a more typical model for those of us who want to carry on the lives of our books online. The wiki was a crucial aspect of my initial negotiations with the amazing Kathryn Deiss, Content Strategist at ACRL, who approached me about editing the book. Kathryn's excitement about the idea says so much about her and her vision. And score one for ACRL, and ALA too, for trying this model. Because of the nature of the topic, I doubt I would have agreed to edit a book of case studies about Library 2.0 projects. While snapshot chapters had the potential to be useful, it didn't make a lot of sense to stop there. We're in the early days of both Library 2.0 as well as these initiatives. Things will evolve. It will be interesting and worthwhile to track what happens. And speaking of evolving, it will also be interesting to see how the authors choose to use the wiki to present their updates.

Besides, some of you already know how I feel about the nature of completed publications.

Also, I think these cases show a seriousness of purpose, intellectual effort, institutional commitment, and applied creativity that are all hallmarks of the best of Library 2.0.

Finally, there's impressive work going on out there, and we need to know about it. Many of these projects will be new to readers, all to the good. This publication highlights a variety of successful strategies, goals, and scales of operation. There are many roads forward, and I think it helps to see this.

The wiki is just getting underway. Each page has an RSS feed for tracking updates, as does the entire wiki. Select the chapter(s) that interest you, subscribe to the feed, and watch the content come in.

Chapter 1: Discovering Places to Serve Patrons in the Long Tail

Patrick Griffis, Kristin Costello, Darcy Del Bosque, Cory Lampert, and Eva Stowers,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Chapter 2: Chat, Commons, and Collaboration: Inadvertently Library 2.0 in Western Australia

Kathryn Greenhill, Margaret Jones, and Jean McKay, Murdoch University Library

Chapter 3: Yale: Taking the Library to Users in the Online University Environment

Kalee Sprague and Roy Lechich, Yale University

Chapter 4: Delivering Targeted Library Resources into a Blackboard Framework

Richard Cox, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Chapter 5: Adapting an Open Source, Scholarly Web 2.0 System for Findability in Library Collections

Bethany Nowviskie, Elizabeth Sadler, and Erik Hatcher, University of Virginia

Chapter 6: Push and Pull of the OPAC

Daniel Forsman, Jönköping University Library, Sweden

Chapter 7: UThink: Library Hosted Blogs for a University-Wide Community

Shane Nakerud, University of Minnesota

Chapter 8: Discussing Student Engagement: An Information Literacy Course Blog

Gregory Bobish, University at Albany, State University of New York

Chapter 9: Building Library 2.0 into Information Literacy: A Case Study

Susan Sharpless Smith, Erik Mitchell, and Caroline Numbers, Wake Forest University

Chapter 10: IMplementing IM @ Reference: The GW Experience

Deborah B. Gaspar and Sarah Palacios Wilhelm, The George Washington University

Chapter 11: Taking the Library to Users: Experimenting with Facebook as an Outreach Tool

Dawn Lawson, New York University

Chapter 12: YouTube University: Using XML, Web Services, and Online Video Services to Serve University and Library Video Content

Jason A. Clark, Montana State University

The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. The purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable.

Scholars will upload documents to the archive with an enhanced version of the Zotero plugin for Firefox. Imagine scholars contributing documents that they've annotated with Zotero and you get one of the great ideas behind this initiative. This version of the plugin will also allow scholars to collaborate on materials on a shared server.

Score one for social scholarship. Score a big one. But where are libraries in all of this? Andy Guess, the author of the article, has an answer. Here is his opening paragraph:

Bypass libraries entirely.

Apparently, we libraries are a) not innovative enough to solve the problem of access, and b) too caught up in copyright issues to be of much use in the age of social scholarship.

Is this a fair comment? On the face of it, not really. First of all, I'm not sure that access and copyright are the main things holding us back. And second, these are issues that concern us and rightly so.

I think the problem goes deeper. I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don't have the group vision. If we did, we'd be doing it.

There seems to be promise in the Open Content Alliance. The OCA is also associated with the Internet Archive and includes content from academic library collections. But here's the heart of the matter, the operative phrase "library collections". We need to be looking beyond the realm of our collections and figuring out our role in the process of scholarship. This is where our profession doesn't seem to get it. This is why an initiative such as Zotero Commons has no library involvement.

Our collections are our bedrock, but the notion - and reality - of collections are changing. The scholarship that makes use of these collections is changing. The Zotero Commons might contribute to that. " “I think it’s really going to have an impact on the way that scholarship is done.” So says the Center director. This may be overly optimistic, maybe not. But when two notable groups get together with this goal in mind, academic libraries should sit up and take notice. We should ask ourselves why we aren't involved. We should wonder why we didn't think of this ourselves. We should ponder what this says about us, and our role - and our concept of our role - on campus.

Bypass libraries entirely. It's so disheartening to read this.

Last summer, the management of my university's dorm network was outsourced to a third party ISP. This has placed the dorms outside of the university's IP address range. For the first time ever, more than 6,000 students living in the dorms have been required to authenticate themselves through EZproxy to access research materials licensed by the library. As a result, the library received this approximate number of complaints:

If you selected "d", you pass the quiz and get an A in Modern Reality Librarianship.

So here's the story. We in my library had a hazy notion that the management of the dorm network had been outsourced. But we didn't connect this with the fact - not at all inevitable - that the IP range had moved off of the campus network. So, for the last four months, and unknown to any of us, EZproxy logins from the dorms have been required.

I got wind of this last week when a colleague asked me to help him solve a username/password problem for a student who lived in the dorms. My colleague and I were puzzled about why this was an issue in the first place. If the student was on campus, no login should be required. The student was using a wireless laptop, so at first we thought this might be a wireless issue.

I investigated. Within a few hours, I learned about the new IP range for the dorms.

This brings to mind two interesting questions.

1. Why didn't a single student complain to anyone in the library?

I can only speculate.

Students aren't shy about registering complaints. And, as I said, this particular one has never once come up. We've got three libraries and a multitude of public services points. Besides visiting us in person, students can e-mail us, IM us, and call us up. But there has been utter silence on this issue.

As an experiment, I came right out and asked a student why it didn't bother him that he could get to our resources directly last year, but this year he had to log in. He shrugged and said it was no big deal - entering his credentials was nothing.

I've got to think that the culture of the university and of the wider Web has engendered this point of view. On campus Web spaces, students are required to log into their e-mail accounts, WebCT, MyUAlbany (to register for courses, etc.), the campus wireless network, the ERes electronic reserves system, our ILLiad interlibrary loan site, and our catalog's My Minerva Account. On the wider Web, there are all sorts of sites that require logins in order to use their services. (This reminds me of the amusing Useless Account site that calls attention to this very thing.) What's the big deal if one more login is required? This probably passed pretty much unnoticed.

But one of my colleagues said to me yesterday, "Students should always question this!" They should never blindly accept that they need to hand over their credentials.

On the other hand, we caution students about security issues. We encourage them to understand that privacy is an important factor in their lives on the Web. They should pay attention to it. Logging in to restricted sites is not only expected, but desirable. When they log in to campus Web spaces, we're protecting their privacy and adhering to copyright law. These are good things. Why should we expect them to understand the rules of license agreements and network access technologies?

2. Despite the lack of complaints, should I volunteer to incorporate the new IP range into EZproxy so that dorm students won't have to log in?

I love this question. Too often, I think, we tell ourselves we'll offer services based on user need. And our users - students in the dorms - obviously don't need not to log in. They don't care. Really, they don't. They've proven this.

Maybe our students don't care, but I'm not about to stand by and require them to log in when they're not only affiliated with us, but are also living right on campus. It's a matter of principle, not need or expectation or complaint or even request. In short, it's a professional responsibility to fix this problem.

So I publicized the situation to my colleagues and figured out a solution. My goal was to relieve our Acquisitions Department from having to contact every last vendor about the new IP range, especially since we couldn't guarantee the stability of this range. Thankfully, EZproxy has a nifty feature called AutoLoginIP. This has turned out to be the solution.

So what have I learned? Well, I've learned that students can be tolerant of barriers to access, but maybe for a good reason. I've also confirmed my notion that professionals shouldn't wait for surveys or complaints before fixing problems that are eminently solvable and deserved by the community.

I'm sure we've all noticed that many libraries are ahead of their campus communities. For example, they've got their own blog and wiki programs while their campus has none. You can reach the library via IM, but not the campus IT help desk. Libraries are the unit on campus working with RSS feeds, creating Facebook applications, coming out with browser toolbars, and so on. Is this a good thing?

In a way, absolutely yes. It's heartening when libraries take on a leadership role and break new ground on campus. But this should be only part of the story, only step one. Ultimately, I think, there's a significant down side when libraries go it alone. In other words, the ideal 2.0 library in a vacuum is not the ideal 2.0 library.

Let me give an example to explain why. On my campus, the library has its own blog and (forthcoming) wiki program, while the campus is piloting its own. These have become separate, parallel programs. This is not how we in the library wanted it. We believed that the library should collaborate with campus IT to host these platforms. Scholarly communication is our realm, and we felt that we had a logical role to play in fostering, guiding, and empowering faculty and students to use the tools of the trade. We made various attempts, both formal and informal, to place the library at the center of these activities. Much to our regret, we failed. We got mixed messages: either campus administration didn't understand the importance of these platforms, or they wanted campus IT to host these platforms without our influence. Take your pick. In either case, the end result was a disjunction between the library and the campus. This was really disappointing.

Sure, there are advantages when libraries host their own projects. These include independence, control, relative lack of red tape, and implementation of their vision. Having experienced these benefits, I have lots of sympathy for this point of view. And certain things make sense for the library to do on its own.

When collaboration occurs these days, it isn't always for the right reason. For example, a number of libraries are worrying about their Web sites (as they should). Should they conform to the campus design template? Should they join up with the campus content management system? Should they let campus PR determine content elements on their sites?

Compared to the substantive issues we're facing, these issues are petty. They have little or nothing to do with serving users, and absolutely nothing to do with moving campus Web spaces into the next generation. I don't mean to imply that we can avoid these issues. We live in current times, and politics are politics. But someday, we'll look back on these tussles and realize that they were a waste of time.

Farther on down the line, both the campus and the library will be transforming themselves to deal with the revolution in the social Web in general, and social scholarship in particular. Trust me: sooner or later, these issues will be at the forefront of our concerns.

Librarians should be preparing for this now. Assuming that we've educated ourselves aggressively (major assumption), we should be carving out a plan. We should be identifying and making contact with scholars on our campuses who are early adopters. We need to be exploring how we can learn from and support these individuals. They'll have ideas, we'll have ideas. We need to be working together to forge the library's role in a scholarly world that will be changing our professional culture in the next decade.

We need to be working, relentlessly, with campus adminstration and IT units to convince them that our role in scholarly communication is real, practical, and potent. We need to demonstrate that we are more than just interested parties. Do they want to discuss the future of scholarship in the socially networked world? Do they want to collaborate with us in hosting social platforms for pedagogy and research? Do they want to put their heads together with us to build meaningful, participatory online communities for our users? Do they want to work with us to optimize the creative use of these platforms? Do they want our help in devising a plan for preserving the content produced in these environments? These are just a few of the questions we need to be asking.

The library and the campus might go their separate ways, and both be proud of their accomplishments. But I don't think this can go on much longer, not without too much lost opportunity.

The report is packed with facts and figures that confirm what most of us already know: that the social Web is big. Some of these facts are quite interesting - read the report and take your pick. Some are trivial, if not silly. Did you know that U.S. library directors are far less likely than the general public to identify their sexual preferences on social networking sites? A little too much information...

As I was reading through this extensive report, something felt like it was missing. I finally figured out what it was: OCLC doesn't use the term "2.0" anywhere. Not Web 2.0, Library 2.0 or just plain 2.0. Nada.

Sure, you can search the report and find mention of these terms. The terms trip off the tongues of the professionals in their conversations. They appear in the title of featured Web sites and in items in the bibliography. Both Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 are definited in the glossary. But in the body of the report, in OCLC's text, 2.0 and all of its variants are conspicuously absent.

Why? If the non-appearance of the term was inadvertent, somebody please tell me. I'll be glad to hear it - though disappointed by the oversight.

I hardly need to point out that 2.0 terminology is showing up all over the place, within and beyond our profession, in books, articles, Web sites, blog postings, teaching modules, conferences, conversations, you name it. So what is it with OCLC? I'd rather not think that their action, or inaction, is indicative of the library world's resistance to getting with it. OCLC is positioning itself to be our global innovator and standard-bearer. So why the missing terminology? "The next generation Web," and "the social Web" appear in the report, but not Web 2.0 and certainly not Library 2.0.

Maybe this shouldn't be bothering me. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. At the very least, let's say that I'm curious. I'm one of those people who believe that labels are important. No, they're not substitutes for understanding or action. But they can help to gather concepts into an identifiable unit. They can be a shortcut to certain assumptions, more or less agreed upon. When a term comes into common use, and you refer to it, you signal that you get it. And there's more: someone please explain to me how the OCLC report is not about Web 2.0 or Library 2.0.

The report might have tipped its hat to 2.0 terminology by including even this. My additional text is in italics.

I would have liked to see this.

If you're known as someone who's far out there on issues, you generate conflicting reactions. Obviously they're not all positive. I've had clear sailing on certain ideas - blogs and wikis come to mind. I've also had my hands slapped - an example is a committee-produced Web site strategic plan that I lead authored that was attacked from all sides.

It goes without saying that you've got to get out there and hustle if you want to advance your ideas. You've got to stick your neck out. But when? Is timing everything? Even after all these years, I'm not sure.

Here's one example:

Back when Google Scholar first came out, I recognized that it was a Google property and therefore students would use it. It included content from many of the e-journals we licensed, and had the potential to become a useful federated search tool. With an ever-increasing off-campus user base, I reasoned that I should proxy the site and add it to our heavily-used list of Databses & Indexes. Once proxied, off-campus users would have access to the content the library had paid for. I got permission from my supervisor to add the title.

Big mistake. When one of our public services groups got wind of this, the group told me to remove Google Scholar from the list. The reasoning: Google (and presumably any of its properties) is a search engine, not appropriate for our database list. Also, Google Scholar was in beta. Finally, everything we licensed was not included in Google Scholar, so its use would give students a false sense of what they have access to.

I could have argued against each of these points. "Databases" are search engines, too, but just of a different type than Google/Google Scholar, and we've paid for access to content that Google Scholar brings up. Google keeps things in extended beta - in fact, Google Scholar is still in beta. Everything we license appears in none of our individual databases. And I could have pointed to the UT Austin Libraries Web site, which prominently offered on-campus/off-campus links to Google Scholar right on its main page.

But I kept quiet, and simply removed the title. It's clear I was outnumbered and overruled. In such cases, it's best to cooperate.

Now, a few years later, the topic of Google Scholar has come up again. My Action Plan for a 2.0 Library includes a recommendation that my library join the Google Scholar Library Links program. (Hope springs eternal!) A couple of weeks ago, the idea got administrative approval. (Yes!) Also, I've just learned that some of our user education librarians are now teaching Google Scholar. They've been faced with explaining the on-campus/off-campus access dichotomy since the library doesn't offer a proxied link. I've offered such a link as a solution. We'll see what happens.

I'm not sure if my earlier attempt to push Google Scholar has had any effect on the new situation. If nothing else, it raised the issue in my own mind so that I could bring it up again at a later time. Nowadays, the librarians are more aware and accepting of usage patterns that start with Google. I was ahead of my time then, more of my time now.

I honestly don't know how to judge the best time to make a proposal. There are certain guidelines I could suggest, based on various local factors. I could recommend that you get the lay of the land, prepare good documentation, create a propotype if you can, do an in-service session on the topic, cultivate allies, go through the proper channels (or, on the contrary, first invest in skunk works). Any of these things would probably be helpful at least some of the time.

But sometimes you can over-analyze things and get them wrong. At one time or another, I've broken any rule I could come up with and ended out fine. I've been surprised either way - getting things through that I thought had little chance, and getting blocked on seemingly easy things. The risk of repeatedly being "out there" is burnout, and getting burned. You take your chances and play the odds. It's an adventure.

"What librarians can do" was the topic of my last handful of slides. My final three bullet points were these:

• Dialog with publishers
• Ask publishers to host publishing models that support social scholarship
• Ask publishers to do R&D – cooperatively with other publishers and academic institutions

The first two points are fairly obvious, given my view of things. They're an important lead-uip to the third and last point, the one I want to address.

What might be the ideal publishing platform for social scholarship? I assume this will always be a moving target as our ideas develop about what might work well and as our experiments shape our preferences. The basis of social scholarship, with its roots in author and reader participation, will drive the platform. I predict that social publishing platforms will be as common as the hands-off platforms that currently predominate. But getting there from here will be an extremely difficult challenge.

Let's leave aside the general lack of readiness on the part of commercial scholarly publishers to move in this direction. At Charleston, for example, I sensed a combination of business as usual along with an anxious background sense that things need to change. For argument's sake, let's say that, little by little, publishers agree that their online platforms need to reflect the tenets and practices of social scholarship. How will they go about entering this space en masse?

I've always been a proponent of scalability. So I honestly don't see how publishers can each, on their own, do the work of researching, developing, testing, deploying, maintaining, and enhancing social publishing platforms. The time is ripe for collaboration.

Think of it. Publishers that maintain online platforms all have a stake (once they admit it) in developing modern platforms to meet the evolving needs - if not demands - of their customers. These platforms will be far more complex than what they offer now. Cooperative R&D makes sense in a fast-moving environment that requires fundamental changes in what these publishers do online. Without partnerships, and without sufficient resources, individual publishers run the risk of falling far behind. And the industry as a whole risks becoming marginalized as the publishing platform of choice. To put it very simply, 1.0 publishing platforms in an emerging 2.0 scholarly world is untenable.

I've been thinking about the role of university presses in taking up the slack. It's an interesting thought. Universities have infrastructure, software developers, and scholars. This could be a potent brew.

It isn't unusual for businesses to partner with each other. And it's far from unusual for businesses to pay attention to the input of their customers - this is called survival.

Whatever develops needs to do so in collaboration with scholars who are experimenting with social scholarship. There's a new generation of scholars who will make up the next generation of customers. If publishers fail this up-and-coming generation, these scholars will search out alternative publishing models. Pre and post-print repositories, wikis, the networked book and the like, are only the beginning. It's in the interest of scholarly publishers to collaborate on developing new kinds of platforms. If they put their best minds together, everyone has the potential to benefit.

I'm impressed when someone who works in scholarly publishing opens his mind to these issues. These are issues that will change the face of the business in the next 10-15 years - I'm in agreement with Michael Jensen on this point. Not only is Leigh thinking about these things, but he wants to share his ideas with an audience at Charleston. So I'm especially glad to be collaborating with him to give a librarian's perspective on this topic.

I'll be speaking on "The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship." You can take a look at my PowerPoint slides on SlideShare. SlideShare didn't do a perfect job of reproducing my slides, but it's good enough.

One big advantage of presenting at the Charleston Conference is the opportunity to dialog with scholarly publishers. Publishers make a point of attending the talks. This is something that distinguishes this conference from others at which I've spoken. And this is such an important time for academic librarians and publishers to be talking to each other.

Besides, do I ever love Charleston, the city. It's an architecture-lover's dream.

There's one sour note. I'm disappointed that the South Carolina Democratic party rejected Charleston native Stephen Colbert's bid to be on the presidential primary ballot. But hey, you can't have everything.

This brings me to information literacy. Let me say right up front that I'm not an instruction librarian. Over the years I've taught in a variety of contexts - a graduate course, guest lectures, drop-in sessions - but I haven't made a systematic study of information literacy as practiced by librarians. I'm no expert. But I'm aware of general practices. And lately I've been wondering about information literacy as it relates to social scholarship.

I've blogged about social scholarship often enough, for example in Social Scholarship on the Rise, which proposes fourteen characteristics of a social scholar; and The Metrics of Social Scholarship. So I won't repeat this material here except to say this: there is a variety of practices, platforms, venues and metrics that make up scholarly discourse in the networked social world. These options, I believe, will become dominant in the next decade. The question is, how should information literacy approach these issues now?

Remember those Web pages about evaluating Web sites? This has been a staple of instruction, and I've done my part. Eleven years ago, I put together a brief advisory page with a colleague who is head of our instruction program here. I look at this now and wax nostalgic about the early days of the Web. This page has 1996 written all over it. I'm especially struck by the statement that Web sites are rarely refereed or reviewed, as are scholarly journals and books. And then there's admonition to look for evidence of bias.

This sounds to me so quaint. As social scholarship evolves, bias is all the rage. We're entering an era of what I like to think of as "authoritative bias."

In this context, bias consists of a number of things, including blog postings, comments, forum conversations, ratings, rankings, annotations, bookmarks, tags, etc. In the networked social world, this is combined with the metrics of use. How all this activity becomes authoritative is summarized by what Michael Jensen calls Authority 3.0. It's a fascinating concept, and it's something that has the potential to change the face of scholarly publishing.

Out of context, you could say that blog postings, comments, annotations, discussions, ratings, and so on are representative of bias and therefore have no part to play in scholarly discourse. But this notion is being turned on its head as scholars make use of networked social tools to expand the scholarly process. This expansion makes scholarship more open, participatory, conversational and democratic. In other words, I wouldn't want to see an updated page about evaluating Web resources that presents social tools as monolithically biased phenomena that offer nothing more than personal opinion that has no place in the scholarly endeavor. In fact, Authority 3.0 has the potential to become an integral part of scholarship. I'd like to see this acknowledged in information literacy training.

We can no longer be content to train students to understand the difference between peer-revewed journals and popular magazines, to appreciate the value of books, newspapers and reference sources, and to understand how to evaluate garden variety Web sites.

We're on the cusp of profound changes in the scholarly process. The evolving nature of publishing, scholarly conversation and peer review is rich fodder for our students. This makes the work of forward-thinking instruction librarians challenging, but not impossible. These librarians can, among other things:

• Make students aware of the emergence of social scholarship.
• Teach students about Authority 3.0 - or whatever you want to call it. Alert them to the expanding world of scholarly communication.
• In conjuction with this, abandon of the notion that there is a clear distinction between traditional peer-reviewed authority and authority derived from social scholarship. To put this another way, introduce the notion that there are emerging metrics of authority that can be derived from social scholarship.
• Use social tools (blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, etc.) as part of the research process in their courses.
• Assign readings from authoritative blogs in the research areas students are asked to explore.
• Practice social scholarship, and show these activities as examples of what's on the horizon.
• Incorporate this new material in tutorials on their library's Web site.

Authoritative bias is messy. It's not as clear-cut as peer review vs. popular publishing. Its metrics have yet to be figured out. But the neat little world of beware-of-bias is fast disappearing. Information literacy needs to acknowledge this, and train students to watch for the train coming around the bend.

How do you keep such people? Can you? I think this has been blogged about by others, but I've got my own take on the matter.

When I talk about techies, I'm referring to non-librarian professional staff. Systems librarians are a different breed, because they've got their master's degrees and most have already made a commitment to employment in a library setting. It's a greater challenge to consider tech staff - the systems administrators, programmers, database administrators, Webmasters and the like - who are not librarians.

I could write about the things we might do to attract and keep such people, including:

• giving them reasonable projects, and a reasonable number of them, within reasonable time frames
• not bogging down projects with red tape, extended discussions, layers of approval, delays
• sufficiently prioritizing and funding their projects
• encouraging them to innovate
• giving them room to grow
• funding training opportunities
• maintaining or growing the staffing levels in their department so that workloads are reasonable
• giving them a reasonable infrastructure to work with
• keeping meetings to a minimum and letting them do their work
• giving them promotional opportunities
• showing appreciation for their work
• respecting their knowledge and skills
• paying them as well as you can

And so on. This sounds like a good situation for anyone, doesn't it? In fact, it sounds almost too good to be true. I notice the number of times the word "reasonable" cropped up. I've seen enough over the years so that this word is foremost on my mind.

We need to earn good staff of all kinds, including techies. They sell themselves to us, but we also need to sell ourselves to them. What is it, exactly, about libraries that might be attractive to a techie? Most talented techies can go into the business world and probably make more money than we can afford. So there's something about the non-profit world, the service world, of an academic library that's attractive. Can we leverage these things?

To be sure, the service aspect of our work is a big selling point for those who are attracted to such a thing. Also, libraries are known as being (generally) more humane than the rough and tumble business world. Our previous sys admin came from a dot-com, and often remarked that "being loved" on the job was a pleasant contrast to his previous experiences. This was great to hear. In certain academic library settings, professional staff can get permanent appointment. This is a plus for anyone looking for employment stability.

Sometimes I wonder if libraries really can keep the kind of techies we need. A highly skilled, innovative (often young) person who's technically adept may not want to stay in an often slow-moving, inhibiting environment. Often they come up against fear of change, at the same time that they're raring to go with something new. It's a tough act. If you combine this with missing a lot of the factors I listed above, you've got trouble.

This may be heresy, but I don't necessarily expect great techie staff to hang around the same library for years. I'm on a search committee now for a new sys admin, and we recently debated whether to ask this question of the candidates: "Where to you see yourself in five years?" I've always disliked this question, and especially in the context of this position. The candidate will probably tell us something we want to hear. But if a candidate says he wants to migrate to the business world in five years, should that stop us from hiring him even if he has a number of attractive virtues and strengths? Do we imagine that there's something inherently wonderful about us that would keep this person here? Have we even attempted to figure out what this might be?

If we can get a few fantastic years out of someone, we should be grateful. For me, this is the bottom line. At the same time, this shouldn't necessarily stop us from trying to keep good people around. But we should recognize that this takes a certain amount of soul-searching and commitment on our part.