librarianship

Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age

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[Professorial Lecture series post eight]

“Digital scholarship is the use of digital evidence and method, digital authoring, digital publishing, digital curation and preservation, and digital use and reuse of scholarship” – Abby Smith Rumsey.

Digital Scholarship include activities such as writing, research, and communications that take advantage of technologies in the digital world. While digital scholarship might be found everywhere from Twitter to Tumblr to WordPress, it most frequently centers around the development of scholarly works. I can say with a high level of confidence that everyone reading this post has used some form digital scholarship within the past 48 hours. If you don’t think you have. Look at what you are reading.

One can argue that any young scholar entering our profession cannot hope for a successful career without embracing digital technologies and engaging in digital scholarship. Digital scholarship is opening up a world in which in more forms of communication that use richer media, permitting easier, faster and deeper interpretation of the information.

Data (https://www.flickr.com/photos/neeravbhatt/)

The ability to generate and analyze unprecedented amounts of data has significantly changed many areas of scientific research. Such data sets are becoming a significant part of the scholarly record and are being published in repositories such as The Dataverse Network so that scholars can use, find and manage them as easily as journal articles and books.

The use of interactive diagrams or multimedia such as images and videos that show procedures, sound recordings, presentational materials, and other forms of media still on the horizon can help facilitate the understanding of complex concepts. Multimedia can be used so that data can be observed in action rather than simply reported. In this sense digital scholarship is more than just using information and communication technologies to research, teach and collaborate. When taken together, the current networked environment has opened up exciting opportunities for new kinds of data-and information-intensive, distributed, collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship.

Digital scholarship requires us to yet again to come up with new metrics in an attempt to more fully capture the influence of scholarly work. For instance, the Public Library of Science publishes a variety of metrics for each of their publications including article usage statistics (page views), comments, and blog posts citing published articles. Such metrics may help scholars gain a firm understanding of the impact of their scholarship and outreach, provide transparency to the research community and allow richer depictions of a scholar’s influence and impact.

Digital scholarship can only have meaning if it also represents a break in scholarship practices brought about through the possibilities enabled in new technologies. A 2012 survey by Ithaka S&R notes that even though “digital practices may influence these scholars’ work in a variety of ways,” few scholars see “the value of integrating digital practices into their work as a deliberate activity.” Some scholars commented that using digital methods would simply “not be worth the time. ” Even about one-third of the respondents stated that they do not know “how to effectively integrate digital research activities and methodologies” into their research and scholarship and have no desire to learn.

As Martin Weller notes in the Digital Scholar:

“Academic research is in a strange position where new entrants (researchers) are encouraged to be conservative while the reinterpretation of practice and exploration is left to established practitioners… This should be an area of concern for academia if its established practice is reducing the effectiveness of one of its most valuable inputs, namely the new researcher.”

[ Next: Scholarly Communication: The Future ]

Changing Nature of Scholarly Communication

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[Professorial Lecture series post three]

The Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) defines scholarly communications as:

In the stacks (flickr.com/photos/eclecticlibrarian)

“the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs.”

Without a doubt, scholarly communication is a cornerstone of academia. Yet there is no one-size-fits-all definition for scholarly communication due to differences in the various disciplines.

Traditionally, scholarly communication in librarianship has involved the use of mediums such as books, journals, and formal presentations. As librarian-scholars, we recognize and continue to place importance on peer-reviewed publications primary formal was to disseminate of new knowledge. Such publications provide a dated snapshot of  the authors’ thoughts at that moment in time and becomes a part of a more permanent scholarly record.

Yet, the past decade has created new dilemmas for our profession as evidenced by the emergence of new ideas about the practice of scholarly communications,  issues around the crisis in journal publishing and the challenges within the peer-review system. As a disciple we have embraced open access policies and retaining rights to our scholarship. The change in scholarly communication that we have been witnessing has been facilitated by the digital technology evolution.

The Internet has expanded the range of possibilities for scholarly discourse by changing both the means of distributing ideas and the process of evaluating scholarship. The network has lead to the development of new tools which facilitate interaction between authors, readers, or between authors and readers.

As a member of faculty of The Ohio State University Libraries I am pleased to say that we have been at the forefront of these changes, advocating for alternative forms of scholarly communications in librarianship. Yet, deciding which tools and work best to communicate and scholarship in the discipline of librarianship has not been a simple transition. How we have evolved and adapted our scholarly communication has in part been documented by the various dilemmas face throughout my career at Ohio State.

[Next: A Gopher on the Reference Desk]

The Role of an Emerging Technologies Librarian

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The central purpose of a library is to provide access to information. Next to salaries, the largest expenditure that a library makes is on the acquisition and licensing of resources which are being made avaialble almost exclusively online. With such an investment in resources, we are talking tens of millions of dollars in academia, libraries have had to continuously innovate services in order to maximize access to information in order to realize a return on its investment.

It has become increasingly critical that libraries investigate and integrate emerging technologies and use them creatively to create new services to meet their customers changing information seeking needs and behaviors. To do this, libraries need to anticipate the technologies that customers will be using in the future to access resources that they want, when they want it, and how they want it.

The role of an emerging technologies librarian is to serve as a leader in exploration, identification, implementation, and evaluation of new technologies and their use in the library seting. They then adapt the technologies so that they become innovative solutions within the library setting which support of evolving reference, instruction, and access services models. In addition to customer services, emerging technologies can also have a significant impact on creating staff workflow efficiencies and facilitating their interactions with customers.

An emerging technology is simply any new advancement or innovation in technology. It can be hardware or software-based technology, or a combination of both. (Many librarians have taken to using Web 2.0 to label many such technologies. I dislike this term but use it here to make a connection with those that use it.)

Examples of emerging technologies that I have implemented in the past have included social media, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, bookmarking systems, instant messaging and chat, browser plug-ins, cloud computing systems and services such as online storage, and bibliographic management systems. However, not all the technologies that are investigated can, or should, be implemented. Some technologies investigated  are not sustainable or discarded since they are disrupted by even newer technologies. For example Radio Frequency Identification  (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC) or Second Life. (the list can go on and on: Cha-Cha, knol, Netbooks, Quora)

An emerging technologies librarian spends a good deal of identifying and experimenting in order to better understand how a system/service works. This is an important part of the process since most times an emerging technology is created for use by another discipline or context. By tearing technologies down to see how they work, many times virtually by spending hours online researching a technology, the emerging technologies librarian gains a better understanding of how it could be modified and applied in the context of services offered by a library.

Once a technology is identified, an emerging technologies librarian must work with colleagues to create buy-in and to implement the technology solution. The success of an implementation is often dependent on librarians and library staff learning about and understanding how to utilize, assist, and interact with customers using these technologies. As a result, another role the emerging technologies librarian plays is as a teacher who demonstrates and encourages others to participate in purposeful play, using formal or self-guided approaches.

The emerging technology librarian must also spend time educating themselves as to what other libraries are doing. While paying attention to what other libraries are doing is an important part of this, one needs to spend a good deal of time looking outside the discipline to spot technology trends that lead to their implementation as innovative library services.