technology

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 ]

Scholarly Communication and the Social Network

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[Professorial Lecture series post seven]

Networked technologies like the Internet and mobile devices connect people to both information and each other, fundamentally changing how we share and receive information. These connective technologies have enriched the information environment and has shaped our ability to navigate and interact with information flows, to develop and maintain new social networks, to create and share content, and to engage in customized and personalized ways.

20110604-NodeXL-Twitter-MobileMM11 graph (flickr.com/photos/marc_smith)

Just as the Internet has created new opportunities for libraries to provide innovative public services, emerging social communications tools changed the nature of scholarly dialog, who is sharing knowledge and how it is being communicated.

For scholar-librarians the social network provides a more open, transparent and participatory dialog by providing an opportunity for all librarians to make their voices heard and participate in the conversation. The social network allows scholars to communicate with each other internationally in real time, to target specific communities, access others’ research, and to attract more citations to their own works.

The social network has become a key tool for sharing and disseminating my ideas. Previously, as a scholar, if I wanted to communicate an idea or a research finding, my choices were limited to a journal article, a conference presentation, or a book or chapter. With the social network, I can write a blog post to get an immediate reaction to a concept that be worked into a conference presentation, shared through SlideShare and Twitter, and perhaps evolve into a paper that is submitted to a journal.

Conversely, I can reference not only other scholars publications, but their videos, presentations, blog posts, curated collections, and maybe even their social network. All of this combines to create a network that represents the modern scholar. I have also found that participating in the librarian-scholar social network has helped to build my internal academic identity more than my traditional publications.

Since communications on the social network are self-published and do not go through a pre-publication peer-review the dilemma of determining impact for tenure and promotion reviews remained. The available metrics included  the number of time an item was viewed, how many times it was downloaded, or how many times it was embedded in another side are not perfect quality indicators but they do help to determine some level of impact.

Once again, a discussion around social media and other emerging technologies scholarship being explored by myself and Libraries colleagues was occurring, and again, had an impact. The University Libraries tenure and promotion criteria was changed in 2011 by the faculty body to acknowledge such works:

“No single type of publication/creative work is invariably a more significant component of a research program than another. Nevertheless, a body of work, which is cumulative in nature and reflects the highest academic standards, is required.”

Scholarly Communication and the Early Web

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[Professorial Lecture series post six]

Unlike all previous Internet communication tools, the Web allowed librarians to become independent publishers of the very resources which are changing how information and knowledge is distributed. The Web provided an opportunity to investigate and develop new techniques for teaching, research, publication, and participation in professional service activities.

World Wide Web (flickr.com/photos/bull3t)

Scholarly communities first began using the web to sustain existing models of communication by creating web-based e-journals. An examination of electronic library journals available using the Web in the early 1990’s reviewed that hypertext and multimedia capabilities were not fully utilized. None of the electronic library journals I surveyed in the early 90’s accepted HTML Web documents. Electronic publications requested that manuscripts be sent in plain ASCII text format. Since ASCII eliminates the use of charts, graphs, and images, the resulting Web documents are pure text, lacking even the look and feel of traditional print publications.

The challenge of how online publications were transforming scholarly communications became a hot topic in the traditional literature, with individuals like Clifford Lynch commenting:

“We should recognize that not all these potentials are likely to be attractive to those accustomed to, and comfortable with, a system of scholarly communication based upon refereed print journal”

Still, the availability of hyperlinks to related resources offered academics new ways of working in research and new kinds of academic output. Internet resources referenced in Web documents can be updated as the resources move, change names, or are deleted. Works in progress can be made available for colleagues to comment on content and structure. One of the first groups to take advantage of the flexibility of the technology in their scholarly communication were high energy physicists. The web site xxx.lanl.gov, then hosted by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was groundbreaking at the time and today remains a model for oen scholarlship.

In 1995, I started “Writing for the Web: A Primer for Librarians,” an electronic publication which was been well received by the library community.   I continuously updated the content, adding new sections over a period of 10 years.  This publication not only provided me with a sandbox to experiment with the latest techniques of Web site development. The document itself demonstrated many of the principles I discussed in the document’s navigation, layout, and overall presentation.

Since the Primer was self-published and did not go through a pre-publication peer-review I had to create my own quality indicators to demonstrate the impact for my promotion and tenure review. The review process at the time required that I provided a hard copy of list of sites linking to it at that time including Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, American Library Association, Special Library Association, Medical Library Association, and IFLA. I printed off  comments and suggestions that I received comments as well as feedback from library peers from all over the world on its value.  I printed off  syllabi from where it was being used as required reading or as a reference resource.

Even with all the documentation as to the impact, the tenure and promotion committee commented:

“The academic or scholarly value of a website publication or resource which is heavily used … remains problematic if examined under the light of traditional research and publication criteria”

A new dilemma became how to does a scholar document and communicate the value on a web publication when very often traditional research and publication criteria cannot be applied. A printed version of “Writing for the Web” , which is how I was asked to submit the work for review, lacks all the dynamics elements which make it a useful publication. As a result, an external reviewer reviewing a Web document sent in print form is not reviewing the publication in its native form. It was like requiring a dancer to submit a series of still photos depicting a dance recital, but not a video.

So, even as I explored the emerging forms of scholarship and the dilemma on how they should be assessed, I hedged my bets and authored traditional papers that complemented by web publications. However, a discussion around my online publications and the other web-based scholarship being explored by Libraries colleagues was occurring and did have an impact. The University Libraries tenure and promotion criteria was changed in 2001 by the faculty body to acknowledge such works:

“In the University Libraries, scholarship usually takes the form of a publication, but it can also be evidenced in other ways, e.g., exhibits, public performances, digital resources, papers at professional meetings, etc.”

[Next: Scholarly Communication and the Social Network]

Technology is Like a Fish

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[Professorial Lecture series post five]

“Technology is like a fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes” – Andrew Heller; lead IBM RS6000 team

My Gadget Drawer

The odds are pretty good that every one of you has an old cell phone in a drawer at home, or perhaps even a gadget drawer that looks like the image on the right.  Our house has four. You may may keep old devices just in case something happened to your new one, or maybe you just didn’t know what to do with it. As technologically evolves at an ever-increasing pace the practice of discarding technological devices for shinier models with new and different features has become a part of our lives. As you will see, this applies to scholarly communications as well.

The technology life-cycle begins with invention of a specific technology, continues though a process of continuous improvement, and ends with how the technology is eventually diffused to the end user. The phrase bleeding edge is often used to describe the early adoption of a technology while the laggards are the last to adopt. The Tipping Point is the moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses threshold, tips, and becomes popular and commonplace. Consider just 10 years ago:

Each year, the Gartner group releases it’s technology Hype Cycle.  It is a continuum of where various technologies are in the hype cycle. Like with Gopher, many technologies will become obsolete before they even reach the tipping point. Keeping an eye on what is coming up on the horizon is sometimes more important than knowing the ins and outs of each technology. Many times it is not a single technology but a combination of technologies that when used together become a viable solution.

As Clayton Christensen discussed in his dissertation turned best seller The Innovator’s Dilemma, technologies are either sustaining or disruptive. Sustaining technologies improve a current product performance thorough increased efficiency. Disruptive technologies are often those where the ultimate use or impact is unknown at the time of release. Gopher was a sustaining technology since it really improved upon FTP. While in many ways Mosaic was a sustaining technology it was also disruptive since at the time of release we didn’t fully understand its potential for scholarly communications. In libraries, the online catalog was both sustaining and disruptive. It sustained the classic card catalog structure but disrupted how users could access resources.

The dilemma that the rapidly changing technology landscape at that time presented was trying to identify which emerging technologies could be used to sustain current models of scholarly communication and which technologies would creating disrupting models. Not only how would the technologies be identified, but how could the be used to keep scholarship in the discipline of librarianship relevant in a rapidly changing technology and communications environment.

[Next: Scholarly Communication and the Early Web]

A Gopher on the Reference Desk

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[Professorial Lecture series post four]

When I began my Ohio State career in 1992, the criteria for promotion and tenure at University Libraries was clear and straight forward. There was no dilemma.

“Candidates are expected to produce research/creative work of high quality and scholarly significance. The work is be be widely disseminated through publication and/or presentation.”

To meet this criteria I got to work on identifying my first research topic for my first publication.

At the time, FTP was the tool which was used to distribute documents on the Internet. The leading emerging Internet technology was system developed by the University of Minnesota called Gopher.

Gopher (SUNY Cortland)

Gopher was designed by a team led by Mark P. McCahill as a method for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents on the rapidly growing number of servers on the Internet. It’s text-based hierarchy menu interface was well-suited to the text-oriented computer systems which were common at the time. It joined existing services such as including WAIS, FTP and Usenet. There are still Gopher servers online today (video: The Hidden Internet: Gopher Protocol).

Having explored Gopher I found it a great tool to help facilitate library user access to the resources that began to populate Gopher. So, after exploring and using the system I got to work drafting my first manuscript, entitled A Gopher on the Reference Desk. I submitted for publication in the summer of 1993 and when it was accepted without revision my scholarly career was launched.

However, between the time that I submitted the paper and when in was actually published in 1994, Mosaic happened. While the World Wide Web had been in development for several years, it didn’t become accessible to Windows and Macintosh computers until Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in September 1993.

The dilemma I immediately faced was that for all intents and purposes the already rapidly changing Internet landscape, coupled with the lag time of traditional print publications, turned my paper into a historical piece even before it was published. While many will say that remains a useful scholarly communication since it documents the technology of the day. However, my professional goal was to influence the deployment of new technologies in other libraries.

[Next: Technology is like a Fish]