Momentum for Open Access

Inside Higher Ed:

Last year, a proposal in Congress to require all federally supported research to be placed online, freely available, attracted considerable attention and debate — and ultimately stalled.

This year, a measure that is narrower — it would apply only to research supported by the National Institutes of Health — appears within reach of passage. ...

While supporters of the “open access” movement continue to want a similar provision to apply to all federally supported research, they view the prospect of a win on NIH-supported research as a significant breakthrough. ...Passing the NIH bill would show that this is “sound and prudent public policy” and that “the sky won’t fall.”

But Patricia S. Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said that her group’s opposition to the legislation was not lessened at all by its being limited this year to the NIH. Large publishers will be fine, but she predicted that the bill could eventually kill some small, nonprofit publishers that play key roles in advancing research. “It’s the law of unintended consequences and to us that’s very sad,” Schroeder said.

The open access movement comes from a combination of philosophical and economic views. Proponents argue that since the federal government pays for much of the research that ends up in journals, and colleges and universities support that research by hiring faculty members and creating laboratories, it is unfair for the results of that research to be available only to those who can afford high subscription fees for journals.

The movement has taken off in recent years at a time when libraries have felt intense budget pressure as the Web seemingly made it possible to share information at minimal cost. ...

C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success

New York Times: By Harriet Rubin

“My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,” Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.”

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. ...Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private. ...If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors...”

C.E.O. libraries typically lack a Dewey Decimal or even org-chart order. “My books are organized by topic and interest but in a manner that would make a librarian weep,” Mr. Moritz said. Is there something “Da Vinci Code”-like about mixing books up in an otherwise ordered life?...

It took Dee Hock, father of the credit card and founder of Visa, a thousand books to find The One. Mr. Hock walked away from business life in 1984 and looked back only from his library’s walls. He built a dream 2,000-square-foot wing for his books in a pink stucco mansion atop a hill in Pescadero, Calif. He sat among the great philosophers and the novelists of Western life like Steinbeck and Stegner and dreamed up a word for what Visa is: “chaordic” — complex systems that blend order and chaos.

In his library, Mr. Hock found the book that contained the thoughts of all of them. Visitors can see opened on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam’s “Rubáiyát,” the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune.

I'm not sure the headline writer got this article right.

I do wonder how W files his book.

Dewey? At This Library With a Very Different Outlook, They Don’t

New York Times: By SARAH N. LYNCH and EUGENE MULERO

GILBERT, Ariz. — Trying to build popularity, many public libraries across the country have been looking more like big chain bookstores, offering comfortable easy chairs, coffee bars and displays of the latest best sellers.

But the new library in this growing Phoenix suburb has gone a step further. It is one of the first in the nation to have abandoned the Dewey Decimal System of classifying books, in favor of an approach similar to that at Barnes & Noble, say, where books are shelved in “neighborhoods” based on subject matter.

It was Harry Courtright, director of the 15-branch Maricopa County Library District, who came up with the idea of a Dewey-less library. The plan took root two years ago after annual surveys of the district’s constituency found that most people came to browse, without a specific title in mind. ...

So at the 24,000-square-foot Perry Branch, there is not a hint of a card catalog. (Mr. Courtright says most people do not know what the numbers me

an anyway.) Visitors may instead search for books using an automated computer system, which classifies them by subject and author. ...

And while even chain bookstores still put out classics like “Jane Eyre,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Moby Dick” for summer display, at Perry such books have taken a back seat to Paris Hilton’s “Confessions of an Heiress,” a children’s book by the New York Yankee catcher Jorge Posada and Chris Gardner’s “Pursuit of Happyness.” ...

But the attraction is hardly universal. On Web sites where librarians frequently post, the abandonment of Dewey has not been welcome. One blogger titled her entry “Heresy!” Another called the Perry Branch’s approach “idiotic.”...

Ms. Mitchell also said she could not recall an earlier instance of an American public library’s totally abandoning Dewey or the Library of Congress system since she became editor of Dewey in 1993. Of Mr. Courtright, she said gently: “Perhaps he knows his library’s clientele and he’s meeting their needs. Libraries are always experimenting to meet the needs of its patrons.”

Her assessment, though, understates his goals. Throughout the recent annual convention of the American Library Association, in Washington, Mr. Courtright and 16 of his employees paraded around wearing and distributing eye-catching badges that bore the word “Dewey” encircled in red with a slash across the middle.

Love Your Librarian: Librarians Find a Place in a 'Web 2.0' World

The Chronicle:

With the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the various ventures that fall under the big tent of Web 2.0, it would be easy for researchers to feel that they’ve entered the era of do-it-yourself scholarly searching. But there are chinks in the armor of even the most sophisticated search engines and folksonomies, writes Thomas Mann, author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research. ...

But only a human guide or a classification system controlled by librarians can effectively sort the wheat from the chaff, Mr. Mann writes. Google “hides the existence and the extent of relevant sources on most topics” by “burying the good sources that it does find within massive and incomprehensible retrievals,” he says.

Mr. Mann is not an anti-technology activist: He argues that much of the Web is well suited to the “inexpensive indexing methods” used by Google and Web aggregators. But academic work is still grounded in books, not Web sites, and his essay is a reminder that scholars still benefit from librarians’ ability to organize those books in a fashion that rigorous researchers will find useful.

On the Internet and the Embrace of Miscellanea

The Chronicle:

David Weinberger is perhaps best known as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a document, written in 1999, that urges businesses to treat the Web as a “global conversation.” Now Mr. Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says it’s time to shed “the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.”

In Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, a new book published last month, Mr. Weinberger argues that the Internet breaks down information so that people can reorganize it as they see fit. “Lots of people have seen lots of ways in which things are related, and we can express that on the Web,” says the author in an interview with the blog 10 Zen Monkeys. “We don’t have to minimize it.”

When a librarian files a book, he or she is forced to choose just one shelf through which to categorize the volume. “That’s not a natural restriction,” says Mr. Weinberger. The beauty of the Internet, he argues, is that physical space no longer dictates how detailed categorization and organization can become. —Brock Read

I agree with the concept (as any reader of this blog and its highly idosyncratic index would recognize immediately), but my librarian spouse would cause me harm if I didn't include the following comment, quickly posted to The Chronicle site:

The point about filing a book in only one spot is correct, but it is only part of the story. For years libraries have assigned multiple subject headings, author names, and secondary titles to catalog records. These additional access points enable a catalog user to find a book or other library resource in many different ways. The Internet clearly opens up access to library materials, but the basic concepts have been there all along.

A ringing call for less civility, more vigorous argument?

My wife is an academic librarian, much involved in web discourse (and generally conflict-averse). Wonder what she will think of this piece?
From Inside Higher Ed:
Good at Reviewing Books But Not Each Other
By Steven J. Bell

Perhaps what the library profession needs to do, if it wants to be taken seriously as a science, is to realize that we need to be accepting of rigorous discourse. We need to learn that there’s something special about it, and that we do a disservice to ourselves and our profession when we fail to do all we can to encourage it. Despite the chill factor that has descended on the library profession there may be some hope. We need to look at how other disciplines stimulate and support discourse. At our conferences and through online communities we need to engage in discussions about how to encourage discourse and appropriate ways in which to engage. We need to hear from scholars in other disciplines with experience in discourse so that we can better understand how to inspire ourselves and our colleagues to be both constructively critical and accepting of criticism. We need to focus on the content, and resist the temptation to make it about personalities.