Reshaping Sharing

Given for the SWITCH Consortium meeting on January 12, 2017.

Transcript

1. Reshaping sharing Dorothea Salo UW-Madison iSchool 12 January 2017 Elena Penkova, “Hands at work” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/126710094@N04/17147767102/ Hi, I’m Dorothea Salo, I teach at the iSchool at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and I’m very glad to be here today among people who share the mission that drew me to librarianship. I have always been in this game—even before I was formally in this game!—to get more knowledge to more people. The work you all do is attached to a vital and honorable mission, and I owe it to you to acknowledge that. So thank you. Thank you for what you do. That said, the OTHER thing that drew me to librarianship, and through librarianship to teaching about information, was my restless, peripatetic personality. I absolutely CANNOT do or learn about or teach about anything without being intensely curious about how it’s changing, and most of the time, intensely desirous of changing it in directions that seem good to me. This is just how I am, it’s ironically one of the few constants in my very restless and peripatetic professional life, and so yes, I came here today to talk about reshaping sharing.
2. emdot, “Austria Today” CC-BY, cropped, https://www.flickr.com/photos/emdot/45246607/ Logan Ingalls, “just the ones I’m getting rid of” CC-BY, https://www.flickr.com/photos/plutor/134329177/ And I want to talk about reshaping two kinds of sharing today. First, sharing in the world of journals, so licensing and Big Deals and I-L-L and document delivery and open access and all that kind of thing. Second, sharing around textbooks, the textbooks our students buy — or increasingly don’t buy—and resell, or not, and share when they can and sometimes even pirate, and isn’t there a better way for both them and us?
3. Clinton Steeds, “Threats” CC-BY, cropped, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cwsteeds/47121729/ But before I dive in I want to say, I’m not one of those annoying and sometimes horrible pundits who uses change as an excuse to threaten and browbeat people, or act all superior to them. With all respect to John, and believe me I understand his frustration, I’m not going to do that clickbaity pundit thing where you’ve been doing it wrong all along and shame on you—who am I to say such a thing? I’m also not here to tell you that the library will be dead in five years if you don’t do this new thing, that is NOT my style. Frankly I don’t think it ought to be anybody’s style.
4. Scott Robinson, “Eye of the Beholder” CC-BY, https://www.flickr.com/photos/clearlyambiguous/21785174/ I don’t have all the answers as I look at all of you today; the answers are in you, not in me. I’m not sure what I’d even do with all the answers if I did have them. But I do think these are interesting times, not that they’re ever not, and I see a lot of good questions for sharing work, worthwhile opportunities—and yes, potential and actual threats—that I want us all to consider how to deal with.
5. mk30, “clay” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/mk30/10095301463/ Because nothing is set in stone! Look, the other thing that irks me about many library pundits is that they see things in the world as happening to us, where all we can do is react, usually defensively. And that’s just—it’s not a true or useful way to look at things. Everything happening around sharing is clay, malleable and shapeable.
6. Bhavesh Khothari, “Potter” CC-BY, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/bhaveshkothari/3851242075/ And I want OUR hands to be hands that are shaping it. Not the only hands, to be sure. But still. Our hands.
7. Tim Green, “Boat” CC-BY, cropped, https://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/12239547795/ So as I was emailing back and forth with Jason and Jennifer about what I’d say here today, I heard a lot of anxiety about serials costs, especially Big Deals. What I want to say about that first is, you’re not alone! You’re not! We’re all in this ugly raggedy boat that nobody wants to be in. So if you’re not tuned into the conversations about all this, I’m saying, they’re there and they’re valuable, so tune in!
8. We feel we are virtually required to provide access to whatever researchers in our local community ask for while restricting access from anyone outside that narrowly-defined community of users. Instead of curators, we’re personal shoppers who moonlight as border guards. Barbara Fister, “The Fix Isn’t In,” Inside Higher Ed 3/3/2016 https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/fix-isnt What is the status quo, really, where are we at on this? I think Barbara Fister of Gustavus Adolphus College did a great job laying it out in Inside Higher Ed: we have to buy what our patrons say they want, and it doesn’t matter who else might want it because it’s our job to keep them out of it. “Instead of curators,” says Barbara, “we’re personal shoppers who moonlight as border guards.” Wow, ouch, I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I got into librarianship to do. Yet I can’t dispute this is what we’re being forced to be. The world I want gets us away from personal shopping and especially from border guarding. That’s a big part of why I want that world, and why I want you to want it.
9. Alan, untitled, CC-BY-SA, cropped, https://www.flickr.com/photos/40586272@N03/14916602134/ And to make matters worse, I have to be the messenger with bad tidings here. I’m sorry, and I’ll take the consequences of bringing bad news. The subscription serials situation for us in this room is not going to get better in the short term or in the medium term. It. Will not. Get better. It WILL get worse. This is not your fault exactly. Even so, you have no way to avoid cancellations, including cancellations of entire Big Deal packages. You do not have enough negotiating power to fix this. The consortia that you belong to do not have enough negotiating power to fix this. Nobody does, okay? I’m sorry. That was very blunt. But I’ve been watching this space for over a decade, teaching about it for more than half a decade, and the evidence is overwhelming and only mounting faster of late. Unfortunately, denial about this among librarians is pretty common too, and I don’t know how to get past that denial except to be blunt. I am here to tell you, you WILL have to cancel more journals and journal packages, it WILL hurt, and denial will only make things worse for you.
10. Well, but maybe interlibrary loan can save us. Or document delivery. Or some of these newfangled one-use licensing deals you see now and then. I’m gonna say, mmmmmmmaybe not. Publishers and aggregators are trying to replace I-L-L with licensing agreements, and they’re not doing that to be nice! So far, it isn’t working out well for libraries. See, the British Library had an international document-delivery I-L-L thing going for libraries and hospitals and similar non-profit outfits that was working pretty great, users loved it, libraries loved it. Who didn’t love it? You tell me, who didn’t love it? *pause* Right. Content owners and vendors hungry for more licensing revenue.
11. Toshiyuki IMAI, “Coffee” CC-BY-SA, https://www.flickr.com/photos/matsuyuki/2161126917/ So the publishers said, okay, British Library, we’re going to replace YOUR REGULAR COFFEE with our dark, sparkling Folger’s crystals— —just making sure everybody’s awake— —so, what they said was, we’re going to replace YOUR regular I-L-L document-delivery service with OUR dark, sparkling licensing deal. Basically, cut it out with the document delivery, licensing will be better for your users, we promise! So… who in this room thinks licensing turned out to be better?
12. From Teresa Hackett, “Licensed to Fail,” http://eifl.net/blogs/licensed-fail, CC-BY Yeah, no, licensing wasn’t better. The headline here pretty much tells the story: titles available way, way DOWN, satisfied requests—and satisfied users—way, way DOWN, refusals way, way up. So we pretty much could have seen this coming. Content owners who make money from selling licenses don’t have a whole lot of incentive to share, or let anybody ELSE share, when they can avoid it. And I mean, this seems obvious to us, right? So this isn’t just a UK thing, not just a Europe thing, it’s a thing right here and right now: library sharing is endangered by content licensing and content licensors. Obvious. Incredibly, incredibly obvious, and something that we need to contest, or sharing will be reshaped in a way nobody wants. But here’s the thing. It’s not obvious to everyone, is it? The reasons behind journal cancellations aren’t obvious to everyone, are they? This stuff isn’t obvious to everyone inside our libraries, even, never mind the faculty, staff, and students that our libraries serve. So that raises a really important question: okay, we’re gonna be stuck with a lot of cancellations…
13. Yarik.OK, “Pottery” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/yarik-ok/7937200432/ … how do we talk about that? How do we teach other people to understand what’s going on in our world, when they don’t have our training and experience? Because that’s shaping the world, isn’t it? Shaping people’s ability to understand what’s going on, predict what it will lead to, and work toward the best outcomes? Yeah. That’s shaping the world. And in this context, it is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY that we shape the narrative here. I’m starting to see case studies of mass cancellations in the library literature and at conferences. There’s stories about big cancellations in the higher-education press, too. There’s been anecdotal stories around for years if not decades. And every single time, what separates a total disaster for the library from a difficult but manageable job is COMMUNICATION WITH FACULTY. So let’s talk about that.
14. Tell them: what you’re about to tell them what you’re telling them what you just told them You can’t read advice on public speaking very long before you run into this truism about structuring a talk. As a speaker, I’m supposed to tell you what I’m about to tell you, *CLICK* tell you what I’m actually telling you, and then *CLICK* tell you what I just told you. I actually think this is terrible advice! I don’t structure my talks this way, at least not intentionally… but. You don’t have to modify this much to turn it into a workable way to communicate with people and even hone their predictive powers.
15. Tell them: what’s about to happen what’s happening what just happened Here’s how you communicate out when an undesirable outcome is pretty much inevitable. First, you tell them what’s about to happen. *CLICK* Then you tell them what’s going on WHILE it’s going on. *CLICK* Then when they storm into your office yelling “WHAT IN THE WORLD JUST HAPPENED?” because they weren’t paying attention, you tell them again… and if you’re really expert at this kind of communication you ALSO tell them that you already told them it was coming. Eventually they start to listen to your predictions.
16. Tell them: what’s about to happen So taking that a piece at a time: Telling people in advance what’s about to happen, especially when it’s something BAD, is something I haven’t often seen academic libraries be good at. Mostly I see academic libraries not even trying! It’s not that we can’t or don’t see things coming—often we do! We just don’t communicate them out. I have some ideas about why that is, though I’m not swearing they’re the whole story.
17. Michael Coghlan, “Just Ignore Him” CC-BY-SA, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/8280946214/in/faves-8511458@N02/ One reason is that nobody listens… or at least we’ve convinced ourselves that nobody’s gonna listen, which, what is that, come on, it’s like conceding defeat before even getting in the game. Now, faculty are busy, faculty are self-important, I get that—I just think that’s actually okay. The strategic thing to do when nobody’s listening is to communicate such that you can prove later on that you communicated. Send the email newsletter. Put the news on your blog. Go talk to the faculty senate. Publish a report on your website. Whatever you need to do so that you can say with a clear conscience “hey, um, we kinda warned you this would happen… you did read it, didn’t you?” And what happens then is, instead of you being the villain because you didn’t warn them, THEY become the villain because THEY weren’t paying attention. And I’ve found that faculty will totally internalize that, you don’t have to be nasty about it, because they’re smart people who think they know everything important that’s happening—I’m telling you, it’s like magic.
18. My favorite example of this is Simon Fraser University, where they just lay it all out there. No panicmongering, no propaganda, no promises, just “hey, here’s the situation and here are the numbers, and if this keeps going, y’all tell US what it’s gonna look like.” Nobody at Simon Fraser, NOBODY, gets to blame ANY access-related problem on poor communication from the library. I think that’s worth something. So, speaking of. Non-disclosure agreements on serials subscription deals. If you’re signing them, try to stop it. If you’re not, don’t start. If you have to change policy to make that possible, do it. Anything that forcibly shuts your mouth about your situation is not good for you.
19. Ray Bouknight, “44/365 ~ Bad News” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/raybouk/8005045965 The other reason libraries don’t always warn everybody—and this reason seems obvious to me, maybe to you too—is that nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. In some circumstances it can be downright scary! I have two suggestions on this point. First, bad news is a lot easier to communicate in advance, when you’re not panicked and you’re not threatened. Like I said, I’ve seen several very well-attended talks about massive Big Deal cancellations. And if somebody’s willing to get up in front of a roomful of people and even TALK about that, it can’t have gone THAT badly, right? So I think it’s significant that every single librarian I’ve seen speak about this has talked about BOTH an advance communication strategy, “hey, we’re gonna be in trouble here real soon, here’s why, here’s what we’re doing” AND an input-gathering phase, “hey, we gotta cancel, here’s your options, pick some.” Whereas when I’ve seen what I think is pretty poor communication about a big cancellation—and I have, though I don’t want to call anybody out in public for it—ask me later if you want to know—what’s going on is that the cancellation is sudden and out-of-the-blue. So library folks are rushed and panicking, because faculty are yelling at them and local media are buzzing around asking lots of awkward questions, and nobody’s had time to think through what to say and how to say it. So getting your story straight in advance is a pretty big deal, I think.
20. Tell them: what’s about to happen A couple other things to think about, as you’re thinking about advance communication: You have to be pretty specific about what’s going to happen, and you have to tie it to something that THEY, whoever “they” are that you’re talking to, actually care about. In the British Library case, you can’t just say “titles available will go down and refusals will go up,” because nobody’s gonna realize what that means and they won’t care. You can say something like “we believe that within the next year, we will be able to put in people’s hands LESS THAN HALF of what they ask for.” Oh. Whoa. Suddenly that looks serious. Even more serious if you can put numbers and faces on it, EIFL goes into some detail about hospitals getting turndowns on medical information and what that means for patients. And you have to be careful about timeframe, too. Look at journals, right? Everybody warned about that, and then everybody else got bored of the warnings because the sky didn’t fall. So, you have to think short-to-medium term on this. If the Bad Thing looks to be any more than three years out, don’t bother talking about it. You just look like Chicken Little.
21. Who’s done advance communication well? Harvard, actually… mostly. I know they’ve been struggling with reorganization the last few years, but this I think was smart. The Faculty Advisory Council to the libraries said pretty bluntly back in twenty-twelve that yeah, Harvard can’t afford serials. And because they’re Harvard, this got picked up pretty widely in academic weblogs and the education trade press, which is great when it happens because then you have even MORE reasons that faculty who haven’t heard about it should have. Funny thing, I haven’t heard of any faculty yelling about serials cancellations at Harvard. How about you? Huh. Maybe this helped. The only thing BAD that Harvard did was putting this notice somewhere it wasn’t archived. I had to grab the text of the notification from a weblog totally unaffiliated with Harvard. Like I said, you really need to be able to PROVE you communicated—don’t let stuff four-oh-four, okay?
22. Tell them: what’s about to happen what’s happening Then you wait until the sky really is starting to fall, and you make sure to tell people it’s falling and get their input on what to do about it. Of course you refer back to what you already told them. Of course you update what you recommend people do to accord with current reality, and to make sure nobody’s coming at you with stuff that’s completely impossible—or that you’ve already actually done. I love faculty who suddenly find out about the serials crisis or I-L-L problems and are all “heeeeeey, I have an idea, how about a bunch of libraries band together to buy stuff and share the cost! I bet that would help!”
23. Starmama, “Sarcasm” CC-BY-SA, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/thestarmama/2746074234/ Are you kidding me?! I know they’re genuinely trying to be helpful as they get to grips with stuff they’ve never thought about before, but how do you not roll your eyes at that? How do you not be sarcastic? “Wow. What an amazing idea that absolutely nobody has ever thought of before, especially not librarians whose whole careers revolve around this stuff. That has totally never been tried anywhere in the history of ever.” I don’t know. Maybe you’re all more patient than I am. I hope so, because this drives me right around the bend.
24. So, yeah, faculty, there seems to be a temptation to make promises to faculty when the serials crisis hits the fan. Promises like, we’ll save “core journals.” Promises like, if you just give us more money the journal problem will go away. I’m here to say, don’t do this. Don’t make promises of any kind, don’t explain your negotiation goals, don’t pretend it’s gonna be okay, just don’t. It doesn’t help and it does hurt. It doesn’t help you in license negotiations, because if the vendor knows you made a promise to faculty, they know they can jack up the price of keeping that promise. It’s business, it’s what they do. It hurts you with faculty because if the result of negotiations isn’t favorable — and I say again, at some point it won’t be — you’ve not only got a collections problem, you’ve got the problem of explaining to faculty why you broke your promise. This is the hole the Jisc consortium in the UK is in right now. They promised some stuff in an Elsevier negotiation that Elsevier didn’t let them come through on, and UK faculty are Not Amused.
25. Tom Hilton, “Shrug”, CC-BY, cropped, https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhilton/16686579989/ What do you do instead? You shrug, say you’ll do your best, but the vendor controls this negotiation, and you leave it at that, okay? Say it over and over again—you don’t control the vendor, you don’t control the vendor, you don’t control the vendor. Your aim, here, of course, is getting faculty riled at the vendor instead of at you. In an ideal world, they’ll not only back you up if you walk away from the table, they’ll actually TELL YOU to walk away. And then you can, without damaging faculty relationships. ‘Cos you need your faculty on your side a lot more than you need a vendor, any vendor.
26. And as it turns out, two European countries are doing this RIGHT NOW, and so far, it seems to be working out okay for them. One is Germany and one is Finland, and they’re both negotiating with the Mighty E itself, Elsevier. This is a press release from a month ago, and Germany is just laying it right out there, no apologies no nothing: no access starting January because Elsevier won’t offer us a deal we can accept. Finland negotiated a one-year extension, so they’re not losing access quite yet, but they’re also laying it out there: if the deal Elsevier offers is garbage, we won’t take it. If all of Germany can do it, if all of Finland can do it, so can you. Not least because you have to, all your other choices are worse. Keep an eye on Perú, their national consortium is in exactly the same hole with Elsevier that Germany and Finland are in, but they’re doing all the things I just said not to do—making promises, begging for more money, not blaming the vendor—and I’ll predict RIGHT NOW that Germany and Finland will come out of this a lot stronger than Perú will. Just y’all wait and see.
27. I also want to mention SUNY-Potsdam, which cancelled their American Chemical Society stuff back in twenty-twelve. Potsdam’s library dean Jenica Rogers has a blog called Attempting Elegance where she explains the whole thing, including how she led up to the crisis point, all the options she presented her faculty actually AT the crisis point, and a later follow-up on how it all went, so you can check it out when you have time. All I really want to lean on about this is once more, that good communication makes bad stuff survivable, yeah? Jenica survived, despite catching some flak from librarians who apparently aren’t going to cancel anything ever and what color is the sky in their world exactly? The library survived. The chemistry department survived. Everybody survived! You can survive bad stuff! We all can! But you have to shape it. You HAVE to shape it.
28. Tell them: what’s about to happen what’s happening what just happened So the reality is, there’s always gonna be some jerks who haven’t been paying attention and thinks that’s everybody’s problem but their own. Them you gotta tell what just happened, with particular reference to how you communicated out but they ignored it. I mean, you can be nice about it, sure. “Golly gosh, we issued a public report two years ago and held meetings in your department last year—how should we keep you in the loop in future?” But the subtext is pretty clear: they weren’t listening and they shoulda been, and here’s how they can keep up-to-date from here on out.
29. From Teresa Hackett, “Licensed to Fail,” http://eifl.net/blogs/licensed-fail, CC-BY And I want to return to the British Library licensing fiasco for a moment, actually, because their post-fiasco communication is really interesting. See, I don’t know why the British Library went for that licensing deal. There are a few possibilities. One, they just didn’t see the fiasco coming—which, come ON, I don’t believe that! I mean, do you? Two, they were under a lot of pressure from vendors, which I completely believe, we’ve all been there. Three, somebody high up who didn’t really understand what was going on fell for a vendor pitch and forced the library into this bad deal. Which I can believe. Don’t raise your hands, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, but—anybody felt a whole lot of pressure to take a licensing deal? Anybody been next door to threatened, with lawsuits or whatever? Yeah, I can believe it. So, however the licensing deal happened, it flopped. And what’s interesting about the communication here is that the British Library didn’t try to hide the flop, or spin it positively, or anything like that. They said, quite calmly, “this flopped, here’s how it flopped, here’s the impact the flop has had.” Whoa. The f-word. They said the F-WORD. Ffffffffffffailure. We’re not supposed to talk publicly about failure, are we? Especially if it might be partly our fault? Actually we are. And we have to. We have to shape this kind of conversation actively. Because look, the vendors sure are talking about it, and THEY are blaming this kind of nonsense on US. If we don’t talk, we are letting faculty believe that story. We’re tacitly ENDORSING that story. That’s really not good for us, folks. So no matter how embarrassed you feel, you gotta get out there and talk. I mean, I’m not beyond imagining that some folks at the British Library knew they couldn’t prevent this, so they deliberately let it fail and planned to communicate out about its failure so that they’d have clear and obvious reasons to say no to licensing deals getting shoved at them. And if that’s what you have to do, that’s what you have to do. So there you have it. Tell ‘em what’s gonna happen real soon now. Tell ‘em what’s happening. And tell ‘em what just happened. Go home to your libraries, find the three immediate things you’re most worried about, and start working out how to communicate about ‘em. It may be scary, I get that — but what will happen if you stay silent I guarantee will be worse.
30. Elena Penkova, “Hands at work” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/126710094@N04/17147767102/ Now. If the scholarly publishing system is so broken that we can’t actually get our people what they need, how do we actually reshape it?
31. Adrian Scotlow, “Who”, CC-BY-SA, cropped, https://www.flickr.com/photos/chodhound/6385911033/ And who’s “we,” anyway? This question is important because librarians can’t do all this reshaping alone. We don’t control where faculty publish or the publishing contracts they sign. We don’t control their incentives; we certainly don’t control tenure and promotion committees, except maybe our own in libraries where tenure is a thing — is that anybody here, by the way? Yeah, maybe look at those guidelines? Talk to me about this, it’s really easy for these guidelines to reinforce the status quo in ways you don’t mean to.
32. mk30, “clay” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/mk30/10095301463/ I said this stuff is malleable and shapeable, and I do believe that. The stuff that’s changed in the decade since I graduated library school is amazing, y’all. But that’s not the same thing as saying scholarly communication is EASY to shape. It isn’t. And if you are serious about wanting to reshape it, you are also going to have to reshape your professional self-image, I’m just saying. I’ve found that that’s a really hard thing for some librarians to do.
33. Elizabeth Swift, “Clay Public Library” CC-BY, cropped/brightened https://www.flickr.com/photos/eswift/3982041122/ I’m going to say a phrase some librarians don’t like. OPEN ACCESS. Okay. I said it. Still here? Yeah, okay, good. Open access is a tremendous opportunity to reshape sharing. The scholarly literature is a clay library! It is malleable and we can reshape it! And there are pretty good reasons to reshape it. Look at the hours on this slide. I’m not criticizing this library, they have only the resources they have, but can you even imagine the reactions on our campuses if access to the scholarly literature was only available a fixed twenty hours per week? But given how much we can’t afford, it sort of feels like that sometimes. Doesn’t it. And that’s what we can help reshape.
34. Paul Sableman, “Private Property - No Trespassing” CC-BY, cropped/brightened https://www.flickr.com/photos/pasa/6778814349/ We reshape it by reshaping what we think of as “sharing,” for starters. We tend to have a very library-internal, consortium-internal sense of what sharing is. Sharing, as Barbara Fister said, means sharing only within defined organizational boundaries. Outside the boundaries? No sharing for YOU! The literature is private property, so no trespassing! Which, how horrible is that? Teaching is trespassing? Learning is trespassing? Research is trespassing?! Wow, no. Just no. I did not get into librarianship to put up “no trespassing” signs around knowledge. But this is exactly where librarian self-concepts get into the mix. If we don’t buy things for people, if we don’t represent walls around special knowledge, who are we? And I think there’s a million answers to this, I gave a whole presentation about some of them last year, but look, yes, this IS a shift in what some of us are, ain’t gonna lie. I know that several of the institutions you work for have explicit social-justice missions. I also know you can connect knowledge sharing to those missions without my sloppy help. I’m just saying.
35. If we reshape sharing in our own minds so that it’s even PARTLY about real openness, new possibilities open up for us to select the publishing efforts and even the publications we fund. Everybody says hey, open access ain’t free, and you know what, that’s totally right! So let’s decide who deserves our collections money, okay? Forty-percent profit margins in recessions fueled by “no trespassing” signs? Or non-profit, basically cost-recovery outfits that share knowledge with as many as can download it? Already we’re pretty spoiled for choice here. On the open-access journals side there’s the usual suspects, Public Library of Science and BioMedCentral and the Open Library of the Humanities and Collabra and their various imitators, BUT—and I love this, it makes me happy—we’re seeing real development on the open-access monograph side of the house too, and I can’t urge you strongly enough to consider supporting this, it’s really the only way that I see out of the monograph crisis that the serials crisis helped create. Knowledge Unlatched, Lever Press, Luminos from the University of California Press.
36. Wolff, Rod, and Schonfeld. “Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2015.” http://www.sr.ithaka.org/publications/ithaka-sr-us-faculty-survey-2015/ Fair use asserted. Here’s another reason to reshape how we spend our money. This graph is from the latest Ithaka report, it’s college and university faculty’s opinion of what libraries and librarians are for. As usual, the top line is “buyer,” libraries exist to buy them things, what was I saying about librarian self-image just a minute ago? So. If we libraries are not buying open access, BUT open access is still happening, still being paid for, and touching more and more of our patrons one way or another every day, um… what does that do to our buyer role exactly, and what are the knock-on effects if we start to seriously let go of it? When I talk about open access to librarians, practically every single time, somebody the Q&A session pulls out the “altruism” argument. Libraries won’t support open access because we’re too hardheadedly practical to be that altruistic. And I can see a lot of historical weight in that argument, given how comparatively little money libraries have sent in open-access directions. Straight-up, y’all, a LOT OF US ARE FREE RIDING. YALE. (I always call Yale out for this. They’re just the worst.) But look, y’all, I’m honestly getting kinda worried about how common that argument is still. If we don’t figure out how to buy open access even considering all our constraints, aren’t we cooperating in the marginalization of our buyer role? It’s not altruism — well, okay, it is, but it’s not JUST altruism. It’s service, and it might yet turn into survival.
37. Elena Giglia, “Leslie Chan in 2013 at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI8).jpg”, CC-BY-SA https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leslie_Chan_in_2013_at_the_CERN_ Workshop_on_Innovations_in_Scholarly_Communication_(OAI8).jpg 1% So where do you get started? Allow me to introduce this gentleman, Dr. Leslie Chan, an anthropologist from Toronto. I want you to know his name and associate it with his “one percent solution.” Dr. Chan says, and the numbers I see tend to bear him out, that if academic libraries everywhere put just one percent of their materials budgets toward open access, THE WORLD OF SHARING WOULD BE RESHAPED. One percent. One measly largely-symbolic little percent. It’s not by any means the only thing you can do to reshape sharing away from Big Deals and toward open access. But it’s the thing I want you to take home and think about. Talk to your faculty too, what would they do with that one percent? I bet some of them have good ideas, and it’s always good to have their buy-in. Leslie Chan. One percent. Now you know.
38. So, textbooks. Here’s a small selection of headlines from the past couple-three years. They tell a story y’all are probably already pretty familiar with: textbooks are expensive, and really visibly expensive at that, some students don’t buy them despite what that ends up meaning for their classroom performance, and there’s all kinds of tricks textbook publishers use to force students to pony up. *CLICK* So let me focus in for a moment on that last bit, okay? Here’s one thing that’s gotten some play recently, the “access codes” thing where who even knows where the student got the actual textbook, but if they want to turn in their homework, they have to pay the textbook company to let them in to do that. Let me say this louder: The textbook companies are doing this kind of thing to DEFEAT TEXTBOOK SHARING, whether it’s sharing by students or sharing by libraries. It’s just like journal publishers pushing licenses to defeat the British Library’s interlibrary loan program!
39. Martin Weller, “Day #93 OER,” CC-BY-SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/edtechie/4966600375/ But there’s starting to be a fix for all this: open educational resources, or OER. You’ll also hear “open textbooks,” though textbooks are definitely not all there is to OER. Before I keep going, let me ask: any OER projects happening or being thought about on your campuses? Now, if you look in the literature or the higher-ed press, you’re going to see a whole lot of OER creation and authoring projects. And those are great, I’m not running them down or anything, but you don’t have to go there and you certainly shouldn’t start there—unless an opportunity lands in your lap or something, which can happen. Getting OER adopted at your institution is plenty to work on, and it’s where you’ll make the most impact.
40. Steven Damron, “open sign” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/sadsnaps/3676812382/ So yes, I’m a fan of the Open Educational Resources movement. I have no love for many textbook companies—Pearson frankly repels and terrifies me—and the price of textbooks really distresses me. If that’s not enough, I LOVE the way O-E-R helps instructors take back control and direction of curricula. (Admittedly, this may be because my own instructional style has a lot in common with a seven-year-old’s Legos: Jason here can tell you, I’ve always put courses together myself out of whatever materials seemed good at the time. I’m just not a textbook kinda gal.) What O-E-R lack at this point is dedicated human infrastructure, the kind of reaching-into-classrooms infrastructure that many of you have already built, in the form of liaison programs and electronic reserves programs and licensing review and copyright expertise and guide-on-the-side enrichment material and so on. Discovery for OER is also a major, major problem, because faculty are used to textbooks being pushed on them, but O-E-R at this point mostly expect faculty to go hunt them down. Which most faculty won’t! There was a report out not long ago that says this loudly and clearly; faculty WILL NOT go hunting for O-E- R. So I ask you, what does it mean for your library to “acquire” O-E-R for sharing, and what services does that imply? What does the rest of the OER lifecycle look like? What can the library do to push O-E-R at appropriate faculty the way textbook publishers currently push textbooks? I don’t know entirely, but I’d like y’all to think about it. More sharing means better student outcomes at less cost—the research so far is pretty clear on that.
41. Photo: debaird™, “fill in the blank” https://www.flickr.com/photos/debaird/1032953361/ CC-BY-SA, cropped And just by way of encouragement, open educational resources are seeing the biggest adoption rates and the biggest results at community colleges and smaller undergrad institutions. I kid you not, check out the literature for yourselves. This is a big, big thing that small schools are schooling the big schools on! And in my head, OER is a great example of reshaping how libraries think about and implement sharing. It’s leveraging the commons, leveraging everybody’s generosity. It’s kind of a neat thing!
42. Martin Weller, “Day #93 OER,” CC-BY-SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/edtechie/4966600375/ Quinn Dombrowski, “Expensive!” CC-BY-SA, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/236007237/ Now, you can go into an OER project with at least two possible goals: making things less expensive for students, and encouraging your campus to be friendly to open stuff, to Creative Commons-license things and post their research online and stuff like that. Often these two goals go hand in hand! But sometimes they don’t, so much. I’m a big open booster, as you might already have figured out, but I’m telling you—don’t be a snob about full openness when you’re just starting out, okay? It won’t help students and it won’t help openness at your institution. So here’s what I suggest instead.
43. Library resources count as “less expensive for students” even when they’re licensed, not open—use ‘em! I mean, not that you’re not, but some OER purists get upset about this. I’m here to say, ignore those people; do what’s gonna work in the classroom. And do I need to tell you not to purchase stuff like Harvard Business Review where they put restrictions on classroom use? I hope I don’t need to tell you that. Don’t buy stuff your patrons can’t get any use out of! There are better places for library money.
44. AK Rockefeller, “Handshake” CC-BY-SA, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/akrockefeller/7208427782/ When you’re just getting started, pick the instructors you want to work with carefully. Don’t just spray some marketing around and work with whoever comes in; you can end up with divas or other problem people that way, or even set yourself up to fail. If at all possible, choose an instructor you already like and have a good relationship with, somebody openminded who’s willing to talk this up when it works. With OER, you need some success stories early on, and those are easier to come by if you approach likely prospects deliberately. I’ve seen two schools of thought on who you pick. First, you can work with them as are willing. You might already know a faculty member who wants a different textbook, or is concerned about student costs. Or, you can try for the biggest-impact targets first, the intro courses and the large-lecture courses and the courses with the priciest big fat books. Both approaches have merit; both can work fine. Start wherever you’re comfortable, okay? No judgment from me.
45. Denise Krebs, “2012-240 #SixWordMission” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsdkrebs/7876968098/ You don’t even necessarily want to start with instructors right away. This kinda depends on what other resources are available where you are, but good allies in an OER effort can include instructional designers, academic-technology people, student-achievement offices, dean of students office, assessment and accreditation folks—basically whoever you’ve got at your shop that influences the classroom experience for students, yeah?
46. Campus Computing Project. “Going Digital: faculty perspectives on digital and OER course materials.” http://www.campuscomputing.net/goingdigital2016 Fair use asserted. And don’t forget students themselves! Talk to student government about this, if you can. When students gripe to you about textbook costs, use it as a teaching moment! This graph is from a recent report on a faculty survey about textbooks and OER. Now, it’s self-report, so you can’t believe everything in it one-hundred percent—I personally don’t believe faculty take cost to students real seriously most of the time, it’s just polite for them to say so and they know that. Most faculty I know don’t even KNOW what the books they assign cost. But when faculty say they take actual student comments seriously, that I do believe. So coach students on how to approach instructors! I do. I say, go on up, tell the instructor politely what the book cost, ask if they knew. From there, maybe pitch a different book, pitch OER, or at least ask if the instructor can reconsider the book.
47. Toshiyuki IMAI, “VICTORINOX Classic SD” CC-BY-SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/matsuyuki/7780621380/ Now, when you start a conversation about a specific course with instructors, go prepared! Have your tools in hand! Get the syllabus if you can, know what the current book is, and research suitable alternatives in advance. Don’t go in there waving your hands around, “open is great, open is wonderful,” that doesn’t work because it doesn’t give instructors anything to grab on to. And it’s gotta be said, some open textbooks I wouldn’t ask a dog to teach or study from. They’re just not very good! So you don’t want to let an instructor search for OER on their own necessarily, because if they find something bad they’ll just assume all OER are like that, and they’ll never look at OER again. Also, when you go in with a book to recommend, you’re doing exactly what the textbook publishers do. This is how faculty are accustomed to picking out books! Having books shoved in their faces! So it’s actually kind of reassuring and normal to faculty when you act the way they’re used to textbook publishers acting.
48. Finding open textbooks • OpenStax: https://openstax.org/ • Open Textbook Library: https://open.umn.edu/ opentextbooks/ •This one’s nice because it has reviews for some books. • Open Oregon: http://openoregon.org/ •SPARC Library OER Forum (mailing list) •http://sparcopen.org/our-work/sparc-library-oer-forum/ •(the actual list is on Google Groups) •Commonest question on the list: “I need OER for a course in X. Anybody know of anything?” brian kelly, “open @ night” CC-BY, desaturated and cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/y2bk/528300692/
49. @DrGarcia, “#sachat #highered #assessment,” CC-BY-SA, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/gypsyroguescholar/22203033045/ So you place an open textbook in a class, and you say YAY, because you deserve to! But the story isn’t over yet. If you want to place MORE open textbooks, which you do, you need to tell the story of the first one. That means assessment. There are a few broadbrush OER assessment techniques I’m seeing a lot. One is just surveying students about their experience with the book. Remember to ask them whether they’d have bought the book at the prevailing price for the book you replaced. Another is grade comparison across semesters—and look, students don’t have to have done BETTER, though this does happen pretty often, they just have to have roughly similar outcomes. And boom, you do this and you have an outreach story you can tell. Capybaras optional BUT AWESOME.
50. WOCinTech Chat, “wocintech (microsoft)” CC-BY, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/25926634151/ Once you have some success and outreach under your belt, you can start thinking about a structured approach to consultations about OER. How exactly you do that will depend on how you already structure public service and what other allies on campus you have. It may make sense to train all your ref-desk people. It may make sense to have special OER hours, or a dedicated email address for OER questions, or being on-call for the instructional-design folks, or setting up meetings with departments. Totally your call, there’s no One Right Way To Do It, whatever gets you the most progress for the time you decide to spend.
51. Didriks, “Straight Candle Snuffer by Match Pewter” CC-BY, cropped https://www.flickr.com/photos/dinnerseries/6169567870/ I want to close the OER segment of our proceedings with one small warning. Pearson and Amazon and one or two of the other big textbook publishers are starting to offer what they’re calling OER platforms or discovery services or whatever. Be really, really, REALLY suspicious of these, okay? Don’t sign on without thinking REALLY hard. People my age or thereabouts remember Microsoft from, like, the nineteen-nineties, right? When something new happened, like the Web or ebooks, that got standardized so everyone could play, Microsoft’s standard response was—anybody remember? Three E’s. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Embrace the standard, then extend it—do things that weren’t compatible with it—so that they’d catch on and then Microsoft could extinguish the standard. I think that’s exactly the publishers’ game plan here. Embrace OER, extend them such that y’all lose your independence from the publishers again, and then OER might as well be snuffed out, because they don’t matter—you and your students are still captive to the publishers and their expensive access codes. I don’t want that, I don’t think you want that, so don’t play with textbook publishers on this, okay? Here’s one place where you DO want to be a stickler about open: don’t let the companies that have already shown they want to hold education up for ransom do it again.
52. Reshaping sharing This presentation is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Please respect CC licenses on included images. Thank you! Elena Penkova, “Hands at work” CC-BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/126710094@N04/17147767102/ I think each of us here, in our own way, can reshape sharing? So as long as we’re here together, let’s pick up our potter’s wheels, let’s talk about our craft, and let’s make real workable plans to make things better—better for ourselves, and better for our patrons. So I hope that’s got you thinking. Thanks for having me here, and let’s get this party started! Have a great day!