Too Much To Know

For those who think that Google Books, Wikipedia, and various forms of social computing are new challenges, Ann M. Blair, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) may come as a surprise. Blair, a historian at Harvard University, contends that every age faced information overload, a point others have made. Blair focuses on the period up to 1700, examining various approaches to managing information, including sorting and storing, summarization, note-taking, dictionaries, sentence collections, commonplace books, indices, bibliographies, and encyclopedias. Blair pushes back on the claims for the influence of printing on the creation and use of scholarly references, arguing that most of the methods of scholarly reference were in place before the advent of printing. She weaves through her narrative, rich in detail about the techniques of early information management, political, educational, religious, cultural traditions, and technological influences and issues.

Adrift

From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Vedder reviews Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. Vedder notes that Arum and Roksa conclude that “students study little and, as a consequence, learn little.” Drawing on some results from test instruments, these researchers conclude that “gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills (i.e., general collegiate skills) are either exceedingly small or empirically non-existent for a large proportion of students”; 36 percent of students experienced no significant improvement in learning over four years of schooling; “less than one-half of seniors had completed over 20 pages of writing for a course in the prior semester”; “total time spent in academic pursuits is 16 percent”; “students are academically engaged, typically, well under 30 hours per week”; “scholarship from earlier decades suggest there has been a sharp decline in both academic work effort and learning”; “students…majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields…demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study. Students majoring in business, education, social work ,and communications had the lowest measurable gains”; “35 percent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone; the average for all students was under 9 hours.” This ought to be disturbing to a school like ours recruiting students from such undergraduate programs.

Taking Our Pulse

Jackie Dooley, Katherine Luce. Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research, 2010. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf

Issued as a followup to the Association of Research Libraries 1998 survey which resulted in the emphasis on exposing hidden collection, Taking our Pulse reminds us that “much rare and unique material remains undiscoverable, and monetary resources are shrinking at the same time that user demand is growing.” (p.9) I was particularly struck by the finding that two thirds of the respondents reported that they have special collections materials in secondary storage – so bring those collections back home and put that expresso bar somewhere other than in the library’s “empty” stacks.

Also sobering is the finding that while nearly all respondents have completed at least one special collections digitization project, many of these projects were specially funded one-offs and production levels achieved were not sustainable or scalable. This echoes the concerns about "boutique digital collections" raised by Paul Conway for at least the last 10 years. While it was not surprising that the data reveals a “widespread lack of basic infrastructure for collecting and managing born-digital materials” (p. 13), there is also some ambiguity as to who should manage these digitized collections as that responsibility does not necessarily return to the originating special collections department.

Overall, a useful state of the art review, which poses questions that we could begin to answer in our courses.

A View of a Crucial Document

Jill Lepore, “The Commandments: The Constitution and Its Worshippers,” New Yorker, January 17, 2011, pp.70-76, provides an interesting examination of how a particular document has taken on symbolic significance in contemporary political debates. Citing evidence about how few Americans have read this document or possess any idea of what is in it [even though it is only 4400 words long], Lepore acknowledges that “Ye olde parchment serves as shorthand for everything old, real, durable, American, and true – a talisman held up against the uncertainties and abstractions of a meaningless, changeable, paperless age” (p. 72). She discusses the Constitution’s history as an archival artifact, how it been used and abused in debates, and how it often frames or shapes political discourse.

A different view of copying

Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) offers an alternative perspective on the debates of intellectual property and copyright by exploring a variety of non-Western and other philosophical perspectives and cultural practices about the copy and the processes of copying. Boon argues that copying is a fundamental part of being human and that that inherent need is often at odds with legal and commercial ventures.