Here is a long overdue, idiosyncratic, and long (do note my first use of the Read More functionality of WordPress) report on the Fiesole Retreat in Hong Kong last month, written from notes I made on the spot and meant, naturally, to post immediately. I’m not sure the time it’s taken me to write them up has added much insight, much as I wish I could claim that. There was much interesting discussion and some important questions raised that I wanted to make sure were posted here, because they do contribute to some of the discussion we’ve been having. Here, too, is a photo of the Fiesole Retreat participants. I’ve been trying to get my photos into consistent sizes, but as you’ll see they vary widely. Not through design, I’m afraid – I’m definitely not a model photo blogger!
Let’s start with the dread PowerPoint, since this was an academic library conference. I am an admirer of Edward Tufte, author of a remarkable series of books on the visual display of information, who wrote a well-known article called “PowerPoint Does Rocket Science.” An article about Tufte and his criticism of PowerPoint in Wired magazine was entitled, “PowerPoint Is Evil. Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” ((For contrast, here’s the HCI guru Donald Norman’s take on the subject, in less than perfect prose, which I think interesting because both he and Tufte are adept commentators on design and the presentation of technical information.))
But I capitulated and used PowerPoint (or as some colleagues in China say, “ppt”) for the “Doing Business in China” program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 12 April. I thus discovered a reason for avoiding PowerPoint that Tufte doesn’t mention.
The IT guy was getting me set up as my co-presenter, Matthias Wahl of Brill Publishers, and I talked about how to adapt our material to an audience that turned out to be all librarians, rather than other publishers. My desktop came into view on the screen and it looked fine – with a gorgeous photo of fireflies at dusk on the Iowa prairie as the background (this photo, by naturalist farmer Carl Kurtz, is going to be the cover of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability). Then I saw a folder labeled “Manicures” sitting plunk in the middle of the screen. It contained the files from a forum exchange I’d downloaded, with information about where to go for manicures in Hong Kong.
Was I embarrassed? Yes. And did anyone see it? No, probably not. I clicked into the PowerPoint with unprecedented speed, and we sailed into our talk without a pause.
Why this was so embarrassing at the time and yet I’m willing to write about it here is another question. I think the reason is that this experience it makes a point about how entwined our public and private lives can be online – and on our computers. (And here’s a photograph, just received from Becky Lenzini. You can see one of my lovely Chinese manicures, in fact, if you double-click for the full-size version.)
The opening keynote speaker for the Fiesole Retreat, a small and exclusive library/publisher conference organized by Against the Grain and the Charleston Adviser, was Lorcan Dempsey, vice president and chief strategist at OCLC, a library cataloging company with 1,300 employees in Ohio, where the company was founded by a statewide library association. I know little more about library cataloguing than any library user, so it was enlightening to find out more about that (later in the day we saw the cataloging department at the UHK, which must have had 50 desks). But the heart of Lorcan’s presentation was an analysis of types of content that libraries acquire and manage. It seemed that many people were surprised to learn how much redundancy there is in library collections, how little the so-called “long tail” is affecting what libraries provide to their customers. Ninety per cent of usage is only ten per cent of the collection – even more extreme than the usual 80/20 rule that applies in many areas.
In the course of his presentation, he said that some content is “born digital,” while other content is “reborn digital” and “boring digital.” A note of humor! I was very much interested to hear that selecting from content that has not been vetted – i.e., preselected by a publisher – is becoming the job of librarians. This strikes me as highly problematic in terms of return on investment. What’s the opportunity cost of managing the long tail?
The rest of the morning was a discussion of “The Issue of Language and Communication: Can Any Language Dominate?” Colin Day of the University of Hong Kong Press gave “A Publisher’s View of the Issue of Language of Publication,” which I found interesting. (Unfortunately, some other attendees had heard the same presentation at another conference – another reason for widening the net when looking for speakers, something I’ll remember for GIIS 2007.) What I learned is that English is increasingly the dominant language in scholarly publishing, though certain countries, such as Japan, put great emphasis on material produced in their own language, and China wants to see more scholarly research published in Chinese. The convenience – for publishers and readers – of a global lingua franca goes hand in hand with a serious danger, that research throughout the world, in developed and developing countries, is being oriented towards the needs and desires, and based on the value systems, of English-speaking countries. Instead of richer and more diverse knowledge, we may find ourselves knowing more and more about less and less. ((Later Colin recommended a book called A Geopolitics Of Academic Writing by A. Suresh Canagarajah. Here’s a riveting description: “This is a bold and intellectually honest attempt to deal with the ethnography of writing focusing on the post-Foucauldian problem of power-knowledge as it applies to the unequal relationship between centers of academic power located in the United States and Europe and various peripheries located mostly in the third world.”-Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University.” I’m sure it is a fascinating book, but I do hate that academic jargon – “the post-Foucauldian problem of power-knowledge.” What does that mean in English?)) Colin said, and rightly, that we need access to divergent and uncomfortable ideas. But how odd that people think of this as meaning subjects such as Taiwanese independence, when there are many other kinds of uncomfortable ideas – uncomfortable to us, that is, instead of to someone else.
Colin Storey of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was another male, British speaker – appropriate for Hong Kong, I suppose, but a little surprising at an international library conference. His presentation was entitled, “The Use of the Global Multi-lingual Web in Mainland China: the Ebb and Flow of Government Control of Information.” He gave a thorough overview of the control that exists over publishing in China, and the various ways that the Internet is monitored. Fortunately, he had a balanced perspective about this, pointing out that quite a number of government’s control their nation’s mass media, especially newspapers, radio, and television, and monitor the Internet in various ways (shutting down sites like YouTube, for example, when videos making fun of leaders are uploaded). And in the U.S., the monitoring of Internet usage is probably more commonthan we know – and something that’s stimulated a lot of concern in the library world. (In the U.S., the justification for such monitoring used to be child pornography and today is more like to be counter-terrorism.)
It would seem that in all nations this monitoring is less than 100% successful, usually because of bureaucracy, and Colin brought up a point that struck home with me, and others, using an odd metaphor. He said that the censors don’t have to do much after a while, because they become like a python in a chandelier, hanging there above your head. Not moving, but clearly dangerous. As a result, people start to self-censor, adapting to the situation, and monitoring what they contribute to forums and write on blogs. Those of us who care deeply about China and our relationships there naturally take care with what we say and how we express ourselves. (My question: do pythons really get comfortable in chandeliers?)
In fact, you can check freedom of the press ratings and see that Myanmar, Cuba, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and DPR Korea are doing more poorly than China. The US is rated 53 and Hong Kong 58 out of 168. Not so great for the Land of the Free.
There was an excellent wrap-up session, something more conferences should have, with Ward Shaw, founder of CARL and now an independent investor, and Michael Keller of Stanford University.
Here is a quick list of some of the points Ward made, which I thought particularly shrewd:
- Beware of empirically based conclusions and political correctness. ((Was it he who said – I have this in my notes – “Pervasive ideas can dominate rationality”?))
- Don’t deprecate cottage businesses – most important inventions have come from them, not from big companies.
- To think of all research as taking place in an academic setting is sticking our heads in sand: 70% of all research takes place outside the public sector in Japan.
- We have to start thinking about the quality factor. ((I was relieved that he said this. I am consistently shocked at library conferences by the utter absence of discussion of quality. I’ve heard librarians say that that’s not their job – that they simply provide as much as they can, and let patrons decide about quality. This makes no sense in the Internet age; it’s like fighting tanks with bows and arrows.))
Ward seemed to think that open access to research output will eventually trump today’s commercial academic publishing chain, but that this should be done through some kind of government funding mechanism, based on the fact that research and knowledge provide value to society.
Michael Keller commented that there are too many vanilla collections and urged libraries to focus on local publishers and regional think-tank data to create distinctive collections (with relevant metadata). He also said that OPACs, abstracting and indexing services, and Google’s keyword search are not the only modes of access. He thinks there will be new modes of searching and new taxonomies, especially across languages.
In past researchers built information-gathering activities around the library workflow, while to survive libraries today must building around user workflows. To survive, publish and vendors must help libraries, or skip them as unneeded links in the information chain.
A few final questions of my own:
- Mark Robertson, president of Blackwell Publishing Asia, talked about “Scholarly Publishing and Open Access in Asia.” His explanation for wild price rises in STM journals – the major impetus for Open Access journals and the reason some people have potent nicknames for Elsevier, Blackwell, and the like – was that there’s more research so we have to publish more. That is, the journals get fatter and so should the cheques paid to them. This strikes me as applying the Super Size Me principle to the growth of knowledge, when divorced from any comment as to whether there is more research worth publishing. Am I missing something? I would love to have an explanation of this.
- I would love to get a historic perspective on the Google phenomenon. People talk about Google as if its dominance is inevitable, and I find it kind of creepy. There’s a 1984 quality about this bowing down to the red, green, and blue. Has there ever been a company regarded like this, and what happened to it?
- Is inadequate tagging worse than none?
- If employees contribute to social media sites, might they be diminishing the competitive advantages of their own company by sharing their knowledge with colleagues working in other companies?
- Owning a book is in essence owning the container. Can we compare the IP in a publication to the design on curtains on curtains we buy? We can use, and reuse, the curtains as long as they physically last, but the pattern still belongs to the original designer.
And some opportunities for publishers and librarians:
- Distinctive local collections
- Providing provenance and context
- Helping readers, and writers, with storage/organization of research materials (especially in universities)
And here’s the text that came up – in PowerPoint, of course – at the end of the day:
Dsoi Gin/Dzai Jian ((Could they be using Wades Giles instead of PinYin??)) /Good bye
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