2008 CACUL Great Debate
Overview The Great Debate turned 10 at the 2008 CLA annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. To celebrate this accomplishment, CACUL honored the co-creators/conspirators of this now illustrious conference event. CACUL President Alison Nussbaumer presented tokens of appreciation to founders Dr. Norman Horrocks, Jane Beaumont, Su Cleyle and Melody Burton. A slide show presented 10 years of resolutions and debaters. This year’s topic was, “Be it resolved that social software is not what users want from the Library”. The teams consisted of Melody Burton, Head, UBC Okanagan Library, Kelowna, BC and Pam Ryan, Head, Science & Technology, University of Alberta Libraries, Edmonton, AB for the Affirmative side. Lisa Goddard, Emerging Services Librarian/Division Head for Systems, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL and Wendy Rogers, Humanities Liaison Librarian, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL were for the Negative side. The Debate allows the audience to participate by voting for the resolution before and after the debate. Changes in the vote are an indication of how well the teams did in convincing the audience of their arguments. The counts for this year’s debate are: Affirmative: 89 pre-debate, 110 post-debate Negative: 60 pre-debate, 56 post-debate The debaters were excellent – dueling with each other with their sharp wit and repartee. The audience alternated between holding its collective breath to shouting in glee and bursting into applause. And all was firmly directed by Su Cleyle, moderator extraordinaire. The Great Debate has entertained, challenged, provoked thought and brought smiles to CLA delegates for ten years. The next question is, “To debate or not to debate?” On the conference evaluation form, CACUL asked attendees to let us know if they wanted the great debate to end after ten years of glory, or to continue, with a new generation of debaters, a new moderator, and new resolutions. Let the members decide. Waiting with bated breath, Alison Nussbaumer President, CACUL 2007-09
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Question Be it resolved that social software is not what users want from the library. Moderator Su Cleyle, Association University Librarian, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL Affirmative Melody Burton, Head Librarian, Okanagan Library, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC Pam Ryan, Head, Science & Technology Library, University of Alberta Libraries, Edmonton, AB Negative Lisa Goddard, Emerging Services Librarian/Division Head for Systems, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL Wendy Rodgers, Humanities Liaison Librarian, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL First Affirmative Constructive: Melody Burton (to be added) First Negative Constructive: Wendy Rodgers Social software IS what users want from the library. At my library, users are mainly 18-24 year olds, and when I look around my Learning Commons, what do I see on every second screen? Facebook. My users want social software. But do they want it from the library? Well, they seem to want it IN the library . . . But we all know that many of our users never darken the door of the building. They use our resources and services remotely, where software joins the telephone and postal mail as pillars of the library’s distance services model. We’ve been offering digital services since the dawn of the Internet, and some libraries have been on the social software bandwagon, broadly speaking, since the heady days of Freenets and Bulletin Board Systems in the 1980s. The resolution of today’s debate actually leaves out the most important word related to social software – networking. Social software is a means to the broader end of social networking. And libraries have been providing opportunities for social networking – in the offline sense – for over 2000 years . . . • Think of Cicero in his library entertaining Atticus by reading aloud to him about Roman aqueducts . . . Roman numerals . . . Roman Polanski.
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2000 years later, think of girl meets boy as both reach for the same copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
From community meeting rooms to coffee shops, libraries have been and continue to be committed to providing social space and facilitating intellectual encounters for users. Social networking – in the online sense – allows users to draw upon the connections, direct or indirect, between one another. In a real life network, I only meet your friends when you introduce us. And since you flatly refuse to introduce me to your friends, or invite me to your parties, that’s why I love social software, ‘cause I get to meet your friends anyway, because I can find them online and learn about their behaviours and preferences . . . and I can poke them . . . and send them imaginary cocktails . . . and throw virtual sheep at them! I know I speak not only for myself but also for your friends when I say sincerely: Thanks for introducing us. Psychologists used to believe that Internet use was positively correlated with depression, loneliness, and stress. New studies involving social software are now suggesting that Internet use can decrease loneliness and depression significantly, while increasing self-esteem and perceived social support. The Internet is no longer unhealthy or anti-social. For consenting adults, meeting people and making friends online is normal. It’s not weird or creepy or unusual – it’s how our esteemed opponents get dates! Indeed, the field of Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI, is being recast by some researchers as HHI – Human-Human Interaction. It’s still the same field, looking at humans and technology, but researchers have shifted their conception of the discipline from “humans interacting with computers” to “humans interacting with each other through computers”. And humans being duped by Bridezilla, and humans being enlightened by Miss Teen South Carolina. Social networks link people through each other, but also through ideas. Communities develop as users build on one another’s knowledge in blogs, wikis, forums and the many-to-many conversations they facilitiate. Social software encourages debate. We could all have this very debate anytime at all from the comfort of our own homes . . . • • You reclining on your chaise longue in your elegant silk pajamas, sipping brandy and eating caviar . . . Our esteemed opponents, Pam and Melody, in their Batgirl Underoos, washing down a box of Lucky Charms with a couple of cans of Red Bull . . .
all of us contributing to the discussion (some more energetically than others!) rather than limiting it to the voices at the microphone. (I have it on good authority that Pam is actually wearing her Batgirl Underoos today for good luck.)
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So if our users want social software, what are we so afraid of? One fear of social software is the loss of privacy. Here I will quote from Marshall Keys, “privacy is unimportant - community is important.” According to Keys, libraries seem to care more about our patron’s privacy than our patrons do, which may hinder our ability to deliver some of the services our patrons would really like to see. Another fear is that social software challenges what it means to be an expert. People fear that credible sources will disappear in the face of Wikipedia, a reference tool written not only by amateurs, hacks, and that creepy guy who lives in his parents’ basement and keeps asking to be your friend on Facebook, but also by professionals, recognized experts, and that creepy girl with the PhD who keeps asking to be your friend on Facebook. Some no doubt fear the potential risks associated with any new technology. We don’t know enough about it, we don’t know what trouble it may bring. Well, think of Ryerson University student Chris Avenir who administered a study group on Facebook. He passed the course, and remains in school to this day. In the face of social software, we fear that we will no longer be the sole keepers of the collections. All kinds of people are building collections with social software. Collections of: • • • • • web sites through social tagging on sites like Delicious moving images on sites like Youtube photos on sites like Flickr maps through mashups with information from sites like Google Maps and yes, they are exposing the collections of books they’ve built over the years through Library Thing.
The combined output of the social web adds up to a larger, slicker, automated version of . . . a . . . Library? Users don’t just want libraries to jump on the bandwagon because everyone else is there. They want us to make judicious choices – just as we do with our collections, just as we do with our services. Making a profile of your library on Facebook teaches your users one thing about your library – that it has completely missed the point about Facebook, a tool built on individuals using their real names to make contact with real people who, in most cases, they already know in real life. Critical mass is the most important requirement for successful social software, built as it is primarily on user-generated content. So go where the users already are – but be choosy and do it because it makes sense and fills a need, not because you think it’s trendy.
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The library has a duty to be present in and to its community – wherever that community may reside, regardless of whether it is physical or virtual. One thing that libraries are committed to and commercial sites are not is that, for the most part, our users participate for free. In our social software, there would be no cash payment, and no distracting ads demanding the much more expensive payment of attention. Libraries can use social software to provide • • • • • • Public feedback mechanisms, such as an online Q&A blog Portals to library services, such as a catalogue search widget in Facebook Folksonomies, such as tagging in the catalogue – alongside the tried-and-true controlled subject headings, of course Social software for cell phones, also known as “Mobile social software” or by the truly funky nickname MoSoSo Social meeting space, such as an online book club or discussion group Collaborative work and idea space, such as an online homework club.
Here’s a golden opportunity for the library to facilitate social and intellectual connections and communities without demanding that people come together physically. While our colleagues would have you believe that social software is a threat to all that is sacred in libraries, I ask you to choose which benefits libraries more in the long run: • • • Officially sanctioned, narrowly-focused collections – or dynamic, all-encompassing collections? Arcane methods of organization – or plain-language taxonomies? Dictatorial signs demanding Silence – or open, challenging conversations?
In other words, would you rather be a part of the future-oriented, technology-embracing, userfriendly library – or a part of the anti-social one? Second Affirmative Constructive: Pam Ryan (to be added) Second Negative Constructive: Lisa Goddard Be it resolved that social software is not what users want from the library. Social networking did not emerge with FaceBook, you know. We are hairless apes with no advantage in speed, strength, or natural defences. The ability to collaborate has thus been one of our primary survival strategies as a species. It‘s an innate part of the human condition to be obsessed with other human beings. Show a person a beautiful vista of lush rain forest with a majestic waterfall cascading over cliffs of rare fossils, and they will focus in immediately on the barely discernable little person standing at the bottom – “hey, I have that shirt!”.
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The internet is, above all, a suite of communication technologies that have trumped all other media specifically because of their interactive nature. It’s estimated that over 70% of current internet content is user-generated. Thanks to web 2.0 and social networking tools the internet has engendered a global conversation. The entire world of academics revolves around scholarly communities who read, review, challenge, replicate and build upon the results of one another’s work. In the very early days scholars wrote letters about their work to one another. After a while they formed societies to read these letters aloud. Eventually the societies began to produce journals to expose a larger number of people to their ideas, and to encourage discussion and debate. Scholarship is a conversation, and is, therefore, an innately social activity. Part of the reason that we’re even debating today’s resolution, is that academic libraries, along with our users, tend to take a narrow view of social networking technologies. They’re understood in the context of existing services like Facebook and MySpace that tend to be used as “personal” rather than “professional” spaces. This is a fatal limitation of vision on our part. If people have found social networking tools so useful that they flock to these spaces in the hundreds of millions, then surely the same technologies can provide “scholarly networking” platforms. Social networking tools are ideally suited to the scholarly environment, consisting as it does of small communities of specialists who are spread out all over the world, who have a pressing need for frequent communication, and who are already separated by very few degrees. New contacts can be added with a single click, and one-to-one, or many-to-many conversations are immediately possible. These can happen in private or public spaces, in real time or asynchronously. More importantly, as researchers gain single-click access to their associates’ contacts, their professional networks grow exponentially. Social networking tools therefore have significant implications for knowledge dissemination. Despite enormous advances in communication technology, we continue to labour under a highly inefficient and increasingly obsolete publishing process. Even the words we use “volume”, “page”, “issue” are meaningless descriptors for works that have never existed in paper format. In the new media, articles are the unit of currency and the journals that hold them are anachronistic containers. Compared to the months or years it takes for journals and books to publish ideas, social networking tools allow ideas to be shared almost as soon as they are conceived. A large community of other scholars can provide instant feedback, discuss relevant experiences, and recommend related sources. They can even involve other groups in the conversation by linking the post on their own blogs. By providing a public forum for discussion
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around pre-prints or articles in progress, social networking sites can also function as a tool for “soft” peer review, allowing posts to be vetted by hundreds of eyes, rather than the three or four sets that a journal might engage in the process. Once they are published, most traditional journals are indexed in discipline-specific sources and hidden behind password-protected interfaces that exclude a large part of the world from the conversation. Moreover, and very peculiarly, research sponsored with public money is given to private publishing companies that profit from it by selling articles back to the very institutions that produce them. Blogs and social networking sites enable scholars to share information in real time with very few barriers to publication, and no subscription fees for access. They allow many voices to participate unfiltered by scholarly societies, funding agencies, and commercial publishers. These conversations are indexed for easy retrieval in major web search engines so researchers with similar interests, even those from other disciplines, will find them serendipitously. This takes us well beyond “freedom to read” into “freedom of information” in its truest sense. Social networks are the most trusted recommender systems in existence, making them indispensible for scholars who must devote long hours to uncovering new and promising sources of information. Scholars rely on their own networks of peers to recommend useful resources more than they do alerting services, librarians, or even amazon.com. What is “impact factor” and “citation analysis”? It’s social networking in another guise. It’s the analysis of who is reading whom, and who is quoting whom, and where they’re doing it. Social citation software like Connotea allows researchers to organize, annotate, and share references to all of their consulted sources. By amassing and exposing the information gathered in on-line citation systems, social software will allow scholars to see what specific peers are reading, scan reviews and comments from top names in the field, and identify publications their own scholarly community has deemed important. More comprehensive bibliographies will be the product of these types of intersections. Social citation software can also suggest “related users”, people who are exploring similar subjects. This feature exposes global opportunities for collaborative research output. When libraries link their indexes to citation manager data then every article will be enhanced with information about the people who have book-marked that article, what else they are reading, and what annotations, reviews, or comments each has assigned to that particular article. To our patrons, this is valuable information. Tagging is another extremely powerful tool that derives from web 2.0 and social software. It enables end-users to apply their own keywords to organize resources according to a particular context. The problem, obviously, is that end-users can’t be trusted. We know that they’ll use
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words like “Beehive”, instead of the LC approved term “Honeybees -- housing” and they’ll fail to leverage approved headings such as “Running races in rabbinical literature” or “Sewage -collected works”. The power of folksonomy, however, is connected not simply to the creation of tags, but to the act of aggregating. Folksonomies that reach a certain critical mass can function as sensitive concept-matching tools despite variations in terminology. Tags can also be used as a resource discovery tool. One scholar could be saving papers under Avian Flu, and another saving some of the same papers, but using the tag Bird Flu. Tag aggregators are able to automatically discover the relationship between those two tags, and to alert the researchers to the presence of other terms that they may want to explore. As a bonus, libraries can improve the visibility of our resources on the wider web by encouraging users to tag our web pages, our catalogue records, and our digital collections. Scholars are, in fact, clamoring for new solutions to the problems of scholarly communication, resource discovery, and source integration. Typically though, they’re having those discussions within their own communities. They don’t perceive libraries as technology innovators and partners. This is perhaps unsurprising given the state of our current web services which are poorly integrated, platform-dependent, and provide little opportunity for interaction and cocreation. Our static sites are particularly puzzling in light of the fact that librarians as a profession have wholeheartedly embraced social networking software. There are more than 10,000 blogs about libraries or librarians. Via my facebook friends I’m probably linked to every famous librarian in the English-speaking world. We have clearly found advantage in the ability to build professional networks, to conduct a real time many-to-many conversation with our peers, and to apply our collective intelligence to common problems. How can we possibly argue that our patrons would not find value in the same new media? As a matter of fact, whether we believe that they need to or not, academics are already embracing social software. As our patrons discover, incorporate, and build new tools based on social networking technologies, our library interfaces have to be able to keep up. That means that we must build systems that use common web standards. We must provide tools that allow content discovered on our site to easily be exported. We must expose ourselves to mashups. We must incorporate tagging functionality so that our resources can be easily aggregated into personal collections, and organized according to the needs of the end-user. We must provide item-level reviewing and feedback mechanisms within our interfaces. We must facilitate connections and collaboration between our users, and especially between disciplines. We must, above all, provide links between our materials and the global conversation that surrounds them. In the new environment patrons will become partners and co-creators of the library. They will help to promote resource use by sharing citations with their peers; they will help us to integrate
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our resources with the global library by exporting information to blogs and social bookmarking sites; they will provide new search engine access points by applying their own vocabularies to describe our holdings. In doing so they will inadvertently provide a rich set of data about their preferences, their needs, and their research interests that will form the basis of a new conversation between libraries and our users. First Negative Rebuttal: Lisa Goddard The immutable, standalone web is dead. According to web 2.0 manifesto Wikinomics, 2006 was the year when the programmable web eclipsed the static web. “Flickr beat webshots, Wikipedia beat Britannica, Blogger beat CNN, Epionions beat Consumer Reports. The losers launched websites, the winners launched communities. The losers built walled gardens, the winners built public squares. The losers innovated internally, the winners innovated with their users.” Think about your own library website – are you a winner, or a loser? Libraries brand themselves as community spaces, but our online presence doesn’t reflect this core value. We’re mired in the “gate-keeper” mentality of the old media. We’ll tell you what sources are “best” for you without actually knowing anything about you or your context. We will tell you the most appropriate words to use to describe things. We will only allow experts to be part of the conversation. Meanwhile, back in the real world, MySpace had 68 million visits last month and nearly 79 million users watched over 3 billion videos on YouTube. That’s impressive even when you account for the fact that about a million of them are videos of that monkey sniffing his own bum. But the point is that the internet is becoming a giant computer that everyone can program, providing a global infrastructure for creativity, participation, and self-organization. For maintaining and developing networks of contacts, for quickly disseminating new ideas, as vehicles for many to many discussions, as platforms for collaboration and soft peer review, as recommender systems and as resource discovery tools, social networking technologies have obvious benefits to researchers and scholars. Beyond research, a core part of the library’s mission is to support teaching and learning. Social networking technologies will be instrumental in creating a new paradigm that does not put the teacher at the center of learning, but allows students greater control to engage with the subject, and with other learners. These applications are already popping up at most of our campuses in the guise of Learning Management Systems and Learning Object Repositories. With them comes a key opportunity for libraries to push their resources to students at the course level, and to become a tightly integrated part of the teaching and learning environment. And you know that libraries have already decided that our patrons want social software. Almost every OPAC interface developed within the past five years has incorporated comments, reviews, tagging, exporting, and bookmarking. From John Blyberg’s SOPAC, to Scriblio, to
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Elsevier's social collaboration site, we are already building social networking tools into the research environment. Scholarship is about conversations, about making connections. T.S. Eliot has famously written that "Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing." With social software at our disposal, libraries and our patrons can co-create a less hellish interface. Our future challenge will be integrating user-generated data from many sources in a way that will allow us to understand connections that have previously been hidden, and to create new connections that were hitherto impossible. First Affirmative Rebuttal: Pam Ryan (to be added) Second Negative Rebuttal: Wendy Rodgers It makes me Twitter to think that our opponents stubbornly resist giving our users what they clearly want from us. Just because they hold a certain narrow view, they demand that Youtube should subscribe to it. I hope that they eventually prove to be the Movable Type, though, folks who refuse to Digg a hole and bury their heads in the sand. Our opponents want to discourage any Flickr of online collaboration in your library. They would sooner see you Furl your sail against the Current, claim intellectual superiority over the Flock, and stand in isolation from the Mixx of people – that’s M-I-X-X – we claim to serve. They would have you ignore all of that Delicious software you Stumbleupon every day. They would rather sit mired in the irrelevant details, sure to give every T a Slash, dot every i, wait until it’s perfect – and perfectly too late. And they think we’re Wiki wacky! They want to get up in your Face, book in hand, and demand you swear off social software. Well my Friendsters, when you see that book coming your way, you be sure to tell them that you Reddit and it deserves nothing more than a Tailrank. Tell them you’ll write about it in your Blog, lines that they’ll never read, for sure. Tell them to get a Second Life. Tell them that your library’s digital space is a collaborative space, a community space, a social space. Say to them, “Myspace is for my users, and the rest of you can go Share This!” Second Affirmative Rebuttal: Melody Burton (to be added)
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