Keeping Track of the Digital - DANS

The DANS site visit ~

The visit to the DANS was probably one of the most informative for the MLIS students, and it contained topics that I had been thinking about, but had not encountered in classes yet. The first talk, by Andrea Scharnhorst, we listened to had to do with digital archiving of journal articles, mostly for the Netherlands. We discussed also the trouble plaguing research universities the world over with the publishing industry and its total lack of understanding that money does not, and never will, grow on trees ripe for the plucking. In short, the prices are so outrageously high, that research universities are struggling to keep up with subscription prices. The use of the word struggle is probably no longer accurate, with the phrase “desperate gasping last attempts to stay above the water level,” being more accurate. This has been happening across the board with digital articles and books, resulting in some universities (we’re looking at you California), leaving the negotiation table entirely, in favor of finding an alternative. I can’t say that I entirely disagree with that decision. 

From what I understood the DANS is a digital archive for works of a scientific nature that relate to the Netherlands, but Andrea also talked about other formats, or search platforms, that organize and assist in finding journal articles you need. Unfortunately some of those articles are behind paywalls, and that has a lot to do with the publishing companies. It was interesting to see an overview of the patchwork systems from different universities that are used to search for relevant articles. Since it’s patchwork though many things that are relevant to a researcher’s topic may not be found however. One of the things that may work to step around the publishers, is to install ways to connect university databases, and it sounds like there was some luck with this along with a lot of failures because not enough universities use the same search platforms or organization tools. If someone did build a system that allowed for everyone to link their systems for search, that would be amazing. Technically you could do something like this, but use the basis of a public search engine. Google Scholar does this to some extent, but only for articles that are in a venue that it can reach. You’d need a specific journal article crawler capable of reading files from multiple code platforms. Not easy, but probably doable at a huge expense.

Another issue with digital articles and information found on the net is that links break, and addresses may stay the same, but content changes. This is a problem if you have sited a work in a paper. Herbert von de Sompel (I hope I got your name right sir) has done some extensive studies in PID or Persistent Identifiers. Basically he studies ways of keeping track of digital information where ever it may be found. This particular topic is something we haven’t discussed in any of the MLIS classes I have taken, but I am most definitely familiar with it because I have a BA in history and trying to nail down a working DOI for some of my reference materials was insanely difficult and it shouldn’t have been! I only got the answer of why I was having such trouble with some sources came from this lecture, because instructors certainly never said a word about this, and help desks for reference citation don’t say a word about it either. Basically a company gets bought out by another company and they migrate all the digital articles over, and install a new DOI, just leaving the old one ... orphaned. As an academic student, that is an infuriating revelation. I always double check my DOI citations to make sure links are active before turning in a paper, and when they don’t work, I spend literally hours tracking one down that works in case my instructor actually clicks the link to read the source article. Those companies sleep in disgusting piles of wealth every night... the least they could do is not be sloppy with their acquisitions. This is a pet peeve of mine apparently. Frustration levels with paper writing are not helped by this at all.

Currently solutions for digital drift and broken links are unfortunately complicated, and some don’t work very well. For the time being our lecturer at the DANS suggested making a ‘momento’ file in which you snapshot the URI, Date Time stamp and the original URI, and put it all together so you have something to show that it was actually like that when you visited the page. This is especially important if you aren’t using a journal article, but a blog or website that at the time of writing a paper was full of the information you used. But those sources may only stay good for a limited amount of time. Sometimes they go down, the web address is sold, or even blocked by governments. Basically nothing on the web is going to remain the same, and changes just like everything else in the world. It was a very eye opening and very relevant subject for me, and I very much appreciated the lecturer’s time. 

After our, now infamous, lunch, Kathleen Gregory, a PhD candidate who studies how people search for information gave us a lecture. This was also interesting because it showed what people may be looking for and how they would go about searching for that material. Admittedly, I’m fairly terrible at setting up ways of search for topics that work. No talent for this at all, which is sort of sad given I like organizing things. But it was interesting to see how, during our activities, each group found different ways of organizing information into a format that made it findable. And no group was wrong, because each would have worked just fine for the context of the information used. I’m sure not everyone agreed with everyone else’s way of doing things, but they all would have worked. I very much enjoyed these activities, not only because they gave me a new perspective on knowledge organization, but gave me an idea of how people are going to look for a topic. Ways that will look nothing like mine and possibly boggle my mind, but they will still work with some instruction. 

Overall this was one of my favorite site visits, because it dealt with what I call front line issues that I had and am tackling as I make my way through this MLIS degree. It’s not only something that I deal with myself, but while I was a librarian, I had to help student navigate organization systems in order to find information, track down webpages that moved or find DOIs that actually worked. Given that so much information is being moved to a digital format, or is already in a digital format, these problems will increase, and academic papers and articles will suffer for it if we don’t start implementing new ways of doing things. Granted, when I did try to remedy orphaned DOIs by adding more DOIs or links, I got in trouble for improper citation and had to go to bat for myself in explaining the need for reliable source availability and the web’s lack there of. It is almost an invisible problem that most students doing their undergrad aren’t really thinking about, and a lot of professors aren’t double checking, thus there is no outcry. But what do we do when nothing we source in a paper citation remains? How do you separate the real work, with real sources from the ones that were written in haste, and the person only threw in citations to make it look good. In either case looking at the sourced work won’t help you determine the through, because there has been digital drift, broken links or orphaned DOIs that no one has bothered to clean up. Not only that, how do you double check source work when the only link is behind a paywall that you don’t have access to? These are very very relevant questions and they urgently need addressing. 

This is my last blog entry for my Netherlands trip. I was super sick, but I also really loved the trip and I am extremely sad that I missed so many site visits. I will have to go back when it is not tourist season, and it’s cold and raining all the time and visit some of these places again when it is quiet, and I can hear myself think... and I am not feeling like death warmed over. There are places that I was upset about missing, like the archive at the ICC. I was not all that excited over seeing an active trial, but I did want to see the archive. On the other hand, being sick allowed me a great deal of time to talk with Dutch staff, and get an idea of what things are like in the Netherlands, an opportunity that I am abundantly grateful for in many respects. Overall I had an excellent time both in and outside our hotels, getting to know people and seeing such amazing places and hearing lectures about such timely subjects. Very well worth the trip, especially with such an amazing group of people. My hat is off to you all!!

Safe Spaces

We moved to the hotel in Delft on the 8th of July. I was feeling pretty good that day, so I was optimistic that I would be feeling good for the rest of the trip. It was sort of a crazy morning with everyone moving out at once, and on more than a few occasions I was fairly sure someone was going to get dragged unwillingly down the stairs by their overly huge suitcase, but I worried for nothing. Everyone moved out in remarkably orderly fashion. My group went last, and it was relatively small. It was nice to sit and talk with everyone in the dining area. Scott, our tallest classmate took some time to straighten out things on the chandelier in the dining area without the aid of a ladder or chair, (we were all rather impressed) and we said goodbye to the owner and staff. The trip to Delft itself wasn’t bad, however I am afraid I overdid it on the way there. I got to go to one site visit on the following Monday, and then I was sick all over again, complete with high fever. 

The one site visit was to see the National Library of the Netherlands, aka Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB). I have to admit to not really understanding how we were going to get into the building because it seemed to be buried among other buildings, and on the outside it was an unassuming neutral white. In short, it really did not outwardly represent itself as a library. Once we got inside, it became evident that what it lacked on the outside, flourished on the inside with bright open spaces, inviting work areas, and gave multiple nods to pieces of the library’s past and to the current transition under way from hardcopy records to digital formats. A portion of a card catalog still sits on one of the floors, in a side room sit old school microfiche machines to view old newspapers, and wall sculpture pays homage to the original National Library building. It was a very comfortable space.

I think what really made this trip memorable was getting the lecture from Erik Boekesteijn, as he gave us a tour of what innovation really looks like, because I think he pretty much embodied ever single innovator type from the Ten Faces book. He was all of them at once, and perhaps a bit of a white knight, champion of making libraries and other public entities step out of their comfort zone. Granted it was scare tactics, but honestly sometimes there is no other choice. Having taken a class with Rolf this past spring on community engagement made this talk a really nice companion to that class. More so when it became apparent that they had worked together on DOK1 in Aarhus, Denmark. Trying to imagine these two working together on a project inspires visions of fantastic ideas flying in every direction. 

As Erik spoke about the innovative spaces, it made me think of some community response papers I had seen while taking David Hendry’s class on design thinking. The pubic had been asked to think of their perfect library, and then draw it with explanations on the side. What is needed in a library? I am not sure what the initial project was for this feedback, but we used them for in class exercises. None of the responses I saw looked anything like a library currently out there, except perhaps DOK1 comes close. People wanted more from a library than just books, and it showed, with people asking for sleeping spaces, gaming rooms, meeting spaces for the public, garden areas or heavily planted interiors. But most of all, they wanted large open spaces, with lots of light, and plant life. Books were always on the list, but in a secondary capacity. The focus was much more on an inviting space, rather than focus on the books or learning materials. What it really came down to was safe space in which you could do anything you needed to, or wanted to. 

Safe space. I have to wonder when the public view of the library changed from a place to gain information or read a book, to a place that was a safe space. This also came up at a seminar I was at for children’s activities and other elements of running a good children’s library section. I can no longer remember her name, but the very first things she said was that if children didn’t feel safe in the space you had already lost them. As an example, she spoke of being in charge of a branch library in Oakland, CA. That’s a fairly tough area, high crime, lots of tension. She said every morning during the summer she’d walk past basketball courts behind the high school next to her branch, and she’d wave at the kids playing basketball. They never waved back, but watched he walk past. October 17th, 1989 rolls around, and she and her staff are getting ready to close up and there are a couple of patrons looking for books, when a 7.2 earthquake hits. The lights go out in the library and all anyone can here is things crashing to the floor, car alarms going on and the city emergency siren. When the shaking stops, she and her staff go to make sure everyone is okay, and discover that they not only have the couple of patrons still there, but all the kids from the basketball court there too. Those kids ran to a safe place. The library. A safe space. As a librarian we’re looking at our library as a book collection that serves the public. From the public standpoint, libraries are so much more than that. It’s something to keep in mind when someone wants to try something outrageous with a library and the staff are freaking out about it because it would not be traditional. I suspect that the public is more than willing to give the library some leeway.

So, in short, Erik’s talk reaffirmed a lot of things I had always thought true along my time as a library manager. Just make sure, first and foremost, that whatever space you make it safe space. Don’t be afraid to go big with something, although if you’re on a tight budget be careful with that. But as libraries move into a future were they will almost certainly be expected to do things that never entered the minds of a librarian, I suspect going large on something is going to become a normal event. Something never before seen in libraries to meet a need. It is something to think about. 

Meermano Museum -

By the time we left the KB, I wasn’t feeling my best. Mostly because I was worn out I think so unfortunately my attention for this museum was not the best. Sorry! We ventured out after lunch to the Meermano museum, which houses very old books, printing presses and type sets for some of the books in the collection, and what I think might be considered something of a cabinet of curiosities given the eclectic nature of the non-book collection. The book collection was exquisite and I would have liked a lot more time to explore it with the curator, but I suspect we were on a schedule. I also would have liked to have been feeling better because I had a difficult time paying attention. 

I remember the curator, whose name escapes me at the moment, talking about the paintings, Roman, Greek and Egyptian objects and what to do with them because the building was not properly equipped to store such items without causing decay. It was quite warm in that room, and I could understand his concern. If you don’t have the money to install climate control systems, then what do you do? It’s a good question. Especially in the Netherlands with the high humidity and the very weird weather patterns that are probably only going to get worse. Fragile things, such as the mummies of the cat and the child will not fair well. 

I as also not sure on some of the labeling for some of the objects in the museum area. One marked Greek appeared to be Minoan and a small statue that looked Assyrian was mixed in with Roman objects. Then again, I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I just happen to recognize certain aspects from ancient cultures. 

What really had my attention though, were the books, and being able to get so close to them, even if some were under glass. The ones that the fellow pulled out by Moore with the incredible attention to detail was amazing. I was going to ask for a closer look, but others had made requests for other items, and I decided not to ask. So amazing though. I had seen one or two books this old before while in Australia, which were copies of bibles or scripture like the ones he showed us in the beginning. That’s something I could spend days looking at. The rose garden was also lovely, even though it technically had nothing to do with the books and small museum collection of objects from ancient empires. But I very much appreciated the opportunity to sit outside and enjoy somewhat drippy weather and talk with new friends. 

I’ve only got one more post to go having to do with the DANS visit, and then I think I’m out of things to talk about. Hopefully will have the DANS post up tomorrow.