Caveat Lector

Jim Franke, UChicago joint appointment, including running a humanities institute. Word of welcome! Talking about partnerships with other humanities-institute folks to work on interdisciplinarity, thinking about disciplines, and how that fits with Project Bamboo: dynamic relationships among disciplines, content of disciplines not fixed; universities haven’t reflected that dynamism, instead proliferating small fiefdoms. Humanities centers might be good campus partners in innovation and change!

(rundown of agenda, logistics)

First section, two questions for table-by-table discussion: “What do you hope Bamboo will accomplish?” and “Given what you’ve been hearing, what questions do you have about Bamboo?”

(introductions around the table)

A1: Want to see Bamboo touch all the stakeholders, including publishers and aggregators, scholarly societies. Need a laundry list of these stakeholders! People who haven’t gotten into the room, work with these orgs as a group, rather than one-on-one. LEVERAGE. Make them play ball!

A2: “Pub conversation” learning things by accident. How can those conversations happen more often and more systematically? Working with technophobes—how do I talk to them about how I can help them do their work better?

A3 (me): I feel underutilized. Because of my checkered background, I have a grab-bag of skills to offer that A&H people say they need, but I can’t make the connections. How do I make people aware what I can do, willing to take advantage of my services? How do I tell my higher-ups that I need to get out of the library into the community?

A4: Intersection of these sets of people, as public-services librarians. How do we develop services to support what researchers are trying to do? We’ve been slow in doing that.

A5: Central IT has not been supporting the research community for 15 years at our campus; how do we change that? Where are shared needs, and how can shared services address those needs? A&H are the have-nots on our campus; how do we change that?

A6: Curious what will happen. Research focuses a lot on work practices, why people do or don’t do what we want them to do with technology. Tools: Why isn’t there an iTunes for articles? Seems buildable! We’re 3/4 of the way there. How about recommenders (quality/use indicators), to deal with info overload?

A7: Folklorist, not “high culture” type. Strong public orientation. Bamboo needs to pay attention to humanistic materials. Because the materials are often not inside universities, universities let them slide. Nobody to count, describe, make available, digitize these collections. Organizing holdings cross-institutionally. Dealing with closed collections.

A8: Publisher; why is he the only one in the room? A lot of academic publishers are talking about these questions. Why can’t Bamboo engage that parallel conversation, bring it in? Libraries and publishers are talking, but NOT libraries/publishers/faculty. We need that triumvirate! If libs are going to branch out into production/publishing, faculty need to come into it. With IT in the background as a facilitator. Do humanists want to be “efficient/effective?” Is that the goal? Can the tech reproduce the “productive inefficiencies” of humanities studies? How does tenure connect into all this; very important to him as an editor. None of the stakeholder groups can determine how tenure will work by itself. But we have to talk about how to value this stuff vis-a-vis tenure!

We want useful efficiencies (e.g. in discovery process); we also like unique materials, things that nobody else is working with! Tension between finding whatever one wants and finding material that moves ideas in interesting directions and often gets buried. We don’t want to spend hours and hours sifting through haystacks! Because we want one thing, we may want its opposite too. Working out competing desires.

Publishers have to be on board for some things to happen, e.g. exposing metadata. We are impoverished if we leave them out.

What is effectiveness? Is it machinelike, or is it enabling you to do what you want to do the best way? Example: finding verb usages in paper versus electronic text.

Some A&H people are in full retreat from technology; they get sad and upset when told that models are changing. How to tell them that the world is moving with or without them? How to help them look forward?

What’s a “productive inefficiency”? Mind-numbing gruntwork, triggering a creative thought process, which wouldn’t happen if you’re just creating. For some people, you need the resistance between the mundane and the creative to do the best work. Unintended consequences of the speed at which work occurs. Do we think in a different way? Does it short-circuit thought processes? Example: transcribing texts by hand instead of OCR; only half of mind on work, other half freewheeling.

Dissertation: lots of side trips during the research process. Drafting threw them all away for a time, and then some got added back in—but all those distractions were necessary! A lot of these serendipitous experiences are replicable digitally (e.g. vague Google searches turning up odd results).

Connections? Theme in department reaccreditation hearings: everybody has to rethink what their standards are and what their dissemination modes are. Have to legitimize digital formats in addition to traditional ones. UPresses are getting hit economically, and are not willing to crank out “tenure books,” universities without presses are freeloaders on those with, what about audience? Economic model of UPresses is altering. On one hand, opportunity to present work in different formats; on other, shrinkage of traditional outlets.

What presses/societies are talking about: how to produce digital books, how to get over the hump? Establish electronic series, grabbing up important scholars first so that young faculty can feel comfortable publishing.

What about graduate students? Where do they fit in? At MPOW, we want to bring grad students into the conversation. They’re the next wave; we want to grab them now. Some graduate students are very forward-looking, not Luddite at all! What they know can even spread to faculty. But you can’t assume they’re more technical. In LIS we face this problem constantly. Base tech level of techie students has gone up, but the low end is still very low.

Good to hear from students whose desire to do digital work shut down by hostile departments. What about info literacy training, too? What level of digital familiarity are we going to assume from our students in the future, as opposed to what we’ll teach?

What communities is Bamboo going to impact? Faculty, grad students, undergrads? IT as training partner. Undergrads have to be taught how to do research; what we’re doing is breaking down research into its components. If undergrads don’t know how to do research, can they contribute to Bamboo discussions? True, but we want to make sure we pay attention to the impact on them, and recognize that they’re already pushing the boundaries.

What are the publics for Project Bamboo? What aren’t? Performing arts hits the whole public. Scholars pull material from everywhere. Commonalities between us and eScience, perhaps the small sciences? Maybe Bamboo will touch a lot more disciplines, because of interdisciplinarity. Do we have enough interdisciplinary types in Bamboo? What kind of technical needs will come up, as projects interbreed disciplines?

Hard to know what the audiences are (looks like everybody right now!) until we narrow down a bit more what we’re talking about. Some of us don’t need new tools; we need help doing the work of making what we have available. Some of us do that kind of labor, and need projects! And who knows what we could do with cheap undergrad/grad labor that was digitally aware?

I want Bamboo to open all the doors so I can do whatever I want, and not find “their software” a barrier. Metasearch, no more competing interfaces. Don’t want Bamboo to be a barrier, new standards. But I’d rather have a silo than an unscoped universe of stuff most of which I don’t want. Bamboo can’t be so inclusive that the tools are dumbed down to uselessness, or unusable within specific communities.

(Pulling the larger group back together.)