Interesting library position: Open Education Library Fellow

Cal Poly is hiring a librarian to work with their burgeoning open education programs.  For those of us wondering what librarians should be (or are) doing with MOOCs, this is interesting news.  A major research institution, investing in a dedicated position* for open education support–that’s pretty great.  I haven’t seen other positions like this, but would be interested to hear about them if they’re out there.

In case you’re wondering what a librarian for open education support actually does, here’s my nutshell reading of the (extremely small-font!) duties:

• help find, compile, assess, coordinate, and disseminate open educational resources and open content
• foster the development of open educational resources
• help build ways to use open educational resources
• tie open educational resources to the curriculum (I read this as, find ways to build information literacy skills into open ed resources)
• support a two-way relationship with open content repositories like Hathi Trust and Open Content Alliance
• offer workshops and other faculty instruction on open education projects
• encourage faculty to contribute to open access projects
• advise users on copyright and Creative Commons issues
• promote Open Access Week
• do outreach and liaison work to the School of Education
• write grants (and presumably help manage them if successful)
• teach, manage the collection, and develop digital resources
• provide professional service to the campus and community

That’s…a lot of stuff.  A few things in there seem a little tossed-in, like “Creative Commons” being somehow lumped in with copyright issues, as if it were a separate field of inquiry.  But it looks to me as if the folks at Cal Poly are thinking broadly about where open education may be headed, and working to get out ahead.  I’m not sure that I’d focus much of my Open Education Library Fellow’s time on MERLOT when s/he could be working on MOOCs (and I’m not sure if there’s a reason why the job names some names (Hathi Trust and Open Content Alliance) and not others (*cough*Coursera)…but overall, this is really interesting and encouraging.

I hope that positions like this will gradually start to appear more frequently, that we’ll see universities recognizing the natural linkages between libraries and open education, and that libraries will start making these positions fully-funded and tenure-track.  Because if you ask me, we’ve just seen the tip of the open education iceberg.

Interesting image of the day: Mailman with child in bag, courtesy Smithsonian.

*  A dedicated two-year fellowship, that is.  With a salary starting at $48K, in San Luis Obispo. 

7 Things to Make Librarians Happy

This week has seen the death of Ray Bradbury, the victory of Scott Walker, and the depressing revelation that a three-bedroom house in Arch Cape, OR will cost you $459,000.

It’s time for a list of good stuff, library-style.  Please feel free to add more in the comments.

 

1.  New York Times-bestselling novelist Catherynne Valente writes a beautiful love letter to libraries:  We Are All Wyveraries.  Hooray for wyverns!

 

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2.  The MLA will now allow authors who publish in its journals to retain their own copyright, post copies of their work to open access repositories, or on the open Web.  Hooray for open access!

 

3.  The New York Public Library recently cataloged and made available a huge historic collection of Farm Security Administration photographs–including works by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.  Hooray for catalogers and free online access to these great images!

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4.  The folks at Teach.com made this awesome summer reading flowchart, perfect for printing and posting where everyone on earth will see it.  Hooray for reading!

 

5.  Durham County Library has made the code for their awesome single serving library hours site freely available.  Now your library too can have a fun, elegant answer to the most-asked question ever.  Hooray for simplicity!

 

6.  In San Diego, libraries are actually expanding their hours, thanks to a budget surplus (!) and a mayor who sounds like he gets it.  And Norwood Public Library in Norwood, NJ is getting some new space, thanks to donor funds.

 

7.  Oprah still believes in books.  And the book she’s championing right now is a good one, made right here in Portland.  (Read it at your local library.)  Hooray for Oprah!

 

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West Hollywood’s murals make Sunset

Sunset magazine, darling of West Coast yuppies*, has a blog post titled “Better than Kindle: libraries are back.”  Hard to think that this awesome mural on the side of the West Hollywood Public Library didn’t have something to do with that great PR.

Just one more reason to pay attention to good visual design in your library.  And if you can get Shepard Fairey to do your murals, more power to you.

* I say this with love.

New post, new look

It’s been too long since I posted last, but that’s a good reason to update the look of this blog a little.  The theme I’ve been using has been upgraded (or just plain changed) slightly, and I like the new version.  So, new look!

Recently Netflix has started offering TED talks as part of its streaming video content…which is sort of odd, considering that TED talks are already available free online.  (Thanks to my wife for pointing this out as we browsed the meager selections last night.)

What’s not on Netflix, but possibly useful or at least interesting:  TED has put together a Fellow Speaker Guide, listing TED Fellows who are available as speakers for events.  As someone who’s sat in a lot of meetings trying to think of keynote speakers, this is a good thing.  I’d love to see ACRL put something like this together, and keep it updated–a well-designed, clean, easy-to-find-and-refer-to list of speakers in different areas of librarianship (and outside of it) knowledge areas, reviews, and biography listed.

And just to test out the new theme, here’s a TED talk I particularly like–Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity:

Street Books

I recently did an interview with Street Books librarian Laura Moulton, who runs a free bike-powered library for people who live outside.

Good news update:  the original project was funded by a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant, but Laura just announced that it will live on past the term of the grant, which was due to end in early September.  Based on the enthusiastic response she’s gotten, from both patrons and donors, this is an idea whose time has come.  There’s someone in Seattle interested in starting a Street Books library there, and who knows where else?

You can read the full interview here.

Once I had a kid who’d torn it up a little because it was his 21st birthday, and he told me so.  He was pretty swaggery and belligerent.  I asked him what he liked and he said Che Guevara.  The next week he came back and asked for that, not really even looking at me.  I said yes, here it is, and it blew his mind.  I saw him again and waved to him when I was biking home on Saturday, and he waved back.  It’s a pretty cool thing.

 

Five things Lady Gaga can teach marketers about community building…

Courtesy of Fast Company.  (For “marketers,” read “librarians.”)

1. Target like-minded individuals.
2. Be vulnerable.
3. Treat the consumer patron like your boss.
4. Create a collective experience.
5. Become a better company library through community.

 

The Chronicle covers the Big Deal

Just a quick pointer:  the UO Libraries are featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s lead story today, on Big Deals between academic publishers and academic libraries.  Basically, Big Deals compel libraries to subscribe to a fixed set of journals for multiple years, and to agree to pay inflation that averages 5 to 6 percent per year.

The UO, as well as Southern Illinois at Carbondale, both just negotiated out of the Big Deal and into arrangements that work better for us.  It sounds simple, but it’s a huge amount of work, research, and negotiation–and you have to remember that publishers are businesses, who make a living by negotiating.  Libraries are libraries.  So to broker our own way out of an agreement that doesn’t work for us, into one that does, is…kind of a big deal.  I hope more libraries will take notice, and do the same.

 

The ivory tower and the street

My academic library is in an area of Portland, OR that’s starting to transition.  Many of our closest neighbors are missions, shelters, and other social services, and there are plenty of folks who sleep on the sidewalks and under the bridges.  On the other hand, the library is in a beautifully restored 19th-century block of warehouses, along with the rest of the University of Oregon in Portland–and a handful of creative, financial, and other firms.  Next door to us is the brand-new headquarters of Mercy Corps, a major international aid agency. And going in across the street is the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, renovating yet another of the old neighborhood buildings.

A little further down the street, an artist, writer, and activist named Laura Moulton has set up a project called Street Books, providing a free library service to people who live outside.  With funding from Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council, Laura’s repurposed a snazzy, vintage-looking delivery bicycle to hold about 50 books and a card catalog.  She keeps regular hours–two shifts a week in two different locations–and checks her books out without due dates or home addresses required.  She gets them back, too.

Reading a little about the project on Laura’s site, and passing by her setup as she’s working, has made me reflect a little on some of the most basic values that underlie what we do in all libraries.  Here’s the CLA’s list of “Our Values.”  I like the first one in particular.

We believe that libraries and the principles of intellectual freedom and free universal access to information are key components of an open and democratic society.

Diversity is a major strength of our Association.

An informed and knowledgeable membership is central in achieving library and information policy goals.

Effective advocacy is based upon understanding the social, cultural, political and historical contexts in which libraries and information services function.

Laura’s project walks the talk–whether you call it art or librarianship, or something else completely.  I’ll be trying to take a little of her style and substance into the work I do in my library.  Maybe you can too?

Cross-posted at Re: Generations, a blog for Canadian academic librarians.

Resilience vs. sustainability

I work with architecture and design students, and I have a strong interest in understanding some of what they do.  Sometimes this means I get to take a class in a related field–this term I took one in urban planning.  The topic was sustainable cities, which is a pretty fascinating one when you consider how quickly our world is urbanizing, and how this affects poverty, ecology, energy use, and a zillion other factors.

One idea that came up early in our conversations was resilience vs. sustainability.  These are both complex notions, but I’ll boil them down to what I took away.  Basically, a sustainability model supposes that we can create or find ways to live on the planet that don’t deplete more than they give.  In other words, we can keep things going without fundamentally altering our relationship to the world.  A resilience model says that we’ve already altered the planet beyond certain tipping points.  We’ve changed the ground rules–the temperature, the acidity, the fertility, the habitat, whatever–and now we have to focus on finding ways to live with those changes.  There’s no going back.

I find it really interesting to apply a resilience model of thinking to libraries.  Resilience emphasizes adaptability, the ability of an organism or organization to change itself to survive in new circumstances.  Libraries and librarians have for some time been dealing with major, destabilizing changes in our environment.  Gillian recently posted a Call to Arms that speaks to these changes, I think.  Print texts are ceding ground to digital, traditional service models aren’t reaching new users, the skills we learned in our MLIS degrees may not be the ones we need in our jobs.  It can be overwhelming, especially for librarians who have been in the profession for a while and are used to seeing things a certain way.

Thinking about ourselves and our libraries in terms of resilience might help us feel more in control of our situation.  It means we’d have to accept that we’ve passed certain tipping points, and that may not be easy or fun to do.  But if we can do it, then we may be able to start thinking in terms of our own ability to adapt in meaningful ways.  Change is happening all around us–serious change, world-shaking change.  As a species, we have some serious decisions to make about how we deal with that change.

Professionally, ecologically, politically, and in all other ways–isn’t it empowering to start from an assumption that we’re resilient and adaptable?  Doesn’t that make the outlook seem better, no matter how disruptive the changes we face?

This post was originally made at Re:Generations.

Sobering thoughts on higher ed

n+1 has some pretty disquieting thoughts about higher education, student loan debt, and the changing profile of university campuses, both for- and non-profit.  Author Malcolm Harris compares the spiraling costs of federally-backed student loans to the housing bubble that just blew up in our faces.  He writes:

The result [of increasing student loans] is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.

Yowch.  Of particular interest, if you happen to be or know someone with student debts or probable future student debts, is Harris’s overview of how higher ed has shifted to a corporate-ized model over the last forty years or so.  Tuition costs have exploded, which means students take on more debt–but there’s less and less assurance that when they graduate they’ll have a job at all, much less a job allowing them to pay off $50,000 while also establishing a household and a life.  At the same time, high-cost university courses are more likely than ever to be taught by adjuncts or graduate students, who are paid little and have no job security.

And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.

Double yowch.  And:

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

Triple yowch.

In today’s Oregonian (our newspaper around these parts) was a piece about a bipartisan state bill (HB 2732) that was just passed, requiring high school students to apply to university, the military, or an apprenticeship program before they can receive their high school diploma.  There’s no requirement that people actually follow through (although an application to enlist in the military seems potentially binding to me) but the bill is on its way to the Senate.  No word on whether the state will put any more money into actually funding degrees for those students who are accepted.

Image: Burlington County National Greenback Labor Ticket, courtesy Cornell University Collection of Political Americana