William F. Garrity

The Council on Libraries and Information Resources publishes a report of a recent meeting about "HOW SHOULD WE be rethinking the research library in a swiftly changing information landscape?" 

A Vision for the 21st-Century Library

The breadth of the discussion underscored a critical point: the future of the research library cannot be considered apart from the future of the academy as a whole. Researchers are asking new questions and are developing new methodological approaches and intellectual strategies. These methods may entail new models of scholarly communication—for example, a greater reliance on data sets and multimedia presentations. This has profound consequences for academic publications because traditional printed books and journals cannot adequately capture these novel approaches. With the predicted rise in new forms of scholarship, the promotion-and-tenure process, which favors print publications (especially in the humanities), will need to be rethought. As these methods of communication change, the procedures, skills, and expertise that libraries need to manage them will change as well. With growing cross-disciplinary emphasis, it will also be necessary to reassess the organization of higher education—its departments, schools, and centers.

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The June 17, 2008, http://www.insidehighered.com/ reports on Cornell's Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative: 

When “Google” has become a synonym for “research,” how should faculty respond? And if the answer doesn’t lie in musty books and stacks of journals, are libraries still part of the answer?

The problem is near-universal for professors who discover, upon assigning research projects, that superficial searches on the Internet and facts gleaned from Wikipedia are the extent — or a significant portion — of far too many of their students’ investigations. It’s not necessarily an issue of laziness, perhaps, but one of exposure to a set of research practices and a mindset that encourages critical thinking about competing online sources. Just because students walk in the door as “digital natives,” the common observation goes, doesn’t mean they’re equipped to handle the heavy lifting of digital databases and proprietary search engines that comprise the bulk of modern, online research techniques.

Yet the gap between students’ research competence and what’s required of a modern college graduate can’t easily be solved without a framework that encompasses faculty members, librarians, technicians and those who study teaching methods. After all, faculty control their syllabuses, librarians are often confined to the reference desk and IT staff are there for when the network crashes.

So instead of expecting students to wander into the library themselves, some professors are bringing the stacks into the classroom. In an effort to nudge curriculums in the direction of incorporating research methodology into the fabric of courses themselves, two universities are experimenting with voluntary programs that encourage cooperation between faculty and research specialists to develop assignments that will serve as a hands-on and collaborative introduction to the relevant skills and practices.

Kathy Lee Berggren, a professor at Cornell University, teaches oral communication with a “heavy research component.” Still, she pointed out, “a lot of my students really [only] scratch the surface with the type of research they’re doing.”

“Research isn’t a Google search,” she said.

That sentiment was echoed by several others involved with the Cornell Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative, a program that kicked off on Monday with a week-long summer institute aimed at understanding how students perceive university research, how to guide their habits and how to merge existing course goals with instruction in research methods. Those practices, of course, can apply whether inside a brick-and-mortar research facility or logged on from home. The goal is to “really learn how to use a library whether they’re in it or not,” Berggren said.

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The Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries are very active in supporting evidence-based medicine and healthcare.  (For instance, see http://www.dartmouth.edu/~biomed/institute2008/.) 

In the June 16, 2008, Scientific American (online) Community, is a post by Merrill Goozner, "Evidence-based medicine in Russia: the challenge and the hope."

MOSCOW – On my last morning in Russia, I dined with Vasiliy Vlassov, professor of research methodology at the Moscow Medical Academy and head of a small but feisty group of Russian physicians called the Society of Specialists in Evidence-Based Medicine. “We’re trying to get the government to cancel ineffective care,” he said.

Give me an example, I said as I bit into an inch-thick lox sandwich. “The salt rooms,” he replied without hesitation. A quick check online later found that halotherapy, or speleotherapy as it is sometimes called because aerosolized salt dust is administered in cave-like rooms, has been widely practiced in Eastern Europe for over 200 years. There are dozens of spas, including some in government-run hospitals and health clinics, offering the salt cure for almost every lung disorder, ranging from chronic pulmonary obstructive disease to seasonal asthma.

However, the practice, which has almost no following in the U.S., has never been systematically studied. The National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database contains just 14 citations for halotherapy – all written by Russian physicians and none involving a test on more than 138 patients. Most were on just a few dozen. “It is from the middle ages. It is nonsense,” Vlassov said.

It’s been nearly four decades since the Scottish epidemiologist Archie Cochrane introduced the concept of evidence-based medicine in the west. It spawned a worldwide movement among physicians called the Cochrane Collaboration. Committees were established to evaluate all the clinical trials in a given area of medicine and issue objective clinical practice guidelines. Many reformers in the U.S. believe getting physicians to use evidence-based “best practices” generated by independent groups like the Cochrane Collaboration as key to holding down health care costs, since it could eliminate many useless medical practices.

But whereas American physicians often must be persuaded to ignore powerful financial incentives and pay close attention to the evidence, their Russian counterparts face an entirely different problem. They don’t have the intellectual tools necessary to evaluate the evidence. The Cochrane Collaboration’s local chapter, which Vlassov headed, fell apart a few years ago. 

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A colleague in the Baker-Berry Library (Bill F.) points to this article in the June 12, 2008, The New York Review of Books:

The Library in the New Age

By Robert Darnton

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape?  How to make sense of it all?  I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated.

My colleague says,

Thought this might be of interest to CD Forum list members -  it's a long article, but the best part of the article begins with section 2, which focuses on the advantages & shortcomings of Google Books, preservation, and the role of research libraries.

Again, from the June 5, 2008, The Economist: 

Book publishing in America

Unbound

Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry

JEFF BEZOS, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, destination for nearly four-fifths of online book buyers, appears harmless. But to some in the publishing industry, he looms like a recurring nightmare. Having upset booksellers' apple-carts in the 1990s with his online stores, he is now widening his assault on the industry, as he personably explained in a speech at Book Expo America (BEA), a trade fair in Los Angeles, on May 30th.

From the outside, book publishing looks like an impregnable edifice: 411,000 new titles were published in America last year, and more than 3 billion books sold there. Growth was 4.3% in the “adult trade” segment, the mainstay of the market. In fact, the existing order is fragile. Reading in America, as in many rich countries, is down. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, says leisure reading is declining, especially among the young. Since 1985, books' share of entertainment spending has fallen by seven percentage points.

Books have changed very little in half a millennium, but they may now be on the verge of going digital. The first high-resolution e-book reader, made by Sony, came out in 2004. Last November Amazon launched the Kindle (pictured), a $359 e-book reader with a high-speed wireless link to the firm's online store, allowing e-books to be downloaded in seconds. Mr Bezos says Kindle e-books now account for 6% of sales of the 125,000 titles available in both print and electronic formats.

Though they are an improvement on a computer screen, e-book readers remain crude simulacra of books. A poll released by John Zogby at BEA found that 82% of Americans strongly prefer paper to pixels. None of the handful of e-book manufacturers will divulge sales figures. First-quarter sales of mass-market e-books in America have tripled since the same period in 2005, but they were worth just $10m.

 But Kindle and its kind are merely the first generation of a product that is sure to evolve quickly in the coming years. Eventually, e-books point the way towards a cleavage of content from platform, threatening publishing with the wholesale change that has hit the music industry. It is a familiar story: fearing piracy, publishers are already adopting various mutually incompatible security technologies that are sure to annoy readers—although ePub, a new standard backed by many big publishers, may clarify things.

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