20 000 visits today!

Today, the number of visits to Notes on Documentation and Librarianship passed 20 000 since the start in the fall of 2010. Is that a lot? For a blog, I don’t know - but to me it is!

What I find particularly gratifying is the international reach of these short entries. During this last week, visitors have come from Indonesia, Brazil, USA, Argentina, Pakistan, Peru, Malaysia, Poland, Colombia and Sweden – and that’s just the ”top ten”.

Thank you all for coming here – thank you for reading!

Now, I will just finish off the academic year here in Sweden in a few weeks time, then I promise a whole bunch of new entries on various subjects concerning documentation and librarianship. So stay tuned, there is a lot more to come.

Tonight, though, I celebrate this with a nice vegetarian dinner in the evening sun on my porch with my loved one.

/Joacim

Of railway stations, universities and the curse of corporate ideals in free spaces

I am very fond of railway stations. Just as I like airports. There is something very democratic among travellers in those spaces, where everyone is there only to get to the next destination. At the same time, however, they are also places for contemplation and observation. We see each other in a different way there. We are stripped of our everyday roles and images, even though some do their best to uphold them. We are very (in a deep sense) human there and that, I like. Somehow it makes me feel less lonely in this strange and, for me at least, yet unresolved world.

A couple of days ago, I went to a meeting in Stockholm, as I do a couple of times a year. The train ride takes about three and a half hours, and I know the town well. I quite enjoy those trips, although I would never like to live there. When the meeting was done and I had a couple of hours to kill before returning, I decided to go back to the central station to get something to eat – there are a couple of places serving at least decent vegetarian meals there – and to read a good book (right now Frank Zappa’s hilarious autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book).  As I strolled around the ever expanding waiting hall, I noticed that something had changed. Practically all the benches where people used to sit, rest, read, talk to each other or observe were gone. The huge waiting hall was… empty. If I now wanted to sit and do those nice things, I had to go in to one of the many coffee shops that had been established along the sides of the hall. Or simply wander around in any of the many new shops selling stuff I don’t need. There had obviously been a change in the way that people were treated in this old, open building. They are no longer travellers or citizens. They are consumers. To sit and read, observe or talk do not render money, so away with the benches and put the people where they have to pay to sit. Then they can do whatever they are doing while waiting for trains. It is a striking picture of social development (or degradation). Social space has turned in to economic space. Thank you, Ronald Reagan (who started it all) and the subsequent non-thinkers of present Swedish politics. 

As I got on the train it struck me that I had not only seen a wrecked social space, I had seen a picture of Swedish universities – not least my own. Departments are seen as production units, students as consumers moulded to a marketplace of (un)employment and even the thought of ”free” research is opressed in the race for ”external funding”. A place where we once could read, observe, talk to each other, and see each other as human beings has been replaced by a system where intellectual space has turned into economic space. No benches are left to sit on.

My own university is extremely senitive to this development. Not only has it recently been re-organized so that it is now run more or less like a private corporation – all in the name of New Public Management. It has also been subjected to a large donation of research funds which is well on the way of killing every inch of free critical research in any of its faculties – not least in the arts and humanities faculty to which I belong. Suddenly the whole university is running like crazy for an, although ridiculously large, amount of money tied to ”research themes” dictated by ignorant corporate representatives without the slightest clue of how research is being done. Of course, critical (or ”free”) research is not what is sought for. Highly qualified researchers are used as marionettes in the pursue of further economic growth. Is that what we really need? It would have been a lot better if the absurd amount of money in this fund would be taken in by the tax system and then distributed to the Swedish universities to take care of without the muddling of corporate ignorance. This, of course, will not happen. It is too late. Instead I see good and capable colleagues nervously discussing how to "adjust" their research interests to fit requirements set by people who know very little, but have a hell of a lot of money. Somehow, the will of these people have been mixed up with the needs of society – there is of course no similarity there. It is just so sad.

Someday this system will crumble and break under its own weight. But not yet. As we wait for that to happen, is it possible to oppose, to stand beside all this? Of course. By not applying for their money. By focussing on ones own research, without letting others dictate the problems studied. By not running in the same direction as everybody else, just because management tells you to. By not believing the myth saying that ”this is the way it must be – the way it is”. Disobedience in these matters might bring some personal disadvantages, it might even lead some symbolic punishment. It is a hard system we have had imposed upon us. However, it would, above all, be a manifestation of integrity, and of belief in the value of free thought and critical research - in contemplation, talking, reading, observing. In order to do that we need somewhere free to sit. So, let us begin by carrying back the benches.    

On Academic Library Support for Scholarly Publishing

Together with my good friend and colleague, Dr Krister Johannesson of Skövde University, I have recently wrapped up a two-year project in which we have studied the everyday experiences of academic librarians in their work with researchers. Special focus was put on issues concerning publication strategies and work with Open Access. The project, which was done without any ”external funding”, involved some 25 librarians in three library units at Linnaeus University and Skövde University, who participated in repeated focus-group interviews and wrote log books of their daily work over a period of six months. This provided us with a very rich material which was encoded with the analysis software NVivo and boiled down into two articles. We’ve had a good run and the project turned out very well.

We would like to extend a big ”Thank You” to the participating librarians, who put down both time and effort into this. To paraphrase the good Morrissey: the pleasure and the privilege was ours. We hope the results will contribute to further discussions on these issues – both within the participating libraries and inte the academic library sector in general.

The main article is now published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship:

Librarians' Views of Academic Library Support for Scholarly Publishing: An Every-day Perspective

by

Joacim Hansson, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

Krister Johannesson, Skövde University, Sweden 

Abstract

This article reports on a study of academic librarians' views of their work and possibilities regarding support for researchers' publishing. Institutional repositories and Open Access are areas being dealt with in particular. Methods used are highly qualitative; data was gathered at two Swedish university libraries over a six month period through focus group interview sessions and personal logs by informants. Findings indicate that attitudes are often in collision with practicalities in the daily work in libraries. Even though they have a high degree of knowledge and awareness of scholarly publication patterns, librarians often feel insecure in the approach of researchers. There is a felt redirection in the focus of academic librarianship, from pedagogical information seeking tasks towards a more active publication support, a change which also includes a regained prominence for new forms of bibliographical work. Although there are some challenges, proactive attitudes among librarians are felt as being important in developing further support for researchers' publishing.

Keywords

• Academic libraries;
• Scholarly publishing;
• Open access;
• Sweden;
• Organizational identity;
• Focus group methodology

 

The DOI of the full article is here

The second article from the project is written in Swedish and published in a Danish anthology on current academic library challenges:

Johannesson, Krister & Hansson, Joacim (2012) ”Akademiska bibliotekariers förhållningssätt till forskares publiceringsstrategier – med särskilt avseende på frågan om Open Access”. Viden i spil: forskningsbibliotekers funktioner i forandring, Eds: Helene Hoyrup, Hans Jorn Nielsen & Birger Hjorland, Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur, pp. 280-302.

The book can be found and ordered here

Krister Johannesson and Joacim Hansson

Photo by Ingeborg Ekman Telehagen /LNU

Wittgenstein, Knowledge Organization and the value of ginger

When Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1921 stated, as the seventh and last main proposition of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that ”whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, no one thought that he would actually take it literally. He would never publish anything as ambitious during his lifetime again and only after his death came out the ”follow-up”, Philosophical Investigations, which denied much of what had been said in the Tractatus, although he had claimed to therein have solved all philosophical problems.  After his long silence he formulated the idea (to simplify dangerously) that instead of the extensional meaning of a word being that in the world that it referred to (the picture theory), it should be defined by its use. A word (or a term) can mean many things in various contexts and discourses, and contains all these potential meanings. The specific meaning reveals itself only in relation to how it is put to use in different discourses.

This formulation of the function of language is interesting for Library and Information Science (LIS) in that it directly affects research on classification and the organization of knowledge. The meaning of terms is what constitutes the basis of ”subjects” and relations in knowledge organization systems. If we study the epistemological discussion in relation to bibliographic classification, for instance in the erudite writings of Elaine Svenonius, we find that the ”late Wittgenstein” strikes down on most of the underlying epistemological assumptions of classification throughout history. No small thing. After centuries of Aristotelian classification where each class must be both exclusive and exhaustive, with each subject in one and only one place, the door was suddenly open for other interpretations of the possible organiziation of knowledge. Subject terms could have different meanings in different areas, contexts and situations. Svenonius offers a good and simple example: ”mercury” – metal, planet, car, Greek god etc etc. Classification had to face, as a consequence of Wittgenstein’s thought, such practical issues as how to treat homonymes and polysemes – ”Polysemy abounds”, Svenonius exclaimes.

The turn from the Aristotelian coloured picture theory of the Tractatus, where a subect in a classification scheme mirrored ”reality”, to a view on subjects seen in analogy with family resemblances led to, among other things, fuzzy set theory and use of ambiguity operators in indexing systems.

Reading the literature on knowledge organization one sometimes get the feeling that the end now was reached. If language used in indexing and classification is not absolute, neither in relation to truth nor to reality, but instead relating to discourse and context, we do indeed have a huge set of interesting challenges to deal with - and so has been done.

Philosophical investigations was first published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein’s death. Even though influential visions of new modes of organizing knowledge had been formulated by Paul Otlet in the 1930’s and Vannevar Bush in the 1940’s, the environment of these thoughts were firmly set in the pre-computorized world – a world, some would say, much simpler. Aristotle reigned still.

Today we have a somewhat different situation. New metaphores and new modes of thinking to intellectually grasp a technology we could not conceive of just a few decades ago seem to be needed. The vast dissemination and lack of organization of knowledge in today’s digital document environments challenge us. It seems to be the very practice of post-modernism (which owe so much to Wittgenstein), that is in front of us. It is in this context that the concept of rhizome has come to relevance in LIS. It was formulated by Deleuze & Guattari in the mid 1970’s. Most people today try as good as they can to avoid French post-modern philosophers, and Deleuze has mostly gone unnoticed in the LIS literature, but in an interesting way the concept of rhizome has stuck, and started its own (rhizome-like) life in the literature of the discipline. Lyn Robinson and Mike Maguire has made a good overview of the relevance and use of the concept.

Rhizome? Well, it is a term taken from botany. There, it is a subterranean stem structure consisting of ”nodes” where roots may spring out of virtually every place of it, in every direction. Most of us encounters rhizomes in the kitchen, as ginger. The rhizome is thus seen metaphorically as the way in which information and knowledge connect on the world wide web and in digital document environments. From every place, anytime, in any direction. The language theory of Wittgenstein is not seen as sufficient anymore. The Internet is an anarchic mass of documents which links to each other in unpredictable ways, making systems for information and knowledge organization face completely new challenges. The question is, of course, how revolutionary this is. Has it not always been like this? Perhaps technical tools have just made the chaos of reality explicit? How do the ”old” metaphores (the tree of knowledge, nets of knowledge) hold up against a dynamic rhizome-like structures of documents? We cannot say. What is clear though is the the need for new metaphores and modes of analysis in knowledge organization are considered to be acute. We may lean on Aristotle, and we may lean on Wittgenstein, and in many aspects they of course still hold sway. Knowledge is not its presentation, the Internet is not our knowledge – it is merely a technical tool which we in many ways still have to figure out what to do with, both in terms of epistemology and in oragnizational practice. Those who say we have already figured it out are not worth believing. Many should – like Wittgenstein – withdraw into silence, think hard and come back when they have something to say on the "novelty" of knowledge today. Perhaps the rhizome metaphor will show to be stronger than more established structures of knowledge classification. Perhaps it does best to keep in the kitchen – the health benefits of ginger seem, at least for now, indisputable.     

Suggested readings:

Svenonius, Elaine (2004) The epistemological foundations of knowledge representations. Library Trends, Vol. 52(3), pp. 571-587.

Robinson, Lyn & Maguire, Mike (2010) The rhizome and the tree: changing metaphors for information oragnisation. Journal of Documentation, Vol. 66(4), pp. 604-613.

20 years in Library and Information Science - reflect and repent, part 4: theorizing

One afternoon in 1997 (or 1998) I had a seminar on the study that eventually became my doctoral thesis. I can’t quite remember the discussion, but it must have concerned some rather theoretical issues, because I do remember my supervisor, professor Lars Höglund, sighing: ”but we must be able to tell something – it is possible for us to know things!!?”. I was a bit puzzled by this odd exclamation – that was really not the way I looked at what I did.  Of course he was right. When I started off in research twenty years ago it was not, however, self-evident that a young doctoral student would have that perspective. Postmodern theory was, at least in Library and Information Science, prevalent amongst the young, and we upheld some pride in taking in the ”new”.

Looking back now, however, I can see that maybe I never actually was as postmodern as I thought I was. At some point I definitely understood that I at least had left the postmoden irony-laden theories which I, to be honest, found quite tedious. Instead I see, through the whole of my work, a consistent theoretical underpinning relating to marxism (the ”young” Marx), neo-marxism and critical theory. The names I have followed and used in my research are, among others, Paul Ricoeur, James G. March, Chantal Mouffe and lately also Maurizio Ferraris. I have revolved around an axis which actually consists of a serious questioning of the postmodernity I thought I was a part of in the beginning of my scholarly path. What instead has guided me is the firm belief in society as something which really is ”out there”, possible to grasp and analyse, based on a materiality untouched by interpretation (often visible through its documentality) and without the binary relation of individual/context that so has fuelled contemporary Library and Information Science. The theory of mimesis by Paul Ricoeur was Aristotelian rather than Platonic; the ”new institutionalism” of James G. March opposed traditional institutional theory, based on simple behaviorism; the theory of agonistic pluralism forwarded by Chantal Mouffe gave me tools to analyse political processes which could explain why the often proclaimed death of ideologies was just an illusion; the concept of documentality, as formulated by Maurizio Ferraris, has made it possible to explain the legitimacy of social objects and insitutions through the documents and processes of documentation by which they are made visible.

These perspectives of course not only provide arguments for social critique, they may even be part of an argument for change. On the other hand, I don’t believe (anymore) that science will overturn the structures of power that opress the world today. Should the masses act on scientific knowledge, then we would for instance all be vegetarians, based on the fact that (a) we do not need to eat dead animals to survive, (b) the logic of the ”market” make the meat industry one of the most cynical and disgusting in the world.  But most people don’t act on such facts, now do they?

In Library and Information Science, we can establish the democratic significance of library services working in local society settings, as well as we can analyse the importance of a well working scientific communication – a prerequisite for development through knowledge. Not enough, perhaps, to turn contemporary society into a more worthy and humanistic one than that which we have today – but, enough to provide the basis for formulation of important questions that reach well beyond the influence (and interest) of the discipline.

In order to see the world, we need knowledge; in order to see the knowledge we have to document it; the documents need to be described and organized, they need to be made available and possible to retrieve; once so, we can internalize them and convert them into action, and out of this action there is (still?) room to achieve change. But, of course, the thought of redirecting social development requires an understanding of the very existence of social relations, not as ironies or discursive constructions, but as experiences of real people. In this way both studies of librarianship and documentation may in itself be legitimized from a materialistic point of view. Library and Information Science has indeed a lot of potential in this respect.

If any of my scientific writings should find a place for someone, somewhere, in the quest for social change and the role therein of documentation and librarianship, I would probably die a happy man. Before death, though, I might just keep doing this for, well, another twenty years.

20 years in Library and Information Science - reflect and repent, part 3: writing

For twenty years now I have been paid to communicate abouth things I find important in writing. As I am not particularly fond of people in general, I see this as a privilege. As a scholar I am to a very high degree a writer, something which I feel seldom is talked about when it comes to research – one only rarely hear a social researcher talk about his or her writing process – focus is always on the ”results”. To me the identity as a scholarly writer has been essential. When I entered the academy it was with a large portion of curiosity of what I would be able to do as a writer within the confinements of science – both in terms of research, and in terms of more popular writings. All of my research output is very personal to me. When I see my list of publication, I do not see just a list of articles, book chapters, reports and books. I see an ouvre. Some might find that pretentious, and it is. I do believe that lack of pretention is a big problem today, in research, and in society as a whole. The original fascination for documentation and libraries that once made me choose to engage in Library and Information Science in teaching and research, has always been my main guidence in the choices I have made in terms of topics and form. To me, my work follows a fairly straight path (with a few exceptions), and each new project I have taken on has begun in my own private contextualization, were I ask myself where this could fit in to the overall structure of my work. Whether this is visible to others is completely uninteresting. I am only interested in the direction of my own inner compass.  If I follow that, I am confident I will formulate interesting things to say that will take on a life of its own and be a part of discussions and debates of various sorts. In many cases this has also been the case. Suddenly I see, or hear of, a text of mine in a discussion that I could not imagine – sometime several years after it has been written. To see the individual lives of my books and articles unfold before me is gratifying beyond words. It is very much the way in which I connect to the world. I have several times over the years been invited to discussions and debates relating to topics I have written about. For the most I decline such invitations – I do not feel comfortable talking in the context of a debate – it is really as simple as that.

My research is, as I said, very personal to me.  It is therefore very important to me to keep as much independence in my work as I possibly can. Once the text is out and about, it is for any and all to scrutinize and crucify, but I do not compromise with my ideas. This why I do not engage in searching for ”external funding”, as it is called at the university. As most external funding in Sweden is the same tax money that already give me my pay at the end of the month, this is of course just discourse. External funding, especially in a topic like Library and Information Science, is nothing more than a control system giving some research a political legitimacy, and other not. I am utterly uninterested in the political legitimacy of my work, and doing my research in the realm of my given slot of time as a scholar has always been important. The result starts by now to show – it is possible to develop and do interesting research without spending a lot of time applying for money that you will most likely not get. This system set to discipline the spirits of scholars is devastating for many good ideas or, at the very least, time consuming - time that could be better used doing research. The system of reward within the university in terms of symbolic power and influence is obvious. It does, however, not have anything to do with the quality of research performed.

Writing science is in itself a negotiation, in terms of peer review processes and the scrutiny at conferences. The important thing is that these processes come relatively late in the creative process, and primarily concerns (at least with peer reviewing) the presentation of results. I remember when I started off with my first articles in 1993/1994, how I felt as if I was learning a new language. It was like learning to write sonnets – without the correct rhymes, it will simply be something else. Soon enough I realized it wasn’t all that rigouros, and I have done some experimentation with forms - for better and for worse. It was, however, an important choice for me – if I wanted to communicate and reach out to people, this could very well be a way that was fruitful. The writing process still holds. I can work though a project, or dwell on a problem for a very long time (sometimes years) without even making notes. At a given time – or a deadline – I sit down and I… write, quickly, with the basic structure all set in my mind's eye. Sometimes a given argument or line of thought finds its form in this very late writing process as I tap away – sometimes I have had a formulation or a sentence in my head for a very long time. If it’s good, it stays, if it doesn’t hold, it’ll disappear never to come back.

Results of social research is always negotiations and interpretations. I have always wondered why individual writing processes are so seldom discussed within the universities – as if we only reported, as if we are not – first and foremost – creative intellectuals, authors of science.

20 years in Library and Information Science - reflect and repent, part 2: teaching

Having worked for a full 20 years in academia, there has been a lot of teaching. I enjoy being in the classroom. I have never seen myself as a teacher – I still don’t – but I enjoy it. It’s a decent way to make a living. When I first entered a classroom in the role of a teacher in 1993, I had been employed at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) in Borås for about three weeks, immediately after graduating at that very department. The new semester was just about to start and one of the most experienced teachers had, for reasons I have long forgot, failed to appear. I was told to replace him and at a three days notice I had to prepare a course in cataloguing and bibliography. I was given a copy of the Swedish cataloguing rules and a few articles and set off to work.  I quickly got a grasp of the rules (I had studied them thoroughly only a year earlier, as a student). What really scared me, however, was the idea of mantling the role of a teacher. Not ever have I had any urge whatsoever to lead anyone else, and a teacher is obviously a leader. I needed to get over this nervousness, so went to the bookstore and bought a copy of Karl Popper’s ”Unended quest: an intellectual autobiography” - don’t ask… For some reason it worked; when the students arrived I had prepared a series of lectures on cataloguing and bibliograhpic control. To my sincere surprise, I found that they accepted the authority I was set to uphold. Up until today I have since favoured the traditional lecture as my pedagogical vehicle. I find it simple enough; the only thing I want from the students is their full attention – as they can demand my full attention while giving my talk. If I find the group unattentative, I leave the room, as I expect my students to leave if they find me unfocused or ill prepared. We should not waste each other’s time.

In the mid 1990’s distance studies were not as common as they are today. At the SSLIS we had, interestingly enough, a group of students in Stockholm, some 400 km away. Several times each semester teachers went on the train, booked into hotels, and taught the same things as on campus. In between meetings assignmets were sent by mail – not e-mail, of course – real mail. It was, by today’s measures a clumpsy and not very efficient way of teaching, but it worked well. It’s easy to forget that such solutions actually did work, and that the new tools for distance learning has done nothing in increasing the quality of the work performed by the students – even though we have a whole learning industry feeding the denial about this. Technology is only just that  - technology – not something which increases quality in teaching or learning. What it has done, however, is impose a lot of previously unecessary work on the teachers. It has not done us much good.

In 2008, I shifted departments to my present one, at what now is Linnaeus university in Växjö. In terms of teaching I was put in a completely new situation. Leaving a large school with (topically) limited teaching assignments, I now had to teach ”everything”. Fewer students and less faculty doing the same job as at the larger department. I had to reconsider my view on how we best teach Library and Information Science. The discipline consists of a large number of disparate subfields, and it often requires both skills and patience to make the students see how it all fits together. Is it reallly necessary to cover it all? As I am a friend of deep study rather than of superficial overviews, I sometimes consider the order that was taught when a was a student myself; there were two lines of study. One that focussed on public librarianship, with literature, pedagogy, school librarianship etc. The other focussed on academic and specialized librarianship, and consisted of study in scholarly communication, advanced information seeking, bibliographic practices etc. As that was a division set to fit a vocational education of its time, it made sense. I wonder though, if perhaps it still would make sense, in some odd way. Would it be completely impossible to make indepth study into the different fields of the academic discipline, focusing on the relation to the (increasingly) various fields our students, for the most parts, are entering their educational programmes to reach?

There is no answer to this, of course, but today when we are more or less forced to simplify university courses in order to get every student to pass, it is important to question the development. Not everyone should study at university level, just as not everyone should be allowed to fly an aeroplane. A university should pride itself in offerning students qualifyed, indepth teaching and study opportunities.  Today that has become, strangely enough, more or less a utopia.  It is really sad. The bizarre trust put in technology, social media and other new ”tools” in teaching contributes – along with short-sighted funding terms and evaluation practices – to the eroding of the system. Pedagogical theory, based on these tools take us away from the essence of learning – the knowledge itself.  When I introduce a course, I tell my students that I, apart from their full attention, only expect one thing; that they read. Books and articles. In full. A lot. There is no way around it – small talk and web-based communication platforms can never replace slow and deep reading as a way of attaining new and durable knowledge. Does this seem hard? Well, take comfort in thae fact that I could never impose such demands on others if I had not imposed them on myself first. I skip the new learning platforms in my daily work as a teacher, as much as I possibly can. Instead I read. A lot. The order is really that simple – first we read, then we can talk. In the end, we might just learn something.