Once I figured things out it wasn’t hard to get the album back into my regular listening rotation. But this small annoyance illustrates a bigger issue: the problems created by digital rights management (DRM). Today is the International Day Against DRM, advocacy initiated by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF’s Defective By Design campaign seeks to eliminate the restrictions to digital media use imposed by DRM. While DRM is intended to combat piracy and other illegal uses of music, ebooks, movies, software, and other media, it also restricts uses that seem perfectly reasonable from a user’s perspective. And while (as the website notes) DRM has become much less prevalent in music recently, other media are still very much affected.

DRM is an enormous thorn in the side of academic, public, and other libraries. Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian yesterday, which discusses scifi publisher Tor Books’ decision to stop using DRM on its ebooks, covers many of the issues around DRM well. Some that are most pressing for libraries include:

Formats
With the proliferation of ebook formats the landscape is cluttered and complex, and it can be difficult to determine which ebooks can be read on which devices. This hurts libraries and readers immensely. Like many libraries we’ve acquired lots of ebooks recently which seems like good news for our students and faculty on the face of it: we’re a small physical space and our readers have long commutes, so ebooks could be super useful. But the barriers to actually getting that content on your device are so high, requiring many confusing steps and sometimes including downloading additional proprietary software. While my colleague Allie Verbovetskaya created an awesome handout to guide our users, I still worry that it’s just too much to bother with.

Number of Users
One of the wonderful things about digital media is that it’s easy to allow multiple, simultaneous uses. This is a feature, not a bug, but DRM seeks to restrict multiple uses. Don’t get me wrong: writers write, publishers publish, and I believe that both deserve to get paid for their work. But I think there’s something wrong when I have to wait 6 wks to read an ebook from my public library because someone else has it “checked out,” or when only 1 student at a time can read an etextbook because the publisher’s price for a license that supports multiple readers is prohibitively expensive. There has to be a better way.

So Happy Day Against DRM! Learn more on the Defective by Design website, which includes a guide to DRM-free media and other great resources:

And for more on library-specific DRM issues, check out the Readers Bill of Rights, Alycia Sellie of Brooklyn College and Matthew Goins’s wonderful project:

Interestingly, we couldn’t convince any of the kids at the party, aged 2-10, to play the game with us, so gameplay involved 5 of us, all adults. And a rollicking good time was had by all: we found ourselves telling little stories about the segments and associated pictures on the tiles, and ended up being more interested in the possibility of connecting every tile to the board than of someone winning (we had decided that the first person to place all tiles in their hand was the winner).

One aspect of Rivers, Roads, and Rails that I really enjoyed is that the game board is created in the process of gameplay. Carcassonne, one of my favorite board games, uses the same mechanic: players draw tiles with segments of cities, roads, and fields, then place their pieces (called meeples) to claim features, each with different point values. The game ends when the last tile is placed and whomever has racked up the most points is the winner. It’s a fantastic game: the basics are easy enough to grasp to make it fun for beginners, but there’s also real strategy possible which keeps more experienced players engaged.

But what does any of this have to do with the library? I’ve been thinking lately about ways to incorporate more games and game mechanics into my library and information literacy instruction, and speculating on the possibilities for games that could help our students with their research assignments. Because the mechanic described above, which I like to think of as “we make the board by playing” (a riff on the title of a book designed for first year experience coursework called College: We Make the Road by Walking), is so interesting to me, I’ve found myself considering how to use it in research instruction.

In some ways the experience of building a game space as you play the game is very similar to the process of doing research for an assignment: you begin with some parameters (taking your turn or coming up with a research topic), you take an action (draw a tile, start your search [engine]), you figure out what to do with what you get (place your tile, use or reject your search results), and then you adjust accordingly the next time around. In a tile matching game the landscape shifts with every turn, just as it does in the research process as topics broaden or narrow, and the iterative nature of research means that the sources we find mold and change our topics, which feeds back into how and where we search for sources.

It’s all very well to point out the similarities between the research process and a tile matching game, but how can we actually use that to help students learn how to do research? I’m not convinced that creating a game to teach research competencies that is itself separate from students’ research needs, most often determined by the requirements of the research projects assigned in their courses, is the best way to proceed. But I wonder whether the research journal connects well with the tile matching mechanic?

Sometimes students are required to keep a journal of their research process, which they may have to hand in along with their research paper, presentation, or project. At its best the research journal forms a kind of story of the journey students take as they do research: the hesitant beginnings, wrong turns, forks in the road, unexpected shortcuts, and (hopefully) the successful outcome of completing the research needed to finish their project. And we hope that students find it useful to reflect on their own research process, and that they begin to understand the iterative nature of research, that it’s not just a straight line from point A to point B. What if we asked students to create a game that tells the story of their research rather than keeping a research journal? Would students achieve the same goals of recording and reflecting that they do with a traditional research journal? I’m not sure, but I’m considering giving it a try the next time I teach my department’s research and documentation course (and I’ll report back if I do).

Open Access Week begins tomorrow, the 5th year for this international advocacy event. In honor of OA Week I’d like to share my personal open access pledge. It’s not original — lots of other scholars and researchers are doing it, from institutions like Harvard and Kansas State and Oberlin, to library faculty members at Oregon State University and Gustavus Adolphus College, to individuals like danah boyd and Jason Baird Jackson. It’s a small step, but I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do, both for my own research and my participation in the broader scholarly community.

1. I will not submit articles I have authored or co-authored to any closed, subscription-based journals.

2. I will not undertake peer review for any closed, subscription-based journals.

3. I will not join the editorial board for any closed, subscription-based journals.

4. I will not accept the editorship of any closed, subscription-based journals.

5. I will make my own research and scholarship available online wherever possible.

As I was tooling around online tonight I found a nifty website called Open Access Pledge where everyone can make a pledge to support open access publishing. If you’re interested, head on over and sign up, it only takes a moment. And get ready for Open Access Week: there are lots of great events right here at CUNY — check out the Open Access @ CUNY blog for more details.

We started to speculate about using smartphones and augmented reality to virtually shelve the periodicals in the stacks in our own libraries. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could walk up to a shelf, scan the call numbers with your phone’s camera, and the list of journals and magazines in that call number range would pop up on your screen? I kept thinking about this later that day and spun it out even further. What if, in addition to periodicals, other information about the library’s collections in a specific call number range could be displayed:

- books that are currently checked out, with their due dates (and a link to place a hold on the book)
- journals that are available in the library’s article databases (and a link into the databases)
- ebooks in the library catalog (ditto link)
- books from other CUNY libraries
- video, audio, and other multimedia

That’s a lot of information for a user interface to accommodate on a small screen. Maybe each type of item could be displayed in its own layer, and toggled on and off as desired? We could even get cute and display the information on a little book image, right down the spine.

I think what seems most attractive about this to me goes back to the notion of serendipitous discovery. Librarians talk lots about the possible loss of serendipity with the move to digital reading, and augmented reality or something similar could be one way to address this issue.

And speaking of serendipity, not long after that conversation (and associated speculation) the news of an augmented reality shelfreading app sped ’round the libraryverse. This app, developed at Miami University, scans a bookshelf and locates books that are out of call number order, making short work of an otherwise fairly dull library task.

Then I went to the ACRL National Conference last week, the biennial gathering of academic librarians, only to find that QR codes were everywhere, from posters (including my own) to presentations. QR codes are not new, of course, but this is the first time I’ve both used them (ask me how many poster URLs I snapped!) and thought about the ways that they could help folks find information in our libraries.

We might be closer to Rainbow’s End than we think, at least in libraries.

I can’t justify buying a whole new desk, so I set to figuring out how to rig a temporary standing desk at home and at work. Home is somewhat easier because my primary computer is a laptop. We have lots of big, big books, and it turned out to be no trouble at all to pile a bunch of books on the dining room table and pop my computer on top. Here’s what it looks like:

But most weekdays I’m in the library, so I wanted to try a standing desk at work, too. Lots of books there, of course, but I can’t just take books from the stacks to pile on my desk. Enter some extra metal journal holders that were sitting on the shelves in my office when I moved in last semester. As it happens, when you place 4 of them next to each other and turn them face down, they make a perfectly sized surface for my computer keyboard. Another two together fit the mousepad and mouse. Then I pull up my computer monitor and tilt it back slightly, and my temp standing desk for the office is all set:

In some ways the work setup is even better than the pile of books at home, because the keyboard is close to the edge of the journal holders which encourages me not to drop my wrists as I type.

Both setups are easy to put up and take down quickly, which is important because one thing I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks is that I’m not ready to move to a standing desk full time. Certain things are more difficult to do while standing, like eating while working or writing in longhand (though the latter would likely be easier on a real rather than temp standing desk).

But I’ve found that I really enjoy having the option to stand or sit while I work. Standing seems to make it easier for me to focus on certain tasks, like sustained work on a project. On the other hand, if I’ve been running around between meetings and teaching and other stuff, it’s nice to sit down for a spell.

But I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, so I thought this might be a good year to jump in. My plan was to chronicle yesterday, but then we got 15″ (or was it 18?) of snow and the college closed (I took my kid to the park instead). So I’m going to try and reconstruct Wednesday’s work happenings.

I should note that most weeks during the semester I teach at least a few classes or workshops for students or faculty, though that varies from week to week. I also spend time at the Reference Desk, though not as much as I teach. And the meetings tied to the semester calendar haven’t started back up again yet either. So with that caveat…

On Wednesday I got into work at about 9:15, a little late for me (I had a routine doctor’s appt). Usually I try to get to the library by 8-8:30 and spend the time before I officially clock in working on research + writing. I’m most focused in the morning and I find that I’m most productive (especially with difficult tasks like writing) if I stick to this habit. Doesn’t always work out, but I’d say I keep to the plan more often than not.

Once my day officially started I triaged (answered, filed, deleted) email for about an hour. I also posted my handout on our staff wiki from the morning not-really-a-retreat we had in department the prior day. The theme of the non-retreat was productivity and connectivity, and we spent lots of time discussing email management techniques and how to use our new staff wiki for information we all need to access. I tried to use some of these email techniques this morning — while I’m not an inbox zero person I do try to keep my inbox relatively clear. I was bad about clearing out my sent mail folder last semester so I’m making a special effort to keep that manageable now.

Then I ran some errands around campus. First I went to media services to drop off a request for a media cart for our Web 2.0 Happy Hour faculty wine & cheese program in March. Next I took the handout and worksheet to the campus copy center to be copied for our English Composition I library instruction sessions, a required component of that course. Finally I headed to the grants office to pick up and drop off forms, and checked in to confirm that a grant I’m submitting is complete.

I don’t remember exactly when I had lunch, but it’s usually no later than noon. Most often I bring my lunch and eat at my desk (boring, I know). Probably did a quick email check and looked at my Google Reader briefly, too.

Next I spent some time crunching data from the surveys we ask students in our English Comp I sessions to fill out. Since we’ll be giving the survey to students during the Spring semester I didn’t spend too much time running the numbers now, but I like to take a look before the new semester begins to see if there are any unusual comments. This time a student requested additional materials for help with using the library from home, which dovetails nicely with our plans to create more online video tutorials and guidelines.

I also checked in on our faculty feedback form responses from last semester’s English Comp I sessions. Frustration in dealing with plagiarism was mentioned a couple of times. Unfortunately we don’t have time to discuss plagiarism thoroughly in our sessions (they’re only 75 minutes), so I emailed the instruction library faculty to pick our collective brains about strategies for helping to address the plagiarism issue.

After that I played around a bit with Zotero in advance of a faculty workshop I planned to co-teach this morning (but instead I was home with a sick kid — too much sledding?). I’m a bit sheepish that I haven’t used Zotero much in the past, and I’ve liked having an excuse to become familiar with it. I’m particularly excited about the collaborative features, which I think will come in handy for several projects I’m working on right now.

Next I made some coffee and prepped materials for our department curriculum committee to use to crossgrade student assignments as part of the collegewide assessment committee work I’m involved in. I’m on a few college and university committees and I genuinely enjoy most of my service work. It’s been a nice way to learn more about how things work and helps keep me thinking about how the library fits in with the broader institutional mission.

After putting in a request to CIS for student email addresses for a pilot program we’re trying this semester, it was back to email. I’ve been making the effort to keep my email to discrete chunks rather than checking constantly all day (I turned off notifications), but sometimes it’s difficult.

I headed out for home shortly after 5 today, when the library closed. During the semester we’re open later and I tend to stay a bit later, too. I try not to do too much work at home in the evenings, but I had a couple of time-sensitive things to get done this week. One of the students in my class last semester asked me for a recommendation so I wrote that up for her. I also did some formatting tweaking on the preliminary report of last year’s fieldwork that my research partner and I recently finished writing.

And that’s about it for this day. Next week this will all change, but I love the busy beginning of the semester after the (relative) quiet of January.

Last year I collected data at my own college (City Tech), but this year I’m working at another CUNY school: City College. I expected that the surroundings and students would be different — many of our programs at City Tech are unique in CUNY, and CCNY has grad students, while we don’t at City Tech. But I hadn’t anticipated the many other ways that fieldwork would be different this year.

In a sense I’m like a new student. I don’t know where anything is, though posting fliers to recruit students helped me start to internalize the layout of the college. CCNY has a much bigger campus than City Tech, so at the beginning of the semester I constantly underestimated the amount of time I needed to get from one place to another. Sometimes the cafeteria is so crowded that it’s hard to find a spot to eat lunch. I can’t ever seem to find an outlet to charge my phone and netbook when I need it. And until I scored a guest wifi password last week I was (guiltily) jockeying with students to use computers in the library (I have trouble typing lengthy emails on my phone).

Like many CUNY students, my commute is long: 1+ hrs each way, whether I come from home or from work. I need to carry what sometimes seems like a ridiculous amount of stuff: reading material for the commute, notebook, consent forms and instructions for students, disposable cameras (sometimes), voice recorder, netbook, stapler, tape, lunch, water, jacket (and–perish the thought–sometimes it rains, so add an umbrella to the list). A colleague in the library has graciously offered to let me stash my outerwear at her desk when I’m up at City, but it’s so different from last year, when I could meet students at my own desk.

As I’ve interviewed students I’ve found that I’m learning a lot from them that’s not only great project data but also immediately useful to me. Where are the best bathrooms in the NAC Building? What’s the quietest spot in the Cohen Library, esp. during the very crowded afternoon hours? What’s the best food in the cafeteria? Where are the working electrical outlets?

It’s interesting to consider my own experiences as project data. I’ve kept a research journal since last year so I can keep track of how things are going in the study. Last year it mostly included personal thoughts and notes about best practices for data collection method, but this year my journal could be an additional data source, too.

1. EBSCO, including Academic Search Complete
2. LexisNexis, the news and law database
3. JSTOR, the full-text database of scholarly journals across the arts and sciences

I’d wager that these three databases together probably capture the lion’s share of our undergraduates’ searches — if not in total then at least their first attempts at finding information on their research topics. I haven’t had time to fully explore the changes, though I did take a brief spin through each database.

At first glance the EBSCO changes look fairly minor. In their last redesign they added an incredibly useful feature — a pop-up bubble that displays an article’s abstract from the results list — so I’m predisposed to feel positive about this redesign.

On the results list, all of the options that can be used to refine results have been moved to the left side of the page (previously they were split between left and right columns). I’d guess this will make it much easier for students to use these options.

Another nice new feature is that once you click through to the article detail page, the links to use to print, save, email, etc. the article appear in the right column under the Tools menu.

Of course these are only a few of the changes, but I’d like to point out just one more that I like: in the top navigation bar the Thesaurus link now reads Subject Terms. The less time librarians have to spend explaining library jargon, the better (IMHO).

I’ve always disliked the LexisNexis interface so my hopes were not high for this redesign. So I was pleased to see that the changes have made LexisNexis much easier to use.

While the Easy Search page looks a bit busy, most students will probably get the most use out of the Search the News box. And the news search from this page is much, much better than it used to be. It’s streamlined, and with far fewer choices it is far less confusing. An advanced search with more fields and limiters is just one click away on the All News page.

Most importantly, the News search now defaults to all available dates. Previously the default date range was only the prior two months, and the dropdown menu to change this option was all the way at the bottom of the page and very easy to miss.

I’m still not a big fan of the LexisNexis results or article displays (why are the icon links for printing/saving/emailing so incredibly tiny?), but the search redesign is definitely a step in the right direction.

And then there’s JSTOR. JSTOR caused quite a stir late last month when their interface changes were unveiled. Briefly: when the redesign launched, the search results defaulted to displaying articles from all publications archived by JSTOR. While this doesn’t sound like a problem in theory, in practice not all libraries subscribe to all JSTOR collections. The kicker is that initially JSTOR didn’t enable OpenURL, which allows libraries to link between databases. This meant that search results were potentially returning lots of articles that could be available in another database, except there was no way to link over to them.

Lots of librarians cried foul when they realized the scope of these changes, and you may have seen the article at Inside Higher Ed and several blog posts (here and here, to name just two) about the kerfluffle. And luckily JSTOR responded pretty quickly, so OpenURL has been enabled.

Other than the linking issues, I think the JSTOR interface changes are great. Again, I’d never been fond of their previous interface – I found it deceptively simple with just the one field for search terms, and the Advanced Search always seemed overly confusing. The new interface still has just one field, but with the addition of Browse By Discipline links that make it easier to drill down to a specific journal or quickly scan the journals available in each subject.

The Advanced Search also seems streamlined and easier to use. Again there’s the option to limit by discipline or individual journal, which seems like it will be really useful for beginning students who may get far too many results if they search across all disciplines.

These redesigns will definitely change the way I teach students how to use EBSCO databases, LexisNexis and JSTOR. At City Tech our research and library instruction program starts up again tomorrow, and I’ll be interested to see how students react to the changes, too.

I wasn’t completely ignoring games on June 4th, though. I spent the day at the annual program of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) New England Library Instruction Group (NELIG) up in Connecticut. The NELIG conference was devoted specifically to library instruction and information literacy, and I heard lots of great presentations (I wrote up some of the highlights here). Keynoter John Palfrey (Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School and co-author of Born Digital) shared a very interesting piece of game-related info: their research revealed that gaming is one thread that connects and joins teens across socioeconomic statuses.

But the main reason I headed up to the conference is that I was a presenter. I spoke about a low-tech classroom game I’ve been developing and implementing over the past semester called Quality Counts, which is designed to help students learn how to evaluate internet sources. I was tickled to learn afterward that my talk was liveblogged (and my slides are available here).

Of course the inspiration for this game came from a CUNY Games Network meeting, and it was great to have the chance to discuss the group as well as my game. After my presentation I chatted with several folks who wanted to learn more about us (and who seemed a bit envious, to be honest!). One of the things I find most inspiring about Games Network meetings is the opportunity to connect with other faculty and staff across the university to discuss using games in teaching and learning. I never fail to come away from our meetings with fresh ideas for my own teaching.

So while I was sad to miss the meeting, I was pleased to have the opportunity to speak about my game and about the CUNY Games Network. And I’m looking forward to getting back to our meetings again in the fall.

In brief, the University of California system libraries are resisting outrageous price increases for the Nature Publishing Group’s scholarly journals. This situation is, sadly, a familiar one for academic librarians, and this is not the first time that a large consortial group has pushed back. What’s new is the scope of the resistance: unless NPG comes down in price, U Cal faculty are being asked (among other things) to decline to peer review or submit articles to NPG journals.

This is huge, and a huge step in the right direction. As a librarian, a faculty member and a researcher I am absolutely thrilled to see this happening, and I’ll be following the situation closely as it evolves.

Here are some great places to go for more info:

• The Chronicle of Higher Ed‘s article U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs provides a thorough introduction to the boycott.
• Dorothea Salo, Institutional Repository Librarian at the University of Wisconsin who writes a fantastic blog about scholarly communication and open access (among other things) over at The Book of Trogool, has been covering the story since early in the week. (It was actually a tweet from Salo that first tipped me off to this situation late Tuesday night.)
• Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library, wrote a great post called Fight Club Soap that, among other things, includes a powerful discussion of the relationship between scholarly journal pricing and scholarly monograph publication.

Good stuff, all. Go read it!