Digital Preservation in the Canadian Landscape

I attended this Association of Canadian Archivists Pre-conference on the current state of digital preservation in Canada. The range of 12 thirty minute presentations was broad [see link to the program].

At the end of the day, the moderator asked all the presenters to come to the front of the room and indicate in 2 minutes their message to the group. The overwhelming message was to join with others, to collaborate. No one organization can do it all, work with others and in particular work with community groups, don't reinvent the wheel. Put your content up and make it findable, in the best way you can. This was the same message from the Library of Congress, which is now archiving tweets (not all of them!), to the folks at COPPUL using LOCKSS for e-journals.

If you note any presentation that you are interested in learning more about what was said, let me know. I took comprehensive notes, too many to post here.

From Doubtful to Doable: The Problem of Formulating Good Research Problems

Dr. Alvin Schrader, Director of Research at the University of Alberta Libraries; and Professor Emeritus & former Director of SLIS, University of Alberta, described research as a structured problem solving process. Research begins with a doubt, an uncertainty, a question regarding what to believe or what to do. From there it is a process with three distinct phases:

1. Problem formulation
2. Problem investigation
3. Problem reporting
   

Each of these phases involves particular thinking/reasoning skills and all have research literature informing them.

The session focused on the problem formulation stage which Schrader described as having three stages:

1. General Problem Area
2. Specific Research Problem - the what? question
3. Key Terms - concepts, definitions, semantic triangles, relationships involving digraphing antecedent-consequent, showing direction of influence

Schrader used suggestions for research provided by the session participants as examples for working through stages #2 and #3 above.

Schrader provided a list of research problems which may arise from:

• a theory or model or policy
  
• a gap or void in understanding
  
• contradictory claims
  
• contradictory evidence
• inconclusive or weak evidence
• faulty assumptions
• overgeneralizing conclusions from limited data
• unexplained relationships
• a new relationship
• a provocative exception
• unrepresentative sample
• response bias
• a theory-action conflict or gap
• a professional practice conflict or gap
• a methodological alternative
• an alternative setting, time, population, population sub-group, or social context
• literature reviews for meta-analysis
• recommendations for further research in publications
• research agendas developed by associations

Finally, Schrader suggested that research proposals and ethics review submissions should answer two questions:

1. Are you the right person for this study?
2. Is it worth doing?

From this presentation, I would recommend the Scholarly Librarian blog as a potential source of information about doing research as a librarian. I also have a 2-page handout from Dr. Schrader with additional detail on the above. Let me know if you'd like a copy.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Dr. Carl Sagan

Zounds! Biff! Kablam! Or How I Started a Graphic Novel Collection at My Academic Library

Crystal Rose, a Public Services Library at Memorial University in Corner Brook, began with a brief history of comics and graphic novels. Her presentation was particularly interesting because she used graphics to show the history of this genre. She gave evidence that graphic novels are being used for courses in many disciplines, and in scholarly journals as the focus of academic research. She included a list of criteria being used at MUN to make selection decisions and a sense of cost and circulation statistics for this collection. Crystal provided tips for choosing titles, ways to promote the collection, as well as cataloguing challenges.

Licensing Digital Content

This "workshop" session was designed to teach us how to read licenses for digital content, and to understand the subtleties therein. We were given copies (or parts thereof) of a few different licenses, including an Access Copyright Repographic License, an Access Copyright Transactional License, and a few licenses for access to specific vendors' digital collections. Here are a few key points from this session:

• Prior to signing a license, individuals have statutory rights allowing them reprographic rights in certain situations. We should be careful not to sign away such rights for our users when signing onto a license.
• The AC Reprographic License allows for digital copies, but only if they are destroyed following the transfer.
• The OCUL license with Emerald allows for a local load of the content (this is unusual).
• Before signing a license with a U.S. vendor, make sure that they are authorized to sell those rights in Canada.
  

Developing Your Assessment Toolkit

I was curious to learn that Kathy Ball (McMaster) and Margaret Martin Gardiner (U. of Western Ontario) have the title of Assessment Librarian at their respective universities, so I decided to attend this session and see what kind of assessment they take have initiated at their institutions.

Not surprisingly, there was some discussion about LibQual, which they feel is a worthwhile tool which can give hints at what aspects of the library needs work -- especially when it is followed up with targeted efforts (focus groups, interviews) to assess the improvements needed in those areas.

Some of the assessment tools they discussed were: surveys and questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, and observational techniques. They suggested that in this day and age a library administrator cannot ask for funding without proper support for their endeavours.

Although not surprising, they repeated at least three times to "be aware of your bias." Whether at the question-writing stage, during an interview or focus group, or at the data analysis stage -- bias can creep up and skew one's results. In more basic terms, they told us to "be prepared to hear both what you want to hear and what you don't want to hear."

Note for Rita: A programmer at one of their institutions devised a way to send their LibQual comments to a PostgreSQL database, attach categories to the entries, and render them searchable and sortable. Perhaps we should contact them and see if they would share some notes about this?

Video Killed the Radio Star, But Made My Library Awesome!

I attended this session by Shawn McCann, Catherine Baird and Krista Godfrey of McMaster University because a few months ago I put in a request for funding to hire two summer "student videographers" at the Angus L., and I was curious to hear about their experiences. (They made their videos themselves, but did recruit students to participate.)

Much of what they covered amounts to "video 101" fare -- storyboarding, shooting out of sequence, basic lighting continuity and the importance of good sound quality. Although I knew this stuff already, it was good to hear in a pared-down way. A few points that are worth noting:

• The librarians and staff they chose to "star" were those that students might run into at the library.
• They mostly shot at times when the library was closed to avoid sound interference.
• They made an intro sequence that could be appended to all the videos.
• All their videos are under one minute in length.
• They chose to use memes that are known to anyone who uses social media (pirates, ninjas, zombies).
• They ended up purchasing a Canon Vixia HD camera, and were happy with the results (it records to SD card, which makes it easy to transfer footage).
• They used the lights from their digi-lab.
• They used the SoundSoap application for cleaning up sound, Audacity for audio mixing.
• They recommend starting to think about promotion at the very beginning (they only tackled this later on). Make sure to have a target audience selected (e.g. first-year students).
• Using local music is a good way to promote local bands!
  

Complying with Copyright in the Digital Age

This session was delivered by Erin Finlay, Legal Counsel, Access Copyright). Considering that a) she is a lawyer and b) she works for Access Copyright, I was not very surprised at Ms. Finlay's interpretation of the current copyright law as it applies to libraries. She began the session by giving an overview of some of the main concepts around copyright in Canada:

• the Berne Convention protects copyright laws internationally, so that each signatory country agrees to honour the copyright law in the country in which the use of the work happens


• copyright only applies to a fixed original work (although she did remind us that courts have ruled that a phone book has enough original content to be called an original work…)


• rights apply when there is use of “a substantial part of a work” (her legal interpretation is that any part that is significant enough for someone to want to use it can thus be called “substantial”)


• unlike copyright, moral rights are never transferred to the publisher or any other copyright owner – these remain with the author, and allow for protection of the integrity of the work (an author can only challenge his or her moral right if the use in question prejudices the author’s honour or reputation)

She then engaged the participants in a discussion of “What is a copy?” (her interpretation, not surprisingly, was quite broad)

• BMG Music vs. John Doe – in this Canadian court case, BMG Music wanted an Internet service provider to give up the names of users who were downloading music illegally. According to her, the federal court judgment’s decision has given many the impression that peer-to-peer is not illegal in Canada [the exact passage from this decision is: “Under Act, subsection 80(1), the downloading of a song for a person's private use does not constitute infringement.”]. As a result, Canada now hosts the five largest peer-to-peer websites in the world.


• There are a number of defenses available to users, but according to her these need to be used independently (institutions cannot mix and match) between Fair Use and the Educational Exemption

A representative from the CLA Copyright Committee spoke up during the Q&A -- she announced that the committee will soon post to the CLA website all-new signage that libraries can post next to photocopiers and scanners instead of the current Access Copyright signage. From what I heard through the grapevine, these will apparently be significantly different from the signage distributed by Access Copyright.

Our Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Libraries

This was an informal session by John Dupuis (York U.) and Janice Mutz (Lakehead U.). They presented provocative statements/questions on the screen and asked participants to respond and interact. Here are some of the questions put forward by the presenters, as well as comments made by the participants:

• the core of the library’s offerings has to be the educational mission of the institution; our first loyalty must be to the patron


• What is our relationship to stuff?


• What value does our physical space have?


• What is our expertise on a campus full of experts?


• Everyone thinks they know what a library is...


• We should be thinking of ourselves as being in the reputation and attention business


• We have to get better at finding free stuff, not just what’s in our collection


• We’re living in an on-demand world; librarians have to be much more available than ever before (there was some discussion about Meebo widgets, answering reference questions in the evening from home, creating personal relationships with students and researchers, etc.)


• RefWorks is on its way out


• What happens when GoogleBooks starts charging? Do we pay? Will it affect our ability to buy other material? Do we not pay and risk being completely circumvented? (there was discussion about how librarians should become even more active in the GoogleBooks settlement debate)


• Discussed with Sonny Banerjee, librarian at Ryerson, about the fact that some faculty members are showing audiovisual material without even consulting the library about rights – that all the work we do with public performance rights might be for naught

Somewhat unrelated: In this session I also learned that a disproportionate number of librarians are Buffy fans.