ICS Students & Libraries

Bill TomlinsonAssociate Professor

Department of InformaticsDonald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

UC Irvinewmt@uci.edu

ALAJune 25, 2012Anaheim, CA

Disclaimer

• I am not a librarian, nor do I do research involving libraries.

• Some/all of the topics of this talk may already be completely obvious to you. If so, I apologize, and you have my permission to doze off.

Outline

• Value of Libraries• Changing Times• What Students Want• Potential Projects• Collapse Informatics

Value of Libraries:To Students

• Locus of information access• Course reserves• Place to study• Etc.

Value of Libraries:To Society

• David Rosenthal, Stanford University Libraries– Distributed knowledge preservation system– No single point of failure– The danger of Google Books

Changing Times:21st Century Skills

• Digital literacy• From scarcity to abundance: search is of

growing importance

Changing Times:Evaluating Information

• Judge Carter example

Changing Times:Research Requirements

• NSF data management plans• Libraries hosting datasets

Changing Times:Sources of Information

• Undergraduates: Wikipedia• Graduate students: Wikipedia, Google Scholar• Faculty: Wikipedia, Google Scholar, ACM

Digital Library, etc.

Changing Times:Quality of Wikipedia

• As good as Britannica (Nature, 2005), and far more comprehensive (3.9M vs. 65K)

What Students Want

• 62 students in undergraduate “Social Analysis of Computerization” course.

• 50 minutes of discussion/questionnaires.• Note: I have questionnaires with me if you’d

like to look at them.

What Students Want:A Sampling

• More knowledge about real world – how to get internships• Remote (and ongoing) access• Knowledge of how to communicate across disciplines• Make everything searchable• Things get outdated fast – stay current• Centralize class information• Concierge Librarian – help organize one’s own resources• Support Wikipedia • More collaborative data – crowdsourcing• More reasons to go to the physical building – like a coffee shop without coffee

(only 3-4/62 work in library on regular basis)• Combine career center and library• Be as awesome as Stackoverflow• Integration with mobile tech• Reference management (Zotero/Mendeley)

Potential Projects

• Extend Wikipedia and Google Scholar for students– Draw attention to recent changes to Wikipedia• Natalie Jeremijenko’s How Stuff Is Made assignment –

ever bolder font – Augment Google Scholar – if it’s the place they’re

going to look, make sure it’s as good as it can be.

Large-Scale Projects

• Work broadly with other universities and/or encourage open source projects to do the work.

Project Aaugh!

• Six Silberman• Fix the problem of someone you know having

a library book you want.

Potential Assignment

• Each student finds a piece of information (journal paper, dataset, etc.) that is not accessible via Google Scholar.

• Students write descriptions of easiest way to find their pieces of information.

• Students exchange descriptions, and track each others’ findings.

(Part of) My Research: Collapse Informatics

• Build sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity.

• Maintain quality of life in declining standard of living.

Peak Information

• Peak oil -> Peak computing -> Peak information

• What will libraries and universities be like in a condition of diminishing information access?

• Google is neat, but it’s only been around since 1998. Libraries have been around since 2600BC. I know which ones I trust to keep information available. :)

Short Story

• Future Librarians– Keepers of PDFs– Transcribers of e-books– Selectors of most relevant information of our time

• Like many science fiction authors, I have a setting, but no plot yet. :)

Conclusion

• Embrace and improve the new technologies current generations use, but don’t lose the books!

Thank You!

wmt@uci.edu