Open Access and MFA theses
Exhibit I: The U of Iowa recently instituted mandatory electronic deposit of all graduate theses and dissertations henceforth. Again, I am generally in favor of this, and newsflash, this is the way the academic world is heading. My own U is trying to go 100% digital for graduate T&D’s starting this fall. These documents will be made publicly available in our institutional repository.The U of Iowa, of course, is home to the most famous MFA program in the country, the Writer’s Workshop. As the MFA is currently structured, it is considered the terminal academic degree in the field. As such, the final product of the degree is considered an academic work, created w/in the academy for academic purposes.
Only, that’s not really how it works. Although it may look like and academic degree and act like one in the job market (after you have a publishing career anyway), students in MFA programs think of themselves as writers, not academics, and the MFA is usually a period of intense, focused work geared toward the production of a saleable manuscript. I think it even says that in a lot of MFA descriptions–you need a booklength manuscript to graduate. That’s a measure that reflects the demands of the marketplace, even if the degree is earned in the academy.
So you know where this is headed. U of Iowa MFAs don’t want their TD’s electronically accessible. They are afraid that having a clickable version online will disqualify that work from consideration by publishers. They might be right–we don’t know yet, although there has been no trouble for writers of more obviously academic work getting their stuff published once it has been made electronically available. It also remains to be seen just how visible these ETDs will really become. Institutional repositories are not indexed by Google or any other web search engine. They are stuck underneath layers and layers of library gateways. To find one, first you would have to know it existed. Of course, you could just make a habit of frequenting the IR’s of schools whose ETDs you wanted to keep abreast of… it would be possible to find them, but it’s not like you could just type it into Google and wham. At least not yet.
This is a quandary for me, as both an MFA student and an MLIS student. I resent the attitude of exceptionality displayed by the departments in question at Iowa–the idea that their work should be exempt from a policy geared toward the general good, not toward any kind of desire on the University’s part to make money from their creations. That’s paranoid, but also a sign that the academics and librarians who support open access are not getting the message across (although Peter Suber always tries). Getting control is not the point behind this, the point is maintaining access. If your work is different from other products of the university academic community, then maybe you ought not do it within the academy. Letting you off the hook (which is exactly what the Dean eventually did) sets a precedent that could allow departments to beg off and defeat the whole… well, movement sounds a bit ideological, but a movement it is.
On the other hand, well, if having my MFA thesis online means I can’t publish it, that sucks. And I’ll have to raise a fuss about it when the time comes for me to upload, although I kind of doubt that the Deans at my school will take my concerns as seriously as Dean Lopes at Iowa. In fact, I should probably start raising this issue now if I have any hope of getting around it…
The only real solution, I think, would be to require some kind of critical piece or let the artists’ statement alone count for the actual “thesis” in question and make the manuscript of creative work part of an unpublished defense process, b/c simply letting MFA’s off the hook is problematic both to the status of the program w/in the academy and to the process of gaining control of academic work.
The library rhizome grows
As cited in ALA Libraries Direct this week, the Contra Costa County Library is going to place book vending machines in public transportation hubs. I love this idea, and I hope it works. The press release has some very promising angles. First, the emphasis is clearly on meeting readers where they are, and finding a way to fit in to their hectic life/workflow and lowering the barriers to access. Secondly, it sounds like this is being seen as a genuine collaboration on both sides. It is the BART Board President, Gail Murray, who proclaims, “BART has a history of being at the technological forefront. Being the first in the nation to install the book lending machines continues this tradition. This project falls right in line with BART’s overall goals to help protect the environment, enhance accessibility and improve service to our customers.” Bingo–the library mission is interconnected with other public service goals. It’s wonderful to hear that coming out of a non-librarian’s mouth.
And of course, the whole principle of this is simply cool: the library (not just information) is an entity that is no longer tied to single physical spaces, but a large idea from which offshots can adapt and grow into new areas.
See rhizome.
CNN shows the love to librarians with consumer health literacy skills
I want to print out the opening line of this article on using the Web to find accurate medical information and stick it on the wall behind my desk:
When Mary Ryan’s 4-year-old nephew, Nick, landed in the hospital with a serious infection, her brother called her in a panic. Ryan isn’t a doctor. She’s not a nurse. She’s a librarian.
Yeah she is. Right on.
Besides a nice shout out to savvy librarians, the article does provide good tips for med-surfing, such as
- Use PubMed to find review articles that give a broad overview of current research
- Invest half an hour in the PubMed tutorial
- Click on information about annual meetings related to medical specialties
- Find smart bloggers with your disease
I guess I’ll learn this when I graduate
Ha haaa… Librarian Secret Handshake Revealed! in the Modesto Bee, my latest new top source of wacky news. Money quote:
Q. Yo, Librarian: How’s it going with your quest for the world’s most perfect metaphor?
A. Dear Reader: Just as physicists search for a grand unification theory that unites quantum mechanics and relativity into a single working model for the universe, I’m still searching for a figure of speech that unites clarity, profundity and beauty into one bolt of pure enlightenment. Metaphorical sparks are everywhere, but the perfect turn of phrase is elusive.
Across the pond
School libraries in the UK are having a funding crisis, too:
“The research, based on interviews with representatives of 300 schools, found that over 92% of secondary schools and 61% of primary schools were spending far below the recommended figure a head on books for their libraries. One in 20 primary schools banned children from taking any books out on loan, while half closed libraries at break times.”
Having watched my mother in law live through a year of blatant, perpetual disrespect at the hands of her middle school’s admin as a media specialist, I can say that this article rings true, except for the fact that the kids at her school were fairly heavy users of the library. Principals often expect a media specialist to handle every single facet of library operation on their own, and then wonder why everything can’t be done at once. Shelf-reading or ordering? Overhead projector check-out or setting up new software on the computer? The principal in my mother in law’s case laughed at her request for a paraprofessional assistant to help with book check-outs while she was leading workshops and doing more labor-intensive tasks (even though library assistants were overall quite common in her district). A lot of principals seem to be taking the attitude that they’d rather have another teacher than a librarian, and it’s hard to blame them when so much emphasis is put on testing. One case I’ve heard about involves a librarian being expected to teach classes and fulfill library responsibility.
But there is one thing I would like to steal from our trans-Atlantic neighbors: can we please call our hours of operation “opening hours” instead? I am incredibly charmed by that phrase.
I sense a British comedy coming on…
Americans wouldn’t have the touch to bring this story to the screen, but in the tradition of The Full Monty and Saving Grace, I think these boldly fundraising librarians deserve a flick in their honor.
Alice Munro retires
Get out your copy of Open Secrets and start re-reading, that’s the last where that came from. A blogger friend alerted me to this story in the Toronto Star announcing that she’s decided to stop writing, making her memoir The View from Castle Rock her final published work. There’s nothing that I can say that is nearly as effortlessly articulate as a single sentence from any of her stories, so I’ll just quote this final paragraph from the title story of the first book I mentioned:
Maureen is a young woman yet, though she doesn’t think so, and she has life ahead of her. First a death–that will come soon–then another marriage, new places and houses. In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she’ll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking into an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.
Scholarly Communication in the Sciences, The Soap Opera
This article was part of last week’s reading for my ST info sources class. After reading several academic articles examining what constitutes the communication process in the sciences (largely informal but uses formal publication to establish priority) and why this supports an open scientific community, this New Yorker piece “Manifold Destiny” by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber pretty much summed it up from the human, real world perspective. It’s a fun read.
Best quotation on DOPA I’ve read so far
The so-called Deleting Online Predators Act is about senator’s campaigns, not children’s safety or education. This quotation from Christopher Harris at Infomancy pretty much explains why:
“Filter a website, and you protect a student for a day. Educate students about online safety in a real world environment, and you protect your child for a lifetime.”
Exactly.
New Orleans Tivo Alert
What a good idea: HBO gave Spike Lee all the money he asked for to make a documentary about New Orleans after Katrina. According to the NY Time story, it will air 21 and 22, in two two-hour segments, and in its entirety on the first anniversary of Katrina, August 29. It’s titled “Levees” and the reporter describes it as a “gumbo of a film” that “lingers on the politics of disaster response, the science of levees and storms, the city’s Creolized culture, the stories of loss.” I can’t wait. And I hope lots of people watch it and see a little bit of what we saw and start feeling something again. Since I got back, I want to talk about New Orleans every other minute, just to remind people that it is maybe the biggest problem in our country right now. Lee is quoted as saying it’s less a documentary about a hurricane than a listen in on discussions about “Politics. Ethics. Morals…This is about what this country is really going to be.” New Orleans should be a wake up call: this is the future. Things will happen and no one in power will care, nothing will get fixed, and we will all be on our own.
Not directly Katrina related, but related to national values, yesterday in my ALA Direct I read this alarming quotation:
My opinion is, no one dies if the library closes. We have to look at parts of the budget that reflect peoples ability to livenot to enjoy life, but to live.
Medway, Massachusetts, Finance Committee member Phil Giangarra, in Medway May Axe Library, Milford Daily News, May 11.
You kind of have to take him at his word–if homes and electricity are optional for the people living in New Orleans, how can we argue that libraries aren’t optional for all of us?
