librarypunk - 051 - The Library Value Agenda feat. Donna Lanclos and Dorothea Salo

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

Readings Library Strategy and Collaboration Across the College Ecosystem - Ithaka S+R Huang, C., Samek, T., & Shiri, A. (2021). AI and ethics: Ethical and educational perspectives for LIS. https://doi.org/10.3138/jelis-62-4-2020-0106  A Comprehensive Primer to Library Learning Analytics Practices, Initiatives, and Privacy Issues | Jones  The Mixed-Method Library:  Qualitative Research and the Future of Assessment in Libraries Media mentioned   Roxanne Shirazi https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6wq.11?seq=1  Who Succeeds in Higher Education? Questioning the Connection Between Academic Libraries & Student Success. – Zoe Fisher .  University of Wisconsin Circulation and E-Resource Access Records  Soylent Semantic Web Is People!, slides. Andrew Asher - Project MUSE - Unethical Numbers? A Meta-analysis of Library Learning Analytics Studies

And I can never remember what you call Cajun and what you call Creal? Cajun is closer into Lafayette and Opelousis. There are Cajun, and then there are Cajuns in along the bayou and stuff. And Creole is New Orleans. Okay. But then there's Creole outside of Louisiana, and the history is complicated. I have books that I could recommend to you, but a lot of times the division is race. That makes sense.

A lot of people will, like, if you are in and around Lafayette and you say you are Creole as opposed to Cajun, you are signaling that you are black. Oh. And Cajun tends to be a particularly white French American identity. Yeah. There's a lot of race stuff in and around there. It's not pretty. Yeah. But that tends to be the rule.

But then if you're in New Orleans, Creole is a whole other, because you've got white creole in the sense. of the sort of colonized French identity, but then you also have the racial Creole that is the mix of Afro-Caribbean and Spanish and indigenous and all. So Louisiana is a very complicated place to talk about race in America. But for the most part, Cajun, and I'm sure every Cajun will tell you differently. But my interpretation of the Cajun ethnic identity is it tends to be the white French ethnic identity from Louisiana. Okay. That makes sense.

You learn something new every day. But, you know, tomorrow you're going to encounter some black person who says, my family is Cajun, and they will also be correct, right? Yeah. It's fuzzy. Yeah. You know, race. It's weird. Isn't there something about Acadian as well?

like there's a connection between. Yes. So, Akadhi and Canada, Acadia. So Louisiana, the part of Louisiana that Cajuns are in is called Acadiana. So one of the things that happened was when the Acadians got kicked out of Canada by the English before they reestablished Quebec, that my history here is fuzzy. there was a whole group of them that then went down to French Louisiana. So you had Acadians coming down from that port of Canada and settling in Louisiana when it was still being colonized.

You also had people coming directly from France to Louisiana because colonization. And then you also had a wave, at least a wave or two of people coming from Germany because there's a part outside of New Orleans called the German coast. And you know that's true in port because of the surname. So my mama's maiden name was deranger, which is ultimately of German descent. And there's German foodways throughout Cajun cooking. So my mom would make a hot potato salad that was straight out of, oh, I don't know, no, like the original German. Like D.E.R. Yeah, something like that.

But it became deranger. But so it would be, you know. But her potato salad was a straight-up German potato salad. There's a lot of German food ways. But they all, within a generation or two, were speaking French. Maybe it was more fun. I don't know. You couldn't, like, I took French in high school, then I took German in college.

And it's like you pronounce nothing in French. And you pronounce everything in German. That's the difference between the two. Including the unpronounceable. Yeah, you also have to like learn the like cases in German. That was the thing. I could never get the hang of in German. I love the cases.

There's dare, de, denda. And that is why you are a metadata person. The weird clauses and move the verbs around. I was just like, it's that thing over there. I'm, you know, having a hard enough time with le and la, right? Just leave me alone with the derdi den das. I can't, I can't even. I am an old choir singer.

And for me, just every once in a while, they'll give me something in German. I'm, you know, reading through it and be like, nope, that is not a word. I don't know what that is, but that is not a word. I'm sure, yeah. You say every letter. You don't, you don't pretend some of them don't exist. I feel like the French people in Louisiana just bullied the Germans out of their language. They were like, listen, listen, Sha.

I'm not doing all of those cases. So you need to come on, you know, over to this side. just start talking like that guy from that like king of the hill boomer absolutely no no not boomer they're like cage and rich relatives or where it just turned into a Tennessee Williams you know what there was a part of King in the Hill beyond which I never went so I maybe didn't even see that one anyway this is your show what would you like us to do all right we got the theme song and I've got a new thing

song for today. What? That's going to work with what we've been talking about. Yeah, let's go. Is that that one, the... That's the FD. Yacht song. Yeah, the political one. Yeah, the East German Communist Party Youth Wing.

Yeah. That was their actual song, and it slaps. It slapsed. Yeah. That's great. That's amazing. Okay. Introductions.

Hello, I'm Justin. I'm Skalkan Library. My pronouns are he. him. I'm Jay. I am a academic metadata and discovery librarian, and my pronouns are he-him. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves? I'm Donna. I am an anthropologist and a consultant, and I used to work in libraries, and I still occasionally do. My pronouns are she-her. And hi, everybody. I'm Dorothea, and I am an L-I-S educator, UW-Madison I-School, and my pronouns are she-her.

Welcome. Welcome. Welcome back with you. Thank you. Good to be here. One of our very first guests. You were our first guest. I think that was the first. Yeah. Like episode two or some shit. Mm-hmm. Yep. So I didn't put in a segment this week because, although I did end up reading something else today that was on topic.

So I might bring it up later. But it was another Ithaca SNR report. Oh, another one. What is at this time? There's more to the value agenda. new values. New values just dropped. I am refusing to do any of that. I am on work to rule right now. I'm excited about the idea of new values because I feel like, you know, we've just barely

got a handle on the old values and now we've got to move on to this whole new set. We've got to align. Oh, alignment. Harmonize. Yeah. I did do yoga yesterday. Does that count? Does that help?

I think so. Alignment thing? Okay. Certainly. So we're going to talk about the library value agenda, which I had never really heard. When we were talking about it in the chat, I asked, like, Dorothy, I was like, did you come up with this term, like to describe a thing people are talking about? Because I never just hear it mentioned as like a thing because it's mentioned like,

it kind of has variations, like the library agenda for or the library values or libraries demonstrating values. but the whole thing is basically ways of the library proving it has value via very spurious definitions of value. So if you define value poorly. Exquisitely low values of proof. Yes. Yeah, the bar is low. I mean, my general line about the proving of value is that imagine somebody comes.

comes into a room and says to you, I need you to prove to me that you're valuable. What that says to me is that you've already lost the conversation. So my starting assumption around any sort of proving value, value agenda is that you're already on the back foot. You're already in a position where they don't actually value you, because if they did value you, they would not be asking you to prove your value. Right on. Like there are other ways to ask like, oh, I don't understand what you do or how you help or anything. Could you please tell me versus.

Prove you're worth something. Yeah. Prove your worth to me. And I think it is. And, you know, this is something that I know that Dorothea and I have been agreeing with in public for a very long time with each other. Is this idea that the proof of value is coming from a. a place where they not only don't understand the work of the library. And by they, I generally mean the people who hold the budget strings and the people who get

to make the big deal decisions, which might be, Justin, why you're not hearing it talked about in everyday library conversations. I don't think that people are sitting around while they're doing their library work saying, oh, how did we prove our value today? that phraseology shows up in the dean's meetings and in the meetings with the provost and in the meetings with the sort of great and powerful Oz type people at the top of the hierarchy who say things like we need to prove our value to these other people that they're beholden to. Do not look at the administrator behind the curtain. Exactly. It's fundamentally an administrator-centric conflict. because the people who were doing the actual work of libraries,

the sort of what my colleagues in the UK would call Coleface work, understand that what they are doing is valuable and take for granted that what they're doing is valuable because otherwise they would not be doing this work. I don't want to edge too far into vocational awe stuff, but I think that there is a fundamental assumption by people who do the work in libraries, that there's a reason that this sort of work exists, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it in the first place. And I think that's true for education as well, right?

We're now in a situation where politically, lots of people are asking for proof of the worth of things like public schools. And I think that proving the value of libraries is aligned, to use that word advisedly, with the agenda that doubts the value of all sorts of public service. institutional things like schools, like libraries, like health care, you can pick any number of things. And I guess what I would add to that is that there's fear behind this. There's a lot of fear coming from librarians, library administrators. The libraries are not understood that libraries would be

defunded in an instant if top admin thought they could get away with it. And these fears, are legit. All right, I understand these fears. I share them. I just, I have problems with this particular reaction to them. But I do want to acknowledge that the impetus here is not coming from an evil place. It's coming from a place of reasonable, justified fear. Yes, I think it's absolutely true that libraries are precarious, as are all of our other public sector things. So, again, I think the question, how are you valued? How do we value you? Why should we value you? Is a symptom of actual peril in our system. I am remembering a time when I was still working full-time in libraries where I was brought into a library to talk about the qualitative work that I was doing

at the time. And the ethnographic work that I did at UNC Charlotte is part of what allowed us to make arguments for doing additional things in the library, like renovating and opening up a group study space for students. It was something that now is a little bit taken for granted that libraries would do. It was something that was new to UNC Charlotte, so that was very cool. So I went to this place and I was talking to them about the work that I did and the arguments that I got to make. And I spent a series of meetings not just talking about the potential role that qualitative work could play in library assessment and library work generally, but also trying and failing to answer a series of questions that was basically people saying, how do you get people at your university to care about the library?

How did you get them to listen to you? and it turned out that they were in a position where they were going to lose their leadership. They were being told that they were going to lose budget. They were scrambling to figure out a way to convince their institution not to do this. And I felt terrible because the only answer I had for them was part of the reason that we know that people care about the library is because we have built these relationships with people outside of the library. library. And we have champions. We have people in the faculty. We have people in student affairs. We have people in disability services. We have people in lots of different parts of the university who know us, not just know our stats and can talk about, you know, how many books we have or

how many databases we give access to, but know us as human beings. And it's those connections that give us a certain stability and security. But they were looking at decisions that were going to start coming down in the next month or so. And there was certainly nothing useful I could say to them about that. Yeah, there's nothing you can do in a month. Yet there was a shift. When I was in library school, which was like 2003 to 2005, I took the systems analysis and project management course. Very good course. Got a lot out of it. And we were working with a small library on campus. and UW Madison had and still has a gazillion little tiny, usually disciplined specific libraries. And it was this conversation about the space was understaffed.

And basically to keep a space open, you have to chain somebody to it. Or at least that was the perception then. And so one of the questions we asked is, okay, if we're going to make an argument, about staffing the space, maybe with a student employee, you know, whatever, we'll figure out the labor model later, what would you do with the extra time? And the librarian we were talking to was, you know, didn't even have to think about it. She knew immediately what she wanted to do and what she wanted to do was exactly, go out there, be in the halls, go to the meetings, and build those relationships. It was just, you know, a time where the library,

was not so much circling the wagons and looking inward all the time, but learning to actually look out into the community. And I don't think we're all the way there yet. It's very hard to turn the wagon like that. But yeah, I feel like it's a different time now. I feel like we're finally acknowledging that those relationships are important, and the library is not just a silent monolith of books. Just because I'm getting very into like the concept of information. as a concept and whatnot. And something I've been turning around in my head is like of what the purpose of a library is, right?

Or a librarian thinking about like maybe older school, it's like, oh, this is about, you know, people can come here to access books or databases or whatnot or I can help them with a reference question or whatnot. And rather thinking about it as like these are the various community that my library will serve. What needs do they have? What needs are, like, reasonable and, like, within my scope to meet those needs, and starting to think about information is way broader than, okay, here's journal articles, okay, here's canopy, so you can watch a documentary for your course. Here's our popular fiction books because you're a student, and you're are a person and not just a student, right? Going even beyond, like, the materials that we have. And so I don't know if, like, that sort of shift is happening elsewhere,

or if that kind of shift of how we view the purpose of libraries and what we do, if do you see that, like, correlating with the increasing questions of demonstrate your value or the types of analytics and assessment that administrators rely on or anything. I mean, existential angst we shall always have with us. This is like, I don't even think that's new. I think it's healthy for us to ask ourselves these questions. I think they're good questions. I think they're the right questions.

One thing that I wish would happen, though, is that we would get out a little bit of the mindset of what is the library for. and more what does the library want to happen? What is the library and its librarian's point of view? Because without that, we can end up in these situations, and I was a scholarly communication librarian for way too long, so been there, done that. We can end up in these situations where we have a point of view, as with open access.

We have needs, like getting out from under, big deals and extremely exploitative publishers. But we're not, we don't feel empowered to just stand up and say, the current system is garbage and we need to change it. This is the point of view of the library. We, in the early days of open access, the library point of view is all, oh, okay, we will serve our communities with open access. When open access was not actually something that our communities wanted,

yet or even knew what it was for the most part. So when we have these existential angst conversations, I think it is not just what are we for, but also what do we want to see in the world? And how are we going to make it happen? And how are we going to nudge our communities toward what we need to see happen? So I started working in libraries in 2009. And it seemed to me, that the hiring of me as an anthropologist in the library was potentially part of a shift away from the library as a container of stuff to the library as this center of expertise and this location for people and workers that could generate their own agenda. And it was because I was not working full-time in libraries before that moment. I don't know from personal experience what the

specific run-up to it was. But I felt like from 2009 to about 2015, there was this moment where we were getting somewhat successful and making the argument for the library as a location of expertise that included people and not just resources. And that was a little bit in tension with anxiety about if we're not at the desk, how will people see us? So there were there were all of these competing conversations. I remember witnessing conversations about the reference desk and about what are we going to do with this big old reference desk. Students come up, to ask a lot about directions and they come to ask about basic stuff, but they're not asking in-depth reference questions at the desk. They're doing it at another place. So maybe our staffing model

could start to reflect something different. There was a tremendous amount of resistance from people who worried that if we did not have people with MLIS degrees at the reference desk, that we were not going to be visible in important ways to ever walked into the library and they weren't going to recognize our value. No, I don't know how they thought they were going to signal that they had an MLIS. Right. Thank you. Any random person who walked in. We're a giant button on your shirt. Anybody who works in the library is a librarian. Exactly. So there was lots to sort of deconstruct around that. But there was this real anxiety about if we're not in the space, they won't see us. And then they won't value us. If we don't have books all over the place, they won't see our resources and they

won't value us. And the idea that you could be perceived, not just literally visually seen, but perceived and recognized in other places outside of the library, was hard work to convince some people of that. Some folks were like, of course, of course I'm, and they might have been people who had not just a library background, but came from other academic disciplines and we're used to behaving more as peers and colleagues and less as people who were positioned by their institution as service staff, which is another whole piece of this, right? That is a whole thing, yes. You're here to help me.

Roxanne Charasi has some good pieces on it. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, Roxanne's stuff is really good on that. So I kept witnessing this tension between, you know, being a person and being, a service worker. And then there was this whole other thing about the library spaces and can they be useful if they're not inhabited by staff who then signal library stuff. So I was witnessing in the library that I worked at the conversation around can we sell space as a service? You know, can we say we're open 24-7, but not as a service? But not as a service.

our library workers to be on staff at the reference desk? Like, is that even a thing we can do? In 2011, that was apparently an open question. I think that there are more people doing that now. Well, I mean, the other piece of it beyond the reference desk is actually gate counts, which in the odds absolutely plummeted, particularly in STEM libraries and STEM collections because the journal literature migrated, or was in the process of migrating online. So you would get like engineering professors, I have one of them say this to me back in the day.

You know, we don't even think about the library anymore. Our students don't go there. We don't go there. So we were in effect functionally invisible to them. And I mean, you know, what's, I don't want to say what's the point, but I'm going to say it anyway. what's the point of expertise if nobody knows it's there nobody values it and it's all wrapped up in stereotypes from the freaking 1950s right like i um i was an english major the reason i used the library was not for my courses or for writing my english papers it was because i was a dork who like read derida for fun yeah um if i wasn't like that asshole who would check out the entire t s elliot row um at once i would not use have used my library in college because I didn't need to. All the stuff I needed was online, and I actually didn't have to cite things for my English papers because it was all new

criticism, you and the text, nonsense. But the points y'all are making, especially about, like, reframing it as expertise and putting the focus, like, on the worker and not the books and stuff, and, like, the worker, not just in the library, but the librarian, like, can be in other places. kind of reframing it not as the library, but like, here's this person and here's how they can collaborate with you and help you and whatnot. I do metadata and, um, you know, often a lot of metadata work is very invisible. People won't notice if I'm doing my job right. I mean, I want them to notice. I would love if I could, but, you know, I'd like to tell people like, oh, I'm the person who does that. But ideally, if I'm, I'm doing my job right, right, right. It like,

it will be smooth. If I'm not doing my job right, then people will notice. So interestingly, just a couple weeks ago, I ripped, absolutely ripped apart a draft framework opinion piece from Invest in Open Infrastructure, which is actually an organization I appreciate. I'm glad it's there. I love y'all if you're listening to this. But it was talking about, okay, what is infrastructure? sure. And basically this invisibility idea came up over and over and over again. And it was thought of as something inherent to the work rather than, you know, something that is something that is done so well by actual people performing actual labor that the people for whose benefit it is done are allowed to or choose to forget or ignore that those. people are even there. The library catalog becomes like commodity fetishism. Bingo. Like if we're going to get

like Marxist about it. Yep. But so so we have our whole library strategic initiative and whatever. And of all the operational plans, one of them is like maximize discovery of and access to information resources, right? And because I'm the metadata and discovery strategy library and I'm the relevant leader. And so I like, you know, come up with like the goals and actions of like for like five fiscal years and, you know, I don't have to do everything, but I have to like, you know, I have to do the puppet strings, right? And my dean met with each of the relevant leaders and like, you know, maybe the decision maker or if someone else was like really closely tied with it. Just to sort of check in on the strategic initiatives, not to be like, have you finished this yet? Have you finished

this yet? But just like talking to the people and like, how are things going? What roadblocks? Like, what is keeping you from maybe getting traction that you need? Not even looking at the plan, but just like, what, is there anything that I can do to help smooth something out or rearrange? Basically, it's an agile stand-up meeting. Kind of. But I actually really appreciated that meeting. I thought it was good. And one of my big goal initiatives was about, like, creating a culture of, like, documentation as, like, that setting the foundation and groundwork, especially. We just had a bunch of people retire. And so it's like that's important where a small library budget cuts, like this is important and we can share that that knowledge. And we've been doing really good

on it. I'm proud of it. And, you know, I was focusing on like, this is helping the workers. And then we can share this with other libraries too because I know we benefit from other libraries who share their documentation, right? You know, that's that's sort of how I frame it. And she said that like, you know, I might come. You know, she's like, maybe this is because I come. You know, from like a reference and instruction background. And maybe I just don't understand. But anytime I'm coming up with goals and maybe like, you know, if it's a long term integrated goal, thinking of like maybe like a deliverable to help like goalpost progress, it's never going to end. But oh, what's a thing where I can show? I've moved this far in it. And because I was like, that's our

next step is maybe thinking of some of these like, what are they minimal viable products or something like goalposts mid deliverables right yep and she's like you know i always try to think of those as like okay what can i point to where i can say and this will help the students do this like x y z like where the the goal of the deliverable is and now students will be able to what and i completely understand that viewpoint and i don't think it's a bad viewpoint to like try to like okay, what is this, how is this fitting in? What can this do? And I pushed back against her, not in a like, you're a wrong way, but in a way to be like, I think it's okay. Like, well, like, one, if we're able to do our work well and stuff, of course, that's going to, like,

reflect on how well people can use our services or access things. But also, I think it is okay for the focus to just be. And now the workers will have more efficient work. and not run into as many roadblocks or will, you know, be able to share their knowledge with each other and with other libraries. Like I think it's okay for the goal and the focus of things to not always be the end user student, but to be the people doing it. And she kept trying to like push back and like my faculty chair kept being like, you know, will we have to keep in mind? And I was like, yes, I understand, of course. But I still think it's okay just to focus on the worker. What's the opportunity cost of inefficiency?

Yeah, and I know Violet Fox talks about this sometimes, especially criticizing the like, and I'm guilty of this. This is like the user-centered, patron-centered, like metadata. Like my like first article is patron-driven subject access or something. So I'm guilty of this too. But, you know, with the whole, like, library value stuff. That is where that comes from. Your dean is quoting the new refined value of academic libraries that very deliberately focuses exclusively on the student experience. So it has collapsed because I think that part of what you and Dorothea have been talking about is,

is all of the different end users, right? If we want to call them that of the library. You have students. Library workers use it too. You have faculty. You have the people who are not library people who work in library systems. You have non-institutional researchers. You have, it is important to so many different people that it is legit challenging

to talk about a monolithic value of library. because there isn't just one. There are multiples. It's like how there's not just one library community of like where each library doesn't just have one community, there are communities. And this is part of what I keep trying to shout as an anthropologist is when you center the human experience of libraries,

it's much easier to have a variegated sense of what those experiences are. and the different ways in and the different ways we need to talk to exactly as you did is right, you know what? Sometimes we need to talk about what makes it good for library workers and think about it as contributing to this larger whole. If we reduce everything down to the student experience, imagine if we did, we don't have to imagine. They're doing it now. Imagine if they reduced every university to the student experience. We would get. Which student?

Yeah. The first year students, the upper level undergrads, the PhDs, because if it's an R1, that's who they actually care about is the doctoral students who are doing research. So I'm currently adjuncting at the university that I used to work for the library for, and their traditional student in the history of them as an institution is a non-traditional student because they were established as a four-year university post-World War II. they were established to serve the veteran population originally and then sort of gained this reputation and this expertise as being the university that was four people who were coming back to it after they had been out of school for a while. So the University of Utah. Yeah.

And every state has one of these, right? They have, it's a big old four year university. It's got lots of faculty. And not all of their undergraduate students are first year full-time freshmen, who don't have jobs and don't have families. And so you would think this institution, of all institutions, would actually be very practiced in making arguments about the student experience that are not reductive

and not stereotyped about the first year full time. But that doesn't seem to be what happens all the time. I still think they're better about it than a place like, say, you know, Chapel Hill would be where they reduce everything, to R1 stuff. Even UNC Asheville, which is our public liberal arts university, which is very much about the undergraduate experience, right? They don't have graduate students to worry about. So they get to be reductive. But we're a big, messy institution. And so if you work in the library and you want to talk about the student experience, these are exactly the questions, Jay,

that you're posting, right? Are we talking about student parents? Are we talking about student veterans? we talking about students who work full-time? Are we talking about students who are doing professional degrees? What kind of student are we talking about? And that makes those conversations really complicated and difficult. And I think sometimes it's a lot easier to say, you know what, let's just talk about first year, full-time freshmen and talk about impact in a very simple way because then that makes the impact seem really big, right? If you diffuse your impact over all of these complicated life stories, it's much more difficult to demonstrate. And it's certainly more difficult to demonstrate very specifically the role that the library

might play in any given students' experience. And that was a struggle that I never really successfully navigated when I was working full-time in libraries was to try to convince library workers that it was okay if students didn't have libraries at the heart of their experience. There's a piece by Zoe Fisher talking about this specifically in the context of the library, the library value agenda and kind of the classic library value agenda study, which is the impact of the library on GPA, right, with various mediators. But still, that's the classic library value agenda study.

And Zoe is like, and she just lays it out there, respect. You're not measuring the impact of the library, y'all. you're measuring privilege because who exactly which of your students has time to come and plant their butt in the library. That is what you're measuring. Yeah. Bringing it back to some of like the early reports. I read one. I don't remember when this one came out. The value of academic libraries report, when did this one come out? I'll say 2011, 2010. 211 around there. One thing I noticed was aside from trying to define value was sell, it seemed to be mostly selling assessment management systems, which are sort of centralized data warehouses to try and

prove these things, prove that you're improving GPA based on, did they check out Catcher in the Rye 10 times and get an A on their physics exam? Well, that must mean that the library improve their GPA. Because I work with libraries. He does go to a museum in it. I've never read it. Oh, boy. No, I'm going to actually take a step back from that. All right? It's not just the data warehouses. It's the collection and intentional retention of library data that should, damn it, be private. And destroyed. And destroyed. Never collected in the first place. Or never collected in the first place. Tell me, explain to me right now why UW Madison has 20 years of my circulation records. 20 years? What is this? freaking years.

Anytime I hear some like bullshit like circulation record things, it's like the movie seven, that's how they catch Kevin Spacey is because he catched he checked out Canterbury Tales or something. Oh God, I didn't remember that. Yeah, and they get the log from it. Yeah. Yeah.

Every single time. That's definitely against ALA principles there, right? Y'all are supposed to keep that kind of day. He did not. They did not. Consult the librarian. So, but that's, I'm I mean, that is the one of the core motivations, forgive me, for attributing this to you, Dorothea, of the Data Doubles project, is to talk about the impact of these assumptions about,

well, we have this data, we should do something with it, we have the potential to collect this data. Maybe we ought to collect it, right? The tyranny of the potential data collection then drives the actual collection and makes it so that then these companies can come in and say, hey, you guys have all that data. Maybe you all should do something with it. Here's a system that does something with it. So to Justin's point about somebody's selling you something that this data could be plugged into that can then give you the reports that your administrators can take to your provost

and weaponize against you. And weaponize against you. Because as I believe Andrew Asher has pointed out multiple times, there's no guarantee the numbers that you collect are going to go in a favorable direction for you. That happened to my library. So the university hired the consulting firm Huron to look at all our... Yeah. To crunch some numbers and tell us where we can move things around. So like, oh, maybe this chunk of money could be better invested over here. You know, whatever. And the first round of the Huron thing, I think I've talked about this on the show before, whatever, was, you know, it was mainly like various sort of staff type, like, departments in the university.

So not like colleges or anything, but like support services and whatnot, except for the library. The library, because we're faculty, so the library is technically a college, right? So I have a dean and all that. The library was the only college targeted in the first. round and they want us to like cut our budget by like five million or something and the way that Huron got their numbers was they looked at our reference stats and like compared it to other like ARL or ACRL libraries that are like our comparators or something and looked at like how many students we have and the size of our collections and stuff and that's how they made their

decision about how much money we should get and It was based on like the self-reported stats that we gave and that we've been collecting through like lib answers and like and stuff like that. Yeah. And immediately we were all like they, no, these are, they way misinterpreted the data, but that's the point. Are those the same people who screwed over the library at Texas A&M? Uh, probably. Because they had a very similar thing happen where a consultant firm. came in and they were looking at the whole university and they targeted the library as the place

where they would make the cuts. Well, they thought a library was a library school because they're idiots. Right, because they're, oh, wow. That was part of it. There was, and again, this is the whole people who don't recognize the library as a location of expertise also can then willfully misinterpret what even is a library and what is that thing over there. And maybe.

It's our job to worry about. Right. And maybe because I don't understand it. It's not important. Their library is so fucked because they have like a great library with like a lot of independent IT still and a lot of faculty. And all those faculty are just like leaving because they can't get appointed in the other colleges. So like they're just, they've just destroyed their whole workforce, basically.

Because of where my family is from in Louisiana, I am obligated to be delighted about the misfortunes of Texas A&M. However, I agree with you, they're fucked and they shouldn't be, right? Like, they were done tremendously dirty and it's going to haunt those students and that faculty for a very long time. I have a really hard time imagining them as an institution, recovering from that in a substantial way. They're going to be completely transformed. They're going to be a whole other kind of institution after this. Yeah. The library runs so many central services like journals, and they run it all on their own IT system.

And they also run the crisp system. It's not quite a crisp, but the thing, the Vivo or whatever it is, the open source thing. Right. Actually, one thing I was going to say, though, that's when Jay was talking about numbers being used against you. One time our collection development library and used the function in Alma that lets you see return on investment.

So like the cost of an e-book versus how many times it's been checked out. And I was like, that is very brave. I would not have shown that number. Because it's like, it's like $50 a click or something. It's like, yeah, I wouldn't have run that report ever. I would have pretended I didn't know how to do that. It's not hard in Alma to pretend like you don't know how to do something. I may have done like six presentations last year, including internationally,

about how bad X Libris's documentation is. I'm sorry. But again, any of these ROI things, right? Because as soon as you've got a person who's asking you about ROI about a resource for learning doesn't fundamentally understand learning, doesn't fundamentally value education, doesn't think that open-ended research is a thing that we should build our systems in for. If the only books that you have or resources that you have in your library are the ones that get checked out over and over again, you haven't built any slack in your resources for people.

to find and work with unexpected things in the same way that we don't have any slack in our workforce. Everybody is working absolutely to the margins of where they can. If you strip down the library just to the stuff that you think people are likely to use, then you've stripped all of the potential creativity and surprise out of your higher education system. Serendipity. the humanists like that word. Use it a lot. Yeah, and sometimes I don't think it means what they think it means. I completely agree with you.

However, it's a useful word. It is, and I value it, right? And I think that we in libraries and in universities are too often confronted by decision makers who want to be told what's going to happen as if that is evidence of value. And then if we say to them, you know what, if we do this thing, something unexpected might happen, that's not valued by them. And not to bring NFT discourse into this, but because of, you know, all that bullshit that's been happening, I feel like a good thing that's coming out of that discourse is people are talking about how, I mean, you know, people have. been talking about the neoliberalization of higher education and of libraries in general and even how it's moved beyond that to actually being more of like a business mindset and using those

kinds of frameworks and stuff for how do you run this. Because businesses always do so well. Right, right. And like bringing those mindsets into running it. But also it's like with the rise of like crypto currency. and NFTs, people are starting to talk about the like financialization of everything, where instead of value kind of being this, I mean, obviously there's also thinking value in like dollars and stuff, but like assigning a dollar sign to everything, like everything can have some sort of like monetary value or it's meaningless. And like that is the kind of system where I'm surprised I haven't seen more like NFT higher education stuff because it seems like they would love it.

Right. It just seems like it would, it so fits in with the model of trying to ascribe value to every single thing. And if you can't demonstrate value, then what is your point? You have to, you have to have a reason for existing and that reason has to be making us money. And therefore, like, we are like semiotically, like, reducing you to a, like, a dollar sign. And if you stop being a dollar sign, we will get rid of you. So one of the things that was going to save our library when I was working there was we were going to figure out a way to sell things about the library.

If not to people outside of the university, then maybe to other units. I want to call it reprobe, but that's not what it is. Like a chargeback system? Yeah, something like that. So it was not going to be like core library work stuff, but maybe, for instance, if I was on offer to do qualitative work, they could figure out a way to charge other units for the stuff we do. Or if we had...

Oh, for like consulting. Yeah. Or if we had a graphic designer in the library, which we did have, they could maybe charge other units of the library. So there was this sort of nascent and when I was there, never entirely successful attempt to try to very deliberately figure out the stuff that we could sell about what we did outside of the library in an attempt to get resources and in an attempt to sort of fill the hole of the cuts that we were weathering so that we might not have to rely on one-time money to pay for databases and things like that. Yeah, I've had tech commercialization come up to me and try and get me to figure out stuff we could sell via licenses. And I'm like, no, my whole job is making stuff open access. I really don't know what we could sell.

That wouldn't be like private data or just pointless to keep licensed. Well, and I work at a university where a whole lot of IT running. that way on a chargeback model, and you end up with huge inequalities, in my view, unacceptable ones in who gets served at all and who does not. I've never heard of this kind of thing happen. It might be something that happens in larger institutions. I don't know that, and it's certainly not monolithic, but I think it's another piece of evidence of the financial precarity of academic.

libraries and also evidence of the mindset that we find ourselves within, right? That there is a world where we think it's complete nonsense to talk about selling the stuff that the library does to other parts of the university. And yet, because of the political moment that we're in and because of the defunding of public education and because of discourses like this value of libraries discourse, which is very market adjacent, right? It's that same logic. It is the neoliberal logic, right? It's the, what's the return on investment and what are we spending money on and what are our outputs going to be? And how do we

make that into something that we can put into a bar chart that would then signal to people that this thing is better than that thing? All of this is of a piece. Yeah, it also ties back to what we were talking about earlier with respect to the invisibility of some infrastructure and some systems. We're in a situation where we do not dare be invisible because if you're invisible will cut you, right? If you're invisible, you don't exist. And to be fair, I've actually seen this within libraries as well. I have a good friend who's in the general collection, serials acquisitions part of the universe, who working for a very prestigious university, which I will not name, whose top brass were just a god.

at the idea that you'd need a whole person, a whole librarian just to run the ILS. Doesn't it run itself? Only one? Jesus. One, right. Yeah, one. I literally just do Primo. Yeah.

I don't even look at all that. Yeah. Doesn't the ILS run itself. Yeah. So if you don't understand what labor goes into library work and you come and you're like, that whole person, instead of them doing whatever that thing is that I don't understand, we could sell them to somebody else who could do work that I might understand more. And then, Jay, what you were just saying, if you do your work well, nobody sees it.

And that is the most thankless kind of work because then people are only coming to you when things break. I'm surprised by metadata librarian considering how huge my ego is. You think I'd be some like rock star reference library, but no. It's just thankless maintenance labor. You should do Skullcom. It's very useful for egos. I do like copyright. I do like copyright.

I can wear suits like Kyle Courtney does. Fun light up shoes. It'd be great. Sorry, Donna, I interrupted. I hate to call that work invisible because it is foundational. Thank you. You don't see it if it's working. And that's true for a lot of stuff, right?

You don't see the stuff if it's working. If our health care system is working effectively, then we don't see it working because we don't have, you know, lots and lots of ill and injured people that are evidence of something not working, right? Things working well is a lot harder to point to because there isn't some sort of disaster that immediately sort of fires people. people's, I need to do something instinct, right? They, it, I was going to say, if you don't schedule maintenance, it will schedule itself. Yeah. At the most inconvenient possible time.

Yeah. I was thinking about my colleagues in public health, bless their hearts, who are having a very hard time these last couple of years. And one of the things that public health people have been saying is that if you deal with a pandemic effectively, nobody knows that it was a problem. And that's very psychologically difficult for people to get a handle on. There was this terrible thing that never happened. Well, why aren't the emergency rooms overflowing the time I went? Right. Like that kind of. Yes, exactly. And I don't want to be too facile about, you know, uncontrolled global pandemics and library

systems. But I think there's a very similar psychological thing happening, right? Where if everything is ticking along and everything is fine and then people somehow are like, well, then I don't have to pay attention to that. I don't have to fund it because clearly it's working and I can maybe take that money and move it somewhere else. It's like when you take antidepressants and you start feeling better and you're like, oh, maybe I can get off my pills now. No, that's when you know you should stay on them. Maybe I don't need my meds anymore because I feel fine. But yeah, it's the same mindset. It is. My God, we need our meds, right? So we need to keep doing what am I like Prozac or something? Right. Yes. So you are medicine for your library, the work that you do. And

again, one of the thing that terrifies me about the orientation of the value of libraries agenda very specifically to the student experience is students do not give a shit about your metadata. students do not give a shit about any of these systems, right? No, because they don't understand and they shouldn't have to and they shouldn't care. They shouldn't have to. They shouldn't have to. I don't want to make them care about metadata. This is something I get into all the time is the reference librarians wanting Primo to be like a tool of instruction.

And it's like, no, students are like in their dorms or in their apartments eating pizza at like 2 a.m. trying to finish their paper. I don't give a shit if Primo is going to teach. them the secrets of how you search things. I want them to be able to find that article, right? Oh my God. Using broken systems to teach students about how valuable library expertise is, is one of the worst ways to teach. That's not the tool to do it. That's not the way you, and I, oh, I had so many, because early on, I was doing some usability stuff. And I was trying to, along with another colleague who also had some usability experience, we were trying to redo the website.

And I will remind you this is 2009 when a whole bunch of library websites were just walls of text, right? Wait, they aren't anymore. Well, okay. There's a hero image. There's a cycle, right? You strip all the text away, and then you have all those meetings where somebody mistakes their importance for presence on the homepage. And they say, but you should put that link back and you should put that link back. So there's an ebb and a flow.

But I heard over and over again. this website works fine once you learn how to use it. All we have to do, all we have to do, all we have to do is teach the students how to use the website, and then it'll be fine. And I had to sit down and say, look, if students have to learn to use the website, they're going to go somewhere else to get their stuff.

Or they're going to walk right up to the desk and ask you to do it for them, which is a legitimate choice, by the way, because they don't have the time and they don't have the energy. And they shouldn't have the time. And they shouldn't have to be experts in these broken systems that we buy from vendors to be able to do their academic work.

If we aren't experts in them, how do we expect students to be? Well, we shouldn't. Exactly. And nor faculty, right? And so. I'm not an expert in Primo. No. Hell no.

And I don't know how I could be because I have a bone to pay. It sucks. overpriced. I feel like if it works through Google Scholar, it's fine. I mean, I don't trust Google Scholar, but as long as it works, I really don't care how people get information, especially, I'm just thinking in like an open access context. Like it's, as long as the metadata is linking out and the links are all working and the indexes are all being, you know, properly filled out, it's fine. But I wanted to bring it back to one of the reports that we, that I read, getting ready for this.

And it said something interesting about collaborations between the library and other units on campus are expected to take greater hold in the years to come, while external partnerships of third-party vendors and public libraries are likely to stay relatively stable. Why wouldn't the external partnerships decrease? So you're just saying, do more. It seems to be sort of an infinite, just do more. And like I said, I read another thing today that said, pivot to STEM faster. but also doubled down on humanities.

And I was like, great. So we just do those two things. Well, and that's another danger lurking in the financialization of everything, I think, because if we as libraries resist the pressure to put a price tag on our services, we have some folks who will, frankly, exploit us happily, cheerfully. How much do we play the game? Right. Yeah.

And, you know, if we don't have a price tag, if we don't have policy, if we don't have management with spines, how do we turn the exploiters away? Yeah, so this is a leadership problem. Yep. This is a... Like some of those like marketing and business and whatnot skills, it's not that they're bad. It's not that like framing the entire library through that lens is bad, but I think knowing some of those skills can absolutely be useful.

Oh, I agree. Utterly. Yeah, but it shouldn't maybe consume the entire rhetoric around. why we exist in the first place. And I think, you know, Justin, to your point about a lot of what these kinds of reports and, you know, a lot of what some of the other stuff that's written about what libraries should do is very much, you know, you need to do this thing and you need to do that thing and you need to do this other thing.

At the same time that you're doing all the other stuff that you're doing, but we're not going to hire any more people and we're not going to give you any more money and we're not going to give you anything that would help retain people like, oh, say, flexible work or any of those things that people are asking for, just keep everything the same but do more. And the value of the library's discourse prevents people from feeling like they can constructively say no to things because they're coming from a position of terror that they won't value us if we don't say yes to everything. And so what I would like is for, library leadership to create space for the people who work for them to say, if you want this thing

immediately, then I have to stop doing that thing that you also value. Yep. So make a choice, right? So maybe even they might say, okay, pause on that so we can do this. Fine. Yes, but be transparent about the labor that is involved in these things that you're asking of people. And don't treat it like this sort of endless, limitless, well, they've said yes before. So they'll probably say yes now. When I first started working in libraries, I had a colleague who was still doing the bibliographies for her faculty as a liaison. What? And she was super popular. Oh, I bet. With the faculty. And did she ever get author credit? Of course not. I doubt it. Faculty just want their live guides to be a list links. That's all they want. Yeah. And so that's sort of, you know, to Dorothea's point earlier about, you know,

we need for libraries to have the space to set their own agenda because faculty who don't work as collaborators with libraries have a very limited imagination about what is possible from library workers. And the thing that will make any given generic faculty member delighted with their library is probably the least of what the library is capable of. Yeah. Yeah. I do that pretty much every day. The whole, you know, if you want us to do this, we're stopping doing this.

Like, I send my dean lists of like, here are the projects we can't do now. Like, I got a thing today about research data management. I was like, okay, but like, we'll have to stop doing something else if you want us to start doing RDM because we're at capacity. Like, we can't take on. The whole team is at capacity. Like, everyone on my team can't do anything more. So, like, and I mean, he understands that.

So it's like, yeah, like saying no is, I don't know if people have ever made space for me to say no, but I have definitely listened to other people who are like, if you don't do this, you will burn out and quit libraries forever. So I've gotten pretty good at it. And I want to write, I want to present about it. You need to write that up and share it with the people who do struggle with it. And it's also really good that you're supported in that. Like I'm imagining any number of situations where you would have said, well, if this,

then not that, and then be told make it work. They're definitely like when you're talking about like library design, I've been on the library website committee forever. And then like just we get overridden on stuff that we spent like weeks working on. Because some faculty was like, why isn't there a calendar on the front page? I'm like, no one's going to fucking look at that calendar. Don't remove the link we just decided to put on the, but they had to. Well, and they're so excited about evidence-based practice until the evidence that I produce for the practice of the website doesn't quite jive with what they think should be happening because of their own little deal.

Evidence-based practice is just like a cover-up for evidence that supports my bias. Absolutely. And that's absolutely. And so, again, with my anthropology brain. I'm guilty of it too. So we all are. Websites and org charts and desk arrangements are social constructions of hierarchies and importance in the library as a culture.

And until and unless we get a more secure way of people feeling their position within their institutions, these same. signifiers of importance are going to remain things that we can't be evidence-based about. If somebody's professional sense of worth is indelibly tied to the reference desk, there is in any amount of evidence about what students do or don't know or faculty do or don't do at a reference desk that is going to pry that desk away from them because it is the thing that they have tied their sense of importance to. The website's the same way. Mark, Mark, Mark, and catalogers.

And not all catalogers, let me just say that, but quite a few catalogers who are just still, right, in the year of our whoever, 2022, cannot even imagine doing anything but Mark. I'm wanting to write this whole paper eventually about, like, focusing on metadata schema and just like metadata work in general, from like this perspective of a metadata worker and not the end user,

but where I focus on not ethics, not does this work or not work, but how much do they enjoy using it, like the erotics and sensuality and joy of it? Like, why don't I like doubling core? It's like, yeah, it's kind of oversimplified and therefore kind of hard do sometimes. But is that the real reason? No, the real reason is I find it boring and I don't like how. it looks in oxygen because it's not fun enough and not indented enough. Emotional affect and things like that is huge. And I'm telling you, I would so read that

paper. I want you to write it. And it's something that came up when I was interviewing students about their own web practices around institutional spaces. If the library website made them feel confused and dumb, they weren't going to use it anymore. Like think, think of anywhere that you've ever been that made you feel confused and dumb. It is also a service point. Yeah. And like, so you have to go there, but you don't want to go there. I did a project towards the end of my tenure at that library where I had students map two different sets of things. They mapped places on campus where they had to go and places on campus where they wanted to go. And then we talked about the difference. Oh, that's great. And you can do that with websites too. But, you know, one of the things that

came out of the places where they want to go is about, you know, places where they're familiar, places that make them feel good, places where they're not anxious, places where they know they can settle in for a while. It's like a kind of like psychogeography. Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, who you are as a student. So if you are a racially minoritized student, if you are a student whose gender makes you feel vulnerable in public spaces, then not all parts of campus are going to feel equally comfortable. And, you know, digital places are also places. And that is something that has an impact on their feelings and their likelihood that they're going to go back to those places. I talked to an international student who said, I think he told me he was originally from Pakistan, and he said,

I'm most comfortable in places on campus where there are lots of different kinds of people. So he wasn't even looking for homogeneity of who he was. He wasn't looking for a whole bunch of people who were just like him. He just wanted to not be the only different person in that space. I recently, so we're trying to get a like New Hampshire like DPLA thing up and going. And I'm the metadata person for that. And in March, because my. annual report was due April 1st. I did a workshop training at

virtually, but at the state library for any librarian in the state to attend on basic like just like doing, like describing digital objects because a lot of the places that would be like

contributing stuff to RDPLA those librarians aren't trained in metadata. They might not even like have gone to library school, which doesn't mean they're not librarians, but they might not have the training to do it. And they're just like, here you go. You do this now because it's a small rural library in wherever New Hampshire, right? And I know that there's a lot anxiety around metadata. I know that. And I know that like, because there's only so much jargon you can peel away from it when you're teaching it that I come like, I come like, yes, I have

expertise in this. But I calm off as like intimidating and like better than them and smarter than them because I've had staff tell this to me before and I was like oh that is good to know that you know and so when I was teaching it I made sure to like not read a script I was very casual with them and my like I was glad that I made mistakes while I was doing it yeah and I every single time I do instruction I'm like I hope something goes wrong yep but the little questionnaire because I was like I need this for my annual report um that I sent that like the questions that I asked was like how fun do you think it will be to do metadata work now? Like how fun was it before and how much fun do you think you'll have doing it now?

Like that was the main thing for me was like, is this going to be fun for you now? Like are you going to enjoy doing this? Are you going to view it as like a fun puzzle to solve instead of this like thing that you will never figure out? Like that was my like, I didn't go like on a scale of one to ten. How well do you understand how to do this now? I didn't care if they like understood it. I wanted to know if they would like not be in pain. Yeah, right on.

Doing it. And like that's a type of value too that like people just ignore. Like the like obviously, you know, it's a job. It's your work. But I still feel like you can enjoy your work and like be proud of your work and the value that you are creating. If only we could seize the means and all that. But, you know, I don't. don't feel like you're being like a neoliberal shill. If you're like, yeah, I have fun doing the

work that I do and I like it and I'm proud of it. And I, if I can help more library workers to get saddled with like doing Dublin Corps and Omega, then like, that makes me feel proud of myself. That's tremendous. I mean, I think, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we took, for instance, the evidence that students want to be in the library whenever they can be, and that's part of why they want 24-7 spaces, not because they're going to be there all the time, but they want to not have to worry about when it closes and when it opens. They want to be able to just sort of come in, settle in,

not have anybody clearing them out. So, you know, the point of a 24-7 library space isn't that you're going to have 200 people in it 2 in the morning. It's that the students who work until six can come in at seven and know that they're not going to be cleared out at nine just when they're getting everything going. Getting in the groove. That's right. So students who are comfortable enough to want to be in those spaces, students who are comfortable enough to sleep in the library, that's evidence of students valuing the library. That's not going to show up on your circulation data.

that's not going to show up in your reference counts. And that's something that has to be described by people who are paying attention to the behaviors of people in and around library spaces and library work. So some faculty member coming up to you and saying, hey, I really enjoyed XYZ project that we did or that thing that you did for me.

That made it easier for me. These are not quantifiable things, but these are tremendously valuable things that we need to be able to communicate. And the flip side of that trust and safety that I think you are talking about, Donna, particularly with the example of somebody who feels safe falling asleep in the library, tying this back to the library value agenda and to data doubles, this level of trust and safety can be lost. And one way to lose it is surveillance.

In the last phase of data doubles, we actually had a very interesting, unexpected natural experiment happen with respect to one of our scenarios that we asked students about in focus groups, which is about geotracking, right? Geotracking on campus. And students were pretty equivocal about it at most of our sites, you know, willing to listen to it, but in general kind of creeped out, at least in some situations. And they drew a very clear boundary around. the campus. Maybe it's okay if you know where I am when I'm on campus, but you do not need to know where I am when I'm off it. That was a very clear line. But natural experiment, yes, Northwestern University, which was one of our research sites, in 2019, had then Attorney General

Jeff Sessions come to campus, and there was quite a bit of student protest. The student newspaper published photos of student protest in which students were clearly shown and identifiable. And students were, to put it mildly, really upset about this, right? They understood the reality, which is this is how our administrators, this is how campus police, and, you know, who even knows on up to ICE and the NSA and whoever, this is how they're going to get us. And so at Northwestern, when we ask them about geotracking, they immediately understood the punitive uses of knowing where anybody is at any particular time.

And they were like, nope, we're not having this. It is not okay. And they were the only research site where that happened. So the library value agenda is largely predicated on surveillance being invisible, students not knowing which of their information practices are being surveilled for how long,

what the data are being used for, they know none of that. And I can't help wondering what happens the first time, you know, library data that is being retained too damn long for some library value agenda thing.

I'm waiting for a leak. I'm waiting for a leak. And I want to see specifically how much value is subtracted from the library brand by this sudden knowledge on the part of students and the rest of the university of what's really going on. And the weasel words that get used when we bring this up in value agenda rooms, right?

Aren't you worried about what the students are going to experience when this stuff leaks? aren't you concerned about the fact that you are retaining data that the ALA code of ethics says that we probably shouldn't even be collecting? And a lot of the rhetoric that comes back at those of us who say maybe we shouldn't is stuff like, but we can do good with it. Or, you know, we just need to find a way or this is how we're helping the students and all of these, you know, demonstrating value and these sort of,

oh, but our intentions are good. And the point is Road to Hell Absolutely Absolutely paving the road to hell But also, you know If we have learned nothing else In the last little while

It's that your good intentions Don't actually matter It doesn't matter If you thought you were doing a good thing If the thing that you're doing Can lead to a very bad thing Actually bad Did we learn nothing from Aaron Swartz?

Nothing at all Did we learn nothing Unfortunately, it frequently looks like we learn nothing. I'm still after, of course, college and research libraries to retract a bunch of library value agenda studies on grounds of absolutely putrid ethics. And not even just library ethics, but human subjects ethics. Where was the notice? Where was the consent? Where is the beneficence going all the way back to the Belmont report?

The research did they see the thing at the bottom of their browser that said, okay, except all right? cookies. Uh-huh. So this is another thing, this is another thing about different audiences and who you're, who the people are that you're pointing this to. And one of the things that I learned as a researcher coming into libraries is this whole idea of big R and little R research. And so I was, I approached all of the stuff I did as big R research.

I had a big old IRB protocol and I would amend it every time I dealt with a different method or technique and I would say, now I'm going to talk to these students and now I'm going to work with these faculty, had it on file the whole time. I was there and I was constantly encountering people, not necessarily always in the library that I was working in who would say things like, well, I'm just doing little RRRB and so I don't need to file an IRB because I'm not intending to publish it. It's just for assessment purposes. It's internal only. These are things that are technically exempt. But every time I teach a methods class, be it to professional library workers or to my students, I say, I don't care if you think you're exempt. You talk to your ethics board anyway.

You prove to those people that what you're doing is not going to put anybody at risk. I don't want anybody assuming that you're doing the right thing without at least right. And IRBs are not perfect. There's a whole lot of stuff that isn't covered by institutional review boards. But the idea that you would self-vette your ethics and say, no, I mean well, I'm good, is wrong. It's just flat out wrong. Yep. Well, and the other thing about Little R research, and they can't hate me any worse than they already do. I'm going to say their names. Minnesota. Minnesota. All right. Soria Naccharood at all. Minnesota. Every single article published out of that needs to be retracted on ethics. grounds. That is my story. I am sticking to it. Anyway, the thing about Minnesota.

In any of the pod, Minnesota. Right. In light of what Donna just said is that little R research has a way, at least in libraries and apparently student assessment offices as well, of suddenly becoming Big R published research. And there are various dodges that are used for this. Some of them are laid out in a piece by a group that I was kind of cat herder in chief of the group that is now DLF, privacy and ethics and technology. It had a different name back in 2018 when this came out. But anyway, there are various dodges that you can use for this. But one of them is that we're not actually collecting the data. The data just exists, right? You know, data about students from their student records just exists so I can use it and I don't then have to go through IRB.

Because IRB at the time that IRBs were invented were specifically focused on harms of data collection, which is understandable given the ethical horrors that they were reacting to, right? They were reacting to things like Tuskegee, where it was the data collection process that was hideously harming people. So I get it. but the entire research ethic system has not caught up to the harms here. And the learning analytics industrial complex has not even confronted them, not for lack of prodding, but they just haven't.

I think that one thing that is in the Belmont report that is important is being precise about for whom is this research allegedly beneficial. And that's something that is going to pursue. regardless of are we collecting or are we harvesting, right? There are these hair splitting technicalities about where did the data come from. Mom, it followed me home. Can I keep it? But if you're- It'll eat your homework.

Yeah, if your lens is who is this for, then you're golden. Because the ethnographer's responsibility as somebody who does applied work is not to the person who hired me. My responsibility is to the people I'm studying. My ethical responsibility is to the people from whom I am learning. And if you're doing your big R research to benefit the library, you are doing it wrong because your big R research and your little R research should be for the benefit of the people in your community to whom you are beholden. And the library value agenda has failed at this from the very beginning. Go back and read the original Oak Leaf report.

Every single stated benefit is for the library. This is wrong. Yeah. It is unethical. It is a thing that should not be. And I believe I've said in more than one talk, I don't actually care about the library. I care about the people who work in the library. I care about the people who work in the university.

I care about the community in which the university or college is embedded. But I don't actually give a shit about the library. Preach. And the value of libraries agenda gives too much of a shit about the library. And not enough about the people who are embedded in that system. Like, what are they, like, it's just like this amorphous concept, the library. right? Like, it's a building that we've put things in. That's like, I don't care. Right? I mean, it's soilent. The library is people. I, you know, I'm not the only one to make this joke.

Matt Reedsma made this joke at a talk. He and I were both at a conference together, and I made a library's people, and I had a Soylent slide up. And Reedsma came up to me afterwards, and he said, I had a Soylent slide up. line in that I took out because I didn't think anybody was going to get it, but I'm putting it in for tomorrow. I did an entire talk in 2013 Soylent Semantic Web is people. Absolutely. So we are the Soylent crew. Yes. Do you have the slides for that?

I do. Let me find them. Team Soilent. Absolutely. Yeah. I heard semantic and I was like, yeah. So the ethics, so the ethics of this are actually clear. I don't need to engage in a conversation with people about.

where the data come from because the motivations of the use of that data are suspect. Yep. Oh, but I wanted to let you know that Ithaca SNR I was reading today, the one that had, there's another one. I posted it in the Skullcom shit-talking discord. Where is it? Oh, yeah, I highlighted two things. There's an entire discord for shit-talking and Skull-Com.

Yes. Of course there is. How could there not be? Obviously. redress relationships with historically marginalized groups and serve the needs of the political entity that funds or controls the institution. Pick one. And then I said, I said, we're about to resolve, we're about to end history with this paper. We're resolving all the contradictions.

Pick one. Oh, but there's a new agenda item, which is, there's a new agenda item that we need to be aligned with. That Arthur is here. That's what the new agenda item is. the on-campus experience. Now that's a new goal for the institution. So now the library needs to align itself with the on-campus experience, which I assume is going to go great for us because we have our staffing is about half of our,

the staffing of our other institutions in the same system with the same enrollment. And we can't even open on Saturdays anymore. So that's going to be fun when, like at all. So we're not a 24-7 library. where, you know, and people are going to start getting mad about us being closed. And it's like, we have no staffing. And we have been denied more money for staffing. So the on-campus experience and the whole back-to-campus thing now that the powers that be

declared the pandemic to be over. And everybody got that email this morning. Yeah. Everybody needs to go back in the buildings. This is something that I've been doing research on in the UK. and because they have the same deal, right? Same political agenda that's around ignoring the pandemic. Same misunderstanding of people being in physical spaces

for the only way that you can engage with people in a global uncontrolled pandemic, right? So I'm seeing the back-to-campus agenda and the on-campus experience as a very particular kind of code for, I need to see you doing traditional university things or I don't understand what's going on. It's also surveilling.

Absolutely. It is if you're not in the classrooms, if you're not... It's surveilling the workers too. And if you don't, yes, if you're not... That's a primary thing. There's a butts in seats, yeah, there's a butts in seats presentism that particularly hit libraries hard in the pandemic.

I saw this in public libraries. I saw that not even in a research thing, just in a people I know who are library workers, were constantly struggling with people persistently misunderstanding them not being able to do their work if they weren't in the building, right? That, again, that fundamental disconnect around what even is library work and can it be done if you're not in your office where I recognize you as a library worker. And I think that this then translates into what's happening at universities now around, you know, okay, the student on-campus experience and it's going to be sweetness and light and it's going to be people in buildings the way it used to be, whatever that means. And that means we're going to see everybody. So I absolutely agree. Surveillance is a big deal because if they can, you know, if you are visible, then you are controllable.

But that kind of surveillance comes out in the ways that students are online on campus, too, the whole you should turn your cameras on when you're in an online class. That's a kind of surveillance. And also, ableist is hell, right? Because you don't have to visibly see people to be able to connect with them wherever you are. So we've got work to do. We have work to do around pushing back against this notion of a monolithic. on-campus experience that, you know, we should roll back all of the stuff that we got in terms of accessibility from having access to remote options and online options. All of this is work that we need

to do now because the snapback, as my colleague Peter Bryant in Sydney, Australia called it, is coming. And they're just, the powers that be are going to want it all to look like it did, when they thought they could control everything. And I mean, I don't think it's working because this is like the fifth get back in the office email I've gotten. And it's like, I don't think people are listening to you, man. I just think I consider just seriously emailing back and being like, fuck you. But then they would have just forwarded it to the dean again like the last time I did that. So I don't email the president's office anymore.

Is there anything that we want to. get out of the way before wrap up. I've noticed we have not been very positive here. We've been very negative Nellies. Okay. And that's bad for graduate students in library school. Are you kidding? They're worse than I am. Arthur is staring at me because I'm having like a bad change. Arthur, it's okay, buddy. So I will say what I often say to people, who raised the specter of critique. Well, that too, but critique scaring people off from doing the work. And so what I would say to anybody listening who has gotten this far and is still like, gosh, I just wish they'd say something nice.

As first of all, I don't do nice. Second of all, if I didn't care about all of this stuff, I wouldn't have so much to say about what I I wish we're different. Critique is engagement. Critique is community. If I didn't give a shit, I wouldn't spend so much time trying to work so that it would be different. Amen. You're here.

You don't have to be gay to get married to a man. I mean, you did it. I didn't know when I was going to use that stuff. I've been hanging on to it. But that is one of my favorite clips now. The guy who's like, I'm committing marriage fraud because I'm married. my best friend. It's like, you're married to your husband. You're married, man. That's it. That's it. Can I make a plug, Justin? Yeah, go for it.

Anyone listening, stand in solidarity with the University of New Hampshire AAPU faculty, which includes the librarians. We are not legally allowed to strike, and we just declared work to rule on May 2nd because it has been 800 days thereabouts. since we started negotiating our new contract, and the university refuses to settle a fair contract. So please, you know, stand in solidarity, spread the word, make the University of New Hampshire Board of Trustees look bad. Solidarity.

Yeah. Okay. Wrap this up. Was there anything you wanted to plug any work that's coming out, or do you want people to leave you alone? We, Data Doubles actually just had a piece come out in library quarterly. we can't make it open access yet. That'll be another 11 months.

But ping us and we can maybe get you something on the down low. Good piece. It's an excellent piece. I highly recommend all the Data Doubles stuff that you guys do. It's a fantastic project. I'm so glad you all got to do that. I do have a forthcoming article with colleagues in the UK about the back-to-campus rhetoric

and talking specifically about camera use and a student experience in the UK during the pandemic. That should be out in the next couple of months. So I will be posting that in various places. You can no longer find me easily on Twitter, but I have moved over to Mastodon, and you can find me there and on my website. So thanks, Justin and Jay, for having us.

This was fun. Yeah, this is terrific. Good night. I'm going to