Conference report 2
So of the sessions I attended at ACRL, the two standouts were the pair of papers on "Curiosity and Motivation-to- Learn" and "Socratic Pedagogy at the Reference Desk" by Kate Borowske and Jessica George, respectively, and the session on Google Print and Google Scholar, with Adam Smith from Google and John Price Wilkin from the University of Michigan. (I missed the Quality Metadata/Mining for Digital Resources paired session, alas. Next time…)
The papers on pedagogy intrigued me because they confirmed hunches I had while teaching composition: e.g., that if students think they know either all or too little about their topics, they won’t want to explore; and that narrowing down a question too early can foreclose the possibilities that open up with a more open-ended approach. The latter point was from Jessica George, and she was talking about reference-desk interaction, but it was also what I tried for years to convey to my first-year writing students: if you start the paper knowing exactly what your thesis is, the end result won’t be as good, and it’ll be boring to write, to boot. As something of a connoisseur of weird coincidences, I liked her
emphasis on serendipitous discovery through unexpected search results. I also liked Kate Borowske’s point about showing students the "manageable gaps" in their knowledge but making sure these gaps are neither too trivial nor overwhelmingly huge.
At the Google session, what Adam Smith had to say about Google’s side of the mass digitization project was, for the most part, what I’d already heard. One could tell he was aware of librarians’ reactions, as he was careful to say, early on, that Google’s scanning technology won’t harm any of the books, that it’s not intended to supersede or replace other digital projects, that it’s going to be multilingual and international (hmm, I wonder who prompted that?), and that one of the goals is to encourage discovery of libraries’ print holdings. I would have liked to hear more specifics about how Google is working on the parts of Google Scholar that are still "challenges," especially how they’re going to handle disambiguating authors’ names and sorting out different citation formats.
John Price Wilkin reminded everyone that the libraries are keeping their own copies of all the files Google produces (it bore repeating: there was a question during the Q&A about the prospect of a Google "monopoly" on the digital texts). He gave us a narrative of Michigan’s side of the project, explaining the stipulations they made before agreeing to work with Google and the guidance they got from the university’s lawyers and the Preservation and Conservation departments. He also sketched out some of the possibilities: Michigan is looking into developing richer and more flexible ways to display and cite its own versions of the electronic texts, and possibly do some data mining eventually. He ended by mentioning the "paradox of the library as place," with more patrons visiting the physical building even as more and more collections become accessible online.
The Q&A that followed had its share of "Google is scary! We’re doomed!" questions, but a good number of non-panicky ones as well. One person asked about the implications for accessibility, and another asked about what Google plans to do with non-Roman alphabets and languages with diacritics (answer: "Well, we haven’t managed to solve all the world’s problems yet…": okay, but we still want to hear more!). Another audience member asked whether this project wouldn’t reinforce students’ tendency to go to Google first and not go further when they have to research something. To which John Price Wilkin replied that that’s all the more reason to make sure they get directed to relevant library holdings when they do go to Google.*
It was hard to tell whether anyone dead set against the Google digitization project had their mind changed (I’m guessing, realistically, probably not), but for me the most useful thing about the panel was hearing about how the project is actually working out from the library perspective. I hope we continue to hear these kinds of reports, and in as much detail as possible.
* You could tell who in the audience belonged to the "students doing research on the web is inevitable and we have to adapt" school of thought and who belonged to the "it’s a sign of information illiteracy that students go to Google" school of thought by where the applause came from after he said that.
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