That is an important step forward. In library statistics, my own field of interest, most of the work on standards goes on behind closed doors, in ISO committees. This makes it hard

• for other specialists to participate in the technical discussions statistical standards need
• for librarians in general to learn from the scholarly debate

IFLA’s interest will make these processes more transparent.

The committee made a call for papers for the IFLA conference in Singapore. Five papers were selected, including my own proposal. I look forward to present it. Its full title is:

Improving practices. Statistical standards in global libraries

Standards are recommendations. Library standards are recommended ways of working in libraries.  Standards often differ from practices, or the ways libraries actually work. This is not a problem in itself. The purpose of standards is not to describe, but to improve practices. But standards have no value in themselves. Standards are only interesting if they change the way librarians actually do their work.

We may distinguish between active and passive standards. Nearly all standards are developed by committees that include practising librarians. But active standards interact with their environments. They are openly discussed, widely applied and frequently revised by the library community. The Dewey Decimal System is a good example. Passive standards are locked up in documents that few practitioners read or care about. They are paper tigers.

The paper presents a thesis. For many years library organizations have tried to change the statistical practices of librarians through committees, concepts and proposals from the top. This approach seldom works. The introduction of standards is a political rather than a technical process. Standardization incur costs and imply changes that affect peoples’ interests. Librarians are not willing to change their routines just because committees, without power or money to impose their views, say so. We have to shift from a top-down to a bottom-up approach. That means to start with current statistical practices. It means to improve existing data and procedures, step by step and year by year.

Change can be encouraged at the top, by library authorities and associations. But it can only be realized at the bottom, in the libraries that do the actual work of collecting, interpreting and applying statistical data. The German library index BIX is a good model.

The paper will present empirical evidence for this thesis. We look at the interaction between standards and practices in library statistics, with examples from ISO, OCLC and IFLA and from several countries that have tried to introduce statistical standards during the last decade.

I thought it was original, well-written and exciting. Law spent a year observing the activities in a large UK laboratory in the late eighties. His approached the organization like an anthropologist – and combined observations, personal experiences and theoretical questioning in an attractive way.

Picture: Daresbury laboratory

Last week I read it once again. The book is still engaging. But now I am more conscious of its weaknesses.

British common-sense

Twenty years ago deconstruction was a big thing. John Law had learnt from Foucault, Baudrillard and Derrida. He questions himself as well as his informants. He is much more accessible than the French nouveaux philosophers, though. British common-sense shines through.

I accept that all orders are social constructs. I am all for the sober analysis of dogmas, myths and ideologies. Deconstruction is a useful tool. But the moment we generalize the tool, we lose more than we gain. Systematic deconstruction is a dead-end. It can be done once or twice, to shake things up. Provoking the established order is always fun. But deconstruction is necessarily parasitic. It feeds on existing social orders. There must be something to take apart.

More importantly: deconstruction is a purely verbal game. It separates theory from practice. In the midst of furious discussions, life goes on. Experiments continue. Salaries are paid. People go home for dinner. Even Derrida gets hungry.

But Law writes well. So I have collected some of his sentences. Partial truths are also useful.

Quotations from Law

Page 1

• This is a book about organizing and ordering in the modern world.

Page 2

• The social is materially heterogeneous: talk, bodies, texts, machines, architectures
• When we write about ordering there is no question of standing apart and observing from a distance.
• We’re caught up in ordering too.
• For about a year I became a fly on the wall in a middle-sized formal organization, a very large scientific laboratory.
• I listened to participants. I asked them questions.
• I was present as the managers wrestled with an increasingly intractable set of financial and organizational problems.
• So I watched them trying to throw an ordering net over the activities within the organization.

Page 3

• As we have lived through a period of liberal economics triumphant, politics and political changes have reached deep into our lives.

Page 4

• As I describe the Laboratory I do not always want to make myself invisible.
• I want to tell tales about processes of ordering and organizing.
• I want to tell tales about the very important but very local social philosophies which we all embody and perform.
• And I want to tell personal tales about research.
• For research, too, is aprocess of ordering.
• And, like many processes of ordering, research is hard.

Page 5

• The social, all the social world, is complex and messy.

Page 7

• The vain and brutal search for pure order has been around for as long as human history.
• But this search has become sharpened, more systematic, and more methodical as time has passed.
• There are many ways of telling tis story
• Michel Foucault described the rise of disciplinary technique – strategies for ordering human bodies, human souls, and the social and spatial relations in which we are all inserted.
• Bruno Latour spoke of the development of intermediaries, part social, part technical, and the simultaneous denial of such “hybrids” in favour of a purist distinction between nature and culture.
• Zygmunt Bauman has identified the search for root order with the basic project of modernity itself.

Page 10

• Robert K. Merton held that true scientific knowledge did not need sociological explanation precisely because it was true – the product of proper scientific procedures.
• David Bloor argued against this and said, by contrast, that both true and false knowledge deserves sociological analysis.

Page 15

• There has always been tension in sociology between those who want to explore how things got to be the way they are, and those who prefer to talk about structures: those, in other words, who would like to cleave to an order and assume that the maintenance of that order is a second-rank, qualitatively different, technical problem.
• Karl Marx was on the ordering side of this divide, committed to a sociology of verbs, for he saw capital as a process, a movement, a set of time drawn-out relations, rather than something that could be locked up in a bank vault.
• But the insight that society is a process is even more deeply embedded in the interpretive sociologies.
• Symbolic interactionism treats bopth the pattern of social relations and the self as an interactive product or outcome – which reproduces itself (or not) in further performance and interaction.
• Nothing is necessarily stable, and consistency is a product.

Resources

• Law, John. Organizing modernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. – 219 pp.

To be continued …

• Elite – this is the most privileged group in the UK. They are set apart from the other six classes, especially because of their wealth, and they have the highest levels of all three capitals.
• Established middle class – this is the second wealthiest class group and it scores highly on all three capitals. It is the largest and highly gregarious class group and scores second highest for cultural capital.
• Technical middle class – this is a small, distinctive new class group that is prosperous but scores low for social and cultural capital. It is distinguished by its social isolation and cultural apathy.
• New affluent workers – this young class group is socially and culturally active, with middling levels of economic capital.
• Traditional working class – this class scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived. Its members have a reasonably high house values, which is explained by this group having the oldest average age (66 years).
• Emergent service workers – this new, young, urban group is relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital.
• Precariat (The precarious proletariat) – this is the poorest, most deprived class and scores low for social and cultural capital.

Bourdieu must be smiling from his cloud.

Source

• Survey charts emergence of new class system
• The making of the Great British Class Survey and its essential capacity to communicate through digital modes

Appendix

Elite

• Elite.
  • 6% of population.
  • Average household income: £89.000
  • Very high economic capital (especially savings), high social capital, very high  highbrow cultural capital.

Middle class

• Established middle class. .
  • 25% of population
  • Average household income: £47.000
  • High economic capital, high status of mean contacts, high highbrow and  emerging cultural capital
• Technical middle class.
  • 6% of population.
  • Average household income: £37.000
  • High economic capital, very high mean social contacts, but relatively few  contacts reported, moderate cultural  capital.

Working class

• New affluent workers.
  • 15% of population
  • Average household income: £29.000  
  • Moderately good economic capital,  moderately poor mean score of social  contacts, though high range, moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital.
• Traditional working  class.
  • 14% of population.
  • Average household income: £21.000
  •  Moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable house price, few social contacts, low highbrow and emerging cultural capital.

• Emergent service workers.
  • 19% of population
  • Average household income: £13.000
  • Moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable household income, moderate social contacts, high emerging (but low highbrow) cultural capital.

Precariat

• Precariat.
  • 15% of population.
  • Average household income: £8.000
  • Poor economic capital, and the lowest scores on every other criterion.

Typical occupations

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African libraries need statistics to plan their work and to promote their standing.

Picture: group work at the 2012 LATINA training course, at Makerere University Library.

This year The International Association of Academic and Technical Libraries meets in Cape Town. The convener, Elisha Chiware, is the Director of Cape Peninsula University of Technology Libraries. After the main IATUL conference (April 14-18) there will be a workshop on library statistics to

• encourage the collection of statistics for benchmarking,
• improve the collection of statistics in African libraries,
• develop a basis for regional cooperation and activity
• and to create an awareness of the various options available

Elisha was also the regional expert from Africa when IFLA developed guidelines for the Statistics for Advocacy training course, at a workshop in the Hague in late 2009.

Improving library statistics is mainly a matter of organizational development. The technical aspects of statistics play a part, but it is the institutional changes that represent the main challenges. The organizational processes are very well described in Joan Rapp’s paper on Quality assurance at the University of Cape Town Libraries.

In Cape Town, Helen Livingston (University Librarian, University of South Australia) will present the Australian experience. I will look at regional and global initiatives.
My three sessions cover three different aspects of the subject:

• the first, on statistical literacy, looks inward. It has to do with the skills and practices of librarians
• the second, on statistical advocacy, looks outward. It has to do with the defence, marketing and promotion of libraries
• the third, on statistical trends, looks forward. It has to do with the role of libraries in a knowledge based economy.

A tool for change
All three share a common basis, however. My three axioms are:

• Statistics is a tool for change.
• To work with statistics is to argue with numbers.
• Change must come from below

This implies

• If you don’t want change, stay away from statistics.
• If you don’t want discussions, stay away from statistics.
• If your staff wants stability, you have a problem.

Change can be encouraged at the top, but must be realized at the bottom. That’s the way the world works.

The picture, from León De Greiff-Biblioteca Marsella, was published on the library’s Facebook page. This library is one of 26 libraries exploring the use of ICT with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project is coordinated by the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Resources

• Map of the libraries
• 3,2 millones de dólares invertirá fundación de Bill Gates en bibliotecas colombianas. Semana, 26.10.2012

Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation. …

• Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul-searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all. …
• The drop in applications is widely viewed as directly linked to perceptions of the declining job market.

Many of the reasons that law jobs are disappearing are similar to those for disruptions in other knowledge-based professions, namely the growth of the Internet.

• Research is faster and easier, requiring fewer lawyers, and is being outsourced to less expensive locales, including West Virginia and overseas.
• In addition, legal forms are now available online and require training well below a lawyer’s to fill them out
• In recent years there has also been publicity about the debt load and declining job prospects for law graduates, especially of schools that do not generally provide employees to elite firms in major cities.

Even lawyers (of the middling kind) are prone to disintermediation. MOOCs will probably have a similar impact on lecturers.

The jobs that survive are jobs that cannot (for the time being) be routinized:

1. those at the very top – which demand exceptional skills
2. those that require complex personal and practical skills

Candidates to (1) are recruited by competition. Candidates to (2) are recruited through long processes of formal and on-the-job training.

How can students best judge educational quality?

Given

• graduate unemployment at an all-time high
• 8 percent fall in student applications
• unrestricted ABB+ recruitment plan: The plans are likely to benefit top universities, with around three in four universities likely to have an overall drop in numbers
• Research Excellence Framework: A growing obsession with funding scale

Students are

• viewing their university experience differently
• questioning their money’s worth

Source: Higher Education Network

Hattie is basically asking: which teaching methods work? Which conditions are conducive to learning?

In his book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning (2011) he compares eight hundred metastudies on teaching methods and their impact. These overviews summarize more than fifty thousand individual studies.

I have not read the book. Yet …. But I found a useful summary of the summary on Twitter.

This suggests that the most important inputs teachers can provide are:

1. Pervasive feedback (1.13)
2. High instructional quality  (1.00)
3. Direct instruction (0.82)

The terms are explained below. The numbers indicate the potential size of the effect. The value 1.0 corresponds to a major impact on grades: an improvement of two grade levels (e.g. from C to A).

VEDLEGG

Feedback

Hattie has made clear that ‘feedback’ includes telling students what they have done well (positive reinforcement), and what they need to do to improve (corrective work, targets etc), but it also includes clarifying goals.

• This means that giving students assessment criteria for example would be included in ‘feedback’.
• This may seem odd, but high quality feedback is always given against explicit criteria, and so these would be included in ‘feedback’ experiments.

As well as feedback on the task Hattie believes that students can get feedback on the processes they have used to complete the task, and on their ability to self-regulate their own learning.

• All these have the capacity to increase achievement.
• Feedback on the ‘self’ such as ‘well done you are good at this’ is not helpful.
• The feedback must be informative rather than evaluative. 

Instructional quality

• This is the student’s view of the teaching quality; the research was done mainly in HE institutions and colleges.

Direct instruction

• Active learning in class, student’s work is marked in class and they may do corrective work.
• There are reviews after one hour, five hours, and 20 hours study. 

The title does not refer to England and France, or to England and Germany, but to England and England. The rapid industrialization of Great Britain created an urban working class of poor and uprooted people which started to develop its own social and political identity – separate and unequal; them and us – but sharing the same territory.

Gladstone (left) and Disraeli (right) were the leading British politicians in the second half of the 19th century. Both spent several periods as prime minister, for the Conservative and the Liberal party, respectively.

Today thirteen million Jews and Arabs (as well as some smaller ethnic groups) are sharing less than thirty thousand sq. kms of land in the Middle East. The numbers below are from gWolframAlpha (though details may be disputed):

• Israel: 20,770 sq.kms.
• West Bank: 5,860
• Gaza: 360

The current populations are

• Israel: 7.3 million
  • 6.0 million Jews
  • 1.6 million Arabs
• West Bank: 4.4
• Gaza: 1.6

This means that Arabs constitute a demographic majority in the area between Lebanon and Egypt, west of Jordan. This is also the case if minorities like Druzes, Bedouins and Christian Arabs are excluded.

This majority will increase in the years to come. The projected populations in 2020 are:

• Israel: 8.2 million
• West Bank: 5.8
• Gaza: 2.2

The so-called “two-state solution” is still the official policy of most states concerned about the Middle East. But the lack of political progress, and the steady growth of settlements in the occupied West Bank, seems to close that window. We are left with two nations sharing one piece of land.

There is no Palestinian state, but sixty-five years of conflict has created a Palestinian nation.

Background

Wikipedia: The population of Israel, as defined by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, was estimated in 2012 to be 7,941,900 people, of whom 5,985,100 are Jewish. Arabs form the country’s second-largest ethnic group with 1,638,500 people (including Druze and Bedouins).^[3][2] The great majority of Israeli Arabs aresettled-Muslims, with smaller but significant numbers of semi-settled Negev Bedouins and Arab Christians. Other minorities include various ethnic and ethno-religious denominations such as Druze, Circassians, African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem,^[19] Samaritans, Maronites and others.

Disraeli (or D’Israeli) came from a familiy of Portuguese Jews.

Resources

• Pl 57/11: Conflict in Palestine. Personal reflections
• PL 56/11: Twitter in Palestine. The parliament of birds …