Among the central findings

• Disciplinary differences do exist in researcher behaviours, both professional researchers and students.
• E-journals are increasingly very important to the process of research at all levels.
• The evidence provided by the results of the studies supports the centrality of Google and other search engines.
• Google is often used to locate and access e-journal content.
• At the same time, the entire Discovery-to-Delivery process needs to be supported by information systems, including increased access to resources.
• Journal backfiles are particularly problematic in terms of access

The realities of the online environment observed above led several studies to some common conclusions about changing user behaviours:

• Regardless of age or experience, academic discipline, or context of the information need, speed and convenience are important to users.
• Researchers particularly appreciate desktop access to scholarly content.
• Users also appreciate the convenience of electronic access over the physical library.
• Users are beginning to desire enhanced functionality in library systems.
• They also desire enhanced content to assist them in evaluating resources.
• They seem generally confident in their own ability to use information discovery tools.
• However, it seems that information literacy has not necessarily improved.
• High-quality metadata is thus becoming even more important for the discovery process.

In addition, some common findings regarding content and resources arise:

• More digital content of all kinds and formats is almost uniformly seen as better
• People still tend to think of libraries as collections of books
• Despite this, researchers also value human resources in their information-seeking

In some cases, the studies reviewed included findings which seem to contradict one another, and for which evidence may be mixed:

• There is evidence for both broad and narrow range of tools used for scholarly research
• There is evidence both in favour and against formal training in electronic searching
• There are mixed conclusions on the question of whether recommendations, provided by recommender systems, and social media are having an impact on information seeking

In a few cases, the above findings from the studies under review offered evidence that runs counter to popular perceptions of the current information scene.

• Many popular media claims about the ‘Google generation’ may not be supported by all the evidence
• In choosing among search engines, some evidence indicates that speed may not be the most important evaluative factor
• The studies that addressed library OPACs provide little support for the advanced search options which are still popular in these systems

Resources

• The digital information seeker: Findings from selected OCLC, RIN and JISC user behaviour projects

In its Annual Report for 2010, Oslo University Library presented a diagram (above or right) that showed

• the rapid increase in subscription rates for scientific journals, on an annual basis
• the (only) partial compensation for this in their budgets

Most graphics can be improved. We tend to spend time revising our written texts until they sound right. We draft and redraft, scrub and polish. We should apply the same amount of attention to our graphics.

Since rates are compared year by year, we do not get a grasp of the main problem, which is the cumulative effect of undercompensation. Below I have revised the graph to bring out the gap between price increases and compensation  more clearly.

This should not be seen as negative criticism. Oslo University Library is a highly professional institution. I am exploring their data because I was praising their work with statistics and infographics. But the state of the art – in all fields of social and management statistics – is such that nearly every graph or table you meet can be substantially improved.

Resources

• Ray Lyons: Blog. Leading US library statistician
• Ray Lyons: Statistical reports

Samstat

• ST 7/12: Bibliotekanalyse ved UBO. In Norwegian.

Picture: students from LATINA Summer 2010.

This summer we are offering two courses:

• a two week course in Kampala, Uganda, in cooperation with the Makerere University Library (June 18-29)
• a three week course in Oslo, as part of the HiOA International Summer School (July 2-20)

Recruitment for the Oslo course has already started – see LATINA Summer 2012 for details. Application details for the Kampala course will be announced in February – at LATINA in Africa 2012 and other web sites.

Active learning

The LATINA courses are conducted by the LATINA Lab, which is part of the Learning Centre and Library at Oslo and Akershus University College (HiOA). The Lab develops, demonstrates and provides intensive training in teaching and learning metods that are based on the current state of – and emerging trends in – user-oriented ICT. We adapt our training to the participants, institutions and countries we work with.

The LATINA approach is not lecture based, but centered on student, group and production activities. We emphasize the importance of team-work between teachers as will as between students or participants. We prefer to work with people and institutions that are committed to strategic development work over several years.

Cloud, touch, multi-media

We generally use software that is free and widely used. Our work is increasingly web-based, cloud-based and multi-media oriented. We access, produce, edit and curate resources through a variety of devices, such as portable computers, touch tablets and mobile phones. The materials we develop before and during our courses are normally published on the open web with a CC license (allows free re-use for non-commercial purposes).

The Kampala course will be directed by Tord Høivik, associate professor in library and information science at HiOA. The Oslo course will be directed by Helge Høivik, professor in e-learning at HiOA.

About HiOA

Oslo and Akershus University College is the third largest higher education institution in Norway (16.000 students, 1.600 staff). It has several doctoral and many master programmes.

By normal European standards HiOA is a full-fledged university (aimed at professions like teaching, nursing, engineering, social work, librarianship, journalism, ….). By formal Norwegian standards, however, it is a “university college”. It is likely to achieve formal university status in three to five years.

Statistics for Advocacy

Statistics for Advocacy (SFA) is a brief training course (1 or 2 days) in library statistics. The course was developed by the IFLA Statistics and Evaluation Section as part of IFLA’s BSLA Program: Building Strong Library Associations. The development work was coordinated by Tord Høivik. In Uganda, we hope to organize a one day SFA course, based on the LATINA approach to learning, during the week June 11-15. Application details will be announced before Easter – at the blog Global Statistics for Advocacy.

Tord Høivik will also give a practical workshop on library statistics at the SCECSAL conference in Nairobi, Jun 4-8, 2012.

Resources

• International Summer School. Oslo and Akershus University College (HiOA)
• Building Strong Library Associations. IFLA.

SCECSAL

• Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa Library and Information Associations

IFLA regional offices

• Africa in Pretoria, South Africa
• Asia and Oceania in Singapore
• Latin America and the Caribbean in Mexico City, Mexico

Social magazines
(from Helge Høivik ++)

A variety of program are available to convert RSS streams into digital magazine or newspaper formats:

• feedly
• Google Currents (W)
• scoop.it
• paper.li
• Pulse (W)

Flipboard (W) is the best one (HH), but only works with iOs/Apple.

We will, of course, continue to visit monuments like the pyramids and Parthenon on the spot. Digital images cannot replace the experience of being there. But digital artifacts can enrich the physical visit. Good reproductions can also substitute for “the thing itself”.  A virtual Forum Romanum and a digital Beowulf allow much closer interaction with the historical objects than is possible in real life.

Web access is fast, cheap and convenient. Families cannot spend years and years traversing Europe in search of culture. For most of us, physical visits must be the exception. Virtual access will be the rule.

The actual movement of culture from physical to virtual varies between fields and countries. Music, movies, games and television series morphed rapidly. So did academic journals – as well as encyclopedias and other reference books. The introduction of tablet computers will have a similar impact on books in general.

Proud horses and sailing ships have not disappeared. But they now represent hobbies and leisure rather than trade and war. Nor will books on paper die. But they will no longer be the dominant actors in the world of texts and documentation. The centre moves like the magnetic pole – from words on paper to digital texts and multimedia.

Europeana

Europeana is a cross-national European response to this large-scale shift in cultural production. Europeana presents itself as the biggest and most important web-based entry point to Europe’s culture:

Europeana enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. It promotes discovery and networking opportunities in a multilingual space where users can engage, share in and be inspired by the rich diversity of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.

The project offers access, but not use. The project is basically defined and driven from the supply side. A network of important cultural institutions will make their digital resources available through a single portal. Visitors may engage, share and be inspired – if they decide to come.

Ideas and inspiration can be found within the more than 14.6 million items on Europeana. These objects include:

• Images – paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
• Texts – books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
• Sounds – music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
• Videos – films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Fifteen million items is an impressive number. But the statistics focus on supply rather than demand. You have to look closely at the published documents to find information about the actual use of Europeana. Most readers will be awed by the scale of production and forget to consider the demand side.

Politicians and journalists are suitably impressed. Do they use Europeana often themselves? Most unlikely. They recognize the famous works that are presented as shining examples of Europeana content, and are overwhelmed by the vast number of items. The mind boggles. We cannot even imagine a million books, a million paintings, a million hours music, film and video.

But the European public at large cannot cope with millions and millions of cultural items. The average Norwegian reads 20-25 books a year – less than two thousand books in a liftetime. at most fifteen hundred books in a lifetime. An ordinary reader cannot grasp or relate to a library of million books. The great majority of all books – and works of art – are only of interest to scholars and specialists in particular fields.

Most readers stick to recent books that are written for today’s general audience. Elite readers will sample the classics as well, from the Analects of Confucius and the Egyptian Book of the Dead – through Homer, Plato, Cicero and St. Augustin – to the great writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Darwin and Dostojevskij, Nietszche and Tennyson, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. But only a tiny minority will bother with  such second level classics as Ssu Ma Chien and the Sanskrit grammarians, the tourist guide to Greece by Pausanias, the Historia Naturalis of Plinius the Elder, the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and the medieval Roman de la Rose – and so on and so forth.

Most books, however, are neither first nor second level classics. They were written, well or badly, for purposes that no longer exist. For ordinary modern people they are basically unreadable.

Today’s users

Jon Purday, Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana Foundation, gave an interview  to the Greek magazine Synergasia, not too long ago (No.3, December 2010). He said:

- At present, our key demographic seems to be people over 40 – the same age group that makes most use of museums and libraries.. A lot of them are professionals, researchers, curators and similar.

It is important to reach young learners, students and school children. For that purpose, we are starting to work with EU School Net to put teaching applications together.

We have been developing a Facebook group for people interested in Europeana. We link exhibitions, e.g. the Exhibition of Art Nouveau, to the Facebook art nouveau community,. We are piloting the use of APIs, as a way to integrate Europeana content into other sites. An example of an API is Google Maps, that can be embedded in a wide range of different websites.

The Europeana API will enable our content to be searched from and integrated into a college’s website, for example. We offer the APIs for free and we will also offer web services such as widgets. Thus, we will be able to put our material into the workflow of a younger demographic population.

The typical users of Europeana were actually middle-aged scholars and academics. The project wants to reach out to young people, but they had not actually achieved this by the time of the interview.

Pie in the sky

The aim is laudable. But good will is no substitute for mastery. I have followed Europeana with great interest from its beginning. the start. The planning documents, the web site and the actual use of social media do not reveal a forceful  2.0 strategy. Articles and interviews by the people involved do not – so far – demonstrate a realistic understanding of the intense competition for customers that characterizes the web environment.

Many other institutions have tried to find a web strategy without changing their organizational culture. They tend to fail. Deep transformation is needed.

Europeana wants “to put our material into the workflow of a younger demographic population”. That means

• to catch the attention of young people,
• to deliver services that interest them (rather than their parents and teachers)
• in competition with a swarm of lean and hungry innovators

I believe Europeana will succeed in the youth segment when I see it. Not a minute before. It’s a jungle out there.

The notes for my final talk at LATINA Winter in Haikou were brief:

A culture is the way we do things:

• a way of acting
• a way of thinking
• a way of teaching
• a way of learning

A culture is a way of life.

• To learn a language is to learn a way of life. Wittgenstein.

Three guidelines on the web

• Be polite
• Be personal
• Be persistent

Three new guidelines

• Share what you have.
• Use what you get.
• Network like crazy.

Note

I did not have time to produce a set of twenty slides for a seven minute Pecha Kucha presentation. But the first twenty-three slides from Judy O’Connell’s great set on SlideShare worked just fine.

Resources

• New culture of learning. SlideShare presentation by Judy O’Connell. December 15, 2011.

Plinius

• PL 74/11: Creativity required. The culture of learning in China.

The class had room for thirty students. They had been selected from a substantially larger number of applicants – and were young, bright and hard-working. The Chinese cult/ure of learning is very, very strong.

The tradition goes very far back. High Chinese officials (“mandarins”) were selected on the basis of their learning.

For around 1300 years, from 605 to 1905, mandarins were selected by merit through the extremely rigorous imperial examination [Wp]

Innovation and control

Competition for access to higher education is still intense – and universities are also ranked from high to low. China’s problem is the emphasis on standardized reproduction of “established knowledge” (rote learning) rather than individual production and creativity. As China develops, its economy must turn from imitation to innovation.

The government is aware of the fact that central control stifles creativity. It has asked schools, teachers and students to be more  creative and independent. But it is obvious that creativity challenges central control.  The teacher’s authority can no longer unquestioned. Teachers must step back from direct control and encourage students to find their own paths and voices.

In LATINA, we try to do that. We are still teaching, of course, but from another perspective. We do not order and demand, but guide and support. We may suggest, advise and warn, but we do not decide. The students and participants make their own choices.

The freedom of choice, I must add, is not infinite. It exists within a clear practical and conceptual framework established by LATINA. If people want to work in total freedom, they should not sign up for our courses. This framework is what LATINA

A student response

A couple of days ago I got a nice letter from one of our students. I’d like to share the central paragraphs:

Thank you for bringing new teaching concept and pattern. Chinese education has had a thorough reform in several decades, but is still traditional. Both the learners and the teachers need to learn advanced technology content of modern education.

Thank you for bringing us a totally different educational experience. I have never taken a part in such interesting course. Latina teachers conduct this course in very attractive and effective way. In the beginning, I hardly understood what the teacher said. I found this challenging. But, I like to challenge myself. I’m not afraid to try, understand and accept new things.

Later on I discovered that I had a feel of it, which made me feel so excited! Now I quite like this teaching mode and students learning method. It really works for me.

In addition, in my heart I described every professor as a very charismatic teacher. I’m also excellent, but I still have a long way to reach the height of them. I think what these professors have done and this course most meaningful and bring about many changes in our life, which maybe you won’t realize. From this course, I’ve learned to open my eyes and my mind to more new ideas.

It’s Christmas Day. Merry Christmas, all teachers, your friends and families! Best wishes and Happy New Year! In China, we don’t celebrate Christmas Day. But we students convey our best wishes to each other. I wonder how people in the west celebrate Christmas Day. Really want to experience that. In the end, is the beginning. Hope to see you again.

In December, the first calls for papers for next year’s IFLA (in Helsinki this time) are published. This time, people started to complain about the high conference fees that IFLA charges. The original issue had to do with members of the IFLA sections – who are (s)elected for four years and have to find money for five consecutive conferences.

The debate has moved from the IFLA mailing list to a website change.org, which organizes petitions of all kinds. I just added my signature to the petition, with the following comment:

I am glad this debate has started – supported by  the power of digital technology

IFLA is a progressive and democratic organization with a rather traditional structure. This includes the high cost of the annual conferences and  the “sequence of hurried lectures” format.

Much has been done to adapt the organization in recent years – but the conference itself has only seen small changes. Process oriented small group sessions and spontaneous “unconferences” remain experiments. The high cost means that participants tend to come from senior positions in big libraries and hence to be above fifty or sixty (like myself …).

To flourish, IFLA needs young and innovative participants from not-so-rich institutions and countries.

Background

Change.org is an online advocacy platform that empowers anyone, anywhere to start, join, and win campaigns for social change. Millions of people sign petitions on Change.org each month on thousands of issues, winning campaigns every day to advance change locally and globally.

LATINA training in Ramallah

Both publics, journalists and researchers tend to overemphasize the value of single studies. Publics want simple answers, journalists want spectacular news and researchers want results that will further their careers.

Science does not work that way. Knowledge accumulates slowly, through trial and error, missteps and detours. Established truths are never fully established.  Answers are valid until further notice. I quote the crucial parts:

How can two studies of the same topic reach opposite conclusions?

Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis has famously estimated that 90 per cent of published medical research is wrong, thanks to factors such as sloppy statistics, inadequate study size and duration, and bias – both conscious and unconscious.

Three common research failings.

Cherry-picking data

Last year, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a review article showing that cigarette smoking can help marathoners run faster. 

• Numerous studies show that smoking boosts lung volume and hemoglobin, and stimulates weight loss – all factors known to improve running performance.
• University of Calgary medical resident Ken Myers wrote the article as a spoof, to show how easy it is to support virtually any hypothesis by carefully selecting your data.
  
• For the record, the increased lung volume and hemoglobin in smokers are signs of respiratory problems – unlike in runners, where they signal adaptation to training.

Correlation versus causation

In 2009, a study made headlines with the finding, based on a 10-year study of 500K people, that eating more meat increases your risk of death.

• The results were “adjusted” to take into account confounding factors such as age, education, weight, exercise habits and so on.
• In the meat study, a closer look at the data reveals that eating more red meat also seemingly raises your risk of accidental death from car crashes and guns
  
• – a clear sign that the statistical adjustment failed to find all the underlying risk factors that affect meat-eaters.

Fishing expeditions

A 2008 Harvard study of 38K women looked for links between caffeine and breast cancer.

• They found three different patterns that were “statistically significant,” meaning there was less than a 1-in-20 chance that the apparent pattern was just a random fluke.
• The researchers had analyzed 50 different possible caffeine-cancer links.
  
• Since you expect that one out of every 20 tests will randomly produce a false positive, the researchers should have expected about 2.5 of these false alarms – which is pretty much what they saw.
  
• As a result, the results are most likely due to chance.

Comment

Calling the article How to spot bogus research is also a case of journalitis, however. What the columnist describes is not bogus, but very ordinary research. The problem does not (usually) lie in the single project, but at the collective level.

Researchers are exposed to the same tensions and interests as everybody else. For practical reasons, we get very many studies of groups that are easily available to researchers – such as students, patients, clients and sociable people from the middle classes. We study data that have been collected for administrative purposes (cheap) rather than data we have to gather ourselves (expensive). We tend to avoid studies that challenge the organizations or groups that fund research (risky). And so on.

Enlightened scientists and governments are aware of this. In medicine and other health sciences, meta-analyses (Cochrane) get lots of support. Other subject areas are more politicized.

One answer, as I see it, lies in more autonomy at the collective level. That means

• more support for arenas of debate that are protected from the forces that try to control professional knowledge
• more discussion about, and more studies of, these forces

I missed the opening, since I had to get my visum for China (where we’ll do a LATINA course in mid-December). I arrived in the middle of Vesa Taatila’s keynote on Passion, inspiration, networks and a little bit of Learning by Development.

Taatila works as a special advisor at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Finland, where learning basically takes through real projects that students do off campus.  He did not use the standard (unreflected) expression R&D (research and development), but referred to RDI: Research, Development and Innovation. The growing importance of innovation – or real changes in the world of production – has been clear in public policy making for the last two or three years, I think.

The old model: Research followed by Development followed by Production, sets up barriers between types of activities – and encourages researchers to remain within the sphere of research. The Norwegian government now asks both schools and HE institutions to teach entrepreneurship to students, and asks researchers in HE to come forward with new business proposals. But the prestige and safety of academic research remains strong.

Students participate

Taatila said:

• All our learning  takes place in practical projects.
• Learning to create innovations; working on shared goals; resource leverage; continuous networking.
• Students have to “sell” their skills
• We can respond quickly – and manage a great number of students- creating projects on the go.
• Lecturers are for those who cannot read ….

Sandwhich studies

In Norway, a private college of computer studies has introduced a new bachelor programme in cooperation with Accenture and their daughter company Avanade

• B. with placement takes four years, including 18 months of practical experience (two periods)
• Students are paid appr. 200.000 NOK pr. year during their employment periods – and maintain student rights at NITH

A senior adviser in the employers’association for trade and services asked for much closer collaboration between education and production. In the knowledge economy, the Teaching – Research – Innovation triangle is basic. We want to be included in all three sectors – not just innovation. Commercial and public actors demand

• Parity of esteem between university-based and work-based learning

In the long run, specialized HE institutions may even disappear, with

• Learning in a workplace as mainstream for students

Saras Sarasvaty

The second keynote (+ a workshop) was given by a brilliant and lively business professor – and former entrepreneur -from the Darden school of business, University of Virginia. She presented the principles of entrepreneurship – based on detailed empirical studies of real-world entrepreneurs:

1. Bird-in-hand. Start with Who-you-are; What-you-know & Whom-you-know. No pre-set goals.
2. Pilot-in-the-plane principle: The future comes from what people do. “History does not run on auto-pilot”
3. Affordable loss principle (not highest expected return).
4. Crazy Quilt principle: Build a network of self-selected stakeholders (not competitive analysis). You co-create the future through stakeholder commitments.
5. Lemonade principle: Embrace and leverage your surprises. When life throws lemonade at you, make lemonade …

Her thesis on entrepreneurial expertise was supervised by Herbert Simon. Before that, she was on the foundings team in five entreprise ventures.

• Effectuation is widely acclaimed as a rigorous framework for understanding the creation and growth of new organizations and markets.
• There exists an entrepreneurial method. We are at the the stage of Bacon (F) when he wrote Novum Organum.
• An expert is someone who has at least fifteen years of founding enterprises and CEOs Multiple ventures incl. successes and failures
• We use multiple methods of investigation to counter criticism of our empirical study of entrepreneurs

Major initial study: collected entrepreneurs and had them think aloud while they solved a 17 pp. problem set of 10 typical startup decisions. Entrepreneurs all hate market reseach. They did not rely on predictive information.

You will find lots of open-access background material at effectuation.org.

More than 4K instructors now have password access to teaching materials (free).

Pierre Omidyar on eBay

Its system is self-sustaining. Was this planned? No – it started as a hobby, and had to be simple. Build a platform and prepare for the unexpected. eBay is and was a commun

For foodies

Saras: Do you cook causally or effectually. What would cooking causally mean? Select recipe, get ingredients, follow instructions …

How do you compare entrepreneurship with cooking? Causal = with recipes + systematic purchases . Effectual with what you happen to have in your fridge and pantry.

• Causal restaurant: Knut Boge (professor at my college): start with market research; location-location-location, analyse competitors
• Effectual restaurant: Start with WWW: Who-What-Whom. Try it out on friends and neighbours …

The effectual approach (working with what you have) is generally more cost-effective.

Q&A

• Saras asked: we predict the future in order to control it. What is the opposite of that?
• Plinius: If we make the future, we don’t have to predict it.
• Saras: How do you do that?
• Plinius: We just do the best we can with what we have
• Saras: Did you read my web site beforehand?
• Plinius: I peeked – but knew this a long time ago [I could have referred to Giambattista Vico ...]
• Saras: I’ll give you my after-the-lecture gift

She actually did give me the book … which describes some of the most beatiful roads in Norway

Resources

• Check out the Freitag (brothers) video at Saras’ web site: effectuation.org
• I twittered quite a bit from the event on Friday