ALCTS Sym­po­sium, ALA Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

Mar­garet Ashida — Going Global in the Knowl­edge Economy

the global econ­omy is a knowl­edge econ­omy
agri­cul­ture –> goods –> ser­vices (shift­ing eco­nom­ices over time, now it’s services)

(one per­son raised her hand when asked if there were any dig­i­tal natives in the room — yay!)

today’s stu­dents are very dif­fer­ent and are not the ones our edu­ca­tion sys­tem is designed to teach
today’s social net­works and tools are impor­tant for recruit­ing and engag­ing with prospec­tive employ­ees now
there’s no expec­ta­tion any­more that you’ll stay at the same com­pany for 30 years
have to give employ­ees the feel­ing that their work mat­ters
IBM let all employ­ees chat online with the CEO

Why STEM?
(there have been so many stud­ies about this stuff now that there are stud­ies say­ing, please — no more stud­ies
mas­tery of sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, math is vitally impor­tant for all of our kids
“the oppor­tu­nity equa­tion” — took a lot of these stud­ies to another level (Carnegie Cor­po­ra­tion)
– aligned the rec­om­men­da­tions by stake­holder groups
first STEM stu­dents will come out of the pro­gram in 2011 — 166,000 of them
momen­tum is build­ing around the coun­try around STEM
more than 150 schools now

teach­ing inno­va­tion is a major focus
more than 500 stake­hold­ers in the Rochester STEM pro­gram
“need to embed STEM learn­ing from twin­kle to wrinkle”

North Carolina’s design prin­ci­ples:
1. make STEM lit­er­acy & eco­nomic oppor­tu­nity attain­able for ALL NC stu­dents as soon as pos­si­ble
2. drive scal­able and sus­tain­able inno­va­tions for con­tin­u­ous improve­ment
3. focus on suc­cess at a higher level & empower com­mu­ni­ties along with their edu­ca­tors to inno­vate
4. empower & sup­port a cul­ture that nur­tures the cre­ation of inno­v­a­tive STEM pro­fes­sion­als
5. incu­bate sup­ports col­lab­o­ra­tion & net­work behav­ior for STEM excel­lence through knowl­edge capture

“think glob­ally and act locally”

Kevin Guthrie — When Books are Bytes, What Adds Value?

Ithaka is a not-for-profit org ded­i­cated to help­ing the aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity (JSTOR, PORTICO,Ithaka S+R)

uni­ver­si­ties become dra­mat­i­cally more acces­si­ble and will be drawn more into com­merce
com­merce is drawn into the world of the acad­emy; it’s never impacted the acad­emy in these ways before (espe­cially schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion)
sys­tems were ori­ented towards serv­ing schol­ars, but now that the knowl­edge is dig­i­tal and uses a com­mon net­work, the scholar uses Ama­zon to search for a book, not the library — that’s new
schol­ars used tools designed for them — the lines are blur­ring now
the net­work is now ubiq­ui­tous
the pace of inno­va­tion is on inter­net time
today’s value added is tomorrow’s com­mod­ity — any­body can hire a ven­dor to do some­thing
con­tent is mov­ing to the wire

com­pared Block­buster (phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture) and Net­Flix (dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work, cus­tomer ser­vice focus)
anal­ogy to libraries

libraries can’t depend on the cen­tral­ity of their build­ing as a source of value in the pro­vi­sion of infor­ma­tion
it’s still very valu­able, but by itself it’s not value for dis­sem­i­nat­ing knowl­edge
it has to have ser­vice lay­ers on top of it & libraries have to com­pete to serve their nat­ural constituencies

jour­nals have made the tran­si­tion to the elec­tronic envi­ron­ment
evo­lu­tion­ary inno­va­tion, not trans­for­ma­tive inno­va­tion
libraries are doing this, too

what about books, though?
the tran­si­tion from the objects to the bits
the value in mov­ing phys­i­cal objects is going down
jour­nals are very spe­cial­ized; books are not spe­cial­ized to the acad­emy like jour­nals
the tools and capa­bil­i­ties pro­vided are likely to be opti­mized for a non-academic audience

in this envi­ron­ment, the advan­tage goes to scale
what needs to be a spe­cial­ized resource? we keep think­ing some things need to be spe­cial­ized, but then we watch Google come in and do it “good enough”

there is a ten­sion to be man­aged between serv­ing your insti­tu­tion or a broader audi­ence
how do you jus­tify the local bills when offer­ing dig­i­tal col­lec­tions glob­ally? how do you match the con­stituen­cies who pay with those you serve?
pres­sures on costs make this a more chal­leng­ing ques­tion
can the uni­ver­sity really say our mis­sion is to serve the world?

great evo­lu­tion­ary change, but haven’t seen trans­for­ma­tive change yet (will come with ubiq­ui­tous net­work, when users use the net­work to do schol­ar­ship in cre­ative ways — not just a bet­ter way of doing what we always did)

a race to pro­vid­ing many-to-many iner­ac­tions, shar­ing, and research sup­port tools that assist the knowl­edge cre­ation process (in con­trast to approaches focused pri­mar­ily on knowl­edge dissemination)

as more con­tent & knowl­edge go dig­i­tal, pres­sure on libraries & pub­lish­ers to add value through the spe­cial­ized ser­vices they pro­vide to researchers & stu­dents (as opposed to assis­tance in the use of phys­i­cal objects)

ques­tion from audi­ence: when will books really become dig­i­tal?
answer: there are likely to be two phases. google book search said, hey this is pos­si­ble. before that, most peo­ple said all of the con­tent would never be dig­i­tized. we don’t have to wait until it’s all there, so the pres­sure will come when the read­ers are good enough. that mar­ket is grow­ing, so the com­mer­cial pres­sures will wash over us at that point. that’s maybe 3 years away. the upper demo­graphic is using the read­ers, and the younger ones are using the iphone. but it won’t be because every book is avail­able dig­i­tally and freely

ques­tion: what about the role we play in con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing resources? do peo­ple value the JSTOR clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme?
answer: there’s too much infor­ma­tion already, and there’s only going to be more. the que­si­ton kevin doesn’t know how to answer right now is tools — at some level, tools want to go to the cloud/network level; believes in the value of the face-to-face inter­ac­tion and under­stand­ing needs; con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing locally will have value, but you have to make invest­ments to under­stand the needs of that com­mu­nity. how do I under­stand what I can do for my local con­stituents because I’m here phys­i­cally in this area — that’s where nobody can com­pete with me.

See Also: Ithaka’s Case Stud­ies in Sustainability