The digital attack that brought Estonia to a standstill 10 years ago was the first shot in a cyberwar that has been raging between Moscow and the west ever since
It began at exactly 10pm on 26 April, 2007, when a Russian-speaking mob began rioting in the streets of Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others. That incident resonates powerfully in some of the recent conflicts in the US. In 2007, the Estonian government had announced that a bronze statue of a heroic second world war Soviet soldier was to be removed from a central city square. For ethnic Estonians, the statue had less to do with the war than with the Soviet occupation that followed it, which lasted until independence in 1991. For the country’s Russian-speaking minority – 25% of Estonia’s 1.3 million people – the removal of the memorial was another sign of ethnic discrimination.
That evening, Jaan Priisalu – a former risk manager for Estonia’s largest bank, Hansabank, who was working closely with the government on its cybersecurity infrastructure – was at home in Tallinn with his girlfriend when his phone rang. On the line was Hillar Aarelaid, the chief of Estonia’s cybercrime police.
“It’s going down,” Aarelaid declared. Alongside the street fighting, reports of digital attacks were beginning to filter in. The websites of the parliament, major universities, and national newspapers were crashing. Priisalu and Aarelaid had suspected something like this could happen one day. A digital attack on Estoniahad begun.
“The Russian theory of war allows you to defeat the enemy without ever having to touch him,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. “Estonia was an early experiment in that theory.”
Since then, Russia has only developed, and codified, these strategies. The techniques pioneered in Estonia are known as the “Gerasimov doctrine,” named after Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military. In 2013, Gerasimov published an article in the Russian journal Military-Industrial Courier, articulating the strategy of what is now called “hybrid” or “nonlinear” warfare. “The lines between war and peace are blurred,” he wrote. New forms of antagonism, as seen in 2010’s Arab spring and the “colour revolutions” of the early 2000s, could transform a “perfectly thriving state, in a matter of months, and even days, into an arena of fierce armed conflict”.
Russia has deployed these strategies around the globe. Its 2008 war with Georgia, another former Soviet republic, relied on a mix of both conventional and cyber-attacks, as did the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Both began with civil unrest sparked via digital and social media – followed by tanks. Finland and Sweden have experienced near-constant Russian information operations. Russian hacks and social media operations have also occurred during recent elections in Holland, Germany, and France. Most recently, Spain’s leading daily, El País, reported on Russian meddling in the Catalonian independence referendum. Russian-supported hackers had allegedly worked with separatist groups, presumably with a mind to further undermining the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote.
The Kremlin has used the same strategies against its own people. Domestically, history books, school lessons, and media are manipulated, while laws are passed blocking foreign access to the Russian population’s online data from foreign companies – an essential resource in today’s global information-sharing culture. According to British military researcher Keir Giles, author of Nato’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, the Russian government, or actors that it supports, has even captured the social media accounts of celebrities in order to spread provocative messages under their names but without their knowledge. The goal, both at home and abroad, is to sever outside lines of communication so that people get their information only through controlled channels.
According to its detractors, RT is Vladimir Putin’s global disinformation service, countering one version of the truth with another in a bid to undermine the whole notion of empirical truth. And yet influential people from all walks of public life appear on it, or take its money. You can’t criticise RT’s standards, they say, if you don’t watch it. So I watched it. For a week.
My note; so this is why Oliver Stone in his “documentary” went gentle on Putin, so his son can have a job. #Nepotism #FakeNews
RT’s stated mission is to offer an “alternative perspective on major global events”, but the world according to RT is often downright surreal.
Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, about Putin’s Russia, and now a senior visiting fellow in global affairs at the London School of Economics, was in Moscow working in television when Russia Today first started hiring graduates from Britain and the US. “The people were really bright, they were being paid well,” he says. But they soon found they were being ordered to change their copy, or instructed how to cover certain stories to reflect well on the Kremlin. “Everyone had their own moment when they first twigged that this wasn’t like the BBC,” he says. “That, actually, this is being dictated from above.” The coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 was a lightbulb moment for many, he says. They quit.
Applications for the 2018 Institute will be accepted between December 1, 2017 and January 27, 2018. Scholars accepted to the program will be notified in early March 2018.
Title:
Learning to Harness Big Data in an Academic Library
Abstract (200)
Research on Big Data per se, as well as on the importance and organization of the process of Big Data collection and analysis, is well underway. The complexity of the process comprising “Big Data,” however, deprives organizations of ubiquitous “blue print.” The planning, structuring, administration and execution of the process of adopting Big Data in an organization, being that a corporate one or an educational one, remains an elusive one. No less elusive is the adoption of the Big Data practices among libraries themselves. Seeking the commonalities and differences in the adoption of Big Data practices among libraries may be a suitable start to help libraries transition to the adoption of Big Data and restructuring organizational and daily activities based on Big Data decisions. Introduction to the problem. Limitations
The redefinition of humanities scholarship has received major attention in higher education. The advent of digital humanities challenges aspects of academic librarianship. Data literacy is a critical need for digital humanities in academia. The March 2016 Library Juice Academy Webinar led by John Russel exemplifies the efforts to help librarians become versed in obtaining programming skills, and respectively, handling data. Those are first steps on a rather long path of building a robust infrastructure to collect, analyze, and interpret data intelligently, so it can be utilized to restructure daily and strategic activities. Since the phenomenon of Big Data is young, there is a lack of blueprints on the organization of such infrastructure. A collection and sharing of best practices is an efficient approach to establishing a feasible plan for setting a library infrastructure for collection, analysis, and implementation of Big Data.
Limitations. This research can only organize the results from the responses of librarians and research into how libraries present themselves to the world in this arena. It may be able to make some rudimentary recommendations. However, based on each library’s specific goals and tasks, further research and work will be needed.
Big Data is becoming an omnipresent term. It is widespread among different disciplines in academia (De Mauro, Greco, & Grimaldi, 2016). This leads to “inconsistency in meanings and necessity for formal definitions” (De Mauro et al, 2016, p. 122). Similarly, to De Mauro et al (2016), Hashem, Yaqoob, Anuar, Mokhtar, Gani and Ullah Khan (2015) seek standardization of definitions. The main connected “themes” of this phenomenon must be identified and the connections to Library Science must be sought. A prerequisite for a comprehensive definition is the identification of Big Data methods. Bughin, Chui, Manyika (2011), Chen et al. (2012) and De Mauro et al (2015) single out the methods to complete the process of building a comprehensive definition.
In conjunction with identifying the methods, volume, velocity, and variety, as defined by Laney (2001), are the three properties of Big Data accepted across the literature. Daniel (2015) defines three stages in big data: collection, analysis, and visualization. According to Daniel, (2015), Big Data in higher education “connotes the interpretation of a wide range of administrative and operational data” (p. 910) and according to Hilbert (2013), as cited in Daniel (2015), Big Data “delivers a cost-effective prospect to improve decision making” (p. 911).
The importance of understanding the process of Big Data analytics is well understood in academic libraries. An example of such “administrative and operational” use for cost-effective improvement of decision making are the Finch & Flenner (2016) and Eaton (2017) case studies of the use of data visualization to assess an academic library collection and restructure the acquisition process. Sugimoto, Ding & Thelwall (2012) call for the discussion of Big Data for libraries. According to the 2017 NMC Horizon Report “Big Data has become a major focus of academic and research libraries due to the rapid evolution of data mining technologies and the proliferation of data sources like mobile devices and social media” (Adams, Becker, et al., 2017, p. 38).
Power (2014) elaborates on the complexity of Big Data in regard to decision-making and offers ideas for organizations on building a system to deal with Big Data. As explained by Boyd and Crawford (2012) and cited in De Mauro et al (2016), there is a danger of a new digital divide among organizations with different access and ability to process data. Moreover, Big Data impacts current organizational entities in their ability to reconsider their structure and organization. The complexity of institutions’ performance under the impact of Big Data is further complicated by the change of human behavior, because, arguably, Big Data affects human behavior itself (Schroeder, 2014).
De Mauro et al (2015) touch on the impact of Dig Data on libraries. The reorganization of academic libraries considering Big Data and the handling of Big Data by libraries is in a close conjunction with the reorganization of the entire campus and the handling of Big Data by the educational institution. In additional to the disruption posed by the Big Data phenomenon, higher education is facing global changes of economic, technological, social, and educational character. Daniel (2015) uses a chart to illustrate the complexity of these global trends. Parallel to the Big Data developments in America and Asia, the European Union is offering access to an EU open data portal (https://data.europa.eu/euodp/home ). Moreover, the Association of European Research Libraries expects under the H2020 program to increase “the digitization of cultural heritage, digital preservation, research data sharing, open access policies and the interoperability of research infrastructures” (Reilly, 2013).
The challenges posed by Big Data to human and social behavior (Schroeder, 2014) are no less significant to the impact of Big Data on learning. Cohen, Dolan, Dunlap, Hellerstein, & Welton (2009) propose a road map for “more conservative organizations” (p. 1492) to overcome their reservations and/or inability to handle Big Data and adopt a practical approach to the complexity of Big Data. Two Chinese researchers assert deep learning as the “set of machine learning techniques that learn multiple levels of representation in deep architectures (Chen & Lin, 2014, p. 515). Deep learning requires “new ways of thinking and transformative solutions (Chen & Lin, 2014, p. 523). Another pair of researchers from China present a broad overview of the various societal, business and administrative applications of Big Data, including a detailed account and definitions of the processes and tools accompanying Big Data analytics. The American counterparts of these Chinese researchers are of the same opinion when it comes to “think about the core principles and concepts that underline the techniques, and also the systematic thinking” (Provost and Fawcett, 2013, p. 58). De Mauro, Greco, and Grimaldi (2016), similarly to Provost and Fawcett (2013) draw attention to the urgent necessity to train new types of specialists to work with such data. As early as 2012, Davenport and Patil (2012), as cited in Mauro et al (2016), envisioned hybrid specialists able to manage both technological knowledge and academic research. Similarly, Provost and Fawcett (2013) mention the efforts of “academic institutions scrambling to put together programs to train data scientists” (p. 51). Further, Asomoah, Sharda, Zadeh & Kalgotra (2017) share a specific plan on the design and delivery of a big data analytics course. At the same time, librarians working with data acknowledge the shortcomings in the profession, since librarians “are practitioners first and generally do not view usability as a primary job responsibility, usually lack the depth of research skills needed to carry out a fully valid” data-based research (Emanuel, 2013, p. 207).
Borgman (2015) devotes an entire book to data and scholarly research and goes beyond the already well-established facts regarding the importance of Big Data, the implications of Big Data and the technical, societal, and educational impact and complications posed by Big Data. Borgman elucidates the importance of knowledge infrastructure and the necessity to understand the importance and complexity of building such infrastructure, in order to be able to take advantage of Big Data. In a similar fashion, a team of Chinese scholars draws attention to the complexity of data mining and Big Data and the necessity to approach the issue in an organized fashion (Wu, Xhu, Wu, Ding, 2014).
Bruns (2013) shifts the conversation from the “macro” architecture of Big Data, as focused by Borgman (2015) and Wu et al (2014) and ponders over the influx and unprecedented opportunities for humanities in academia with the advent of Big Data. Does the seemingly ubiquitous omnipresence of Big Data mean for humanities a “railroading” into “scientificity”? How will research and publishing change with the advent of Big Data across academic disciplines?
Reyes (2015) shares her “skinny” approach to Big Data in education. She presents a comprehensive structure for educational institutions to shift “traditional” analytics to “learner-centered” analytics (p. 75) and identifies the participants in the Big Data process in the organization. The model is applicable for library use.
Being a new and unchartered territory, Big Data and Big Data analytics can pose ethical issues. Willis (2013) focusses on Big Data application in education, namely the ethical questions for higher education administrators and the expectations of Big Data analytics to predict students’ success. Daries, Reich, Waldo, Young, and Whittinghill (2014) discuss rather similar issues regarding the balance between data and student privacy regulations. The privacy issues accompanying data are also discussed by Tene and Polonetsky, (2013).
Privacy issues are habitually connected to security and surveillance issues. Andrejevic and Gates (2014) point out in a decision making “generated by data mining, the focus is not on particular individuals but on aggregate outcomes” (p. 195). Van Dijck (2014) goes into further details regarding the perils posed by metadata and data to the society, in particular to the privacy of citizens. Bail (2014) addresses the same issue regarding the impact of Big Data on societal issues, but underlines the leading roles of cultural sociologists and their theories for the correct application of Big Data.
Library organizations have been traditional proponents of core democratic values such as protection of privacy and elucidation of related ethical questions (Miltenoff & Hauptman, 2005). In recent books about Big Data and libraries, ethical issues are important part of the discussion (Weiss, 2018). Library blogs also discuss these issues (Harper & Oltmann, 2017). An academic library’s role is to educate its patrons about those values. Sugimoto et al (2012) reflect on the need for discussion about Big Data in Library and Information Science. They clearly draw attention to the library “tradition of organizing, managing, retrieving, collecting, describing, and preserving information” (p.1) as well as library and information science being “a historically interdisciplinary and collaborative field, absorbing the knowledge of multiple domains and bringing the tools, techniques, and theories” (p. 1). Sugimoto et al (2012) sought a wide discussion among the library profession regarding the implications of Big Data on the profession, no differently from the activities in other fields (e.g., Wixom, Ariyachandra, Douglas, Goul, Gupta, Iyer, Kulkami, Mooney, Phillips-Wren, Turetken, 2014). A current Andrew Mellon Foundation grant for Visualizing Digital Scholarship in Libraries seeks an opportunity to view “both macro and micro perspectives, multi-user collaboration and real-time data interaction, and a limitless number of visualization possibilities – critical capabilities for rapidly understanding today’s large data sets (Hwangbo, 2014).
The importance of the library with its traditional roles, as described by Sugimoto et al (2012) may continue, considering the Big Data platform proposed by Wu, Wu, Khabsa, Williams, Chen, Huang, Tuarob, Choudhury, Ororbia, Mitra, & Giles (2014). Such platforms will continue to emerge and be improved, with librarians as the ultimate drivers of such platforms and as the mediators between the patrons and the data generated by such platforms.
Every library needs to find its place in the large organization and in society in regard to this very new and very powerful phenomenon called Big Data. Libraries might not have the trained staff to become a leader in the process of organizing and building the complex mechanism of this new knowledge architecture, but librarians must educate and train themselves to be worthy participants in this new establishment.
Method
The study will be cleared by the SCSU IRB.
The survey will collect responses from library population and it readiness to use and use of Big Data. Send survey URL to (academic?) libraries around the world.
Data will be processed through SPSS. Open ended results will be processed manually. The preliminary research design presupposes a mixed method approach.
The study will include the use of closed-ended survey response questions and open-ended questions. The first part of the study (close ended, quantitative questions) will be completed online through online survey. Participants will be asked to complete the survey using a link they receive through e-mail.
Mixed methods research was defined by Johnson and Onwuegbuzie (2004) as “the class of research where the researcher mixes or combines quantitative and qualitative research techniques, methods, approaches, concepts, or language into a single study” (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004 , p. 17). Quantitative and qualitative methods can be combined, if used to complement each other because the methods can measure different aspects of the research questions (Sale, Lohfeld, & Brazil, 2002).
Sampling design
Online survey of 10-15 question, with 3-5 demographic and the rest regarding the use of tools.
1-2 open-ended questions at the end of the survey to probe for follow-up mixed method approach (an opportunity for qualitative study)
data analysis techniques: survey results will be exported to SPSS and analyzed accordingly. The final survey design will determine the appropriate statistical approach.
Project Schedule
Complete literature review and identify areas of interest – two months
Prepare and test instrument (survey) – month
IRB and other details – month
Generate a list of potential libraries to distribute survey – month
Contact libraries. Follow up and contact again, if necessary (low turnaround) – month
Collect, analyze data – two months
Write out data findings – month
Complete manuscript – month
Proofreading and other details – month
Significance of the work
While it has been widely acknowledged that Big Data (and its handling) is changing higher education (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=big+data) as well as academic libraries (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/03/29/analytics-in-education/), it remains nebulous how Big Data is handled in the academic library and, respectively, how it is related to the handling of Big Data on campus. Moreover, the visualization of Big Data between units on campus remains in progress, along with any policymaking based on the analysis of such data (hence the need for comprehensive visualization).
This research will aim to gain an understanding on: a. how librarians are handling Big Data; b. how are they relating their Big Data output to the campus output of Big Data and c. how librarians in particular and campus administration in general are tuning their practices based on the analysis.
Based on the survey returns (if there is a statistically significant return), this research might consider juxtaposing the practices from academic libraries, to practices from special libraries (especially corporate libraries), public and school libraries.
References:
Adams Becker, S., Cummins M, Davis, A., Freeman, A., Giesinger Hall, C., Ananthanarayanan, V., … Wolfson, N. (2017). NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition.
Andrejevic, M., & Gates, K. (2014). Big Data Surveillance: Introduction. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 185–196.
Asamoah, D. A., Sharda, R., Hassan Zadeh, A., & Kalgotra, P. (2017). Preparing a Data Scientist: A Pedagogic Experience in Designing a Big Data Analytics Course. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 15(2), 161–190. https://doi.org/10.1111/dsji.12125
Bughin, J., Chui, M., & Manyika, J. (2010). Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch. McKinsey Quarterly, 56(1), 75–86.
Cohen, J., Dolan, B., Dunlap, M., Hellerstein, J. M., & Welton, C. (2009). MAD Skills: New Analysis Practices for Big Data. Proc. VLDB Endow., 2(2), 1481–1492. https://doi.org/10.14778/1687553.1687576
Daniel, B. (2015). Big Data and analytics in higher education: Opportunities and challenges. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(5), 904–920. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12230
Daries, J. P., Reich, J., Waldo, J., Young, E. M., Whittinghill, J., Ho, A. D., … Chuang, I. (2014). Privacy, Anonymity, and Big Data in the Social Sciences. Commun. ACM, 57(9), 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1145/2643132
De Mauro, A. D., Greco, M., & Grimaldi, M. (2016). A formal definition of Big Data based on its essential features. Library Review, 65(3), 122–135. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-06-2015-0061
De Mauro, A., Greco, M., & Grimaldi, M. (2015). What is big data? A consensual definition and a review of key research topics. AIP Conference Proceedings, 1644(1), 97–104. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4907823
Eaton, M. (2017). Seeing Library Data: A Prototype Data Visualization Application for Librarians. Publications and Research. Retrieved from http://academicworks.cuny.edu/kb_pubs/115
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Globalization’s cheerleaders, from Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, made arguments from classical economics: by buying manufactured products from people overseas who made them cheaper than we did, the United States could get rich concentrating on product design, marketing, and other lucrative services. That turned out to be a mostly inaccurate description of how globalism would work in the developed world, as mainstream politicians everywhere are now discovering.
Certain skeptics, including polymath author Edward Luttwak and Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, put forward a better account. In his 1998 book Turbo-Capitalism, Luttwak gave what is still the most succinct and accurate reading of the new system’s economic consequences. “It enriches industrializing poor countries, impoverishes the semi-affluent majority in rich countries, and greatly adds to the incomes of the top 1 percent on both sides who are managing the arbitrage.”
In The Great Convergence, Richard Baldwin, an economist at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, gives us an idea why, over the past generation, globalization’s benefits have been so hard to explain and its damage so hard to diagnose.
We have had “globalization,” in the sense of far-flung trade, for centuries now.
ut around 1990, the cost of sharing information at a distance fell dramatically. Workers on complex projects no longer had to cluster in the same factory, mill town, or even country. Other factors entered in. Tariffs fell. The rise of “Global English” as a common language of business reduced the cost of moving information (albeit at an exorbitant cost in culture). “Containerization” (the use of standard-sized shipping containers across road, rail, and sea transport) made packing and shipping predictable and helped break the world’s powerful longshoremen’s unions. Active “pro-business” political reforms did the rest.
Far-flung “global value chains” replaced assembly lines. Corporations came to do some of the work of governments, because in the free-trade climate imposed by the U.S., they could play governments off against one another. Globalization is not about nations anymore. It is not about products. And the most recent elections showed that it has not been about people for a long time. No, it is about tasks.
his means a windfall for what used to be called the Third World. More than 600 million people have been pulled out of dire poverty. They can get richer by building parts of things.
The competition that globalization has created for manufacturing has driven the value-added in manufacturing down close to what we would think of as zilch. The lucrative work is in the design and the P.R.—the brainy, high-paying stuff that we still get to do.
But only a tiny fraction of people in any society is equipped to do lucrative brainwork. In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy.
One of these platitudes is that all nations gain from trade. Baldwin singles out Harvard professor and former George W. Bush Administration economic adviser Gregory Mankiw, who urged passage of the Obama Administration mega-trade deals TPP and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the grounds that America should “work in those industries in which we have an advantage compared with other nations, and we should import from abroad those goods that can be produced more cheaply there.”
That was a solid argument 200 years ago, when the British economist David Ricardo developed modern doctrines of trade. In practical terms, it is not always solid today. What has changed is the new mobility of knowledge. But knowledge is a special commodity. It can be reused. Several people can use it at the same time. It causes people to cluster in groups, and tends to grow where those groups have already clustered.
When surgeries involved opening the patient up like a lobster or a peapod, the doctor had to be in physical contact with a patient. New arthroscopic processes require the surgeon to guide cutting and cauterizing tools by computer. That computer did not have to be in the same room. And if it did not, why did it have to be in the same country? In 2001, a doctor in New York performed surgery on a patient in Strasbourg. In a similar way, the foreman on the American factory floor could now coordinate production processes in Mexico. Each step of the production process could now be isolated, and then offshored. This process, Baldwin writes, “broke up Team America by eroding American labor’s quasi-monopoly on using American firms’ know-how.”
To explain why the idea that all nations win from trade isn’t true any longer, Baldwin returns to his teamwork metaphor. In the old Ricardian world that most policymakers still inhabit, the international economy could be thought of as a professional sports league. Trading goods and services resembled trading players from one team to another. Neither team would carry out the deal unless it believed it to be in its own interests. Nowadays, trade is more like an arrangement by which the manager of the better team is allowed to coach the lousier one in his spare time.
Vietnam, which does low-level assembly of wire harnesses for Honda. This does not mean Vietnam has industrialized, but nations like it no longer have to.
In the work of Thomas Friedman and other boosters you find value chains described as kaleidoscopic, complex, operating in a dozen different countries. Those are rare. There is less to “global value chains” than meets the eye. Most of them, Baldwin shows, are actually regional value chains. As noted, they exist on the periphery of the United States, Europe, or Japan. In this, offshoring resembles the elaborate international transactions that Florentine bankers under the Medicis engaged in for the sole purpose of avoiding church strictures on moneylending.
One way of describing outsourcing is as a verdict on the pay structure that had arisen in the West by the 1970s: on trade unions, prevailing-wage laws, defined-benefit pension plans, long vacations, and, more generally, the power workers had accumulated against their bosses.
In 1993, during the first month of his presidency, Bill Clinton outlined some of the promise of a world in which “the average 18-year-old today will change jobs seven times in a lifetime.” How could anyone ever have believed in, tolerated, or even wished for such a thing? A person cannot productively invest the resources of his only life if he’s going to be told every five years that everything he once thought solid has melted into ait.
The more so since globalization undermines democracy, in the ways we have noted. Global value chains are extraordinarily delicate. They are vulnerable to shocks. Terrorists have discovered this. In order to work, free-trade systems must be frictionless and immune to interruption, forever. This means a program of intellectual property protection, zero tariffs, and cross-border traffic in everything, including migrants. This can be assured only in a system that is veto-proof and non-consultative—in short, undemocratic.
Sheltered from democracy, the economy of the free trade system becomes more and more a private space.
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Caldwell, C. (2014, November). Twilight of Democracy. CRB, 14(4).
Caldwell’s book review of
Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. SCSU Library: https://mplus.mnpals.net/vufind/Record/007359076 Call Number: JC11 .F85 2011
Fukuyama’s first volume opened with China’s mandarin bureaucracy rather than the democracy of ancient Athens, shifting the methods of political science away from specifically Western intellectual genealogies and towards anthropology. Nepotism and favor-swapping are man’s basic political motivations, as Fukuyama sees it. Disciplining those impulses leads to effective government, but “repatrimonialization”—the capture of government by private interests—threatens whenever vigilance is relaxed. Fukuyama’s new volume, which describes political order since the French Revolution, extends his thinking on repatrimonialization, from the undermining of meritocratic bureaucracy in Han China through the sale of offices under France’s Henri IV to the looting of foreign aid in post-colonial Zaire. Fukuyama is convinced that the United States is on a similar path of institutional decay.
Political philosophy asks which government is best for man. Political science asks which government is best for government. Political decline, Fukuyama insists, is not the same thing as civilizational collapse.
Fukuyama is not the first to remark that wars can spur government efficiency—even if front-line soldiers are the last to benefit from it.
Relative to the smooth-running systems of northwestern Europe, American bureaucracy has been a dud, riddled with corruption from the start and resistant to reform. Patronage—favors for individual cronies and supporters—has thrived.
Clientelism is an ambiguous phenomenon: it is bread and circuses, it is race politics, it is doing favors for special classes of people. Clientelism is both more democratic and more systemically corrupting than the occasional nepotistic appointment.
why modern mass liberal democracy has developed on clientelistic lines in the U.S. and meritocratic ones in Europe. In Europe, democracy, when it came, had to adapt itself to longstanding pre-democratic institutions, and to governing elites that insisted on established codes and habits. Where strong states precede democracy (as in Germany), bureaucracies are efficient and uncorrupt. Where democracy precedes strong states (as in the United States but also Greece and Italy), government can be viewed by the public as a piñata.
Fukuyama contrasts the painstaking Japanese development of Taiwan a century ago with the mess that the U.S. Congress, “eager to impose American models of government on a society they only dimly understood,” was then making of the Philippines. It is not surprising that Fukuyama was one of the most eloquent conservative critics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the very beginning.
What distinguishes once-colonized Vietnam and China and uncolonized Japan and Korea from these Third World basket cases is that the East Asian lands “all possess competent, high-capacity states,” in contrast to sub-Saharan Africa, which “did not possess strong state-level institutions.”
Fukuyama does not think ethnic homogeneity is a prerequisite for successful politics
the United States “suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems.” It has kept the peace in a stagnant economy only by dragooning women into the workplace and showering the working and middle classes with credit.
public-sector unions have colluded with the Democratic Party to make government employment more rewarding for those who do it and less responsive to the public at large. In this sense, government is too big. But he also believes that cutting taxes on the rich in hopes of spurring economic growth has been a fool’s errand, and that the beneficiaries of deregulation, financial and otherwise, have grown to the point where they have escaped bureaucratic control altogether. In this sense, government is not big enough.
Washington, as Fukuyama sees it, is a patchwork of impotence and omnipotence—effective where it insists on its prerogatives, ineffective where it has been bought out. The unpredictable results of democratic oversight have led Americans to seek guidance in exactly the wrong place: the courts, which have both exceeded and misinterpreted their constitutional responsibilities. the almost daily insistence of courts that they are liberating people by removing discretion from them gives American society a Soviet cast.
“Effective modern states,” he writes, “are built around technical expertise, competence, and autonomy.”
the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb call the “hidden injuries of class.” These are dramatized by a recent employment study, in which the sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example.
The college-for-all experiment did not work. Two-thirds of Americans are not college graduates. We need to continue to make college more accessible, but we also need to improve the economic prospects of Americans without college degrees.
the United States has a well-documented dearth of workers qualified for middle-skill jobs that pay $40,000 or more a year and require some postsecondary education but not a college degree. A 2014 report by Accenture, Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School found that a lack of adequate middle-skills talent affects the productivity of “47 percent of manufacturing companies, 35 percent of health care and social assistance companies, and 21 percent of retail companies.”
Skillful, a partnership among the Markle Foundation, LinkedIn and Colorado, is one initiative pointing the way. Skillful helps provide marketable skills for job seekers without college degrees and connects them with employers in need of middle-skilled workers in information technology, advanced manufacturing and health care.For more information, see my other IMS blog entries, such as: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/01/11/credly-badges-on-canvas/
Following are the SCSU library locations:
USA – To kill a mockingbird – PS3562.E353 T6x
Russia – War and Peace – AC1 .G72 v.51
Canada – Anne of Green Gables – PR6025.O45 A5 1994x
United Kingdom – Pride and Prejudice – PR4034 .P7 1991b online at http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pridprej.html
Spain – Shadow in the Wind – PQ6668.U49 S6613 2004
Iran – Persepolis – PN6747.S245 P4713
Ireland – Ulysses – PR6019.O9 U4 1998 Bulgaria – Under the Yoke – PG1037.V3 U5x China – Dream of the Red Chamber – PL2998.T745 D7 1958cx Congo – The antipeople – PQ3989.2.S64 A813 1988
What do you think should be your country’s favorite book?
a study, the “Why We Post” project, has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London. worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.
In rural China and Turkey social media were viewed as a distraction from education. But in industrial China and Brazil they were seen to be an educational resource. Such a divide was evident in India, too. There, high-income families regarded them with suspicion but low-income families advocated them as a supplementary source of schooling. In Britain, meanwhile, they were valued not directly as a means of education, but as a way for pupils, parents and teachers to communicate.
How would you answer if addressed by this study? How do you see social media? Do you see it differently then before?
On a recent visit in 2015, I found the social media landscape dramatically changed, again. Facebook began actively steering reading practices through changes in 2013 to the News Feed algorithm, which determines content in the site’s central feature. That year, Facebook announced an effort to prioritize “high quality content,” defined as timely, relevant, and trustworthy—and not clickbait, memes, or other viral links. This policy, along with changing practices in sharing news content generally, meant that current events can unfold on and through social media.
how much of your news do you acquire through social media? do you trust the information you acquire through social media? #FakeNews – have explored this hashtag? What is your take on fake news?
meaning management :
Anthropologists and the culturally sensitive analysts take complex bits of data and develop a higher-order sense of them. Information and meaning work at cross purposes. In managing meaning, context is everything while in managing information context is error and noise. When we give our social listening projects to information specialists, we lose an appreciation of context and with it the ability to extract the meanings that provide insight for our companies and brands.
Meaning management also involves a deeper appreciation of social listening as a component of a broader meaning-making system, rather than as, simply, a data source to be exploited.
How do you perceive meaning management? Do you see yourself being a professional with the ability to collect, analyze and interpret such data for your company?
“Framework and Terminology for Understanding Cyber-Enabled Economic Warfare,” a new report by Samantha F. Ravich and Annie Fixler for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Cyber-enabled economic warfare is a “hostile strategy involving attack(s) against a nation using cyber technology with the intent to weaken its economy and thereby reduce its political and military power.”
For example, China’s economic theft of intellectual property from the U.S. is considered CEEW, along with Russia’s cyberattack on Estonia and Iran’s Saudi Aramco attack. The authors also contend that the U.S. sanctions on Iran using cyber means to cut off Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication access also falls under CEEW.
Sugimoto, C. R., Work, S., Larivière, V., & Haustein, S. (2016). Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: a review of the literature. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08112
One of the central issues associated with altmetrics (short for alternative metrics) is the identification of communities engaging with scholarly content on social media (Haustein, Bowman, & Costas, 2015; Neylon, 2014; Tsou, Bowman, Ghazinejad, & Sugimoto, 2015) . It is thus of central importance to understand the uses and users of social media in the context of scholarly communication.
most identify the following major categori es: social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, microblogging, wikis , and media and data sharing (Gu & Widén -Wulff, 2011; Rowlands, Nicholas, Russell, Canty, & Watkinson, 2011; Tenopir et al., 2013) . Some also conside r conferencing, collaborative authoring, scheduling and meeting tools (Rowlands et al., 2011) or RSS and online documents (Gu & Widén -Wulff, 2011; Tenopir et al., 2013) as social media. The landscape of social media, as well as that of altmetrics, is constantly changing and boundaries with othe r online platforms and traditional metrics are fuzzy. Many online platforms cannot be easily classified and more traditional metrics , such as downloads and mentions in policy documents , have been referred to as altmetrics due to data pr ovider policies.
the Use of social media platforms for by researchers is high — ranging from 75 to 80% in large -scale surveys (Rowlands et al., 2011; Tenopir et al., 2013; Van Eperen & Marincola, 2011) .
but
less than 10% of scholars reported using Twitter (Rowlands et al., 2011) , while 46% used ResearchGate (Van Noorden, 2014) , and more than 55% use d YouTube (Tenopir et al., 2013) —it is necessary to discuss the use of various types of social media separately . Furthermore, there i s a distinction among types of us e, with studies showing higher uses of social media for dissemination, consumption, communication , and promotion (e.g., Arcila -Calderón, Piñuel -Raigada, & Calderín -Cruz, 2013; Van Noorden, 2014) , and fewer instances of use for creation (i.e., using social media to construct scholarship) (British Library et al., 2012; Carpenter, Wetheridge, Tanner, & Smith, 2012; Procter et al., 2010b; Tenopir et al., 2013) .
Frequently mentioned social platforms in scholarly communication research include research -specific tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike, BibSonomy, and Connotea (now defunct) as well as general tools such as Delicious and Digg (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005; Hull, Pettifer, & Kell, 2008; Priem & Hemminger, 2010; Reher & Haustein, 2010) .
Social data sharing platforms provide an infrastructure to share various types of scholarly objects —including datasets, software code, figures, presentation slides and videos —and for users to interact with these objects (e.g., comment on, favorite, like , and reuse ). Platforms such as Figshare and SlideShare disseminate scholars’ various types of research outputs such as datasets, figures, infographics, documents, videos, posters , or presentation slides (Enis, 2013) and displays views, likes, and shares by other users (Mas -Bleda et al., 2014) . GitHub provides for uploading and stor ing of software code, which allows users to modify and expand existing code (Dabbish, Stuart, Tsay, & Herbsleb, 2012) , which has been shown to lead to enhanced collaboratio n among developers (Thung, Bissyande, Lo, & Jiang, 2013) . As w ith other social data sharing platforms, usage statistics on the number of view and contributions to a project are provided (Kubilius, 2014) . The registry of research data repositories, re3data.org, ha s indexed more than 1,200 as of May 2015 2 . However, only a few of these repositories (i.e. , Figshare, SlideShare and Github) include social functionalities and have reached a certain level of participation from scholars (e.g., Begel, Bosch, & Storey, 2013; Kubilius, 2014) .
Video provide s yet another genre for social interaction and scholarly communication (Kousha, Thelwall, & Abdoli, 2012; Sugimoto & Thelwall, 2013) . Of the various video sharing platforms, YouTube, launched in 2005, is by far the most popular
A study of UK scholars reports that the majority o f respondents engaged with video for scholarly communication purposes (Tenopir et al., 2013) , yet only 20% have ever created in that genre. Among British PhD students, 17% had used videos and podcasts passively for research, while 8% had actively contributed (British Library et al., 2012) .
Blogs began in the mid -1990s and were considered ubiquitous by the mid- 200 0s (Gillmor, 2006; Hank, 2011; Lenhart & Fox, 2006; Rainie, 2005) . Scholarly blogs emerged during this time with their own neologisms (e.g., blogademia , blawgosphere , bloggership) and body of research (Hank, 2011) and were considered to change the exclusive structure of scholarly communication
Technorati, considered t o be on e of the largest ind ex of blogs, deleted their entire blog directory in 2014 3 . Individual blogs are also subject to abrupt cancellations and deletions, making questionable the degree to which blogging meets the permanence criteria of scholarly commu nication (Hank, 2011) .
ResearchBlogging.org (RB) — “an aggregator of blog posts referencing peer -reviewed research in a structured manner” (Shema, Bar -Ilan, & Thelwall, 2015, p. 3) — was launched in 2007 and has been a fairly stable structure in the scholarly blogging environment. RB both aggregates and —through the use of the RB icon — credentials scholarly blogs (Shema et al., 2015) . The informality of the genre (Mewburn & Thomson, 2013) and the ability to circumve nt traditional publishing barr iers has led advocates to claim that blogging can invert traditional academic power hierarchies (Walker, 2006) , allow ing people to construct scholarly identities outside of formal institutionalization (Ewins, 2005; Luzón, 2011; Potter, 2012) and democratize the scientific system (Gijón, 2013) . Another positive characteristic of blogs is their “inherently social” nature (Walker, 2006, p. 132) (see also Kjellberg, 2010; Luzón, 2011 ). Scholars have noted the potential for “communal scholarship” (Hendrick, 2012) made by linking and commenting, calling the platform “a new ‘third place’ for academic discourse” (Halavais, 2006, p. 117) . Commenting functionalities were seen as making possible the “shift from public understanding to public engagement with science” (Kouper, 2010, p. 1) .
Studies have also provided evidence of high rate s of blogging among certain subpopulations: for example, approximately one -third of German university staff (Pscheida et al., 2013) and one fifth of UK doctoral students use blogs (Carpenter et al., 2012) .
Academics are not only producers, but also consumers of blogs: a 2007 survey of medical bloggers foundthat the large majority (86%) read blogs to find medical news (Kovic et al., 2008)
Mahrt and Puschmann (2014) , who defined science blogging as “the use of blogs for science communication” (p. 1). It has been similarly likened to a sp ace for public intellectualism (Kirkup, 2010; Walker, 2006) and as a form of activism to combat perceived biased or pseudoscience (Riesch & Mendel, 2014. Yet, there remains a tension between science bloggers and science journalists, with many science journals dismissing the value of science blogs (Colson, 2011)
.
while there has been anecdotal evidence of the use of blogs in promotion and tenure (e.g., (Podgor, 2006) the consensus seem s to suggest that most institutions do not value blogging as highly as publishing in traditional outlets, or consider blogging as a measure of service rather than research activity (Hendricks, 2010, para. 30) .
Microblogging developed out of a particular blogging practice, wherein bloggers would post small messages or single files on a blog post. Blogs that focused on such “microposts” were then termed “tumblelogs” and were described as “a quick and dirty stream of consciousness” kind of blogging (Kottke, 2005, para. 2)
most popular microblogs are Twitter (launched in 2006), tumblr (launched in 2007), FriendFeed (launched in 2007 and available in several languages), Plurk (launched in 2008 and popular in Taiwan), and Sina Weibo (launched in 2009 and popular in China).
users to follow other users, search tweets by keywords or hashtags, and link to other media or other tweets
.
Conference chatter (backchanneling) is another widely studied area in the realm of scholarly microblogging. Twitter use at conferences is generally carried out by a minority of participants
Wikis are collaborative content management platforms enabled by web browsers and embedded markup languages.
Wikipedia has been advocated as a replacement for traditional publishing and peer review models (Xia o & Askin, 2012) and pleas have been made to encourage experts to contribute (Rush & Tracy, 2010) . Despite this, contribution rates remain low — likely hindered by the lack of explicit authorship in Wikipedia, a cornerstone of the traditional academic reward system (Black, 2008; Butler, 2008; Callaway, 2010; Whitworth & Friedman, 2009) . Citations to scholarly documents —another critical component in the reward system —are increasingly being found i n Wikiped ia entries (Bould et al., 2014; Park, 2011; Rousidis et al., 2013) , but are no t yet seen as valid impact indicators (Haustein, Peters, Bar -Ilan, et al., 2014) .
The altmetrics manifesto (Priem et al., 2010, para. 1) , altmetrics can serve as filters , which “reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem”.
There are also a host of platforms which are being used informally to discuss and rate scholarly material. Reddit, for example, is a general topic platform where users can submit, discuss and rate online content. Historically, mentions of scientific journals on Reddit have been rare (Thelwall, Haustein, et al., 2013) . However, several new subreddits —e.g., science subreddit 4 , Ask Me Anything sessions 5 –have recently been launched, focusing on the discussion of scientific information. Sites like Amazon (Kousha & Thelwall, 2015) and Goodreads (Zuccala, Verleysen, Cornacchia, & Engels, 2015) , which allow users to comment on and rate books, has also been mined as potential source for the compilation of impact indicators
libraries provide services to support researchers’ use of social media tools and metrics (Lapinski, Piwowar, & Priem, 2013; Rodgers & Barbrow, 2013; Roemer & Borchardt, 2013). One example is Mendeley Institutional Edition, https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley/Mendeley-Institutional-Edition, which mines Mendeley documents, annotations, and behavior and provides these data to libraries (Galligan & Dyas -Correia, 2013) . Libraries can use them for collection management, in a manner similar to other usage data, such as COUNTER statistics (Galligan & Dyas -Correia, 2013) .
Factors affecting social media use; age, academic rank and status, gender, discipline, country and language,
Library marketers crave media attention and coverage, but most don’t know how to get it. The first step is having a Press Room as part of your library’s website. This workshop, led by a member of the media who’s also a library marketing expert, shows you how to build a Press Room that works. It includes how your library benefits from having an online Press Room, even if you don’t have a marketing department; where it belongs in your website hierarchy; what content members of the press expect to find there; SEO basics and PR tactics to lead reporters to your online Press Room; why building relationships with the media is vital; how press coverage affects your library’s usage, funding, brand recognition, and position in the community. Help ensure positive coverage by adding this strategic tool to your website.
In this half-day workshop, a former advertising executive and trainer of strategic storytelling in marketing shares secrets on how to create video that has an impact on your community. Join her to shoot, edit, and polish a video while gathering tips, techniques, and strategies to create your own video-a medium which grabs communities in exciting new ways!
W10: Implementing an Internet of Things Infrastructure & Apps
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
May Chang, Assistant Director, LibraryTechnology, East Carolina University
Mehdi Mohammadi, Graduate Assistant, Western Michigan University
The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming widespread in academia as well as industry. It refers to connecting smart objects with built-in unique identifiers and sensors to communicate with each other autonomously. This enables actionable insights and ultimately makes the environment around us smarter. This workshop looks at how libraries can incorporate the IoT and reviews different aspects of developing an IoT infrastructure and creating your own application. It is based on four layers of IoT application architecture: the physical layer, the communications layer, application and services layer, and data analytics. Speakers discuss the potentials and challenges of IoT applications, including the footprint of IoT applications, i.e., a high volume of sensory data, the tools and methods for data analytics. As a case study, they focus on location-aware applications using iBeacons and smartphone sensors to show how all the IoT elements work together. Gain a better understanding of the usefulness of IoT in libraries, learn the main elements and underlying technologies of IoT applications, and understand the difference between a wide range of IoT devices, protocols and technologies to choose the right ones for your IoT application. Get budget and resource estimates and more. Come with a basic understanding of JavaScript/ HTML5/ CSS and your laptop for hands-on development practice. An instruction document will be provided for the attendees to prepare their system before the workshop.
W15: Tech Trends for Libraries in 2017 & Beyond
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
David Lee King, Digital Services Director, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library and Publisher, davidleeking.com
Technology has changed the face of libraries and is continuing to change how we work and how we deliver services to customers. This workshop introduces emerging technology trends and shows how those trends are reshaping library services. Examples are provided of how to incorporate these evolving trends into libraries. Attendees learn what trends to look for, find out the difference between a technology trend and a fad, and get ideas on how their library can respond to technology as it emerges.
W16: UX Design for Broader Discovery
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Stephanie Rosso, Principal Web Developer, Hennepin County Library
Amy Luedtke, Senior Librarian, Information Programs and Services, Hennepin County Library
While patrons have embraced using online technology to access their public library, most of these interactions are limited to borrowing transactions. If libraries are to be truly relevant in the digital world, we need to nudge patrons out of the well-worn pattern of log-in/transact /log-out and find ways to get them to linger long enough to discover the richness the library has to offer beyond borrowing items, while offering them opportunities to add their own voice to the library’s online community. This workshop explores design patterns and techniques for introducing content to patrons at appropriate moments in their learned workflows. It considers how to encourage patrons to add their voice to the library community and overcome concerns about privacy and security. It shares research and experience from BiblioCommons and Hennepin County Public Library’s efforts and looks at analogs from other domains. Workshop participants will be asked to participate actively in a hands-on session to solve a specific design challenge in teams.
My note: Ha. Even the public library understands that service goes beyond “borrowing items” and must have “patrons to add their voice.” Only in the academic library, prevails the opinion that librarians are those omnipotent and all-knowing lecturing types.
B103: Website Redesign: Techniques & Tools
1:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Dana Haugh, Web Services Librarian, Stony Brook University
Roy Degler, Associate Professor, Digital Library Services, Digital Resources and Discovery Services, Oklahoma State University
Join three web experts to learn about tips, tools, and techniques for taking the pain out of website redesigns. Haugh provides advice on the visual design of your next site and shows some examples of library web redesigns. Degler takes a look at why many libraries are using popular, free, CSS-based frameworks such as Bootstrap; explains how the grid layout works; and shows how the built-in responsive design layouts can deliver a site that works on desktop, smartphones, and tablets.Often the biggest challenge in redesign isn’t the visual design, content management system or coding. It’s the people and politics. Everyone thinks they know what the library website should look like, but no two people—let alone groups—can ever agree. How do you move ahead with a library redesign when you’re facing conflicting demands from the administration, co-workers, users, and stakeholders? Mitchell tackles this challenge head on and points out the weapons that we have at hand—from data to documentation; and discusses how to wield those weapons effectively to win (almost) any fight in order to build a great website. Grab lots of insights and ideas from this experienced panel.
C102: Digital Literacy & Coding Program Models
11:15 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Karen Walker, E-Services & Digital Access Manager, Jacksonville Public Library
Brandy McNeil, Associate Director – Tech Education & Training, The New York Public Library
Steven Deolus, Technology Training Program Coordinator, TechConnect (Technology Training Program Department), The New York Public Library
This session looks at how one library created a technology class and programming model that spans a 21-branch, 844-square-mile library system. It discusses mobile classrooms and how Chromebooks, MacBooks, tablets, and other equipment are used to create “classrooms” throughout the system. It shares how the library is focusing on members and programming for the community, for instance, the development of Spanish language, 50+ and immigrant/refugee programming. It looks at developing new programs and instructors using the 3D model from printer to pens, from tablets to coding, from core expertise to everyone. NYPL speakers discuss how coding is the new black! They discuss how to launch a coding program at your library, how to expand the age range of current coding programs, how to promote events related to your program to gain participants, how to get staff buy-in, how to educate staff, and how to create partnerships with some of the biggest names in the game. The NYPL Tech- Connect program will help you plan out all your needs to take your existing or non-existing coding programs further.
My note: one more proof that digital literacy is not “information literacy dressed in the new verbal cloth” of “digital literacy,” but entails way more topics, skills and knowledge. Information Literacy is a 1990s concept. Time to upgrade to 2016 concepts and recognize that digital literacy requires skills beyond handling information. Moreover, information today is way more complex then the skills being taught, since information from social media is more complex then information from news media and it entails technology skills, which one does not have to preside upon for handling news media
E104: From Textbook to Activism: Engaging Students in Social Issues They Care About
2:15 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Janie Pickett, Head Librarian, Eureka High School, Eureka, Mo.
Anna Gray, Social Studies Teacher, Eureka High School, Eureka, Mo.
recent collaborative effort between a high school social studies teacher and a school librarian transformed a “same-old” unit on social movements in the 20th century into a dynamic study of effective social activism—and how students can become effective activists. Using both primary and secondary resources, students learned to analyze social issues, then to identify the type of activism that proved effective for those issues. Next, students selected social situations important to them, analyzed the changes they sought to effect, and determined a means of activism to effect that change in practical—and often surprising—ways. The project’s design and implementation is straightforward and replicable. This session provides concrete steps to follow, specific patterns for locating learning resources, and reproducible forms that educators can carry back to their own campuses.
B202: Managing Tech & Innovation
11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Jen Baum Sevec, Senior Metadata and Acquisitions Librarian, Library Of Congress
Brett Williams, Systems & Liaison Librarian, University of Toronto Mississauga
Sevec offers leaders at any level the opportunity to up their game by learning current management strategies for technology and innovation. Library leaders and constituents engage in the nearly constant interplay of enabling technology and innovations to explore a wealth of information and greater depth of data in the Information Age. A framework for managing this interplay is provided as well as an understanding of the dynamic lifecycle inherent in technological innovations and constituent demands. Williams provides an introduction to Wardley Value Chain Mapping, an innovative IT planning processes discussed by Simon Wardley on his blog Bits and Pieces. He shares specific examples of how this tool can be used by systems librarians, library administrators, and library IT decision makers.
B203: Finding Your Social Media Voice
1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Meghan Kowalski, Head, Preservation, The Catholic University of America
Kirsten Mentzer, Technology Specialist, Northern Virginia Community College’s Medical Education Campus
Alexandra Radocchia Zealand, Web Editor, New Media Developer and Video Producer, Web Team, Arlington Public Library PLA, VLA, ALA, LLAMA
Lennea R. Bower, Program Specialist, Virtual Services, Montgomery County Public Libraries
This session provides an in-depth look at how to speak in social media. Each institution and organization’s social media accounts has a personality. How you say something is just as important as what you say and why you say it. Your voice on social media says a lot to your followers. If done well, your tone will help to attract and keep an audience. The wrong kind of voice will turn people away. Finding the right voice can be difficult and involves a lot of trial and error. Speakers provide tips for finding the right voice and presenting the best personality for your intended followers. Social media is no longer the “new kid on the block,” and the panel highlights the best ways to communicate content, being real, tone, and more. They showcase what kinds of tones can be used and how to find the “real voice” for your accounts, why those voices are (or are not) successful for those accounts; and how to make your chosen voice sustainable and consistent across your accounts.
C203: Migrating & Developing With Drupal
1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
June Yang, Senior Librarian, International Monetary Fund
Linda Venable, Systems Librarian, International Monetary Fund
Elizabeth Zoby, Information Specialist, PAE, National Institute of Corrections (NIC)
Billy Mathews, Web Developer, PAE, National Institute of Corrections (NIC)
Migrating to a new ILS system is not easy, and it is even more challenging when faced with a very tight deadline. Presenters share the recent experience of migrating from SirsiDynix Symphony to Alma within 5 months: what worked, what didn’t, lessons learned, and what to prepare in advance of the migration. They also share some insight about post migration work related to data cleanup, workflows review, etc. Zoby and Mathews share their development of the NIC micro-sites using Drupal, an open-source content management software, to create dynamic websites that make accessing material easy and user-friendly. Instead of having to download and shift through large PDF documents, users can access the content on easily searchable websites which can be edited by authorized users. See how the NIC Information Center is using these sites to help customers and the public access information in innovative ways.
D202: Funding Opps for Digital Library Initiatives
11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist, Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library Of Congress
Nicole Ferraiolo, Program Officer, Scholarly Resources, Council on Library & Information Resources
Joel Wurl, Senior Program Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities
Discovering and deciphering guidelines for grant programs is a daunting and challenging process. This session provides an opportunity to directly hear from and ask questions about grant opportunities for digital libraries’ initiatives to program officers from different government and private funders. Following brief overviews of the relevant funding opportunities at their organizations, panelists discuss the kinds of projects that best fit their specific programs. Get suggestions on how to develop a competitive proposal and insights on the application and review process. Panelists consider themes and trends from the digital library projects that have received funding, such as digitization, open educational resources, linked data, crowdsourcing, open access publishing, emulation and virtualization, and data visualization. By bringing together representatives from different funders, this session offers a unique opportunity to connect directly with program officers and identify new opportunities and approaches for funding.
A301: Augmented Reality & Learning
10:45 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Ashley Todd-Diaz, Head, Special Collections & University Archives, Towson University
Earl Givens, Head, Systems & Technology, Catawba College
Art Gutierrez, Head, Technical Services, Emporia State University
Bethanie O’Dell, Virtual Learning Librarian, Emporia State University
Just when you thought the battle of augmented reality (AR) was over with Pokémon GO, libraries across the nation have been exploring additional AR options in order to meet the needs of the mobile learners walking through their doors. With the use of free AR software, four individuals team up to become the ultimate masters of AR. Hear from a panel of closely networked professionals, each with a unique story of embedding AR into specific library services directed for higher education. These stories range from embedding AR with liaison departments to incorporating AR into information literacy sessions (both online and face-to-face).
A304: Multimodal Learning: From Textbooks to Playlists
Colleges, universities, and libraries are considering adding video making, or visual literacy, as a core skill. Preparing individuals for a highly visual communication landscape requires critical thinking to offset consumerism as well as multimodal learning and cognitive skills. Researching, creating, and sharing video playlists are important ways to create personalized learning pathways and promote continuous learning. Explore a number of case studies that demonstrate the positive learning outcomes of multimodal learning in academic and corporate settings and discover how to create playlists that can be annotated, edited, and shared across teams.
B304: Raspberry Pi
2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
David Bennett, Systems Librarian, Robert Morris University
Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive computing tool that is ideal for new projects within libraries. It’s a powerful single board computer that plays high-definition video, yet it’s only the size of a credit card. The Raspberry Pi 3 was released in February of 2016, and the built-in networking options make it an exciting fit for library applications. Learn how Raspberry Pi can be used as a people counter, a dedicated OPAC, a social media tool, and more.
D302: Upping Our “Gamification”: Speaking Millennials’ Language
11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
David Folmar, Emerging Technology Librarian, Main Branch, Richmond Public Library Author, Game It Up! Using Gamification to Incentivize Your Library
Be tech-smart and culture-savvy by using game-design thinking and gaming activities to connect with current users in a fun way and draw in new ones. Hear from a library communicator who literally wrote the book on this topic. Online games are incredibly popular; libraries, book apps, and learning institutions are leveraging this to bring in new audiences and engage with existing ones in new ways. Why are they doing this, what is the benefit, and how do you make it work to promote your library? Get the answers here!
Video is a powerful, emotional storytelling medium that plays well in social media, and its use is still fast-growing. Video can spread your library’s story, and you can do it without hiring an expensive pro. A tech-savvy info pro shares basic video facts, along with her favorite tools, tips, and techniques that almost anyone can use for creating short, compelling videos to promote library services, staffers, and resources.
My note: my mouth ran dry to repeat this to the SCSU library. In vain. 1. make a low-cost social-media type of movie of 30 sec each week/month. 2. post on a prominent place on the library web page. 3. Have web form harvest info from patrons on the issu[s] reflected in the video 4. mirror video on the social media 5. aim as ultimate goal patrons (students, faculty, staff) furbishing the video footage instead of library staff
Why is it soooo difficult to comprehend?
E302: Zero to Maker: Invention Literacy & Mobile Memory Lab
11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Dominique China, Information Services Librarian, Brampton Library
Colleen Dearborn, Adult Services Librarian, Alsip-Merrionette Park Library, Alsip, Ill.
Invention literacy is not just about understanding how a thing is made or how it works; it is also the ability to use that knowledge to bring one’s own ideas into reality. China gives examples of how one public library is empowering children, teens, and adults to become “invention-literate” through its maker programming. Find out how a combination of high- and low-tech equipment, safe and accessible learning environments, and a unique community partnership is nurturing invention, creative confidence, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Sparked by the CIL 2016 Hawkins and Mears talk about personal digital archiving and the DCPL Memory Lab, Dearborn shares her library’s inexpensive journey to create a mobile memory lab program. She discusses the acquisition of equipment and technology, the demo classes, lesson plans about personal archiving, outreach to other community organizations, and providing classes on related topics, such as saving and uploading images, backing up files and using cloud storage, writing and self-publishing memoirs, conducting oral interviews with veterans and other family memories, coding and saving memories on a website, etc. Future plans include digitizing local history documents, a community website with links to these documents, as well as to our patrons’ digitized images, videos, interviews and memoirs.
The reputations of Asian universities, and Chinese universities in particular, are on the rise. China’s World Class 2.0 project, announced in August 2015, aims to strengthen the research performance of China’s nine top-ranked universities, with the goal of having six of those institutions ranked within the world’s top 15 universities by 2030.
After two decades in which China has been largely an exporter of students to Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, it is now increasingly attracting international students to study at its universities. And what is true of China is true of other countries too. Global flows of students are an increasing feature of the world’s higher education systems.
You can see the recruitment of international students as an exercise in soft power, in global engagement , in global citizenship, a great exercise in language learning , the practical application of a challenge thrown down by the great American social anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
Certainly, my friends who lead universities in Australia, Canada and New Zealand are delighted when they read politicians’ rhetoric about making it harder for international students to come to the UK.(my note, this is a Guardian article, but applies perfectly with Bush Junior politics and with the rhetoric of Trump)
Revenues for self-paced e-learning in 2016 are heavily concentrated in two countries — the United States and China. The growth rate in the U.S. is at -5.3 percent, representing a $4.9 billion drop in revenues by 2021, while in China, the rate is at -8.8 percent, representing a $1.9 billion drop by 2021. The e-learning market in China has deteriorated rapidly in just the last 18 months, the report said.
Of the 122 countries tracked by Ambient Insight, 15 have growth rates for self-paced e-learning over 15 percent during the next five years. These countries are heavily concentrated in Asia and Africa, with the two outliers being Slovakia and Lithuania.
Eleven of the top 15 growth countries will generate less than $20 million by 2021. Of the top 15, Slovakia and Lithuania are anticipated to generate the highest revenues for self-paced products by 2021, at $55.4 million and $36.5 million, respectively.
The growth rates are negative in every region except Africa, where the growth is flat at 0.9 percent. The steepest declines are in Asia and Latin America at -11.7 percent and -10.8 percent, respectively. The economic meltdowns in Brazil and Venezuela are major inhibitors in Latin America.
There are 77 countries with flat-to-negative growth rates. The countries with the lowest growth rates are Yemen (-18.7 percent), Brazil (-19.8 percent), Qatar (-23.5 percent) and Venezuela (-26.8 percent).
Self-paced e-learning products include online courses, managed education services, managed training, e-books and learning management systems, according to the report. The author does not consider mobile and game-based learning, which are growing, to be in the self-paced e-learning category.
The news on the self-paced e-learning industry is so bad, Ambient Insight will no longer publish commercial syndicated reports on the industry, the firm says on its website and in the report.
