Another Reason Why Google Isn't God

Google has, to the best of my knowledge, never claimed to be omniscient. While their oft repeated motto, "Don't be evil", might be seen as a claim of omnibenevolence, Google usually is straightforward about their interests: Reconciliation and redemption are outside of their purview, but data and dollars are right up their alley.

Thus it should be no surprise to the watching world that the Google Books project falls short of divine infallibility. (In spite of Google invoking the cadences of Genesis 1:1 in the project history.) This especially has been no surprise to the watching academic world which still has many mixed feelings about the benefits to be derived from the digitized corpus of the bibliosphere. Geoffrey Nunberg has written an excellent exposé of the shortcomings of Google Books when it comes to meeting the needs of researchers.

Of most interest to me as a librarian, though, are Mr. Nunberg's words of advice to librarians everywhere. He exhorts us to hope that Google "may be responsive to pressure from its university library partners—who weren't particularly attentive to questions of quality when they signed on with Google—particularly if they are urged (or if necessary, prodded) to make noise about shoddy metadata by the scholars whose interests they represent."

This blog post is only a leaf in the tossing forest of the Internet, but it is my effort to heed Geoffrey's advice and put in my $0.02. Our first response as librarians to digital books may not be embracing them, but, as librarians, we do have something to contribute when it comes to organizing them. Our catalogs (if I can persist in using such a quaint term) are not about the arranging of material volumes on physical shelves; they are about the organization of knowledge. Or so my Cataloging 101 course told me many years ago. Librarians are not divine, either, but neatness is next to godliness. Google Books is one horrific mess that needs a good cataloging. We already cataloged it once. Like housecleaning, though, it may need to be done again.

Laws, Sausages, and Statistics

I have just completed the annual task of compiling library statistics for ATS and ATLA a little later than usual, but still before the deadline. I should preface what follows by stating that I like statistics. I like being able to break complex processes down into neat rows of numbers and then lining up those rows of numbers on a spreadsheet. It gives me a secure feeling inside to see all that data marshalled into an eye-friendly format that can be surveyed historically for trends and changes. (Yes, I was one of the popular kids in high school.)

But there is that nagging feeling that an awful lot of ambiguity falls by the wayside when statistics are made. What about the book that comes with full PDF accessibility on a web site for registered purchasers? Did I purchase a book or access to a book? And if I purchased both, how much did each cost? If the publisher helpfully threw in a CD plastered inside the back cover, how do I record that much less circulate it? (Answer: Throw out the CD, and no one will ever know.) Then there are those misleadingly simple numbers about staff and staff salaries. I had one year where a part time professional librarian quit part way through the year. Do I then measure her contribution to staffing totals as 1/4 of a librarian? Or 5/12? The Devil is in the details, which means that there is something diabolical lurking in the white space around those neat rows of numbers.

What is especially troubling to my orderly soul is that we then construct empires out of aggregates of these numbers. "Peer comparison" is one of the benchmarks for how we're doing. It is always much easier to compare yourself to your peer when they are a compact, distant set of numbers, not a flesh and blood institution with crows feet and callused elbows and a host of other minor imperfections that jump out at you. I can say with great confidence that all the libraries in all the ATS schools reported total holdings of 49,280,000 volumes in the 2007-2008 ATS Factbook. (Don't believe me? You can double-check that fact -- I double-dog dare you.) The correlation between that number and the actual number of volumes in all of our libraries ... let's just say I hope that NASA doesn't depend on it to calculate the trajectory for the next Mars mission.

But, like many of my colleagues, I have turned a stony countenance toward those ambiguities, guesses, and WAGs and have now submitted my tidy spreadsheet of numbers to be laid quietly to rest in orderly rows with everyone else's numbers. In addition to being like laws and sausages, statistics are also like cemetaries. It's better not to dig up what lies beneath.

Room for Lots of Librarians in St. Louis

This is the lobby of the Millennium Hotel in St. Louis where the American Theological Library Association will hold the opening reception for their annual conference during June 17-20, 2009.

I'm in St. Louis right now meeting with the Education Committee and the Annual Conference Committee to plan what is shaping up to be an excellent conference for next summer. What follows is a brief pictorial preview of what everyone will be able to enjoy in June.

The conference will be in the Millennium Hotel:
with a great view of the Arch from the North Tower rooms:
One of the highlights of the conference will be our day on Concordia's beautiful campus when we will be able to enjoy seeing the Luther Tower with its 49-bell carillon:
Wartburg Commons:
Share in worship in the Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus:
And, of course, browse the books, art, and Reformation materials in the library:
A picture from inside the library:
Luther Tower reflected in the fountain outside the library:

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in St. Louis in June.

Many Returns from Hurricane Ike

I know that most of us in the geographic region of the country known as Chicagoland have little to complain about compared to those of you in Texas and other parts of the country that bore the brunt of Hurricane Ike's fury. But I did see in a weather map on Saturday evening that Ike had pushed bands of rain across the Midwest and even as far north and east as Buffalo, NY.

When I came into the library Monday morning, I was surprised to find that four boxes of books in my office had been soaked by a leak. I can't even blame this small-scale disaster on that venerable achilles-heel of libraries: our flat roof. Instead, we evidently had a strong enough west wind to push the heavy rain in around a window with cracked glazing. (Though our flat roof and clerestory also leaked as they usually do.) On the positive side, instead of being boxes of new books to be added to our collection, these were books that had been culled from donations to go toward our book sale.

At the moment, we're still drying out in the Chicago suburbs and laying on more sandbags while waiting for some of the area rivers to crest. I pray that other libraries damaged by Ike will recover quickly.

My Thoughts On Google Chrome (FWTW)

Since I have sometimes posted on things Googlish in this blog, I thought I would mention that my first experience with the beta version of Google's Chrome browser was less than ecstatic.

Until I tried Chrome, I had no idea how prevalent Macromedia's Adobe's Shockwave Flash is. Chrome definitely has a bug when it comes to the Flash plugin. I found blog postings where other people claimed that reinstalling Flash solved the problem for them, but that certainly did not work for me. On the positive side, every time Chrome put up an error message in response to the Flash bug saying that it would have to close, it never did close, and I could continue my browsing uninterrupted. I just couldn't see all the pretty, flashing pictures. Maybe that's a good thing.

I also did not experience the blazing speeds that some bloggers were talking about, especially for library-type applications like OPAC searching or pulling up result lists in WorldCat. I did find the option for the default phishing filter and turned it off, which noticeably improved speeds, but my perception was that it was still taking longer than either IE or FireFox to display results pages.

People have already started finding security flaws, and there was the EULA flap over the early version of Google's agreement that stated in section 11.1,

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

The kinder, gentler version of 11.1 now simply reads, "11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." (Remember "Don't be evil"?)

I also missed the ability to install my Dictionary.com toolbar that lets me lookup words on Dictionary.com easily plus a number of other standard browser amenities like decent bookmark management.

In short, I think Google Chrome has a long way to go yet, and I uninstalled it. (Kudos, Google, on the cute uninstall message--"Was it something we said?") I'm sure I'll be coming back for another look, though, once more of the rough edges have been knocked off. I wonder how long until the library vendors start listing Chrome as a supported browser?

And the Winner Is . . .

After having been gone on a lovely vacation in Colorado and after having unburied my desk at work, I am now prepared to declare the winner of the Longest Thesis Title Contest:

Congratulations to Eric Benoy from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for submitting the winning entry, weighing in at 289 characters (including spaces and punctuation), a Ph.D. thesis title from 1993:

An investigation of the roles of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, the Louisiana Baptist Convention, and the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in the planting of selected churches and missions in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods of New Orleans, 1950-1991

Look for this contest to reappear next summer when you, too, could have a chance to claim the coveted title, The Person Who Submitted The Longest Thesis Title On That Blog Thing.

(All contestents in this year's program have received honorable mentions and a no-expenses paid trip to Anywhere They Can Afford To Go. All decisions and awards depend on the arbitrary skills of the blogger to paste titles into Microsoft Word and hit <ALT><F> and <I> and are final. This contest is not endorsed by Microsoft® or by Bill Gates, who never wrote a thesis in the first place.)

Longest D.Min. Title Contest

It's that time of the year when we are working on processing the new D.Min. theses. A quick query of our catalog turned up one thesis title from 2001 that was 207 characters long:

Development of an educational program of Christian formation for the Baptist Church of Quintana, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico to deal with the racial and ethnic prejudice in the congregation and the local community

What's the longest thesis title in your library? To be sporting, I'll allow Ph.D. titles as well.

Best Wishes to William Patry

William Patry has announced the end of his Patry Copyright Blog.

For the past four years, William Patry has provided a well-written inside look into the messy world of copyright legislation. In an area where most of us are as much at sea as beginning Hebrew students are with BDB, Patry gave us intelligent landmarks by which to chart our course when trying to understand copyright. Anyone who has interacted with copyright law cannot help but appreciate the reasonableness of his postings even in areas where there are disagreements. His writings have given me hope that people can (and sometimes do) apply common sense to copyright laws.

Sadly enough, however, he cites as one of the main reasons for discontinuing his blog that the current state of copyright law is too depressing. It is hard not to agree with him. He writes, "Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners."

Copyright law affects education and especially affects libraries as we gain access to more digital resources. We will need more voices like William Patry's if we are to ensure the availability without prohibitive cost of the resources our students need.

What's Wrong With Students Today?

Today's online Chronicle Careers is an article by Thomas H. Benton entitled "On Stupidity". In it, he briefly reviews a spate of books warning of America's burgeoning anti-intellectualism. He then lists a number of complaints that come out of his own direct observations as an educator. He sees too many students who are:

• Primarily focused on their own emotions — on the primacy of their "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by evidence.
• Uncertain what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tending to use the most easily found sources uncritically.
• Convinced that no opinion is worth more than another: All views are equal.
• Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)
• Unable to follow or make a sustained argument.
• Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).
• Hostile to anything that is not directly relevant to their career goals, which are vaguely understood.
• Increasingly interested in the social and athletic above the academic, while "needing" to receive very high grades.
• Not really embarrassed at their lack of knowledge and skills.
• Certain that any academic failure is the fault of the professor rather than the student.

Among other things, he proposes,

"We need to reverse the customer-service mentality that goes hand-in-hand with the transformation of most college teaching into a part-time, transient occupation and the absence of any reliable assessment of course outcomes besides student evaluations."

I was struck by his recommendations, coming as they do from an undergraduate, university perspective, as they are similar to issues that we are discussing at our seminary. I spent three profitable days last week at a Higher Learning Commission workshop on making student learning assessment a core institutional strategy. Graduate theological education faces many of the same trends and challenges that Benton notes above.

I also increasingly feel the importance of one solution that he does not mention in his article: Libraries can play a significant role in addressing student learning barriers. To the extent that higher education today is trying to make (keep?) education a marketable commodity by side-lining traditional learning environments, it often does so by also diminishing the role of the library. Libraries are significant places of learning, and librarians are well-positioned to engage student interest in learning at that most critical stage of learning: research and discovery.

To misquote Shakespeare, "Stupidity, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere." Libraries are one place, though, where stupidity's light grows dim.

To ATLA: A Modest Proposal

I had an earlier posting proposing the creation of a digital repository for theological librarians. I have now discovered another reason why we should create such a repository: It would be a great way for ATLA to make some extra money.

According to The Chronicle, the American Psychological Association is going to start charging its members $2,500 per article to be deposited in the PubMed Central depository. "“The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university,” the policy says."

Interestingly enough, the link to the new policy now brings up only a brief notice: "This page is currently under review." Maybe charging members exorbitant fees for sharing information isn't such a great idea after all.

OPAC Disease?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the library: Many thanks to the students at Mary Gates Hall for demonstrating the presence of fecal coliform bacteria on the keyboards in the library and computer lab as reported in The Chronicle.

Yet another variant on The Name of the Rose -- don't lick that thumb after hitting the space bar!

In Short, We Need More Space

One of my college professors used to use a humorous speech called "A Speech For All Occasions". It began with the phrase, "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the meeting," and built from there to make the point, "In short, we need more funding." The rest of the speech was made from clichés and stock phrases cobbled together in a way that almost made sense.

I sometimes feel like my reports on the library could make use of that speech. Instead of funding in general, though, my plea usually boils down to a specific plea for space. I do not think I am the only librarian facing this issue.

I saw in the OCLC announcements that a new OCLC staff blog has been started: Metalogue. The July 2 post is titled, "Library Preservation: Managing the Collective Collection Over Time". In it, Janifer Gatenby summarizes what many of us already know -- publication of print items continues to expand at unprecedented rates. She mentions the staggering statistic that the British Library reports a growth in shelving of 12 kilometers--pardon me, make that "kilometres"--per year. As a result, more libraries are making use of off-site storage, creating a need for better metadata to assist patrons in selecting appropriate records when they cannot examine the physical items.

To put it bluntly, there has not been a "peace dividend" yet to the digital revolution, at least not for monographs. I am aware that many of our state universities have divested themselves of back runs of periodicals that are now available on JSTOR. For a theological library, there is the option of discarding back runs of journals digitized by ATLA, though there are still niggling difficulties caused by title-specific restrictions on the use of e-journal articles found in aggregator databases. Once you abandon ownership of the physical copy, you are solely dependent on the mercies of the publishers as to how your digital content may be used. For monographs, though, there is nothing in sight yet that is going to relieve us of the obligation to own paper texts that are not in the public domain. And the number of monographs to be acquired only increases each year.

In short, we need more space.

Good Libraries & Good Students

Having just returned from the better part of a week in beautiful Ottawa, Ontario at the annual American Theological Library Association Conference, I find myself re-energized for the daily work of being a theological librarian, serving as a steward for the collected resources of the theological disciplines. I was interested, then, to see the following report in The Chronicle this morning: "More Top Students Answer the Ministry's Call.

According to The Chronicle, from 2000 - 2007, the Lilly Endowment's Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation gave $176.2 million to 88 church-related colleges in order "to help students explore the relationship between faith and work, to encourage talented students to consider entering Christian ministry, and to prepare the faculty and staff members to help students think about work in new ways."

While The Chronicle does not provide statistical evidence of the Program's impact, it does offer anecdotal evidence from two of the institutions who participated. Russell K. Osgood, president of Grinnell College, states, "we have seen an uplift, not a huge increase, but an uplift, both in the quality and in the quantity of students who consider ministry and do it." And Hastings College, in Nebraska reported, "In 2001, the 1,100-student college had only one undergraduate majoring in religion . . . By 2007, that number had climbed to 42. In the same time period, the college saw 12 of its students go into seminaries."

Our own seminary benefits greatly from the charitable work of The Kern Family Foundation whose Kern Scholars Initiative funds the seminary education of students 27 years of age or younger with cumulative GPAs of 3.25 or more. Initiatives like Lilly's Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation and the Kern Scholars Initiative are designed to attract top students to consider full time ministry as their first career choice.

Which brings me back to the role of theological libraries in stewarding the collected resources of the theological disciplines. I am not trying to say that older or second-career students are not excellent scholars or are not interested in a life of learning. But I am saying that if our seminaries want to see programs like the ones mentioned above bear fruit, they need to invest in top faculties and excellent libraries. Organizations like the Lilly Endowment and the Kern Family Foundation believe these goals are worth significant investment; I believe our institutions, which benefit from these investments, should follow suit.

Information Commons: A New Concept?

For my final roundtable of the conference, I attended the Information Commons roundtable led by members of the Information Commons staff from Asbury Theological Seminary. Last year, quite a large group attended their presentation on the Information Commons model; this was a much smaller group interested in continuing the conversation about how Asbury has made the Information Commons model work for them.

Asbury established their Information Commons in 2003, but, due to faculty demand, they added a Faculty Information Commons (FIC) in 2004. The FIC is staffed with four people drawn from other parts of the library and information technology areas: one librarian, one person from I.T., one person from media services, and one person from ExL, the extended learning program using Moodle for online courses. The FIC supports around 50 full time faculty members plus many additional adjuncts, assisting them with online course development, providing media services, and training them in the use of software and media devices. The result has not only been greater collaboration with the faculty in teaching and learning, but a greater horizontal collaboration across library and information technology staff as well.

Jared Porter and Paul Tippey also shared a number of observations based on Transforming Library Service Through Information Commons, by D. Russell Bailey and Barbara Gunther Tierney. According to Bailey and Tierney, institutions that move from the traditional separation between Information Technology departments and the library to a shared Information Commons model go through four stages:

I. Adjustment level -- there may be a computer lab in the library, but its functions are separate or it is run by library staff.

II. Isolated change -- library computers include more productivity software, and there is some integration of staff functions across departments.

III. Far-Leading change -- the library and I.T. share in collaboration with faculty, and the boundaries of the library become functional rather than physical.

IV. Transformational change -- there is full integration of library and I.T. functions, and the resulting Information Commons is an active participant in the educational mission of the institution.

As institutions move through these four stages, the tendency is for service models to become less data-centric or collection-centric and to become more user-centric in both their accommodation for user needs and their presentation of I.C. services.

I have not read Bailey and Tierney's book, and listening to the Asbury staff, it is clear that the Asbury I.C. is a vital part of Asbury's educational program that is successfully meeting the needs of both faculty and students for both library and I.T. services. I do not, however, understand the assumptions behind Bailey and Tierney's four stages. It sounds to me like a false dichotomy between a poorly managed library and a well-managed one. Even before the advent of the Internet and I.T. departments, a library's mission was never defined by the walls of the library building. Librarians have an excellent track record of serving both local and distant information needs through interlibrary loan, consortial arrangements, and document delivery services. As is abundantly clear in the ATS standards, the library is and has been a vital part of the educational mission of the institution. Close collaboration between library staff and faculty in teaching and learning is the assumed norm, not something new that dropped down from heaven with the advent of the podcast.

To the extent that the I.C. model eliminates information silos and departmental turf battles, I think it is a wonderful model. One reason the Asbury I.C. model is as successful as it is is because they have also ensured the continued delivery of traditional library services. In addition to their cross-trained I.C. staff, they also have full time librarians who are available for reference and research assistance not provided by the front-lines workers. I hope someday to be able to visit the Asbury I.C. as it looks to me like it has been carefully thought out and creatively designed. I am reassured to hear that in the midst of their many technological and departmental transformations, they have also continued to offer the educational services that librarians have always offered even without the I.C. model.

People of the Book

The most thought-provoking seminar that I attended during the conference just happened to also take place on the last day of the conference. I am grateful to Anthony Elia from the JKM Library for his presentation, "Beyond Barthes and Chartier: The Theology of Books in the Digital Age". By interviewing seminary faculty members and researchers, Anthony uncovered some of the emotions and somatic connections (my phrase, not his) that people who do research in theology and the humanities have for that amalgam of cloth, glue, pressboard, paper, and ink called the book.

I cannot do full justice to everything Anthony had to say in a blog posting--you will have to wait for the annual Proceedings to come out in order to read his paper in full. I will summarize, though, the seven qualities that the responders to Anthony's questions value in books:

Tactility--the physical interaction between skin and book.

Proximity/Spatiality/Kinesthetics--you have to be present to appreciate a book; using a book grounds you physically.

Duration--maybe you could call this "boundedness". Books are linear (even if you cheat and read the last page first) with clearly marked beginnings and endings.

Sensorial aesthetics & sacral nature--the responders were impassioned on this point, even claiming that there was a sacred experience in imbibing a book equal to or transcending what they experienced in church.

Semiotics--the mere presence of books can communicate symbolically; academics tend to define themselves by their books.

Society; anthropology and sociology of books--books are objects that have literally formed our culture.

Identity/Extension/Embodiment--the anthropomorphism of books. As Anthony pointed out, most people do not feel distress when confronted with a broken computer, but a torn, damaged, or desecrated book can evoke strong emotions.

One response to all this is to conclude that if you ask a lot of loopy theology profs these kinds of questions, you get a lot of loopy answers. It would be interesting to know how faculty in science or medicine might answer these same questions. Or how I.T. professionals would answer these same questions. There is a great picture of someone hosing the mud out of servers after the 2004 flood at the University of Hawaii. I remember wincing when I first saw that picture.

Being a loopy theology person myself, though, I resonate with many of these attributes that other scholars appreciate in books. Particularly as a theological librarian, I am immersed in the printed word in a way that I am not immersed in anything else, especially since I have no television in my home. I do believe that human civilization predated books, and I believe that human civilization might outlast books, but I cannot escape a gut feeling that it will be a different kind of civilization should books go away. If there is something out there that is better than a book, I am all for it. But if it is a choice between a book-based culture or one that is solely formed by the evanescent images of mass media, I would echo the words of John Wesley, "O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!"

Some More On Libraries & Facebook

This morning's roundtable was about Facebook. Roger Loyd, Michelle Spomer, and Emily Knox each shared some of their experiments with Facebook and with creating Facebook Pages for their libraries. Michelle noted that Facebook has recently surpassed MySpace in terms of the total number of users, with Facebook having over 124 million users compared to over 115 million users on MySpace. MySpace, though, has the largest number of users within the United States--70 million compared to 35 million U.S. users on Facebook, which means that Facebook has a much wider global membership. Users 25-years and older are the fastest growing segment of Facebook users.

In the past year, Facebook has made it much more clear that organizations are intended to create Pages rather than Groups for their members who then become "fans" of the organization when they choose to join the Page. It is still not immediately clear, however, how to create a Page for your library--you have to click on the "Advertising" link at the very bottom of the screen and then click on the "Create Facebook Page" button on the right half of the screen. Note that you do not have to use your main or personal profile when creating a Page. Many people who create Pages for their organizations do so with a minimal or professional profile that they maintain separately from their personal profile.

Several applications were recommended for Facebook Pages:

• MediaFire for easily sharing files
• My HTML for embedding HTML in Facebook
• Bookshare Books for displaying new books or starting book discussion groups
• LibGuides Librarian for pushing library content to Facebook users (note: you have to pay to open a LibGuides account)
• Page Maps to provide a quick map to your library or for geographic-related displays
• TalkShoe for coordinating conference calls or informational podcasts

Many of us were also impressed with Emily's demonstration of Digsby.com to aggregate all her email, Facebook, and chat messages in one easy-to-manage application.

If you are a theological librarian interested in Facebook, please join the Theological Librarians Facebook group for ongoing updates and links to new resources.

ATLA in DSpace: A Digital Repository Proposal

I am grateful to Tracy Powell from the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University for initiating a roundtable discussion on establishing a digital repository for theological librarians. Her presentation took us through the basics of what a digital respository is and some of the advantages of DSpace as an open source program for establishing a digital respository. We then had a good discussion of whether there is a need for a digital repository for theological librarians.

One question that was raised was whether a wiki would be a better solution for our needs than a digital repository. It depends, of course, on what kinds of materials theological librarians would like to collect. Something like ALA's Professional Tips Wiki provides a fund of common wisdom on library issues. A wiki, though, is meant to be an evolving document reflecting the contributions of a community; a digital repository is meant to be both an archive and an access point for resources created by individuals and distributed to a community. In my opinion, we need more than just a wiki.

Another question that was raised was whether we could piggy-back on an existing repository. E-LIS (E-prints in Library and Information Science) and dLIST (Digital Library of Information Science and Technology) are two existing repositories dedicated to the needs of the library community. Again, speaking strictly for myself, I think the needs of theological librarians are distinct enough that we would be better served by our own repository.

One reason we would be better served by our own repository is the question of copyright. Institutional repositories are positioned to force an eventual change in publisher attitudes toward the ownership of copyright. Experiments like Harvard's open-access requirement for its faculty have the potential to return copyright ownership, if not to authors, at least to their academic institutions. By establishing our own digital repository for theological librarians, we would have control over how copyright is managed and what items are made publicly available and what items are located in a dark archive with restricted access. We would want to encourage contribution to the repository as widely as possible across our profession. Should a copyright conflict arise, say, due to the eventual publication of material that had previously been in pre-publication form in the repository, we would want the flexibility to honor member copyright obligations by controlling how that material is stored and accessed. We need our own digital repository if we are to have that level of flexibility.

Finally, we already have a number of collections that could provide a solid core on which to build a theological librarianship repository. The Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative, the annual Summary of Proceedings, Theology Cataloging Bulletin, and resources collected by Interest Groups like the Technical Services Interest Group could all be collocated and simultaneously searched in a repository. I do not know how our Publications Committee is going to provide access to the new Theological Librarianship journal, but a digital repository would also be an ideal way to preserve and provide access to this publication.

It remains for us to find an avenue to raise awareness about the benefits of a digital repository and construct a proposal that would be attractive to ATLA or to some other institution that would be interested in hosting this kind of a resource. I look forward to further communication from Tracy to all of us who attended the roundtable discussion, and I invite your responses to this posting if you are interested in seeing this project move forward.

News Flash 2: EBSCO/ATLA Digital Archives

It was announced at this morning's Town Meeting that EBSCO is partnering with ATLA to provide a digital archives collection. This announcement has also been released through various online forums. From the June 27 Religion News Service release:

"EBSCO has partnered with American Theological Library Association (ATLA) to provide new collections of historical monographs and serials in digital format. ATLA Historical Monographs Collection: 19th Century, ATLA Historical Monographs Collection: Early 20th Century and ATLA Historical Serials Collection will consist of digital versions of rare and historical primary sources.

The monograph collections will contain more than 29,000 monographs covering religion and theology. The majority of the monographs date from 1850 through 1923 with the earliest monograph from 1322. The monograph collections are estimated to include 7.5 million pages of content. The historical serials collection will contain more than 1,200 serials from the early 19th Century to the early 20th Century and are estimated to include 5.4 million pages of content."

Details of pricing still have to be finalized. In audience responses to this announcement, it was requested that EBSCO take into consideration that many libraries have already purchased this entire collection in microform. These libraries should receive a price reduction if they purchase it again in digital format. To quote Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black, "So now I gotta buy the White Album again?" EBSCO hopes that the first parts of the new digital collection will become available early in 2009.

News Flash 1: ATLA Involvement in ATS Revisions

Dennis Norlin reported this morning that ATS announced at its recent biennial meeting that it is beginning a 4-year review process to revise the accreditation standards. ATS reported several trends that are reshaping theological education:

• 2007 saw a decrease in the total number of M.Div. degrees awarded across the country.
  
  
• The megachurch phenomenon is increasingly changing the path through which many people enter full time church ministry. Internal promotion of volunteer staff within megachurches is replacing traditional avenues of pursuing theological education before pursuing full time ministry.
  
  
• Seminaries are evolving new models of organization and educational delivery that overturn traditional categories. Dennis cited the example of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary which offers simultaneous video streaming of courses to two other campuses while a class is being taught in a third location. Under current standards, only courses at the location with the professor present qualify to meet residency requirements.

To address these kinds of changes, ATS has formed a commission to review and revise the accreditation standards. It is good news for theological libraries that two of ATLA's members will be involved in different aspects of the review. Melody Mazuk from Palmer Theological Seminary and Pat Graham from the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University will represent the concerns of librarians and keep ATLA abreast of the revision process.

Teaching, Learning, & Faculty Collaboration

Most of my time during the first day of the conference was focused on issues surrounding library involvement in teaching and learning. (Though there was the ever highly stimulating ATLA business meeting led with decorum and aplomb by Martha Lund Smalley and distinguished members of the ATLA staff.)

Paul Myhre from the Wabash Center conducted a juiced-up roundtable on teaching and learning that took us through about two days' worth of Wabash seminar-style discussion in just one hour. (And we even got chocolates for attending!) Paul began by shamelessly flattering us, telling us all the wonderful things about theological librarians that we have so much difficulty communicating to our administrators. Then he split us into groups and took us through a series of reflective questions on teaching and learning that forced us to critically examine our assumptions about our roles as librarians. Some tidbits of collective wisdom that floated to the surface of our frenetic thinking:

• Librarians should sit in on classes to observe teaching
• Even when rebuffed, we should patiently persist in seeking opportunities to collaborate in teaching and learning
• Even when it is out of character for us, we should cultivate our inner extroverts
• Make opportunities to discuss course content and syllabi with faculty
• Invest the time necessary to build a relationship of trust with faculty
• Provide faculty with free beer/coffee/chocolates
• Actively volunteer to teach in the classroom; begin with the assumption that faculty welcome our involvement

Two more books that I want to track down and add to our collection:

Assessment & Learning: The ICE Approach by Young & Wilson

Library Assessment in Higher Education by Joseph Matthews

Then, in the afternoon, I took part in the first-ever meeting of the newly formed Teaching and Learning Interest Group (TALIG). There was discussion of how to pronounce the acronym -- with a short "a" or a long "a"? (Kudos to Paul Myhre for suggesting the Brit-sounding pronunciation, "talley-gee".) The by-laws were approved, and the steering committee was elected. We then spent the rest of the meeting brain-storming ways that TALIG can encourage librarian involvement in teaching and learning. We left the steering committee with quite a list. It will be interesting to see what they choose to tackle first.