I’m not sure how I missed this yesterday, but the American Historical Association blog announced that a number of titles in the Gutenberg-e series (learn more about the Gutenberg-e prize/series) were now available open access via the Gutenberg-e Publications page:

The electronic monographs published by Columbia University Press in the Gutenberg-e Project are now available in an open-access form through the University’s Libraries, and are also being made available through ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB). By taking this new step, we will continue the project’s ongoing experiment with different forms of electronic publication, and also hope to demonstrate whether open-access publications will garner greater use and more citations from students and scholars.

These are really nice online books (check out Tonio Andrade’s How Taiwan Became Chinese, for example) and are also examples of excellent historical scholarship. I would encourage librarians to catalog these titles so that students and faculty at your institution can access them via your OPAC (if you are reading this and are not a librarian, please contact your librarian and ask that these titles be added to the catalog).

Kudos to AHA and to Columbia University for making this happen (thanks also to the financial support provided by the Mellon Foundation). It’s nice to see history’s professional organization continuing their support for open access to historical scholarship.

[more scribblings]

In the “old days,” bibliography (of the enumerative kind) was important because of scarcity: researchers needed to know where things were because it was difficult to find things (articles, books, whatever). Nowadays, there’s not really information scarcity to the same degree? There’s too much information, so historians just need to know what’s really good/important. Thus, a different kind of bibliography is necessary – more things like the AHA Guide to Historical Literature (which is now getting a bit too old): an annotated list of the most important scholarship. Citation indexes become more important, as do review essays (doing cited reference searches and finding review essays need to become more central to advanced library instruction). Using wikis to create online, collaborative guides to historical literature (e.g., Mason Historiographiki). This is something I’ve advocated for before.

[This will be a series of very loosely connected ideas because I don't have time to "work them up" right now, but I don't want to forget too many of my thoughts (I've already misplaced a few ideas about this from last night)]

Sometimes, librarians wonder how academics convey information to each other and often do things like study the citation patterns in journal articles to get a glimpse into an exotic world (librarians do “ethnographic” studies as well – though while librarians often put students into the “savage slot,” I’m not sure that academics are seen as savages in the same way. I think it’s more that librarians see academics as The Mysterious Other.). Luckily for librarians, there is now this thing called the Internet where academics leave traces of their scholarly communication, thus allowing librarians to observe academics “in the field,” as it were.

Here’s Mark Grimsley (the author behind the most excellent Blog Them Out of the Stone Age) describing how he conceptualizes a new “information need” (to use the librarian lingo):

When I think about how to go about it, my first instinct is to turn the issue around: What approach would best assist me if I were trying to learn a subject area in which I had no graduate training? This has actually happened more than once, and it’s invariably been a source of some anxiety. What is the cognitive landscape? Do I understand the main conceptual frameworks that define the area? Am I finding the best books and articles on the subject? Are there opportunities and/or mine fields of which I’m unaware? All these questions occur to me well before the crucial one: just how exactly will a knowledge of field X assist me in my own professional work?

These questions help provide a framework for understanding the information needs of graduate students as well, and I think are interesting because they can be a way of conceptualizing how librarians fit into the research cycle of historians. I don’t think many historians would find Grimsley’s questions foreign; this sounds a bit like how anyone trying to learn the field would go about it.

But then how does an historian go about answering these questions? Let’s take a look at the context for Grimsley’s questions above: he’s responding to another historian (Rebecca Goetz) who wants to know how better to integrate military history into her teaching (“Military History 101“). Grimsley doesn’t respond with “Look it up!” Instead he offers suggestions and more generally shares his expertise. While I don’t want to make this exchange into a model of “how historians do things,” it is productive to note the following:

**The learning process has a social element: Goetz remarks that she’d rather learn in a seminar setting; this whole exchange started because Goetz asked a recognized expert in the field how she might learn more about military history.
**While this exchange was facilitated by a blog, I don’t think one can assume that social software is what makes this kind of exchange possible; my guess is that, generally, the difference that social software makes is in making this kind of exchange more explicit (visible) and easier/faster (it facilitates); my own experience tells me that this sort of conversation happens all of the time. I recognize that I may be underselling the role of technology in this, but back in the day when things were sent in the mail and I was still using a typewriter, there were exchanges like this in classrooms, over the phone, via post, and at conferences.
**How useful, given this exchange and Grimsley’s enumeration of his own learning process, are library catalogs or library databases as they exist right now? That is, if we have a hypothetical researcher who wants to integrate military history into his or her “knowledge base” (to use the information literacy term), are the resources we offer the best way to resolve this kind of information need?
**Would librarians be more useful if we had expertise in subject areas beyond “search and discovery”?

A follow-up to the previous post:  if librarians are having a hard time keeping up with the literature in their field (and not reading blogs either), what about some kind of monthly periodical that presented summaries of the literature?  Maybe not summaries as much as “hot topics.”  The magazine (or whatever it would be) could contain columns that go over both online and print content.  There’s too much stuff going on for one person to summarize (though Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights comes close to what I have in mind), but a group of librarians could work together to provide a very useful survey of professional developments.  The magazine would of course be open access.  Anyone interested?

Two of my colleagues are writing up an article on how librarians keep up with the field. Their survey notes that 47% of their respondents do not read blogs at all (303 librarians) and that 82% of respondents (527 librarians) read fewer than 5 blogs (that category includes librarians who do not read blogs).  I am surprised that blogs have not become more prevalent among librarians both for keeping up with literature as well as disseminating our scholarly/professional wares.  Blogs allow librarians to discuss issues and network with colleagues from around the world as well as around one’s workplace.  Furthermore, it seems to me that blogs are the perfect vehicle for getting the word out about research in progress, successful projects, or new ways of organizing library instruction.  These new ideas can be discussed with blogs in ways that publishing an article in one of our magazines or journals cannot.  There is greater access and much more immediacy with library blogs, to the point that I would rather publish to a blog than in a journal – and I’m sure there are others who may feel this way too.  An excellent example of the discussions that online articles/essays can generate is the new blog InfoTangle.  A librarian at Columbia U. posted an article about folksonomies to this blog and in a few days, she was receiving comments to her post as well as comments at other blogs about her article.  In Bloglines alone, there are now 45 people subscribed to this blog’s feed; not a massive community, but a good reflection of a base of interested librarians who will be reading this blog, passing along a link to the article to colleagues, and generally spreading the word.  That’s a powerful model of scholarly communication and one in which more librarians should participate.