ICS Students & Libraries Bill Tomlinson Associate Professor Department of Informatics Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences UC Irvine ALA June 25, 2012 Anaheim, CA

Disclaimer I am not a librarian, nor do I do research involving libraries. Some/all of the topics of this talk may already be completely obvious to you. If so, I apologize, and you have my permission to doze off.

Outline Value of Libraries Changing Times What Students Want Potential Projects Collapse Informatics

Value of Libraries: To Students Locus of information access Course reserves Place to study Etc.

Value of Libraries: To Society David Rosenthal, Stanford University Libraries – Distributed knowledge preservation system – No single point of failure – The danger of Google Books

Changing Times: 21 st Century Skills Digital literacy From scarcity to abundance: search is of growing importance

Changing Times: Evaluating Information Judge Carter example

Changing Times: Research Requirements NSF data management plans Libraries hosting datasets

Changing Times: Sources of Information Undergraduates: Wikipedia Graduate students: Wikipedia, Google Scholar Faculty: Wikipedia, Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library, etc.

Changing Times: Quality of Wikipedia As good as Britannica (Nature, 2005), and far more comprehensive (3.9M vs. 65K)

What Students Want 62 students in undergraduate “Social Analysis of Computerization” course. 50 minutes of discussion/questionnaires. Note: I have questionnaires with me if you’d like to look at them.

What Students Want: A Sampling More knowledge about real world – how to get internships Remote (and ongoing) access Knowledge of how to communicate across disciplines Make everything searchable Things get outdated fast – stay current Centralize class information Concierge Librarian – help organize one’s own resources Support Wikipedia More collaborative data – crowdsourcing More reasons to go to the physical building – like a coffee shop without coffee (only 3-4/62 work in library on regular basis) Combine career center and library Be as awesome as Stackoverflow Integration with mobile tech Reference management (Zotero/Mendeley)

Potential Projects Extend Wikipedia and Google Scholar for students – Draw attention to recent changes to Wikipedia Natalie Jeremijenko’s How Stuff Is Made assignment – ever bolder font – Augment Google Scholar – if it’s the place they’re going to look, make sure it’s as good as it can be.

Large-Scale Projects Work broadly with other universities and/or encourage open source projects to do the work.

Project Aaugh! Six Silberman Fix the problem of someone you know having a library book you want.

Potential Assignment Each student finds a piece of information (journal paper, dataset, etc.) that is not accessible via Google Scholar. Students write descriptions of easiest way to find their pieces of information. Students exchange descriptions, and track each others’ findings.

(Part of) My Research: Collapse Informatics Build sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity. Maintain quality of life in declining standard of living.

Peak Information Peak oil -> Peak computing -> Peak information What will libraries and universities be like in a condition of diminishing information access? Google is neat, but it’s only been around since Libraries have been around since 2600BC. I know which ones I trust to keep information available. :)

Short Story Future Librarians – Keepers of PDFs – Transcribers of e-books – Selectors of most relevant information of our time Like many science fiction authors, I have a setting, but no plot yet. :)

Conclusion Embrace and improve the new technologies current generations use, but don’t lose the books!

Thank You!