Elsewhere in the blogosphere, and on a somewhat related note, The Little Professor and Undine (of Not of General Interest) point out a flaw in James McWilliams’s argument that universities would be justified in raising the tenure bar even higher, since, in his opinion, today’s technology actually makes conducting research so much easier than it was in the past (take that, young turks!). Although Undine admits that it’s certainly “easier to search for things electronically than to lug a stack of index cards to the long tables of reference books,” she rightly notes that many professors don’t have access to the kind of fabulous electronic databases McWilliams raves about (in fact, McWilliams got access to the historical database he describes through a friend at an Ivy League institution, since his own university can’t afford to subscribe to it): 

“These resources aren’t free and available to everyone, and access to them shouldn’t depend on being a faculty member at Moneybag$ University or on having an obliging and well-connected friend who doesn’t mind lending an access code.”

So much for that idea.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

British Library wants to archive the UK web, creating an invaluable national treasure trove of porn, celebrity trivia gossip and Daily Mail comments. But it admits it can’t put a figure on the project - which looks like becoming a huge, open-ended commitment for the taxpayer.

Today the Library stepped up the pressure for the law to be changed, giving copyright libraries to create copies of web material for research purposes of other copyright holders material. Five statutory libraries already have permission to make printed material available. Now the British Library says it wants the Web too.

» via The Register

I was interested in writing an academic piece on the general perception of weeds in early America. To undertake this research, I accessed an on-line database of several hundred thousand documents from roughly 1640-1850. (Note: my university cannot afford this particular database, so I’ve gained access through the account of a close friend who works at an institution with ivy on the walls.) Within an hour, I‘d found and printed out more than 74 documents (out of 187 found) with references to “weeds”—my chosen search term. Making matters even more convenient, the term was highlighted, thus obviating the need for me to read the full text.

Given the range of documents that came up, it’s safe to say that—had this powerhouse of a search engine not done the digging for me—it would have taken decades for me to find these obscure references to weeds, most of which are buried in documents living in a vault under some research library in Boston or Philadelphia (I live in Texas).

This experience is becoming increasingly common for those of us who work in the humanities and social sciences. And while I think there are many downsides to relying too heavily, or exclusively, on this form of research, there’s no doubt that it allows the engaged scholar to pursue questions in a much more streamlined (and inexpensive) manner. Which brings me to my question—one that I ask with some trepidation in light of the recent shootings at a University of Alabama faculty meeting: Should publishing requirements for tenure go up for scholars in the humanities and social sciences?

» via Freakonomics

markswartz:

Great post featuring educational cartoons on critical thinking, peer reviewed articles and scholarly vs. popular periodicals (thanks Meg!).

The study has involved 127 universities over 15 months, with questionnaires at the beginning and end. Nicholas and his colleagues have been studying logs of user behaviour over time, and users were asked in focus groups why they used the e-books in the ways that they did.

In the first 14 months there were seven million page views and half a million sessions. Typical sessions included eight to nine pages and lasted 17 minutes. ‘Users consume the contents of e-textbooks in small chunks but then I don’t think readers ever read whole books of this sort in one session,’ said Nicholas. A quarter of usage is outside the hours of 8am to 6pm. Students access e-books at 3am or 4am just like they do with e-journals. However, Nicholas cautioned against assuming that usage of e-books would have exactly the same pattern as for journals.

» via Research Information » via TeleRead

Heaven forbid that we would reallocate significant amounts of time and money from acquiring and managing access to information toward practices that would actually liberate knowledge for all.

Our values say people should have access to information. Our practices support that access in ways that we know are dysfunctional and limiting. We try to do “everything plus,” but some things are sacrosanct, so the solutions are underfunded, regardless of what we believe are best practices and what practices are quite thoroughly broken.

Such solutions are doomed to slow starvation from the moment they are born. We value access to information, but we only assign value to information that costs money. This is nuts!

» via Library Journal