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Arizona Convocation 2002 Sunday Evening Panel
The following is a transcription of informal remarks made by panelists
at the Convocation.
GladysAnn Wells
Wells is the Arizona State Librarian and Director of the Arizona
State Library, Archives, and Public Records.
This evening we're going to talk about information. And we're going
to talk about where four professionals who've been kind enough to join
us get it, how they find it, who they talk to.
Each of these people has in some way distinguished themselves by the
way they think, what they bring to all of us, the way they look at problems.
I was very thrilled that I proffered a couple of invitations, and Richard
a couple of invitations, and everyone said yes. Every one then struggled
to figure out what it was that I wanted. We had a wonderful discussion
before dinner about information; about how they get it for their professional
lives and for their lives as a whole. I'm going to ask to introduce themselves
in terms of what they do and to give us a little bit of an idea of how
they find information.
I want all of us to think very much about how the way we work is changing.
It's changing because of the laws of our nation, because of the laws
of technology, and because of the expectations of all our user groups.
Ubiquitous, 24/7 is here, and looking at all of us. And we're not really
as prepared for it as we'd like to be. When we got through discussing
things before dinner, one of the panelists asked me, “How are we training
librarians for this?” And Brooke Sheldon of the Library School is in
the audience tonight.
Neal Lester
Lester is a professor at Arizona State University.
I was perhaps the most reluctant panelist to agree to participate because
I've never consciously stopped to think about how I gather information.
Toward responding to this task, I electronically surveyed university
students and colleagues to gauge how we, as a group, get information.
I teach African American literature and cultural studies in the Department
of English at ASU. I approached this task from three perspectives: as
a professor/instructor, as a researcher, and as a parent of two young
researchers just beginning the research venture. In many ways, it's exciting
to see how much information we can get so quickly and easily, but it's
also quite scary. As I witness my children and my students getting information,
I become even more concerned about how and where we get information.
I was very interested in emailing students and colleagues to see what
they would do with a question like, "Where do you go for information?" They
expectedly responded, "What kind of information? If I wanted this kind
of information I'd go one place; if I wanted that kind of information
I'd go that place." What came through in their responses is that people
stopped for a moment to start to think about various sources of information.
And of course, one of the top responses was the Internet. It was interesting
to see that people were very concerned and excited about Internet research,
but they were also very uneasy about trusting all the information we
can get so easily and readily. So one of the things that I tried to sort
of remind myself of is, To what extent am I still suspicious of Internet
information and research? As a publisher/as a researcher, I recently
published my first piece online very reluctantly until I had responses
from people who were actually reading my work. It made me realize that
perhaps I was being a little too old-fashioned by thinking that I could
only publish in something that could be touched and not necessarily read
from the screen. It's very satisfying to get responses -- not always
positive responses -- from people who are actually reading my work and
who bother to quickly tell me "I read your work and this is what I think
about it." I rarely get that when I publish books, when I publish in
journals.
What I don't want to do in making these sort of rambling comments is
to position electronic information versus book information, or libraries
versus books. That's what some of my students sometimes think when they
come to my classes; they somehow want to think research is only the Internet.
And one of the things that scares me about teaching students who think
that way is that I'm wondering if we are as instructors are adequately
preparing students to be skeptical about that kind of literacy. One of
the things I try to raise or question with my students and to some extent
colleagues, "How can we determine how accurate and authentic that quick,
overwhelming information is?" That also raises the question with books
and other print resources, too.
I don't necessarily come here with answers, but with other questions
that have come out of this task. When it comes to my children who are
ten and twelve, who are given a research task, they immediately think
that going to sit at the computer is all they have to do. And it scares
me because I wonder if they think that's the only step in the research
process. Already, just in research that my son has done, he has found
contradicting information from various web sites because anybody and
everybody can put a web site up. It raises the question of how we determine
what's real and what's Memorex. How do we determine the extent to which
we are educating ourselves on how to become skeptics of literacy?
Even when we start putting the Internet over in a corner by itself,
there are still very conventional sources that I and colleagues and students
still go to. I go to radio, I listen to hip hop, and I listen to NPR.
I go to television. I go to newspapers. I go to magazines. I go to the
things that we've always gone to. But ultimately, I think, the response
from a lot of students and colleagues came down to going to other people.
No matter how much information we can get, there's something about talking
to another individual about your research or your need for information
that goes beyond what we can click on and sight-scan. That's the single
answer I conclude from the assignment, Yes, Internet, television, radio,
newspapers, magazines are fine. But ultimately there has to be some person
that can somehow help us get information more easily and more credibly.
A colleague wrote an article called "Skepticism: A Literacy for Our
Time," which questions all this information that can be quite overwhelming
and quite satisfying and quite quick. In the end of this piece, she questions
the extent to which we are educating ourselves and our students to be
skeptics. She says, "While we do not advocate that teachers set out to
make students paranoid or cynical, we hope that teachers can work with
students to seek the truth in the Persian proverb, 'Doubt is the key
to all knowledge.' An idea, also expressed by Oscar Wilde in one of his
aphorisms, "Skepticism is the beginning of faith." I suppose the bottom
line of this little rambling is that this task has forced me not to come
up with answers as to how and where get information, but has forced to
look more closely at what I use and how I use it and how I determine
what's usable or not.
Mark Söderstrom
Söderstrom is a canine neurosurgeon.
I faced the same problem of not knowing where to start. What I ended
up doing was thinking about what I need information for, especially on
a professional basis. Basically, I'm a veterinary surgeon. I boiled this
down to three different areas I need to have information for.
The first was specific patients. If I have a patient who's not doing
well or has an odd problem or something has not been reported or something
I don't know about, then I need to be able to get that information about
that patient very quickly. The other area I need to grab information
is for research. We do have interns in our hospital. As we teach them,
we encourage them to write papers and scientific manuscripts. Gathering
a large amount of information for this purpose is also very important.
Finally, just keeping up and broadening my own horizons, both in the
veterinary field and in human medical field; just keeping up with current
literature.
The major sources are primarily journals. Journal articles are going
to be much more specific and much more scientific. They'll help me a
lot more than something general. Textbooks are also very useful, but
they're more useful for something that I don't have a basic understanding
of. They're too broad for the specific patient in many instances. But
they're very good for expanding horizons. Online sources are another
area I go to. Finally, libraries. Libraries are in many ways a last resort,
simply because of timing.
Basically in veterinary medicine there are four main journals that are
very easy to subscribe to, and they're easy to keep up with. Keeping
up with current literature is very simple from that standpoint. But trying
to get through the human literature is much more daunting. There are
twenty different journals on neurosurgery alone; and neurosurgery isn't
the only topic I read about. That becomes more difficult. I end up selecting
a journal that I know is very reputable and covers a breadth of topics
that I'm specifically interested in. For example, I subscribe to the
Journal of Neurosurgery. One of my colleagues subscribes
to the Surgical and Oncology Clinics, because that's his
specific area of interest. That allows us to keep pace with the research
being done in humans as well as animal models, and to get a good cross
section without having a thousand journals to read.
There are a number of periodicals that are review periodicals. We subscribe
to one of those.
As far as textbooks, a personal library is the major area that we're
able to have textbooks. Most public libraries do not have the types of
textbooks we're interested in. Even the university libraries, their medical
libraries don't have a good representation of all the types of textbooks
we're interested in. ASU has a very good library, but some of the specific
textbooks just aren't there because they don't have a specific focus
on medicine.
As far as online sources, there are a couple of online medical journals
that are quite helpful, but unfortunately those are few and far between.
They're also very young; their articles aren't quite as good as more
prestigious journals which aren't online. The place I use online journals
the most is in literature review. If I have a question about a particular
topic, I punch something in on Medline. I pull up a couple hundred articles,
and I can review the abstracts and can decide which articles I actually
want to go and get. The other thing about being online is that you can
order articles online. Being in private practice away from a medical
library, that seems on the surface a very good way to go. For example,
I pulled up 38 articles for a paper I would like to write. I thought
about ordering them. Keep in mind this is my preliminary literature review
that's going to be refined and probably doubled or tripled by the time
it's done. When I went to look into ordering these articles, it was about
$11 an article. But the copyright costs varied from thirty cents to $15.75.
The highest was in a veterinary journal; I was a little surprised to
see that. It rapidly became cost prohibitive to order them online. It's
much more effective to perform my search and then make a road trip to
Tucson or call a friend at a university.
As far as the libraries that are available to us, there are a few sources
I wouldn't have normally thought about. But, deep in the bowls of most
hospitals there's a small library. You have to search for them. It took
me thirty minutes to find the library in St. Joe's, and I knew where
it was. It's back behind a janitor's closet, actually. It's a very good
library for any topic especially involving neurology. And, as you get
to know the various hospitals, you can begin to realize that some specialize
in certain areas. Phoenix Children's Hospital, anything pediatric. St.
Joe's and Barrows, obviously neurology. VA Center; large number of respiratory
patients, very good respiratory holdings. Just by learning what types
of patients each hospital sees, you're able to pick which hospital you
want to run down to.
The downside to running to human hospitals is that they're truly private
libraries. Access is a bit restricted. The other difficulty is that they
don't have user friendly hours; they're nine to five operations. It takes
a bit of planning to make that work for you.
Finally, a road trip to Tucson to visit the closest medical library
is also another good source.
When I go to get information for a specific patient, I end up consulting
my own personal library, my own personal journals and those of my colleagues
that are there at the clinic. If that fails, I perform a Medline search,
and then I call a friend at a University, have them make a trip to the
library and fax me a copy of the article I need. I need it very quickly
for that patient. I can't wait a week to make a trip to Tucson or make
it down to the hospital libraries during working hours. That works very
well for a specific patient because often it's a specific article that
I'll need to see.
If I'm going to try and get information on a research topic, the most
effective thing is to plan ahead, perform my literature review, and make
a road trip. Otherwise I wind up bouncing around each different hospital
in Phoenix or including ASU to get the articles I need. Or I call up
a friend and wind up having them spend an entire Saturday in the library
copying articles. That burns up favors pretty quickly.
As far as general literature review and improving my breadth of knowledge
and keeping up with information that's out there, the basic journals
that cover a breadth of topics is a good place to start. When you do
make that road trip, you spend the day in the library perusing the shelves.
Picking up the textbooks and journals on the shelves, looking through
the catalogs and indexes to the journals picking out articles and reading
them.
Clay Thompson
Thompson is a reporter for the Arizona Republic and
author of the paper's Valley 101 column.
I write a column seven days a week for the Arizona Republic,
which is the Phoenix newspaper. I should explain to you the nature of
the column. It started out as a column to answer questions that newcomers
to the Valley would have about the area. Why are garages so big? Why
do some older houses have stones on the roof? One of my favorites just
said, What's that smell? It is, since then, either evolved or degenerated,
depending on how you look at it, into just a general question thing.
People send me questions, odd things that they've always wondered about,
and I try to find the answer.
I also have to tell you I love libraries. I am at the Central branch
library once or twice a week, but for my own pleasure. In terms of gathering
information for my column, I rely almost entirely on the Internet. I'd
be dead without Google. I do use the Archives, especially with place
name questions. I get a lot of questions, Where did such and such a name
come from? And the people at the Archives are very helpful for that.
I do use individual sources for specific questions. Especially medical
questions, physics questions, architecture questions. I have people I
go to for that. Because either I don't understand the answer I find on
the Internet, or it's too esoteric for me to find on the Internet.
In terms of just going out and gathering information, I could not do
the column and I could not do it seven days a week without going to the
Internet. The danger is as the other two gentleman pointed out, there's
a lot of stuff out there that isn't true. Or that you don't know if it's
true or not. The week that GladysAnn first approached me about appearing
here tonight, I got a question from someone who said, Is it true that
the quack of a duck -- a duck's quack -- doesn't echo? [laughter] Come
on, it pays the bills, folks. And I went on the Internet, and within
a matter of minutes I found twenty five, thirty sites that said that
a duck's quack does not echo. And this, of course, is hooey. Anyone knows
there's no reason a duck's quack wouldn't echo. So, in the same sense
that these other two gentleman do, I approach the information I find
on the Internet with the same sort of skepticism that any reporter approaches
any source. I don't have a Persian proverb or Oscar Wilde, but one of
the first things you learn as a reporter, If your mother says she loves
you, check it out.
And so, the Internet is a wonderful tool. I couldn't do my job without
it. It's really revolutionized the way newspapers gather information.
But you get back to the same basic you always had as a reporter: approach
everything with skepticism, double check it, and check your sources,
and it all comes down to that.
George Paul
Paul is a lawyer with Lewis & Roca.
That's going to be a tough act to follow. I'm going to have to speak
about more mundane things. I'm a lawyer. What I do for a living is not
only test what people assert, but try to attack it and test it in the
most severe way possible. There are various types of evidence that people
present in front of tribunals -- courts -- which can be such courts involved
in resolving individual disputes or the US Congress sitting as a giant
court trying to figure out what to do with certain things like certain
professions that have gone awry. You can either listen to a person talk,
which is called live testimony; and then the cross-examiner comes in
and tests the authenticity and the sincerity of the person's testimony
through skillful questioning. It's very effective, it's an art. You're
really trying to get at, Are they really communicating what they're saying?
Are they saying the truth?
There's another type of evidence called real evidence. There are two
types of real evidence. It could be something like this [holds up a box],
a physical object, or a gun, or the poison, or the money, or the drugs,
or whatever. Or, by far the most overwhelming type of real evidence in
courts in society, in education, in all our institutions is something
else. It's called information. And that's what runs our industrial world.
That's what runs our culture. It's information. We package it through
human language.
So what courts do is they're often involved in battles of information.
You have what's called an informational record. A memo. An email. A contract.
A letter. I purchased a thousand widgets. No, you purchased ten thousand
widgets. You told me to shred the files. No I didn't. All these things
are communications of information.
A giant tsunami of social change is happening right now. It's about
10,000 feet high. But no one's really noticed it. It's sort of invisible,
but I can guarantee you that the lawyers of the United States -- of which
there are approximately a million -- almost none of them have noticed
it. But very rapidly in the last fifteen or twenty years, we've morphed
or warped or evolved from a society that is overwhelmingly stored its
informational records in analog format -- like that paper stuff invented
several thousand years ago -- or magnetic tape, which is an analog type
format, or these little molecules of silver on this thing called film
emulsion, another type of analog format. Film for video cameras, like
the Zapruder format. All these things are analog technology; that's how
we used to store information.
Guess what. Now, all of a sudden, all of our society's information records
are being stored in the digital domain. This is something that's going
to be relevant to everybody. Everybody -- philosophers, lawmakers, archivists,
librarians, educators -- and those people that most people detest but
everybody realizes your really need them, lawyers, who you hire when
you really want to find out what really happened because everybody's
lying -- and you have to get at the real truth, and Is this a real document?,
and Is it really authentic?
So what's the big deal about digital information? When you think about
it, it's nothing but a little bit. Or a plus or a minus. Reduced down
to its fundamental level, it's nothing but an abstraction, and it exists
in a medium that can be seamlessly edited. Like there's this stuff --
they didn't have it when I went to law school -- it's called word processing.
And it's great. Because you can take this record, this electronic file,
and you can change the words and then you can print it out, and it looks
beautiful. There's no white out, there's no artifact of your change.
If any of you are photographers, you know if you digitize film or a photographic
file, you can erase a person or put a new person in, or make someone
look a little better than they were, or take the scotch glass off the
table, or perhaps change the time on the clock. Or maybe change the license
plate on the car, seamlessly, very, very easily. Very, very cheaply.
It's on millions and millions and millions of computers. It's widespread
throughout society. There are now digital cameras. Well ten years ago,
they were $10,000; now they're $250. All the insurance agents are going
around with digital cameras created digital files that can be seamlessly
edited with a photo editing equipment.
Now if you saw someone get assassinated in the videotape you immediately
go, Well I wonder if they just phonied that up? Because you can do it
now so real that it's hard to know what's true and what's not. So what
we have is really a crisis of authenticity in our records that society
uses to know what is true and what is not. And the business world in
particular accumulating huge amounts of digital files. Hard drives are
getting cheaper and cheaper. Everything's being stored in digital format.
What normally happens is the litigators, the trial lawyers, don't come
onto the situation till three, four, five, eight years later when the
train is terribly wrecked and they're trying to figure out what happened,
and then they become archaeologists. What's true? Which document is which?
Well, gee, you've been sending Word documents back and forth, and you'll
never know what is the final contract. And actually, unless you've stored
the computer in a special locker, you may not even be able to read the
file.
So the bottom line is, there is this enormous sea change in the most
fundamental thing that our society has, and that is how do we record
truth? How do we record information? And How do we test it? This is a
preliminary type of brainstorming, but there now certain technologies
that are being developed that allow you to prove that every single bit
of that digital file is exactly the same with mathematical certainty,
it's called public key infrastructure technology, and I was on an international
committee that wrote the legal background to allow people to engage in
international electronic commerce securely and with authenticity. Unless
you've taken pictures with a forensics camera, how are you going to know
that's how it really looked? You could take it, change it in the computer,
take it down to the camera store, say “I want you to make a negative
out of this,” drop it in the dust, scratch it up, say “Make a print out
of this negative.” Scientifically, there's no way to know that wasn't
taken originally with a Kodak Instamatic or a very cheap point-and-shoot
camera. The law suit doesn't happen ‘til five years later, and the only
thing in court that's necessary to prove that this is a actually the
truth is to ask someone “You were there, is that what it looked like?” “Oh,
yes, that's what it looked like,” and the photograph is admitted. The
license plate could have been changed, the clock could have been changed.
Thank you very much, you can go back to Colorado, and three days later
you're giving your closing argument, and the case is over. Because everyone
knows -- at least they used to -- photographs don't lie.
I've been doing some writing about this and the rules of evidence and
lawsuits are going to have to be re-written. And businesses -- and I
think also the institutions that store information if they're doing so
digitally -- are going to have to develop entirely new protocols to ensure
that they know that their records do not change through time either inadvertently
or on purpose. Which sometimes happens when there's money involved. Even
in academia people sometimes phony up results.
Peter Hirtle
Hirtle is an archivist and Vice President of the Society of American
Archivists.
I'm a bit of the odd man out on this panel. Because rather than being
an information user, I tend to think of myself as an information provider.
I'm the Director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, and
what we do all day is turn analog collections into digital form and make
them available. And we're also now working on grants to see about preserving
journals that are being published in electronic form and how the library
can maintain those things over time.
I'm deeply concerned about how we can make information available to
users in a way that's helpful. Thinking about the four panelists we just
heard, I can draw a few general conclusions from my perspective as an
information provider. I was struck how little they talked about libraries
and archives and museums as being sources for information for them. I
think this is a trend that we see in a lot of different areas. People
think about information, they're going out and getting information wherever
they can find it. That's less and less becoming the library environment,
especially as information becomes available in digital form. And that's
a little troubling.
There's a flip side to that. When we make information available in digital
form, we find it expands our base of users tremendously. One of the things
we're proudest of is an early project called the Making of America Collection,
which is twenty-two 19th century American journals which are available
as page images and also as full text, searchable form on our Cornell
Web site. And it's available for free. We do this -- the mantra is --
for students, faculty, and researchers at Cornell University. But because
we make it available to the whole world, we think we're doing it for
other educational uses, and somewhere around sixty percent is from people
in the dot com environment. So we're reaching out to the general public
and not to our traditional educational users. That's exciting, because
we're a land grant university, and we've got that mission. It does suggest
that we're playing a slightly different role than what we think our role
is supposed to be.
The second trend that we heard several people talk about is the increased
automation that's going on in information. A few years ago, I spent a
while editing a journal called D-Lib Magazine, which is for digital library
research and innovation. One of my co-editors, Bill Arms wrote a very
controversial piece in that call Automated Librarianship, in which Bill
suggested -- pointed out -- something that we all know about, Moore's
Law. This rule that computer power doubles every 18 months. It's been
going on for thirty years, and looks like it's going to go on for at
least another decade if not longer. And Bill's point about, 'What does
that mean, Doubles every two months?' means that in ten years we're going
to be dealing with computers that are a hundred times more powerful than
we have right now for the same amount of money. And when you have that
tremendous increase in processing power, what does that make possible.
It makes even more powerful Google search engines, things that can index
and catalog large amounts of material automatically, things that can
do voice recognition, and you can speak to your computer, and you will
say to your computer, 'Find me whether ducks' quacks echo?' And the computer
will talk back to you and say, 'No, they don't you ninny' or 'Yes, they
will.' or whatever they'll do. This is a very controversial article,
especially since Bill's wife is a librarian, and he had his battles at
home. But it's an interesting issue to deal with. What's going to happen
when an environment that changes so much more rapidly than we normally
can?
It was very interesting to hear Mark talk about his information experiences,
because I just heard about three major university library directors who
were called in as consultants to an internationally famous oncology hospital
in New York City to help it determine what it should with its library.
And the recommendation of these three university librarians was to close
the library, that there's no need for these researchers to have a library,
that you can license the full text of journals, everything else that
the staff would need for their basic information needs, and that what
couldn't be filled could be done with a hospital library across the street.
That's pretty scary, especially since one of those librarians was my
wife.
So what place is there for libraries and archives and museums in the
future? In a world of ubiquitous information that people can snatch from
wherever they want? I think there's three areas where there will still
be an important role for us.
One is, that we all have unique material in our holdings. That's going
to become more important. To try to identify our focus and make that
available to people. Sure anyone can go and get the Journal of
Neurology from the publisher in electronic form and pay a license
to it if you want and have it delivered to your desktop. But that collection
of 19th century Arizona photographs that only you have will be something
that will distinguish yourself, if you know how to make it available
to people and advertise it to them.
The other thing that is perhaps even more important is the issue of
authenticity that Neal, George, and Clay all talked about. The important
thing is that there's always going to be a place for third parties to
provide an assertion of authenticity. Imagine you had a document that
had the Enron logo on the front and that said “Let's rip off our staff
and stockholders as much as we can.” That would be a very important document,
and think how much more important it would be if it came out of the internal
files of the Enron corporation itself, and had been protected in an archives,
rather than being a document just picked up off the street that could
have been generated on someone's word processor with a scanned copy of
the logo. It's going to become very important to know that information
comes from the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, rather
than just from a friendly Arizona history site.
The last thing we can do is help people navigate this Internet source
of information. What we hear all along is that people need to be trained
on how to do searching, how to evaluate work. This is something that
librarians have been doing every since we started doing bibliographic
construction. Just because there's more information available on the
Internet doesn't mean that there's less need for it. If anything, there's
more. We're going to be teaching information skills, and that I think
is going to be one of the future's most important roles for libraries,
museums, and archives.
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Updated: 8/10/2007
