"Curated" means "Professional" when one's speak about supporting the research practices of historians in Libraries?

I very much liked a post in the  H-HISTBIBL listserv, the H-Net Discussion List for the Study and Practice of History Librarianship, an "international network of librarians, archivists, curators, and scholars interested in the practice and study of bibliographic and library services to support historical study and teaching. It is affiliated with the Association for the Bibliography of History [ABH] and the History Section of the American Library Association". I am reading with interest what both list editors: Charles A.D'Aniello, (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) and Dominique R.Daniel, (Oakland University) are sending in the listserv. I really appreciate the way they use email: precise arguments, short summaries of the issue dealt with, a link to further information. This is a good way to say about important questions in the Digital History and Humanities fields not limited to history librarianship. Daniel and D'Aniello emails are often better than blog posts. They offer a kind of mixture between Twitter and a blog itself.

So I would like to discuss here Dominique R. Daniel's  post (19th March 2013) called "Curation for Discoverability: When Buzzwords Go Bad". It applies directly to my job as library information specialist between history academic users and the library structure itself. It says about what I have to do nowadays: benchmarking four different discovery tools platform (Ebsco, OCLC, SerialsSolution and ExLibris) that the library (European University Institute) selected to replace our Innovative-Encore Discovery tool. (We had to hide Encore from being our first access to our library catalog because of the incoherence in retrieving bibliographic information and displaying them in a correct way to our community.) We define discovery tools as being able "to expose users to content and resources beyond our local holdings, offering a single search point for multiple sources, including our library catalogue, our repository and our electronic resources."

I reproduced the image of Daniel's email and quotation of Barbara Fister's post (College librarian who works at the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library, Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota) called "Curation for Discoverability: When Buzzwords Go Bad". This post was  published in her blog, Library Babel Fish, one of the chapter of the broader American Inside Higher Ed portal, the 7 of March 2013. Fister writes: "...for the undergraduate, providing more results for a search doesn't help them figure out which will actually be valuable. We need to help them learn how to curate for themselves. Providing simpler interfaces for more unsorted stuff doesn't really help with that. Maybe we should work harder on the curation thing and ease up on trying to build the ultimate discovery tool." 

Such a quotation connected with the selection of a discovery tool,  reminds me of a central question that we looked at for more than 15 years together with other historians, archivists, librarians: how to teach to use Internet and web contents or, better, how to critically deal with web contents?  

How to validate web contents is a central question in academic environments and not at all maximizing the number of bites available for meta-searching in discovery tools. We don't want to "discover" things when we want instead to retrieve relevant documentation and information which would possibly help to answer specific research and teaching queries. 

So I asked myself, what should be the best tool used in libraries for validating contents? And looking around, my best bet would still be to use and "curate" the good old OPAC. Of course we are talking about a professionally curated OPAC. But now that discovery tools will allow libraries to add all kind of contents and mix everything, frightened librarians -who's thinking that their profession is endangered because of Google- are looking at discovery tools as the ultimate technology offered by the semantic web. These tools may stand for a technological substitute to services that library staff could offer to their users (also providing support to specific electronic resources) and more as a philosophical and "existential" answer to Google so to keep -as ultimate goal- their "real libraries" alive. But opting in for discovery tools in libraries, library users will need even more protection: they will be exposed to the noise and raw contents resulting from answering generic queries performed within non-similar databases collected altogether within discovery tools. 

"Validation" is exactly the contrary of what will be offered when applying a meta-search to many different contents. This will happen independently of the fact that each database will be previously selected by professional librarians. Database's technical functions and contents are created by single publishers not with the intention to be added to discovery tools but to live their own digital life and to answer -using very specific search features- to relevant search strategies not conceived nor planned for wider digital environments. 

Different is the purpose of creating curated digital libraries like Europeana or what will become in the future, the Digital Public Library of America: interoperability of the best meta-data is all about curated and filtered contents for specific communities of users. These data about data -and the way they describe contents- are the most important issue to deal with when speaking about supporting the liability of web contents from different digital origins. This is not at all what we will achieve with library discovery scrambled techniques and mismatch tools which should support academic research.

The buzzwords "curated/curation/curator" are meaning that we have to use a "professional" approach to information where librarians are still needed to orient users, select and filter web contents? This is exactly what Barbara Fister writes asking for maintaining professional interfaces to specialized information in libraries: "we forget that it takes some subject knowledge and some interpersonal skills to match the needs of a particular community of living, breathing human beings to information resources that they will find worthwhile. We no longer trust our curatorial instincts."

These reflections are dealt with in the December 2012 ITHAKA survey by Roger Schonfeld and Jennifer Rutner, "Research Support Services for History Scholars: A Study of Evolving Research Methods in History" (New York: Ithaka S+R, 2012). This important US report is telling about current support practices whihc are not limited to the USA. It tells what should become the best practices  to facing the digital turn in history and on how best supporting the research practices of historians. (History is the first discipline that the think tank institution ITHAKA S+R connected with JSTOR and with Portico have looked at). The role of Libraries, Archives, History Departments, is benchmarked because of the new practices of Historians –the new craft- within our new digital environment.

Following the survey conclusions, libraries seems to play a limited role today because of the availability of many other digital information sources commented Robert B. Townsend in the February 2013 issue of Perspectives on History the American Historical Association (AHA) magazine (Report Claims History Discipline Failing in Modern Research Practices): “the role of the library for historians is narrowing, and serves primarily as a buyer of databases, a source for interlibrary loans, and a pedagogical tool”. 

Looking for "discovery tools" would be in line with what historians "need" from libraries today? Or should we better look at small, and selective web index like EHPS (European History Primary Sources) or browse through big digital libraries and "curated" data's  in Europeana or the DPLA? Anyway, the fact that libraries would provide their users with the best access to databases seems trendy if we follow the conclusions of this survey. So, here comes also  the automated discovery tool. Also because if we follow the survey, professional librarians are often unable to satisfy precise information/documentation queries within specific area's in  history. In fact, the same survey indicates that users don't anymore trust history librarians professional skills. Because of this mistrust or lack of specialized knowledge would we need automated discovery tools? Or could we legitimately argue that these tools are more about the last game for undergraduates? These tools are the last trench or a last illusion (?) offered –with a lot of money for libraries to spend that could be used for other purposes- to follow new media and new commercial information systems developments in poorly staffed library environment?

The ultimate question seems indeed to understand wetter librarians are still or not able to dominate their field of information to support high level research and teaching activities within digital contexts. But labeling these technological substitutes as "curated" information" just because they add databases to their discovery tool would really simplify their work? 

This would mean being driven by technologies, not at all to control them. We are here far away from what the Digital Humanities are about: the human capacity to develop and manage technical tools that would answer scholarly questions in the digital realm. And what are we controlling if we add database contents and web contents to discovery tools: new curated searching activities, text mining capacities that are related to research and teaching profiles in history? If we continue to look for the polar star, we will still recognize where the North stands. So the same will happen with libraries and librarians' role as intermediary between information and information seekers provided that they would continue to update their professional skills.
At the end, do we really care about being now called "curators"?

Brussels Declaration on Open Access to Belgian Publicly funded Research

The Brussels Declaration on Open Access to Belgian Publicly funded Research was signed during the OA week, the 22nd of October 2012 and engages the Belgian Government.

Interesting comments were written by Marin Dacos in the OpenEdition’s blog, Déclaration de Bruxelles sur le libre accès : la Belgique s’engage and in the ORBi blog at the University of Liège during the OA week on the 31st of October 2012, Open Access: the Belgian Ministers commit themselves! The Brussels Declaration on Open Access.   

The Liège University OA blog explains also easily in French, the difference between Green and Gold Open Access and how to proceed as an author if wishing to publish in OA. Following such comments, the Rectors of the Belgian francophone Universities (CRef) wanted to "strengthen institutional depositories (ID), notably in resolving the problem of ceding copyright, but above all in moving forward to a common Belgian OA mandate and to create a shared portal harvesting the IDs of the Universities in the French Speaking Community of Belgium, thus offering a global window of visibility for the excellence of Belgian francophone research."

We reproduce here the full text of the Brussels declaration on Belgian publicly funded research.

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Brussels Declaration on Open Access to Belgian publicly funded research

By signing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2007, Belgian research institutions and research funders agreed to support the dissemination of publicly funded scientific research through Open Access.
Open Access to scientific research offers stakeholders an alternative for traditional ways of disseminating scientific research results, which do not always meet the demands of stakeholders.
Free, online access is the most effective way to ensure widespread and democratic consultation and usage of publicly funded research results. During the last years, research results available in Open Access gained considerable visibility internationally, which proves beneficial to individual authors, institutions and funders.
Open Access can be achieved in two nonexclusive ways, each having their own merits: by deposition in a digital open access repository or through Open Access publishing.

Open Access policies do not affect the author’s freedom to choose where to publish, nor do they interfere with patenting or other forms of commercial exploitation. Brussels Declaration signatories commit to maximizing free availability of publicly funded research results, by :

-actively informing researchers about Open Access

-asking researchers to make the published output of their publicly funded research freely available in Open Access, either through a publication in an Open Access journal or by depositing a peer reviewed version of their paper in an Open Access repository at hand, preferably immediately and in any case no later than 6 or 12 months (depending on the scientific discipline) after the date of publication

-investigating the possibility of public authorities covering the costs of Open Access publishing

-supporting the creation and the maintenance of Open Access repositories and other innovative digital
infrastructures for facilitating scientific communication

-investigating possibilities and new opportunities in the broad Open Access field, all in frequent collaboration with relevant stakeholders, considering Open Access to scientific publications a forerunner of new initiatives in the ‘Open Data’ and ‘Open Science’ areas.

By actively stimulating free and online access to scientific research results, *signatories* subscribe to a principle that has acquired broad support on international level. This support has been demonstrated both by recent statements by top researchers, and by Open Access policies launched by influential funders such as the European Commission, the World Bank, CERN, the UK Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health.

By signing this declaration *signatories* declare Open Access to be the default infrastructure for dissemination of Belgian scientific research results and express their determination to be amongst the frontrunners in this evolution, both at European and worldwide level.

Signed on October 22nd 2012, in Brussels

OAPEN: online library and publication platform for scholarly books in the Humanities and Social Sciences

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe.

  I had a chance to assist to one of the first presentation of the OAPEN platform at the University College London, 12 May 2009, during the workshop E-books and E-content 2009. And already at that time, the project and business model for OA was really attractive starting with a partnership with Google Book Search (at that time the name of Google Books). 

   Today the OAPEN platform is the result of an agreement between several scholarly publishers that decided to publicize their commercially sold printed books using also OA for digital copies. They created the OAPEN consortium and accepted an economic model which would offer to authors and readers the possibility to meet thanks to publishers and university presses paying a fee to the consortium to maintain the platform. Doing so they spread knowledge in the Humanities and Social Science disciplines and they provide access to high quality contents in the same fields. Publishers accept to pay such a fee to the consortium to promote in the database their own front list titles and divide the costs of maintaining OA for everybody. Other publishers may join the project. Of course for academic authors writing books that have a restricted diffusion worldwide, this is the best way to promote their research and findings and todiscover better their selected public, connecting through OA to their potentially interested readers. OAPEN is also the result of a peerage process: "publishers or publishing entities (usually research institutes with their own publishing program) need to be predominantly academic publishers, which primarily means they should have proper and transparent procedures for peer review of manuscripts and it should be clear which publications are peer reviewed."

 

At the moment publishers which are partners within the OAPEN platform are the following: 

Aarhus University Press - Academia Press - Aksant Academic Publishers - Amsterdam University Press - Brill - DANS - Firenze University Press - Hong Kong University Press - IOS Press - KITLV - Leiden University Press - Liverpool University Press - Manchester University Press - Museum Tusculanum Press - Palgrave Macmillan - Tartu University Press - Universitätsverlag Göttingen - University of Wales Press.

A very important feature of the project is compatibility of their bibliographical meta-data's with other databases. OAPEN wants to be fully interoperable with academic libraries and databases in general using some open meta-data's formats to describe their OA eBooks.(ONIX – XML -MARCXML – based on MARC 21 XML Schema - CSV – comma delimited text file - XML - optimised for import in Excel -XML - deleted records). These data's are in the public domain and could be used by anybody wishing to harvest them under a Creative Common license: it enables Libraries and Aggregators to use the metadata of all available titles of the OAPEN Library.

How to join ? Here are the official information available on the OAPEN website:

"Joining OAPEN

OAPEN combines the advantages of an independently operating commercial venture with the benefits of being embedded in the scholarly community. Joining the OAPEN network involves no membership costs, while giving you privileged access to information-sharing and lobbying that are an important part of the initiative. Listing your titles in the OAPEN Library involves a fee which starts at around €700, depending on the size of your frontlist, as well as the number of titles submitted to the OAPEN Library.

Who should join?

• publishers with a focus on the humanities and social sciences who would like to explore Open Access;
• research institutions with an existing publishing programme or an interest in publishing;
• research funders with programmes for the humanities and social sciences.

OAPEN is also open to cooperation with other partners, as long as their business goals are consistent with Open Access.

Why join?

• OAPEN is a mission-driven network dedicated to promoting OA publishing as an essential service to the academic community. OA publishing is in the public interest and should be seen as an essential service to the scientific community and to society at large.
• We promote common standards and share valuable information on, and experiences of, markets as well as business and publishing models. We will save you time and effort in the transition to sustainable OA publishing."

The Centre pour l'édition électronique ouverte (Cléo) was right considering the recent American Historical Association's statement on OA

Who works in universities and for accessing the content of her/his own intellectual output, always thought that Open Access was the frontline for all sciences and disciplines against the power of big publishers.

But should we slow down a bit our enthusiasm and rethink the meaning of Open Access publishing in the Humanities ?

 Yes if we follow the conclusions of the important Finch Report on OA in the UK (Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings): producing free information and scholarly contents is not done for free. This is exactly what the Centre pour l'édition électronique ouverte (Cléo) (CNRS, Université de Provence, EHESS and Université d'Avignon) in France understood in February 2011 with their offer for an OpenEdition Freemium programme for libraries, which was the "Cléo's innovative economic model for Open Access" where libraries will soon contribute to the costs of free information and scholarly contents. Marin Dacos for OpenEdition published recently a statement on OA and OA business model. This model creates a form of Open Access publishing that enables authors to publish and readers to read without financial obstacles. OpenEdition hopes to convince the French Government that this OA academic model should be backed up.

But in general, following the Freemium OpenEdition economic model in France, OA publishers and universities should develop more services to academic libraries to foster, on the long run, a fully operative OA and gather some money from these libraries participating directly to a better diffusion of OA contents in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Maybe a continuing interaction between libraries and OA publishers will allow to understand better the kind of services academic libraries would like to see implemented in such a business model like Freemium, etc.?

So, in France (OpenEdition), in the UK (Frisch report) and now the AHA report, the American Historical Association suggests that some money has to be found for paying the costs of scholarly OA.

This is why the AHA recently argued about the fact that the movement toward "open access" of scholarly journal articles was not looking at the impact on humanities scholarship as a whole for maintaining the real costs of OA.

The AHA writes in their official statement that until now, "the conversation has been framed by the particular characteristics and economics of science publishing, a landscape considerably different from the terrain of scholarship in the humanities. "

This is what suggests the post "Not So Fast on 'Open Access" recently published by AHA Today on September 24, 2012. Not to say that many tweets and blogs in the US and everywhere already informed, commented and discussed this controversial issue and statement which was not published in Perspectives Online, the association's famous Bulletin in its September issue, but on the AHA blog, for a faster diffusion. Comments were offered that same day in Inside Higher Ed for example which describes Dan Cohen's critical lecture.

The director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University wrote -I quote here Scott Jaschik Inside Education Ed interesting post - "that he understood "the bind that professional societies outside of the sciences are in, with pressure toward open access while worrying about the sustainability of their relatively small publishing units. In that context, this statement is understandable." But he added [...] that there has "been a great deal of thinking over the last decade about sustaining open-access publishing beyond what the Finch Report recommends with subvention fees" Cohen was looking more at "an energetic discussion about creative solutions that allow historical scholarship to reach the broadest possible audience".

Dan Cohen's comments on the AHA statement asking for more concerns for historical scholarship seems not to offer real alternative economic models and new  principles towards a broader global policy for OA in the humanities where the solution mentioned above and offered by the Cléo with the  Freemium program does offer one.

The OpenEdition proposal was to enter in contact with libraries on their own field of duties: producing services for the community of humanist and social scientists scholars that libraries would pay for but maintaining open and free the access to their intellectual output.


The content of the AHA Statement on Scholarly Journal Publishing is here reproduced in its entirety for you to judge and comment:

"Many members of the international scholarly and scientific community are justifiably concerned by a growing inequality of access to the fruits of their labors. The subscription prices for many journals, especially scientific journals, have escalated to the point where almost no individuals and fewer and fewer institutions can afford to subscribe. Prosperous universities and institutes maintain their subscriptions and their members thereby enjoy free access to the content of thousands of journals. Other, less fortunate, scholars have free access to declining numbers of journals, thereby impoverishing the research and pedagogical capabilities of their communities.

In today’s digital world, many people inside and outside of academia maintain that information, including scholarly research, wants to be, and should be, free. Where people subsidized by taxpayers have created that information, the logic of free information is difficult to resist.

The AHA, like other scholarly societies, has been wrestling with this complex discourse for some time. The issues have provided a focus of conversations in our governing Council; and staff have participated in relevant conference panels. Recently, however, decisions made at individual institutions regarding faculty publication, debates over federal legislation, and the influential “Finch report” in the United Kingdom have drawn broader attention the issue of open access to scholarly journals.

The Finch Report is particularly significant because it is likely to influence public policy. Relying implicitly on evidence and practices largely drawn from the sciences, the Report builds a case for open-access journals, free to everyone with internet access. It recognizes, however, that information is not free (indeed never has been); financial resources are required to produce high quality academic journals – even of the digital variety. Accordingly, the Report recommends a transition in the financing of journals away from subscription revenues to a system in which authors pay journals when their work is published and all content is offered free to readers. In the Finch Report, this is called an author payment charge, or APC.

The concerns motivating these recommendations are valid, but the proposed solution raises serious questions for scholarly publishing, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

(a) Would the unfairness of unequal access be replaced by a different unfairness, one of opportunity to publish based on the availability of funds? Rich universities (and rich authors) can with equanimity pay a charge to have work published. So can those funded by research grants with provisions for publication subventions built in. But others, especially junior scholars and those with only tenuous institutional arrangements, cannot pay. This different unfairness would be at least as pernicious as the current one. It would particularly diminish publication opportunities in fields where grants tend to be small and not central to the way research is done. For a foundation considering a million dollar physics grant, the inclusion of an additional $6,000 to publish the three articles that the proposers hope will result is completely trivial; for a historian who already funds his/her own summer trips to archives, that same $6,000 could represent a substantial share of the year’s salary.

(b) While libraries (and individuals) would be able to maintain journal subscriptions, would universities and research institutes find themselves robbing Peter to pay Paul? Would the money saved from library budgets instead be used to subsidize publication for scholars?

(c) Would the finances of the most comprehensive “flagship” journals be imperiled? While they accept roughly the same number of articles as others, they must evaluate many more submissions across a much wider swath of their disciplines, and have larger sections devoted to book reviews and other content that produces no revenue? Last year the American Historical Association spent over $460,000 to support the editorial processes of the American Historical Review, such as arranging double-blind peer review for articles, administering the selection of books and reviewers, and copyediting the content. How could AHR and others like it maintain the highest editorial standards without lowering its standards and accepting many more articles? Alternatively, flagship journals would have to charge much higher publication fees to cover the costs of reviewing the submissions they do not accept; this, too, would create perverse effects, encouraging more junior scholars or those at less wealthy institutions to shy away from the journals where their findings would get the most attention.

(d) Would an APC system create perverse incentives for both journals and authors? Would it tempt journals to publish as many articles as possible, and inspire authors to post papers on websites and bypass journals and peer review altogether? The American Historical Review, for instance, currently publishes only about nine percent of the articles received. The Editor and Associate Editor read all articles submitted, and if the articles are accepted for further review, the staff refer to an extensive (and expensive) database to find historians working in an array of institutional settings. Peer review is a costly procedure but justified where quality of scholarly publication is a high priority.

The current system of access to journal content certainly contains elements of unfairness, in addition to adding burdens to budgets of institutions already coping with diminishing resources. But solutions that ignore the wide differences between the respective landscapes of science and humanities journals generate new, and more difficult, dilemmas. Requiring authors to pay the costs of their own publications is not the answer. The AHA suggests that historians begin thoughtful conversations at their own institutions and participate in the discussions that we will initiate at our annual meeting, our web site and other appropriate venues.

Drafted by the AHA Research Division, approved by Council August 13, 2012