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Miles Conrad Award 2020 Discussion (condensed) - Todd Carpenter, Deanna Marcum, Jim Neal
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Miles Conrad Award 2020 Discussion (condensed) - Todd Carpenter, Deanna Marcum, Jim Neal
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TODD CARPENTER: So let's kick off with a question relevant to our community. Jim, you talked about radical collaboration. And how do you see organizations like NFAIS, like NISO, and what are our roles in helping to bring about those collaborations that you had discussed?
JIM NEAL: Well, I think there are several important things that organization like NFAIS and NISO and other professional associations should be doing. First of all, I think they need to be a primary advocate for the role that we as libraries, we as information intermediaries, and publishers play in our communities. They need to demonstrate and help us to demonstrate why we are important, why we add value, and to provide us with tools to influence thinking about what we are and where we're going.
JIM NEAL: Secondly, I think these types of associations need to provide for the professional development of the people in the field. We're constantly changing, as I emphasized in my remarks, and I think we all need the ability to learn and to grow. And I think the associations can provide those opportunities for us. I think the associations also have to be an important voice on the national and international level in the very complex policy areas in which we work.
JIM NEAL: I listed a whole series of policy concerns, ranging from intellectual freedom to intellectual property. And I think we need to develop much more of a presence in the legal legislative and policy arena. And I think these associations can help us do that. The last point I'll make is that we, as a community of libraries, as a community of publishers, as a community of information distributors, we tend to stand side by side and not with one another.
JIM NEAL: And I think the associations can build that sort of radical relationship among us so that we can be far more effective in our work, less dependent on redundant investments, and build a much larger voice and a more effective collaborative strategy by working together, rather than on the fringes of our work. And I think those are critical roles that NFAIS and NISO and other associations should and can play.
TODD CARPENTER: And Deanna, as having led NFAIS as one of the convening organizations that brings these communities together, what do you think is the impact of that? How can we be more effective in leading the community?
DEANNA MARCUM: One of the things I appreciated most about NFAIS is that it was the one place where librarians, publishers, and technologists came together. And many of the problems that we need to solve involve those three communities. So it's really important that NISO, as it continues this work, thinks about the ways in which these three communities can come together to solve problems.
DEANNA MARCUM: And it's also a platform that can be provided for volunteers. One of the challenges we have, of course, is we rely on volunteers. And the staff of any of these professional organizations will be relatively small. But giving a place where the volunteers can come together and do real work and try to find solutions to some of these problems, it's really important.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, one of the things that I found within NISO, and I've seen this in NFAIS as well, is the diversity of the community in trying to solve--
DEANNA MARCUM: It's really important.
TODD CARPENTER: --some these issues. It's always been very gratifying to see the different communities come together in a way to help advance common interests, rather than an adversarial way which the community is often in different circumstances, at loggerheads.
JIM NEAL: I think as Deanna has said, we are trying to solve national and international information challenges on the backs of institutional budgets. And that's simply not going to work. We need to build systemic national and global strategies. We need to stop duplicating our investments, because we have such limited resources. And therefore, the thinness of what we're accomplishing in these very challenging areas will never help us solve these challenges unless we find a way to co-invest.
JIM NEAL: I used the word parabiosis in my presentation. It's an obscure word from biology, usually applied to phenomena like Siamese twins, where we share body parts and share body systems, body organs. And I think we need to migrate to that reality that we will only really make significant progress if we're able to share our investment and share of the work in much more comprehensive and much more radical ways than we have in the past.
DEANNA MARCUM: And I think that means not assuming that you can just make a $25,000 contribution and it's going to get solved. We really have to think about the budgets that are needed for these problems. And I think the organizations like NISO can help us with those, understanding where we make investments that are going to pay off, and thinking not just about the financial contribution, but the people contributions that we make to those organizations so that there are real roles and responsibilities and accountability, both at the professional association level and at the institutional level.
JIM NEAL: I think we can all identify a dozen organizations that we have collaboratively created over the last decade. Many of them have disappeared, and many of them are floundering because they're dependent to a large extent on foundation and federal grants. And that's not going to sustain that business going forward. So we need to be much more creative at the front end in how we not only invest our resources, but how we're going to build that capacity on a continuing basis.
DEANNA MARCUM: It was really one of the reasons that we brought NFAIS and NISO together. And I think it's a real opportunity to build on the two foundations to a stronger core.
JIM NEAL: And that's one of the reasons why we bought RLG and OCOC together, basically for the same reasons.
TODD CARPENTER: Sure, yes. And we're working in a much broader community, really, outside of the institutions, outside of traditional publishers, outside of traditional vendors, outside of traditional institutions. How do you see our community reacting to that expanded scope? How do we as a community deal with companies coming in from say, Silicon Valley, who are invested in our space, who come with far more resources than institutions or even publishers might have to address some of these problems?
JIM NEAL: Well, I think it's wrong, or probably not necessary, for us to pit ourselves against these large international search engine technology companies. They have a global presence. We have a community presence. And we need to find a way to demonstrate that that partnership that we have developed with our communities-- whether it's a campus, whether it's a company, whether it's a city, a school-- that working relationship between the information professionals and the practitioners and the scholars who work in that space.
JIM NEAL: To me that's where we can add a lot of value. I think it's hard, as I said in my remarks, to draw a line between what we do in the information industries, and how students and citizens are effective, how faculty and researchers are productive. How do we add to the economy and the values and the impact of our communities? I think we have a special role in that relationship, and we need to demonstrate that more effectively to distinguish us from those large technology companies.
DEANNA MARCUM: In many ways, I think our biggest challenge that we have not yet addressed is building a robust, useful digital library. And in order to do that, we're going to need those Silicon Valley organizations. We're going to need their funding. We're going to need their technology. They're going to need our understanding of providing services with that digital library.
DEANNA MARCUM: And it's probably the biggest radical collaboration project on the agenda, and how we do that, how we become effective partners. And we can't think about it only in terms of money, because they have a lot more than we're ever going to have. But how do we combine forces in a way that benefits society. And that is-- that's the big collaborative project we need to focus on.
JIM NEAL: You know, there are many, many, many organizations in this world who we can think about and who our communities think about as really representing the public interest. And I think that's one of the important values that we bring, and we need to continue to emphasize that. We don't ask people when they come in through the physical or virtual doors of the library, "Why are you here? What do you want to do?" We give them a sense of freedom and anonymity in carrying out their information inquiries.
JIM NEAL: And that, I think, is a value of privacy and confidentiality that we need to continue to sustain. I think that Deanna's correct-- building that global digital library is essential. We made a effort in that direction with the Digital Public Library of America trying to link it up with other initiatives around the world, particularly the Europeana. But I think there is a concomitant challenge, which I mentioned in my remarks, which is how do we capture and preserve the digital record.
JIM NEAL: We have several tools that we've put in place to try to dea with e-journals. They have done-- they've done some modest things. But no one's preserving e-books. No one's preserving e-government. No one's preserving e-media, much less the billions and billions of objects that are created in a born digital environment, which are largely ephemeral, largely multimedia, largely dynamic.
JIM NEAL: We don't have an understanding of how to get them and how to take care of them and how to be sure that they're not only available, but usable going forward. The Internet Archive has done some important work and some important capture in the web space. But there's enormous amount of challenge. I mentioned scholarly integrity. If an author or researcher publishes a paper, and they've cited a number of born digital sources in their footnotes, and I, as a reader, come later, six months, 12 months out, and I say, "Wow, this is an interesting thesis.
JIM NEAL: I'd like to take a look at some of the evidence that they presented," and I can't find those sources-- because they've disappeared or they've changed or they've moved-- then I have to question the integrity of the work that's being presented to me. And how are we going to write about this first 20 years of this century if we don't have access to the social media, the digital media, which increasingly defines the way we work and we help produce science and culture.
TODD CARPENTER: Yes, and how we're communicating online is changing radically. And what your experience of The Washington Post or The New York Times is so dynamically driven, what does it mean to preserve that thing, because your experience is different from mine.
JIM NEAL: Exactly and we're not having those conversations.
DEANNA MARCUM: And one of my concerns is that when you describe the problem, people say, "Oh my gosh, it's so complicated. It costs so much money." And I always go back to Billy Frye when he was the President of the on and Preservation and Access. And he said, "When confronted with the need to eat an elephant, you need to take the first bite." And we almost need to take the first bite and begin showing how this can be done.
DEANNA MARCUM: This is another place where professional associations can exert real leadership in helping people understand that it is a huge problem. But it can be divided into these steps, and these things can happen, and show results, show that we're making progress. We almost need-- remember those thermometers we used to have in the town square showing how much money you've raised for something or other?
DEANNA MARCUM: You know, how much, how much are we doing? Are we making progress toward that? I think that would make a big difference in helping every institution understand that it has a part to play.
TODD CARPENTER: To draw the conversation to a close, one of the goals of this conference, one of the goals of bringing both NFAIS and NISO together, is to propel action. And you've talked about a variety of ways and collaborations. What are ways that we, as a community, can most effectively-- where are the areas of most fertile growth for collaboration, for things that NISO and NFAIS and in partnership with other organizations can do?
TODD CARPENTER: Where can we best direct our efforts to bring this about?
JIM NEAL: So I'll echo some of the things I said in my remarks. One, I think professional development is key. I think all professional associations, I think, have a responsibility to educate and enable their members to grow in their understanding and their effectiveness. And that's done through workshops and programs. It doesn't have to just be a conference. It can take many forms of synchronous and asynchronous learning.
JIM NEAL: Second, to be a key national, international advocate for the field. Demonstrate why publishers, technologists, and librarians working together represents such a powerful and effective force and why we continue to be relevant and important in the communities that we serve. And third, roll up those sleeves around policy. Identify those things where we have common interests and common concerns and build a advocacy, legal, legislative policy, advocacy capacity that allows us to be a player in our communities, but more importantly, perhaps, in Washington and in international venues where global policy is being set.
DEANNA MARCUM: Well, I'll end on a really practical note. One of the-- within NFAIS, one of our goals in merging the two organizations is we were saying NFAIS is really good at identifying issues and bringing in great speakers and talking about what's coming next. NISO is really great at implementation. And so our hope from the NFAIS perspective is that the new organization will use these conferences to identify the most pressing issues, put together working groups, capital W working groups, people who really care and can give some time to it.
DEANNA MARCUM: Their organizations will support them, put together projects, and make sure people know what progress is being made from time to time. And that was our hope. And that's what we see happening and we're delighted.
JIM NEAL: Ideas into action.
TODD CARPENTER: A great way to end. [MUSIC PLAYING]