Stop the press – the world is about to fall in love with Facebook Messenger! Wait a second, there’s something horribly wrong with this, and it’s not just about giving your phone number potentially to 750 million different FB accounts.
Facebook Messenger: How to stifle consumer choice
Do you like to text? Do you like to SMS? MMS? You love it, you really do. Well, guess what: If you shift all of your texting over to FB Messenger, then the way you text is going to be beholden to Facebook Inc. If Facebook decides that changes are needed to FB Messenger and you don’t like that, it will still change them. If Facebook decides to open up your privacy controls on FB Messenger, then hopefully you’ll get that memo before your creepy internet stalker figures you out. If Facebook decides it doesn’t like the way FB Messenger is working, even though you, do, it will still make those changes. Facebook owns the Facebook Messenger pipes, so the traffic you put on it is dependent on Facebook.
Look. Right now, you are texting from your mobile or smartphone on a long-established open standard that is used by every mobile/cell carrier around. That’s why I can text from my Canadian provider, Telus, to my father-in-law in California who is on Verizon, and to a good friend in the UK who is on Virgin. SMS is a standard that’s been agreed to and used for years by the entire industry. If you decide to go with FB Messenger, then you’re giving the keys of the castle to ONE COMPANY, who will make their own policies and decisions as it suits them instead of the consumer.
Don’t do that. Don’t give up on an open standard because FB Messenger seems like the greatest thing since Kanye and Jay-Z laid down a track together. Don’t switch over to FB Messenger, which conveniently went live one month before the start of a new school year everywhere in the west. Stick with your open texting SMS/MMS standard. Texting developed, works, and thrives because EVERYONE agrees to use it. Choosing FB Messenger will shut out out all the major players in the industry who built your smartphone, let alone the hundreds of millions of people in the world who actually depend on a mobile phone and texting for real communication.
I am not saying that Facebook is an evil empire. Facebook is as good (or as bad) at privacy as Google, Microsoft, or any other large web company. But Facebook’s products are very much closed and proprietary and built to improve their bottom line. This is bad news for the consumer. You are giving up your ability to choose between products and you are stifling innovation when you choose closed products. FB Messenger is not good for anyone but Facebook. So stick with SMS. Why? Because it’s something you all have already, and it’s still face better than what FB Messenger can offer.
(P.S. It shouldn’t matter AT ALL that FB Messenger is a “free app.” SMS texting is a standard feature on your phone already. Oh look – a green texting button: it came with my iPhone already…)
Micah Vandegrift ofHackLibSchoolhas written great post on the future of libraries (or on the librarian of the future, anyway you cut it) on his own blog; it neatly parallels some of the things I’ve been ranting about on blogs and on Twitter this past week. He, too, sees the need for librarians to increase their technical knowledge and abilities, and to increase these competencies fast:
My advice to LIS students? Get digital skills, whether you want to or not. To those who want to work in academic libraries? Get deep knowledge of digital trends, including CompSci, Data science, information architecture, digital humanities, digital archiving practices, CMS’s and yes even programming . . . To current academic librarians, maybe its time to use some of your free continuing education credits and update your skill set to remain in the know.
Kudos to Vandegrift for calling it as he sees it. It’s high time that we stop acting like we’re the kings of the library technology castle unless we actually have the ability and are willing to defend these statements. We need to not only walk the walk but also talk the talk when it comes to information technology as it affects our workplaces, other people’s lives and their research, and our culture in general. Librarians aren’t so removed from this sphere that we can’t accomplish this, but we have some catching up to do in order to make it happen.
On a sidenote, I’d like to note that Micah makes this call to arms without have to deal with any of the off-base assumptions made by Jeff Trzeciak (recipient of the 2011 Jeff Trzeciak Award for Just Not Getting It) in the run-up to and during #fulmac11. I believe this IT question presumes that credentialed librarians are the experts on librarianship and should be the people who organize and run our information centres and libraries. What matters here is the amount of IT knowledge we’re bringing to the profession when we enter it, and also what we’re doing to enrich ourselves and our organizations once we’re there. The letters MLIS (or MLS, etc) will remain compulsory; Let’s just find a way to emphasize the IT within the degree.
Seth Godin wrote a great post today – I’m sure you’ve read it by now – on the “The Future of the Library.” It’s a future with librarians who serve as catalysts of digital information access and as collaborators with their patrons. Given the state of the economy and the fact that libraries have always used the latest technologies to collect, store, and diffuse information, the “library of the future” is always a favourite blog topic, even outside of librarianship. But when some one who works in spheres well beyond what we do, some one like Seth Godin, waxes poetic on our profession, we stand up and take notice.
And take notice we did. Some of the earliest commenters include:
Bobbi Newman, who lays vendor and wikipedia economics out on the line and shows why it’s the libraries and librarians who are pulling more than their weight when it comes to e-resources; Newman also reminds Godin in no uncertain terms that the librarian’s role as educator should never be underestimated (this is where she always excels)
Gwyneth Marshman, who considers how information access is just as important to academic and special libraries as the printed word is to public libraries
I held back on my two cents because I had too many demands on my Monday (like a third cup of coffee to make it through the afternoon), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an opinion. When it comes down to it, I agree with Seth. Mind you, Godin isn’t saying anything new or profound either about or to librarians. Seth is saying all the things that many of have said before, that:
[a] librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
Or, when discussing the pedagogical aspect of our work, that any good librarian will take:
responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.
Seth likes his animal imagery, for sure: librarians are data hounds who help our youngsters grow into being data sharks. I like these metaphors, too, and like them a lot. What’s there not to like in these statements? Seth Godin is speaking about the potential and the responsibility that our profession has, and he’s speaking to a general audience. Godin is speaking to the world and to librarians when he says he foresees a library as a place full of digital and print containers of information, managed by librarians who know where all the information is stored, how to get to it, and how it all fits together. This is a future where librarians don’t work in dusty offices, don’t work with card catalogues, and don’t shush people.
But wait a second. Seth has got some great ideas, but I think the future Seth wants is very much here already. Librarians are at the cutting edge of tech, bringing people and their data and information together. We help people create knowledge. Hell, we can make the trains run on time.
Or, that is, a lot of the time, we can help others make the trains run on time. And here’s my real issue, which doesn’t haven so much to do with Seth as it has to do with ourselves. I’m glad to see that Seth and I are on the same page and that we both think that librarians need to be tech mavens and data gurus. But the problem is that a lot of us aren’t. A lot of us are focused squarely on the educational side of the profession. There is nothing wrong with that. We are teachers, after all, and we have a crucial role to play in research methods, in critical thinking, and in lifelong learning. I couldn’t be more serious when I say that since I work in information literacy and know first-hand that some one has got to show these students how to create a research plan, how to mock up a topic and a subject, how to open a database and how to create a hypothesis. I am dead-serious about this because I’ve met enough students in my short time as a librarian to know that these skills are not taught adequately in all classrooms (this is not the fault of teachers, by the way: it’s symptomatic of poorly funded educational systems at all levels, in my mind). Indeed, many of us must be focused on our pedagogical role because it is an important and vital part of our professional obligations. But when so many of us are working in the front of the house on the educational side of things, who is it that’s making sure the gears don’t get gummed up and slow down the system? Who really is working on information storage, search, retrieval, and organization?
I’m not being willfully ignorant here. I know full well that there are plenty of librarians who still work in Tech Services, in Bibliographic Control, and in Systems, and I value their work. The thing is that I value their so much that I think it’s a subfield of our profession that more of us should be acquainted with. In my place of work, a mid-sized university with some 600 academic databases from a bevy of vendors, there are very few librarians who know how they all fit together, and there are few others actively working in data collection and storage into local repositories. This is our collective loss and it it’s a disservice to our patrons and to our institutions. Collectively, we should know more about our systems and our data collection, but we don’t.
Know kung fu: rule The Matrix by understanding its architecture
Dear fellow librarians: don’t take this as a criticism of our work. Instead, take it as a call to arms. The world has gone digital, and we were there to guide it through its growing pains. MARC long ago taught us a lot about systems, authorities, and control, and this is an area we still have strong expertise in. So, let’s not sit by the wayside as the world steams ahead of us on account of the knowledge we developed and then shared in information systems and retrieval. It has become more and more apparent that the Internet really does need a strong cadre of “editors” and “curators” who truly understand how to select, store, and retrieve the best information out there; there is no single search bar to rule them all, but there are librarians who can help others find and then use the information they’re looking for. Seth Godin is right on the money in his post only because he’s seen the writing on the wall and is parroting what we know already: that the world’s gone digital and it needs some help figuring out what do with all this data. Let’s use our skills in information literacy, yes, but let’s also use our skills in information organization to fine-tune the systems already. We can’t be the best teachers of information retrieval, of information literacy and of research skills unless we understand the systems which house the information in the first place.
However, The article also reports on the difference in opinion between librarians and teaching faculty on how we perceive our work in teaching and learning. Ithaka compared the ways that library directors valued teaching and learning in the 2010 survey to the opinions of teaching faculty on the same subject in its 2009 Faculty Survey, and the difference in opinion is not pretty:
Ninety-seven percent of library directors said it was important that their library help facilitate teaching [in the 2010 survey] . . . Just under 60 percent of faculty members felt strongly about libraries’ pedagogical involvement [in the 2009 survey].
Librarians understand this already. We spend a lot of time strategizing how to convince teaching faculty to let us enter the classroom and show our stuff to the student body. We know things, yes we do, but not everyone knows that.
What bothers me, though, is the way that this news article has spread on Twitter. Maybe I’ve overlooked something – and please correct me if I am – but I’ve seen a lot of people retweet this news piece today by retweeting the Chronicle’s own headline on the news story, which misses the point entirely:
Not just archiving anymore: Librarians spend more time supporting undergrads and teaching information literacy. http://bit.ly/eLd1B1
I want to forgive everyone who retweeted the article without reading it since it’s something I’ve done in the past, too. After all, it’s the nature of Twitter and information exchange to value messages given to us by people we know: we take it on faith that the article must be good if some one we know retweeted it. But then I surfed to Bit.ly to look closer at who tweeted the page and how. You can do the same:
(Yes, it’s so important to this post that I had to center the text and change its font size.)
Not only have a lot of people who re-tweeted the post, but we are also collectively re-tweeting it as if it is focused on the the good things in our field – that we value information literacy. Of course we value information literacy. But The Chronicle’s article is actually troubling because it explains plainly that many of our peers in academia don’t understand the value our work in teaching and learning. And it’s even more troubling that we are re-tweeting the article as if it shines a glowing light on our work in the academy when many people don’t know what we do, how we do it, and why.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, I’m not sure how to write up my thoughts right now. On the one hand, I want to comment on the fact that we value our work but that not everyone else does. But on the other hand, I’m compelled to talk about way we’re re-tweeting this article as if it says good things about our work. I admit it – I could be quibbling since The Chronicle did report on some good things, after all. But I still think we should spend more of our energy thinking about ways to shrink that 37% difference of opinion on the librarian’s role in teaching and learning as opposed to giving ourselves a pat on the back and calling it a day. This isn’t about talking about ways to just get in to the classroom. It’s about convincing the other 40% of teaching faculty (and that 3% of library directors) that we actually do make a difference.
These librarians are smiling because they're certain that everyone knows what a great role they play in teaching and learning on campus. (Photo Source: Christchurch City Libraries)
You know it had to happen sooner or later, and here it is – my first foray into the paper.li editing realm. I’ve created a paper.li newspaper called The Academic Librarian Review. Check it out now.
The premise is simple. Paper.li will scan Twitter for tweets that have links of interest to academic librarians. I developed this by creating the following Twitter search string:
library OR libraries OR librarians academic OR college OR university OR universities OR post-secondary OR PSE -high -school -elementary -kids -children -teacher -public -ousted -4sq.com
The search string is simpler that it looks. Paper.li will first consider only tweets that have these words in them:
library OR libraries OR librarians
It will then limit this query by holding onto tweets that contain any of the following terms:
academic OR college OR universities OR post-secondary OR PSE
And finally, it will definitely throw away all tweets that have any of the following words:
high OR school OR elementaty OR kids OR children OR public OR teacher OR public OR outsted OR 4sq.com
This hopefully filter tweets referring to high school, to public libraries, and to foursquare notices (because libraries are popular Foursquare locations). Apologies if you’re offended that I’m discriminating against school librarians and public librarians. I’m focusing this paper.li product on academic librarians since that’s my profession at the given moment. Later this weekend, I may create a feed for public librarians, though, since I’m passionate about the social justice and community-building work that goes on in these important institutions.
At any rate, be sure to check out The Academic Librarian Review on paper.li. Maybe this venture will work, maybe it will be a bust. We’ll know by next week, I’m sure.
