Libraries and Learning
Curation, Evaluation, and Open Access for Teaching
November 22, 2016
I had the pleasure of serving on a panel at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Minneapolis that brought together teachers, many of them from community colleges, to discuss how (and whether) to use open access materials in the classroom. It was a lively discussion that touched on how valuable open access journals are for cross-disciplinary research, how difficult it is for faculty with heavy teaching loads to find the time to curate readings and select texts, how valuable textbooks (as opposed to a menu of primary articles and other readings) can be for students who are struggling to see the big picture, and how much effort and thought goes into designing a textbook. We also had an interesting detour into students’ reading habits and the value of books that aren’t online. Panelists were Nina Brown, Anthony Balzano, Evin Rodkey, Ryan Anderson (who I’ve “known” online for years but hadn’t actually met) and Anne Brackenbury, who provided a valuable publisher’s perspective. Katie Nelson was our discussant and general cat-herder. I promised to share my remarks, so here they are.
The description of this roundtable discussion – how do we curate and evaluate open access materials in teaching situations? – reminds me of the near panic some teachers were in as students began to use the web. They suddenly wanted sessions on how to evaluate online sources even thought they were perfectly used to students using out-of-date books or poorly-chosen articles. The questions asked of a website are no different than those one should ask of a book or a journal article. The problem was that faculty were so used to judging books and articles, the filters they had in place to sort out options had become automatic, deeply embedded tacit knowledge. When confronted with a website, they were nearly as lost as their students were when confronted with a shelf of books in the library. What do we look for? How do we know what’s good?
Curation is not native to the Web, nor is evaluation only difficult with open resources. Library shelves have lots of out-of-date books on them; our databases are full of third-rate journals and worse – because in addition to our prejudice that something is good if it’s expensive, we also have been persuaded that the more consumer choice we can offer, the better. This makes both publishers and vendors fill library databases with stuff that has little value.
Let me give you a couple of egregious examples. For years, a general database that is available in most academic libraries included two white supremacist journals: Mankind Quarterly, founded to publish articles that would scientifically prove the biological superiority of the white race, and American Renaissance, which is far less subtle about its neo-Nazi and white nationalist mission. These were included because one thing librarians ask for from databases is more full text content