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Arizona Convocation

3-4 March 2002
Tucson, Arizona

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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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