This is from the department of Probably Everyone Knew This But Me. I’d been aware that ProQuest had taken over the Statistical Abstract, but I hadn’t realized that they were also producing a print version of the work. So for those of you who are looking at options for your 2013 edition, here they are:

• ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States 2013, in print with a prepublication price of $161.00 (publication date of November 2012)
• ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States 2013 Online, which, according to their earlier press release, is scheduled to be available in fall of 20113. No word on pricing, of course. [Update: If you're in the Minitex area, they're negotiating consortial pricing.]

So there you have it.

This week, as I and those I talk with have been mulling over Bibliographic Instruction, Information Literacy, and Transliteracy, I keep circling around to thoughts about the act of naming concepts — particularly concepts that sit at the heart of a group’s raison d’être. Names are powerful things, holding within themselves layer upon layer of articulated and unarticulated meaning, meaning that cannot be consistent from person to person and that cannot stay consistent over the course of time, since cultural context inevitably shifts and changes.

In the messy transitions implied by the introductions of new names that overlap with and build on concepts that came before, what do we gain? What do we lose?

I think we gain opportunities and motivation to examine our practice, to have difficult discussions, to encourage and pull stragglers along, to mollify and reign in renegades, and to shift emphasis from one point to another in the vast matrix of professional goals.

I think we lose a sense of the complexity of our past. New concepts or emphases do not spring fully formed into being, and new pedagogies retain large portions of old pedagogies, but a new name assignes concepts and pedagogies an artificial start date.

To complicate this even further, new names in pedagogical concepts seem usually to have the foundational goal of eradicating ineffective teaching, but the reality is that there will always be ineffective teachers. That’s an entirely separate issue. This goal, then, will never be realized but yet will spur the shifting of the old name’s layers of meaning to emphasize outdatedness, simplicity, lack of imagination, homogeneity.

Names are shorthand, simplified or problematized from moment to moment depending on context.

What’s in a name? People’s hopes, and people’s fears. No small thing.

As our public debate swirls around whether the working poor should go to college, whether academics work hard enough to justify their pay and social standing, and whether libraries are worth their budgets, it stikes me that we’re grappling with what it means to have value in our society. Faculty and librarians answer, “We work for the public good — education, access to the thoughts and works of others, and the critical thinking skills to make something of that access all create a better society.” But I think that may be answering a question that is not being asked, or answering it based on assumptions that are not shared. As a society, we’re questioning the fundamentals: From what capacities do we derive value? From what outputs can that value be measured? What, ultimately, contributes to the value of society as a whole — the public good? And what are the rewards for value in time, money, and social standing?

As I think on this, here are some of the voices I’ve heard giving compelling answers or asking compelling questions about these fundamental questions.

Do Librarians Work Hard Enough? by Barbara Fister

“We have never tried to corner the market on information or drive any other organization out of business. We’re the opposite of empire builders. We’re trying to preserve access to common ground where ideas can be shared openly, not a trading pit for buyers and sellers. We’re not serving customers, we represent the will of the people so they can help themselves and be part of a community that learns.”

The Last Enclosures by Timothy Burke

“I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.”

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity by Sara Robinson

“Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls, and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.”

Kathrine Rowe, while talking to Carleton humanities seniors yesterday about how their skills prepare them for work, in this case the work of software development.

“I have spent my life, my career, apprenticing myself to the study of acts of expression.”

“Humanists are trained to enquire if the questions being asked are the right questions and if the assumptions being made are the right assumptions.”

Last summer, our workhorse of a pager finally fell to bits. Literally. So we had to buy a new one, and it’s actually  not a walk in the park to find one that will transmit all the way through our library, but we landed on this one. The good news is that it does indeed transmit throughout our library.

Aaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

The bad news comes in two parts. First, it turns out that “Good Vibrations” is actually stamped onto the pager — a pager that vibrates exuberantly. This is… not what I really want to be wearing on my belt buckle as I go about my librarianly work. We covered the phrase over with a slip of paper that says “Reference Pager.” Imaginative, I know, but I’m all for utterly useful things at service points.

The second part of the bad news was the extreme exuberance with which this pager vibrates. You can hear it vibrating away from across the main floor of the library, followed immediately by the poor on-call librarian’s startled scream. And at the beginning of every shift, you can watch as the librarian on duty gingerly unplugs the pager from its charger, turns it on, and cringes as it gives 4 excessively happy “I’M FUNCTIONING AND I’VE MISSED YOU AND I’M SO READY TO WORK TODAY” vibrating pulses.

I’m on call this afternoon while all my other colleagues are either working off campus, at a conference, or on vacation. If this thing goes off and I have a coronary, nobody will know what happened until everyone returns tomorrow to find my cold, dead hand clutching the maniacally vibrating pager.

p.s. Here’s the thing’s “I’m awake” war cry. (Surgeon General’s Warning: turn down your volume if you value your ears.)

In January we started piloting the Wiley pay-per-view option. Based on our usage stats and other schools’ usage stats, we bought tokens that would get us through the calendar year, after which we would reassess. Sounded like a plan!

Due to several unforeseen factors, we didn’t turn on the pay-per-view access in our link resolver. Seemed like a tiny bump in the road. Our real pilot would be delayed a couple of weeks. No biggie.

However, in those first two weeks, we went through over a quarter of the tokens we’d purchased, tokens that were supposed to last us a full calendar year. Apparently Google, Google Scholar, and the DOIs in scientific citation styles lead enough students to the Wiley publisher website version of these articles that going purely pay-per-view would crush our serials budget.

And it’s not just the students. The last 2-3 years, one of the main themes to the questions at new faculty orientation has been how to get to the full text from Google or Google Scholar.

Now, if you’re like me, none of this is particularly surprising. It’s just the first time I’ve seen it quantified in budget form. But it’s left me wondering if our to-be-configured discovery system will make a dent, and what Google plans to do with Google Scholar anyway now that the redesign (rolling out slowly to different people) removes Scholar from the “more” menue. And I wonder about the future of aggregator databases and of our budgetary structures. Not that I think databases are “dead” or anything, but I do think that Academic Search Premier does not now serve the function it served even just a few years ago, so it and it’s ilk will inevitably change focus or fade.