Western cultures have developed an unhealthy relationship with the concept of time due to hidden assumptions that we have cultivated since the beginning of the industrial revolution, according to Dawna Ballard, associate professor, Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin (UT). Ballard, an expert in chronemics—the study of time in human communication—explained the concept during "Finding Time: From Industrial Mythology to Chronemic Literacy," the thought-provoking opening keynote at the 11th annual 2016 Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) conference held at UT’s AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, April 3–6. Featuring dozens of sessions and workshops on topics including emerging technologies, e-resource management, collection development and assessment, user experience, and organizational strategies, this year’s show was attended by more than 800 registrants from ten countries and 49 states, conference founder Bonnie Tijerina announced during the opening session. This summary includes just a few of the sessions that LJ had the opportunity to attend.

It's about time

Using the two ancient Greek words for time, “Chronos” and “Kairos,” Ballard explained that preindustrial societies think of time in relation to people and events. In agrarian cultures, for example, there are times that are appropriate for planting, and other times that are more appropriate to harvesting. Time is cyclical, but all times are not the same. This Ballard described as Kairos. The industrial revolution led to a focus on the clock—or what Ballard described as the Chronos aspect of time—and ultimately three common assumptions that Western societies make about time, work, and life: that “time management” skills make people more productive; that “if you love what you’re doing, it doesn’t feel like work”; and that it is possible to achieve “work/life balance” through policies. In reality, people don’t work like machines, and while happy workers are generally more productive, employers can’t trick workers into being happy, and people should be skeptical of language that describes work as anything other than work. Research has also indicated that many employees are either baffled or frustrated by the concept of “work/life balance.” The term “balance” infers that choices are being made between work and personal priorities, Ballard said. People assume that others are achieving balance while it eludes them personally, and that this must be a failure on their part. Ballard encouraged employers and employees to be conscious of these ingrained assumptions, and to rethink productivity as a long-term proposition rather than a day-to-day issue. Consider time spent on work and time spent on “life” in terms of long-term alignment and sustainability, rather than balance. People, after all, are capable of pushing themselves to achieve goals, she explained, but in the long term, when priorities aren’t properly aligned, there are negative consequences.

New habits die hard

Technological innovations have helped improve access to knowledge, but tools such as search engines and Wikipedia are also reshaping learning styles, noted Kanu Nagra, associate professor for the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, during the “Google vs Library Databases: Cultivating Research and Critical Thinking Skills in the Undergraduate Student Population” joint presentation with Bernadette Lopez-Fitzsimmons, information services librarian for Manhattan College, Bronx, NY. The Google vs library resources battle is a familiar one for many librarians and teachers, but Nagra and Lopez-Fitzsimmons presented an empathetic and detailed description of how student research habits have fundamentally changed. “The 21st century learner is a fast-paced learner,” Nagra said. “They want everything quickly.” Many attendees in the audience nodded and laughed when she described working with students who would ask for help with a database, pick the first two results of the first search they conducted with the student, thank them, and then use those two results to write their assignment. Today’s students “are champion multitaskers with a long list of goals,” Lopez-Fitzsimmons agreed. “They prioritize their work…and Google serves as a triage point.” Several factors may be responsible for this type of behavior, Deirdre Costello, senior UX experience researcher for EBSCO, explained during the “Researching Researchers: Developing Evidence-Based Strategy for Improved Discovery and Access” panel on April 6. Citing research that included video diary studies and one-on-one interview and UX sessions with high school students, Costello described how SAT prep courses are coaching students to “skim and scan” both long-form assigned reading and other content, including search results pages. They understand that Google results can’t be used in a citation list, but they use search results as a learning opportunity, skimming and scanning links, summaries, and Knowledge Graph information for related topics and buzzwords. Young people also trust Google to surface and rank relevant information. Costello’s research indicated that when the first two or three Google results aren’t what a student was looking for, they tend to assume that their search was flawed. And while they expect library search interfaces to be different than Google, the ranking mentality appears to be carrying over when they examine the results of database searches. Costello suggested that high schools might actually have more success teaching information literacy skills by lowering the stakes on research papers and encouraging students to explore a topic of their choice. In her separate session, Nagra suggested that academic librarians might try “flipped classroom” exercises in which students use the same keywords for Google and database searches, and then bring notes about their results to an information literacy class to discuss, ask questions, and fill in information gaps.

Think fast

Introduced last year, the conference’s new 15-minute “short talk” format enjoyed continued success, offering attendees the opportunity to learn about a variety of topics within a single session. During Monday afternoon’s emerging technologies short talks, for example, Keith Casey Jr., former Library of Congress employee and current director of product for Clarify Inc. discussed the future of audio and video data mining. Transcripts, he noted, have always been an imperfect representation of audio or visual content. “Audio is not just words that are said,” Casey explained, pointing out that speech recognition and natural language processing software doesn’t currently detect or process cues such as tone, levels of enthusiasm, or sarcasm. Similarly, traditional video metadata and transcripts don’t capture facial expressions, video-recorded text or graphics, motion, action, lighting, or other key aspects of visual communication. “Just knowing the content is not enough, knowing the meaning is vitally important,” he said. “There’s this massive amount of data out there…. A transcript or just the metadata that we have in our record system is not enough,” to make audio and video collections truly useful to future researchers. Next, Uta Grothkopf, head librarian, European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, Germany, and Jill Lagerstrom, chief librarian, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, each gave presentations on telescope bibliographies and harvesting and curating astronomical data. "We assemble a complete list, the entire set, of an observatory's [research] papers," explained Grothkopf. "The real value lies in the interconnecting resources.... From these databases we can pull all kinds of statistics and reports that help us to measure the scientific output of our facilities and evaluate their performance." Time at major observatories is a precious commodity, Grothkopf noted, and Lagerstrom later explained how aggregated papers and data linked to an observatory can lead to additional research discoveries and, separately, help shape observation policies. "Publications are one of the few tangible products of scientific inquiry," Lagerstrom said. "Uta mentioned that proposals [for observing time] are a really big part of astronomy, proposing to get on this telescope or that telescope... and [policies are] carefully engineered. We're going to give this much time to planets, we're going to give this much time to large programs, to small programs.... We actually have something called the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus that we're developing right now to help us out with text mining and data mining so that we can get answers to those questions." And Whitni Watkins, now web systems engineer for semiconductor company Analog Devices, discussed how coding workshops were created during her work as systems librarian at St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY. The program began with a one-off Hour of Code workshop. "This was out of the blue, off the cuff, 'hey let's try and do this,'" Watkins said. "Our library director said 'sure, go ahead,' and we had ten days to plan and 35 people in attendance." Many attendees, however, asked for more, Watkins said. "Now what? How do I continue learning? Where do I go? Who can I ask questions to?" When building ongoing courses, Watkins said that teams should reach out to student groups, professors, or other collaborators to get information about what should be covered in classes. Ideally, one-on-one help should be available for course attendees, and classes should include time for question and answer sessions. Instructors should suggest resources that students can access after class, and contact trees are especially helpful for attendees seeking more help or information. Also, to ensure optimal attendance and participation in academic settings, librarians should be conscious of timing. Most students won’t be interested in learning a new skill during midterms, for example.

Tough call

Many academic libraries are squeezed by rising resource costs and flat or declining budgets, and Richard Wineski, assistant director, Cleveland State University Library (CSUL), offered a case study for how he was broaching this topic with faculty in his April 5 presentation, “When the numbers don’t lie: telling not so good assessment stories to faculty and administration.” From 2009 to 2015 the total amount CSUL spent on library materials declined from $2 million to $1.3 million, and the library’s budget for serials and electronic resources shrank from $1.6 million to $1.2 million. Most of the university’s departments have felt the impact. Wineski urged libraries facing similar situations—especially leaders who are new to an institution—to take a frank assessment of the situation and which resources patrons are using and not using from a collection and analyze the usage and costs of interlibrary loan, consortial lending, consortial funding, and participation arrangements. He also encouraged attendees to discuss with department heads and faculty the pitfalls of cost-per-use and cost-per-download services, and be upfront about the library’s strengths and weaknesses via comparisons to peer institutions and by sharing circulation trend data related to an academic program or department. Libraries should also establish a collection development policy template—no more than two pages, he suggested—that librarians can use to facilitate a dialog with their department liaisons. Have departments document what is essential and what is on their “wish lists.” This documentation can help serve as a bulwark against future budget cuts, he said.