[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, July 2010

[Jill O'Neill]

NFAIS Enotes, July 2010

Written and Compiled by Jill O'Neill

 

Books: Immersion, Assessment and Engagement

 

In July 2010, Jakob Nielson published research findings that asserted
maximum reading efficiency is still done using the print medium, although he
also acknowledged that tablet reading experiences (such as with an iPad) are
nearly equivalent in terms of user satisfaction.  Specifically he found that
digital devices slowed reading speed by anywhere from 6.2% to 10.7% when
compared with reading speeds from printed texts (see:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html). In his study,
subjects were asked to read a short story by Ernest Hemingway on four
different devices - the printed page, a desktop PC, an Apple iPad, and
Amazon's Kindle device. "On average, the stories took 17 minutes and 20
seconds to read," according to the July 2nd Alertbox, a time sufficient to
create an immersive experience. Neilson also noted that users said that
reading from a printed page was more relaxing than the use of a screen for
the same purpose.

 

As it happens, a white paper from Elsevier, dated July 2010 and entitled A
Study on the Usage, Application, and Value of Online Books on ScienceDirect
in an Academic Environment, noted a similar length of time for perusing a
chapter in a digital book. "Sessions where full-text from Online Books on
Science Direct was accessed and downloaded lasted considerably longer than
sessions involving full-text journal articles. More than half the sessions
with full-text book chapter usage lasted longer than ten minutes." The
Elsevier research attributes the greater length of time spent in
book-related sessions  not only to time devoted to examining a book's
overall structure and content, but also to users' assessment of the
relevance and value of specific chapters.

(NOTE:  In the wake of the soft launch of Elsevier's new integrated
platform, SciVerse, and the related closing of the previous ScienceDirect
Librarian Information Web site, the full text of the study is no longer
available.)

 

Michael Levine Clark of the University of Denver indicated in an interview
with Sue Polanka of Wright State that their patron-driven model for rental
or purchase of e-books allows for three five-minute sessions of user
assessment (fifteen minutes in all) before invoking the cost of either
rental or purchase of an e-book (see:
http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?page_id=42). 

 

Assessment of relevance, the document triage referenced in the June 2010
issue of NFAIS E-Notes, may be so automatic to many of us that we are not
even aware of the intellectual process as we pass judgment. However,
graduate students are taught to look at the primary bibliographical elements
(title, author, publisher, date) as well as to examine the front matter -
table of contents, preface, introduction, etc. Further assessment (in the
field of history, for example) occurs through looking at the critical
reception of the work, the author's affiliations, agenda and awards, the
scope of the text, its methodology or historiography, and only once all of
that has been done, does the student investigate more of the book's actual
thesis and supporting evidence. 

 

Playing around with the reading apps on a mobile device, you would quickly
learn that  any assessment of an e-book using the above criteria would have
to take at least ten minutes, primarily because most of the interfaces are
not set up to support that kind of close examination. In the past five
years, the focus has been on determining how best to deliver book content in
digital form, rather than on creating a better set of methods and tools for
assessment of its value. 

 

John W. Warren of the Rand Corporation has been tracking the development of
e-books in articles that have been appearing in the International Journal of
the Book (http://www.book-journal.com <http://www.book-journal.com/> ). He
recognizes the concept of the book as the physical artifact, just one form
of consolidating a body of knowledge, and notes examples of alternative
forms of consolidation. His first article drew attention to the Codex
Sinaiticus (http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/en/), a cooperative initiative
involving the British Library among others in re-assembling scattered
fragments of a Fourth Century Bible in manuscript form into a readable
whole. "The electronic edition of Codex-Sinaiticus presents the manuscript
in an interlinked interface, with high-quality images of each page in
standard light and raking light; a transcription of the text on each page,
including the numerous corrections; translations of selected passages; and
detailed physical description of each page." The result is essentially a
facsimile edition of the text as it was originally conceived, made
accessible via the Web and equipped with a complete set of navigational and
translation tools. In his second article, Warren used the example of the
COMPARE site (Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts) from the Rand
Corporation, a "unique online resource providing objective, peer-reviewed
information and statistics on the U.S. health care system" created in aid of
the health care legislative reform initiative. In his view, the COMPARE site
is a compendium of knowledge that deconstructs the scholarly monograph.
Warren also references digital textbooks, another example of aggregated
knowledge intended to introduce and explain a body of knowledge.  Warren's
work addresses the question of whether a book (as a representation of a
corpus of knowledge) need necessarily be a book. 

 

Both articles may be found in PDF file formats at:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/w/warren_john.html.

*	"The Progression of Digital Publishing: Innovation and the
E-volution of E-books," The International Journal of the Book, Volume 7,
Number 4 (2010)
*	"Innovation and the Future of E-books," The International Journal of
the Book, Volume 6, Number 1 (2009).

 

It's worth noting, however, as columnist David Brooks did in the New York
Times, that the various forms of sharing of knowledge suit different
learning styles more effectively. Brooks wrote that the literary (print)
world was best at helping the reader master "significant things of lasting
import," whereas the Internet was (as with Warren's COMPARE example) better
suited to helping the reader become "knowledgeable about current events, the
latest controversies and important trends." Brooks closed his column
suggesting that what we really need to do is figure out how the "Internet
counterculture could be used to better attract people to serious learning."
(see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/opinion/09brooks.html?hp).

 

Kevin Kelly in the Smithsonian wrote something similar - "In books we find a
revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own truth from pieces."  (see:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-
Whole-New-Way.html).

 

Whether we ever reach agreement as to whether an e-book is a monograph, a
web-based resource of interlinked parts, or a stand-alone app on a mobile
device, there are challenges for the researcher in assessing relevance. 

 

Long-established abstracting services, such as American Psychological
Association's PsycInfo, have an edge in this regard when you look at the
records created for book titles for the purposes of discovery via that
resource. The structure of such a record does in fact supply the bulk of the
criteria recommended for assessment (see the tab labeled "book" at
http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/sample.aspx).  One of the main
rationales for abstracting services has been this type of assistance
rendered to users in evaluating material. Scanning the various fields of the
bibliographic record offers clues to whether the work is pertinent to the
research. There is the abstract, there are the elements of the author's name
and affiliation, even keywords appear to help the reader categorize the
areas in which a work may be useful. 

 

But there is a long-standing question as to whether or not this particular
function of traditional Abstracting & Indexing might be at risk, given the
strengths of technology.  For documents or for chapter length units,
wouldn't it be just as easy and/or efficient to skim the document rather
than study a bibliographic record?  One 2008 research article looked at the
use of document thumbnails as a mechanism for this type of triage
("Improving Skim Reading for Document Triage, Buchanan, Owen, ACM
International Conference Proceedings at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414714), and concluded that "semantic
thumbnails provide a means for improving the effectiveness of users'
interactions with new literature, through enhanced readability of headings
and other content."

 

In that instance the researchers were referring to the headings that appear
in the body of an article, but it triggered a reminder for me of a book I
had been reading, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books by H.J. Jackson (Yale
University Press, 2001).  Jackson notes that in earlier centuries, it was
expected that marginalia would be read by others; it was perceived as a
public contribution, one that increased the value of those costly volumes
owned by the wealthy. Poet Samuel Coleridge gave books as gifts that he'd
already read and for which he had already created marginalia, because the
gift was as much the results of his engagement with the content as it was in
offering the recipient an opportunity to do the same.  Jackson wrote, in a
different setting, of the use that President John Adams made of marginalia,
creating headings for each paragraph of a text as he read. Jackson notes
that Adams' did this as an aid to working out his own thoughts about a
particular author's ideas, crafting his arguments as a statesman (see:
http://adamsjefferson.com/papers/adams_marginalia_jackson.pdf).

 

Modern educational experts refer to the value of this practice as the
"generation" effect. Through active annotation, students retain more. By
viewing the annotations of others, serious readers are more stimulated in
considering multiple points of view and weighting the value of opposing
ideas (see this practical individual example --
http://peterc.org/blog/2010/248-notetaking.html -- as well as this article
drawn from a search of the U.S. Department of Education database, ERIC
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=EJ851577).

 

While modern information services have routinely used keywords to amplify
understanding of what a particular text may be "about," the practice was
primarily engineered in the interests of enhanced retrieval rather than as a
support for the thinking process. Nor are those keywords found in an
abstracting record assigned at the granular level of a paragraph as
reader-generated marginalia historically have been. In the rage for
user-generated tagging two or three years ago, this was likely examined, but
not necessarily embraced by NFAIS member organizations on the grounds that
user-generated tags lacked accuracy and consistency as descriptive terms and
were not easily integrated into retrieval systems. And yet the value of a
piece of content is demonstrated every time a user employs tagging,
annotation, or highlighting to improve retention or mark a text's
significance. 

 

Amazon has been testing that level of engagement with the Kindle. Back in
May of 2010, it released a site spotlighting popular highlighted passages in
Kindle digital books (see http://kindle.amazon.com
<http://kindle.amazon.com/> ). Privacy experts denounced the idea as
invasive, but since the highlighting is only made public if three or more
people highlight the same passage, user outrage at the time seemed muted
(see Bob Sullivan's nicely balanced coverage in May at MSNBC:
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/05/as-the-battle-of-e-book-readers-heats-up-am
azon-is-trying-to-beat-the-competition-by-continually-adding-new-features-to
-its.html#posts). 

 

If you are unfamiliar with the way this works, there are two ways that
Amazon permits viewing of annotations from Kindle editions. Visiting as a
guest, one may view "Most highlighted passages" across all Kindle users; at
the time of this writing, the top quote on the list was from Outliers by
Malcolm Gladwell, noted by more than 2,000 readers. It is also possible to
view a list of titles receiving the greatest amount of highlighting. The
other option is to view the lists of titles and passages most recently
highlighted. From a cursory monitoring however, the disciplines that
predominate these lists are business and religion/spirituality. 

 

Whether by accident or design, there are few instances of group highlighting
of either textbooks or scholarly monographs.  Those students at institutions
of higher education who were given Kindles to use in classroom settings
consistently complained that annotation on the device was simply too
inefficient. When questioned about this, students at Princeton specifically
indicated that they either (a) wanted to use a stylus for marking up the
text or (b) wanted a touch screen that would allow them to highlight a
passage using their finger and in color (see page 5 at
http://www.princeton.edu/ereaderpilot/eReaderFinalReportShort.pdf).  At
least that body of users wants the capability of adding in marginalia. 

 

Good thought requires stimuli. Readers find such stimuli through whatever
traces previous students and scholars have left behind, ranging from the
most highly organized annotated bibliographies and lists of citations down
to anonymous highlighting or penciled marginalia.  Those things are useful,
representing a form of social collaboration. 

 

How useful and for what class or population of user are questions that are
as yet unanswered (as I think is evidenced by Amazon's experience). Scholars
and professional readers regularly interact with content; they annotate and
highlight and engage with volumes of material, but always somewhat
privately. For those who follow after, the fruits of researcher interaction
with a text are still measured primarily through citations or
bibliographies. Those are what graduate students pore over in assessing
relevance of a given work to their own study.  

 

Those users observed in the Elsevier study spent time assessing book
chapters for relevance before determining whether or not to download the
full text. There must be ways in which NFAIS member organizations can help
those users reduce the time spent in evaluation - from ten minutes down to
seven or even five minutes. We haven't hit upon the right combination of
technologies to make engagement with text viewable and intelligible, and yet
it is in the moment of engagement that the user senses the greatest value in
content. 

 

Modes of annotation and marginalia will assuredly undergo further change. In
the meantime, NFAIS member organizations might do well to consider a
question or two in the context of the communities that they serve:

 

*	What might an information provider do to improve the process of
assessing relevance, particularly with regard to book content? 

 

And a harder one:

 

*	What combination of technologies (print or digital) will better
support thought in the communities being served by NFAIS members? 

 

MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR THESE NFAIS EVENTS:

 

October 13:            Improving the User Search Experience Part II:
Leveraging Content to Improve Discoverability and Use, Philadelphia, PA

 

October 18:            NFAIS Humanities Roundtable IX, New York, NY

 

November 10: Assessing the Usage and Value of Scholarly and Scientific
Output: 

                        An Overview of Traditional and Emerging Metrics,
Philadelphia, PA

 

November 18: Mobile Computing: Delivering Content to the Research 

                        Community, Washington, DC (joint with CENDI)

 

December 8:           Webinar on the Information Industry in China

February 27- March 1:  NFAIS 2011 Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA

 

 

2010 SPONSORS

Accessible Archives, Inc.

American Psychological Association/PsycINFO

The British Library

CAS

Copyright Clearance Center

CrossRef

Data Conversion Laboratory

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)

Getty Research Institute

H. W. Wilson

Information Today, Inc.

Office of Scientific & Technical Information, DOE

Philosopher's Information Center

ProQuest

Really Strategies, Inc.

Temis, Inc.

Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science

Thomson Reuters IP Solutions

Unlimited Priorities Corporation

 

 

 

 

***************************

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jill O'Neill

Director, Planning & Communication

NFAIS

(v) 215-893-1561

(email) jilloneill at nfais.org

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lyralists.lyrasis.org/pipermail/nfais-l/attachments/20100830/2c4d118f/attachment.html>