I’ve been reading Applied Ontology (Munn & Smith) and really connect with this idea:
“…goal of increasing our knowledge about the world, and improving the quality of the information we already have. Knowledge, when handled properly, is to a great extent cumulative. Once we have it, we can use it to secure a wider and deeper array of further knowledge, and also to correct the errors we make as we go along. In this way, knowledge contributes to its own expansion and refinement. But this is only possible if what we know is recorded in such a way that it can quickly and easily be retrieved, and understood, by those who need it.”
Do we have a professional responsibility to not only collect, describe, evaluate, store, preserve, and share information—but to also improve it? I was thinking about this when my friend Tara was telling me about her interlibrary loan (ILL) work.
Here is one story: a number of years ago she was trying to locate a journal article. It was roughly twenty years old and had been cited several times… but uncovering it was impossible. She finally tracked down the author who somewhat reluctantly admitted that he made it up much earlier in his career to beef up his CV. The student had some difficulty accepting this explanation because the item had been cited in a dissertation and several scholarly articles. It makes you wonder how often people cite things they have not read just to pad their own bibliographies.
Tara described her work as forensic bibliographic reconstruction, which she defines as the use of Google Scholar (or other tools, usually in multiples and/or in creative ways) to track down missing or incorrect pieces of a bibliographic reference, due to printing errors or human errors in compiling Works Cited lists.
I asked her to tell me more about her work:
You use the phrase “forensic bibliographic reconstruction” – tell me what that means.
Some interlibrary loan (ILL) requests are very routine: the user is able to provide a citation that includes complete information for all of the relevant fields needed for a lending institution to fill the request, and all we need to do is find out which institutions hold the item and submit the request.
For other items, however, it can feel more like being a forensic scientist, or an archaeologist attempting to reconstruct an artifact from its broken shards. The person provides us with some evidence—the pieces of information that he/she knows about the document—but some key facts are missing. It’s up to us to assemble more information about the item in order to gain a fuller understanding of the item needing to be tracked down, much like a forensic specialist would piece together physical evidence to support a criminal investigation, using the available clues. What type of item is being referred to? Is it a straightforward book or article, or is it something more obscure (grey literature, or possibly a conference presentation/panel discussion that completely lacks a published counterpart)? Once we know what we’re looking at, we can then focus on its publication and library holdings status. Does it exist as a circulating item in our lending network? What if it doesn’t? Is there a vendor source for it? Is it archived online? Can we determine if it was once available, but is now (for all intents and purposes) lost to scholarship? Who might we contact for more information? Is the author still alive? Reconstructing the history and potential availability of the item can be a time-consuming and multi-step process.
Librarians and staff often start with something like this:
And end up with something like this... which only two libraries in the world own.
How has the web and all the various online tools impacted your work?
All of our wonderful databases are fantastic at increasing the findability of a reference--but that does not necessarily mean the findability of full text. A lot of what’s trickling through to interlibrary loan (and reference services) are the more obscure, and less widely-held, items that haven’t been (and likely never will be) digitized...print and microform (etc.) items that are on the endangered species list as universities purge their print collections, if they don’t have a strong retention/preservation policy...not to mention the mass extinctions that occur when special archives close and their materials aren’t bought or absorbed into other active collections.
I’ve seen it happen with a lot of old technical papers. I know they existed once, and were held in some collection--but now, frustratingly, no researchers have access to them because they’ve been dispersed--or more likely trashed. It’s very painful to have to explain that to a student or faculty member.
How often do you encounter troublesome or challenging citations?
I can only speak for myself here; ILL departments serving larger populations, or specialized populations, may have different experiences. It also depends on what you mean by “troublesome.” On a daily basis I have to do at least a little routine legwork in verifying or completing citations—finding missing page numbers, verifying correct editions or journal issue numbers, etc. Being able to provide complete information is a courtesy to the lending institution on the other end, making it as easy as possible for them to find and deliver the information to us.
For one routine example, I received a book chapter request from a grad student yesterday; the item was in the area of gender studies in organizational science, but the publication date I received through her submission was 1947, which didn’t make sense given the seemingly more modern subject matter and terminology in the rest of her citation. I don’t know whether it was a user typo, or if she drew the information from somewhere else. It was a very quick process to confirm the book was published in 1992 (via WorldCat), and correct the ILL information before I sent the request out. That type of quick verification process may occur several times throughout the day. Even when it looks like a student has given complete information, I might find a slight discrepancy in a title that could make a difference: “Organizational Science” instead of “Organization Science” – or the Americanized “behavior” instead of “behaviour.”
More challenging items, where I’m stumped for a period of time, don’t happen every day. A few items per week may require deep searching, where I have to consult a number of different resources to find the answer I need. At least a small handful every month might require a special inquiry: contacting an organization that sponsored a publication or a non-OCLC partner institution, or tracking down an author. In some cases, I’m working with a foreign language in which I have limited experience: locating a dissertation by conducting a search in a Lithuanian institutional repository, or confirming for a student whether an article from a Portuguese journal happens to have been subsequently translated into English. Or, finding out whether a source cited from a particular conference has an actual published artifact: the citation may indeed refer to a panel discussion that the author was fortunate enough to attend; there may be no conference paper or transcript available (that’s a common enough situation, in my experience).
Those aren’t the worst types I run into. Sometimes you just have to be savvy enough to know that when a student wants “the law of bibliographies with the funky blue cover,” what they really need is the APA Style Manual, 6th edition (which is actually held on the reference shelf and might not require an interlibrary loan request, after all). The most frustrating types are the ones that I can confirm existed, but I can’t confirm a source for: one I’ve dealt with recently was an early 1970s 12-page report on “case method” (there is an OCLC record for the specific item requested, but zero library holdings attached to it, and the sponsoring institution has been defunct for a long time).
Increasingly, the items trickling through to ILL are those that patrons absolutely can’t find themselves, despite trying library resources to the best of their abilities. They might find items cited once or twice via an Internet search, often referenced obliquely or in passing and not always in a handy, standardized citation style. I see this as a trend that will continue as the Internet increases the discoverability of references, but not necessarily of their full text; the increasing digitization of full text also tends to lead to the discovery of other source material that has since been “lost” over time. It can be a vicious cycle.
What’s your mental process for tracking down these oddball citations?
The best mental processes involve flexibility and openness. Sometimes after finding a particularly difficult item, I can’t even recall the exact trail I’ve followed. The process can be almost Zen-like on a good day.
I’m also a big proponent of the idea that no knowledge is ever wasted. My personal interest in hockey has led me to follow some former NHL players in the Kontinental Hockey League; along the way, I’ve learned enough Russian to recognize names and read box scores. That came in extremely useful in personally scrolling through rolls of Russian-language newspaper microfilm to find a 1960s anthropologist’s obituary for a grad student; I could find his date of death (Wikipedia!) but had no way of knowing when the tribute article finally went to print overseas. Out of a possible range of up to several months’ worth of daily newspapers, I was able to find the exact ½ page item she wanted. It was painstaking to scan through the Cyrillic, but it was ultimately rewarding to be able to hold the microfilm printout in my hands and deliver it to our student.
How long can a forensic bibliographic reconstruction project take?
At some point, you may realize just how much time you’ve already put into a single item; occasionally it needs to be set aside temporarily to take care of other priorities or more straightforward orders. The classic forensic project takes on the aspect of a personal vendetta—something so irritating to the ILL staff member that it can’t be satisfactorily dropped until there’s a resolution, one way or the other.
I’ve had one request for four technical documents that dragged out at least four months and required the help of a technical documents vendor to retrieve them from their stored archives and convert them from microfilm (three of the four eventually arrived; I never could discover what happened to the fourth—there were no other sources I could find for the item, so I had no choice but to let that one go). I might add that the person requesting them was one of the co-authors, in fact. He participated on the DoD technical project contract that produced those documents circa 1974 and apparently never kept a copy of his work.
Do your students and faculty expect that all information is obtainable?
They often come in with the understandable expectation that, if a previous researcher has used it before (or indicated that they used it, which isn’t always the same thing), then it must “be out there” and obtainable. Of course, no shortage of unforeseeable catastrophes may have happened in the meantime: the closing or destruction of libraries and archives, the outright discarding of materials (without regard to the overall number of existing OCLC holdings), broken URLs, etc.
People believe what they see in print (I include Google in that category), or what they gather from a source they consider authoritative, like their professor. Questioning those sources can cause some cognitive tension, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Patrons tend to come in with a strong belief in the traditional preservation mission of librarianship, so it can be a shock to explain that not everything (print or electronic) is held within circulating library collections. A similar perception applies to Internet resources: “I remember downloading this information five years ago; what do you mean it’s been taken down?”
How has your background and experience with various research projects impacted your skills related to tracking down citations?
John Ruskin is an author close to my heart. I’ve read numerous sources noting that his first publication was The Poetry of Architecture (serialized in 1837-1838), which isn’t the case! While still in his teens, along with writing some original poems, the very precocious and well-rounded Ruskin published several geological essays in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, a fact potentially of interest to scholars of his scientific and natural philosophy works, although perhaps less so to readers concerned with the subjects for which Ruskin is best known today: art, architectural, and social criticism. If small errors can creep into the research surrounding a major author, as Ruskin was in his day, it’s easy to appreciate just how widespread the problems of “bad” citations are among scholarly literature in general. We’re all familiar with quotations misattributed to famous individuals (see the recent Maya Angelou postage stamp controversy); that’s a fairly good analogy to some of the garbled citations I’ve run into.
Experience makes you wary of accepting source citations at face value. When in doubt, it’s always good to try to cross-reference information across multiple sources to ensure accuracy…and even then, information may remain elusive, or just plain incorrect.
Most of the ILL personnel I’ve had the pleasure to meet are naturally smart, detail-oriented, inquisitive, and persistent. I feel that participating in active research hones those qualities. It certainly illuminates many of the issues that our library users are facing, particularly at the higher levels.
What does interlibrary loan look like in the future?
I’m encouraged by JSTOR’s recent announcement that they now support ILL lending of JSTOR book chapters. How ILL evolves over the foreseeable future will largely be determined by development in digitization and electronic publishing and, moreover, the limitations or liberalities of publishers’ licensing agreements. Expanding ILL permissions for electronic resources and reconfiguring pricing structures would be a tremendous benefit to scholars everywhere, enabling rapid turnaround of information and encouraging further discovery and innovation in research. The current stumbling block shows early signs of crumbling around the edges; it’s hopeful that trend continues.
That being said, there will always be some of us who need to consult the physical artifact: an item solely available in the print medium, or even a specific edition (such as one known to contain unique marginalia related to a particular research question). ILL staff, I believe, will continue to serve as facilitators in the research process, side-by-side with traditional reference librarians, no matter how many times formats change.
How might interlibrary loan change has new scholarly artifacts and outputs are generated? (blogs, data, digital ephemera, etc)
With great researching power comes great responsibility; for researchers, this means a commitment transparency in reporting sources used and following accepted publication and citation standards. Scholars are increasingly being exposed to systematic literature review methodology, which holds them accountable for their source material and enhances the tracking and replicability of their findings for future scholars. Better reporting can only lead to better documentation for ILL staff and librarians when called to pursue some of these cited items.
Digital ephemera is undoubtedly tricky—one day here, the next not so much--and there is a growing awareness among libraries and archives of the preservation issues involved. The written word is sticky, so many institutions have initiated transcription projects (crowdsourced and otherwise), such as for oral history interviews. There are privacy concerns to be ironed out in cases of sensitive and personally identifiable information; however, creating a written record from audio and video is still of tremendous importance for enhancing scholarly discovery. Data can’t only be curated; it must also be made findable, accessible, and contextualized to have maximum scholarly value—not just to one institution’s affiliates behind a password-protected barrier, but open to the global research community. ILL considerations should absolutely remain part of that discussion. We’re still very much in the early stages.
See also:
