Library Trends

Linda's Design

Lynne C. Howarth and Eileen G. Abels capture the drive that shaped Linda's career as an educator. The authors place Linda's trajectory through the purposeful design of a plan of study including her bachelor's degree, two master's degrees, a PhD, and a certificate along with practical experience that prepared her for her career as an LIS educator, researcher, and administrator. The pairing of a deep respect and admiration for content and delivery is the common thread that weaves reliably across Smith's fifty years in LIS, as an innovator, educator, and researcher. All that she has initiated and accomplished across that time and moving forward can also [End Page 2] be said to be "by design"—a potent mix of experience and anticipation, an eye for identifying what is missing, and a determination to doggedly research and implement an elegant "fix" for addressing that gap (9). This paper explores the common thread of Smith's innovations as an LIS educator, tracing her past and continuing influence on the evolution of LIS curriculum content and delivery, and where it is reflected in, even predicted for contemporary and future graduate programs in information. Suggesting a tenet of design thinking, the authors examine Smith's career path and many contributions to confirm that one can get here from there. They conclude, "The trajectory of Linda C. Smith's career in LIS research, teaching/education, and service across fifty years is recognizable as incremental pieces assembled elegantly, knowingly, by design, not by default. For those of us who have been fortunate to share in any part of that journey, outcomes are genuinely revelatory, though never a surprise" (18).

Rachel Applegate, author of the second article in this volume, captures the importance of Linda's work on the American Library Association (ALA) Committee on Accreditation (COA). Not many people pay attention to the importance of accreditation, yet it is a critical element of ensuring quality education and takes the dedicated work of educators, practitioners, and researchers to ensure that it is done meaningfully. Co-editor Martha Kyrillidou recalls fondly the importance of accreditation as a student arriving from Greece to Ohio and exposed to the process as the external review panel arrived on campus at Kent State University. The process left an indelible memory for Martha as a graduate student helping put together data and statistics on the final reports. It was the impetus for recognizing the importance of ALA and sparked the establishment of the first ALA student chapter in Ohio at that time while initiating a new American to concepts like provisional accreditation and full accreditation.

This article locates LIS program accreditation in professional and sociological contexts and describes past, current, and future initiatives to ensure that accreditation standards and procedures acknowledge, assess, and support the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that LIS professionals need. The author has worked closely with Dr. Smith on the ALA COA.

Linda served on COA from 2018 to 2022 and has completed six site visits to LIS programs in the United States and Canada as part of external review panels. Her influence though was paramount while she served as chair of COA, her last professional engagement. Applegate concludes, "Linda Smith has been a strong, consistent, historically grounded yet future-oriented participant in and leader of these [accreditation] discussions. Her work on the Standards Review Subcommittee of COA, her work with ALISE on statistical reporting, and now her year as chair of COA will represent a culminating contribution to the field and its future" (34).

Continuing on the theme of Linda's contributions as an educator, Melissa A. Wong's article, "'The Teaching of Reference Must Keep Pace': [End Page 3] Teaching Sources and Searching in an Evolving Reference Environment," is written from the perspective of a person who worked very closely with Linda as the coeditor of the fifth edition of Reference and Information Services: An Introduction. Wong emphasizes how reference work has moved away from ready reference questions to emphasize in-depth research consultations, information literacy instruction, and curating online collections and patron guides. As LIS education evolves to keep pace with the changes in reference work, traditional "sources" assignments in which students seek answers to factual questions do not adequately reflect the work of contemporary reference librarians. Nor do they reflect the current complex questions of patrons.

The goal of reference courses has always been to help students develop the knowledge and skills they need for professional practice. While the web has changed the work of reference librarians, knowledge of information sources and skills in resource selection, evaluation, and searching remain essential competencies for graduates. Instructors should redesign traditional assignments to reflect the current and emerging information landscape by including new activities and assignments such as challenge questions and games that help students put it all together, integrating critical thinking with searching skills and providing hands-on experience in source evaluation and selection, online guides, and creative bibliographies. As Linda Smith (2015, 52) stated, reference and the role of reference librarians is ever-evolving, and "the teaching of reference must keep pace."

In the anatomy of bibliographic searching titled "Miranda's Quest," D. W. Krummel in his usual lyrical style highlights eternal truths of searching for meaning, facts, authority, and support: "Searching is basic to all living beings," like bread and water one might add (52). He walks us through the importance of systematic searching on sources of knowledge and articulates how "providing texts for readers" turns them into a "home for bibliographical searchers" (53). Isn't that all of us, all the time these days? He calls for the importance of finding while emphasizing verification and the importance of intuition while emphasizing thinking and judgment. He outlines the special competencies bibliographical searchers need and concludes, "Searching is often dull and mechanical. But searchers can also be blessed with searches that expand their horizons. Writings by obscure authors and in unfamiliar languages and cultures can challenge the searcher to be imaginative and thankful to be intellectually alive" (61).

Intellectual life might be dead if it were not for copyright. In "Navigating the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act in an Education and Library Environment," Tomas A. Lipinski highlights developments and changes in copyright enforcement. He discusses the CASE Act of 2020. While it purports to offer a simpler process for settling certain copyright matters, its processes are complex. This article examines [End Page 4] those processes and discusses the benefits and limitations of the new law. While the CASE Act can affect all copyright holders and users of material protected by copyright, its greatest impact may be on service providers. When an educational institution or library acts as a service provider and follows the removal or disabling processes under section 512 of the copyright law, several consequences result. The article expresses concern about the possibility of increasing the involvement of those entities in section 512 removal and disabling requests and other processes.

In "Modeling of Serials" Ed Jones examines the modeling of serial publications in Anglo-American cataloging practice from the cataloging codes of the nineteenth century to the IFLA Library Reference Model, focusing on the challenges and implications of the various models. His analysis moves from the models implicit in earlier cataloging codes, through the explicit models extracted from catalog records in the late twentieth century, to current models that attempt to align with models in neighboring domains. He includes some complementary and competing models from outside of library cataloging and addresses the evolving impact of online serials and their displacement of their print analogs as a "canonical" version. The article concludes with a modest proposal for realigning the modeling of serials:

In this postulated model, a serial is the idea of the sorts of content that one will find in that serial, conveyed by these decisions taken by the publisher and editor, the sorts of content that make the serial distinctive to the reader, that make the reader want to subscribe. The specific arrangement, augmentation, and so forth of this core content is a matter to be brought out in its various expressions. (Yes, in this model a serial work can be realized in more than one expression.) And because the serial work is an idea, its boundaries are determined by the persistence of this idea over time and space, as evidenced from external signs such as continuity of numbering between titles and shared numbering between versions. This implies the abandonment of the practice of using title change—or rather "major" title change—as a determinant of the boundaries of a serial work.

(109)

New Roles

The last two articles in the volume make the case for new roles for LIS professionals. In "Curating for Convergence: Data Stewardship for Interdisciplinary Inquiry" Carole L. Palmer and Melissa H. Cragin propose and advocate for data curation and stewardship work in LIS to foster convergence research based on a robust understanding of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research methods and practices. Advances in data infrastructure are often led by disciplinary initiatives aimed at innovation in federation and sharing of data and related research materials. In LIS the data services area has focused on data curation and stewardship to support description and deposit of data for access, reuse, and preservation. At the same time, solutions to societal grand challenges are thought to lie [End Page 5] in convergence research, characterized by a problem-focused orientation and deep cross-disciplinary integration, requiring access to highly varied data sources with differing scales. There is a link between data curation and stewardship work in LIS and support for convergence research. Highlighting unique contributions by Linda Smith to the LIS field, Palmer and Cragin outline how her work illuminates problems that are core to current directions in convergence research. Drawing on advances in data infrastructure in the earth and geosciences and trends in qualitative domains, they emphasize the importance of metastructures and the necessary influence of disciplinary practice on principles, standards, and provisions for ethical use across the evolving data ecosystem.

In "Closing the Loop: Bridging Machine Learning (ML) Research and Library Systems" Ryan Cordell explores the intersection of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) with LIS. "As disciplines primarily concerned with documentation collection and information categorization, archival studies have come across many of the issues related to consent, privacy, power imbalance, and representation among other concerns that the ML community is now starting to discuss" (133). He sees that the "relationship of ML/AI to libraries, in other words, should be not simply one of adoption or adaptation but one of mutual influence and collaboration (133).

Cordell sees the possibility of library ML projects that "could serve as diagnostics to the biases and gaps in existing digitized or born-digital collections, as rebuttals to claims—whether from scholars or from Silicon Valley—about ML objectivity, or as a synecdoche that helps patrons, scholars, or students better understand the historical stakes of library collections and archives. . . . Through the cultivation of explaining interfaces, libraries can help meet the goals of cultivating information literacy among patrons. In fact, I would suggest that, building on their existing roles as hubs of intellectual exchange, libraries could become focal sites for the translation of ML/AI research to the public, and leaders in discussions around explainable AI in research communities" (141).

As Linda's Festschrift goes to press, chatbots by ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI, are commonplace. LIS is being extended once again, but Linda's brand of scholarship is a shining light. We thank the authors of the papers in Linda's Festschrift for covering the wide spectrum of LIS theory, practice, and innovative thinking about the future. Shaped by their unique voices, the Festschrift reflects the hallmarks of Smith's servant leadership role at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: exhaustive library research, respect for the essential humanity of librarians and other people working with and designing information services and technological systems, and the unassuming way in which she taught and worked with all. [End Page 6]