Tag Archives: innovation

The 10-Minute International Librarian #15: Think how you can use technology to improve services

Libraries have long been innovators in using technology to share information and carry out their missions.

From automation to the creation of inter-library networks that predate the modern internet, there are plenty of stories of libraries leading the way.

This should be a source of confidence – libraries have it in them to use technology to serve their communities better!

With technology always advancing, there are always new opportunities being created.

Often, this happens so fast it can be hard to keep up! But as highlighted in the IFLA Global Vision summary report, we need to work to make the most of the tools we have available.

So for our 15th 10-Minute International Librarian exercise, think how you can use technology to improve a service.

It doesn’t need to be something advanced.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries have made powerful use of well-established and used tools such as WhatsApp to provide reference services, or platforms like Facebook to organise storytimes.

It can be a great way to reach more people, or save time and effort. Of course, it is important to ensure that it doesn’t leave some people excluded.

But with a little time, and a knowledge of users, technology can increase the positive impact of libraries on communities.

Good luck, and share your experiences of using technology to improve services in the comments box below!

 

This idea relates to the IFLA Strategy! 2.4 Provide tools and infrastructure that support the work of libraries.

As we publish more ideas, you will be able to view these using the #10MinuteInternationalLibrarian tag on this blog, and of course on IFLA’s Ideas Store (especially those related to Opportunities 2 and 4 of the Global Vision)! Do also share your ideas in the comments box.

Library Stat of the Week #24: Where there are more academic librarians, there is more publishing and patenting

As highlighted in last week’s post, academic libraries are central to any country’s infrastructure for learning and innovation. Through giving learners and researchers access to existing knowledge, and support to make the most of it, they enable work to happen that leads to social and economic progress.

Last week’s post offered an initial overview of data about academic libraries and library workers in IFLA’s Library Map of the World database, suggesting that there are, on average, 1.32 academic libraries and 10.63 academic library workers per 100 000 people.

Within this, there is strong variation across countries, with, for example, there being 26.25 academic library workers per 100 000 people in the United States, but fewer than 0.1 elsewhere.

What might this mean for the ability of countries to innovate?

In this week’s Library Stat of the Week, we’ll take a first look at data on some common metrics of innovation performance – numbers of scientific publications, and numbers of patents – in order to look for potential correlations.

For this, we can cross data from the Library Map of the World (using figures for numbers of librarians and libraries per 100 000 people), and World Bank data on scientific and technical journal articles, and on patent applications by residents, also translated into figures for numbers per 100 people.

Graph 1: Academic Libraries and Publications

Graphs 1 and 2 do this in the case of publications. The link between the strength of the academic library network and the number of scientific and technical publication is relatively clear, and makes sense intuitively.

Researchers with better access to books, journals and other resources, through libraries, are better placed to write high-quality articles themselves, likely to be accepted in good quality journals.

Graph 2: Academic Library Workers and PublicationsInterestingly, the correlation is stronger in the case of academic library workers (Graph 2) than in that of academic libraries (Graph 1).

It is likely that numbers of library workers is a better indicator of the strength of the field, both given the importance of staff in helping researchers, but also potential variation from country to country in how academic libraries are organised and counted.

While, as always, correlation does not mean causality (a point we will return to below), the graph does at least seem to back up the argument that a stronger library field will tend to support a higher publications output.

The next stage is to look at patents. These are often treated as a key indicator of the innovation performance of countries, given that they can be associated with new products, services and so business.

Graph 3 Academic Libraries and Patent ApplicationsGraphs 3 and 4 therefore repeat the exercise with patent application data, comparing numbers of academic libraries and library workers per 100 000 people.

In this, in order to avoid distortion, some countries with outlying data (notably the extremely high patenting figures for China and South Korea) have been excluded in order to allow for a better look at others.

It is clear that the relationships are less clear with patents than they are with publications. This is perhaps understandable – much patenting activity comes from businesses, while publications tend to come from universities and research centres

It is already clear that correlations are weaker here – indeed, there seems to be little correlation at all between the number of academic libraries and patents at all (Graph 3).

Graph 4: Academic Library Workers and Patent ApplicationsNonetheless, on the stronger indicator of the strength of academic library fields – the number of academic library workers per 100 000 people (Graph 4) – the correlation does reappear, although is still slightly weaker than with publications.

 

Overall, these results do support the conclusion that countries which perform better on traditional metrics of innovativeness are also the ones that have a stronger academic library field.

As mentioned above, this is not necessarily the same as causality. In next week’s Library Stat of the Week, we will therefore try to control for some of the other potential factors which might influence this connection.

 

Find out more on the Library Map of the World, where you can download key library data in order to carry out your own analysis! See our other Library Stats of the Week! We are happy to share the data that supported this analysis on request.

Intellectual Property Is Important for…

We often forget that intellectual property rights – such as copyright, patents or trademarks – are not ends in themselves, but instruments at the service of development, creativity, innovation and welfare. Today, for World Intellectual Property Day 2019, we want to show this side of intellectual property, and how it has an impact on libraries and similar institutions.

Like all tools, they can be used well, or badly, and in some circumstances may even simply not be relevant. Copyright can contribute to these objectives, as long as the right legislation is in place.

However, it is not the case that more rights mean better outcomes. Scholars have underlined on several occasions how more flexibility contributes to development, rather than stronger protection. Exceptions and limitations are therefore key for many public interest activities. Copyright is not complete and does not fulfill its purpose without them.

In particular, when copyright laws are only written with the industry or and legal practitioners, there is a tendency to forget its strong impact on other sorts of institutions or activities. Unbalanced, unrealistic or unreasonably complicated laws can be a real problem for cultural heritage institutions for instance, whose staff have the important duty of understanding and interpreting copyright, and guiding users, students, authors and researchers through what they can and cannot do.

Copyright needs to be mindful of its impact beyond the most obvious commercial activities. Here are a few examples of where intellectual property has an impact, and so where relevant stakeholders’ views should be taken into account. Libraries, of course, have a key interest in all of these:

Copyright is important for cultural heritage

 Cultural heritage institutions hold collections of items protected by copyright law. Even if some are not necessarily protected, it is sometimes difficult to confirm this (when did the author die? Should the work be considered as being subject to copyright?).

Any activity involving such materials is then affected by copyright law, from public lending (in some countries), to preservation, to digitising and making available orphan works. Unless copyright adapts to support these activities, it will fail to promote this public policy goal.

Copyright is important for research

 Here again, decisions taken around copyright have a major impact. Most research material, for example articles, monographs or theses, have copyright protection. Apart from traditional issues such as plagiarism, or quotation (which should be protected by an exception under international law), new challenges arise as technology evolves.

Text and data mining (TDM), a form of processing information by machine, often involves copying, and so raises questions of whether the content processed is protected by copyright. If it is, then either permission is needed for every single work protected (impossible to manage), or a solution such as an exception is needed.

Exceptions for TDM, as well as other research copying, can make a real contribution to strengthening innovation and scholarship, while protecting the market for original works.

 Copyright is important for education

 Education is all about exchanging and sharing information. Information is present in the classroom, in forms of textbooks or online material displayed, at home with homework, or during examinations. Copyright has a strong influence on how education is provided, as it is applicable to most materials.

Traditionally produced textbooks, as well as digital course ware, play a helpful role, alongside open educational resources and materials produced specifically by teachers for their classes. Such materials should benefit from copyright protection, in order to reward the work of authors.

However, such rules should not stand in the way of educational uses which do not harm markets, or indeed make it unduly hard to create and share open educational resources. As set out in the provisional report by Professor Raquel Xalabarder at the most recent meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, the primary goal must be to make it easy for teachers to teach.

Copyright should be seen as a tool, amongst others, for achieving broader ends, including creativity, innovation, and the public interest activities such as the ones described in this above.

 

 

The Economist and the Librarian: What the Nobel Prize Tells Us about Open Access and Libraries

Open Access and Libraries

Paul Romer, one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2018, has been recognised for his work on how innovation can allow for continued growth. His insights into the nature and role of knowledge – and in particular of access to knowledge – offer welcome support for some of the key functions of libraries in providing access and skills to all.

Libraries and economics are rarely seen together in the same sentence. Indeed, libraries are seen by many as the reverse of economics – a public service aimed at promoting well-being. A long way away from business and profits.

They are, arguably, the answer to the failures of free market economics, which would risk seeing people on low incomes, or who are otherwise disadvantaged, neglected by businesses.

However, the Nobel prize for economics offered a couple of weeks ago to Paul Romer, alongside William Nordhaus, provides an important affirmation of what libraries do.

Paul Romer’s key achievement has been to create models that explain the contribution of research and innovation to long-term growth. The key document here is his 1990 article on Endogenous Technological Change.

Rather than seeing the development of new ideas it as something external, Romer underlines that it was possible – in theory as well as fact – for economies to keep on growing thanks to investing in research and innovation.

Importantly, this also meant that it wasn’t just the number of people, or the amount of capital (machines, computers, investment) that determined growth, but the skills of the population – human capital – that counts.

 

Why Knowledge – and Access – Matters

The key factor in Romer’s calculations is the unique nature of knowledge.

He underlines that knowledge – ideas – are not ‘rival’. Unlike a piece of food or clothing, one person having an idea does not mean that someone else cannot. Ideas are not exhausted by being known or used.

They are also not easy to keep to yourself. Economists talk about excludability – the possibility to prevent other people from using things. This is easy with a piece of food or clothing, but not so much with ideas and knowledge.

There are intellectual property rights, which create legal possibilities to exclude others from ideas as a means of ensuring some return on investment. However, as Romer’s model sets out, this exclusion is only ever partial.

Because in Romer’s model, it is the fact that knowledge is accessible – that it contributes to the sum of human knowledge – that means it can have such a positive impact on growth.

Once an idea or piece of research is produced, it feeds into the work of others, who can then come up with new ideas and research. While intellectual property rights stand in the way of reproducing and selling the same piece of work, it is possible for everyone to be inspired by it, and go further.

This removes the limits that a certain population – or amount of capital – places on growth. Thanks to wise use of knowledge, promoting accessibility while finding means of rewarding creators for their work, it becomes easier to sustain the growth that pays for crucial public services.

 

Libraries and Open Access

There is plenty here that speaks to the role of libraries.

As institutions dedicated to supporting access to knowledge, libraries play an important role in realising Romer’s key point that innovation benefits from full access to the stock of existing ideas.

Romer underlines the importance of trade in facilitating the spread of ideas and innovation. Libraries, through cross-border activities, help achieve the same.

Open Access plays a vital role here. Free and meaningful access makes a reality of Romer’s suggestion that new ideas join a stock that is available to researchers and innovators everywhere as a basis for further progress.

Paywalls risk weakening this effect, and this potential.

For researchers in countries at risk of being left behind, they can lock them out completely. One of the more chilling conclusions of Romer’s work is that in some situations, there risks being no incentive to invest in research, seriously damaging the country’s growth prospects. We need to fight against this.

Clearly, free does not always mean accessible. If there is no effort to make a piece of research easy to discover and use, it will not really join the stock of knowledge out there promoting human progress.

Libraries help here also through managing repositories, developing standards, and helping researchers find what they need.

Libraries also respond to Romer’s key policy recommendation – the value of developing human capital (skills) in an economy. This – rather than efforts to extract money from those who make further use of ideas in order further to support rightholders – is the most practical way to boost innovation.

 

Paul Romer’s ideas have had a major impact on how governments, and intergovernmental organisations think about growth, and how to support it. While not mentioned in his key article, supporting libraries and open access seems a good way to go about it.