WEB CONTRIBUTIONS AND TENURE DECISIONS
by Marylaine Block\
When I was doing the research for an article for Searcher about why some universities produce large numbers of excellent web sites [http://infotoday.com/searcher/sep02/Block.htm], one of the questions I asked was whether university reward systems -- tenure, promotion, and salaries -- encouraged excellence in web-based scholarship. I was told repeatedly that if anything, web-based scholarly contributions were an impediment to success in academia. Rewards continue to reflect success in traditional scholarly publishing because the faculty who do tenure reviews understand the value of peer-reviewed publications but have no idea how to value web contributions. Non-tenured faculty were, in fact, discouraged from time-consuming internet development that would divert them from traditional scholarly publishing.
And yet we all know that there is a great deal of significant scholarly work on the net, as well as significant service contributions to all disciplines. When Professor Paul Halsall puts together one of his Internet History Sourcebook Projects [http://150.108.2.20/halsall/index.html], he is doing far more than publishing a list of links. It is a valuable act of both scholarship and teaching to decide what documents, images, and tools are necessary underpinnings for historical study of a subject, and how best to organize them to help students understand the discipline and method of history itself. Each of his sourcebooks is, essentially, a scholarly textbook that is free to all comers and surely read more than any print textbook ever published.
The same applies to web sites produced by librarians. When Grace York of the University of Michigan Documents Center creates sites like Documents in the News [http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/docnews.html] and Statistical Resources on the Web [http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stats.html], she extends her professional mission -- selecting and organizing high quality information sources -- beyond the confines of her institution and makes her expertise available to the entire world. In the process, she adds luster not only to the reputation of the University of Michigan, but to the reputation of our profession as well. By making it easy for students and scholars to find and use primary sources, she arguably may improve the overall quality of scholarship itself.
When Charles Bailey of the University of Houston's library adds new material daily to his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog [http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm] and updates his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography [http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html], he is not just creating a set of links; he is notifying scholars of the existence of valuable scholarly literature they might otherwise overlook. By doing so, he helps add to the scholarly repute of online publishing.
Tenure committees might argue that without peer review, there's no good way to measure the value of such pages. This, I think, is nonsense.
Google is able to measure the value of a site not only by the raw number of links to it but the kinds of pages that do the linking. When you do a Google search on the Civil War, and the first page that turns up is Dr. George Hoemann's American Civil War homepage [http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/], it's because virtually every single American history web index links to it, often with highly complimentary descriptions -- a pretty good sign that this is a premier resource in the field. Another measure is whether professors in scholarly and professional university programs link in web resources as part of their required reading and/or research sources for students.
It is also true that venues for peer-review on the web are increasing all the time. MERLOT [Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, http://www.merlot.org/Home.po], for instance, is a collection of peer-reviewed web resources. Peter Suber's Free Online Scholarship site [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/, with its newsletter, blog, and timeline of the FOS movement, is an excellent guide to scholarly open archives.
We should consider the question of readership as well. The fact is, any journal article in even an esteemed scholarly journal will be read by a minute fraction of scholars in the field, and virtually not at all by students, hobbyists, and those who simply want to explore the subject. The very same article, if it's placed on the public web and earns a high ranking, may be read by thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people, which can improve the general public's understanding of a topic or an academic discipline. You may think of this as a service contribution in tenure evaluations.
Another way in which web contributions differ from standard scholarly publishing is in speed and ubiquity. Its readers do not have to wait months or years or more for book reviews or professional commentary on news within the profession. Nor do readers have to wait for the issue to be circulated around to them after sitting on the desks of half a dozen other busy academics or librarians. Web work enhances the speed and spread of professional communication.
What, then, is the case for considering web contributions that are not scholarly in tenure reviews? Like mine, for example (though I don't have to worry about tenure), or Blake Carver's LIS News http://www.lisnews.com/ or any of Gary Price's sites? What of the value of moderating a listserv or other professional discussion forum?
Again, I think these fall into the category of service to the profession. When Blake or Gary Price or I mention a web site and it's immediately re-posted on other weblogs and visited several thousand times, and when we toss out an idea for improving library services and it immediately becomes a topic of discussion on library listservs and blogs and other discussion forums, we are obviously helping the profession by sharing our knowledge. When someone contributes a news item or article to LISNews, that is the beginning of a discussion on this collaborative blog, a kind of mini-conference that helps us educate each other.
When an e- zine like New Breed Librarian dies, and other web publishers publicly mourn its passing, you know it has been influential. When you type the term "Jenny" into Google and the first site that pops up belongs to librarian Jenny Levine, http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/, you know that her web work has value well beyond the select community of librarians and that she has elevated the perceived value of our profession.
Another service function performed by these non-scholarly blogs and zines is fitering. The pace of change has become so frenzied that none of us can truthfully say we keep up with everything in the field. So we turn to blogs and zines, where people we trust help us decide, of all the possibly relevant technologies and web sites, which ones we absolutely need to know about, and which ones we can safely ignore. [My own rule of thumb is, if I see something mentioned in three different places in one week, this is a hint from God to PAY ATTENTION, ALREADY.]
For all these reasons, if academic communities wish to reward people for scholarly and professional communication as it is currently practiced by the under 40 generation, they must give fair consideration to scholarly and service contributions on the net in their tenure decisions. But because there is a generational difference in how academics communicate, those who are up for tenure will have to make the case for the equivalence of their internet-based scholarship and service.
That means studying their log files to see how many people are using their work, and what queries or links brought users there. They'll need to ego-surf to find out what people on the net are saying about their work, and check to see who is linking to them, in what contexts. If they find their work spoken of highly by scholars in their field, they'll need to print out the commendations and maybe even approach some of those scholars for letters of support. If the contribution to scholarship or service is worthwhile and valued, the documentation will be there to prove it.
And in the meantime, we who use these voluntary web contributions can do our bit by taking the time to send a note of appreciation not only to the creator of the site but to the head of that person's department or the president of the university telling them how much credit this site brings to the institution. We can help make sure good deeds are rewarded by educating university officials about the value of web contributions.
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COOL QUOTE
Power point could lead us to believe that information is all there is. . . Power Point empowers the provider of simple content . . . but it risks squeezing out the provider of process -- that is to say, the rhetorician, the storyteller, the poet, the person whose thoughts cannot be arranged in the shape of an AutoContent slide.
Ian Parker. "Absolute PowerPoint." New Yorker, May 28, 2001.
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Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2002.
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