Feedback on the latest ITHAKA survey

Last week, ITHAKA, the non-profit "that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways," released the results of its latest iteration of a wide-reaching survey of faculty about "tracking the attitudes and practices of
faculty members at US colleges and universities for more than a decade" (pg. 5).  You can download the report and read for yourself how faculty attitudes and practices have changed.  I'll be reporting, however, the reactions of others to these results.

The first reaction I read was actually in an email from a colleague - "Doesn't really inspire too much enthusiasm…", which itself was none-too-inspiring.  Essentially, attitudes of faculty towards the library haven't changed notably over time - the majority of faculty who responded still view libraries primarily as buying agents, gateways, and archives.  Depressingly, fewer than in 2009 agreed with the statement that the library helps their productivity in research & scholarship and that the library supports their teaching activities.  Finally, less than 60% believed the library helps undergraduates develop critical thinking, research, and information literacy skills.  <sigh>

Even more non-inspiring was the breakdown by broad disciplines - as expected, faculty in the humanities were most supportive of all of the library's roles asked in the survey.  And as suspected, faculty in the sciences primarily see libraries as a buying agent.  Fewer than half of science faculty considered the library important in their research or teaching activities, particularly (and depressingly) the latter.  Of course, faculty in the social sciences responded in between these extremes of "love" and "disinterest".  But only about half of them thought that the library supports their teaching activities.  Hrrmph.

Barbara Fister, in Library Babel Fish, is similarly uninspired by the results, although she brings up some interesting insights.  Given the lack of consideration of the library's role in supporting the development of critical thinking and information literacy skills, she suggests that maybe libraries redirect their attention:

(This makes me think we should stop writing so many articles about information literacy for other librarians and think about reaching the faculty. Just a thought.)

 William Badke notes in his comment to this post that information literacy is not on the radar of higher education, with few journals including articles on IL, citing a publisher whose reason for rejecting a manuscript was that there was "'no market for information literacy books among educators'".  A quick search of our discovery tool, Summon, and Google Scholar for peer-reviewed articles on "information literacy" and "higher education".  About 1/5th of the results were from higher-ed journals (e.g. College Teaching and Studies in Higher Education), and a smattering communications and educational technology journals (notably EDUCAUSE), but about 75% were from library journals.  A quick search of WorldCat retrieved over 400 titles (not limited by publication year), but many of the initial results were from traditional librarianship publishers (Neal-Schuman, Libraries Unlimited, ALA, Scarecrow Press, etc.).  So Badke's comment does bear out, at least on first glance.

Barbara brings up a point, though, that casts doubt on the validity of the report - the incredibly low response rate of 3.5%.  Of course, this 3.5% of the over 160,000 recipients to whom invitations were sent results in 5,261 respondents.  The question is, then, are the 5,261 representative of the sample population.  Once the data are deposited in the ICSPR, this can be determined.

Others, including Steven Harris of Collection=Connection, noted the vast disparity of opinions about the library's roles between library directors and other faculty.  This "disconnect" is apparent in the nearly 40% differences in responses of agreement to statements about the library's roles in supporting teaching activities and research productivity.  Harris suggests it may be a matter of lack of faculty awareness...maybe it's something else?

While Rick Anderson in the Scholarly Kitchen mentions the "less surprising results" (increasing use of search engines by faculty, faculty don't see the library as important as library directors, etc.), he does point out results that he found "more surprising".  These include a modest increase in the use of the catalog as the initial search tool (although I, like others, think this is an anomaly), and a "modest" decrease in comfort with the shift from print to online journals.

Carol Straumsheim looks at the use of technology in the classroom, or lack thereof.  A posting in the blog, Scholarly Workflow, focuses on the the issues of, well, scholarly workflows.  The poster notes the low percentages of faculty who value institutional support of research and publication process in such ways as providing Web pages of research outputs, assessing the impact of work, determining the most optimal venues for publication, etc.  The ranges of support were all below 50%, indicating that most faculty appear to prefer to go it alone.

Overall, the reception of the 2012 ITHAKA S+R Faculty Survey has been modest and less than enthusiastic.  Generally, the faculty have their own opinions about the value of technology and libraries, and they are very different from librarians.  How can we bridge this gap?  More food for thought...

Providing support for research & publication

A paper by two of my colleagues has just been released in pre-publication of College & Research Libraries (C&RL), one of the top library science journals, particularly for academic libraries.  The article, Fostering Research and Publication in Academic Libraries, presents results of a survey my colleagues had been working on for the last two years.  I like this article for more reasons than the fact that I know & respect the authors...I like that it was replicating research completed 35 years ago, and thus providing good comparisons over time.  This is so rarely done in social science research (and even in natural sciences).  Replicating research is important to verify findings, validate instruments, and provide data that can be compared over time.  So I'm proud of the authors for doing the work and proud of C&RL for publishing (one of the biggest reasons replicating research is not done is because it is usually not published).

I also like the purpose of the article, which was to get a sense of the support that is being provided to librarians who are expected to publish research.  This is important because "not all academic librarians are
prepared to meet these requirements because of time constraints and a lack of training."  Think about it...teaching and research faculty in the social sciences have to complete at least 60 more hours of classes, including research methods and statistics, conduct some kind of research project, write a dissertation or several articles, and then either support the dissertation or submit the articles to the peer review process.  Few librarians go through a program that provides that same experience.

I appreciated my education at Texas Woman's University in the mid- to late-1990's, where we were required to take a research methods course and a social sciences statistics course.  We did have the choice of completing a research project or a professional project, but we had to write a "professional paper" - which, for those of us who opted for the research, was on the level of a master's thesis.  Then we had to participate in a poster session where we had to support the project to the dean himself (yes, I was nervous when he stopped by my poster).  My understanding among my peer librarians is that this was not a common educational experience.

So what kind of support do the 70% of ARL deans (who responded to the survey) who expect their librarians to research and publish provide?  They say that their libraries provide "library work time for research and publication" - although a few do not support that.  Yet so often I hear from my colleagues (of this and other institutions) that they just don't have the time.  There is a definite dissonance between what institutions say is provided and what librarians perceive is allowed.  Maybe it's the amount of time that's allowed versus what is thought to be needed.  The median amount of time provided is 1-5 hours per week (that's a big spread: 2.5% - 12.5% of a 40-hour work week).  Interestingly, about 40% of the responding libraries provided 6-10 hours (up to 25%).  Most libraries also offer sabbaticals, but the percentage of pay provided is down from 30 years ago.

What about funding?  Well, nearly all library deans say they support internal funding for research projects, with most of them actually providing money, usually from the library's discretionary budget.  Is it enough money?  Well, the amount provided has increased by 50% in the last thirty years - is that enough?  A quick look at the inflation calculator shows that the total inflation rate between 1980 and 2012 was 191%.

While most deans provide support for training and informal mentoring for research activities, only about half provide formal mentoring programs for their librarians.  And even fewer provide "library research committees", defined by the authors as groups "organized to support the research and writing activities of librarians."  Only about a third of the responding deans indicated that such activities were provided at their libraries.  And what's more, the gap between what was supported by the deans and what was actually provided was notable for the formal training and mentoring activities.

The vast majority of responding deans provide their libraries with "project support" - as in computers, photocopying, mail, even financial incentives for survey or focus groups.  Less than half, however, provide support for student assistants.  This is down from 30 years ago.

OK, so what does all of this mean?  What did my peers conclude?  Well, more ARL libraries provide faculty status for their librarians and, concomitantly, require their librarians to conduct research and publish for promotion.  While the stated dollar amounts of internal funding have increased, it did not keep up with inflation.  More deans state that they think it is right to provide support for research and publication, but fewer state that their libraries actually do provide it.

Time seems to be the biggest concern for librarians.  Yet, as mentioned by the article's authors, this was so even for a university that provided upwards of 20% of work time for research activities, as well as sabbaticals.  I'm very interested in this phenomenom.  My colleagues in this article mention other comparisons of work schedules and division of tasks between academic librarians and other academic faculty.  They particularly point out that faculty have been found to have variations in the divisions of their time within the year and between years, depending on their research activities.  So maybe the issue is that librarians do not schedule these variations themselves; instead, they continue to provide their services year-round, continuously  which leaves only 5-10 hours a week.  And not much can be accomplished with this kind of scheduling.  Rather, librarians should consider taking "sabbaticals" from their regular duties (akin to academic faculty who have a lighter teaching load one year) to focus 50-75% of their time to a research project.   Can this be done without affecting quality of library services?

I think that the main support feature of interest to the authors, though, was the "library research committees," if only because that is what has been attempted at our library.  We have a larger committee that attempts to coordinate training and support groups aimed at different foci of research.  Some groups are more active than others, and evaluation of their success is difficult to measure.  I lead a small group, and I know that it is hard to find the balance between support and pestering, finding just the right amount of pressure to apply to each person.  I think the reason these groups have a hard time catching on and producing measurable results is that they require excellent leadership, which is hard to find, and the right mix of people, which can vary year to year.

Overall, this was a very good article and I'm interested to see what others will do with the information.  Will deans realize that they need to do more than say they think support should be provided?  Will other libraries attempt some kind of support group or formal mentoring program?  Will librarians change the way they devote time to their research activities?

Of course, the whole issue of whether research & publication should even be expected of practicing librarians is for another time...

Dealing with the aftermath of cancellations

Due to factors beyond the immediate control of our library, we had to reduce our materials budget for this current fiscal year by about one-seventh.  This was my initiating into collections management, essentially cutting journals and databases.  For journals, key factors involved in making decisions on what to cut included:

• Usage
• Length of embargo from aggregator
• Cost  (both total cost and cost-per-use)

Although we had worked with our subject liaisons and had communicated the cuts to the faculty through both the liaisons and our dean, it has only been since January when they've really taken notice.  This is because of the inevitable delays between release of the final budget and actual elimination of service.  One such incident provides a good example.

We had decided to cancel the subscription to Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) primary because our $3000+ subscription fee was paying for only six months worth of content, and about 20-25% of these articles were Open Access.  The copyright fee for PNAS is $2.00 - a quick glance at the articles in PNAS (research articles) suggests an average article length of about 8-10 pages.  It would take, then, about 150 ILL requests to make up for the cost (OK, less than that if you factor in indirect costs of ILL, but you get the point).  Indeed, there had only been one ILL request for a PNAS article this year.  

Yet, our liaisons are hit by (admittedly a vocal few) irate faculty who are indignant that we would not have a current subscription.  I hope the liaisons inform these reasonable people of the factors involved.  I wish we could include this information in a Notes field in the MARC record -- maybe they'd read it, maybe not.  

Research misconduct in LIS?

The editorial, Bogus Evidence by R. Laval Hunsucker in the latest Evidence-Based Library & Information Practice (EBLIP), discusses at great length the potential for research misconduct in the LIS field.  After setting the stage with the recent apparent rise in "questionable research practices" (QRP's) and outright fraud in the basic, medical, and social sciences, Laval brings our attention to our own profession, or rather, the lack of attention that our profession has given this issue.  He questions whether we, as members of the LIS profession, should consider research misconduct to be more or less or equally prevalent than in other research fields.  He admits that there is enough evidence to support any of these positions, yet not enough evidence to reach any conclusions.  And that, Laval asserts, is the crux of the problem.  Why should we assume that we are any better (or worse) than any other field?  And if we are neither better nor worse, shouldn't we be concerned that we are equally bad?

Laval brings up some very valid points, particularly regarding the difficulty of detecting research fraud.  Indeed, having been involved in a few research studies, I can imagine where fraud could occur, if so desired, particularly with data.  Auditing the data collected is rarely done, and yet, it is, I believe, the weakest (or easiest) point.  I have heard of large surveys where one single survey-taker fraudulently completed forms. Proper follow-ups detected the problem, but not before so many had been submitted that the integrity of the entire study had been threatened.  But that is an easier problem to detect because the researchers were themselves conducted the study with integrity.  The more difficult cases occur when the researchers manufacture the data.  Only a full data audit could detect this, but as mentioned above, this is so rarely done because it is difficult and time-consuming (and thus, costs money).

So, like so many researchers, those conducting studies in LIS are trusted to collect, analyze, and report their data in an unbiased and appropriate manner with little oversight.  Is this trust justified?  It appears that in this day and age of competition for jobs, promotions, and respect, people are growing more deceitful.  But could we not say, too, that in this day and age of growing transparency with the Internet, people are growing more skeptical and distrustful?

Professionally, I'm less concerned with outright fraud in the LIS literature than with QRP's related to poor training and limited knowledge.  This is particularly true regarding studies conducted by practicing librarians like myself, rather than LIS research faculty who have completed more formal training and apprenticeship in research, in the form of the dissertation.  Most practicing physicians do not initiate and formally conduct clinical studies.  There are many who participate in research, but very few actually develop proposals, gather the data, analyze the results, and write the papers of their own research.  Yet academic librarians are very often expected to do so themselves, often with less training than the physicians receive.  Therefore, why should we not expect QRP's to occur?  Laval himself notes that the "good news, and the other important difference, is that genuinely fraudulent research in LIS is almost certainly far less prevalent than sloppy research in LIS."

Actually, the apparent increase in research misconduct does need more study in order to establish the environment in which our research can be trusted.  But to judge all studies with a jaundiced eye will make it more difficult to move ideas into practice.  Laval discusses the many proposed solutions, ranging from changes to rewards and incentives to formalized research integrity training.  Like any complex problem with multiple foundations, no solution addressing just one of these foundations will work by itself.  But like they tell those with mental or addiction problems, simply recognizing the problem exists is the first step.

New results from impact studies

The ACRL Value of Academic Libraries site highlighted two articles recently published from the University of Minnesota, led by Shane Nackerud.  Both articles are published in the April 2013 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy, although I'll be linking to their institutional repository.  The first article describes how the data was collected and analyzed and provides basic demographics of the users of library's services.  The research questions in this paper were:

• Do sufficient measures exist to determine what services individual library patrons use?

• Do the Libraries reach the majority of students in some way?

• Do students in different colleges use library materials and services in different ways?

• How does undergraduate library use compare to that of graduate students?

With increasing use of methods that capture, essentially, who uses each service, they were able to link with demographic and academic data about each user.  The "access points" or services for which data was captured includes:

• material circulation
• ILL requests
• library workstation logins 
• usage of electronic resources for those who were off-campus or those who logged into the library workstations
• attendance at workshops
• reference consultations
• course-integrated instruction (through Blackboard)

While not a complete set of data from all library services, this set does represent much of what the library provides.  Missing are usage of electronic resources from those on-campus and not using library workstations, in-house usage of materials, brief reference transactions, and visits to the library.  The authors admit that such data, especially the last, would be essential for measurement of "library as place", but they express concerns about over-reaching to such an extent that it would affect usage of the very services they would be measuring.  

But it's still a big data set - over 1.5 million transactions from over 61,000 unique users.  They were able to work with their Office of Institutional Research to get the demographic and academic data.  This step has been a common obstacle to such impact research for many libraries, whose own OIR's were reluctant to share the information.  The solution seems to be to split the collection of data between the two campus units - library gathers the user identifiers and the OIR provides the demographic/academic data, returning an anonymized data set to the library.  This way, neither party should have access to the entire data set, thus securing privacy that much more.  

With the complete, anonymized data set, the librarians were able to run correlation analysis to determine if academic achievement was in any way associated with library usage of any kind.  Pretty basic...and, to no one's surprise, there was a significant correlation.  This is very much in-line with other similar studies, such as the Library Impact Project.  I found this part interesting, though (emphasis added):

Already library staff have been able to share this data with University deans and administration and the feedback has been both positive and somewhat unexpected. For example, while University administrators have been enthused by the results, they are also not surprised. It seems intuitive that libraries should be able to demonstrate appropriate levels of usage, and that usage should result in increased academic success.

How frustrating!  University administration puts libraries (and others) under pressure to justify our value, our impact on student achievement, then says, "So?"!   Maybe this demonstrates a need to find out exactly what measures administrators expect.

In the second paper, the authors look at a subset of the population that could provide the clearest association of library usage and academic outcome: first-year, non-transfer students.  This group would have the fewest confounders, such as previous college experience, to muddie the results.  They looked at the effects of library usage on both student achievement (grades) and retention.  Their statistical analyses was more sophisticated than you typically see in LIS research, using not only t-tests and chi-squared-tests to determine the significance of differences between groups, but also determining the effect size (medium) and multiple linear and logistic regression.  They attribute the (relative) richness of this analysis to their own outreach to campus statisticians, and they recommend libraries not try to do it all themselves.  Hear, Hear.  The value of doing this analysis is that the authors demonstrated the size of the relationships they had found (significantly positive), but also the limitations of such relationships (most correlations were small).

However, with their models, they were able demonstrate significant effect of any library usage on GPA, while controlling for demographic factors.  Essentially, users of library service had a GPA 0.23 points higher than non-users, and that usage of the library accounted for 12.4% of the difference between the groups.  Given how many factors went into the model (12), that's a bigger chunk than expected (1/12th or 8.3%).  The second model broke the services out.  Not unexpectedly, these effects were much, much smaller.  The only services that showed statistically significant effects were database use, book loans, and workstation logins, and while the size was small, they were services that would be used repeatedly over the course of the semester. The totality of the usage of services represented a larger share of the effect - 13.7%.

Finally, their logistical regression models were conducted to predict student retention based on either usage of any service or usage of specific services.  This kind of model demonstrates the strength of the relationships by showing how library services can predict, or explain, outcomes.  This is a key aspect of research - can a variable predict a specific outcome?  If it can, then it can be used to change the outcome.  These models were both significant, even when adjusting for demographic factors.  Another important feature of logistic regression analysis is the calculation of the odds ratio (OR).  This measures the sized of the effect of the variable on the outcome.  In this case, students who used any of the library's services were 1.54 times more likely to continue to the next semester than those who did not.  Conversely, few of the individual services showed significant effects on retention; those that did were likely due to small sample sizes (few attendees).

So, what does this all mean?  Using these moderately-sophisticated statistical analyses is very much like triangulation - analyzing data from different angles to see the true picture.  This picture shows that there appears to be modest relationship between usage of any of the library's services and student achievement and retention.  However, picking out which services had the biggest effects is more difficult.  The linear model showed database logins, workstation logins and materials circulation as having a small effect; this doesn't show, though, in the logistic model.  More evidence, then, is needed.

It is somewhat disappointing that more interpersonal services, such as instruction and consultation, showed much lower effects.  This, I imagine, is due in no small part to the size of the data set.  Usage of these was services much lower compared to the more self-service, well, services. This could hide any association of the less-used services because of higher standard errors.  The problem with studying such low-usage services is selection bias.  If this can be controlled, randomly-selecting classes to provide instruction, then the effects should be more significant.

These articles, I think, are invaluable to the efforts of demonstrating value.  Like all applied research, it is but a piece in the overall puzzle.  It is not sufficient for the argument, but with more such studies filling in the gaps of knowledge, the picture becomes more and more clear.  It would be nice, however, if those who are the intended audience of such studies (presumably the campus decision-makers) would show their interest.

Collection Assessment: Going in the right direction

For the last six months or so, I've been trying to develop a more systematic method of evaluating our collections, incorporating different kinds of measures.  So it's nice to see examples from other libraries, as demonstrated by the slew of posters and presentations from the last Library Assessment Conference.  Here are highlights from a few that piqued my interest...

From out of UC Berkeley, Susan Edwards, et al. describe their evaluation of the library's collections based on three types of measures: collection uniqueness (overlap with their closest peer), direct usage (cross-tab analysis of book usage by location and patron affiliation), and indirect usage (citation analysis of dissertations).    This is very much in the direction I've been working, evaluating the collection from different angles, using these exact same measures (among others).  For collection uniqueness, they point out both that having a fair amount of overlap is appropriate, but that there is no national benchmark for overlap percentages.  How unique should the collection be?  I'd be interested in perhaps collaborating with UC Berkeley to come up with that national benchmark for overlap.  But the citation analysis was most interesting, in part because they used a random selection of citations.  A major obstacle of conducting citation analyses is the time and labor necessary to gather and record each citation.  This is really not necessary if a random selection is used appropriately.  I'd really like to learn exactly how they did their selection.  From this analysis, they learned that their monograph collection for the social welfare students did not meet their needs as well as other collections.  An interesting feature of their poster was an interactive slide on which users could add stickers that related their estimation of how well their own libraries met their users' needs.

From the University of Maryland University College Library, Lenore England and Barbara J. Mann describe their efforts to centralize the evaluation of electronic resources.  Their poster described the criteria included in the evaluations, as well as the methods of communication with faculty and students regarding the review process.  What was most interesting was the use of a LibGuide that is used to both document the process and communicate the progress to those who may be most impacted by the collection development decisions.    The LibGuide not only makes the process transparent, but also provides the opportunity for comments from the stakeholders. This may be a useful method to employ in our next go-around of budget cuts.

Alicia Estes and Samantha Guss from NYU described their methods for Data Gathering and Assessment for Strategic Planning.  This was accomplished using a team-based approach, with librarians from a wide range of divisions of the library.  The team gathered data to be used in the planning process, including summarizing recent library assessment activities, discovering and producing an inventory of data collected, and "identifying trends."  In addition to providing data for strategic planning, the poster listed some lessons learned from this project.  These included discovering a need for more training in gathering, analyzing and understanding statistics, the need for an individual explicitly responsible for gathering and managing data ("to 'own' assessment"), and most notably, the need for a "more uniform process for data collection."  Alicia and Samantha, I feel your pain.

But this is a good lead in to a set of posters on developing such processes and repositories.  From Joanne Leary and Linda Miller describe Cornell Library's implementation of LibPAS for their annual data collection.  This caught my eye because we, too, are implementing LibPAS as a central repository of our statistics.  Some of the challenges, opportunities and the "Conceptual Shifts" seemed quite familiar, including the "chance to review and rethink" data collection, the challenge of a large and complicated organization, and the shift of having standardized data that is immediately available.  Although it's a little late for us to learn from their efforts, but it is good to know with whom we could collaborate or to whom we could go for ideas.  Nancy B. Turner, from Syracuse University, described their use of SharePoint for their data collection. Their document repository was most intriguing, with its "structured metadata for filtering results".  Finally, there is the poster from Kutztown University Library (you learn something new everyday) which describes their efforts to combine their locally-grown data repository system (ROAR) with the university's TracDat system.  Again, this caught my eyes because of our use of TracDat for campus assessment.

Of course, the latest efforts have been to associate usage of library resources and services to student outcomes, notably grades.  The poster from the University of Minnesota focused on using the data that are already available to the library to make this connection.  This included circulation, computer workstation logins, e-resource logins (mostly from off-campus users), registration for library instruction, and individual consultations.  Despite certain limitations of this data, they were able to demonstrate clear quantitative associations of a number of data with student grades and re-enrollment.  They do not mention if these associations were tested for statistical significance, but I am definitely interested in their methods.

Overall, I realized how much I missed from last year's Library Assessment Conference and what I hope to contribute this coming year.

Favorite TEDTalk of the week

For the last few months, I've been trying to schedule a time on Sunday mornings to watch the latest TEDTalks posted during the week.  Today, I'm having to catch up from missing a couple of weeks due to various reasons.  While most are quite interesting, I did want to highlight one that I found most intriguing and/or inspirational.



 Tyler DeWitt talks about his efforts as a middle-school science teacher to explain science without the "tyranny of precision" and conforming to the "cult of seriousness".  His key line is, "Let me tell you a story..." advocating the use of storytelling as a tool for engaging students.  Tyler seems like a person who has been born & raised in a cult and has just thought of and is bewildered by ideas such as speaking your mind and freedom to believe in any (or no) religion.  He (metaphorically) wonders why others haven't thought of this before.  It's almost like Tyler believes he's the first person to use storytelling to reach students in science.  And it's quite reasonable for him to believe this.  He, himself, has been indoctrinated into the "cult of seriousness" and has been complicit in the "tyranny of precision" through his own science education and training to teach and write about science.  So we can forgive him for his seemingly egocentrism and examine the meat of his argument: Make the teaching of science engaging and inspiring to students by using simpler language, metaphors that the students can relate to, and occassional "little lies".  While he winces when people call it "dumbing down" (you'd be surprised at how many of the negative comments use this exact phrase), ....  The "little lies" is another aspect that some people take exception to.  But Tyler affirms it is better that the students learn overall concepts that may not be 100% accurate than to not learn any of the concepts at all.

I always find it interesting to read the comments of the TEDTalks to find what others think.  Inevitably, there are the gushing "Right on!" and "Amen!" comments, but just as inevitably there are naysayers.  I think this exchange is good and right.  And I found it quite interesting that the bulk of the negative comments came from fellow science teachers who express the exact sentiments that Tyler advocates against: a tyranny of precision, focusing on the idea of "little lies" idea; and the "dumbing down" of science.  I think the concerns about the "little lies" are due to a poor choice of words.  From what I understood, Tyler is not advocating lying per se but rather not being 100% precise.  Using the examples of his talk, by leaving out the fact that a few viruses use RNA instead of DNA, he avoids confusing the students as they attempt to understand the basic concept of bacteriophage viruses.  The more exceptions you throw into an explanation, the harder it is to understand.  So, while Tyler is not telling the whole truth, he is, nonetheless, telling the truth.   The second issue of "dumbing down" is also about choice of words, in this case, by the naysayers.  Tyler emphasizes "simplifying" the language, not "dumbing it down".  I believe the difference is based on your assumptions of how learning should happen.  If you believe that it is the individual student's responsibility to "do the work" and understand it on his or her own, then using simpler language is "dumbing down".  If you believe it is the responsibility of the teacher to explain and to, well, teach, then using simpler language is one tool of many.

Finally, context of the class is key to the teaching methods used. Tyler (and most science teachers in  primary, secondary, and lower-level undergraduate education) is teaching students many of whom will not even go to college, let alone become a scientist or science teacher.  His goals are to have his students understand the basic concepts of science and the scientific method, and to inspire interest in discovering the ways of nature.

So, what does this have to do with librarianship?  Well, librarianship is an extension of education, and using library-centric terms and teaching searching skills using complex concepts like "boolean" and "relevance".  Just as with science teachers, there are some who think we should teach the terminology and not "dumb it down".  I believe there is a compromise of sorts - teaching the terminology by telling a story.  Similarly, by using metaphors and storytelling to explain concepts of information literacy, our goals should not include making our students professional searchers, but rather to be able find relevant and useful information and to evaluate the sources and potential biases of the sources.