LIANZA and open access

Moving to a new job has been keeping me happily preoccupied, but the email I received from LIANZA yesterday was just about calculated to spur me to break radio silence. To quote, interspersed with my commentary in [square brackets]:

From November 22, parts of the LIANZA website will be locked to members only. As the cost of developing and maintaining the website comes out of LIANZA membership fees, LIANZA Council decided to make certain pages exclusive to members. The Council worked with the Website Advisory Group to determine appropriate members-only content.

From November 22 you will need to login to the website to view these locked pages:

• LIANZA Blog
  [Really? Does anyone really think I'll log in to read a blog? I won't even click a link to read a blog; I certainly don't have time to log in to a website just to find out if there happens to be a post today. If the full post isn't in my Google Reader, I don't read it.]
• Library Life newsletter features
  [I occasionally click a link from the email newsletter to read the full story. That's about to become even more occasional.]
• Latest issue of the New Zealand Library and Information Management Journal (NZLIMJ)
  [This implies that previous issues will remain accessible, which is something at least. But still a tremendous disappointment. I thought I'd been seeing a move towards opening NZLIMJ up, and had hoped to see it soon appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals. In the current climate, I think a library association should be promoting open access, not locking information down.]
• Conference papers
  [!!!
  ...
  Just... What a tremendous disservice this does to the authors! Conference papers are hard enough to search as it is; locking these behind a login only guarantees that no LIANZA non-members (and not many LIANZA members) will ever read or cite these. Don't we want rather to raise the profile of New Zealand LIS research?]
• Copyright resources
  [...Okay, if you really must have an easter egg for LIANZA members I guess this qualifies as reasonable.]
• Member profiles
  [Okay, sure, whatever.]
• Advocacy Portal (already restricted to members)
  [Because it's... vitally important that only LIANZA members advocate for libraries...? To be honest I can see the argument for this as a valuable resource. I just think it'd be even more valuable if we all - members and non-members alike - cooperated on advocating for both our individual libraries and libraries as a class.]
• Code of Practice
  [This comprises the "policy and procedures that are to be followed, day to day, in the running of the Association." So mostly only of use to members; otoh it seems a bit odd to keep it secret.]

Does LIANZA actually have evidence that there are significant numbers of people choosing not to be members because the content's there for free anyway? Enough people to be worth causing this hassle to existing members?

Because as a member, this does increase the hassle for me to access the content, and therefore reduces the amount of content I'll be bothered to look up. When I was a member of the Website Advisory Group, a big concern was getting conversations going on the website; hiding those conversations away just seems likely to exacerbate that problem. This move also reduces the visibility of LIS scholarship published by LIANZA, so makes it less likely I'd consider submitting to NZLIMJ (however see footnote). And philosophically, I'm not overly happy about paying a subscription to a library association that is working against open access to information.

Lucky for LIANZA's coffers, membership comes with other benefits that still make it worth the annual cheque. Because the moment its website content is locked behind a login screen, its value to me plummets.

---

Footnote for authors: If your conference paper is about to be locked behind the login screen but you actually would like other librarians nationally and internationally to have a chance at finding your research, you can deposit a copy at E-LIS - a subject repository for library and information science. (And/or in your institution's repository if it has one.)

Likewise for NZLIMJ articles - the author guidelines state a 6 month embargo for publication elsewhere, but I emailed editor Brenda Chawner to clarify this, and she says she interprets it to apply to formal publications, not repositories, and it would be fine with her if authors put copies of their articles into an institutional or subject repository.

4 #blogjune

Four fantastic links I want everyone to read:

Proceedings of Codcon 2012
A virtual, hypothetical, parodic library conference held by the Library Society of the World on Twitter and Friendfeed on Wednesday, May 16, 2012.

No, we can’t do it all by Meredith Farkas
"So many of us struggle with determining priorities in teaching. Few of us have a workload that would allow us to do everything we would like to do. We hear stories about embedded librarian programs, librarians who were able to co-grade student papers with a disciplinary faculty member, libraries that have co-taught entire classes, etc. and we think: wow, I’d love to do that. But can we?"

A failure of imagination – the problem with format neutrality
"I often hear librarians promoting their 'modern librarian' credentials by saying 'it's about the information, not the container'. By this they tend to mean that [...] we should not be concerned about in which formats information is available, as long as it is available somehow. But what if it is about the container?" Read more to inspire your imagination.

Collective action for ebook collections
"I still agree with the notion that unless ebook publishing and distribution changes, libraries are still screwed. So let's change things. Here are three things *you* can do." Read more to improve ebook access.

2009 BookCrossing Convention

The BookCrossing Convention was held in Christchurch this year. I've been involved in BookCrossing for a few years, though only casually, so it was great to be invited to give a talk. I didn't attend any of the release or social events but went along to the afternoon sessions today:

Patrick Evans talked about the research he's done for a biography on Janet Frame, and about the different stories surrounding her life: the autobiography in her fiction and the fiction in her autobiography, the protectiveness of her friends and family for her privacy and the eagerness of strangers to recount legends about her. Janet Frame has been called "New Zealand's greatest unread author" and I have to admit I haven't read anything by her - I was surprised to hear she wrote some books that sound like science fiction, so I'll have to keep an eye out.

We viewed an episode of The Lost Book (and were encouraged to follow the link to be involved in the fourth episode which will be set in Christchurch) and CPIT's documentary on BookCrossing.

Bruce from BookCrossing Head Office skyped in (after a few technical difficulties) and showed us a preview of the Facebook application which will launch hopefully May/June. They're also working on an iPhone application and snazzing up the main website to make it friendlier to newbies. Bruce solicited feedback on the user interface - some people talked about the mobile interface not being good, which is something important to BookCrossers. There was also discussion about the store. I was struck when Bruce said that the best selling items are those that make the activity of BookCrossing easier/more successful (eg stickers to make the books stand out, plastic bags to protect them from the weather, etc): it's obvious in hindsight, but it seems a key thing to bear in mind for any institution trying to provide products or services to its customers.

The Netherlands contingent showed off photos of their country to encourage us to come to the 2010 convention there, and it was unanimously voted that the 2011 convention should be held in Washington DC.

My presentation on Books Unchained: A History covered the chaining of books, bookmobiles, e-texts, and the release of books through BookCrossing.

Books Unchained: A History

View more presentations from Deborah Fitchett.

And of course I came away with several books including a couple of childhood memories, which I'll have to (re)read and release in strategic locations!

Non-English blog roundup #7

Bambou (French) reports back from the 1st Congress of the International Francophone Association of Librarians and Documentalists held in Montreal in August. Part 1 covers the success of the conference (280 attendees) and part 2 is a review of the National Library and Archives of Quebec where the conference was held (62 opening hours a week; 2000 comfortable seats; film and music rooms, services for people with disabilities, distance services, federated genealogy search engine, collection for new arrivals, etc; but on the downside strict lending rules, busy webpage, austere catalogue.)

Marlène Delhaye writes (French) "I love LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts) (English), saying "I think it's a shame that it's not promoted more".

Álvaro Cabezas writes (Spanish) about reference management software, "one of the star products in the academic community". "The market offers various tools, both proprietary and open-source software, free or paying, desktop or [...] online". He links to a Wikipedia article comparing the various tools (English) - comparisons include operating system support, import/export formats, citation styles, database connectivity, and more.

Lionel Dujol writes Some noise in our libraries! (French) inspired by the start of Marc Maisonneuve's book "Le catalogue de la bibliothèque à l’heure du web 2.0" (The library catalogue in the time of web 2.0). He (or Maisonneuve) riffs off the concept of librarians trying to keep libraries quiet and trying to keep search results free of 'noise': "A new-generation opac must be able to give our users results, no matter the request and no matter the noise. For a user can always adapt to noise, but not to silence, Maisonneuve emphasises."

Linked from the same post is a document of requirements for the modern website of the modern library of our (modern) dreams (French) found on the French Bibliopedia. "The idea of this page is to gather everything that we expect today from a library on the web." It includes sections covering:

• general recommendations
  
• the catalogue
  
• the user account
  
• social networking
  
• editing / CMS abilities

and additional ideas for user service.

Non-English blog roundup #6 (from June!)

Giving up on an attempt to play catchup more thoroughly...

Biblog (Danish) reports that international conference "The Smart City And Its Libraries" is arranged by Copenhagen Libraries for Wednesday 8 Oct to Friday 10 Oct. Programme here (English).

Documentación, biblioteconomía e información writes about the battle of citation reports between Elsevier Scopus and ISI Thomson. Álvaro Cabezas, arguing from the point of view of transparency, that Scopus has been gaining ground over the last few months: "ISI is not transparent, and that which is not transparent is suspect."