We’re likely to be hearing about John Bohannon's new article in Science, "Who's afraid of peer review?" Essentially the author created 304 fake papers with bad science and submitted one each to an 'author-pays' open access journal to test their peer review. 157 of the journals accepted it, 98 rejected it; other journals were abandoned websites or still have/had the paper under review at time of analysis. (Some details are interesting. PLOS ONE provided some of the most rigorous peer review and rejected it; OA titles from Sage and Elsevier and some scholarly societies accepted it.)
Sounds pretty damning, except...
Peter Suber and Martin Eve each write a takedown of the study, both well worth reading. They list many problems with the methodology and conclusions. (For example, over two-thirds of open access journals listed on DOAJ aren't "author-pays" so it's odd to exclude them.)
But the key flaw is even more obvious than the flaws in the fake articles: his experiment was done without any kind of control. He only submitted to open access journals, not to traditionally-published journals, so we don’t know whether their peer review would have performed any better. As Mike Taylor and Michael Eisen point out, this isn't the first paper with egregiously bad science that's slipped through Science's peer review process either.
Showing posts with label open access. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open access. Show all posts
Friday, 4 October 2013
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
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]:
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.
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.
Friday, 18 May 2012
How libraries can buy DRM-free ebooks
Libraries hate DRM because our customers hate DRM because it makes the ebooks we buy really truly appallingly horrible to use. I can never find the cartoon when I want it, but it's something like "How to download an ebook in 37 easy steps". It involves lots of installation of software and restarting of the computer and logging in to things and troubleshooting, and the final step is to give up and look for it on BitTorrent. (ETA: As per Andromeda's comment, here's the cartoon.)
But what can we do when publishers require DRM before they sell anything to us?
Well, the new venture Unglue.it could change things. The idea behind Unglue.it is that:
- author/copyright-holders pick a lump sum that they think is fair compensation for the rights to their book;
- people who want to read the book pledge however much they want;
- when the lump sum is reached, the book is released as a DRM-free, open-licensed ebook, free to the entire world. (If the lump sum isn't reached, no money's taken from your credit card.)
This is aimed at individual readers, but why shouldn't libraries get in on the game? There are apparently some 16,000-odd public library branches in the USA: if each one of those made a one-off pledge of US$1 then American Book Award-winner Love Like Gumbo would be available to their members (and everyone else in the world) in perpetuity. That's one heck of a cheap ebook. You can store a copy on the library server, or just link to it from the catalogue. You can print it out, if you want - as many times as you want. And you won't have to buy it again after it's been borrowed 26 times.
Currently Unglue.it has campaigns for five books. (If this takes off, and I'm convinced it will, there'll be more.) If any of these books would be of interest to the members of your library, then figure out what's a fair price (or what you can afford -- whichever's less) and then pledge just half of that from your book budget.
If you really can't afford it (or purchasing really has to go through approved suppliers, no exceptions ever), well, then promote the campaigns to your members instead.
Or do nothing. When the books are funded, you and your members will get them for free anyway. :-)
I just think that this is such a natural extension of our mission to use our funds wisely to provide resources to our communities that it's hardly an extension at all. I think it's the answer we've been asking for to the problem of ebooks. And I think it's the best consortial deal ever.
So let's go forth and Unglue!
Friday, 11 May 2012
Links of Interest - ebook lending, web design, bibliographic software, open access
Lending eBooks
Colorado's Douglas County Libraries has come up with a model whereby they buy, host, and manage the lending of ebooks (including DRM), rather than subscribe to publishers' platforms. See more details on the model and a letter to publishers about how it works.
Here's a cute way of reminding users of the value of libraries when they check out print books. It would be interesting to think of ways to make this work with e-resources...
Web design
See a demo of One-Pager, a free template for library websites designed and user-tested to make it easy to find the most important information - and to be immediately mobile-friendly and accessible. You can read more or download the code here.
Bibliographic software
Beyond Bibliographies: Collaborating with Citation Software (powerpoint) is a poster comparing Endnote, RefWorks, Zotero, and Mendeley.
Open Access
(I try to include a variety of stuff in these round-ups, but open access is kind of a strong interest of mine, so...)
Some keen-eyed librarians noticed that the previously open-access Reference and User Services Quarterly was suddenly open-access no longer; the Library Loon investigated and reported back. Apparently in future articles will be embargoed for a year, although as at writing older articles aren't available yet either.
(This reminds me that I keep meaning to find out whether The New Zealand Library And Information Management Journal is intended to be open access or if it's just openly accessible by default, so to speak. In any case they're there at the moment - as are all the LIANZA conference papers from 2004. They're not browsable/searchable in the most user-friendly format but I know from experience what the web group's dealing with, and that just getting them all in one place is a fantastic achievement.)
The Library Loon also has a fantastic discussion about how to recognise scammy "open access" publishers.
SCORE Library Survey Report "aimed to get a national [UK] perspective on institutional engagement in Open Educational Resources through their librarians".
Open Access in Chemistry - slides from a presentation at the 2011 ACS Spring Meeting giving an excellent overview of what it says on the tin - in terms both of numbers and of attitudes.
Colorado's Douglas County Libraries has come up with a model whereby they buy, host, and manage the lending of ebooks (including DRM), rather than subscribe to publishers' platforms. See more details on the model and a letter to publishers about how it works.
Here's a cute way of reminding users of the value of libraries when they check out print books. It would be interesting to think of ways to make this work with e-resources...
Web design
See a demo of One-Pager, a free template for library websites designed and user-tested to make it easy to find the most important information - and to be immediately mobile-friendly and accessible. You can read more or download the code here.
Bibliographic software
Beyond Bibliographies: Collaborating with Citation Software (powerpoint) is a poster comparing Endnote, RefWorks, Zotero, and Mendeley.
Open Access
(I try to include a variety of stuff in these round-ups, but open access is kind of a strong interest of mine, so...)
Some keen-eyed librarians noticed that the previously open-access Reference and User Services Quarterly was suddenly open-access no longer; the Library Loon investigated and reported back. Apparently in future articles will be embargoed for a year, although as at writing older articles aren't available yet either.
(This reminds me that I keep meaning to find out whether The New Zealand Library And Information Management Journal is intended to be open access or if it's just openly accessible by default, so to speak. In any case they're there at the moment - as are all the LIANZA conference papers from 2004. They're not browsable/searchable in the most user-friendly format but I know from experience what the web group's dealing with, and that just getting them all in one place is a fantastic achievement.)
The Library Loon also has a fantastic discussion about how to recognise scammy "open access" publishers.
SCORE Library Survey Report "aimed to get a national [UK] perspective on institutional engagement in Open Educational Resources through their librarians".
Open Access in Chemistry - slides from a presentation at the 2011 ACS Spring Meeting giving an excellent overview of what it says on the tin - in terms both of numbers and of attitudes.
Friday, 30 March 2012
Links of Interest 30/3/2012 - article linker, impact factors of open access journals, and more
Customer service
UConn Discovers What Students Want From Their Library - too complex for a pull quote, follow the link for a summary.
Two solutions for increasing the usability of that blasted Article Linker page:
JQ at the University of Oregon writes about High-impact open access journals and includes some invaluable tables of OA journals ranked by SJR, SciMago, and Eigenfactor impact factors. These (sorted by subject) could be useful for promoting OA to departments and to students graduating from university who still want to keep up with research.
Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking looks at OA journals in the library science field:
Data curation
Demystifying the data interview: Developing a foundation for reference librarians to talk with researchers about their data
Subscription statistics
Subscriptions in Context (powerpoint) is a clear and elegant presentation for University of Central Oklahoma library faculty liaisons on all the factors the Serials department considers when evaluating subscriptions.
Just for fun
A Library Society of the World thread began, "Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a monstrous librarian" and went on from there.
UConn Discovers What Students Want From Their Library - too complex for a pull quote, follow the link for a summary.
Two solutions for increasing the usability of that blasted Article Linker page:
- simple and sweet
- more complex and risky (if you're not a code geek, skip the discussion/coding examples and just scroll to the bottom for the "after" screenshot)
JQ at the University of Oregon writes about High-impact open access journals and includes some invaluable tables of OA journals ranked by SJR, SciMago, and Eigenfactor impact factors. These (sorted by subject) could be useful for promoting OA to departments and to students graduating from university who still want to keep up with research.
Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking looks at OA journals in the library science field:
This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contributions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing.
Data curation
Demystifying the data interview: Developing a foundation for reference librarians to talk with researchers about their data
As libraries become more involved in curating research data, reference librarians will need to be trained in conducting data interviews with researchers to better understand their data and associated needs. This article seeks to identify and provide definitions for the basic terms and concepts of data curation for librarians to properly frame and carry out a data interview using the Data Curation Profiles (DCP) Toolkit.
Subscription statistics
Subscriptions in Context (powerpoint) is a clear and elegant presentation for University of Central Oklahoma library faculty liaisons on all the factors the Serials department considers when evaluating subscriptions.
Just for fun
A Library Society of the World thread began, "Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a monstrous librarian" and went on from there.
Monday, 9 January 2012
How US intellectual property laws affect the rest of us, and what we can do about it
How can it affect us?
Imagine a New Zealand website which sells (eg Fishpond) or gives away (eg NZETC - Eric Hellman discusses Project Gutenberg Australia) ebooks of material in the public domain. Now imagine that a law in the US allows for this site not only to be blocked from the US, but also to be removed from search engine results (search engines widely used throughout the world) and blocked from receiving any revenue from the US (including revenue for legitimate sales of in-copyright books).
Wait, what?
New Zealand's copyright law puts books in the public domain 50 years after the death of the author (which is bad enough - I'm a fan of our original copyright period of 28 years OR life, whichever was longest); US copyright law currently means any book published after 1923 won't get into the public domain until 2019, if ever (see also the Mickey Mouse Protection Act). The difference between the two means there's a whole bunch of books which are legal for anyone to freely distribute in New Zealand, but illegal to distribute without permission from the rights-holder in the US. Currently we just cope with the disparity. I mean, the authors have been dead for at least 50 years anyway. However...
What are the proposed US laws?
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is written such that if any foreign site that is "US-directed" (defined as any site that doesn't actively prevent people in the US from accessing it) distributes anything against US law, then the US can hit it with a bunch of sanctions. Theoretically these sanctions are probably intended to just prevent the site trading with people in the US; in practice, they'd prevent people in most of the world being able to easily access or use the site.
I'm not sure of the relationship of SOPA to the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA), but that seems to have similar intentions. "Don't Break the Internet" at the Stanford Law Review Online discusses the potential effects of these two bills.
If that's not bad enough, there's the proposed Research Works Act (RWA) which is designed to make open access mandates illegal - and thereby cut down on the amount of open access material available to researchers worldwide. (The rationale is that private publishers publish it, so it shouldn't be free to the public. But if the public is funding the research grants and paying the salaries of the researchers and the peer reviewers then why it shouldn't be locked behind a paywall benefitting only the private publisher, either.) Here's a thorough roundup of blogposts on RWA.
Who would want to do such a thing?
The Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing put out a press release in support of the RWA; here's a list of AAP/PSP members. One of the sponsors of RWA has received campaign contributions from Elsevier. So has the other.
Elsevier is also on the List of SOPA supporters (pdf) along with quite a lot of other publishers (academic and fiction).
What can we do about it?
If we voted in the US we could contact our representatives and ask them to vote against these bills. But they probably don't care much what foreigners think.
If this were really a free market we libraries could say "Nah, we're not going to buy from [Elsevier] this year, we'll give our money to some other science-publishing company." But publishers have a monopoly on their titles, and academics would generally have words to say if we didn't provide access to the Journal of Important Research in My Field.
But publishers don't only rely on libraries' purchasing money. They also rely on researchers (including non-US researchers, and including library researchers) providing them free articles to publish and providing them free labour in the form of peer review. So what any researcher can do is withdraw that free labour. And while we librarians are encouraging other researchers to take a stand, we can put our money where our mouth is.
(I'll create it for fun. But to give it away I require something more.)
Imagine a New Zealand website which sells (eg Fishpond) or gives away (eg NZETC - Eric Hellman discusses Project Gutenberg Australia) ebooks of material in the public domain. Now imagine that a law in the US allows for this site not only to be blocked from the US, but also to be removed from search engine results (search engines widely used throughout the world) and blocked from receiving any revenue from the US (including revenue for legitimate sales of in-copyright books).
Wait, what?
New Zealand's copyright law puts books in the public domain 50 years after the death of the author (which is bad enough - I'm a fan of our original copyright period of 28 years OR life, whichever was longest); US copyright law currently means any book published after 1923 won't get into the public domain until 2019, if ever (see also the Mickey Mouse Protection Act). The difference between the two means there's a whole bunch of books which are legal for anyone to freely distribute in New Zealand, but illegal to distribute without permission from the rights-holder in the US. Currently we just cope with the disparity. I mean, the authors have been dead for at least 50 years anyway. However...
What are the proposed US laws?
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is written such that if any foreign site that is "US-directed" (defined as any site that doesn't actively prevent people in the US from accessing it) distributes anything against US law, then the US can hit it with a bunch of sanctions. Theoretically these sanctions are probably intended to just prevent the site trading with people in the US; in practice, they'd prevent people in most of the world being able to easily access or use the site.
I'm not sure of the relationship of SOPA to the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA), but that seems to have similar intentions. "Don't Break the Internet" at the Stanford Law Review Online discusses the potential effects of these two bills.
If that's not bad enough, there's the proposed Research Works Act (RWA) which is designed to make open access mandates illegal - and thereby cut down on the amount of open access material available to researchers worldwide. (The rationale is that private publishers publish it, so it shouldn't be free to the public. But if the public is funding the research grants and paying the salaries of the researchers and the peer reviewers then why it shouldn't be locked behind a paywall benefitting only the private publisher, either.) Here's a thorough roundup of blogposts on RWA.
Who would want to do such a thing?
The Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing put out a press release in support of the RWA; here's a list of AAP/PSP members. One of the sponsors of RWA has received campaign contributions from Elsevier. So has the other.
Elsevier is also on the List of SOPA supporters (pdf) along with quite a lot of other publishers (academic and fiction).
What can we do about it?
If we voted in the US we could contact our representatives and ask them to vote against these bills. But they probably don't care much what foreigners think.
If this were really a free market we libraries could say "Nah, we're not going to buy from [Elsevier] this year, we'll give our money to some other science-publishing company." But publishers have a monopoly on their titles, and academics would generally have words to say if we didn't provide access to the Journal of Important Research in My Field.
But publishers don't only rely on libraries' purchasing money. They also rely on researchers (including non-US researchers, and including library researchers) providing them free articles to publish and providing them free labour in the form of peer review. So what any researcher can do is withdraw that free labour. And while we librarians are encouraging other researchers to take a stand, we can put our money where our mouth is.
- The Library Loon has compiled a list of library and information science journals published by Elsevier which librarians can strike against.
- Or you could even take the Open Access Pledge. Here's a bunch of Open Access LIS journals.
- Anyone in a position to proclaim a Journal declaration of independence gets super bonus points.
(I'll create it for fun. But to give it away I require something more.)
Thursday, 22 December 2011
French open data and historic monuments
Way back I had this idea I'd keep up with library blogs in French (and another couple of languages I was semi-competent at, at least with the help of Google Translate) and feed back the occasional roundup of interesting stuff into the anglophone world. I did it a bit, then ran out of steam, then the rss feeds I followed got out of date so nowadays I've no idea where the really interesting conversations are happening.
But I still see the occasional tidbit, such as (via Des Bibliothèques 2.0) the launch of the official French Open Data website data.gouv.fr. (A nice touch is that down the bottom of the page they link to Open Data initiatives in a bunch of other countries too.)
And even more cool, (via the same), Monuments historiques, a mashup of data from data.gouv.fr, OpenStreetMap, INSEE, Wikipedia and DBpedia, and Yahoo! (see more on the sources and process) which lets you search or browse for nearly 44,000 monuments in France by type, historic period, region, Metro stop... and gives you data, description, and images about each monument in a really pretty interface.
But I still see the occasional tidbit, such as (via Des Bibliothèques 2.0) the launch of the official French Open Data website data.gouv.fr. (A nice touch is that down the bottom of the page they link to Open Data initiatives in a bunch of other countries too.)
And even more cool, (via the same), Monuments historiques, a mashup of data from data.gouv.fr, OpenStreetMap, INSEE, Wikipedia and DBpedia, and Yahoo! (see more on the sources and process) which lets you search or browse for nearly 44,000 monuments in France by type, historic period, region, Metro stop... and gives you data, description, and images about each monument in a really pretty interface.
Friday, 28 October 2011
Links of Interest 19/10/2011 - infolit & student success; serials; conferences
The Swiss Army Librarian posts a regular "Reference Question of the Week". One of the latest covers using file conversion websites to help a desperate patron who needs to print out a file in a format that the library doesn't support.
Sense and Reference discusses three recent blogposts on libraries getting rid of books to create spaces.
The effect of library instruction on student success
Three C&RL papers:
Sense and Reference discusses three recent blogposts on libraries getting rid of books to create spaces.
The effect of library instruction on student success
Three C&RL papers:
- The Academic Library Impact on Student Persistence: "a change in the ratio of library professional staff to students predicts a statistically significant positive relationship with both retention and graduation rates." (Note that they show correlation, not causation; in their discussion they're inclined to suspect that the effect of more library professional staff is an indirect one.)
- Measuring Association between Library Instruction and Graduation GPA: "if more than one or two library workshops were offered to students within the course of their program, there was a higher tendency of workshop attendance having a positive impact on final GPA. The results indicate that library instruction has a direct correlation with student performance, but only if a certain minimum amount of instruction is provided."
- Why One-shot Information Literacy Sessions Are Not the Future of Instruction: A Case for Online Credit Courses: "Researchers analyzed the pre- and post-test scores of students who received different types of instruction including a traditional one-shot library session and an online course. Results show that students who participated in the online course demonstrated significant improvement in their test scores compared to the other students. This study shows freshman students' needs for more comprehensive information literacy instruction."
- Jenica Rogers names names of vendors with annoying practices. Some vendors responded well; some badly. Jenica posted another followup on Vendors that delight me.
- SCOAP3 is an initiative to set up a consortium that redirects library funds from paying for closed access High Energy Physics journal subscriptions to funding these journals to be made open access. The FAQ goes into more detail about how the model will work.
- LIANZA 2011 starts on Sunday - #lianza11 tweets from all attendees will be captured in a set of CoverItLive sessions and I'll be liveblogging as much as my wrists allow
- the worldwide online Library 2.011 conference will follow, running from November 2 - 4, with sessions held in multiple timezones.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Links of interest 7/4/2011 - reference and webdesign
A bit of fun: Book Sculptures
College & Research Libraries (C&RL) will become an open access publication beginning with the May 2011 issue.
Citation Management Software: Features and Futures (RUSQ) compares RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero from both a user and librarian perspective.
Reference and virtual reference
Search for the answer, not the question - "Assume the answer to your question is out there, and think about how the answer might have been written." I've been teaching students something like this, focusing on thinking about who would have written about something and where they would have published.
"Are We Getting Warmer?": Query Clarification in Live Chat Virtual Reference (RUSQ)
"Results indicate that accuracy was enhanced for librarians who used clarifying questions in answering ready reference (factual) questions."
Mu, X., Dimitroffa, A., Jordana, J., and Burclaffa, N. A Survey and Empirical Study of Virtual Reference Service in Academic Libraries The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37(2) pp. 120-129.
"Virtual Reference Services (VRS) have high user satisfaction. The main problem is its low usage. We surveyed 100 academic library web sites to understand how VRS are presented. We then conducted a usability study to further test an active VRS model regarding its effectiveness."
Website usability
One-Pager is a simple, mobile-friendly, user-friendly "library website template that allows your patrons to find what they want" - described elsewhere as a solution to messy library websites.
A couple of papers from Computers in Libraries are reported:
College & Research Libraries (C&RL) will become an open access publication beginning with the May 2011 issue.
Citation Management Software: Features and Futures (RUSQ) compares RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero from both a user and librarian perspective.
Reference and virtual reference
Search for the answer, not the question - "Assume the answer to your question is out there, and think about how the answer might have been written." I've been teaching students something like this, focusing on thinking about who would have written about something and where they would have published.
"Are We Getting Warmer?": Query Clarification in Live Chat Virtual Reference (RUSQ)
"Results indicate that accuracy was enhanced for librarians who used clarifying questions in answering ready reference (factual) questions."
Mu, X., Dimitroffa, A., Jordana, J., and Burclaffa, N. A Survey and Empirical Study of Virtual Reference Service in Academic Libraries The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37(2) pp. 120-129.
"Virtual Reference Services (VRS) have high user satisfaction. The main problem is its low usage. We surveyed 100 academic library web sites to understand how VRS are presented. We then conducted a usability study to further test an active VRS model regarding its effectiveness."
Website usability
One-Pager is a simple, mobile-friendly, user-friendly "library website template that allows your patrons to find what they want" - described elsewhere as a solution to messy library websites.
A couple of papers from Computers in Libraries are reported:
- Usability Express: A recipe for libraries (worth it just for the classic xkcd cartoon)
- Building Great Websites ("Take-away goal: Reduce your site by half – it doesn't mean you have bad content, but people cant find it because there is too much to look through".)
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Links of interest 20/10/2010
QR Codes
(What's a QR Code? See QR Codes: An Overview.)
Google has launched goo.gl, a URL shortening service (like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc) which as a bonus gives you a QR code: eg http://goo.gl/Xxyl links to this blog and http://goo.gl/Xxyl.qr gives you a pretty QR code you can paste onto a poster. Shortly thereafter, bit.ly joined in the fun.
On the downside I recall reading (somewhere on the internet; it sounded plausible at the time) that, cool as QR codes sound, since they're mostly being used by advertisers, actual real people aren't really all that keen on using them.[citation needed] On the upside, I've also heard anecdotes from people who do use them. And in any case they don't cost any money and almost zero time.
Library tutorials
(What's a QR Code? See QR Codes: An Overview.)
Google has launched goo.gl, a URL shortening service (like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc) which as a bonus gives you a QR code: eg http://goo.gl/Xxyl links to this blog and http://goo.gl/Xxyl.qr gives you a pretty QR code you can paste onto a poster. Shortly thereafter, bit.ly joined in the fun.
On the downside I recall reading (somewhere on the internet; it sounded plausible at the time) that, cool as QR codes sound, since they're mostly being used by advertisers, actual real people aren't really all that keen on using them.[citation needed] On the upside, I've also heard anecdotes from people who do use them. And in any case they don't cost any money and almost zero time.
Library tutorials
- An old post I just came across: Subversive Handouts: One Librarian’s Secret Weapon - a sneaky way to get some extra face-time with a class.
- When an imploring librarian is not enough - a sneaky way to get students to actually want to use Web of Science etc rather than Google Scholar
- Dramatic Growth of Open Access
- The Economics of Open Access points out that "Every time a researcher or teacher cannot get to the information she needs to do her work, or must obtain it by labor-intensive means like interlibrary loan or direct contact with the author, time and knowledge, which are both worth money, are wasted; open access reduces that loss."
- Open access: the world is your consortium sees open access as a new solution for the inability of library consortia, let alone individual libraries, let alone individual scientists, to be able to afford access to journals.
- Almost Halfway There: an Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians "presents results of a study of open access publishing and self-archiving behaviors of academic librarians" and discusses "several strategies to encourage academic librarians to continue embrace open access behaviors".
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Possible topics for crowd-sourced research
Since first talking about this I've been pondering what topics would make good candidates to try out the model. I think it should be something that:
A. Trends in patrons' use of electronic equipment in the library
This is basically an extension of the article that inspired my thinky thoughts to start with, which did headcounts to measure laptop use in their library. We could extend this to, say, a headcount of
B. Librarians' perceptions of the quality of vendor training
(ie training provided by vendors in the use of their products to librarians, in case that's not clear)
This is. Perhaps a delicate topic. I've been thinking for a while about blogging about my own perceptions, all aggregated and anonymised but it still feels a bit "bite the hand that holds all our resources", because my perceptions are not good. But perhaps it would be less awkward if it came from a whole lot of librarians. And vendors are starting to respond more and more to concerns raised in social media so maybe it would actually get some attention and help vendors provide better training.
OTOH this would be an inherently messy topic to research. It'd be a good test of whether crowdsourcing a qualitative research topic could work, but perhaps not a good test of whether crowdsourcing research per se is workable. There'd need to be a lot of discussion about what exactly we want to research:
So, for anyone interested in going somewhere with this -- or just interested in reading the results -- what do you think? Topic A, topic B, topic C (insert your own topic here), or all of the above?
- is of interest to as many people as possible; and
- can be contributed to by as many people as possible;
- as easily as possible.
A. Trends in patrons' use of electronic equipment in the library
This is basically an extension of the article that inspired my thinky thoughts to start with, which did headcounts to measure laptop use in their library. We could extend this to, say, a headcount of
- total people, of course;
- users of library computers;
- users of personal laptops;
- PDAs;
- cellphones;
- and a handy 'other' category.
B. Librarians' perceptions of the quality of vendor training
(ie training provided by vendors in the use of their products to librarians, in case that's not clear)
This is. Perhaps a delicate topic. I've been thinking for a while about blogging about my own perceptions, all aggregated and anonymised but it still feels a bit "bite the hand that holds all our resources", because my perceptions are not good. But perhaps it would be less awkward if it came from a whole lot of librarians. And vendors are starting to respond more and more to concerns raised in social media so maybe it would actually get some attention and help vendors provide better training.
OTOH this would be an inherently messy topic to research. It'd be a good test of whether crowdsourcing a qualitative research topic could work, but perhaps not a good test of whether crowdsourcing research per se is workable. There'd need to be a lot of discussion about what exactly we want to research:
- Likert scales of measures on eg amount of new info, amount of info already known, familiarity of trainer with database, ability of trainer to answer questions...?
- more freeform answers about problems with presentations eg slides full of essays, trainer bungles example searches...?
- surveying trainers themselves to find out what kind of training they get in how to give a good presentation?
So, for anyone interested in going somewhere with this -- or just interested in reading the results -- what do you think? Topic A, topic B, topic C (insert your own topic here), or all of the above?
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Links of interest 11/8/10 - open access, accessibility, statistics and more
Open Access
- the Creative Commons NZ mailing list.
- The State Services Commission has released the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework.
- In a brown-bag lunch conversation about open access yesterday a bunch of us also talked about the digitisation of the AJHRs, the Directory of Open Access Journals, ways/issues with getting more open access content in our catalogue and/or Summon, and a bunch of other things.
- Char Booth writes about e-texts and library accessibility including a great quote that "ebooks were created by the blind, then made inaccessible by the sighted."
- NZETC has just posted about the 1064 works in DAISY format available in their collection for people with print-related disabilities. (DAISY = "Digital Accessible Information SYstem")
- Dave Pattern at U of Huddersfield blogs about how "non- and low-usage of library services/resources [...] relates to final grades"
- Some results from extending the Angers university library's opening hours - in French and in Google Translate's English
- Stats from the Toulouse library's standard OPAC vs its mobile OPAC - in French and Google Translate's English.
- And Meredith Farkas writes about "the unsupported interpretations" librarians often make based on our statistics
- The first year of research on the Researchers of Tomorrow (pdf) study finds that "in broad approaches to information‐seeking and use of research resources, there are no marked differences between Generation Y doctoral students and those in older age groups. Nor are there marked differences in these behaviours between doctoral students of any age in different years of their study. The most significant differences revealed in the data are between subject disciplines of study irrespective of age or year of study."
- Assessments of Information Literacy collects links to infolit tests, assessments, rubrics and tutorials available online.
- Christina Pikas lists a Rundown of the new [database etc] interfaces this summer. There were some surprises, including a ScienceDirect/Scopus merger apparently due August 28...
Monday, 12 July 2010
Crowdsourcing library research
Reading Snapshots of Laptop Use in an Academic Library crystallised some thinky thoughts I've vaguely had for a while about the possibility of libraries working together on library research.
The very short version of the article is that in their library "28% of students used laptops in existing spaces in 2005, while 62% of students used laptops in the same spaces in 2008". But of course they're not sure exactly what's causing the change. Is it just the changing times? Changing university policy? Changing library spaces? Something in the water? When you've only got one datapoint - your own library - it's hard to see what the real trend is.
But if you had the same data from a whole bunch of libraries then you'd be able to get a better idea of the nationwide/global trends. And if your data was different from that trend, you'd be able to get a better idea of how your local circumstances are affecting what's going on.
I've had thinky thoughts in the past about libraries sharing their statistics and research and stuff and part of the problem I recognised then was that everyone counts different statistics, so results aren't always comparable.
But. What if, when we want to do this kind of research, instead of doing it in-house, we open it up:
Potential for awesomesauce, yes/yes? Does anyone have any burning research questions they'd like to try this with? Because my burning research question is currently "Let's do it!" which, um, technically isn't a question. <looks around hopefully>
The very short version of the article is that in their library "28% of students used laptops in existing spaces in 2005, while 62% of students used laptops in the same spaces in 2008". But of course they're not sure exactly what's causing the change. Is it just the changing times? Changing university policy? Changing library spaces? Something in the water? When you've only got one datapoint - your own library - it's hard to see what the real trend is.
But if you had the same data from a whole bunch of libraries then you'd be able to get a better idea of the nationwide/global trends. And if your data was different from that trend, you'd be able to get a better idea of how your local circumstances are affecting what's going on.
I've had thinky thoughts in the past about libraries sharing their statistics and research and stuff and part of the problem I recognised then was that everyone counts different statistics, so results aren't always comparable.
But. What if, when we want to do this kind of research, instead of doing it in-house, we open it up:
- stick up a wiki where we can collaborate with a pile of other libraries on deciding the methodology,
- stick up a Google spreadsheet where participating libraries can enter their stats,
- ???
profitPublish!
Potential for awesomesauce, yes/yes? Does anyone have any burning research questions they'd like to try this with? Because my burning research question is currently "Let's do it!" which, um, technically isn't a question. <looks around hopefully>
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Links of interest 13/1/10
Web collaboration
- Tinychat lets you instantly set up a temporary chatroom with its own short url you can share with anyone you want to join you. Once everyone has left the chat it disappears.
- Flockdraw does the same for the virtual whiteboard.
- Virtual provider pessimism: analysing instant messaging reference encounters with the pair perception comparison method looks at how users vs librarians are satisfied with IM reference sessions. They find that users are frequently happy with results even when the librarians haven't felt confident with how things went.
- Cyberspace or Face-to-Face: The Teachable Moment and Changing Reference Mediums looks at instant messaging, chat, and face-to-face reference in terms of levels of instruction in each medium. They find that "patrons wanted to be taught regardless of medium, and that librarians responded by providing instruction in all mediums." (Although different techniques are used in the different mediums.) "These patrons’ consistently high desire for instruction reinforces the notion that the ideal teachable moment can be found in reference work."
- "But I Want a Real Book": An Investigation of Undergraduates' Usage and Attitudes toward Electronic Books
- This Open Access mindmap covers what open access is, what supporters are motivated by, what it applies to, how materials are made available (eg journals and repositories) and organised. Many of the nodes have links to articles for further information.
- Discussion of a simple system a Dutch library set up to encourage users to recommend or 'tag' books as they returned them - and discussion of how this system became so successful that the library discontinued it.
- Karen Schneider writes Reflections on strategic plans that are neither strategic nor plans
- And finally, Beyond the Bullet Points: New Years Resolution says "Let us make a resolution together. Let’s make 2010 the year of the librarian – not the library."
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Tim Spalding on Social cataloguing
What it is, and what it means for libraries?
Tim Spalding founder of LibraryThing
Introduces self as a failed academic, worked in publishing, started LibraryThing.
Warning: Library Science being practiced without a degree
Started as a personal project, now a company. 850,000 members who catalogue their personal libraries - so far 44million books. Available in 12+ languages. (Not Māori but would be open to that - translations done by members.)
Social cataloguing is "what I say it means" because he invented it! It's what emerges when personal catalogue goes social. It's becoming increasingly important to libraries. Used in LibraryThing, Shelfari, GoodReads; Visual Bookshelf, BooksWeRead.
Ladder of social cataloguing:
- started as personal cataloguing and grew from there
- users climb the ladder
- climbing the ladder is more altruism, more cooperation, more social. But participating is primarily for self. There's some application to libraries but it's different there.
Live demonstration of adding "History of New Zealand" by Michael King to his bookshelf. Mixture of tags - "new zealand", "history", "lianza", "interesting". Bookshelf with ratings. Can add from Amazon or many other bookstores or even libraries - 10 libraries in New Zealand contribute data. Can view libraries by list, cover, tag (list or cloud); author cloud or portraits. Statistics on language, number of characters, places. Reviews and ratings. Members' profiles - social networking component but LibraryThing is more about content than people, reflected in focus on users' names rather than user icons.
23,000 people adding Twilight. All doing it for themselves but as a result there are now 1200 reviews people can read; tags are added, recommendations are generated ("Will I like it?" - it correctly predicts he won't like Twilight. :-) ) Can follow a feed of new recommendations. There's also the "unsuggester" - trying to be entertaining around books.
Example of Neuromancer - library of congress has bizarre subject headings; LibraryThing has "cyberpunk" and you can click through to read more cyberpunk. "Chicklit" is sorted by how many people have called it that; cf Library of Congress "love stories" which is just either/or, no sorting. Idea of prototypes - a robin is a really good example of a bird, a penguin is a kind of okay example of a bird...
Non-romance readers think romance readers read romance, but they don't - they read contemporary romance, trashy romance, regency romance, lesbian romance, paranormal romance....
"If you're using terms like "social capital" you've already passed some kind of brain test" so not worried about vandalism....
"magic" is problematic - Harry Potter mixed in with academic ones.
"leather" even more so
Can do tagmashes to get tagmash "France", "WWII", "fiction"
"chicklit" is now an LCSH but not geographically subdivided and will never have a "zombie" subdivision.
Tags: glbt vs lgbt "But those are the same thing!" -- but no: the books are actually different. The terms that people use encode all sorts of stuff. Many things labelled "homosexuality" actually mean "anti-homosexuality".
More than 1.5million covers added (including Albanian, Serbian editions of Harry Potter). When you upload it for yourself, everyone gets the benefit.
Social networking based on books you have in common. "Even if I don't want to be his buddy, checking out his library will be very interesting to me. Social networking for people who don't want to talk to each other."
Most popular group is Librarians who LibraryThing. Conversations about books on groups are tied into the books' own records.
LibraryThing Local - showing us map of bookstores and libraries in Portland, Maine. Can connect to local LT members; find events at bookstores, libraries. Add a photo of our libraries to these pages!
Example of wife's books - members have combined all the editions (other languages, etc) FRBR-style. Members have combined "Mark Twain" and "Samuel Clemens".
"Common Knowledge" - awards, quotes, characters and places in the story, blurbers - all sorts of things not captured in typical metadata.
Series pages - eg Star Wars series. Plus "related series". Much more information than any library has. Collated by people who know about it - the books' fans.
How many books does George Washington occur in? How many books take place in Washington, D.C., or in Hell?
LT "member" Thomas Jefferson, Marie Antoinette. No New Zealanders at the moment. Based on eg auction house records. Done by the group "I See Dead People's Books". Nice to be able to search Thomas Jefferson's library - couldn't do it before; now can see how you overlap with these people. Most popular book among all legacy libraries is Don Quixote; #2 is Complete Shakespeare.
Highest rung of ladder is altruism - flash mob cataloguing where volunteers go to library and catalogue their books in a mob in a day.
Six free ways to use LibraryThing:
1 Make sure you're in LT Local
2 Make an account
3 Libraries of Early New Zealand
4 Flash-mob catalogue your local historical society, church, health centre...
5 "Community library" to create a shared local library with LibraryThing Groups (eg two churches, a historical library, and a couple of people in town).
6 Grab our free data: common knowledge data, frbrised data etc.
One un-free way:
1 LibraryThing for Libraries eg at Seattle Public Library showing other editions and translations; similar books; tags; reviews. Four or five NZ libraries are using it.
What does social cataloguing mean for library cataloguing?
The end of the world! No!
Defends the value of structured metadata but that shouldn't be all we have.
LCSH - A book has 3-6 subjects - why? because that's how many we can fit on a card.
Subjects are equally valid because of... the card.
Subjects never change because of... the card.
Only librarians get to add subjects because of... the card.
Users don't get a say in how books are classified because of... the card.
In the digital world, none of this matters. In libraries these ideas have still persisted.
The physical library was human. The first wave of technology was dehumanising but social cataloguing can rehumanise the library. Everyone can help. (We don't need to let them do everything but they can help!) Local matters again. cf Māori Subject Headings - sometimes local communities need headers other communities don't have.
A note of caution before joining the exciting world of web2.0 - join the exciting world of web1.0! Library catalogues aren't web1.0. Often you can't link to library catalogue records; they're all session-based. Why why why? People need to be able to bookmark and share. And catalogues aren't indexed in search engines! Why?????
Go with the grain of the internet, not against it. We're not in competition with the internet. We should be open. Libraries are going the wrong way. LibraryThing gets twice as much traffic as WorldCat. Dogster gets as much traffic as WorldCat.
Be part of the conversation. Trust people: put your stuff online and risk that people might find the "wrong thing" or tag it the "wrong way".
Choose solutions that favour all this. He thinks open source is the way to go. He doesn't think open source is necessarily better, but it can be.
Social cataloguing can be a last chance to join web 1.0. Before we start struggling with ebooks struggle with the fact that people can't find our books on Google! It's an opportunity to reinvigorate library technology. To reconsider some LIS thinking and improve systems. (Had a LT project to replace Dewey. Turns out to be hard and didn't work. But it's cool to try!) Chance to embrace best traditions of librarianship: radical openness, public spirit, focus, connection to the local and social. Why would we lend books but hold back metadata?
Q: Could libraries organise own flash mobs and [? get stuff on web?]
A: Absolutely! Thinks flash mobs are good for things on the periphery, stuff that's never been exposed eg churches, historical society. So many books exist in private holdings!
Q: What proportion of books on LibraryThing do people catalogue themselves rather than pulling data in?
A: Not sure but probably a small percentage. Zines, comics, etc are the main things.
Tim Spalding founder of LibraryThing
Introduces self as a failed academic, worked in publishing, started LibraryThing.
Warning: Library Science being practiced without a degree
Started as a personal project, now a company. 850,000 members who catalogue their personal libraries - so far 44million books. Available in 12+ languages. (Not Māori but would be open to that - translations done by members.)
Social cataloguing is "what I say it means" because he invented it! It's what emerges when personal catalogue goes social. It's becoming increasingly important to libraries. Used in LibraryThing, Shelfari, GoodReads; Visual Bookshelf, BooksWeRead.
Ladder of social cataloguing:
- started as personal cataloguing and grew from there
- users climb the ladder
- climbing the ladder is more altruism, more cooperation, more social. But participating is primarily for self. There's some application to libraries but it's different there.
Live demonstration of adding "History of New Zealand" by Michael King to his bookshelf. Mixture of tags - "new zealand", "history", "lianza", "interesting". Bookshelf with ratings. Can add from Amazon or many other bookstores or even libraries - 10 libraries in New Zealand contribute data. Can view libraries by list, cover, tag (list or cloud); author cloud or portraits. Statistics on language, number of characters, places. Reviews and ratings. Members' profiles - social networking component but LibraryThing is more about content than people, reflected in focus on users' names rather than user icons.
23,000 people adding Twilight. All doing it for themselves but as a result there are now 1200 reviews people can read; tags are added, recommendations are generated ("Will I like it?" - it correctly predicts he won't like Twilight. :-) ) Can follow a feed of new recommendations. There's also the "unsuggester" - trying to be entertaining around books.
Example of Neuromancer - library of congress has bizarre subject headings; LibraryThing has "cyberpunk" and you can click through to read more cyberpunk. "Chicklit" is sorted by how many people have called it that; cf Library of Congress "love stories" which is just either/or, no sorting. Idea of prototypes - a robin is a really good example of a bird, a penguin is a kind of okay example of a bird...
Non-romance readers think romance readers read romance, but they don't - they read contemporary romance, trashy romance, regency romance, lesbian romance, paranormal romance....
"If you're using terms like "social capital" you've already passed some kind of brain test" so not worried about vandalism....
"magic" is problematic - Harry Potter mixed in with academic ones.
"leather" even more so
Can do tagmashes to get tagmash "France", "WWII", "fiction"
"chicklit" is now an LCSH but not geographically subdivided and will never have a "zombie" subdivision.
Tags: glbt vs lgbt "But those are the same thing!" -- but no: the books are actually different. The terms that people use encode all sorts of stuff. Many things labelled "homosexuality" actually mean "anti-homosexuality".
More than 1.5million covers added (including Albanian, Serbian editions of Harry Potter). When you upload it for yourself, everyone gets the benefit.
Social networking based on books you have in common. "Even if I don't want to be his buddy, checking out his library will be very interesting to me. Social networking for people who don't want to talk to each other."
Most popular group is Librarians who LibraryThing. Conversations about books on groups are tied into the books' own records.
LibraryThing Local - showing us map of bookstores and libraries in Portland, Maine. Can connect to local LT members; find events at bookstores, libraries. Add a photo of our libraries to these pages!
Example of wife's books - members have combined all the editions (other languages, etc) FRBR-style. Members have combined "Mark Twain" and "Samuel Clemens".
"Common Knowledge" - awards, quotes, characters and places in the story, blurbers - all sorts of things not captured in typical metadata.
Series pages - eg Star Wars series. Plus "related series". Much more information than any library has. Collated by people who know about it - the books' fans.
How many books does George Washington occur in? How many books take place in Washington, D.C., or in Hell?
LT "member" Thomas Jefferson, Marie Antoinette. No New Zealanders at the moment. Based on eg auction house records. Done by the group "I See Dead People's Books". Nice to be able to search Thomas Jefferson's library - couldn't do it before; now can see how you overlap with these people. Most popular book among all legacy libraries is Don Quixote; #2 is Complete Shakespeare.
Highest rung of ladder is altruism - flash mob cataloguing where volunteers go to library and catalogue their books in a mob in a day.
Six free ways to use LibraryThing:
1 Make sure you're in LT Local
2 Make an account
3 Libraries of Early New Zealand
4 Flash-mob catalogue your local historical society, church, health centre...
5 "Community library" to create a shared local library with LibraryThing Groups (eg two churches, a historical library, and a couple of people in town).
6 Grab our free data: common knowledge data, frbrised data etc.
One un-free way:
1 LibraryThing for Libraries eg at Seattle Public Library showing other editions and translations; similar books; tags; reviews. Four or five NZ libraries are using it.
What does social cataloguing mean for library cataloguing?
The end of the world! No!
Defends the value of structured metadata but that shouldn't be all we have.
LCSH - A book has 3-6 subjects - why? because that's how many we can fit on a card.
Subjects are equally valid because of... the card.
Subjects never change because of... the card.
Only librarians get to add subjects because of... the card.
Users don't get a say in how books are classified because of... the card.
In the digital world, none of this matters. In libraries these ideas have still persisted.
The physical library was human. The first wave of technology was dehumanising but social cataloguing can rehumanise the library. Everyone can help. (We don't need to let them do everything but they can help!) Local matters again. cf Māori Subject Headings - sometimes local communities need headers other communities don't have.
A note of caution before joining the exciting world of web2.0 - join the exciting world of web1.0! Library catalogues aren't web1.0. Often you can't link to library catalogue records; they're all session-based. Why why why? People need to be able to bookmark and share. And catalogues aren't indexed in search engines! Why?????
Go with the grain of the internet, not against it. We're not in competition with the internet. We should be open. Libraries are going the wrong way. LibraryThing gets twice as much traffic as WorldCat. Dogster gets as much traffic as WorldCat.
Be part of the conversation. Trust people: put your stuff online and risk that people might find the "wrong thing" or tag it the "wrong way".
Choose solutions that favour all this. He thinks open source is the way to go. He doesn't think open source is necessarily better, but it can be.
Social cataloguing can be a last chance to join web 1.0. Before we start struggling with ebooks struggle with the fact that people can't find our books on Google! It's an opportunity to reinvigorate library technology. To reconsider some LIS thinking and improve systems. (Had a LT project to replace Dewey. Turns out to be hard and didn't work. But it's cool to try!) Chance to embrace best traditions of librarianship: radical openness, public spirit, focus, connection to the local and social. Why would we lend books but hold back metadata?
Q: Could libraries organise own flash mobs and [? get stuff on web?]
A: Absolutely! Thinks flash mobs are good for things on the periphery, stuff that's never been exposed eg churches, historical society. So many books exist in private holdings!
Q: What proportion of books on LibraryThing do people catalogue themselves rather than pulling data in?
A: Not sure but probably a small percentage. Zines, comics, etc are the main things.
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
The role of libraries in emerging models of scholarly communication
a faculty-library publishing partnership
Sigi Jöttkandt, John Willinsky, Shana Kimball
abstract (pdf)
Crisis in scholarly publishing
Exponential rise in subscription prices, decline in library budgets, consolidation of the publishing industry. Affects everyone in academia but especially the "book disciplines" eg humanities. Crisis for readers (access to scholarly materials decreases) and for authors (fewer publishers to be published by).
Open access as a response
Definition by Peter Suber.
Alternative publication models
"Green road" - institutional repositories freely available. Discipline-specific eg arXiv.org, CSeARCH.
"Gold Road" - open access publishing - Directory of Open Access Journals
Open Humanities Press
Slow uptake of OA among humanities scholars, perhaps because of perceptions among humanities researchers that internet isn't an appropriate publishing/researching venue. Open Humanities Press founded to counter these perceptions. Primary importance for humanities is not time to publication but prestige. Author-side fees would be inappropriate and didn't want to waste time fundraising, so instead of starting new journals, looked to gather pre-existing efforts.
Launched Open Humanities Press with seven journals. Aim to raise profile and credibility of these journals. Assess journals according to various policies
Libraries Scholarly Publishing Office. Use open source publishing software.
Found there was a perception that OHP would soon be involved in books so ran with it. Formed a model where international scholars get together to edit, peer-review, and publish books - eventually e-publishing. Aim to double publishing of books each year.
Hope model will take off more widely. Doesn't require much change from academics.
Still a community/volunteer project.
Public Knowledge Project
Open journal systems, open conference systems, developing open monograph systems
Made a dummy OA "LIANZA Journal" and Sigi says she'd be happy to talk to people about actually making the journal open access!
They're modularising the journal system to create a software platform for a monograph system.
Q: Would publishers use this system to set up open access monographs? What's the role of the library?
A: Scholarly Publishing Office is just for the conversion side of things - academics still do editing and peer review. Would like to see more libraries offer these services to scholars.
Q: Who does subject headings - authors or SPO?
A: Authors do add keywords. Journals are catalogued by libraries so subject headings are added there too.
Sigi Jöttkandt, John Willinsky, Shana Kimball
abstract (pdf)
Crisis in scholarly publishing
Exponential rise in subscription prices, decline in library budgets, consolidation of the publishing industry. Affects everyone in academia but especially the "book disciplines" eg humanities. Crisis for readers (access to scholarly materials decreases) and for authors (fewer publishers to be published by).
Open access as a response
Definition by Peter Suber.
Alternative publication models
"Green road" - institutional repositories freely available. Discipline-specific eg arXiv.org, CSeARCH.
"Gold Road" - open access publishing - Directory of Open Access Journals
Open Humanities Press
Slow uptake of OA among humanities scholars, perhaps because of perceptions among humanities researchers that internet isn't an appropriate publishing/researching venue. Open Humanities Press founded to counter these perceptions. Primary importance for humanities is not time to publication but prestige. Author-side fees would be inappropriate and didn't want to waste time fundraising, so instead of starting new journals, looked to gather pre-existing efforts.
Launched Open Humanities Press with seven journals. Aim to raise profile and credibility of these journals. Assess journals according to various policies
Libraries Scholarly Publishing Office. Use open source publishing software.
Found there was a perception that OHP would soon be involved in books so ran with it. Formed a model where international scholars get together to edit, peer-review, and publish books - eventually e-publishing. Aim to double publishing of books each year.
Hope model will take off more widely. Doesn't require much change from academics.
Still a community/volunteer project.
Public Knowledge Project
Open journal systems, open conference systems, developing open monograph systems
Made a dummy OA "LIANZA Journal" and Sigi says she'd be happy to talk to people about actually making the journal open access!
They're modularising the journal system to create a software platform for a monograph system.
Q: Would publishers use this system to set up open access monographs? What's the role of the library?
A: Scholarly Publishing Office is just for the conversion side of things - academics still do editing and peer review. Would like to see more libraries offer these services to scholars.
Q: Who does subject headings - authors or SPO?
A: Authors do add keywords. Journals are catalogued by libraries so subject headings are added there too.
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Elsevier scandal for 24/6/09 and other links of interest
Not content with publishing fake journals, Elsevier's marketing division recently decided to "offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes and Noble." Upon exposure, it's now recanted the scheme.
More New Zealand libraries on the social web:
A hilarious and very true rant on attending vendor training sessions; and a more serious post in response on how this applies to the kind of training sessions we give students.
National Library of the Netherlands is to secure long-term preservation of the content of the Directory of Open Access Journals.
More New Zealand libraries on the social web:
- Lincoln Uni Library on Twitter;
- Otago Uni Library on Twitter and showing their Law Library refurbishments on Flickr; Christchurch City Library staff on Flickr (with photos of Paul Sutherland's 50th birthday party).
- Republic Polytechnic Library, Singapore -- lots of space; and
- Hjorring public library, Denmark -- a red ribbon theme flows through the whole building; lots of bright colours and cool spaces; self-checkin.
A hilarious and very true rant on attending vendor training sessions; and a more serious post in response on how this applies to the kind of training sessions we give students.
National Library of the Netherlands is to secure long-term preservation of the content of the Directory of Open Access Journals.
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Links of interest 3/6/09
Resources
Gateway to Scientific Data from the Canadian government.
Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Top 50 papers
The first time Europeana (a digital library funded by the European Commission) launched so many people visited that it promptly crashed. This time it seems to be stable and is very nice to browse.
Musopen "is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music." (Project Gutenberg and Mutopia also have sheet music; Gutenberg also has music recordings, moving pictures, etc.)
Tools
Have you ever used Tinyurl to make a short link for a long url? Now Krunchd gives you a short link for a collection of urls.
Ideas
David Lee King writes about embedding a link to their virtual reference in their HIP catalogue (including on their Search Results page).
Stephen Abram writes about how phrasing on signage can increase compliance.
Gateway to Scientific Data from the Canadian government.
Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Top 50 papers
The first time Europeana (a digital library funded by the European Commission) launched so many people visited that it promptly crashed. This time it seems to be stable and is very nice to browse.
Musopen "is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music." (Project Gutenberg and Mutopia also have sheet music; Gutenberg also has music recordings, moving pictures, etc.)
Tools
Have you ever used Tinyurl to make a short link for a long url? Now Krunchd gives you a short link for a collection of urls.
Ideas
David Lee King writes about embedding a link to their virtual reference in their HIP catalogue (including on their Search Results page).
Stephen Abram writes about how phrasing on signage can increase compliance.
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Non-English blog roundup #11 - the sharing edition
"Non-English" seems to have turned into French, probably mostly because that's the language I read best. Must remedy this. In any case, today I've got a collection of blog posts sharing data:
The Assessment Librarian was thinking about computer posts in his library dedicated to catalogue research only and wondered how much use these got compared to computers available for any purpose. Data collected over two weeks showed:
Inspired by this post, Des Bibliotheques 2.0:
The Assessment Librarian was thinking about computer posts in his library dedicated to catalogue research only and wondered how much use these got compared to computers available for any purpose. Data collected over two weeks showed:
- Arts and Sciences branch
- Catalogue-only - 12% usage
- 'Open' computers - 51% usage
- Law and economy branch
- Catalogue-only - 7% usage
- 'Open' computers - 65% usage
Inspired by this post, Des Bibliotheques 2.0:
- shares Google Analytics statistics for off-campus visits to the library catalogue from 1st April 2008 - 1 Jan 2009 (a good handful of pages in pdf);
- compares numbers of visitors to the homepage (site) vs the number of visitors to the catalogue (OPAC) (note the numbers were gathered using different tools;
- shows the impact of a new website - " the number of visitors has increased from 80-100%; the number of visits has increased from 30-50%; the number of pages seen per visit has tripled".
Thursday, 29 January 2009
More on sharing
Yesterday we presented our conference feedback and I launched my "Let's share everything!" manifesto. By the end of the session we were running late so we eschewed taking questions in favour of adjourning for lunch, but the idea's out there and hopefully percolating. In the meantime I have LibGuides, focus groups, lesson plans, institutional repository verification, liaison, maybe-Facebook, hopefully-podcast, and oh-yes-outreach to set up before first semester starts.
But the other day I was reading (via LibraryTechNZ) a paper on IM a Librarian: Extending Virtual Reference Services through Instant Messaging and Chat Widgets. This linked to an open source tool and I navigated back up the chain to find a page the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries has set up a page of open source software projects they've been working on. So there's one more precedent for the list.
And the fact that I came across it by such a chain of links has convinced me that, valuable as it is to get the stuff up onto the web anywhere, the real value will come when we can pool all of it into one place for easy findability.
But the other day I was reading (via LibraryTechNZ) a paper on IM a Librarian: Extending Virtual Reference Services through Instant Messaging and Chat Widgets. This linked to an open source tool and I navigated back up the chain to find a page the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries has set up a page of open source software projects they've been working on. So there's one more precedent for the list.
And the fact that I came across it by such a chain of links has convinced me that, valuable as it is to get the stuff up onto the web anywhere, the real value will come when we can pool all of it into one place for easy findability.
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