A New Appreciation for Archivists

I spent the weekend wading through crumbling remnants of a life: photographs and letters from my Mom's trunk. It was a personal history lesson, and it was also overwhelming. She saved this stuff for 70 years; some seems like trash to me, but maybe it has some hidden significance. How to decide? An archivist would know.

Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an editorial by author David Kahn about the need to adequately fund the National Archives, which has a backlog, er "document surplus," and is struggling to process documents, answer information requests, and provide customer service to researchers. Seems like an activity worth funding.

What's Missing from Institutional Repositories

Cornell PhD students Philip Davis and Matthew Connolly in their D-Lib article "Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace" describe a picture of faculty apathy towards the institutional repository (IR) at Cornell.

After a balanced description of the camps advocating IRs (not easy to do in this day and age), the authors describe some of the reasons faculty don't deposit research in the DSpace IR at Cornell:

1. Faculty prefer to be associated with their research field rather than their institution.

2. Faculty may be concerned about how the practice of depositing articles in an IR will affect their chances to be published in an archival journal, which is still very important to them.

3. Faculty may work in a field where early dissemination of results is not desirable, either for reasons of competition or of completenss, accuracy and quality.

4. Faculty may find the IR technology more difficult or less convenient than posting to a personal or departmental web page.

The authors found that the culture of researcher's discipline was an important component to the use of the IR. For example, the library collection is one area of Cornell's IR that is seeing steady growth. Presumably, the librarians are the most familiar and supportive of the IR, and so use it for their materials.

This study presents actual data (how refreshing) on how it's really going with IRs. Proponents can use the information here to make IRs more successful. Detractors can use it to say they are failing.

The authors don't talk about it, but I think what's really missing here is marketing. People (researchers included) will generally take advantage of a tool, service, or system that benefits them if they know about it. Until IRs have a sense of importance or imprimateur, or unless they provide a place to put stuff that has no other home (teaching materials, grey literature, datasets), it doesn't suprise me that they are underutilized.

Marketing? Isn't that something publishers are pretty good at? But it takes resources.

Once again, we see that as libraries take on the traditional roles of publishers, they need to become more like publishers in order to succeed.

Sue Google Over Copyright? Get In Line

You've undoubtedly seen that Viacom is suing Google over widespread copyright infringement on Google's recent acquisition YouTube. YouTube has been happy to cooperate in removing infringing content once reported, but has aip.org/publishingservices/ebook/AIPXMLebook.pdfbeen unable (unwilling?) to take resonsibility for prohibiting users from posting infringing material.

Does this sound a little familiar? Like publishers suing Google over violating copyright by digitizing books, and Google responding that they'd be happy to exclude any works that they get requests to omit or remove? Except in Google Book Search, it's Google itself that will be doing the deed, not the clueless masses.

Another difference is that YouTube has reached licencing agreements with other content providers, but that talks with Viacom had recently broken down. Not the same approach as that taken with publishers.

Hmmmm....

Why Libraries Matter

Just came across this piece, "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete? 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important"

Writer Will Sherman compares the role of librarians to good web moderators: "the role of the moderator very much parallels the role of the librarian: to safeguard an environment in which knowledge can be accessed and ideas can be shared."

My favorite reason is Number 23: "The internet is a mess." I used to tell my students that the internet was like a library where someone threw all the books on the floor. (I couldn't remember where I stole that from so, of course I Googled it, and according to this site [Check section 8.12] lots of other people have stolen it too.)

Sherman talks a LOT about Google Book Search and doesn't even mention open access ("Number 3: The internet isn’t free" would have been an appropriate place.) Still for librarians and those of us who value them, it's worth a read.

For parents who know the book Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathman or the video performance, I can't get the idea out of my head of John Lithgow reading out the reasons in a sonorous voice ad infinitum. (In the story, Officer Buckle reads lists of safety rules....)

(Credit to j's scratchpad for leading me to the article.)

5 Tips for Creating Case Studies with Impact

In my travels through trade shows and web sites, I have come across many case studies designed to make concrete the services an organization offers—some more effective than others. I'm a fan of thoughtfully and carefully prepared case studies. How can you make sure yours have the most impact? Here are five tips to great case studies:

1. Provide enough customer background to provide context for the project description and for prospects to be able to relate.

2. Describe the issues or problems the customer had before your solution was implemented.

3. Differentiate your solution from the customer's other options.

4. Prove how the customer benefited from the relationship.

5. Include descriptive comments from the customer, explaining the problem, the process, and the outcome.

If you've covered these basics, check out this article by Mark Levy at Marketing Profs for ways to emphasize your "insight" to the solution in your case study.

Social Networking: The Next Generation

I forgot about this article from The Washington Post until today when my ridiculous hunt for a hard-to-find Webkinz for my niece's birthday took my dialing finger and half a tank of gas. You see, she lives across the country from my kids, and they want to be able to interact more. So I thought I'd see if they could play together in real time using the popular stuffed-animals-with-a-life. Unfortunately my search apparently coincided with a Canadian railroad strike which is keeping the popular virtual pets off store shelves in the Northeast, where they are all the rage.

If you have kids between 6 and 12, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, this article is the best explanation I've seen. (The Post web site includes a video demo by the article's author, Ylan Mui.)

The article was published early in February--coincidentally a few days after David Warlick's presentation of "Digital Natives" at the Publishing 2.0 pre-conference seminar of the American Association of Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Conference (AAP/PSP). A digital native is a person who was "born digital". Warlick introduced us to the teenage cyborg with a laptop connected to the internet, a VOIP headset, a cell phone earpiece, and a gaming system all going simultaneously. His point was that this creature isn't going to respond the same way to traditional learning environments as we did, and that we had better adapt in order to reach him.

O brave new world, that has such people in't! The freakiest part is that two of them are mine...

PSP Joins STM in Position on Open Access

In a not-too-surprising move, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers (AAP/PSP) has endorsed the Brussels Declaration issued last month by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).

The Brussels document supports the position that multiple business models are healthy and warns, "Open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review."

Hotly debated on the listserves (see Liblicense, for example) the declaration is a the next reponse in a series of geographic pronouncements like the Budapest Initiative, the Bethesda Statement, and the Berlin Declaration. (There must be a Saturday Night Live sketch in here somewhere.)

In the meantime, publishers and librarians are experimenting with open access models, which are becoming an accepted part of the scholarly dissemination landscape. Everything in moderation.

Web 2.0 explained

Check out this neat Youtube video entitled Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us—a description of the glories of Web 2.0 complete with a quick explanation of why separating format from content is a powerful thing. The video is by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. For more, see the Digital Ethnography blog.

Search Matters...especially on your own site

In Information Today, Paula Hane summarized an IDC report by Sue Feldman summarized at a recent Fast conference (how's that for a tertiary reference?) about the untapped potential of the web. Apparently, Feldman claims that up to 70 percent of search traffic is actually not going through Google and friends. Rather, people are going directly to the portals they think will have the answers and searching on those sites. The opportunity or challenge is to make sure your site search doesn't stink, and, to monetize the searches by incorporating contextual ads. Fast just happens to have a product that you can use for that, if you decide to leave Googleville.

Closing EPA's Libraries

American Library Association President and Princeton Library Director Leslie Burger calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the New York Times today for closing its libraries. The administration's rationale for the move has been to control the agency's budget, and indeed the proposed 2007 budget cuts $2 million earmarked for the libraries. Since the planned closings were announced in February, many, including EPA scientists, the primary users of the libraries, have hinted that the move is an effort to gut the power of the agency by supressing environmental research. See, for example this press release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

To add fuel to their argument, critics point out that the EPA began to shutter the libraries even before Congress acted on next year's budget.

And EPA libraries aren't the only ones being closed. In today's LA Times article on government library closings Tim Reiterman describes researchers upset about US National Air and Space Administartion (NASA) and Department of Energy (DOE) library closings as well.

Government officials have claimed that the physcial libraries are less important than online access, but critics respond by reporting many reports and documents are simply being boxed up and stored away, or worse, destroyed. (Reminds me of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

This example of the caprices of government funding for research availability lends credence to those who fear open access funding models for journals that depend on government agencies may not be sustainable through changes in political administrations.

Wiley and Blackwell Acquisition Runs into Opposition from Library Community

The Information Access Alliance has challenged John Wiley & Sons plans to buy Blackwell Publishing (see the November 17 news release announcing the acquisition). In a letter to the United States Department of Justice, the alliance has asked that the merger be subjected to close antitrust scrutiny. The Information Access Alliance is made up of heavy hitting library organizations: the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Medical Libraries Association (MLA), SPARC, and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).

The organizations fear price increases due to consolidation in the industry. The letter mentions that because Blackwell has been so identified with society publishers, its prices have been relatively modest. The authors contrast Blackwell's pricing with Wiley's, citing a Cornell study that found Wiley's prices represent the highest average cost per article of the six largest commercial publishers.

In its announcement, Wiley and Blackwell executives cited the "cultural compatibility" and "complementary strengths" of the two organizations. The combined company would publish over 1200 academic journals.

Todd Carpenter Appointed Managing Director of NISO

Todd Carpenter, most recently Diretor of Business Development at BioOne, is taking over as the Managing Director Spot at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in the beginning of September.

Google Book Search: Those in Favor...

Richard Ekman, President of the Council of Independent Colleges supports Google Book Search in an opinion piece in yesterday's Washington Post.

He makes relevant points about opening up access for the poor and downtrodden, to the geographically limited. He applauds the convenience to undergraduates and researchers. He maintains that it is a good thing for society for previously obscure works to see the light of day. He emphasizes that Google is only showing portions of the work. He predicts that book sales will increase for works that would otherwise have reached the end of their useful life.

Then he wonders why publishers and librarians are at odds when they have such a solid history of trust and collaboration, citing JSTOR and Project Muse as stellar examples of what the communities can do when they work together.

The thing is, JSTOR and Project Muse, and Highwire, and BioOne, (need I go on?) are all fabulous and successful libary/publisher collaborations that respect intellectual property rights. Each of these organizations has people whose job is publisher relations. These talented individuals make the arguments that Dr. Ekman is making, not to the whole world as a justification for copying another's material, but to the owners of the property. They convince publishers to participate. They make a business model available to the publishers for them to accept, reject, or modify through negotiation.

Of course, the scale of Google Book Search makes it hard to fathom individual agreements with publishers, which is basically why Google has an opt-out policy instead of a participation agreement.

It may be true, as Dr. Ekman argues, that publishers have a habit of standing in the way of technological progress. He sites sheet music publishers' fear of the player piano. He could just as easily talked about copy machines, VCRs, Napster, and open access. Publishers all fought these developments, and then eventually found or are finding ways to incorporate these technologies and business models into their own products and services. On their terms. With their own property. Because they have businesses to run, programs to fund, and yes, shareholders to please.

Maybe these factors make a person conservative sometimes. Maybe the free market works for publishing. Maybe there are some books for which there are only a few thousand possible interested readers. Maybe some books deserve to be obscure. Maybe successful publishing businesses can provide royalties to authors to encourage them to contribute to the world's knowledge. Maybe there is a place for Google Book Search. Maybe the owners of the property have right to decide for themselves if Google Book Search is the best option for disseminating their content.

Outsell Purchases EPS

Outsell announced today its purchase of EPS, another high-end source of information and consulting to those in the information industry.

This should expand Outsell's international coverage.

Secondary Publishing Reinvented: Blog Carnivals

Blog carnivals on particular topics are the blogosphere's attempt to provide authoritativeness and imprimateur (something publishers are always talking about) to blog posts. For those who haven't ridden yet, a blog carnival is a periodic "best of" collection in a certain subject area, that may have a home at a particular blog or may rotate among blogs. As you can see at indexer Blog Carnival, carnivals exist in many areas--science, education, media, politics--you name it. Many have a popular bent, but this post from Ben Vershbow at IF:Book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, lists a number of carnivals geared to scholarly communities.

To me, a carnival is a secondary publishing service, serving the same function that review journals and survey articles have for many years: making important information findable. The interesting parallel is that these are not automated selections based on number of hits or user-supplied tags like the social bookmarking sites. Posts to be included in a carnival are selected using old-fashioned editorial judgment.

Of course, they are free (or ad or donation-supported), and they have a distributed model of production, unlike the expensive operations such as Annual Reviews and the like. And so they are much less formal, and the inclusion criteria are uneven at best.

But isn't it interesting to see how new technologies keep spawning services that are so familiar?

In the blogosphere as in the traditional publishing world, there's too much out there to keep track of without finding aids. Blog Carnival itself is the Medline of the carnivals as Technorati is the PsychInfo of blogs.

Google Scans California?

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of California is in talks to join Google's Book Search project.

The University of California announced in October its participation in the Open Content Alliance, which will scan out-of-copyright material, a big difference from Google Book Search. Microsoft announced in June that it will use material from the OCA in its Microsoft Live Books Search, as reported by ZDNET. Microsoft also has a way for publishers to opt-in to contribute in-copyright works to its program. With the Google program, publishers must opt out.

See these previous posts for background.
MPC Publog: Google Book Search--the Fair Use Debate
MPC Publog: More on Google Scanning

Transferring Journals from one Publisher to Another

I've just finished a project for a client that showed, among other things, the weaknesses of publishers' procedures when a title moves from one publisher to another. Specifically, the digital object identifier (DOI) may break. This is a bad thing, of course, as DOIs were invented to solve the widespread problem of broken links. A DOI should be a persistent identifier, and a publisher using DOIs agrees to maintain a central repository of those links--that work.

Project Transfer, launched in April by the UK Serials Group (UKSG) and endorsed by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), is attempting to address these issues. Project Transfer is currently recruiting an advisory board to review guidelines.

JAMA Editor as Cop?

The New York Times yesterday ran a profile of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editor Catherine DeAngelis written by Donald McNeil.

The focus of the article is on Dr. DeAngelis's tough public stance for complete disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest by authors, and the discovery that some JAMA authors didn't disclose, and conflicts weren't discovered until after publication.

Her response: “I’m not the F.B.I.”

This rings a bell. In January, the Times ran an article about journal authors doctoring their graphics. Another highly respected journal editor, Emilie Marcus of Cell, echoed a similar sentiment when asked whether journal editors should test each graphic for possible manipulation: "Rather than having journal editors acting as enforcers, she said, it may be better to thrust responsibility back to scientists, requiring the senior author to sign off that the images conform to the journal's guidelines."

My opinion: both researchers and drug companies have work to do. They aren't bad guys, BUT the extent to which research and scholarlship on medical treatments is has been influenced is probably far beyond what is reasonable. Journal authors do need to take responsibility for their research and their data, and editors need to foster a culture that encourages it.

Full Disclosure: Cell Press is a former client of mine.

LibraryThing Obsession

Anybody who has ever spent too many hours on Amazon or Netflix rating and browsing will love LibraryThing, a service where you can choose all the books you own from lists, rate them, tag them, review them (all optional) and then share them with other users or get recommendations based on what other users who share similar collections have in their libraries. Call it social networking for bibliophiles.

As others have wondered in discussing del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr, who would have thought that it would be cool to catalog and index your stuff? Sounds a little geeky to me, but it's actually fun (says something about me, I suppose), and easy since you just select your edition from existing metadata rather than having to type everything in.

Individuals can enter 200 books for free, and then you have to pay $10 a year or $25 lifetime for collections beyond that. The metadata comes from Amazon and from Z39.50 compliant library catalogs. You can even choose which edition of a book you have.

There are apps to import Amazon wish lists, and to export your data to Excel, and to do other cool things. You can put a window to your LibraryThing account on your blog to show what you're reading now, or random titles from your collection. (I'm not sure I would do that, as not everything I read is something to brag about...murder mysteries anyone?)

Iraqi Librarians

This weekend I had a disturbing conversation with Will Wakeling, the Associate Dean for Collections & Tech Services, the Northeastern University Libraries, about a recent trip he took to the mid-East. Simmons, Harvard, and UCLA received an National Endowment for the Humanities grant to sponsor a conference to help 32 Iraqi library faculty rebuild their institutions. Probably for security reasons, the meeting was NOT held in Iraq, but in the United Arab Emirates.

Will reported that the situation in the Iraqi libraries is beyond bleak. Security is a grave concern, as you might imagine. They are lucky to have an hour of electricity a day. The collections have been decimated, the computers looted. A society with a strong tradition of learning and reading is going without the tools to educate its people.

If I understood him correctly, The United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain where the conference took place has brand new state of the art library, doubly underscoring the vast differences in resources between the two locations

Some donation programs that are trying to address the problems of lack of books in Iraq:
http://www.booksforbaghdad.org/
http://www.sabre.org/: The AAUP website reports Sabre is planning a program in Iraq, although the Sabre website doesn't mention it.
An important footnote about Sabre is that they are committed to supporting indigenous publishing. The deleterious effect of donated books on local publishing markets is a common complaint about book donation programs.