Industry Trends, Analysis and Breaking News
Code of Practice: Discovery Services Review of Draft
Feb 01
The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS™) is releasing a draft Discovery Service Code of Practice for review and comment by March 16, 2012. NFAIS believes that discovery services have the potential to provide ease of information discovery, access, and use, benefiting not only its member organizations, but also the global community of information seekers. However, the relative newness of these services has generated questions and concerns among information providers and librarians as to how these services meet expectations with regard to issues related to traditional search and retrieval services; e.g. usage reports, ranking algorithms, content coverage, updates, product identification, etc. Accordingly, the NFAIS Code Development Task Force has developed this draft document to assist those who choose to use this new distribution channel through the provision of guidelines that will help avoid the disruption of the delicate balance of interests involved.
Please begin your review of the Draft Code here
Read more »Robert F. Asleson Memorial ALA Conference Grant
Aug 30
The Robert F. Asleson Memorial ALA Conference Grant is pleased to announce that it has been classified as a public charity by the Internal Revenue Service. As such, it is exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and all contributions to it are therefore fully deductible, as well. The Grant also is qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers and gifts.
Established by Bob's friends and industry colleagues, the Robert F. Asleson Memorial ALA Conference Grant honors the memory of the late Bob Asleson, one of that industry's most creative and prolific executives.
Candidates for an ALA-accredited Master of Library Science degree can apply for the grant that subsidizes attendance at both the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting and the Annual Conference. Recipients are selected based on economic need and an essay written according to criteria set by the grant's board of directors. Applications for attendance at the 2012 Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, Texas are due by October 15. Each grant is in the amount of $1,500.
Complete details regarding the Robert F. Asleson Memorial ALA
Conference Grant, including donation information, are available at
www.aslesongrant.org
Newly Created University Press Content Consortium Featured in March 23 Webinar
Mar 16
NFAIS is pleased to announce that Dean Smith, Director of Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University Press, has been added as a speaker to the NFAIS-sponsored webinar on March 23rd to address the creation of the University Press Content Consortium. The new consortium was created based on the findings from research funded by the Mellon Foundation. Other featured speakers for this March 23rd Webinar include NFAIS Member October Ivins of Ivins eContent Solutions and Temple University Press Director, Alex Holzman. For more information about registration, go here!
Read more »Overview of Author Identification Initiatives
Jan 05
Martin Fenner, a practicing researcher at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany, has posted a pre-print of his article on the various initiatives aimed at the creation of unique author identifiers for purposes of research information retrieval and attribution.
The abstract for the posted pre-print outlines the scope as: Unique identifiers for scholarly authors are still not commonly used, but provide a number of benefits to authors, institutions, publishers, funding organizations and scholarly societies. This report gives an overview about some of the popular author identifier systems, and their characteristics. The report also discusses several important issues that need to be addressed by author identifier systems, namely identity, reputation and trust.
Among others, he touches on ThomsonReuters ResearcherID and Elsevier's Scopus Author ID and the ORCID project. A useful table may be found here in PDF file format
Read more »
Patron-Driven-Acquisition Session, Charleston Conference 2010
Nov 05
A particularly useful presentation at this year's Charleston Conference was on the topic of Patron-Driven Collection Development. Librarians from the University of Iowa offered practical insights into the use of their ebook collections, working in conjunction with YBP and ebrary. Download the presentation here.
Their statistics show that users are happy to get and use books online if materials are made available that way. Circulation of a print title would drop dramatically once the user was aware that an online version was offered.
Print circulation statistics shared make a dramatic point. 71% of the books purchased in 2004 have gotten between one (1) and zero (0) circulations during the intervening five years. (See Slide 33 of the presentation.
Read more »Rich Results from Within Google Books
Nov 03
An interesting piece from The Atlantic reveals a newly-launched enhancement to the search functionality within Google Books. "Rich Results" factors in 100 variables to find the likeliest set of titles that match the individual user's requirements. According to the reporter, "if you search 'dragon tattoo', you get Stieg Larson's block buster, not the 2008 children's book" by that name. The article suggests that the research problem driving this enhancement to Google Books has to do with satisfying a searcher's need without the clues leveraged through links on the open Web.
With Google Editions due to launch before the close of 2010, it would appear that Google wants to see how they can improve upon the efforts of both publishers and libraries in meeting Ranganathan's challenge of "Every book its reader".
Read more »Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights, to Retire End of 2010
Sep 13
From the Press Release: Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters
has announced her intention to retire effective December 31, 2010.
Ms. Peters has served as Register of Copyrights since August 7,
1994, a tenure longer than any other Register with the exception of
Thorvald Solberg, the first Register. Her exemplary service to the
nation began in the Library of Congress in October 1965, and she
began working in the Copyright Office in 1966. During her 45-year
career, she has held positions at all levels in the Office
including acting general counsel, policy planning advisor, chief of
the Examining Division, chief of the Information and Reference
Division, attorney-advisor, and music examiner.
NFAIS and ASIDIC Announce Merger
Jul 01
The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) and ASIDIC (formerly the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers - www.asidic.org), today jointly announced the assimilation of ASIDIC members into the NFAIS Community as a result of the dissolution of ASIDIC on June 30, 2010. the agreement will provide ASIDIC members in good standing with all NFAIS member benefits through June 30, 2011, after which they will have the option to continue their NFAIS membership through a three-year transition period. Any ASIDIC assets remaining after the merger will be used as requested by the ASIDIC Board and that is to attract conference speakers to NFAIS events that are in keeping with the mission and spirit of ASIDIC. In addition, a member of an ASIDIC Member organization will be invited to serve as a non-voting NFAIS Board member from the close of the merger through June 30, 2011 in order to assist the NFAIS Board in a successful membership transition and to ensure the preservation of the ASIDIC spirit and mission within NFAIS.
The full text of the announcement is here
Read more »ProQuest Partners With Getty Research Institute
Jul 01
NFAIS member organizations ProQuest and the Getty Research Institute (GRI) have announced an agreement that will allow ProQuest to take over the indexing of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), providing a secure future for a resource considered central to the study of art history. The agreement assures the database's continuing development and accessibility to researchers around the world.
ProQuest also publishes a significant number of specialist databases in the arts, including ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index and the International Index to Music Periodicals. Further, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), discontinued at the end of 2007, has long been available to researchers through ProQuest on the Illumina platform.
The GRI has supported bibliographical services for the field of art history since 1981.
Read more »Spindex Me
Jun 04
Librarian Phil Bradley and industry analyst Stephen Arnold are two people who have found Microsoft's recent launch of social dashboard, Spindex to be of interest and potentially of some value. Both find the system's capacity to extracting trending topics from within a single user's social network to be a step forward in maximizing the value gained from social media. (As a comparison, Twitter can only generate trending topics based on what it knows of a user's local geographic position (if that's been turned on) or what it gleans from tweets worldwide.) I too have been playing with the system, but as an ordinary user, I'm not particularly enthused.
Spindex is positioned as the first system to fully index and make searchable posted content from those within an individual's personal social network. (See the introductory blog announcement here.) Hence the play on words in the site's domain, Spindex.me
The selling point from Microsoft's perspective is that the Spindex system offers the user a more efficient mechanism for extracting useful "signal" from the social "noise". The system acts as a personalized filter against the rush of activity streams. Since its introduction just about a month ago, Microsoft engineers have made further refinements. http://fuse.microsoft.com/projects-spindex.html
I have encountered no real bugs in using the system, but neither am I a particular fan.
For one thing, even for a closed beta, Spindex is slow in generating merged streams from my Twitter and Facebook contacts; in my experience, it can take five minutes or longer to display the indexed information. In an age where we're used to near real-time processing of tweets and updates, such latency seems excessive. It also represents the strongest argument against adding in any additional RSS feeds as the Microsoft site suggests users might wish to do.
Secondly, the dashboard (at least for me) offers no additional value in its displayed "slice and dice" of content generated by those within my network. Clicking on the photo avatar of one of the "top posters" in my network generates an implicit search of the individual's name against the Bing search tool. Search results may include the person's LinkedIn profile, various web sites associated with the individual, or even his or her blog. The value is supposed to be in seeing a a more complete rendition of that individual's activity, but if I'm already following that person via Twitter or Facebook, the chances are that I am already aware of his or her credentials.
Finally, the interface is not particularly intuitive. Just as one example, there are two buttons below each search item result (Share/Remember). Clicking on "Share" will post the item to Twitter, but I've yet to discover what happens when I click on "Remember". If the system is storing it for me, I can't find where and if the system is "remembering" the item for its own purposes in improving an algorithm to improve personalized results, there's nothing available to me as a user that explains that this is what is taking place.
Further insights are available from Venture Beat, CNet and BlackWeb2.0
Read more »
Library Mobile
May 07
Aaron Tay of the National University of Singapore, blogging at Musings on Librarianship, has done a fascinating job of assessing library mobile sites with an eye to commonality of features. Capturing the essence of what library developers expect users want to do in this environment, his final list (see the conclusion at the end of his post) includes functionality to permit quick look-ups in the library catalog and mobile enabled databases, basic contact and service availability (hours, directions, computer availability, conference rooms, etc.) and links to mobile enabled web2.0 accounts on Twitter/Flickr/YouTube and Facebook.
His posting includes screenshots and is well worth the time of
those working in mobile development.
Social Software in Academia: Users' Acceptance of Web 2.0 Services
Apr 30
There are some interesting findings and statistics in the findings from this research paper, Social Software in Academia: Three Studies on Users' Acceptance of Web 2.0 Services, presented at the WWW2010 event.
From section 4.1.2 of the paper, "How often do you use the following services for scientific research?' with answer possibilities : 'always', 'often', 'rarely', 'never', and 'I do not know this service'...Here Wikipedia and other wikis were considered in contrast to other traditional research tools and Google or other Web search engines. Only 7.6% of survey participants claimed that they never use Wikipedia for this purpose, 20.6% 'always' use Wikipedia for scientific research talks (this is rank 4 behind Google with 35.6%, Libraries with 33.8% and online library catalogs with 29.9%), another 45.3% use it 'often'." This particular quote pertained to student usage of Wikipedia but faculty awareness and use of Wikipedia is also covered in the paper.
There is a good deal of meat in the paper, brought to our
attention by Gary Price of the
ResourceShelf. His is a particularly useful resource and one
that has significant credibility in the information
community.
Google Book Settlement: What's Going To Happen Next?
Apr 22
Judge Denny Chin has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. This is of particular interest to those in the information community because Chin had been the judge associated with the critical litigation surrounding the Google Book Settlement. Chin had heard testimony on the amended agreement in February of this year as a U.S. District Court judge in New York but had not yet handed down a ruling on the case. It is not yet clear when that ruling will be made and Chin's confirmation may further delay a final decision on the controversial settlement.
Because Google Books has the potential to be such an important information resource, the information community is already considering the potential business model for this database. As it happens, Michael Cairns, former President of R.R. Bowker and blogger at Personanondata, has been assessing the options and he presents his conclusions today. You'll want to read his full findings there, but two particular findings of interest are:
--Libraries will see tremendous advantages - both immediate and over time - from the GBS, although concerns have been voiced (notably from Robert Darnton of Harvard).
--Google will add services and may open the platform for other
application providers to enhance and broaden the user
experience.
Annotating Content
Apr 14
The other day I was using the search tool, Bing. It's important to note that the attraction of Bing (at least for me) is not necessarily the actual search results returned. Those are fine, but not necessarily superior to those from Yahoo or Google. The attraction of Bing for me is the compelling user experience. Invariably the site has some beautiful photographic image as the wallpaper which, when one's mouse is moved across the screen, displays clever annotations tied to the featured image. Each annotation has a link which dynamically generates a search query. Clicking on that link may take the user to a set of images of Mandarin Ducks from Bing's image gallery, maps of Ross Island, or videos of the incredible balancing stupa of Kyaiktiyo in Myanmar -- truly a wealth of information beyond mere text. Annotations in such instances truly do present, explain and amplify information as they create engagement.
Annotation has tremendous value to researchers and scholars. It
is therefore worthwhile to monitor the activity of the
Open Annotation
Collaboration project; the Spring 2010 meeting of the
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) featured a
presentation from that group (link to video) and the progress
they are making in this area is most intriguing.
What Is The Library's Value Proposition?
Apr 09
The library profession has prided itself on the contributions that it makes in support of scholarship and pedagogy. In the current environment, there are librarians who feel that role is under-rated. Stephen Bell is one such librarian and has expressed his suspicion that the faculty and students don't get it and that libraries need to refocus attention on their contribution to education and research. The recently-released Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies may bear out his thinking. This year's findings are based on just over 3,000 complete responses from scholars across all disciplines (Humanities (21.6%), Sciences (26.1%) and Social Sciences (38.1%); the remaining roughly 14% were in area studies or "other".).
According to the Ithaka study, faculty believe that the most important role performed by libraries is that of purchasing agent for information resources. On page 11, the report notes "It is striking how faculty members have come to universally perceive the library role as purchasing agent for institutional information resources as essential" (italics added).
That might be somewhat comforting to those research librarians whose responses were included in a recent OCLC report authored by James Michalko, Constance Malpas, and Arnold Arcolio. In Research Libraries, Risk and Systemic Change, the highest ranked threat to the libraries was "a reduced sense of library relevance from below, above and within". This perception was due to the availability of alternative service providers who were providing "a more compelling research environment and support tools." (page 12).
The value of that "purchasing agent" role however shouldn't be entirely dismissed. Information resources are still critical to on-going scholarship. The faculty responses documented by the Ithaka report indicate that "scholars tend to prefer electronic resources specific to their own discipline over those that cover multiple disciplines." This is true across sciences, social sciences and the humanities, although social scientists have a greater tendency to use multi-disciplinary resources than the other two populations. Discipline specific resources are preferred because (1) they reduce the volume of what needs to be searched to a relevant and manageable corpus and (2) more-targeted resources may offer discovery mechanisms and tools tightly engineered to that disciplines workflow needs.
Discovery is still dominated by citations contained within specific journals or monographs and searching online databases that offer full-text access to articles. Google Scholar comes in third behind those two avenues of approach (see page 7 of the Ithaka report).
For-fee information services, then, are critically important in the academic sector. Information professionals should recognize that. More attention needs to be given to all aspects of licensing of content and librarians (particularly those just now gaining their MLS degrees) should fully master the business mindset of vendors and hone negotiating skills in order to ensure the most advantageous terms of use for those who rely on them to continue providing access.
Coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers
additional information on the Ithaka findings while Inside
Higher Education treats the role of the
library somewhat dismissively.
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