JASIST Going Green

July 21st, 2008

From the latest issue of JASIST:

As of January 2008, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) will follow the green road open-access model, whereby authors publishing in the Journal are granted self-archival rights for preprints, with linking to the final article and to the online journal, as detailed next.

Full text here.

Open access potential Catch-22

June 19th, 2008

I’ve written here before about open access, though it’s been a while. And way back in 2005 I wrote about the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development’s office offering small grants to cover author fees. This is great, and the maximum award of $5,000 is generous… more than enough to cover my current needs.

Which brings me to… my current needs. I just had a paper accepted with minor revisions to the International Journal on Digital Libraries. Titled Teaching Digital Library Concepts Using Digital Library Applications, & co-authored with Javed Mostafa & June Abbas. Stay tuned for a preprint… I’ll post one once we submit a revised version.

Anyway, point is, IJDL is a Springer publication. And Springer has an open access option that they call Open Choice. Open Choice costs $3000, which sounds like a lot but is actually more or less in line with other author fees: PLoS Bio & PLoS Med are both $2750, though PLos ONE is $1250. I plan to try to find some money for this in the budget of the project that spawned this paper. But I also plan to submit an application for a publication grant.

Problem is: “The University Research Council meets twice a year, once during the fall semester and once during the spring semester, to consider applications.” So if we submit our revisions soon, and the URC doesn’t meet until close to the end of the Fall semester, that’s 5 months lag time before a decision is made, never mind an account set up out of which to pay an author fee. I could have page proofs by then. Probably not, if my past experience with the turnaround time for journals is any guide. But it’s possible.

So while the VC-RED’s publication grants are a great idea, generous and supportive of faculty ownership of our publications, etc., there’s one significant problem: timing. If I was less on the ball, I wouldn’t have even found out about Open Choice until the paper was finally accepted for publication. At which point:

If and when your article has been accepted for publication, you will receive notification of that fact. At this point you should make up your mind about choosing to publish your article with open access.

So in order to pay an author fee, you need to have the money available at the time of acceptance. Which means paying out of pocket, or having an account with funds ready to go. But if you’re applying for a grant from your institution, that takes time & makes the latter impossible. This seems like an easily solvable problem, & I think I’ll bring it to the VC-RED’s attention. Makes me wonder how many applications they’ve received for publication grants.

worDLcat?

June 10th, 2008

I want to start this by saying that this was completely Kathleen Kern’s idea. We were talking over dinner at LIDA last week, and she asked me, essentially, “Why isn’t there an equivalent of WorldCat for digital libraries?” I gave some lame answer: no standardization across DLs, complexity of dealing with item- and collection-level description simultaneously, cost, I don’t even remember what all I said. (In my defense, we were well into a rather good bottle of Pelješac red.) As I was thinking about it though, I realized that it would be completely possible to build such a database. All of the technology is in place, it wouldn’t even require developing new tools. It would just take time, money, and grad students. It’s a completely tractable problem.

And because I just can’t help myself sometimes, my first thought about what to call this database was: worDLcat. It’s a dumb name, really, and as Kathleen pointed out completely unpronounceable. Also maybe trademark infringement. But that’s what I’m going to call it here, because I don’t have any better ideas.

So anyway, this was Kathleen’s idea. But I’ve started to run with it a bit, at least in my head to start to think through what might be involved.

Point the first: WorldCat is based on MARC. But is there more to WorldCat than that? WorldCat’s search interface disguises the MARC back-end, happily for those of us who don’t think like a cataloger (i.e., most of humanity). Has OCLC added fields or values beyond what’s in MARC? I don’t know. I have an email out to a colleague at OCLC to see if I can get access to this info. I recently discovered the MCDU Project, for which Bill Moen (a fellow Syracuse alum… it’s a small discipline) analyzed a subset of WorldCat records. So that subset might be a place to start to answer this question.

Point the first, sub-point A: Would a database of DL items require fields and values not utilized in WorldCat? That don’t even exist in MARC? Maybe. I’d bet yes. It’s an empirical question.

Point the second: Item- vs. collection-level description. I think the way to go on this is the way WorldCat has gone: have a record for every item, and have each record contain a field that is essentially a pointer to the collection(s) that item resides in. In WorldCat, of course, each item is likely to reside in many (or at least a few) collections. There are unique items in most libraries’ collections, and those may have records in WorldCat, but on the whole there’s a lot of duplication between library collections. In DLs this is not so much the case. Projects like Google Books and the Internet Archive Text Archive are digitizing, well, books, which are going to held by many collections. But perhaps linking to those books is a job for the Open Library? At this point the Open Library does not list or link to the library collections that hold books, but this would be a useful future feature. Anyway, to date DLs have by and large been developed to highlight and disseminate unique materials held by libraries and other organizations. And that is as it should be, frankly. As the Library of Congress’ Final Report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control says: Enhance access to rare, unique, and other special hidden materials. So there is likely to be a much higher percentage of unique items in a database of DL materials than in WorldCat.

Point the third: Sustainability. Well, not really sustainability… let’s say updating. If a library is a growing organism, then a DL is doubly so (whatever that would mean). New items are added to DLs all the time, items change, etc. So how could worDLcat keep up? OAI-PMH is the obvious mechanism. Which means that all items in all DLs must be OAI compliant. I would hope that this would be a critical mass / tipping point thing: worDLcat would start with the low-hanging fruit, the existing OAI compliant stuff. Then as worDLcat gains use, there would be an incentive for more DLs to become OAI compliant, just as there’s an incentive for libraries to participate in WorldCat. When a new DL comes online though, its developers would have to submit it to worDLcat, as one submits a URL to a search engine to crawl. I’m not sure we could operationalize DLs well enough to build a specialized bot to go out & crawl the web & harvest only materials from DLs. I’ve given up trying to define DLs even in my DL course: I give my students some papers to read, have a discussion about definition, & then tell them that I think it really doesn’t matter how you define what a DL is.

Point the fourth: Accessibility & discoverability. If we want to enhance access to rare, unique, and other special hidden materials, then worDLcat should be freely available, not by subscription like WorldCat. Like the Open Library, or LibraryThing. Which suddenly brings Web 2.0 into the conversation. If WorldCat were suddenly opened up and Web 2.0-ified, what would / should that look like? Not quite like LibraryThing, since the assumption is not that you own these materials yourself. But some of the user-contributed and automatic features might be appropriate: tags, reviews, recommendations. Flexibility to define complex objects within, maybe even across collections? Functionality to save items in a shopping cart-like space: MyworDLcat? Oy, that’s even more unpronounceable.

Ok, I’ve spent enough time on this post, when I should be doing other things. If anyone ever reads this, I’m looking for feedback, thoughts, ideas, etc. This is a completely tractable problem, and I believe even grant fundable. So, My Beloved Audience, if you have any ideas about this, I’d like to hear them.

Does Twitter foster a false sense of closeness?

May 5th, 2008

As I wrote here recently, I’ve joined the ranks of twitterers. Earlier today I was thinking about who I’m following. It breaks down into basically only 2 categories, which are not mutually exclusive: people I know well or reasonably well and care about personally (Yvonne, Scott, Paul, etc.), and people who I think are interesting enough to spend some time reading their tweets (Jessamyn West, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, etc.). Even the way I refer to the people in these categories is different: the examples of the former are all first-name basis, while the examples of the latter require first & last names. This is, I think, telling.

(There is, I suppose, a 3rd category: tools such as RTM and hashtags. But as those are not people in the traditional sense, I’m going to just ignore them here.)

As I said, I’m following Jessamyn West; I’m also following Jason Griffey, and Casey Bisson. They’re all fairly prolific tweeters, and apparently know each other as there’s some @ crosstalk between them. So here not only do I get a glimpse into their twitter-filtered streams of consciousness, I also get a glimpse into their relationships with one another.

Frankly, that makes me feel like a bit of a voyeur. I know Jason a bit; we overlapped in my early days in SILS. I’ve met Jessamyn once, when she came to give a talk here at UNC back in 2005. I don’t know Casey at all. But I now have the (I think misplaced) feeling that I could go up to Casey and say, “So what were you doing in Philly anyway?” To which he would be completely justified in saying, “Who the frak are you?”

So does Twitter foster a false sense of closeness? I suddenly have a reasonably intimate view into people’s lives who I know only in the most friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend way. Ok, it’s partly their fault for making their tweetstreams public, so some schmuck off the street can follow them. But suddenly I have the ability to peer in the windows of these people whose lives I have no reason to be looking into, other than curiosity.

Of course, as I’ve been writing this, I’m realizing that this meditation is no different from Fred’s question, What does it mean to have 1000 friends, in the context of Facebook? Online social networks redefine relationships. I’m still getting my head around what that means. Fred and probably many others passed this point long ago.

More Edible Books

April 28th, 2008

Images from possibly my favorite event in a library, the Edible Book Festival, are up online for the 2008 festival!

Hairy Pot(stick)er in 7 Volumes

Libraries of the Future

April 28th, 2008

No, not the Licklider vision, but a new version from JISC.

Through ‘Libraries of the Future’, JISC is hoping to explore these and many other questions, to open up - with partner organisations and librarians themselves - a debate about the future of the academic and research library. The theme will encompass a variety of activities1 – events, printed resources, interactive Web 2.0 services, podcast interviews, and so on – but encouraging debate and discussion will be at the heart of all of them.

On the one hand, this is very exciting: a large-scale, public discussion on what the role of the library should be, sponsored by an organization with the clout to really move the discussion forward, and to implement things at the conclusion, and that has shown itself to be unafraid of change.

On the other hand, this is very discouraging. While the library community sits around and discusses what restaurant we should patronize, everyone around us is eating our lunch: the Open Library and Google are tackling mass digitization of books, Google is fighting our copyright battles, LibraryThing is reinventing the OPAC, Yahoo Answers is providing more reference in a day than most libraries do in a year… need I go on? But (I hear you say), LibraryThing employs a librarian (and one from your very own alma mater, Pomerantz), Scriblio was developed by a librarian, as was libraryh3lp… need I go on? (I hear you say.) Yes (I reply), but von Hippel draws a distinction that I think is relevant here: between the development of entirely new tools and processes, and improvements to existing tools and processes. I would argue that innovations from library-land are predominantly the latter, while the former is coming predominantly from outside.

But then, I’m just cranky because I’m in the middle of end-of-semester grading.

Better course evaluation questions

April 25th, 2008

Here at Carolina, as I’m sure at every college & university, we have our standard end-of-semester course evaluation forms. There are the closed-ended questions that are students answer on a scantron bubble sheet, and open-ended questions answer freehand. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, we have a standard set of 3 additional open-ended questions that we’re all supposed to have the students answer. We all usually just write these on the board in class.

So this morning I walk into room 214, and on the whiteboard I see a slightly modified but considerably improved version of the additional open-ended questions:

  1. The instructor often arrived to class covered in bees.
  2. All masonic rites were performed correctly.
  3. The IRB will never find out.

Who wrote this? You’re hilarious.

EB Widgets

April 23rd, 2008

‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ Is Now Free to Bloggers, from the Chronicle Wired Campus

The Great EB has gone Web 2.0: first, they have a new blog. And second, they’ve developed a widget that enables access to a topically-defined set of resources from the EB. Unfortunately the widgets are by registration only, but it’s a start.

I’ve registered for a widget, though I’m not sure I deserve one, as I’m hardly the most prolific (or interesting) blogger in the biblioblogosphere. Really I just used my registration as an opportunity to do what academics do best: tell other people what projects to work on:

I would love to get a registration for the WebShare program. However, even more important is this: I want to suggest that you should create a widget on the topic of libraries / information / library & information science. There is a huge “library blogosphere” out there, and an active debate among librarians & information professionals about the value of Wikipedia & other Web 2.0-esque information tools. I believe that if there were an information-specific widget, that it would get a great deal of use in the library blogosphere. In fact, as more & more libraries experiment with RSS and other lightweight info tools, it seems to me that there is some opportunity here for the EB for outreach to libraries.

More fun with calendars and task lists

April 21st, 2008

I’m still futzing with Remember the Milk. I got to wondering today if there’s a way to sync RTM to Lightning, for which I installed the Thunderbird add-on when I was investigating new calendar apps, but never ended up using. Using my superhuman search skills, I was easily able to discover that yes, there is a way to do this. Unfortunately it’s only one-way, RTM > Lightning. But still, that’s something. I also learned of the existence of Provider for Google Calendar, which bidirectionally syncs GCal with Lightning.

So now, instead of using Outlook as my one-stop shop for all things calendar- and task-related, I have my calendar and task list in multiple locations, and (mostly) mutually interactive. This seems to me to be a significant change in how I interact with these tools. I’m not sure yet how this will change how I use them.

Kicking the Microsoft habit, Part I: RTM

April 17th, 2008

I’ve been trying to wean myself from all Microsoft products lately, by which I mean everything: the entire Office suite, and Outlook. The Windows OS too, though that will take longer to achieve: I’ve already decided that my next laptop will be a Mac. I have technology envy for the Air, though Yvonne has nixed that on the grounds that it’s apparently a chick magnet.

This is the story of my attempt to wean myself from Outlook. It’s not been easy. I’ve been using Outlook for a decade now, & I use it heavily, for everything except email. My calendar, task list, & addresses, all in Outlook. Once Google developed the functionality to sync Google Calendar with Outlook, I was pretty much sold and moved to GCal almost completely right away. But the task list was a stumbling block. I did a lot of searching for good task list apps, of which there are several, but none of them sync with Outlook, which meant that I would have to manually re-enter all of my tasks in a new app, & I didn’t want to do that.

Recently Kristin & I were talking about this, and a few days later she sent me a link to this post from Unclutterer. That was the tipping point… I’d read about Remember the Milk, but was holding out (in vain, apparently) for something that syncs tasks with Outlook. Anyway, I just decided to bite the bullet & manually retype all of my tasks into RTM. Ugh. It took me a week to do it, but it’s done now.

So far, so good. I like RTM; it syncs with Google Cal & there’s an iGoogle widget, so that helps. I like the ability to tag tasks. Now if I can only figure out how to get it to sync with my Palm, I’ll be back to the level of integration I was at before.

So now I’m completely out of Outlook. I have not launched Outlook for two days, and I feel the unbearable lightness of being. Except for my addressbook, that’s still in Outlook. But that seems like it should be a pretty minor move. All of those are on my Palm anyway (thanks to Palm’s sync with Outlook) and there must be a bunch of contact list apps out there anyway. Anyone have any suggestions?

This has all been a huge time-sink, and really just not the sort of thing I should be spending time on, especially not this time of the semester, when I should be doing more important and time-critical things like, oh you know, grading. Course prep. Revising journal manuscripts. Writing a manuscript review. Writing grant proposals. Al of those things that are on my task list in the first place.