Archive for July, 2005

Scotty, we hardly knew ye

Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

James Doohan

‘Star Trek’ star James Doohan dies, from AP

A moment of silence, please. And bagpipes, of course.

I actually have a personalized autograph from Doohan, “To Jeff” and everything. My dad got it at a conference back in the ’70s sometime where Doohan was a guest speaker. (Bad librarian: I really should know the provenance.) I guess I’d better take good care of it!

State Library of NC Online Workshop Calendar

Tuesday, July 19th, 2005

From the NCLIVE-L list:

Subject: State Library Announces Fall CE Schedule

The State Library has something NEW for you – An Online Workshop Calendar

We are pleased to announce the Fall 2005 schedule of workshops, and we’re excited to make it available to you in our NEW Online Calendar. The Online Calendar will be updated regularly, which will allow you to stay current with the workshops we offer. Most of our sessions are still in-person workshops, but there are also some web-based choices. Using the Online Calendar, you can sort by workshop location, workshop category, month, or week – and you can print as much or as little as you’d like. The listings provide up-to-date space availability and link to registration forms, workshop descriptions, and local directions.

Spread the word to your library colleagues to check out the Online Calendar! http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/ce/conted.htm

Please contact Raye Oldham with any questions.

Mooers’ Law

Tuesday, July 19th, 2005

That’s Mooers, like cows. (Oh come on, don’t say you don’t get it: cows moo, they’re moo-ers, as opposed to humans who hear the moos, making us moo-ees.) Not to be confused with Moore’s Law.

Anyhoo… I don’t even remember how, but I came across a reference to Mooers’ Law recently, so I found the paper that proposes it:

Mooers, C. N. (1960). Mooers’ Law; or why some retrieval systems are used and others are not. American Documentation, 11(3), p. ii.

The law is stated as follows:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Obviously this is a law about use of IR systems, but it struck me that Mooers’ Law really speaks to the modern American political climate:

Having information is painful and troublesome. We have all experienced this. If you have information, you must first read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it. To do this, you may have to think about it. … It is a nuisance to have it come to you. It is uncomfortable to have to do anything about it. …

Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it.

BBC open source

Monday, July 18th, 2005

Maybe I’m just out of the loop, but I only just learned about this site, BBC open source. This paragraph really gives me hope; the Beeb gets it.

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they’ve funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn’t get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC.

Wikipedia Rapid Response

Sunday, July 17th, 2005

I’m posting this mostly for myself, to keep track of this link (Kristina take note) so I can use it as an example in class, come the Fall.

Disaster Response, via Wikis, from The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus Blog

How does Wikipedia, the online open-source encyclopedia, actually work? Web surfers got a close look at the process when users of the site edited an entry about the mass-transit bombs that struck London last week.

As of my writing this, there have been approximately 5,000 edits to the 7 July 2005 London bombings Wikipedia entry. That’s approximately 500 edits per day.

Database indexing & journal copyright agreements, Part 3

Thursday, July 14th, 2005

This is the hopefully final chapter in a saga that began a long time ago in three previous posts far, far away. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

I had a paper accepted for publication in a journal. Given the choice, I signed the copyright agreement by which I retain copyright. Question: Will this paper be indexed in the databases I want it in? Answer: Yes, because databases index the entire contents of journals, or if they don’t it’s because they select articles topically; selection has nothing to do with who owns copyright.

Next question: What would I have gotten if I’d signed the agreement by which I gave over copyright to the publisher? For answer, email the publisher. The publisher’s response:

I would say the two keys are dissemination and money. We make 1,000’s of nickels disseminating all our material by the page with authors’ permission of copyright each quarter from those third parties.

So, ok, the publisher does make some money from reprints. Not much, but some. A “non-agreeing” author, he goes on to say…

…has to make his own agreement piece by piece third party by third party.

But let’s be honest here, I can’t imagine that my slice of this few hundred dollars per month from reprints will amount to very much. I mean, of course my papers are all heartbreaking works of staggering genius & will be citation classics in time. But until then, I think I’ll just give it away.

So, what’s the tradeoff between ceding versus retaining copyright?

…wide availability, convenience and no paperwork vs. dozens of nickels for yourself and some correspondence and paperwork.

My take on this: Dozens of nickels, don’t care. Some correspondence and paperwork, not if I post my papers online.

To be fair, the publisher’s rep who I was corresponding with also wrote:

We have never rejected an author’s own need to use his piece somewhere else just because we have the copyright.

So they’re very generous with use requests, which I give them a lot of credit for.

Conclusion to this long journey into the dark soul of academic publishing? What I gain by retaining copyright is a small sum of money (which I wouldn’t bother trying to collect) and the freedom to not have to ask permission to use my own work. So in the end it comes down to a matter of principle: do I believe that I should have to ask for permission to use my own work? And so I come full circle to the Faculty Council Resolution on Faculty Ownership of Research, brought forward after the Convocation on Scholarly Communication:

Be it resolved that UNC-CH faculty are the owners of their research and should retain ownership and use open access publication venues whenever possible.

I suppose this always was a matter of principle. The serials crisis is a financial crisis, yes, but it’s a crisis for libraries, not for individual authors. For individual authors it’s a matter of principle: think globally & act locally on the serials crisis front, & retain ownership of my own stuff, or succumb to the convenience of corporations handling my stuff for me & making a lot of money in the process off of my colleagues. So, nothing really novel here, I ended up more or less where I began. I’m a slow learner, what can I say?

TX DL

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005

Texas Universities Join to Create a Digital Library for Scholars and the Public, from the Chronicle

Four Texas university systems and Rice University will collaborate on a digital repository whose goal is to offer online resources, such as teaching aids, dissertations, and practical information, although not books.

The repository will be called the Texas Digital Library, but it will not resemble the California Digital Library — not initially, at least. While the California Digital Library — which provides books, journals, and databases to California libraries — provides an inspiration, says Fred Heath, vice provost of the University of Texas Libraries, “this would be closer to the DSpace collaborative at MIT.”

The article also says that UTopia is a model for the Texas Digital Library. On a personal note, I love seeing news of this sort of thing. Experiments in what a DL should be. Fabulous!

SCOTUS Market

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005

Can You Predict Justice O’Connor’s Replacement? Kevin McGuire of the Poli Sci department here at Carolina is running a futures market with play money to predict who will replace Justice O’Connor. I’ve heard about these mock markets & I understand they’re almost alarmingly accurate in predicting political proceedings (a lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!). I’m totally going to participate in this one. And I’ll indulge myself in a little voodoo politics, and pretend that if I bid on the nominee I want, that I can actually affect the real outcome.

First International Conference on Open Source Systems

Monday, July 11th, 2005

This one is for all of you ibiblites in the audience: The First International Conference on Open Source Systems is currently underway, in Genova Italy. (Thanks, James, for telling me about this.) The entire proceedings is online too, all 377 PDFed pages of it.

Guns, Germs, & Steel

Sunday, July 10th, 2005

For all you Jared Diamond-heads out there, news: PBS has made a 3-part series out of Guns, Germs, & Steel, hosted by Diamond himself. Premieres tomorrow (Monday) night, 10 pm.