LiveSerials

Conference round-up and thanks

2011-05-06T17:32:00.003+02:00

A month after the conference, I'm pleased to announce that (most of) the presentations and recordings are now live at:

With our growing number of speakers, it has been increasingly hard to get everyone's permission to post slides / videos, but you'll be pleased to hear we plan to work harder next year at getting permissions in advance. We'll also plan to load all slides to Slideshare, *during* the conference, and hopefully get videos edited and loaded on River Valley TV within about a week.

I would like to publicly thank (a) our sponsor, River Valley TV, for recording, editing and hosting videos of our plenary speakers, and (b) our ace team of bloggers for all their efforts in reporting on the conference. The stats show that we continue to be pretty well read BUT we continue to think about ways to improve / change. Given the growing usage of Twitter at the conference, and the renaming of our 'parent' journal (from which LiveSerials took its oh-so-witty name), we are considering whether we need to revise, rename, retain or retire this blog. *Please* let us know what you think (would anyone miss us?), either in the comments here, by tweeting @uksg, or by good old email.

The UKSG Echochamber

2011-04-15T14:39:00.003+02:00

OU lecturer and UKSG speaker Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) put together a nice graphic during this year's conference, to show who was using the #uksg hashtag on Twitter. Check it out below (click on the image to see it in more detail, or see some of his other UKSG visualisations on his Flickr account).

Academic e-resources in the UK: promoting discovery and use

2011-04-10T18:27:00.002+02:00

Vic Lyte and Sophia Jones from Mimas, The University of Manchester, presented on The UK Institutional Repository Search (IRS), which is a Mimas project commissioned by JISC in partnership with UKOLN and SHERPA. The project was completed in July 2009 and the service has been running continuously since then.

Content stored in institutional and academic repositories is growing and they recognise that there are limited ways to access this information. This project has taken cross-search and aggregation to the next level, creating a visionary platform that pulls together disparate content, making it easier to search and discover in ways that meet personal or contextual needs.

They demonstrated how the search works including an impressive 3D visulisation option.

They gave an overview of the JISC Historic Books and JISC Journal Archives products. They also talked about the JISC Collections e-platform enabling cross-agregated search of a unique resource from the British Library. Content (300,000 books) previously inaccessible will be searchable on the platform. Features include three types of search (exact; detailed and serendipitous) and tabbed filters; Google-style listings and search clouds. It all looked very impressive.

Driving usage - what are publishers and librarians doing to evaluate and promote usage?

2011-04-10T13:07:00.003+02:00

Sarah Pearson from the University of Birmingham kicked off this breakout session and outlined her experience of collection development analysis at her institution. She went on to explain that while they have been doing this for some time, usage alone doesn't tell the whole story. They have been looking increasingly at how users get access to content and what path they take.

Sarah highlighted the numerous ways they promote usage at her university. These include news feeds about new acquisitions and trials; making content available in resource discovery interfaces; activating in link resolvers (SFX); integrating with Google Scholar/A&I services; making authentication as seamless as possible and embedding in apps on other sites.

There is a Mylibrary tab on the institutions' portal page and a library news section, which are widely used. Users can search the library catalogue direct from the portal page of the university rather than go to the library pages.

They are also about to user Super Search on Primo Central, which will be embedded in the virtual learning environment and Facebook.

To analyse usage they use a number of services including in-house templates that compare and contrast big deal usage with subscription analysis; JUSP (Jisc) and SCONUL Returns. They look at JR1 reports and evaluate cost per use. They pay particular attention to those resources with low or zero use. They also look at DB1 searches & sessions and compare archive with frontfile usage.

With budgets under threat librarians are looking at cancelling poorly performing content and big deals, for example, have to demonstrate overall good value.

The University of Birmingham approach, Sarah explained, is to activate online access content everywhere and let the user decide.

Google Analytics is being used to look at user behaviour now and to help understand more about their journey to access content. They know that the Institution's portal page is the number one access point but the OPAC and Google are still high referrer sites. There is a low number for access via mobile devices but they expect that to increase.

Evaluating usage is still very manual and it is labour intensive to measure the ROI of resources. It is important with increased pressure on budgets to ensure librarians are making the right decisions about which content to subscribe to and purchase. Evaluating usage is an important step in doing this.

Christian Box from IOP Publishing followed on with an interesting presentation about the work they are currently doing at the Institute of Physics. By sharing data between publishers and librarians, he said, we can make the industry more efficient.

I was particularly interested to hear more about the video abstracts they launched in February this year. Authors can now submit video abstracts and so far they have had over 10,000 video views. The human factor is important in engaging with students and researchers and helps to humanise the journal by conveying the inspiration and enthusiam of the author or editor.

Publishers can learn a lot from evaluating the data they have such as seeing which research areas are growing. Web analytics; train of thought analysis; traffic dashboards including social media indexes and extended metrics such as A&I services are all important.

Platform development and ensuring connectedness is key. SEO is still vitally important here.

Social Networking/Media activity and how it impacts on usage is difficult to track. Physics World has 8,510 follows on Twitter.

Local language sites (Japan; Latin America and China) have moderate but growing traffic so far.

Access via mobile devices including iphones and ipads is growing and publishers need to operate in this space to ensure users can access content wherever they are.

Challenges for publishers and librarians alike include creating new and meaningful metrics to cope with the rate of industry change; niche areas of resarch and primtive metrics.

As Christian stated at the beginning of his presentation, it is important for librarians and publishers to work together as much as possible and share data to increase efficiency wherever possible.

William Gibson and the future of libraries

2011-04-08T17:19:00.005+02:00

On day one of the UKSG 2011 Conference, John Naughton (The Open University and Cambridge University Library) paraphrased William Gibson, 'The future has already arrived...stop trying to predict it.'

'We are living through a revolution and we have no idea where it is going,' he suggested. He used the term 'information bewilderment' to explain further.

Capitalism, he argued, relies on the creative destruction of industries in waves of activity. This is exciting for those on the creative side but scary for those on the destructive (ie newspaper and music industries) side.

Obsolete business models are at threat and everyone at the conference is affected, he warned. In the digital age, 'disruptive innovation' is a feature and a way of cutting out the 'middle man' to create profit.

He cited Amazon Kindle Singles as an example, whereby they invite authors (previously published or unpublished) to publish shorter articles (longer than a magazine or journal article but shorter than a novel) as an e-book on the Amazon Kindle platform.

Prediction is futile but you can measure changes. Complexity is the new reality and the rise and rise of user-generated content offers numerous opportunites for end users to 'cut out the middle man' (ie publishers).

In the old ecosystem there were big corporations while the new ecosystem relies on everything being available in smaller chunks on content (tracks not albums, articles not journals etc).

What's it got to do with libraries?

There is an intrinsic belief that libraries and librarians do good work but a wave of 'creative disruption' doesn't care. Libraries have traditionally taken a physical form and one of the debates has been about how to maintain the idea of a 'library' when users are increasingly accessing content online. When all academic activity takes place in a digital environment (soon?) how will libraries justify their existence (from place to space)?

John Naugthon ended his presentation by suggesting librarians could add value by building services around workflows (social media; rss feeds etc) as the everyday avalanche of data crys out for the skills of the librarian to create order.

'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.'

Sounds like good advice for those of us in publishing too.

Collections 2021: The Future of the Collection Is Not a Collection

2011-04-07T13:27:00.002+02:00

Rick Anderson invites us to think back to the 1980s and ponder how we answered questions that arose - say you wanted to know the population of a certain small country, or the migratory pattern of a certain type of whale. In the 80's you had a couple of choices: either you wouldn't try to answer it, or if you were lucky you would go to a good library and look in a relevant book. However, access to a good library was an elite opportunity, and most people in the world didn't have access to one.

Anderson calls this pre-internet age the "Gutenberg Terror". Print, he says, is a terrible medium for distributing information. During the Gutenberg Terror the library was an information temple with the librarian as high priest to grant the sacred knowledge. Now the library is a store front - one of many store fronts offering access to information at a price.

As such, many traditional librarian roles have been undermined. Reference services are largely bypassed (although Anderson points out that with a reference desk staffed at various times by one or more of just 25 librarians serving over 30,000 students at the University of Utah, the chances of even a small percentage of students getting constructive help were always small. "It works by failing").

Library catalogues are all incomplete. An OCLC survey of the general public showed just 1% of electronic information searches begin at the library catalogue. Perhaps not surprising, but when college students were surveyed the number rose to just 2%. Initial circulations per student have also decreased dramatically at Utah.

The traditional library collection is a "bad guess at patron needs", but it was all that could be done in the print era. With recent budget cuts even electronic collection development is becoming hard to defend. The wrong e-book, even at a deep discount, is still the wrong book, and Anderson doesn't want unused books in his library. If 80% of an e-book package is used and only 20% not, that's still a number of books that he could have replaced with something his patrons would use.

And so to Patron Driven Acquisition, the purpose of which is to avoid wasting money by buying books no one wants. Anderson sees PDA as the alternative to building collections, and makes some predictions about how things will be in ten years time:

PDA is the new assumption, although it's not the only way. The collection service will be mainly a conduit service, building only limited permanent collections.
The smart phone is the killer delivery app. While few people want to sit down for two hours and read a novel on a small device, many of us have lots of blocks of 10-15 minutes in which we will happily read something that's conveniently available.
Most academic print acquisition is print on demand, this avoiding the major waste of print runs based on guesswork.
Most search is done on primary documents rather than proxies such as the library catalogue.
It is difficult to distinguish library services from other educational services.

Different types of library will build different types of collection:

Big collecting libraries such as Oxford, Harvard, LoC will maintain "monuments to Western civilisation"
Local research institutions will have smaller and more specialist collections based on curricula
Less well funded liberal arts and community colleges will be conduits and will rely heavily on Google Book Search and just-in-time delivery.

The stumbling blocks to this will be

Sclerotic librarians. There are difficult conversations to be had about change.
Traditional accreditation structures - counting books on shelf to assess the worth of the library.
Fainthearted publishers - justifiably so. PDA will put some publishers out of business. You can't make as much money selling just what people want as you can by selling them content they don't want bundled with that which they do.
Customer-focused competitors for patrons time such as Google and Amazon. These competitors aren't interested in helping people find good information in the way that libraries are, but they're quick and convenient.

Q: What about undergrads who don't know what they need?

A: PDA doesn't mean no holds barred access to anything at all - the library needs to put some constraints in place. Librarians have traditionally overestimated the influence they can have on teaching students how to be good researchers - professors have this responsibility and it should be taught in the classroom with support from librarians.

Squatting in the Library? Visitors and Residents at UKSG

2011-04-06T11:48:00.003+02:00

The most tweeted soundbite from Andy Powell's opening presentation for day two of UKSG was 'content should be of the web, not on the web'. This nicely sums up several of the comments and observations of plenary speakers over the first two days. People, we need to be nicer to our content and help it grow to reach its real potential. Content, I'm sorry, you are going to have to work much harder! It was interesting to note that Cliff Lynch was making very similar points to Andy on the other side of the pond, at CNI2011. The well known work 'The Machine is Us/ing Us' demonstrates this well.

Andy drew on a now seminal piece of work on 'Visitors and Residents' by Dave White of Oxford University. This describes how we interact with the online environments - with Residents spending a significant portion of their time online, building a known profile / identity and contributing to the process of creation online. Visitors are more likely to use the web as a tool, dipping in and out to find specific resources or answer specific questions. Both groups are equally valid, but we need to be able to cater for both. To date, digital libraries have tended to focus purely on the Visitor.

So what does this mean to those offering services using an online medium? The changing focus on Residents helps us to move from a controlling "this is you and this is what you are allowed to do' attitude to one where the user has more control - ''this is me and what I have done". Andy posits that social interaction is what creates content, and queries whether the approach of institutional repositories in working in this context. Few researchers see value in depositing or providing metadata, which has let to a culture of mandates - they very controlling approach that does not support the user.

One of the ways we can think about making some simple but significant changes for our content and services is to exploit the potential of URIs (of this type, not this type). URIs support the notion of 'of the web' not 'on the web'. Instead of saying where something is, they say WHAT something is. This moves us closer to the concept of intelligent, linked data and helps provide a platform for the type of social activity that is building content.

Andy notes that the environment and culture for openness does not simply appear over night but that companies are beginning to exploit the benefits of linked data - the 'Facebook Like' button for example relies on linked data to achieve its aims, and that little button is appearing everywhere!

The takeaway from the talk? Probably a call for both libraries and publishers to think more about how their services are supporting Residents and not just Visitors to provide a truly effective service in an online environment.

An attempt to capture the OA debate between Alma Swan and Steve Hall

2011-04-06T10:55:00.005+02:00

In the red corner: Alma Swan's vision for the future of scholarly communication, and how we might get there: researchers and others can have immediate, fully-linked, reusable, repurposable, no charge, no barriers access to the corpus. Researchers and others wishing to access research outputs (datasets, grey lit as well as journals etc) should be able to roam freely through, picking and choosing what they read and use. Technologies should be able to do the same thing, to help advance research. OA is the answer because: 1, access gaps for researchers will widen as library budgets are further straitened and big deals are cancelled; 2, professional, practitioner, educational communities and private citizens also have an interest and need for this material; PubMed Central's stats show that 40% of usage comes from (what they call) "citizens". Immediate access is important - we must not delay the dissemination of knowledge.

In the blue corner: Steve Hall (IOP) says publishers provide services to authors, editors, readers and librarians but above all to authors - registering, validating, disseminating research. Authors don't pay for these services, libraries do - through subscriptions / licences to journals. This has become a problem as research output has grown (partic in e.g. China), but library budgets have decreased. The big deal still has a role, but multiple business models will be needed to maintain existing level of access in academia, and to extend access elsewhere. Open access is 2 different solutions (green and gold) that can't co-exist. Green OA seeks to make research papers freely available without contributing to their costs. Embargoes allow publishers to recoup their investment but don't widen access; ditching embargoes is unsustainable. Gold OA does contribute to costs of publishing, and makes content immediately and widely available, but funding is haphazard at the moment - we need a collaborative community response. It's still not clear whether OA will deliver savings (Hall dismisses Houghton's study and points to a more "real world" RIN one). IOP is going hybrid and will take fees from gold OA into account when setting budgets and pricing.

Alma agrees with Steve on the issue of scaleability (research output is growing, we need a per-article model) but argues that green is not "unfunded" given the hidden costs covered by academic contribution. Steve responds that publishers charge for the management of the peer review process, not for the piece that is delivered by academia, and cites examples of journals that have seen their subscriptions cannibalised by green OA or delayed access. He argues that depositing manuscripts in a repository is not comparable to publishing, since these manuscripts don't have e.g. reference linking.

Alma says stats show that mandates very quickly achieve 60% deposit, whereas voluntary deposit is about 30%. In 5 years, with more policies, we will be approaching an acceptable level of OA. Several journals have made content freely available online but have seen subscriptions rise, because of broader international visibility. Physics publishers have co-existed for years with ArXiv - what impact has that had on subscriptions in the last 20 years?

Steven cites Harvard's mandate as having achieved only 20% deposit. Policies need to be global and for example China is unlikely to adopt. Publishers are quietly ready to engage with gold OA. Over half of Elsevier's journals are already hybrid. What gets in the way is the continuing fight over short embargo green access. If funders keep pushing it, and publishers keep resisting, the stand off does no-one any good. Better to bring a collection of stakeholders together to review how to facilitate gold OA more quickly. Re. ArXiv, these are pre-prints (not peer reviewed - original author manuscript) and very few journals are comprehensively covered. It is more difficult to make new sales of a journal if a librarian knows most of it is freely available elsewhere.

Alma says that there are several other universities to cite that counter the Harvard example. If mandates aren't working, why are publishers so keen to lobby against them? We cannot ask for gold mandates (no university will do it, not many funders will countenance) so need to pursue policies for green. Publishers will incur costs in transitioning to a per article cost system - each publisher has to decide whether that future is viable.

Unfortunately, not enough time was left for questions from the floor - I bet there were plenty :(

Goodbye Serials, Hallo Insights!

2011-04-05T18:28:00.003+02:00

You've probably all heard the exciting news by now. Announced at today's UKSG AGM, our journal Serials has been renamed "Insights: connecting the knowledge community". This follows feedback indicating that the old title wasn't really doing justice to the wide range of topics we cover. The new title was the winning entry in a competition among UKSG members - big congratulations to our winner, Jane Harvell of the University of Sussex. She will receive her prize (an iPad!) at a presentation just before tomorrow's final plenary sessions.

More details at http://bit.ly/g8euj6 - feel free to share your thoughts, below!

Shhhh, Turn of Your Phone!

2011-04-05T16:19:00.004+02:00

James Clay starts his session by encouraging us all to turn on all of our devices, say hello to the person sat next to us and generally have a conversation. How nice :-) He lives online at elearningstuff.net - I'd recommend you check it out if you haven't been there before.

The first mobile phone call (from a car) was made in June 1946! This is not a new technology, we have lived with them for a long time. The first proper handheld mobile phone call was made on April 3rd 1973. It has only been in the last couple of years that we have really begun to exploit the potential of mobile devices. The i-pad sold 14 million units in the first 9 months of its life - mobile is everywhere.

James goes on to show how all new developments have been treated with scepticism (and btw gives an excellent way of how to actually give a 'history of' at a conference). The 'evil' slate, pen, calculator have all been criticised. We do things because they have always been done that way - resistance to change is normal. So we put up signs that say don't use your phones (or don't swim) to try and control change - but what problems to phones *actually* cause in a library?

The Culture of NO is a big problem in libraries today. When you see a big sign saying DO NOT, it is human nature not to respect it. It is much better to talk to learners and help them respect their environment rather than dictate and direct. A YES culture is a much better place to be.

So what CAN we do with mobile devices in the library?? My contributions are some fantastic ideas from thewikiman and Jo Alcock. Other ideas:

Use the web. Sounds obvious, but very necessary. Unfortunately, there are very few journal or eBook platforms that are well developed for browsing on phones, or even small notepads.
eBooks!
Communication.
Collaboration. AudioNote is a great example of tools that can be used in this way.
QRCodes - dotted around the library to provide extra information.
Augmented Reality - layering information over images within the library. It's a great way to UpSell the resources.
Barcode Scaners - scanning a barcode of a book in WHSmiths to see if it is in the library.
Making Notes - such as tools like EverNote.
Using tools like Google Googles to find more information about a statue, a picture, a resource.

It is of course, not that simple. In FE there are significant concerns about safeguarding and the permanency of the web. This is often used as an excuse - James describes the role of the Innovation Prevention Department, a well known department in all academic institutions!

Cost is a real issue. Mobile should be about enhancing the service you already provide, it should not be exclusive and discriminatory to those who cannot afford expensive devices. James also bravely states that eBooks will never replace real books :-)

The digital divide is a real issue (a la Andy Powell's talk this morning). As is connectivity (conference wifi anyone?). The pace of change also makes it difficult for libraries to keep up with changing devices, skilling staff etc. Prioritising is an important focus here.

Despite all of these issues, James is a clear believer in using mobile devices in libraries - and he encourages us all to think about just one way in which we could too.

An introduction to ORCID

2011-04-05T16:17:00.004+02:00

ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) started out as a CrossRef initiative that then flew the nest, with the support of Nature and Thomson. It now has stakeholders including funders, researchers and librarians. Geoffrey Bilder, our speaker today, has been seconded from his day job at CrossRef to be the technical director at ORCID.

The general problem: identity is cheap

The problem at the heart of ORCID's being is that, on the internet, identity is "cheap" - it's easy to create multiple different profiles in silos on different sites, leaving every site with a fragmented view of you.

The problem in scholarly communications

The scholarly record is built on understanding the provenance and 'network status' of content. Publisher brands are based on the 'provenance infrastructure' (credentials of author, editorial rigour, peer review, citations). Both CrossCheck (another CrossRef initiative) and ORCID are key to the credibility of the author, although note that it's not just about authors - it refers to "contributor identifiers" to acknowledge all the other roles. One person (one ID) can contribute in lots of different ways (author, reviewer, programmer, compiler) and can have relationships to other IDs (edited by, co-author, colleague etc).

The knowledge discovery problem: name ambiguity

ORCID is about knowledge discovery, rather than access control or security - about people publicising their work, but ensuring it is credited accurately. The main issue is name ambiguity: name variations, name "collision" (multiple people with the same name, eg. the other Geoff Bilder, a Canadian para-ski-glider), name changes, name translations, corporate authors... All complex problems that must be resolved for accurate crediting within scholarly literature. ORCID's mission is to solve this problem through collaboration; various systems exist - economists use RePeC's author claims service, some countries have national databases of researchers - but regional / disciplinary / institutional silos are unhelpful in our networked age. Aspects of identity can be claimed by individuals or asserted on their behalf by institutions; ORCID recognised it needed to bring both organisational and personal assertions together to seed its system as neither level by itself would ensure sufficient uptake to make the service useful.

Principles and progress

ORCID's ten guiding principles (http://www.orcid.org/principles) demonstrate the organisation's non-partisan, international, open approach. The board is made up of "anyone who can commit the time and wants to participate". So what have they done so far?

Thomson donated codebase for its researcher ID to help jumpstart ORCID
Various functions were added to this for ORCID's alpha prototype - Thomson's system was based on personal "claims", so the organisational layer had to be added
Now working out last details for licensing the codebase to build a phase I version of the system
And planning for future sustainability (funding / staff)
Hoping to have something that people can use, next year

Questions:

Q: Authors are allowed to create profiles - how can IDs remain unique?
A: Authors cannot change the identifier, only the information associated with it.
Q: The contributor ID could become increasingly complex - how do we define where 'contribution' begins and ends?
A: We will studiously avoid defining that - it's going to evolve. But the answer is essentially that people will record what they think is important, and if it's not important, it won't be counted for much. [Given that people will have to take the time to enter this data, they will likely only claim credit for things that are useful / important]
Q: How will this fit with the requirements of REF?
A: It's not clear where REF responsibilities will sit but hopefully ORCID will make the process of gathering information easier.
Q: Pseudonymity?
A: A lot of this information is public already, but in aggregation it's more powerful. What if it becomes too easy to find details about stem cell researchers in Alabama or animal sci researchers in Oxford. People do have good reasons to want to hide information - even just if you want to be credited for peer reviewing without it being public. ORCID will allow any or all information except the identifier itself to be hidden.
Q: What is happening with the development of IDs in different countries?
A: It would be a bad idea to think "ORCID's coming, let's stop working on our system". Other systems will continue to exist and be important. At minimum, ORCID will be able to include information about other relevant identifiers.
Q: What work will be involved for publishers?
A: A classic example: a researcher submitting a manuscript currently fills in all the information each time, and that information quickly becomes stale (e.g. contact data). In future, they will upload their ORCID, and publishers can query and recheck information as necessary.
Q: Who will be the arbiter of who will be attached to a work as a contributor?
A: For example, the corresponding author will have more credibility in saying who else contributed.
Q: Disambiguity of affiliations?
A: We may integrate with e.g. Ringgold to create a controlled vocabulary for organisations.
Q: What are the data protection issues?
A: We are transparent about what is being revealed, to whom, and we give authors control - they can make anything except the identifier private.
Q: What's the long term funding plan?
A: Exactly. The technology doesn't matter if we can't sustain an organisation to keep it running. We are looking at future models, from related service provision to membership.

Curated tweetstream: what our audience said about Charles B. Lowry on the economic crisis

2011-04-05T15:25:00.003+02:00

Here's another first for LiveSerials - rather than writing a report on the session by Charles B. Lowry, Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries, I thought I'd give you a snapshot of the tweeting that took place throughout:

Setting the scene:

bookstothesky Telling wordcloud from Lowry re library budgets: key words emphasized are budget, reduction(s), cut, reduced :-/ #uksg

On US vs UK library budgets:

jharvell Does that mean that 10 universities in the us had library budgets of over 40 million dollars before the cuts? #uksg #didimisssomething?
chriskeene @jharvell and the lowest category was 'libraries with budget less than $20million'. different world!
jharvell Don't get me wrong those big budgets are brilliant. Brilliant. But my gob hasn't closed for the last 5 mins. #ineverknew #uksg
jharvell With the amount of money available in US budgets why are publishers even bothering listening to us in the uk #uksg

On the other hand:

charlierapple Decreasing budgets are the new norm, not an aberration, with consequences for teaching and research internationally #uksg Lowry
ORourkeTony @charlierapple #uksg I heard someone say recently that flat was the new up!
MelindaKenneway Time to head to Canada by the looks of things - they seem to be the only libraries left with budget. #uksg

And finally ...

antet Not sure I like the detached phrase "reduced commitment to human resources" #uksg

Nurturing innovation, or why we need to kiss more frogs

2011-04-05T14:48:00.009+02:00

Sir John O'Reilly, VC, Cranfield University, promises to touch on a number of different topics, seemingly randomly. Which is a handy excuse for a blogger - any randomness that follows was 'im, not me. Sir John is speaking about rebooting UK HE, from the perspective of the VC of a wholly postgraduate STEM university (he gives yet another definition of the M in ST(E)M - in this case, management).

He starts by noting that, in recent news stories, "students" and "higher education" have almost entirely meant undergraduate - even HEPI's Higher Education Supply and Demand document was focussed on undergraduate demands and provision. HEFCE funding per student fell substantially through the 1990s, despite the government's recognition of the importance of the knowledge economy, and we now know that several universities will begin charging high-end fees from next year. Only undergraduate students can access the Student Loans Company's "favourable" arrangements; what will the climate be for postgraduate students?

Sir John uses Langton's Ant to demonstrate emergence, as a cipher for the complexity of the higher education system: a simple algorithm at the heart of a complex system that generates unpredictable behaviour and unintended consequences. For example, the line between teaching and research is convenient but arbitrary, and the two are symbiotic - weaken the research base, and the teaching will be poor. But likewise: weaken the teaching base, and the research will be poorer.

Drawing this together, Sir John asserts that the changes in funding of postgraduate education may have the unintended consequence of weakening the research output of our universities - which in turn will weaken innovation, which will in due course weaken the economy. "The princess and the frog" can be used as metaphor for knowledge transfer; to find a prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs. We must be careful not to disrupt inappropriately the research and innovation agenda and our ability to address it in England. "We are in the business of kissing frogs, to ensure that the future generation has its princes of wealth creation." As Jane Harvell, one of UKSG tweeters puts it, "all this is not news for us working in HE, but it does need saying, and is best said by a Vice Chancellor."

The future is open (thanks to metadata)

2011-04-05T10:35:00.001+02:00

Rufus Pollock from Open Knowledge Foundation tells us how metadata can and will be more open in the future, and why we should care.

Libraries and publishing used to be mainly about reproduction of the printed word. Access and storage also but reproduction mainly which once upon a time reproduction was very costly; people needed to club together and form societies in order to afford reproduction.

Now we're matching, filtering and finding, but there's too much info and every password you have to enter slows you down, and slows down innovation and innovators. Matching is king in a world of too much info - Google's aim is to match people with information and it all relies on humans making the links and building sites. Imagine if they'd had to ask permission of every single person - we would have missed out on something big.

Of course people have to be paid, machines have to run etc. BUT much of this production is already paid for i.e. via academia itself: instead of using the same few favourite books, why not ask friends? Or create our own journals?

Data and content are not commodities to sell but platforms to build on... there are plenty of ways to make money without going closed (although it might be different people making the money of course!)

And why does metadata matter so much? It's the easy way in; everything attaches to it: purchasing services; wikipedia; analytics such as who wrote it, how many people bought it etc.

Data is like code and so the level of re-use, and the number of applications we can create is huge.

One such project is JISC OpenBib which has three million open records provided by the British Library. It integrates with wikipedia, and includes a distributed social bibliography platform so that users can contribute and correct and enhance. We need to harness the users to help us make much better catalogues, to enrich catalog data.

So metatada is the skeleton and right now we have the chance to make a significant change for the better. Metadata and content WILL all be free one day... it may take some time but it will happen. The day is coming when there won't be a choice. There will be enough people with open data to make it happen.

Do the math: PDA not the answer?

2011-04-05T10:31:00.007+02:00

Yesterday, we talked about filtering; today, Terry Bucknell suggests, we're looking at the opposite - buying by the bucketful. A multidisciplinary university like Liverpool (where Terry is e-resources manager) buys a wide range of content, for example, 19 ebook packages in 5 years. These have traditionally been bought with leftover budget at the end of the financial year (n.b. Liverpool decided ebook packages are better than journal backfiles here). As "leftover budget" becomes a thing of the past, Terry is analysing the value from these packages in more depth and always considering alternative purchasing models - individual title selection, patron-driven acquisition, etc.. Here are some highlights of Terry's analysis:

40% of Liverpool's e-resource usage is e-books - yet 95% of the budget goes on journals.
Liverpool's usage is typical - approx 40% of titles in a collection are used in the first year; approximately 60% have been used by the second year
Some subjects (e.g. mathematics, at Liverpool) seem to perform badly - is this a factor of how/when information is used in different disciplines? need to be careful before making collection development decisions based on this data
All types of books get used at least a bit, but some content (e.g. conference proceedings) is used more than other content (e.g. monographs)
Pareto principle applies! 80% of downloads from top 21% of ebooks - Terry doesn't think this should be a factor in how collections are purchased / priced. (Looking more closely, 35% of usage on one platform came from one title! - doesn't tell you anything about the broader collection, just that some books are heavily used)
Even on aggregator platforms (where there's a greater level of individual title selection than a publisher package), a third of ebooks have had only 1 or 2 accesses during 2 years
With patron-driven acquisition, all ebooks are used (because you don't buy them unless they are) - so should be better value? Terry used ebrary model (purchase triggered by 10 page turns / 10 minutes in a title / copy & pasting / printing) to analyse Liverpool's Springer ebook usage stats and calculated that PDA costs would overtake package costs in just one year in most cases (even when cheaper backfiles were excluded from analysis).
Evidence from elsewhere (e.g. U Iowa ebrary pilot) also shows that PDA budgets run out quickly - libraries who started trials had to resort to buying packages after all
... other PDA models are available ... (and may show different results) but Terry found that a PDA model would have to allow for "6 chapters free" before it would be comparable to package pricing.

Experiments like this can give libraries and publishers an idea of what is a fair price to pay for an ebook package; Terry's conclusions:

Some packages are better value than others, and libraries should prioritise these in collections
Aggregated databases give cheap critical mass
Single title selections are important for core texts
PDA can fill the gaps, but not form the foundations

The implications for libraries:

Need to centralise book budgets - stop fragmenting by formats etc - a hard sell for lots of faculty / librarians
Rapid move to e-only book acquisition - implications for logistics / staffing

The implications for publishers:

Packages need to be at least 50% discount for it to be worth it for the library - make it a "no brainer" (70% discount) for the library to purchase, and you'll solve the budget crisis
Offer combined books / journals packages with appropriate cost weighting / discounting.

The Gatekeeper is Dead. Long Live the Gatekeeper!

2011-04-04T18:16:00.008+02:00

In 1994 Cameron Neylon's PhD supervisor told him he needed to spend half a day a week in the library reading the new journals. Five years later when he finished his doctorate he had Google. This, he says, makes him part of the last generation to remember the library as the place that you go to access information. The last generation to think of journals as paper objects. The idea of physically searching a paper index is almost a joke.

Neylon defines his audience this afternoon pretty neatly as "the people who have to deliver for research and education, and also have to add value". In this task we - and researchers - have a shared problem: there's "too much stuff", information overload.

However, Neylon takes issue with Clay Shirky's statement that "it's not information overload, it's filter failure". This isn't a good way to think about it, because filters block. But surely it's good to block out the stuff no one wants from the deluge of information they can't deal with, to apply standards, etc? Neylon suggests that these filters that we apply actually limit the researcher's ability to explore.

Filters are a problem when the researcher doesn't know what they are blocking and why. They can be useful, but the researcher needs to be allowed to choose the filters that they want to apply, and doesn't want publishers or librarians applying the filters for them. Google allows you to set your own filters.

Neylon gives the example of a chemistry paper that claimed to show something fairly revolutionary. Within hours of publication the experiment had been recreated by several researchers and proved wrong - one of the samples was contaminated. The paper was retracted and labelled as such "for scientific reasons". The reaction of the unintended chemicals is of interest to many, but it's been retracted with no explanation. Failed experiments are as useful as successful, but they don't get published - they are filtered out.

The number of retractions is going up. That's a lot of failed experiments that could be useful to someone's research. Researchers don't know they are repeating failed experiments, but they could.

The gatekeeper was needed in a broadcast world - expensive printing and distribution needed centralising. Decisions needed to be made about what to publish and what to collect. The current flood of information is the "central research opportunity of our age".

"Every book its reader" - Ranganathan's third law of libraries. Filtering is not adding value. Rather than filter failure, Neylon believes we've got a "discovery deficit".

People can be the filter - social aggregation, annotation, critique. A network of linked objects - blogs, tweets, RSS feeds can all be found using Google, and come together to be the researcher's own personal collection. Neylon doesn't want a collection that has been chosen for him by someone else - he wants to choose his own filters from those that are available to him.

Neylon's closing advice: We need to connect people with people so they can build discovery systems. Enable, don't block. Build platforms not destinations, sell (provide) services not content. The content game is dead. Forget about filtering and control and enable discovery.

Q: Are there any publishers who are currently enabling?

A: Most are making some effort, but we need to think about how to make them more effective. We're feeling our way together.

Q: There's a lot of rubbish on the web - are you saying publishers should be publishing this too?

A: No - there's nothing wrong with authorities labelling things as trustworthy - the problem is that no one publishes all of the experiments that didn't work. Publishers can mark up, validate, etc. Just don't block the other stuff.

What scientists really want from digital publishing.

2011-04-04T17:45:00.002+02:00

This section of the conference allowed librarians and publishers to hear directly from scientific researchers; first up is Philip Bourne from University of San Diego who is a computational biologist among other things (e.g. open access advocate).

Bourne starts by explaining his big hope for scientists’ relationship with publishers in the future:

“as a scientist I want an interaction with a publisher that does not begin when the scientific process ends but begins at the beginning of the scientific process itself”

The current situation is:

1. Ideas
2. Experiments
3. Data gathering
4. Conclusions - it’s at this stage that the publisher comes in

But why couldn't the publisher come in at the data stage? They could help store it for our group. Or even earlier, at the ideation stage: The moment I jot down a few ideas, the publisher could control access to that information and then at some point down the line when the access is opened up – that’s when it becomes ‘published’.

There are movements in that direction. For example in Elsevier’s ScienceDirect (and some others too) you can click on a figure/image and move it around and manipulate it – the application is integrated on the platform because a publisher and a data provider has cooperated. But this is just the beginning; when you click on the diagram in the article, you’re getting some data back but it’s generic and it might not be organised in the way that you want. It’s generic – the figure is being viewed separately from the article text and related data – now you have to figure out what that metadata means to the article. So this is a good step but it’s not capturing all of the knowledge that you might want. It needs more cooperation, more open and interactive apps. And it needs:

Integrated rich media that improves comprehension, viewable in different ways. A video of an experiment actually being done, delivered to me alongside the text from the article.
The ability to review and interact with data on the mobile platform. Should have apps not just to read but also interact with data.
Mashups with content from other articles and data, must be at the point of capture, not post- anything.
Semantic linking of data that can lead to new knowledge discovery. To find all references to that piece of data – that data itself is probably not cited – would like to know how the actual data is being used discover relationships that other people have found between your data and other sets of data.

So Bourne wants publishers to become more involved with his work as – he confesses – some of the work is less than organised. He thinks scientists need help with management of data in general, and specifically:

· Project management. They use e.g. basecamp for project management but email folders are primary – this in an unhealthy ‘hub and spoke’ situation
· Content management. It’s a mess with content stored all over such as on slides, posters, lab notebooks etc.
· Manage negative data. They generate way more negative data than positive – Negative data is important. But you can’t find it – it stays hidden. This needs to change.
· Software. All the software they create is open source but when the grad student that wrote it leaves, it’s lost.

Solutions?

Bourne’s ‘Beyond The PDF’ workshop has generated discussion and ideas. He says “the notion of a journal is just dead – sorry. The concept of a journal is lost to me; its components and objects and data are what I think about. Research articles are useful but the components could be seen as a nanopublication.”

We need more:

· Semantic tagging of PDFs and beyond
· Citation ontologies
· Scholarly html – to write these workflows
· Authoring tools

Microsoft are looking at some of these things already and Bourn’es group has written plugins for Word – e.g. as you type you auto-check various ontologies that may suggest you change a common name to a standard name. You can tag that at the point of authoring.

All of this is not yet a huge success but it’s coming. Right now there is not much incentive but if publishers can help fast-track the development of these applications then authors will start using them. There’s no use talking about it but it’s only on researchers’ radar when they see science done in a way where this process has made a difference. For example Bourne’s group is running a test to look at spinal muscular atrophy (designated by the NIH as treatable). They will coalesce a set of disparate tools, engage the publishers (Elsevier have opened up ths), in order to address a specific problem that could change lives.

If this works then that would get the kind of attention that scientists would take notice. Only when they see thus process succeeding will they start adopting it. The tipping point will come when the tenure ‘reward system’ starts to change for the next generation, the way science is researched will improve.

From Tortoise Shells to Tweets - The Future of the Book

2011-04-04T12:18:00.003+02:00

Oh dear, Skip Prichard starts his talk at UKSG2011 by praising the bloggers at UKSG - and it's my turn to blog. No pressure Nicole, no pressure! Skip starts by reminding us that it is not worth talking about the 'Future of the Book' without looking at its past.

The earliest know form of writing is some scratchings on a tortoise shell from 6000BC, found in Northern China. From there Prichard takes us on a rapid tour of the familiar names from the history of the book - the Art of War, Guttenburg, Caxton, the Penny Dreadful. All of these developments had a framwork of publication around them that we can reflect on in the same way when we think about digital books - and Ingram Digital has an invested interest in thinking about this. Some of these examples may confuse form and function somewhat, but I think the main point is that we have been consuming 'writing' in various ways for a long time.

So, what is the definition of 'book' in today's age? Is the move from print to digital any different than the move from scroll to bound text? Prichard highlights some trends around the digital move:

1. Shifting Market.

This describes the move from physical stores to online sales. This reminds me of a recent (personal) blog post I wrote about the recent closure of libraries. This is being supported by the growing use of appropriate devices. The predications for 2011 are that there will be 14.7 million e-readers 44.6 million tablets in use.

Prichard also predicts that academic libraries will be 80% e-only by 2020 in US (seems quite slow to me!).

2. Generational Shift.

Schools are using a mixture of modern devices like the i-pad with traditional books that have been in use in the classroom for years. There is a significant change in language - text speak is effecting teenagers learning across the board.

3. Enhanced eBooks.

Moving beyond merely trying to deliver the print version of a book in digital format. The lonely planet's new travel guides are an interesting example of this - I'd note they have to be, as they fight for their market against user-generated content on places like TripAdvisor. The books container is changing, the book itself must change to keep pace with this.

Prichard poses some ideas of where we might go with this:

Could we use biometrics to change the ending of a book based on your mood?
Could your car remember where you were in a book and start reading to you when you start a journey again?
Could locations used in a book change based on where you physically are?
Could books interact with each other more, e.g. viewing other people's underlinings on Kindle?

More practically, MyiLibrary is using algorithms of usage to predict whether a print or digital copy would be more appropriate for a specific library.

Prichard closes by saying that print on demand has to be the future of publishing - it reinvigorates the supply chain, its green, and its user appropriate. He does not see print as vanishing - and reflects on the failure of the 'paperless office' as an example of why printed books will not vanished. There was quite a bit of disagreement on Twitter about this...but I wonder if we think about students printing articles / photocopying book chapters as part of the 'print' process. We might not BUY print, but print consumption will always be a personal choice.

Naturally, the audience is not going to get a publisher get away scot-free with giving a presentation without identifying some of the ways in which publishers are NOT helping the shift to digital. The poor business models for ebooks were highlighted, with prices often being higher than print making them inaccessible. The JISC eBook Observatory project has carried out some interesting work around this concept.

Following a question from Peter Burnhill, Prichard notes that the solution will not come from one part of the industry - we should put the pavements where the students chose to walk.

Starting UKSG in a state of ... informed bewilderment

2011-04-04T11:40:00.006+02:00

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." John Naughton (Observer columnist and OU academic) opens with this striking William Gibson quote, reminding us that you only discover new things if you know where to look and are willing to pay attention. We're in a state of "informed bewilderment", with no idea how the internet revolution will pan out, so should stop trying to predict the future, and pay attention to what's already here.

Dissolving value chains

This is either an exciting, fulfilling & rewarding time ... or a traumatic experience that is likely to be destructive to some well-established businesses (even industries). The internet is "a vast global machine for springing surprises ... a phenomenal enabler of disruption." (Read Barbara von Shewick's "Internet Architecture and Innovation", Jonathan Zittrain's "The Future of the internet - and how to stop it" or John's own "A brief history of the future"). In programming terms, "disruption is a feature, not a bug". It cuts out the middlemen that have been such an enduring feature of our economy - journalists, travel agents .. and librarians, and publishers? "The net dissolves value chains" - where once journalism and classified advertising had a happy marriage, now one is helped by the internet and the other is disrupted. It's impossible to predict when open access will overtake closed access in the scholarly ecosystem, but the direction of funding etc indicates clearly where we're headed, so we need to pay attention to the existing change.

An increasingly complex ecosystem

The scholarly ecosystem has grown complex in its proliferation (of publishers, authors, institutions etc), and "for a system to be viable, it has to match the complexity of its environment." But there's not a single organism in our ecosystem able to match the complexity of our environment. Complexity is the new reality, and complex systems are intrinsically unpredictable. The banking crisis warns us of the dangers of being dependent on a system so complex that few people understand it, a system that is too complex to be modelled, too complex to be understood.

The avalanche of data in science

Librarians' functions have traditionally been determined largely by the physical aspects of materials and their housing. Value and roles were clear in the print ecosystem, whereas now, many students don't visit the physical library. Teaching, scholarship and research increasingly take place in a digital environment; librarians will need to move to where the action is ("from place to space"). The traditional information skills will need overhauling. Cornell's "Seven Steps of the Research Process" starts with encyclopedias and catalogues and only fleetingly, in step 5, refers to finding "internet resources". This already doesn't reflect how students behave. We need to adjust to new realities in science, which is becoming more data intensive. John closes by quoting Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Read UKSG tweets as a daily newspaper

2011-03-31T22:36:00.012+02:00

Twitter has been active alongside the UKSG annual conference for the last couple of years. Attendees share comments and links real-time during presentations, and those not attending can tap into the main themes being covered. In 2009 we even ‘trended’ as the fourth most-discussed topic on twitter; for a heady couple of hours UKSG was being talked about more than the G20 and almost as much as the iPhone – crazy eh?

But that was the problem too. Unless you’re staring at TweetDeck or some other dashboard for the duration of the conference (and know who/what/how to filter and can multi-task), you are likely to be flattened by the volume of posts. But if you ignore twitter entirely you’ll let some really quite useful information pass you by.

So the challenge is to harness only the most interesting posts and filter out the rubbish, as well as to collate sensibly-condensed info to read or share in one sitting. (Actually that also sounds like a general publishing challenge, but anyway…)

We’re trying out paper.li which generates a ‘newspaper’ from tweets that contain URLs. It allows us to sift through the content and just give you the best bits from each day. It’s in alpha (not even beta) so there are some funny goings on (such as not-so-accurate categorising into sections like ‘art & entertainment’ or ‘health’) but it should still be a handy daily digest for conference delegates as well as those watching from afar.

So here it is: every day at 5pm we will publish an edition of The UKSG Daily Twitter Round-up. You can subscribe to get an email alert when it’s out or just visit the site in a break or between drinks receptions.

Oh, and just so you know, we’re not generating the content from the #UKSG hashtag anymore as we don’t want it to be full of “please stop by our booth” links ;-) but rather from the twitter list UKSG Conference 2011 which currently only includes a small motley crew of 16 tweeting delegates but will be added to during the first day. Send a direct message to @UKSG if you want to contribute. Otherwise we’ll find you!

Under starter's orders: your 2011 UKSG blogging team

2011-03-31T12:55:00.007+02:00

LiveSerials is once again emerging from hibernation to bring you reports and opinions from UKSG's 34th Annual Conference and Exhibition. The event kicks off in Harrogate on Monday, with an incredible 834 delegates (think what a great event UKSG must be, for us to have our two highest attendance figures in the anni pauperi of 2010 and 2011*). We've got another stellar line-up of speakers, an all-new quiz and a rash of ways to engage via social media:

Follow us here on LiveSerials. Obviously.
Set up a Twitter search for #uksg to see what everyone else is saying.
Get a daily round up over on paper.li
See who's going or add yourself on Lanyrd

This year's crack blogging team comprises:

Charlie Rapple, TBI Communications
Ginny Hendricks, Ardent Marketing
Kirsty Meddings, CrossRef
Mark O'Loughlin, SAGE
Nicole Harris, JISC

It's a tough job - honestly - so please show us lots of love and appreciation, so that we know our boggled brains, aching necks, roasted knees and broken nails are all worth it.

See you in Harrogate!

*Thought I'd warm you up with a bit of Latin there. Feel free to comment and tell me that my adjective doesn't agree with my noun. It's been a long time.

Call for bloggers: 34th UKSG conference needs you!

2011-03-12T22:47:00.004+01:00

It's that time again! I'm after volunteers to help blog the UKSG's 2011 annual conference here on LiveSerials. It's a very widely appreciated bit of community service that also means you get a little bit of personal / professional kudos, and access to Seats with Power Sockets - surely that's worth sharing a few of the notes you're going to be taking anyway?

What you need:

A Google account - these are easy to obtain if you don't yet have one and are willing to register.
A willingness to take notes during sessions and to write these up either in realtime in later.

What you don't need:

A laptop. It is fine for reports to be posted after the event.
Previous blogging experience. LiveSerials is based on the Blogger software which is simple and intuitive to use; other members of the blogging team will be available to provide support if necessary.

If you would like to volunteer, please contact me with your Gmail address. I look forward to welcoming you to Team LiveSerials!

To review previous UKSG conference blogs, see:

N.B. We'll also be Tweeting at @uksg and The Twitter / Blogger hash tag for this year's conference will be simply #UKSG. And do check us out on Lanyrd - feel free to add yourself and any sessions you're speaking at / attending!

Helen Muir's "UKSG 2010, Librarians and Open Access"

2010-04-27T13:48:00.006+02:00

I promised you more snapshots of UKSG conference summaries, and here's one from Helen Muir, Research Support Librarian at Queen Margaret University (excerpted from Helen's post here). Helen's piece adds further useful examples from experience to some of the issues discussed at the conference.

I attended UKSG on Tuesday 13th April, and the first 3 speakers (Dorothea Salo, Eelco Ferwerda and Jill Russell) were all keen advocates of open access, and from what I could gather, open access had been discussed during the previous day also. Jill's presentation included details of the pilot project that she has been involved with at the University of Birmingham where three colleges have been allocated funding to publish their research findings following a gold open access publishing model. At my own institution, following the gold route has already been disregarded - we simply do not have the funds to both pay for journals subscriptions and pay for researchers to publish with journals as well, and despite funder mandates to make research publicly available, I know that researchers here are not as yet keeping money aside to pay an open access publication fee. I imagine that this is the case for most other institutions, indeed Jill was quick to point out that her institution could not afford to pay these fees for the majority of researchers there, leaving some of those not taking part in the pilot somewhat disgruntled.

All of this has lead to me looking at open access from a different angle. In my own role, I am actively encouraging researchers at my institution to both publish their research following an open access model, and to deposit their work in our repository. I've been doing this for about a year and a half now, we have our open access mandate in place, and I thought that encouraging researchers to make their paper open access would eventually lead to the tipping point where open access journal publishing would overtake subscription based. It's a lot more complicated than that though, isn't it? As well as the researchers being convinced, there is also the much less talked about hurdle (and from what I've seen it's a big one) of librarians who are still happy to follow the subscription based journal publishing model. I don't mean this to be a criticism of library budget holders and serials librarians who are working very hard to negotiate with publishers to retain access to as many journal titles as they can with their ever-decreasing budgets. Academic libraries have students who are paying for their education, and expect to have access to journal articles, and academics who expect access to current research to do their jobs - the idea of just stopping paying subscriptions as an individual institution, or even as part of a consortium is unthinkable at present, when the backlash from students and academics at losing access to journals would be so great.

Discussion of open access does have to be opened up further to the whole academic and research library community, and not just remain mostly within the world of repository practitioners and developers. I also wonder about the effects of CILIP's reporting on open access to the wider library community, with another less-than-positive review in this month's Update entitled Open access could cost some universities dear, says Jisc report. (I'm not putting the link to this in here as CILIP members will know where to look, and for the rest of you CILIP Update is not open access - sorry.) Hopefully the more positive coverage that open access has received at UKSG10 will help to redress the balance of this.

Helen's post was commented on by Stevan Harnad, who concluded that "Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. ... Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible [via green, not gold, OA] to a university's users." Helen's response adds further useful experience to this discssion (emphasis is mine):

I understand and support your argument fully, but also witness some drawbacks as well. Queen Margaret was a very early mandate adopter, but unfortunately this has not meant a dramatic increase in deposits in our repository. Indeed, most of the material that finds its way in gets there because I've actively searched for it, then chased researchers up for the papers. Only if I'm very lucky do I find a researcher who has kept a draft that the publishers copyright policies will allow me to put up following the green model. I do believe that the message is slowly getting through to some of our researchers however, and think that this is encouraging (I was sent a green OA paper today that I can deposit, but I have to honour a 6 month embargo first. The embargo is quite off-putting for some researchers and was a key reason for Birmingham piloting a gold model, according to Jill Russell at UKSG10).

One of my main concerns is my perception that librarians in academic libraries are not directing students and academics towards OA resources e.g. when the institution does not subscribe to a particular journal - it is not within our culture yet to explore databases of institutional repositories such as OAIster yet (I've not had a chance to have more than a quick glance at http://mimas.ac.uk/irs/demonstrator/ yet , but was very pleased to hear of its existence earlier today). It seem to me that I am contradicting myself when I recommend to students that they use the bibliographic databases for the best journal results, but then tell researchers that search engines such as Google will index their articles in the repository, thus making the accessible to a much wider audience. Searching for open access resources has to become an integral part of information search strategies.

Helen's posting and the resulting discussion add some additional nuances to the paper given at UKSG by Jill Russell, and the wider open access debate. Can readers of this blog add comments from their own experience? (And in this context I propose that we stick to experience / evidence-based comment since discussions elsewhere are giving sufficient focus to the theoretical aspects.)

(Syndicated with permission from http://libraryresearchsupport.blogspot.com/2010/04/uksg-2010-librarians-and-open-access.html.)

UKSG Conference Summary

2010-04-26T18:56:00.003+02:00

This is the summary I put together for my SAGE colleagues. I am reposting here in case it is of use. Comments on theme omissions welcome.

The 33rd Annual UKSG Conference was held in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, with a varied programme and over 850 attendees. Themes gleaned from the sessions and discussions I attended are summarised below. The very active twitter stream from the conference can be found here. I was amazed at the ability of delegates to listen, assimilate and then tweet or blog all at the same time!

Social Media

An increase in focus on Social Media and new ways of sharing information and research was very evident. There was a much higher engagement and understanding of newer communication channels. Interestingly, it was not younger researchers quoted as spending more time blogging or commenting online but more established researchers who have already secured a reputation and can afford to spend time in this way. They are contributing to knowledge and growth in their field but not just in the tradition of peer-reviewed high impact journals. An interesting development would be a unique researcher identifier such as ORCID which would help tie all researcher output together.

Researchblogging is interesting, its focus is on serious posts about peer reviewed academic research. It has over 1200 blogs and has doubled in the last year. Adam Bly from Researchblogging explained that more collaborative science and the creation of new knowledge has the scientific information industry running to keep up. We’ll be contacting them to ensure posts on Sage content can be linked back to the original research.

Open Access

OA feels like it is slowly gaining traction as a publishing model. The vibe from various sessions was less if than when. Tony Hirst was emphatic on the new openness of communication channels. Why use traditional journal articles to share ideas he asked? If he or his colleagues do decide to publish an article it will be in OA jnls. However, no clear wide-ranging path for institutions to fund OA was apparent yet.

Usage

JISC Collections have secured funding to progress with the JISC usage stats portal or “make it real”. We'll be contacted for our input, the prototype involved data from Elsevier, OUP and Springer. Its aim is to present usage data in user-friendly ways for librarians and include new ways to benchmark usage. There is not clarity on confidentiality issues and was no resolution proposed on the question of the confidential nature of usage data. It’s early days.

Big Deals, Value & Pricing

An interesting session on value had Ted Bergstrom from UCSB explaining that he is securing information about big deal pricing so he can publish information about outliers in the public domain. His reason: “as citizens of the academic community, we are interested in helping librarians to understand the dynamic economic problem that they face and aiding them in negotiating effectively with large publishers. We plan to release a collection of information and analyses that will serve this purpose.” See his Big Deal Contract Project page.

As in previous years the mood seemed to be that the Big Deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions, but there was no clear way forward proposed still.

Carol Tenopir talked about developing real tools for librarians to demonstrate value of their collections. She pointed us to the ARL website for more information.

Jill emery from Texas talked about patron-driven ebook and journal article acquisition stating 'the age of the article is here'. She explained they need “aggregated article access”. She wants publishers to listen as they have to purchase “Just in time not just in case'.

Quality Metrics

Frustration with the reliance on the Impact Factor and the fact it ranks journals and not articles was apparent. There is a desire to produce new ranking metrics. the Australian Research Assessment is no longer using the Impact Factor we were told.

Pete Binfield (PLOS) ran a session on how they have introduced article-level metrics - it’s worth a look if you haven’t seen. They recognise they are very much at the beginning but are very keen to do whatever they can to help users decide which content is highly valued by the community. Also, these metrics not just about evaluation but to help users filter and discover articles of value.

Pete talked about how they have work to do on working out how to measure “influence”. It’s important to demonstrate influence beyond the scientific community. This ties in with our work to show the value of social science research. How do we ensure the research we publish is credited appropriately when it influences Government policy for instance?

As Hannah Whaley says on her blog: The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud. However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

Hannah Whaley's UKSG summary

2010-04-26T17:40:00.002+02:00

Hannah Whaley is an Assistant Director in the University of Dundee’s Library and Learning Centre, with responsibility for Research and Systems. She specialises in system design, service development and innovation within HE teaching and research. Hannah recently wrote a great blog posting identifying key themes at this year's UKSG conference, and she's kindly agreed that we can syndicate her posting here. Read on for a snapshot of the conference from Hannah's point of view - does it tally with yours? More snapshots coming soon!

The 33rd Annual UKSG Conference was in Edinburgh this week, with a varied programme and over 850 attendees. A number of themes started to recur through the sessions and discussions, as summarised:

Big deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions
We must move further towards open access, but it is not yet clear how
Journal impact factor isn’t good enough anymore, we need to review the commentary and produce new ranking factors
Linked information is nearly here, allowing informal and pre-publish conversations to be viewed and measured in a structured way on the web
The age of the article is here, meaning metrics, usage and discoverability will increasingly be at article level rather than the ‘journal container’
Just-in-time must replace just-in-case, as no one can maintain a full array of items that may only occasionally be required

The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud. However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

(Syndicated with permission from http://www.hannahwhaley.com/2010/04/18/uksg-main-themes/)

The cringe parade: conference photos online now

2010-04-19T16:55:00.002+02:00

This year's conference was fabulously photographed by my very charming nemesis, Simon Williams. (He is my nemesis because I do not like to be photographed unawares, and he was very good at being unobtrusive as he sidled about capturing the conference in full flow).

Enjoy the photographs over on Simon's site. Some personal favourites:

"Oooh, an iPad!" (Conrad Wolfram)
"Is there anybody out there?" (Marybeth Manning)
"Seriously, it was THIS big" (Carol Tenopir)
"Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched?" (Tony Hirst)

And many more, from the very moment the conference opened, through all the plenaries and lots of breakouts, and a good number of the parties ...... go and see if you can find yourself! (Not in a new-age sense.)

A library for the 21st Century - is e-only finally a possibility?

2010-04-15T17:55:00.003+02:00

Monica Crump and Neil O'Brien presented on their work at NUI Galway where they have taken the decision to move towards the 'promised land' of a library with e-only journals whereever possible.

They outlined the recent history in Irish politics and how research had become a key strategy for the Irish Government in recent years. Ireland is a relatively small country with a population of only 4 million people and the NUI Galway Library (previously Sunday Times University of the Year) serves 17,000 students. They have a tradition of being early adopters of new technology (SFX, Metalib, Primo etc) and can the potential for great benefits such as saving on storage; binding and staff costs for example in moving towards e-only.

Over time there has been an evolution in the attitude towards e-journals on the behalf of academics and the collection management policy of the library has evolved too to a position where online subscription is now recommended over print where available.

In Ireland the cost for going e-only is amplified by VAT rates (print 13.5% and electronic 21%) but this has not deterred the NUI Galway Library who believe they save on the costs associated with print (ie storage, shelf space, staff time and binding) and are committed to going e-only wherever possible.

As part of the project they set up a Collection Management Committee to consider any issues raised by academics such as quality of images used online being inferior to print and to ensure core titles (JAMA, the Lancet, BMJ etc) are kept on display. Academics were informed of planned print cancellations and given time to submit any pleas for retention by a set deadline.

This is a legacy project and when complete they hope to be up to 75% e-only by this summer. Moving away from practices which began in the 19th Century and creating a library for the 21st century has meant making big changes (staffing; job descriptions etc) to ensure the library team have the necessary skills. The renewals process too has been so complex that it has taken Swets longer than usual to finish...with some still outstanding.

However, at NUI Galway they appear to be making steady progress towards an e-only library - something that they (and others I'm sure) have been talking about for the past decade. It was interesting to see how far they have come.

Real Challenges in a virtual world

2010-04-15T17:48:00.000+02:00

Philippa Sheail gave a fascinating insight into the challenges of information provision in the virtual world as a part-time (16 hours a week outside work) student on the postgraduate MSc in E-Learning at the University of Edinburgh.

The course is taught completely online and she is particularly interested in the debate surrounding ‘e-learning’. Because it’s a huge variety of different things, there needs to be further discussion about what e-learning is and isn’t, she said, and referred to the 2007 and 2009 JISC reports on the subject.

Philippa talked about the different interfaces she uses (VLEs; online discussion boards, Second Life etc) and talked the audience through how she (and fellow students) use them. Students can see who else is online when they need help at any give time, which is useful as students are based globally and work in different time zones. Discussion boards can be a bit intimidating to students not confidence with their level of subject knowledge but can be really useful. For some modules on the course students have to keep a blog which is assessed. Tutorials and virtual corridor chat is via SKYPE and Second Life. Students really appreciate the feeling of being together virtually even when not together in the ‘real’ world. Different University Schools (Management, Education etc) have buildings in Second Life and Graduation ceremonies take place in Second Life and real life simultaneously with the latter filmed and streamed into the virtual environment. Students can talk to each in Second Life with microphones but prefer to send text messages as easier to refer back to earlier ‘conversations’ and keep track of online discussion.

On one particular module of the course, ‘E-Learning and Digital Cultures’ public Twitter feeds are used and generally students are increasingly following academics ‘live’ as a way of developing a greater awareness of the subject and discovering what the academics are particularly interested in. The trail can lead to other academics in the subject area and creates a wider teaching group to students. Zotero is used to see what others are reading too…both peers and tutors.

Advice from the library is to ‘use the advanced search on Google’ at the least but Philippa says she uses Google for cross search all the time (sometimes Google Scholar) and interestingly said that sometimes Google Scholar doesn’t take her to the article she wants but Google will via a link on the author’s blog for example as a ‘free to download’ pdf from their book. She complained that it can be problematic to access journal content sometimes as she needs to remember to log in first or think about where she is trying to access it from first. Is the content in a journal or a database; is an abstract enough of does she need the full article? Often she just needs to get to the full text quickly and doesn’t care how.

‘I love e-books’ she said and highlighted Dawsons and NetLibrary in particular and said that she uses Amazon all the time as a quick and easy interface for finding what exists before going to library to do further research.

All in all, Philippa’s session was very interesting…so much so that I asked her if she would come and visit us at SAGE. I’m sure others would be interested to hear her views too.

E-book readers in a mobile-friendly library

2010-04-14T14:07:00.002+02:00

Breakout Session B: E-book readers in a mobile-friendly library / Alison Brock, Open University

Although e-books have hit critical mass amongst consumers in terms of awareness and increasing interest libraries are yet to progress their e-book agendas due to hardware limitations and licensing restrictions.

Alison Brock reported on the joint Open University and Cranfield University e-reader project. The main aim was to explore students working practice of using e-readers and to see what kinds of content was available to them and to see how this could inform the development of library services.

6 participants from undergraduate to PhD level were chosen at both institutions using 4 Sony PRS-505 and 2 iPod Touch (8GB) devices. Students were given the devices for 3 months starting from August 2009. The devices were not preloaded with content. Since the study the Kindle is now available in the UK and the UK launch of the iPad imminent.

Prior to the survey less than half the group had used e-readers.

Usability
Students found the devices easy to use and easy to read although no specific testing was carried out with visually impaired students. They also liked the portability and lightweight feel of the devices. The colour screen of the iPod Touch and its multipurpose functionality was appreciated, although it’s highly reliant on wi-fi access.

Barriers
The weaknesses predictably centred on difficulties in finding and uploading content to the devices and the single-purpose nature of the Sony. Most participants would not buy either model tested even if they would consider an e-reader. Presumably different answers would be received in a post iPad landscape. The main barriers for use were formatting issues, navigation, the inability to annotate or interact with text and how tiring they are to use. There is also no way to link between books or link out to other content.

Similar studies undertaken in the United States and the UK found similar results. The business model for e-readers is still aimed at single users purchasing individual titles for their devices. Although ePub is the most common format it is not used on all devices - Amazon’s Kindle for example. Users cannot transfer purchases from one device to another. Licensing restricts libraries and library users from downloading e-books to mobile devices. Obviously cost is a factor. If e-readers were priced at a more competitive £50 or below £100 it would encourage more rapid take-up and experimentation among libraries to see how they can best be used for educational purposes.

Most of all it is an area of constant flux. Other manufacturers and consumers are waiting to see how the Apple iPad performs in the market. Google has announced a new tablet device and other companies are following suit. Until the hardware develops and is able to meet the study needs of learners and licensing terms change, academic libraries are unlikely to heavily invest in e-readers on a huge scale for the foreseeable future until it is clearer how they will impact the development of library services.

2010-04-14T13:47:00.002+02:00

A rollicking end to the conference with Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes and the Annals of Improbable Research (which, as I recall, used to be hosted alongside lots of very serious research on IngentaConnect!). Marc focusses on achievements that make people *laugh* - but then make them *think*. He and his team choose ten Ig Nobel Prize winners every year, from around 8,000 nominations. "It's not easy to win one of these prizes, and in most cases, if you win, we give you the opportunity to decline this 'honor' ... most people choose to accept."

The Ig Nobel Experience
Ig Nobel Prize certificates are signed by 'real' Nobel prize winners, and are accompanied by a specially-designed award that reflects the annual theme. The annual awards ceremonies are packed - 1,100 people (bigger than even this year's monster UKSG!) - and the awards are presented by a raft of Nobel prize winners. (Winner's speeches are chaired by a feisty 8-year-old girl who repeats "Please stop. I'm bored." at ramblers.)

Some Ig Nobel winners

Cows who have names give more milk than cows who are nameless
Whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle (the Peace Prize!)
The directors of four Icelandic banks (economic prize)
Creation of diamonds from tequila (chemistry prize)
Does knuckle-cracking lead to arthritis? for 60 years of left-hand-only knuckle-cracking (medicine)
Analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over (physics)
The bra that converts to a pair of facemasks in an emergency

Marc demonstrates the journal's old distribution method (prior to online hosting) by chucking a bunch of hard copies into the audience. Not quite as fought over as a ball at a baseball game, but pretty popular nonetheless.

(I have to run away now so hope that I am not about to miss something very funny!)

Sense and Sensibility

2010-04-14T13:22:00.005+02:00

For the closing plenary Brendan Dawes starts by telling us that love and art don't make sense - to a machine. We make decisions that make no sense at all, and enjoy things that are completely pointless. One of the reasons we have such an emotive reaction to the i-phone is that Apple are not afraid to include fun, pointless things in their design process.

App designers are picking up on the need for technology to have a human element. Brendan highlights 'It's A Clock' which tells the time the way humans do - it's just coming up to 12.3o by the way :-) We need to continuely question accepted practices and methods which means not necessarily always designing the most efficient thing. To quote Hendrix - you've got to know what goes between the notes, not just the notes.

Brendan then takes this concept and applies it to data - the transition of the data is very important. DoodleBuzz is a great example of this. It moves away from the 'click' paradigm of using the web and encourages people to doodle across the canvas (webpage) to pull and sort information in different ways. This concept is taking further forward by the Magnetic North website which allows you to draw to pull snapshots of information about the company rather than just presenting pages with 'cv' like descriptions of the company. This is more typical human to human interaction, rather than human to machine interaction. A site I would recommend to all of you to go and look at - now!

Brendan ends by quoting Muriel Rukeyser - the Universe is made of stories not atoms.

And now, the end is near ... taking digital risks

2010-04-14T13:19:00.003+02:00

As we approach the end of the conference, I am under the influence of the usual mixture of exhaustion, elation, a faint sense of regret at everything I didn't manage to do, and a definite sadness that it's all over for another year. So I'm looking forward to being cheered up by our Light Programme, which kicks off with Brendan Dawes from magneticNorth, imploring us to "Stop Making Sense". That should be easy enough, given my mental and emotional state.

Those pesky robots
Machines, on the other hand, don't have emotions. Brendan shows us "desire lines" to remind us of the random nature of human desire, in comparison to machines' programmed processes. He distinguishes between human and machine communications using "It's a Clock" (which tells the time like a human, rendering "it's nearly quarter to nine" rather than "The time is eight forty three a.m." - *BIG laugh*).

Humanising through risk-taking
To create connections between human beings and objects, for example by creating beautiful architecture, you don't always have to create the most efficient thing, says Brendan, and this goes against machine logic. He shows us a Cecil Balmond bridge with a big kink in the middle - "bonkers.. but everyone loves it. And the bridge was much stronger, as a side effect." Why aren't we taking more of these risks digitally? "No-one's going to die, taking risks, digitally."

Enhancing data with context
Next up he quotes Jimi Hendrix (yes, Jimi Hendrix, not Ginny Hendricks). "You've got to know more than just the technicalities of notes; you've got to know what goes between the notes." It's about what he *doesn't* play. And we get a comedy rubbish robot reading of "Under Milk Wood", by Brendan's Mac, versus a sonorous rendition by the lovely Richard Burton. "If you apply that logic to data in an RSS feed, the way you present is very important. The flow of the information is important - transitions. The iPhone makes things more human because of the transitions."

Rethinking how we interact with the web
"I like the idea of discovering things over time" - objects, people, persons. The rules of information design are not written in stone, and there is always more to discover. Brendan's company have created a gestural interface for navigating content - forget clicking, it's all about drawing shapes and lines to reflect the way people naturally do things in the way that they browse. "It was just offering an alternative." The iPhone has been a game-changer - "it's an exciting time".

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms" - Muriel Rukeyser. Focus on the human elements, not the science. (As a marketer, I completely agree - and in the context of a conference, for example, the best presentations are those that focus on a story, a structured narrative, not just a wealth of information to be imparted.) "Wonderful things come out of serendipity."

E-book readers in a mobile friendly library

2010-04-14T13:15:00.003+02:00

Alison Brock, Open University, talked about a joint project with Cranfield University to look at how e-book readers could be used in a library setting. OU have a “digi-lab” of technology such as ebook readers, even a Wii console, to help tutors explore ways of using new technology in teaching.

The aim of the project was to explore student working practice of using e-books. There was a total of 12 participants using a mixture of Sony e-readers and iPod Touch (Kindles weren't available in Europe at the time of project). Students covered a mix of levels and subjects and were given the ebook reader to use for 3 months. The project team conducted a pre-pilot survey and start-up workshops on how to download books etc. A Ning forum was also set up, for blogging, news about the project, and technical help, and end of project surveys and interviews were also held.

Less than half the participants had used e-books at all before the project, and those who had used them had only done so on PC/laptops. Participants hoped e-books would help save paper, be more portable and lightweight than books and help them find things more easily.

Sony reader strengths were that is was:

Good for sequential, narrative reading
Lightweight, portable
Easy on the eyes

Weaknesses:

Slowness of navigation
A bit “clicky and clunky”
Only does one thing, e-books only

The verdict on the iPod was that it's:

A “nice gadget”, it does other things
Portable, pocket sized
Page turning easy on touch screen
Coloured pages aided reading

Weaknesses:

Tricky to get content on
Screen size just a bit small
Reliant on wifi

The post pilot survey found that most participants had used the reader for more than just study, including listening to music and audio books, reading fiction and games. However, overall they found that the devices were limited in their functionality. The students said it was tricky to get content onto the devices, and use for study was difficult even for tech-savvy users: they were lukewarm about idea of borrowing e-readers from the library. Most would not consider buying the model they'd used. The main barriers (particularly for study purposes) were formatting issues (eg PDFs, diagrams, images), navigation, not being able to annotate or highlight text, and the fact they found the devices tiring to use.

The OU also found that library subscribed e-books were only licensed for PC use, not for downloading onto e-book readers. They even found that it could be impossible for libraries to buy suitable downloadable copies: in one situation, the student had to buy the book themselves and claim back the cost as the library couldn't buy it even with credit card due to the licensing issues.

Participants also complained that it was difficult to locate suitable e-book content to use, as it's available across so many places.

With text-based, sequential reading, they did see the advantages of portablility, and felt they could work more on the move and print less. The iPod was more popular than the Sony reader, but most still preferred the idea of a laptop which could do multiple things.

Conclusions of the project:

Ebook readers are designed for reading fiction not academic texts (may change with arrival of iPad etc)
They will only play a part in how people study, not replace textbooks altogether
Potential for loan out of pre-loaded e-book readers? Potentially, but there have been issues in US about Kindle and conflicting advice on whether loaning pre-loaded readers infringes terms of service
Potential role for libraries in facilitating and guiding students to e-book content, and also negotiating better licence agreements for commercial e-book content

Students' wish list for an ideal ebook reader would be

Screen A4-A5 size
Touch screen
Ability to highlight/make notes
Internet access
Easier to transfer content quickly direct to device
Lower retail price

They thought the OU could help by:

Loaning out e-book readers with course materials and readings pre-loaded
Offering help with finding appropriate e-book content
Having better systems for transferring existing course materials onto reader eg OU courses being turned into ePub format

So, is 2010 the year of the e-book?

Similar e-reader projects have been run at Penn State University Library, North West Missouri State University, Princeton University, and the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. However there's still some big issues. There's the more general question about how e-textbooks will be made available in terms of licensing and pricing (mobile e-readers haven't even been part of the discussion yet). Most manufacturers and content providers are still working on the one-reader, one-book model, aimed at individuals not libraries. Technology still being developed, and still dependent on proprietary formats.

Research quality: responses from the floor

2010-04-14T10:59:00.002+02:00

Questions from the audience, and answers from the panel, relating to Richard "call me Dimbleby" Gedye and the Four Horses of the Research Quality Apocalypse

Ed Pentz (audience): is there a common definition / agreement on what quality or impact actually is?

Jim Pringle: we rarely articulate this. Quality is in the eye of the beholder - subjective. Is the work making a significant contribution to the field, changing it? Is it well constructed, convincing? From the funders' point of view, was it worthwhile?

Hugh Look: ye-es. I'm pessimistic about this. We can come up with words that everyone agrees on but will it really mean anything? We just manufacture more specialist language. (Rick Anderson summarises this on Twitter as "Shared language" doesn't necessarily equal "common understanding." - exactly.)

Alain Peyraube: who decides what is making a significant contribution to the field? It depends on judgements that inherently don't achieve consensus. And it changes over time.

Peter Shepherd: the easiest way to describe quality is that you know it when you see it! It helps create insight, and enable others to take things further forward.

Hugh (again): if peer review and metrics lead to risk-averse decisions, what do we do? Encourage plurality and diversity. Metrics have a chilling, crushing effect on plurality and diversity. We do need to do riskier things, that we can't foresee the outcome of. That is being lost from the system because we are focussing on targets.

Jim: quality is associated with value and worth. We talk about it because of related funding decisions. Challenge: what would be the evidence of worth and value that we should look for? The issues we have discussed are a failure of management to use tools correctly; they don't mean there should be no search for measurable value.

Judy Luther (audience): what's your sense of the future of the journal as a signifier of research quality?

Peter: journals are a service to authors, and a service to readers. On the harvesting side, journals will continue to be an important measure of quality (from the author's point of view) - represented by editors and editorial boards. Within the great mass of information, most of us need something like the journal's personality to trust our research to. From the reader's point of view, the journal as quality is "becoming more shady". The collection (database) or the individual article might become more meaningful than the journal, as a proxy for quality.

Alain: the journal will continue to exist. The problem is that when a paper is published in a journal with a good reputation, the content of the paper has already been discussed, criticised etc (e.g. at conferences - several months prior to publication) so the article is too late to improve science - there is nothing new for specialists in the field; they already know the content, and they don't read it again. (On Twitter, Ed Pentz argues that "research may have moved on but in many fields old articles can have a huge impact"),

Hugh: we might start to see metrics relating to interestingness, relevance, rather than long-term quality. "Perhaps we need to look at temporal variation in the significance and meaning of metrics, to understand in a more sophisticated way what these things are doing for us."

Hazel Woodward (audience): the focus for assigning value is the article / journal, but research funds are allocated to researchers (individuals and institutions). Should we move to allocating research quality points to individuals / institutions, or is it not practical to pursue this?

Hugh: I feel uncomfortable - that this is an ill-thought out idea. It seems to be further atomisation, further subjective judgements, further bureaucracy. I instinctively feel that practitioners should take a fairly aggressive stance against this.

Richard Gedye: do you worry that it's already happening (RAE etc)?

Hugh: I worry about its use. In the end, it rewards the compliant, not the difficult - those who are performing. It fundamentally supports a structure that does not reward those who go against the grain.

Alain: It's already happening (in institutions) - Shanghai rankings etc. Attributing research quality points to researchers would invoke strong reactions.

Jim: if you're a researcher, and you have a body of work that has never been downloaded, never visibly has been read or shown or cited, shouldn't we ask some questions about the value of your research?

Peter: is this Question Time or I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue? Points mean prizes! I don't in principle have a problem with awarding points, but the problem is the scale of the enterprise sitting behind this. A huge bureaucracy outweighs the benefit of the metric. The cost, in many senses, of playing this game, has become too much.

Richard "call me Dimbleby" Gedye and the Four Horses of the Research Quality Apocalypse

2010-04-14T10:02:00.005+02:00

We're not too thin on the ground for this morning's 9am session, which suggests either that the conference dinner was a washout (it wasn't, as witnessed by my slight queasiness and faint headache) or that this morning's session is big draw (it is - a new, Question-Time-style format for UKSG).

Jim Pringle from Thomson Reuters opens the show. We're talking about the value / quality of research, and the ways in which it can be measured. Jim suggests:

attention (citations, but also more generally)
aggregation (researcher -> institution, article -> journal)
relation (links, related content, metadata - lots of data stored around the institution can be useful in assessing researcher value / impact).

The Impact Factor is "foundational" in this space, and "will continue to be the touchstone for the evaluation of journals for a great deal of time to come." But the area is a "playground for mathematicians, these days". Eigenfactor, for example (network-based factors) consider the journals as a node in a network, and look at relationships between different journals. These metrics show different results, in part due to the way in which different citations are weighted. Normalised aggregates enable us to compare collections across disciplines, and are arguably more flexible / useful.

Tools are emerging that make use of metadata relationships (funders, co-authors, patents, etc) to more powerfully and accurately measure value. "But metrics are only as good as the people who use them, and can support judgements but should never be the sole ground for judgements."

COUNTER's Peter Shepherd walks us through PIRUS2, a project that is developing a standard for reporting usage at the individual article level. Journal-level metrics may not be representative of individual articles and therefore author, and citation data is not adequate for measuring some fields. The H-Index is author-centred but can be biased towards older researchers. Overall reliance on any one metric is misleading, and distorts author behaviour.

Article-level usage is becoming more relevant because:

more journal articles in repositories
interest from authors and funding agencies
online usage growing in credibility e.g. PLoS reporting, Knowledge Exchange
increased practicality - COUNTER, SUSHI

Challenges include the widespread distribution of articles - dispersed usage data to be captured. PIRUS aims to create guidelines for creating and consolidating article-level usage reports. Ongoing issues are technical (scaling previous work), organisational (underpinning business models), economic (allocating costs among stakeholders) and political (engaging stakeholders). Peter closes by quoting Joel Best - statistics are not magical, and need to be considered in context.

Alain Peyraube from CNRS picks up the baton, talking about the European Reference Index for the Humanities project. "We need appropriate tools (for measuring impact) or we are going to lose valuable grants." In the humanities in particular, such a methodology needs to address monographs, book chapters, edited volumes etc as well as journals. The ERIH steering committee took some time to set up the project, identifying which disciplines would be considered (lots of overlap with social sciences), selecting peer review as "the only practicable method of evaluation in basic research", setting up panels for each of 15 disciplines, providing guidelines and soliciting categorised lists of journals. The project suffered from considerable misunderstanding and criticism, especially from the UK scientific community, and particularly around the categorisation of journals. Both the panels and the journal lists have been revised since the project's inception.

Hugh Look takes the stage in a fabulous red blazer (Good Morning Campers!). Trying to attach numbers to things, says Hugh, is a difficult business - numeric targets are always open to abuse, and he points us to the LSE's Michael Power for a widespread analysis of this. What's the benefit of measuring - and who benefits? What are the underlying structures, and what behaviours do they engender? How strong is the link between measurements and real-world impact? We're not currently measuring performance or quality - we're setting up a structure of control, and this risks unproductive use of public money. "The managerial class are the primary beneficiaries of the measurement culture." They manage risk to the institution - but also the risk to themselves, so they use metrics to safeguard their own position / avoid bad PR, and coerce practitioners into compliance by making it part of annual reviews. There is a flight from judgement in the way that metrics are used. Managers cannot do peer review themselves, so they mistrust it.

Hugh acknowledges that measuring things can break "who you know" elitism, but both he and Peter referred to "fetishism" around statistics. Some organisations, e.g. the RAF, are stepping back from using metrics to assess research quality - a "dawning of common sense". Metrics divert attention away from "other things that are more useful to do" - "what aren't we doing?"

(Questions / floor discussion I will post separately, or I'll be verging on LiveSerials' longest posting).

Anti-acquisitions librarians in the era of economic downsizing

2010-04-14T09:53:00.002+02:00

Jill Emery started the perspective of the University of Texas Libraries with the comment that 'anti-acquisitions' isn't necessarily about cuts, it can be about core collection development, which is much more positive message. What's essential to the library service to keep in-house?

Jill posed a model of collection development based on four levels:

Core collections: essential, won't be cut (including some big deals ,when tied to consortia access)
Librarian selected content: small funds mostly based on endowment accounts and linked to specific subject areas
Patron selected content: mostly in the area of e-books at present, although also encompassing some rush print orders coming from the ILL request system
Print-on-demand content: as POD expands, this may become more of an option for supplying out of print content

Texas have also been developing “disapproval” plans, telling vendors actively what they don't want to buy, which is leading to a more granular selection of approval plan stock, and they are considering separating out approval plans and e-notifications (slip plans).

Book acquisitions are the target for a group of big US universities, who want patron driven purchasing of both print and electronic books. E-book vendors are on the whole nearly there, but it's further behind for print, although the fact that print is still coming out before the e-version in many cases means there still needs to be the option.

For patron driven acquisitions, there needs to be set thresholds for purchase and cost, and it also needs interoperable vendor systems and LMS (something which is improving). Texas' experience does show that brief MARC records are OK: they find that users manage to find books and reserve them before they've come in, even just from basic title and author information.

Texas held a pilot project on patron driven article access, but felt that the level of customization wasn't good enough to go further, eg in terms of branding and making sure it was clear access was provided by the university. Other US libraries have moved further in this direction.

Print on demand is “lurking in the background”: their campus bookshop has brought an Expresso book machine, primarily for textbooks, but it opens up new options. Texas are finding that even new books coming in on approval plans are starting to be print on demand copies.

Dana Walker from University of Georgia Libraries was unfortunately unable to attend the conference in person to present Georgia's work on journal management.

University of Georgia faced a significant budget shortfall in 2008, so were forced to re-negotiate some deals and bring in selective pay per view. They also looked closely at usage statistics data, cost per use, cancellation restrictions, ISI impact factors and aggregator availability for all subscriptions (a task complicated by the difficulties in matching ISSNs between usage data and subscription data, so they ended up with a “family” of ISSNs for each journal).

After the initial work, Georgia decided that they needed to create a web based application, more dynamic than spreadsheets, if it was to be used for on-going decision making. They created their own “journal list” bringing together data from multiple sources using WinPerl which allowed them to, eg, connect orders with cost data and usage data, jump to entries in OPAC and e-journals A-Z, produce alerts if journal is non-cancellable, link to ISI impact factors etc. Their next step was to add licence information. The Georgia “Journal list” is effectively a home-grown ERMS, but based around collection development needs, and making decisions about renewals and cancellations, rather than a focus solely on lifecycle management. Interestingly the university had previously purchased a commercial ERM, as part of a consortial deal, but never implemented it due to the time costs of populating it with data [!].

Life Scientists Go Online: collaboration, communication and credit

2010-04-13T23:42:00.005+02:00

Lucy Power at Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Following Tony Hirst’s talk on Network Ecology & the Knowledge Economy, Lucy Power took a look at the roots of scientific communication and linked early scientists’ sharing of marginalia to today’s potential version of the same collaboration – friendfeed.

Marginalia, making notes in the margin of books, was how our early scientists (or ‘Natural Philosophers’) communicated with each other and built on others’ research; sharing by posting their margin notes around the world, forming an ‘invisible college’. This actually continues in the present day, online.

Power is currently conducting research into the use of online tools by life scientists for their work and in particular is looking at friendfeed and also conducting interviews with the life science community. Friendfeed aggregates feeds from any number of sources – videos, images, blogs. The most common use is twitter and personal blogs but also posts directly to friendfeed itself. The main features include:

• The concept of liking. This is a very simple and instant way of giving a thumbs up to useful content, articles, data or images. Introduced by friendfeed and also adopted now by Facebook. One of Power’s interviewees liked the like button for “instant karma”.

• Commenting – just like marginalia, adding to and building upon others’ work. An interviewee liked the conversational aspect; that you can interact just as much as with the person sitting next to you in the lab.

• Sharing – feeding content to other groups within friendfeed. For example The Life Sciences group has about 1350 members and is very active.

The main use of friendfeed among The Life Scientists group is to discuss science and pose questions. They do their research first, they are not lazy; the questions are not necessarily being addressed elsewhere and can generate a lot of answers.

Power presents some examples of these researchers, through friendfeed, securing funding, getting published, and sharing ideas at conferences:

• One Chemist at Drexal University posted a quick query in August 2008. About 16 people ‘liked’ and some commented; one comment was from someone involved with Open Notebook Science. The researcher was able to announce by the November that he had secured funding.

• The same chemist said he had not met half of the people he collaborated with, everything happened online with friendfeed’s The Life Scientists group kicking it off but also helping to move it forward. He was able to be published. ‘Publishing’ might be informally through blogs, or though the formal sense in journals.

• Conference Reporting. During the Intelligent Systems for Microbiology ISMB 2008 conference, all hashtags from twitter, comments from friend feed were aggregated, written up and published. It was a summary of conference but also a ‘meta-conversation’ about microblogging and the use of it at conferences.

So linking the 17c sharing of marginalia to current sharing such as friendfeed - what are the benefits?

• It’s much faster – obviously!

• Network effects – serendipity, people have even found jobs thru the network. An interviewee also mentioned the connections they made with their information management & librarians (a lot of librarians were feeding their twitter thru to friendfeed). Also, cross-disciplinary connections were made.

• Informality – low barriers to entry.

• Openness – ideas are traceable from genesis to publication.

• Global distribution of discussion is quote astonishing – you can fire off a question before bed in one timezone, wake up and have lots of answers from around the world.

Not drawbacks but aspects to be managed:

• Field and disciplinary clashes/differences

• Work habits, managing time

• Information selection – filtering the volume – the disadvantages of scale)

• Ephemeral – no formal archiving – of concern to the community – how can we preserve this and keep it. Still needs to be solved.

Questions:

Q: With all the talk of social discussion and blogs evolving into journal articles, it was interesting to note that both examples used by Lucy Power were open access articles.

Power: getting into Nature would be the ultimate aim, if they think they might have half a chance, but yes a few people did say that they seek to publish in open access journals first.

Q: Is it no longer critical to publish in journals if the way in which reputation building is changing?

Tony Hirst: a lot of young researchers don’t feel they can just go for informal publishing as they don’t have an established rep yet. I was publishing five years ago but stopped – all my conversations take place online and through conferences, all real-time.

Q: What will be the role of librarian in all this?

Hirst: There are lots of tools for processing information and RSS feeds. One important thing is for librarians to get involved in building tools (e.g. yahoo pipes) for processing rss feeds or to build apps that help curate and aggregate.

Dorothea Salo: search for librarian groups on friendfeed too e.g. the LSW room/group – they really communicate with each other there. It can also be a great marketing tool so do just try it out.

EDIT: view Lucy's slides (PDF)

A big long list of cool social tools to check out. Thanks Tony Hirst!

2010-04-13T17:27:00.009+02:00

Charlie Rapple introduced the fourth plenary session - this one on Researchers' Social Behaviour - by announcing an experiment to take questions via Twitter.

Audience members (and those following remotely) sent questions to @UKSG and it appeared to me to be the most efficient Q&A session so far at the conference. Perhaps the size and formality of the Pentland Auditorium has discouraged some in-person questions via roving mic, and the virtual posing of questions within a 140 character limit was less daunting and more considered?

Network ecology and the knowledge economy: why researchers need to get online and social.

Tony Hirst, Open University.

Tony gave a super-speedy rundown of what social tools are out there and being used by scientists. He showed examples of the many methods by which researchers are engaging online, how they are creating objects that are themselves social, and how publishers could embrace this.

Hirst started by setting the scene of the traditional environment where if you don’t publish, you are no one. Metrics such as the h-Index give an indication of an individual author’s reputation based on how embedded their formally-published work is within other articles, known as the citation network.

These days, citations are also being generated informally (particularly in the physics field):

• An example of this is Nature Precedings, a forum for scientists to discuss preliminary findings pre-publication.

• Researchblogging.org has had good exposure with it’s (at least) fourth plenary mention at UKSG 2010; it allows blogs to be linked back to cited articles in a well-defined way so that cited articles can be informed by the discussion, and vice versa.

• PostRank is a look at social activity around blog posts e.g. # views, # comments, # backlinks, # friendfeed shares, # votes.

• F1000 allows academics to filter content, generating post ranks even before those articles become cited. Quite a formal social network essentially providing ‘pre-citation ratings’.

So whole networks of discussion are being built around an article.

Increasingly, these social networks drive how work can be discovered. Google search engine originally was different because of pagerank to determine how important a page was. But this is just one factor for them now. If you have a google acc, all your google searches are logged – now they customise results based on your previous use of results.

Social content is very connected – you can associate your google profile with e.g. your twitter account and so info such as ‘who you follow’ is used to inform what results you get from google. So your results are really yours, including for example results from people you follow on twitter. Social info is being mined heavily and it’s therefore very important to nurture and curate one’s social circle (true too in real life ;-)) and choose your friends wisely as you’re making a public declaration of who you are and what you like.

A brief warning about the risk of ‘deanonymisation’ where thought-to-be anonymous data could be tracked to individuals. For examples Netflix (for dvd rentals) released information from a competition and someone managed to identify some of the borrowers based on their borrowing behaviour, and patterns of their searches. This will be an issue with the release of govt data. BUT these fears should not prevent people from releasing data.

There are some services that do filtering for you such as ResearchGate which is kind of a facebook for researchers where you can recommend a friend in similar area.

How can publishers learn from these networks?

Participate in the conversation. Some people think twitter is a toy for the kids – not necessarily a good opinion. Twitter can be used to identify projects, to relate projects, crystallise work, to discover people at and during an event, for example Hirst created a ‘Hashtag Community’ for this #uksg conference. Also...

• Tweets can be used to automate captions on YouTube.

• Jiscri (JISC Rapid Innovation programme) - generating references for only a small element, paragraph or dataset of the full article

• Gapminder – set up different datasets

• Embedded video is increasingly popular on third party sites

• Many eyes – generate visualisations and support commenting around the data and embed in your own publications.

• Wolfram has introduced the idea of ‘living documents’.

• Tagging means that users are generating metadata for us

• Contribute back to the community – we saw yesterday how the BBC is using Wikipedia to populate their site, using its information but also contributing and enhancing Wikipedia in the reciprocally. The Chemistry community is also doing that – a CAS-number on a Wikipedia articles mean that the community has vetted it.

• Look at trails like Tesco does with its clubcard. Google gives us trails to follow for its advertising. And follows you – it remembers where you’ve been based on where you’ve mean. Leave trails on del.icio.us, Slideshare etc.

• Utilise and integrate with academic citation sites like mendeley and zotero.

• Use Yahoo’s pipes to aggregate and mashup the web’s content

Publishers can get as much value as they want from this.

Questions from Twitter & Audience:

Q: You’ve shown a lot of social networking sites and tools, how do we keep all our networks up to date?

Hirst: Through proactivity. Every so often prune your twitter network – remove people who don’t tweet or only Re-tweet what you already know. Cull them.

Q: You talked about a lot of services but didn’t include your own opinion on some quite contentious subjects; on the subject of personalised searches, do you think it is a good thing to have google filter out results based on your past behaviour? Not just the privacy issue but what if you want stuff want the wider world, influences you haven’t come across or wouldn’t normally consult. Does it need an ‘unrecommend’ button?

Hirst: There is a danger yes but your networks are your own to cultivate so you can shape what you see. People in networks are also in other networks and these scale very quickly. But sure, I subscribe to things that are tangential to my work and want to see alternative opinions to mine, I strongly believe in serendipitous discovery. When you build networks you take responsibility.

Q: With all these sites can you recommend a good password keeper!?

Hirst: I don’t trust them and have actually developed my own algorithm which wouldn’t be wise to share with you all!

EDIT: view Tony's slides on SlideShare

Maximising use of library resources

2010-04-13T14:22:00.003+02:00

Sue White and Graham Stone, from the University of Huddersfield, were presenting a two phase project (although they emphasised that it's still a work in progress)

Phase 1: Looking at low/no use users
Phase 2: Linking use to student attainment, looking for evidence of impact and value, connected to the University Teaching and Learning Strategy

They identified three main indicators of use:

Access to e-resources, via log-ins to MetaLib (as they can see who users are, which isn't trackable in other usage statistics)
Book loans, through Horizon LMS circulation statistics
Access to library, through gate entry statistics at the main campus library which identifies students via their ID cards

The results were sobering: figures for zero use are high, even in Schools perceived as 'good' library users.

They then matched usage data with the student record system (SITS) in order to get complete data for two cohorts of students on 3 year courses. More statistical analysis of data is needed but it suggests a clear correlation between MetaLib logins and books borrowed, and degree classification, across all Schools. There was no correlation with gate entry figures, however, which may be been due to complicating factors like an extensive refurbishment programme and the location of other student services within library building.

The project team have done more detailed analysis of 15 'low use' courses, focused on 3 year undergraduate courses delivered on main campus, and excluding courses with less than 35 students (to avoid the possibility of identifying individuals).

The results still suggest a consistent link between e-resource use, book borrowing and student attainment, across all disciplines. There are outliers, like students who have obtained firsts but didn't appear to be library users, and some courses don't follow the pattern eg where degree classification is influenced by book borrowing but not e-resource use. This raises some interesting questions: are e-resources not relevant to the course? is the tutor not advising them to use e-resources? have they bought the right e-resources? do users know about them? are students using Google to go straight to the e-resources, bypassing MetaLib?

This kind of project does raise some issues so Huddersfield's advice was:

Politically sensitive topic to investigate, beware offending tutors
Important to have support from senior management of university
Identify academic 'champions'
Need to acknowledge subject differences: there may be pedagogic reasons why some courses do not use resources the way a library might like
Not cause and effect relationship: not a case of 'borrow more books and get a better degree'
Be honest about findings eg university spent a lot of money on refurbishing the library but gate counts don't correlate with attainment

Hudderfield's academic librarians now have a mandate to go out to the Schools, to explore reasons for non/low usage on specific courses and develop an action plan. The action plans will cover:

course profiling
raising tutor/student awareness with targeted promotion
reviewing the induction process
embedded information skills training at point of need
targeting resource allocation (both information resources and staffing)

They will produce an Annual Resource Statement each year with Schools, laying out what % budget will be spent on books, journals etc, a list of resources to be cancelled/renewed/started each year. Progress will then be reviewed annually.

More information is available via the University's repository

[This session was also a useful complement to the discussion about metrics and return on investment raised by Carol Tenopir in the second plenary session on "Economics of Scholarly Information", which focused more on the library's impact on research and in particular grant income]

Looking for Semantic Meaning

2010-04-13T12:34:00.002+02:00

Richard Padley is very much aware that the semantic web can be a confusing area of computer acronyms and complex concepts, and he aims to make it easier for us. He starts by describing the web as something that has been built by humans for humans. The semantic web seeks to add value by creating machine readable data.

Facts cannot be copyrighted, and this is a fundamental concept at the heart of the semantic web. Making facts openly available in a machine readable format opens up a huge amount of potential for a variety of applications. However, the concept of trust is really important here - where did that fact come from, and is it a reliable source?

There is nothing particularly formal about open data at the moment. Although standardisation is going on, most of the work is growing up from roots by people exposing and then experimenting with data.

The 'linked' part of linked data is the 'genius' part of the open data movement, using web addresses as identifiers to allow you to link to any concept without having to redefine it in your work.

Open data can help solve the fragile schema problem. With a traditional database, any change to the core information can cause major disruption including the need to communicate the changes, test the changes, make sure that everyone who is reliant on that data is able to update with breaking. By pulling data in realtime from a variety of resources that effectively manage changes to information, these changes are managed 'on the fly' allowing knowledge to be effectively repurposed.

Richard demonstrates how two pieces of text can be analysed using inference to answer questions. By taking one paper that describes the factual properties of 'needles' and 'hay', and a second paper that describes the process of attracting needles using steel, a computer can answer the question 'how do i find a needle in a haystack?'.

One of the problems faced by publishers is that we still work using the metaphor of paper within academic publishing such as having page references that reflect the print world in an online presentation. Publisher platforms are also silos, making linking data across systems impossible. This means users have to develop ever more sophisticated searching skills to cope with the silos. Linked data could take that searching requirement away.

The challenge to publishers is how to change in order to make the best use of linked data, moving beyond the paper metaphor and moving outside the bundaries of their silos. It is time to wake up and start experimenting.

Finally, Monty Python and the Holy Grail can show us how flawed facts can corrupt linked data.

In Support of Open Access, Jill Russell, University of Birmingham

2010-04-13T12:21:00.002+02:00

Despite all of the excitement about open research and the possibilities of the semantic web, the “dead document is still the main unit of currency at most universities” says Jill Russell from the University of Birmingham, who is here to give an overview of her institution’s project to encourage its researchers to publish in open access publications.

Take-up of the green OA route (publishing in a subscription journal but depositing the article in the university’s institutional repository) has been typically slow at Birmingham, and there is a lot of confusion among researchers about what open access publishing - especially the green model - actually is. Gold open access (paying a publication fee so that the article is published as freely available to all) is better understood, and researchers are more willing to pay for the immediate publication that gold provides.

Russell and her colleagues ran a pilot project to communicate with grant holders and grant applicants to encourage them to budget for publishing costs as part of their research projects, and to offer administrative support. They identified the top funders and their policies on OA, focussing mainly on STM where OA already has more of a foothold. Throughout the project they were careful to stress that their researchers still had the choice to publish where they wished, OA or not.

The pilot quickly showed that they had underestimated costs, with the average publication fee being £1500, double their initial estimate of £700. Birmingham’s researchers publish between 3500 and 4000 papers a year, so publication fees to make them all OA would amount to £5 million annually. The budget is £120,000. From September 2009 to March 2010, twenty five articles were funded for gold OA by funding by a combination of Wellcome, MRC and EPSRC.

Birmingham has taken institutional memberships to BioMedCentral, PLoS and Nucleic Acids Research from OUP.

Researchers don’t care about the journal’s business model, just its profile. Articles have to be in PubMed, but many researchers not sure of difference between PubMedCentral and PubMed. The majority of top fifty journals in which University of Birmingham researchers publish do have some kind of OA policy, however many of these policies are extremely unclear, vary vastly from publisher to publisher and sometimes don’t make a great deal of sense (Russell gave an example where paying for gold OA didn’t allow them to deposit the article in their own IR). Publishers really need to make their OA policies clear.

Russell summarised by saying that OA fees are rising rapidly, but subscription fees are falling slowly, so they are not seeing any savings at the moment. If Birmingham were to switch to a complete OA model it would only benefit if publication fees were set at a maximum of £1000 per article.

EDIT: view Jill Russell's slides (PDF)

Perception of the Big Deal one year on (Monday PM)

2010-04-13T12:05:00.003+02:00

Jill Taylor Roe had her work cut out running a discussion-based workshop in the not very intimate surroundings in the Pentland Auditorium. She started by presenting plenty of evidence that budget pressures are starting to bite.

A survey of Nesli colleagues showed a rough 50/50 split between those happy and unhappy with big deals. Those unhappy complained about

lack of options in adding/excluding content
increased costs
hard to find money for non big deals

An ALPSP 2009 survey showed high renewal rates for big deals, but cancellations and downgrades to subject clusters were starting to increase. A CIBER survey from 2009

The Economic Downturn and Libraries [pdf] noted that academic libraries expect to reduce budgets and reduce spending on information resources, going beyond efficiency savings into real cuts.

From a UK perspective, currency rates have improved since last Jan/Feb, and so far libraries generally haven't cancelled big deals. Some publishers have shown sensitivity in terms of zero price increases, but librarians' wish list of improvements still haven't been met (eg deals not based on historical print spend, easier to switch to e-only, more flexibility).

There are still hard times ahead: library budgets are at best static (meaning cuts in real terms) whereas Swets are forecasting 5% increases in journal costs on average. Many people in the room felt that 2010 was better than expected but 2011 may be a worse year, certainly in the UK, as one-off funding and emergency measures come to an end.

Were any solutions offered during the discussion?

Agents/intermediaries may be in a position to help both sides, especially where there are language/cultural differences between publishers and libraries
The library community needs to send price messages to publishers in same way consumers do: are they willing to walk away from deals, and force re-negotiation of terms?
Is Open Access an answer? Libraries are paying out to publishers on both sides at the moment, and take up of open access for the biggest STM publishers is still tiny compared to overall costs
Would wholesale migration to e-only reduce library operating costs in a significant way? Only up to a point, since eventually print processing is minimised and as much as possible switched to e-only. Necessary staff for managing e-resources tend to be at a higher level compared to print, not to mention that budget for staff and resources are often in separate pots and libraries cannot use one to pay for the other.

What's the one thing which participants thought would make things easier?

UK libraries negotiating jointly like Scandinavia, Germany etc, and as SHEDL are doing in Scotland.
Most people don't want to see big deals abolished but they need to be smaller and more flexible.
Would document delivery models be an answer? They would have to be financially viable. Pay per view has proved to be more expensive than individual subscriptions and big deals in many cases.
Zero VAT on electronic books/journals would help (although others felt that an overall increase in VAT was a more likely scenario)

It was obvious from the discussion that there wasn't a straightforward answer, and also noticeable that although there were many vocal librarians, there weren't many voices in the room representing the major STM publishers.

Developing new models for OA monographs

2010-04-13T10:33:00.003+02:00

Monograph sales have been declining since the '70s, says Eelco Ferwerda, Amsterdam University Press / OAPEN. One impact of this is that there are fewer outlets for authors, which can make it harder for some to get started in publishing. Open access monographs will benefit all stakeholders; increasing authors' visibilities and impact; enabling researchers to search and make connections across platforms.

In most cases, OA monograph presses' business models cannot sustain them alone - they are subsidised e.g. by grants or institutional support. Business models include value added services and separate editions (one of which can be charged for). The OAPEN project is developing an OA publication model to improve accessibility and impact, create an OA library, engage stakeholders in the publication process, develop common funding models and standards, and build a platform that can shared with other presses. The project is broadly aimed at academic publishers in the humanities and social sciences, and hopes to create a network around a changing business model - the network already includes publishers of all shapes and sizes, old and new, commercial and NFP. "There is a lot of interest in the idea."

OAPEN's publication model will be a hybrid model - a free web version but also paid-for versions e.g. for specific ebook platforms. Authors will retain copyright, and the monograph's long-term availability will be assured both by the platform that is being developed and by an arrangement with the Dutch National Library. The model requires payment of publication fees - by research funders or institutions. "The library is already spending money on books, making choices between print and e-books, and thinking about open access models. Greco and Wharton suggest that libraries should use their existing acquisition budgets to fund open access publishing instead of buying books." Institutions should pay for OA to ensure effective dissemination and unrestricted access, to advance the spread of knowledge, and to ensure publication of peer-reviewed research results - because not all manuscripts that pass peer review are published, for economic reasons - which is a barrier to entry for young researchers.

OA books are a collaboration between publishers and funders. But how do you calculate the costs, particularly if you are creating a separate, paid-for print version? Ferwerda argues for only including basic marketing as part of the free e-book costs [will authors benefit sufficiently from / be happy with this lower level of service? In my experience many expect / hope that publishers will run glossy publicity campaigns for their books!]

Key OAPEN recommendations include HE institutes establishing dedicated budgets to which researchers can apply for publication funds. Next steps include a pilot to get funders on board; conversations are underway with organisations including JISC. Interested parties can join the OAPEN network - oapen.org.

Roadblocks and what not to do

2010-04-13T10:02:00.004+02:00

"Who owns our work?" - simple words but a vexed question, says Dorothea Salo of the University of Wisconsin. Whose work are we referring to? Lots of people are involved in creating journal articles. There's no one owner, but lots of stakeholders. And the "who" might not be a "who" but a "what". But Dorothea's ultimate point is that, in protecting our various roles in 'creating' 'work', we must avoid putting roadblocks in the path of the work's ultimate goal - usage. (All this talk of roadblocks is pretty apt, given the state of Edinburgh's roads while they work towards an access-friendly tram system...)

Credit where it's due
Researchers are keen to keep ownership of their work to ensure their ideas are protected. But even at this embryonic stage of the publication process, lots of other people are involved in the work - research assistants and lab partners and so on. These people look not for monetary compensation but for credit in the form of prestige. Author lists are a blunt tool for addressing this, so publishers are involved in trying to solve the problem even though it starts way before they become a part of the process. Publishers are perceived as having a "hold on career credit and career prestige" that needs to be broken.

Different stakeholders
The early 'content' that researchers create - conference presentations, for example - are indisputably owned by them, since publishers, librarians etc have not had a role at this point. In open notebook science, the online posting of lab notebooks (methods, equipment lists, preliminary data etc), people are 'publishing' and claiming ownership of their content much earlier in the process. Dorothea warns publishers who plan to extend their services to include research data to be careful how they claim ownership of this. There are many more stakeholders in the process, who want to do different things with research results - peer reviewers, funders etc. "But ownership is only a proxy for what these people really want." The researcher establishes primacy over his ideas by publishing them, and doesn't generally mind relinquishing ownership to the publisher - but in doing so he can start to prevent others from reusing his work. Publishers feel that they should be paid for the work they contribute to the process, but libraries and their users should be able to [use content for learning] without fear of a lawsuit.

Funders are primarily interested in impact, and may also be keen to encourage wider access to the research they fund. Are they doing enough to help researchers achieve the level of ownership they seek? Publishers and libraries conflict over "appropriate ownership in the copies that we purchase", and digital preservation is a key issue here. Librarians are starting to get more radical in their expectations. "Learn to engage in public, online, on these issues." says Dorothea. "Don't use proxies, don't use sock pockets .. don't use private email and don't use workplace chains of command. It will look like you have something to hide, and are trying to intimidate your protractors."

Changing expectations
"Being a roadblock is a poor business model." Librarians are instinctive gatekeepers but "our patrons do not want us getting in their way." The same is true of publishers: when you use ownership rights to get in the way of access and reuse, you're damaging your own brands. There are beginning to be other options for content distribution (repositories, OA publishing), and "closing off access is going to become a liability for publishers who want to make arguments about impact and prestige."

Dorothea's slides and notes are on Slideshare

Plenary session 2: Economics of Scholarly Information

2010-04-12T19:14:00.005+02:00

Ted Bergstrom
Big Deals and the Terrible Fix

Ted started by describing librarians' “shopping problems"

Delegation: Librarians are making choices for consumers who aren't spending their own money – 'the university' pays
Unreliable signals: Arguments for subscriptions are fervid but not always reliable
Complexity: Libraries face all or nothing complex deals, and when there are large numbers of titles covering 100+ disciplines, who can say what it's worth?
Monopoly: Journals represent price inelastic demand, i.e. demand doesn't vary according to price (much like the prescription drug industry)

The first big deals entailed a publisher (roughly speaking) working out the library's current spend, multiplying by a factor, and then offering e-access to all content in addition to the print for existing subscriptions.

How effective was this? Very, since the publisher knows that the library is willing to pay at least same as they did for their paper subscriptions, and giving them additional content costs the publisher nothing. Bundling works well from a seller's perspective: demand for bundles varies less than individual titles, and deters entry to the market by making it hard to add new competing journals. And of course, by the time the deal expires, the faculty are addicted to online access so the library has to negotiate a new deal.

Ted then gave the audience an economic prescription: namely, if you want to allocate resources efficiently, use a price system where users pay for what they get out of their own money, and therefore economise, ie a pay per view model. If informed users spend their own money on downloads, demand becomes more price elastic, monopolists are forced to cut prices, and authors prefer to publish in reasonably priced journals in order to get more readers.

Does it work for academics? Ask yourself: who else is better placed to decide value of article access?

Currently there's a big discrepancy between the average cost of a non-profit and for-profit article. The competition prediction suggests that if users pay, it would drive down prices to just over cost-price. There could be limited role of central purchase, where libraries could subscribe to journals which cost no more than 1.5 times as much as the average non-profit journals and allow their users free access.

What can one library do?

Consider dropping big deal subscriptions to overpriced journals
Maintain subscriptions to reasonably priced journals, at zero cost to end users
Subsidise user-pays models (not to their full cost though)

Marybeth Manning
Reset: a publisher's response to the changing economy

SPIE have taken the “unusual” step of reducing institutional subscription prices to their Digital Library by 10%, because they believed there would be sustained impact on scholarly publishing from changing publishing models and economic crises.

SPIE are a not for profit international society for optics and photonics: their Digital Library contains journals, conference proceedings and books. The subscription model is tiered (with different criteria for academic, government and corporate customers) and was originally based on print pricing.

Their objective is optimal dissemination of information, but it must be sustainable: a balance of reach and revenues. SPIE decided that their tier model was acceptable and understood, but penalised smaller institutions or large institutions with few relevant programmes. Corporations preferred price per use, and overall the cost per use for low tiers too high. Combined with environmental factors (the global economic crisis) they decided on overall price reductions on full DL subscriptions and topical segments (not including consortia or single subscriptions). They also added a 5th tier for the smallest organisations, and allowed introductory discounts to enable institutions to test interest. So far renewal levels have stayed strong, and they have good levels of new business, especially in lower tiers.

Does it apply to wider community?
SPIE wanted to shift their business model rather than have it shifted for them by factors outside their control, and believe that market growth and user demand will support reduced prices in future. They “want to be seen as part of the solution not the problem”.

But does this affect anything when big deals/mega publishers are so dominant? If libraries won't vote with their feet (or with their £) then who is to blame?

Carol Tenopir
University investments in the library: measuring the return

How does the library demonstrate its value to the university and its scholarship?
How can value be measured?

implicit value – downloads, usage
explicit value – testimonials, researchers' purpose in using library services
derived values – Return on Investment (ROI)

Derived measures: A way to show that the library contributes to the income generating activity of the university ie for every £ spent on the library, the university received £ in return. One way is to look at money spent on collections and then money coming back in grants.

Grant cycle => conduct research – write articles – write reports and proposals – obtain grants – conduct research etc. Libraries have already been connected to all steps aside from obtaining grants: this is key unknown.

University of Illinois did a phase 1 study funded by Elsevier which found $4.38 grant income for each $1 invested in the library (based on the % of faculty who rated citations in proposals as important in their success x % of proposals funded/library budget). Their findings have been published in a white paper.

Phase 2 expanded the methodology from phase 1 across 8 institutions in 8 countries – does it still apply? (But remember that ROI numbers do not tell the full story)

Library ROIs fell into three distinct tiers:

STM research institutions: up to 15.5 to 1
Research/teaching institutions STM/Humanities/Social Sciences: up to 3.4 to 1 (most common category)
Research and teaching all disciplines, not so much emphasis on external funding: less than 1 to 1

The project also did surveys of faculty about importance of citations and amount of reading, collected comments from faculty on use and importance of e-collections, and did interviews with university administration. They found lots of positive comments about value of e-resources in research, teaching, scholarship eg facilitates interdisciplinary work, better productivity.

Universities' administration staff also said they wanted the library to help them:

attract/retain outstanding faculty (studies have shown a relationship between reading more library resources, publishing more, getting more grants: typical profile of 'star' faculty members)
foster innovative research (bearing in mind that the number of articles cited will be much lower than those read)
build research reputation of institution (some cases have shown positive relationship between library funding and amount of successful grants)
promote seamless integration of the library with institutional research activities (some studies have shown a positive relationship between article downloads and research productivity)

Phase 3 (LibValue project) will be looking at more complex areas of library's value to teaching/learning, and social/professional activities. ARL will be involved in disseminating tools and measures. They recognise that they also need to look at new scholarly endeavours – e-science, collaborative scholarship, institutional repositories.

Conclusion

It's possible to tie library e-collections to faculty productivity
Libraries help generate grants income
ROI for grants varies according to the mission and location of university
Value can be measured in many ways

Breakout: Article-level Metrics at PLoS.

2010-04-12T16:43:00.002+02:00

Peter Binfield’s breakout session explored the ways in which PLoS are tracking alternatives to the journal-level impact factor. The quality of a journal as implied by its impact factor doesn’t always reflect the quality of every article in that journal; article-level metrics give a more granular, specific, and perhaps appropriate way to measure the impact of content. PLoS has 20,000 published articles across 7 journals, and all of these articles have published metrics.

PLoS are tracking much more than citations. As well as article downloads they are collecting social bookmarking data, ratings from readers, links from blogs. And they are publishing all of the data collected alongside the articles on their site. Their mission, as Peter explains, is to find all commentary relating to an article no matter where it occurs, to bring it back to the article and let the reader use it. In addition to providing a measurement, pulling all of this data together improves discoverability as users can navigate not just through citations but also comments, ratings, blog mentions, etc.

Peter showed a PLoS One article and the various stats that can be accessed by clicking on the “Metrics” tab above the HTML article. In addition to citations via CrossRef and Scopus, bookmarks from CiteULike and Connotea can be viewed and followed, users can apply a one to five star rating, and leave comments (15-20% of PLoS articles receive comments, which is apparently fairly high among publishers). There are also links to blog coverage, and the raw metrics data can be downloaded as an XML file if you want to do your own analysis.

After a heavy period of internal development, integrating with third party APIs to collect data has been relatively straightforward, and the DOI as article identifier ties it all together in PLoS’s ALM database

There is a lack of benchmarks on article-level metrics, although PLoS provides a user guide to help readers interpret the data. Feedback from authors has been very positive, with academics much preferring ALM to Impact Factor.

This is a work in progress at PLoS. Binfield hopes to see additional data added, including expert reviews from Faculty of 1000, media coverage (very hard to track as it rarely links to the actual article), Twitter mentions, etc. Usage data from IRs isn’t counted: an API for PubMedCentral data would be useful, for example. Standards should be developed (NISO? CrossRef?). There’s also the case for author-level metrics and institution-level metrics.

In response to a question from the audience, Binfield said that PLoS had not had any negative feedback from authors or editorial boards.

For the best view of what PLoS are doing in this area, I’d very much recommend that you go and take a look at it for yourself.

What can be done about The Big Deal?

2010-04-12T15:48:00.004+02:00

Jill-Taylor Roe of Newcastle University led a breakout discussion entitled "Is the party really over now? Perceptions of the Big Deal one year on". Unfortunately I joined toward the end but did just catch this summary question: What one thing could be changed to solve the issues associated with the Big Deal? Many representatives from both library, agent, and publisher sides contributed to form the following answers:

• UK libraries should come together and actually negotiate with publishers as a national consortium. Scotland do have SHEDL which has been very successful and could be expanded to cover the rest of the UK.
• Perhaps move away from a subscription model and look at more of a doc delivery model. Sums would have to stack up but it’s not ruled out.
• Why is there a tax on digital information but not on print? We could stand together - publishers and libraries - to lobby the government to reduce tax.
• Usage-based pricing is not used enough but it’s very staff intensive to really analyse the data. Something for the wish-list.
• Librarians should just say no to big deals, be business negotiators and not just content collectors.

Simplifying e-book acquisition at the University of Surrey

2010-04-12T14:32:00.005+02:00

Kate Price, standing in for colleague Laura Smithson, described to us the re-engineering of the University of Surrey's e-book acquisitions process.

Background
U Surrey is quite innovation / research oriented so spends a lot of money on e-resources - mostly e-journals. They have about 90,000 e-books at the moment - another 100,000 if you count Early English Books Online.

650 purchased in the last year
2500 purchased individually (!! - surprising to me) - these usually come from the same funds as a printed book
Packages are usually funded from the same funds as databases

Experiences of e-books
Kate asked us all to discuss our e-book experiences with our neighbours. I chatted with a sales rep from Gale who talked about the difficulties relating to multiple different e-book platforms, and the relevance of different levels of technology penetration. Kate recaptured our attention by asking us to shout out about things we had learned that had surprised us: nothing had! We are all struggling with the same issues.

She then asked us to discuss e-book ordering processes, before quizzing us about whether we found these satisfactory ... no-one did.

Changing processes
In the past, e-book acquisitions at Surrey were strangely paper-oriented and encompassed a number of delays. With budgets being squeezed, re-engineering was necessary to introduce efficiencies - using an aggregator to reduce the number of places to search. Crucially, the aggregator shares pricing upfront, and ordering / fulfilment via EDI means that data is on the LMS from the outset, saving much time and effort.

Liaison librarians can log in to locate and mark the book up for ordering (essentially, adding titles to a shopping cart)
the acquisitions staff will then log in to process the orders, either as batches or (when urgent) as standalone orders
the data is then output as a spreadsheet (and the user can select which fields this should contain) for import into the LMS
each item will appear as "not yet active - item is on order", so that users know access is imminent.

The LMS is a crucial part of the chain, through which orders are made and paid. "We print off the invoice as proof of purchase, because we don't trust e-books to stay there." The ordering, receipting, quality checking processes now take about 2 hours per week for 25 e-books.

[Surrey uses Coutts Oasis and Talis Prism but points out (true BBC style) that "other EDI order suppliers and LMS systems are available".]

Top tips and checklists
Kate (or perhaps Laura) has put together handouts with checklists; tips include:

ask your e-book supplier to match your current stock against their available e-books when you start building your e-book collection, and get them to notify you when an e-book is available for a print book that you order - particularly good to do this for e.g. short-loan collections
training, training, training - help sheets, screenshots, get the supplier in - ensure staff are familiar with the system
establish workflows that suit your set up
give everyone their own login (this can help to ensure e.g. they use the correct fund codes, as these can be configured only to appear for certain people)
test, test, test
integrate e-book ordering into the normal workflow - not something different or new
establish processes e.g. quality checking, usage statistics, wishlists, customer support

"We'd like a lot more e-books to be published!"
Next steps for Surrey include

embedding procedures for purchasing from non-EDI-enabled publishers
introducing paperless processes for print book purchasing
agreeing policy on purchasing e-versions
patron-driven purchasing?

Future improvements Surrey would like to see include:

Improved online selection and ordering
Improved availability of e-books
Easier login to individual titles
Better mobile useability
Reduced DRM
Better understanding of learning needs e.g. multiple downloads, flipping pages, copying - "they need to do all of these things to learn effectively. Why publish an academic work if they can't use it do what they need to do?"

JUSP the Thing

2010-04-12T14:28:00.005+02:00

Attending a session with the word JISC in the title is probably cheating a bit for me, but the JISC Usage Statistics Portal is something I have wanted to learn more about for a while as we think about making better use of authentication statistics for the UK federation.

Ross MacIntyre has been thinking about usage statistics since 2000. The same questions are still be asked: 'what is usage?', 'what do you want information on?', 'what is your holy grail?' - although the underlying standards have moved forward significantly with the development of COUNTER and SUSHI.

The Usage Statistics Portal is looking to provide aggregated usage statistics for Nesli2 journal deals - representing over 6000 journal titles. It is currently very tedious for librarians to gather these statistics from the various providers involved in Nesli2, despite good coverage of COUNTER provision. The Portal aims to solve this problem.

The Portal aims to provide the following to libraries:

Single point of access to own usage statistics;
Monthly figures presented in both academic and calendar years;
Adition where relevant of gateway / aggregator statistics;
Usage of current collections with backfiles removed;
Assistance with SCONUL statistical returm;
Trend analysis, high usage titles, publisher summaries etc.

An important factor to note is that a '0' usage title is not regarded by participants in the pilot as a 'worthless' title, but one where the potential of the resource has not been realised. This may demonstrate a requirement for more internal communication with departments, for example.

The Portal also allows institutions to benchmark journal usage against other institutional responses. A big question around this is the issue of whether this data should be anonymised and whether publishers would be unhappy about non-anonymised data being shown. This will be dictated by confidentiality clauses in current licences.

Some of the outstanding issues to be dealt with beyond the pilot are the need for widespread adoption of COUNTER R3 compliance, the need for machine readable sources for publisher price lists, and the need for better subject categorisation of journals.

Finally, the code is being made available open source so it is hoped that this will be available to lots of other institutions and consortia - something I am sure many of my federation colleagues in other countries will be interested in!

Plenary 1: Technology and Change, Richard Wallis

2010-04-12T13:05:00.005+02:00

“Libraries have always been at the leading edge of technology” says Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist from Talis, as he shows us some photos of very early OPAC systems, many times removed from the modern day library website. To further illustrate the changes of the past several decades he shows us a calculator from the 1970s, whose £39.95 price is the equivalent of £400 today, but whose functionality is now a free app on almost any electronic device you care to name.

The information industry is all about helping people to find things and linking students to the resources that they need. We need to rethink how we do this, bringing the information directly to the user, in the format that they want. There should be no need to bounce the user via resolvers and multiple URLs to a site that eventually proclaims “Here it is!”. It should just be delivered.

Getting users to the answers they need can be done via search (searching the OPAC or more likely Googling) but answers can also be computed (WolframAlpha) or navigated to. All of these methods rely on metadata. Librarians and metadata, Wallis points out, go back a long way, but there’s still a way to go. Library metadata for the most part is “built on principles that worked for physical stuff” and is more often than not only available from the library. This metadata can be made more useful.

And so to Linked Data, which, put simply, identifies things, links to those things and describes those things. The four principles of Linked Data are

Use URIs as names for things
Use HTTP URIs so people can look them up
When someone looks up a URI provide useful info about the thing, in the right format (for human or machine consumption)
Provide links to the URIs of other things to aid navigation.

To show some examples of Linked Data Wallis bravely attempts - and pulls off - a web demo. He shows us education.data.gov.uk, a semantic store of data about UK schools, and BBC Wildlife, which pulls in its descriptions of animals from Wikipedia.

What about libraries? Some are experimenting in Linked Data - the Library of Congress, National Library of Sweden, for example, so we’re seeing the start of library linking hubs. But we need to go further. Library linking hubs should link to non-library hubs (government data, the internet movie database, many other resources) and the library catalogue should become a set of links between concepts, become part of the Linked Data web.

The drivers for this evolution are not likely to be local cataloguers. Metadata for e-resources needs to be good and needs to delivered with the resource. Article level metadata can’t be catalogued, there’s just too much. But it is being aggregated (by CrossRef, for example). As this metadata gets better we’ll start to see non-library hubs linking to library data.

In summary, technology is evolving extremely quickly, and consumers are driving delivery methods - “get it to me on my device”. Education needs to link students to resources and search is only one way of doing this. Linked Data is powering the web but mostly outside of libraries, and libraries and publishers need to catch up.

“You can add great value to the web, but you need to be proactively of the web to do it. They won’t come just because you build it.”

See the slides here.

Bringing data alive - democratising information

2010-04-12T12:59:00.008+02:00

Computation has come of age, says Conrad Wolfram, changing how we represent knowledge, and how authors and readers interact, quite dramatically - changing what 'publishing' constitutes, and what comprises both human and computer 'knowledge'.

Linguistic analysis and computational knowledge
Conrad starts with a quick initial demonstration of Wolfram Alpha (WA), the computational knowledge engine launched last year. He describes how WA picks apart a question ("what was the weather like when Gordon Brown was born?"), interpreting it mathematically to find and collate answers. He demonstrates other searches with ambiguous terms, to show how it uses context to interpret terms in different ways (Brown as a person or a colour; Wolfram as the name of a person or an element). WA linguistically processes and pattern-matches input to create symbolic expressions that represent our query computationally. (Lots of librarians at Wolfram apparently!) The query is matched by scanners to the available data, and the matched elements are combined and rendered together as your answer. (Or, um, something broadly like that.)

Changing role of human experts
Lots of organisations are involved in making knowledge computable - content providers, curation services and so on. These won't become unnecessary - we will need them *more*, to add the automated layer - but their expertise will become broader. (He's not specifically talking about librarians, or publishers, but to me this reflects exactly how all our roles are changing).

Research apps: visualising, not describing, science
WA is one window onto a much bigger project. It is built on four pillars: linguistic analysis (algorithms), curated data (30 trillion pieces, mixture of manual and automated curation), dynamic computation, computed presentation (a bigger deal than you'd think - how to make a document live - issues such as layout, when you don't know what kind of data you'll be rendering). The team is currently working to mesh documents and applications - very separate concepts for most people, but apps are "one of the best ways to communicate technical ideas - the roles of authors and readers need to change to a bidirectional flow, a much more interactive process than reading a journal article." Conrad shows a document with an in-built app that is rendering the data for user manipulation. You can describe science, but building an app into a journal article makes it much more powerful - easier to engage and understand. "The author has set up a workspace, and I'm driving through that workspace" - improving what Conrad calls the "bandwidth of communication" between authors and readers. (Having played with Conrad's iPad briefly this morning, I can suddenly see the wonderful potential of research apps).

Live textbooks
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is a 'knowledge apps' site where people post apps designed for communication. "What's exciting is the idea of what's here for other publishing ventures:" Later this year, Wolfram will be pulling together several of its technologies to create a "computable document format" - open, interactive, supported by solid publisher workflow, making development and deployment easy - "to finally have active stuff happening in textbooks, scientific journals". This same approach will see apps rendered as part of WA results, so that you can manipulate and engage with the data it returns - "not a dead document but an application that is live, unique".

Democratising information application
"The web has democratised information retrieval outstandingly successfully; the challenge now is democratising its application so that people can actually use it, with the help of automation." Examples include government assets - not just putting the knowledge out there, but making it open and useable. "Useable increasingly means computational" - governments are spending $3bn annually on research, with just flat papers as output ("low bandwidth"). "There are much richer ways to do it - we don't have to be stuck in the Newtonian age."

Conclusions

Knowledge is now available - the question is to make it accessible.
The semantic web isn't enough - we need to make it computable.
Value used to be in based knowledge, base content. Now it's in active workspaces, workflows for authors distribution models, compelling interfaces for knowledge.

Learn more!
9th June - one day conference - London Computational Knowledge Summit.

How blogs can drive scientific progress

2010-04-12T12:23:00.004+02:00

Adam Bly opens by thanking the Tweeters for keeping him in touch with the conference. Adam, you see, is in New York. We're in Edinburgh. Virtual speakers: a first for UKSG.

Distributing, managing, sharing, visualising data
Adam will speak around the issue of how we can ensure that we are constantly updating and refining our first principles and our technologies in a landscape that is constantly evolving. He illustrates changes in science by showing a picture of the large hadron collider. "It's a reminder of how science has become increasingly global, with dozens of countries (even those in current geopolitical conflict) coming together to collaborate." These huge, global, multidisciplinary collaborations require new approaches to distributing and managing data. Scientists must not only produce, but find new approaches to sharing and visualising, data.

"Open science is what will drive the most profound and robust advancements in the future, and will ensure that science has the greatest potential to affect society for the better."

Adam says we have a social responsibility to make research as available as possible to the world - to scientists, and researchers, across borders - and ensure that the technology that does this doesn't impede progress. (It's nice to hear someone make this argument about the core data, not the finished article - I think the former is much more valuable to progressing research, and doesn't devalue what publishers add.) The challenge is not whether open science is good or bad, but how it becomes scaleable, sustainable and simple to adopt. We need purpose-built software and environments for researchers, so that this extraordinarily valuable community is not spending its time on IT but is instead discovering the next great cure.

Starting over on scientific communications
We need to bed four first principles into this reboot of the system:

Digital core - we've been moving online for years, and will continue to do so. But if the core isn't fundamentally digital, then we just end up hacking solutions around the edge, and can't create the kind of intelligence that a truly digital core for research promises.
Free flow of information - economic growth is tied to the abundance of scientific information, and we're on track to increasingly free flow.
Standards and interoperability - to ensure that as projects progress they can be tied together, so individual scientists are not navigating through disconnected and redundant applications, but bringing disparate pieces together.
Knowledge from information - using tools like data visualisation to see realtime changes and extract knowledge.

ResearchBlogging
Adam uses the example of the ResearchBlogging platform, which enables scientists to communicate with each other and the public, using the simple, open blog as a medium. Scientists can easily tag posts so that they can be syndicated to appropriate outlets. It helps ensure that they are contributing to the scholarly record, and that their work and dialogue are being seen more widely than hitherto (journal clubs etc). He shows an example of a ResearchBlogging feed in the PLoS One site - conversations relating to published papers being immediately syndicated back to the source.

Value of blogs in tracking, funding and planning science research
Some researchers in the Netherlands have done the first bibliometric / webometric study of blogging in science, and have used ResearchBlogging as the subject. They found that blogs are more immediate than traditional academic discourse, and are more contextually relevant than academic literature. They focus on the implications of science. This kind of study enables us to understand where discussions around the web are focussed, to better understand the movements of science and direct policy-making and funding.

And so it begins ...

2010-04-09T17:49:00.003+02:00

Welcome back to LiveSerials where another year of UKSG conference blogging is about to begin. This year's team consists of:

Bernie Folan, SAGE
Bev Acreman, BioMedCentral
Charlie Rapple, TBI Communications
Frances Machell, University of Wolverhampton
Ginny Hendricks, Ardent Marketing
Kirsty Meddings, CrossRef
Mark O'Loughlin, SAGE
Nadine Edwards, University of Greenwich
Nicole Harris, JISC
Todd Carpenter, NISO

We hope there'll also be lots of useful Tweeting via @uksg (for the pseudo-official view) and #uksg (for the wider view, including occasional thoughts about the UK School Games). There'll be an experiment with taking questions via Twitter during Tuesday afternoon's plenary session on researcher behaviour. No doubt we'll be reporting back right here about how well that goes.

Blogging the UKSG conference can be rewarding in many ways but it's also a lot of hard work. If you're reading this, or any of our forthcoming posts, please do share your thoughts and appreciation with comments to keep us all going!

See you (really or virtually) in Edinburgh!

Call for bloggers!

2010-03-29T16:45:00.002+02:00

We are seeking volunteers to help blog the UKSG's 2010 annual conference here on LiveSerials.

What you need:

A Google account - these are easy to obtain if you don't yet have one and are willing to register.
A willingness to take notes during sessions and to write these up either in realtime in later.

What you don't need:

A laptop. It is fine for reports to be posted after the event.
Previous blogging experience. The LiveSerials blog is based on the Blogger software which is simple and intuitive to use; other members of the blogging team will be available to provide support if necessary.

If you would like to volunteer, please contact me with your Gmail address and details of the plenary and breakout sessions that you plan to attend.

To review previous UKSG conference blogs, see:

N.B. We'll also be Tweeting at @uksg and The Twitter / Blogger hash tag for this year's conference will be simply #UKSG.

Calling for New Editors for Serials

2010-01-19T14:19:00.008+01:00

Long-standing Serials editors, Hazel Woodward (Cranfield University) and Helen Henderson (Ringgold) are planning on retiring at the end of the current volume in 2010. Consequently, UKSG is looking for expressions of interest for new co-Editors to step up to the plate and continue building on the legacy that they have established over the last decade.

Deadline is Feb 12th, and more information can be found here: http://www.uksg.org/serials/neweditors

You can get more information about the journal itself here: http://www.uksg.org/serials or at http://uksg.metapress.com (for details on the content). You could also email me if you would like further information before making an approach to UKSG in the first instance - bev.acreman@biomedcentral.com .

It's a great opportunity and would suit people who are dynamic, well connected and well travelled. Much like Hazel and Helen!

New Transfer email announcement list and blog

2009-10-02T10:57:00.001+02:00

The Transfer project, an initiative of UKSG, is pleased to announce a new email list and blog for announcements about journal transfers between publishers.

Interested parties can join the discussion list to receive and post information about transfers. List membership is not limited to those publishers who have publicly announced Transfer
endorsement, although we do still encourage all publishers to sign up to the code.

Announcements on the list will also be syndicated to our new Transfer blog. More information about post etiquette for both the discussion list and the blog can be found on the Transfer website.

More information about the Transfer project and Code of Practice can be found at www.uksg.org/transfer.

Twitter: waste of time or worth it?

2009-05-05T15:00:00.004+02:00

Back in March, at the start of UKSG's annual conference, Todd Carpenter of NISO wrote this interesting LiveSerials posting about Twitter and how it is used during conferences.

Today this subject is raised again by CrossRef's Kirsty Meddings, writing the editorial in the latest edition of Serials-eNews, UKSG's news bulletin. (Note that access to Serials-eNews is usually an exclusive benefit for UKSG members but all being well you should get access to this article by following this link - let us know if you have any problems!).

Both pieces are useful in helping to explain why Twitter is gaining such traction in our community, and both are generally in favour of Twitter as a channel for sharing resources and building relationships during conferences. Do you agree? what about using Twitter outside of the conference centre - are publishers, libraries and others in our sector putting it to good use, or wasting their time?

UKSG has set up its own Twitter channel, @uksg, and encouraged usage of the #uksg09 hashtag during the conference. Are we right to be exploring this medium? What more could or should we be doing? We're interested to know your thoughts so please do discuss via comments or trackbacks (or on Twitter! - #uksg).

Save the date: 33rd UKSG Annual Conference

2009-05-01T17:40:00.000+02:00

A quick note to remind you that next year's UKSG Annual Conference will be held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre from 12-14 April 2010. Please stick the date in your diary and be sure to join us there!

A Wordle to represent UKSG 2009

2009-04-30T12:58:00.002+02:00

Here's a nice Wordle of LiveSerials postings from the 2009 UKSG annual conference. I think it sums up UKSG's focus quite nicely, although I'm surprised at how small "publishers" and "publishing" have ended up.

UKSG Research - please send us your views!

2009-04-28T12:13:00.000+02:00

We recently surveyed delegates at UKSG's 2009 conference in Torquay to find out more about them, what they thought and what they needed from the organisation. We would welcome your input into this discussion. The survey should not take longer than ten minutes and all feedback is valuable.

Tell us what you think

Presentations from the conference now on the website

2009-04-24T19:25:00.002+02:00

A quick note to let you know that presentations from the conference are now available on the UKSG website:

Keep an eye out for further retrospective reports of the conference coming soon to LiveSerials.

Evolving role of the institutional repository breakout

2009-04-03T13:19:00.005+02:00

I attended an interesting breakout session on the evolving role of the institutional repository in promoting library research support. Garret McMahon provided background about the Research Support System developed at Trinity College Dublin. The RSS is a web-based service allowing research staff to generate CVs and a researcher’s profile from information provided about their research activity. It is fully integrated with complementary systems in the university such as human resources and pushes information out to other services and systems including the institutional repository TARA. The research staff need only enter their publication and research activities once and the information is pushed out internally and externally.

Jessica Eustace, one of 4 Research Support Librarians outlined the kinds of strategies she employed to embed herself into the research process. For postgraduates she offers:

• Specialist training days on database tips and tricks
• Going into labs and assisting researchers on a one-to-one basis
• Drop-in sessions for Endnote queries

For principal investigators she provides:
• Researcher profiling
• Assisted deposit into the IR
• One-to-one training on using the RSS and IR

Both the RSS and institutional repository are promoted by newsletters and bulletins but it is advocacy at the level of individual researchers that has paid the most dividends in that the Research Support Librarian is seen to actively to engage with researchers and their needs. Embedding herself into the workflow for research profiling adds value to the RSS and provides a fuller picture of research activity while promoting output via the institutional repository. Not all institutions have the benefit of the kind of integrated system available at Trinity but getting into schools, faculties and departments and improving dialogue with researchers is a vital first step to understanding their needs and working towards a more holistic approach to improve library support for research. Institutional repositories have created additional work but have enabled librarians to assist in promoting research at our institutions. By adapting our role to meet evolving needs we can help to prevent librarians from becoming irrelevant which in Joseph Janes’ view is the greatest threat to the profession.

We-think: perking us up at the close

2009-04-01T15:19:00.001+02:00

Most people are fumbling around in the fog of social networking - thinking they're making progress without being able to measure this. Very few businesses can be sure of their business model in 5-10 years time (I'm pleased to say he thinks we can bet on Glastonbury's model being the same in 10 years' time. A nice opp for me to post my UKSGlastonbury picture - who'da thunk it).

Newspapers are haemorrhaging revenues and facing the disruption of the web - everyone is looking for new business models. But even what we might class as the key players in the social web (Facebook, Twitter) don't really have strategic business models.

Where should we look for answers? Consumer culture, organisation, business models and ethnic/social values - and the changes all are undergoing. Not so long ago, the web was classed as a passing fad - and some (Andrew Keen et al) still rail against it. A "growing clamour of voices" is starting to see the potential but also the downsides (of malware etc - the web ain't entirely a friendly place). Scary stories about mash-ups in Moscow designed to enable more successful harrassment (of .. ethnic groups?).

Consumer culture
Look at people, and what they want to do. Young scientists are a sign of what research needs to become - open access databases, electronic lab notebooks, open source software - "new collaborative models of interdisciplinary research". Then there's Charlie's 9-year-old son. During one hour of what we would have had to spend watching Songs of Praise, Charlie's son can learn animation on a Sunday night. He likes online social experiences and activities including drawing, photography and Garage Band. He weaves successfully (obliviously) between old and new media. Talk -- do -- sit -- listen -- enjoy: this new culture paradigm requires different offers and business models from our media.

Organisations
Time was, big boulders on the media beach were BBC, FT - bringing out new boulders such as Channel 4, News International was a major mission. Now, media is owned by the users and made up of thousands of "pebbles that threaten to swamp the boulders". "From now on, all new businesses will have to be in the pebble space ... creating and connecting pebbles." There will be "boulder businesses" but they'll be even bigger than before; "in between will be lots of people trying to connect pebbles and boulders". The British Library is a boulder trying to operate in the pebble world; Twitter is a pebble trying to work out its business model.

Business models
We are all trying to find new ways to make money out of information and media. "The language we have inherited from industrial era media disable us from working out what these might be." The notion of media and mediator is old-fashioned; the boundaries are blurred. Charlie hopes for "mutual media" - created by people contributing to media in shared ownership. It's not just publishing, broadcasting (enjoy); it's about enjoy -- talk -- do. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are commercial media businesses in the making; Mumsnet, Wikipedia and the Student Room are social media businesses; the BBC will become a public media business - the British Library faces this same challenge. At the core of all these mutual media businesses is the need to make money while allowing users to generate and share beyond your control. The media businesses of the future will have large communities and small companies, and will require a completely different set of skills.

Values
Alongside this will be "a huge contest about values". It's remarkable that we still refer to the internet as a single thing. It's a "ramshackle organisation" with roots in a "hippie culture" and not in corporations or governments - "which is why they find it so hard to deal with". The internet has a different way of thinking. This is starting to become apparent - challenges to Facebook's privacy policies or Google's dominance.

Roadmap for survival
Organisations used to be about doing for people and, in the process, to people - schools, banks, newspapers. The web is about 'with' - working with, learning with, talking with. "The logic of with" is the key to engaging with users to create a roadmap for navigating the social fog.

21st Century Library: a whole new ballgame

2009-04-01T13:56:00.000+02:00

Team presentation from Graham Stone & Helle Lauriesen. [full disclosure -showed up 10 minutes late]

Early adopters of e-resource managers bought multiple systems that often overlapped on e-resource management. Numerous A-Z provisions for example & now trying to move beyond the status quo.

Biggest problem is the mishmash of administration & finding it unattenable as staff cuts occur.

Trying to enhance the user experience as well as save administrative costs.

CIBER looking at extensive deep log analysis but this won't work if the library has too many knowledgebases in play.

Statistics gathering also harder across multiple systems. The end goal is to wed deep log analysis with statistics to show usage across disciplines.

Users so not have a clear & compelling place to start their research. The OPAC is limited by structure based on print concepts: books, journals, cds, etc.

Lists are an inefficient way to provide access into article level & data retrieval. Federated searching still too clunky for end-users to embrace.

Need a one-stop shop approach. Looked at ERMs solutions & discovery tools. Looked at ten possibilities. Some of these are still in beta. The question is to ask which system will get you where you want to go. Not an evolution of what's come before but a revolution of becoming truly e-resource centric.

Make all resources discoverable thru the building of a complete digital presence. Where possible make the library entry page easy & simple.

Look at what you want to achieve & cut out duplication that results in increase user satisfaction & better control of resources overall. Don't let the market dictate what you need but make the decisions determining your needs first. Then play with the interoperability of the systems that help reach these goals. In all of it keep affordability in mind & determine what you cannot afford to invest in.

Accessibility is not an option but a necessity. Duplication of efforts are not feasible & do we need to de-aggregate & re-create silos in order to provide better discovery?

Question: what about open-access, repository access, & ILL needs?

Can possibly add in local repositories but not necessary global ones-depends on the system.

Question#2: Can you add in all campus resources?

In some cases but then the tool becomes truly an IT solution not necessary a library tool.

Last question was about functionality of federated search?

Federated search is not a tool that panned out in a way that truly answers students needs.

Cocktails the Morning After

2009-04-01T13:17:00.005+02:00

Slawomir Gorniak's title of Security at the Cocktail Party will probably be a bad reminder for many of the delegates who were at the conference dinner last night :-) His focus on social networking as an identity management system is an interesting topic for a conference where engaging with the user has been raised as a key issue through all the presentations.

He highlights that Social Networks can create great business benefits through increasing interactivity. Those twittering throughout the conference would agree on this point I think, and I have been happy to make new contacts with several key publishers through tweets.

Social Networking also lets you know your user - there is lots of information about users available but issues of personal data protection need to be considered. Controls for protecting information are important.

At the moment, social networking is proving to be a bad identity management system in lots of ways - users aren't good at thinking about the consequences, such as answering a quiz saying that you have been arrested in the past and openly publish on Facebook - this will damage your career prospects. It happens in professional networks as well, such as inappropriate disclosure of information on LinkedIn profiles. In a trial, 41% of randomly selected profiles on Facebook were willing to make friends with a plastic frog (fake profile)

The value of social networking is not in the tools, it is in the personal data and the ability to profile people for advertising. The sector is currently estimated to be worth $15 billion. Making the tools more secure is not in the interest of the tool providers, but there is a need to break data monopolies to improve privacy and security. What is the business model? Some of the big players have started to embrace data portability - such as Google Friend which is based on identity and access management standards (however Facebook would not particpate in Google Friend).

We need to create clear corporate policies on social network usage and consider both your personal and professional needs when using the networking sites. This is something we have raised several times over on the JAM blog.

Social Networking is like the Hotel California, you can check out but you can never leave. Nipon Das, New York Times.

Talking to the students about user behaviour

2009-04-01T13:04:00.002+02:00

During questions following Clare Duddy's session, Clare notes that she:
* prefers not to set up "My accounts" on multiple resource platforms. "I prefer to take the information away from you [with social bookmarking or bibliographic reference manager]".
* doesn't use Facebook for information needs - "it's purely social - and so last year - I've moved away from doing any [social networking]". If there's a pre-existing community of users, it can work for a library to engage with them there but you won't create a community that's not there just by putting yourself on Facebook. "It's just one more thing to log in to".
* exchanges information with other students using email and Google Documents.
* likes facets for search but "it requires a lot of getting used to ... and sometimes they're a bit off".
* "doesn't really" use instant messenger - "my mum uses it". In fact, "I know a lot of people whose mums are on Facebook and it's another driver for the Facebook exodus".
* "cannot for the life of me see the point" of Twitter.
* is into RSS - "my whole life is ruled by my reader". Uses RSS over email alerts "just because it's easier".
* is writing her dissertation about next-generation catalogues and tagging ("the fact that hardly anyone wants to tag in the library catalogue .. but I love it"). People don't have the sense (in social tagging) that they're contributing to a pool of information for use by others - they think all tags are individual and will take care to distinguish their tags from others'.
* might want to receive information through mobile phones in future but dependent on how phones evolve - "if it was really cheap and really good".
* "I read on screen a lot more now than I used to when I was an undergraduate, maybe because I can't afford to print anything out. I don't mind it as much now I have a nicer computer with a nicer screen for reading on."

Google and Librarians: why it shouldn't be us and them

2009-04-01T13:03:00.003+02:00

In preparing to speak to us today .. Clare Duddy did some Googling. In Google's browser. She warns us upfront, in case we hadn't clocked, that she's pro-Google.

Clare is a Masters student at London Met university who won a UKSG competition to present her views on information discovery in the Google generation. I am torn between wishing that I'd had an opportunity like this when I was a student, and thinking how petrifying it must be to present to an audience of professionals eager to hear your views. Clare tells us she's nervous but proceeds to speak confidently and knowledgeably on a subject that while familiar to us all, still holds surprises.

Us and them
Clare already works part time at Oxford University libraries as an electronic journals assistant. Interestingly, she sees the "us and them" of the information world as librarians vs Google (not, as some of the other UKSG delegates might see it, as librarians vs publishers). Between her work and her thesis, Clare spends a lot of time looking for information. "I've been online for more than half of my life, and search engines were already prevalent by the time I started my academic career - I've never had to find information without them." She quotes a friend: "Google is an extension of my memory - I don't have to keep facts in my head."

Finding information
There is a new balance in education as we keep up with emerging technologies. Google has 63% share of the search engine market (13.5bn searches in the US in Jan 09); OCLC research shows that 89% of college students start searches on search engines and Clare confirms it's her first port of call for all her information needs from academic to social. It's a known known. Perhaps less known is that the same research shows only 1% of users starting their search in an online database.

The Google generation
The Google generation is not defined by an age group but by a demographic - "always connected"; multi-tasking; computer literate. Clare says we might also see this group as "impatient, gullible and lazy" - taking the first result they find in a search engine and giving librarians sleepless nights. As we know, the main problems with using search engines as our point of entry to research are:

Material not indexed
* deep web
* access controlled
* non-linked
* robot-excluded
* non-HTML
* no static URL)
Despite this, Google has value - it highlights "informal literature" - the non-traditional materials that other library resources don't surface so effectively, if at all. Through Google Scholar you can filter your search to authoritative content, and the Library Links program enables libraries to direct users to licensed content. And because of Google's power and influence, they drive exposure and sensible structuring of content (e.g. Harvard has redesigned its website to expose its digital collections more effectively; National Libraries of Australia have created stable URLs and metadata for individual items in their image collection). There is a sense that we overestimate what you can't find, and underestimate the value of what you can find.

Quality of material online
"Democratic" (user-generated) publishing - famously exemplified by Wikipedia - concerns librarians and publishers, the gatekeepers of authoritative content. But Wikipedia's advantage is its breadth - over 2.7 million entries in comparison to Oxford Reference Online's 1.3 million (yes, there could be an apples and oranges issue here). "We have to assume that we can't control the web or impose our authority on it any kind of comprehensive way", so how do we manage our response to what we find? With "a pinch of salt"; the widespread news coverage of Wikipedia's flaws, and our own knowledge of how simply we can publish what we want, helps us understand that not everything we find can be trusted. Librarians spend a lot of time already training users about the quirks of different online resources; why not include Google and Wikipedia (etc) in that training.

Deskilling search
Clare recalls a lecturer harking back to the glory days where "users were not allowed near the computers and had to use a librarian to find information", but "librarians are no longer required in that role" - they feel displaced; is their reticence about broad search resources based on frustration? There is a context in which "one-box" search engines are in fact the best way to find something. But still users have need of more complex search interfaces and despite their fondness for simplicity they do recognise the value of more sophisticated search.

Conclusion
"Young people today need to be educated to use these tools properly, just as we had to be taught to use a library and book properly in the past". We shouldn't assume there is one Google generation with one set of characteristics - users are still a complex group with varying needs. It can only be helpful for us to acknowledge the place of Google in our users' lives and to help grow their understanding of this tool in the context of the other tools we offer.

(see next post for question and answer session revealing more of Clare's online behaviour)

Coda: Clare's presentation was excellent - not only interesting and well-informed in terms of the material covered but ably and compellingly presented. The feedback about this session has already been overwhelmingly positive and we'll definitely be thinking about how to follow up with more user input at next year's conference.

Consortia: not flaky, but unique

2009-04-01T11:03:00.005+02:00

Kathy Perry reminds us that library consortia are not new; libraries have been cooperating for more than a hundred years (1876 - ALA committee on cooperation in indexing and cataloguing college libraries, and cooperative purchasing "expedition" started in 1913!) Since then, statewide consortia have sprung up - Ohio broke the mould by getting (new) state monies for this in 1987. ICOLC has been meeting twice annually since 1996 and now comprises 211 consortia representing over 5000 libraries, with particular growth outside the US in the last 10 years. Kathy quotes Merryll Penson (Galileo): "consortia are like snowflakes"; not flaky - "unique". Most have very low staffing and rely on volunteers.

Priorities are changing for consortia - tasks that wouldn't even have been on the radar some years ago are now among the top priorities - training, digital initiatives, next generation catalogues. Budgets are a problem here as everywhere - when asked how they are addressing this, one respondent to Kathy's recent survey said "Prayer". Tom Sanville, OhioLINK guru commented that "Flat is the new 'up'." Curiously, "negotiating contracts" is given as a 'new' priority - I don't understand how this wasn't already a priority for consortia! I was pleased to know that "advocacy / marketing" is a growing aspect of consortia's budget management - I think measurable end user engagement and traffic will be key to justifying and growing budgets ongoing (later, in the context of training, Kathy talked more about "justifying our value to our decision makers"). Very few consortia have research projects and very few are working together on issues related to archival storage of print collections.

During questions, Peter Burnhill suggested that a lot of information discovery, retrieval and usage is happening outside the library - between peers in both formal and informal contexts. How can libraries and consortia engage with this? Kathy's initial thoughts: this is why libraries and consortia are prioritising next-gen catalogues, to "more readily reflect the world as we know it". We're also working with products like Zotero to help researchers collaborate in a way that reflects not just scholarly publications but web-based materials and conversations. Libraries are trying to engage at this level. Jill Taylor-Roe adds comments from the OA perspective - we're managing a lot of the OA payments to publishers that we're also licensing big deals from, and there should be some synergies in managing the fiscal movements in a more cohesive and efficient way. Hugh Look notes the skills shortfall in this area and the lack of guidance. We need more investment in these skills that would be transferrable to many other areas.

Responding to change in scholarly communications: fight, face-off, fix and faff

2009-04-01T10:27:00.006+02:00

Hugh Looks tells a long and amusing story about a minor train crash he was in as a child to indicate that despite the serious global threats that circulate in the world, it's often smaller more mundane problems that really derail us. Publishers are under pressure at the moment to sustain their margins and other divisions within their parent companies are also suffering, and unable to provide any support at this crucial time. We don't fully know the shape of tomorrow's pressures, though continuing economic uncertainty will be a shared problem and changes in research and education will have a growing impact, particularly as students become more demanding. Current developments will continue to change the shape of scholarly communications (OA etc).

Responding to threats

Fight - lobby - consult - become indignant.
Flight - sell (who to?) - close.
Face-off - pretend it's not happening; ignore the problems.
Fix - big deal, better terms, enhanced products
Follow - accept that alternatives are needed
Faff - make small changes without a real strategy.

So far we have witnessed a combination of fight, face-off, fix... and faff. The only real solutions are follow and fix. Fixing requires us to make it more attractive for people to stick with the existing model - super-consortia, increased big deal flexibility - creating efficiencies that allow reduced costs without lower margins. Follow (stay in the business, accept alternatives are needed) requires further changes to pricing models, with redistributed functions and costs (e.g. author pays).

There are 3 places where value is created and costs are managed in a networked business.

At the periphery (libraries operate here) - close to the user with specialist expertise.
At the core - where the shared infrastructure and expertise is (where the researchers are).
In the middle - the distribution part - which is always most vulnerable to commoditisation, and is a hard position to defend. Libraries are partly here, as are publishers.

Alternative models that could be considered at the periphery include advertising and sponsorship - not a good market for this just now. We could take a leaf out of the mobile phone pricing market where pricing is comparatively low but with caps on usage.

There are no simple answers
The issues are all about transition - many of these models could work, and the problem is the disruption involved in getting there. None of us really understand how that's going to work, and it can only be managed on a system-wide basis (it can't be managed by individual entities). It may not even be a solvable problem. Potentially we're part way through a long cycle and we don't yet understand the beginning and end of it. We have to live with high levels of uncertainty which will lead to a lot more short-term Face-off (a great shame - waste of time and energy) and more Fix (because we haven't yet worked out what the Follow strategy is). "Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens" (Schiller - against stupidity, the Gods themselves struggle in vain) - deeply and painfully true, and at the root of most of our problems. We are only going to work this out with a lot of communication and some serious applied intelligence - there are no simple answers.

During questions, John Cox points out that it's very difficult for us to communicate well and to act as a system because of anti-trust laws. The only way out is for libraries to decide what they will demand of publishers and see what the response is. John also raised the idea of a telecoms style subscription model for scholarly publishing. I think it was Peter Burnhill who then noted the gap between funding for research and funding for libraries which have not risen commensurately.

Plenary presentation summary: Journal Spend, use and research outcomes: A UK perspective on Value for Money. Presented by: Ian Rowlands, CIBER

2009-04-01T02:57:00.006+02:00

During the second plenary session on Tuesday during UKSG, Mr. Rowlands presented some preliminary data from part of Research Information Network funded research project. He is halfway through project and will be continuing into next year. There are some very interesting visualization tools to explore the data online.

There has been an unprecedented growth in access to journal material over the past decade as content has moved from print to electronic. However, it is critical to assess the impact of the increase in access and availability of content has had in past decade. Has this increase in access led to higher productivity and more innovative research?

In exploring the research outcomes, Rowlands is looking at many quantifiable criteria, including: Number of Counter downloads, # of Phds, # of grants, institutional spending patterns, and deep log analysis in a variety of disciplines.

It should come as little surprise to the community that the transition from print to electronic publication is nearly complete. 96.1% of science journals are online and 88.5% of arts and humanities journals are online. In 2007, the academic community spent £80 million on e-journal licenses. Collectively those purchases have yielded more than102 million downloads or 0.80 £ per download.

There has been tremendous end-user take up of these resources. The number of downloads doubled from 2004 to 2007. This represents a 21.7% per annum growth in downloads over that period. The core proposition of providing online articles is “very popular” among researchers.

There has also been a rapid increase of number of journals available at an average institution. The average number of titles per researchers is up from just above 4 to just below 8. {TC – Given the present economic environment it is likely these figures will decrease in the coming year, but it certainly will remain at a higher average level.}

Citation analysis is showing that users are drawing more sources, and including more references per paper. The use of navigation and discovery tools, increased access, has created a situation where research is now more deeply founded in previous work.

University administrations are looking for clear and compelling justifications for the continued expense of information purchases and Mr. Rowlands thinks that compelling information is now available.

This change of availability has impacted the information seeking behavior of end-users. It is not surprising that Google is the “librarians friend”. Many Researchers are using gateways, such as Google, Pubmed, etc. to get access to content. Examples of the increase of traffic abound. One OUP Journals saw a two-fold increase in journal uses as an effect of opening up their content to Google.

The access provided by online content is also having a profound impact on resource use. The convenience of 24 X 7 access is tremendous. 17% of activity is taking place on weekends and the “Working day is growing” with 1/3 of activity taking place outside of “normal office hours” of 9:00am – 5:00pm. This access was more difficult in a print-based world.

However questions remain about whether efficient search is the same as or necessarily yields successful research? There is a strong negative correlation between research rating of the scientists in institutions and the average session length on Science Direct. The most “successful researchers” were the group spending the least amount of time online with content. Trends pointed to the fact that the most successful researchers use gateways. Much more search activity is taking place outside the library, typically on services like Pubmed, Google, and Google Scholar.

There were natural clustering of intensive use and the figures for the differences between moderate, high and super users correlated significantly with outputs such as the numbers of papers produced, the amount of grants funds received and the number of PhD’s the institution produces. In addition, while the average cost per download is consistent across institution, the more active the institution the less per article the institution paid.

Mr. Rowlands stressed that these data merely show associations not causation. Nor does the data show any directionality. Is it that a lot of research creates demand for lots of information, or is it that research institutions, put things together and in place for research, which therefore impacts results.

The next stage of this research will look at historical information. Among the topics to be explored is what are linkages between products, spending and outcomes? He is working to produce a computer model, that shows, for example, scenarios what the increase in the number of titles and/or downloads might have on research outcomes.

The initial information points to the fact that downloads and research outputs are like “gears on a bicycle” that move in tandem. As one gear gets bigger, the faster the other gear turns. Although one needs to understand the causality question, the understanding of the fact of the connection is a useful addition to knowledge about assessment and performance measurement.

{NB Disclaimer: Much of this summary is verbatim and/or paraphrased from the Mr. Rowlands talk – very little in this post is interpreted and should not be credited to me. Apologies to Mr. Rowlands for any errors.}

Survival of the fittest: big deals at risk of extinction

2009-03-31T17:41:00.004+02:00

Lucky Jill Taylor-Roe has a relatively healthy-sized audience for her graveyard slot at 9am the morning after the conference dinner. She wakes us up with a bit of the Byrds as she posits her theme: to every thing, there is a season. Jill is talking about change in the context of the Big Deal.

Background
In the early days of the Big Deal, the purchase model was based on maintained print spend plus an additional e-access fee that provided access to (almost) all of a publisher's collection. In the period since, Big Deals have been hugely advantageous, with a huge growth in full text downloads (Newcastle's Library is at around 1.5m downloads per year) and a huge drop in ILL and photocopying. NESLi Big Deals have become the major supply model for acquiring new journals.

Problems
But libraries are still not able to buy everything that is requested; in some subject areas (in Newcastle's case it's engineering and the humanities) new titles are not forthcoming because they are not available via any big deals - and the big deals are taking up the lion's share of the budget. This means the collection is compromised - and things will not improve as the credit crunch impacts the value of sterling against the currencies in which most journals are bought (the Euro and the dollar). Libraries are already having to ask for additional funds simply to maintain the current portfolio. In this context we need to reconsider the value of the big deal.

Research findings
Jill has been researching librarians' views of the big deal - early results show some obvious findings e.g. that the big deal simplifies administration and reduces ILL spend. But there is frustration with the limitations (cancellations) and the impact of titles moving publisher. There is a sense that the pricing model, based on retained print spend, is no longer satisfactory. Some are still happy with the big deal, but up to a third have cancelled big deals recently - due to budget pressures caused by currency weakness, in the newer cases - a challenge that will not go away.

Current solutions
In terms of managing the shortfall (median - £100k per annum), many librarians have been cutting the book budget. This is in direct contravention of stated student demand for more textbooks and leaves libraries open to poor ratings from students. Only one library noted that they were making up shortfall with a reserve fund set up for this purpose.

Future challenges
The VAT issue remains and while the recent cut to 15% has helped to moderate the effect of currency fluctuations, this is only a short term benefit - and there's a fee it will be raised to a higher rate than the original 17.5%.

The economic problems we face are not short term. In 2010 and beyond, libraries still plan to raid the book fund but will also tackle the serials fund. Jill's research shows an increase in plans to cut big deals, which will "no longer be sacrosanct". This is driven by other factors beyond currency fluctuations - budgets not keeping up with inflation, growing dissatisfaction with pricing models, an awareness that the books budget cannot be raided indefinitely.

Next steps
Jill's survey is ongoing and further results will become available but it is clear that inflexible deals that don't offer value for money will be vulnerable. Publishers must not bury their heads in the sand but acknowledge the warning signs and "think seriously about this - don't be complacent - there are hard times ahead for all of us and survival of the fittest is not just an empty phrase".

Library marketing: a strategic approach to an interactive library experience

2009-03-31T17:03:00.004+02:00

Olin College of Engineering is a young college (last ten years) set up to bring more hands-on training, entrepreneurial spirit, cross-disciplinary learning and design concepts into engineering education. Students are a diverse group with a range of talents beyond their academic excellence. Dee Magnoni is its Library Directory with some background in advertising.

The interactive library: escaping temporal exhaustion
Olin's library is not huge but Dee believes that you learn by more than just reading and writing; the interactive collections reflect this. The library is a 24/7 space to escape "temporal exhaustion" (when we're too busy to pause and contemplate, our creativity suffers). The small staff at Olin doesn't sit behind a desk. The virtual collection is much larger and deeper than the physical collection. The library is full of games (chess), modelling kits and other interactive "realia" to encourage creativity and thought. It sounds like an inspiring and fun place to learn.

Encouraging e-resource usage
Olin puts most of its budget into e-resources, and makes sure they're used by holding a vendor fair. Olin advocates four steps: goal, timeline, budget, communicate. Dee allows herself 6 months to plan a fair! and works with other departments (IT, facilities) and external partners (caterers, balloons, photographer). In attracting vendors Dee communicated her own excitement along with the benefits for vendors. Vendors have been "fabulous" in partnering with costs and prizes. In the run-up to the event she put together and distributed publicity posters and flyers, and re-confirmed all the vendors and suppliers.

Dee's event coincided with "Talk like a pirate" day and so they used this theme and the seasonal treats (caramel apples and cider) to theme the decor and catering. In order to enter the raffle, users had to answer the question "What did you learn?" - a great way to elicit feedback such as "I learnt where and how to do my research". She also gathered feedback from vendors as to the value of the event to them. "One event is not going to solve all my PR challenges," she notes, and tells us the lessons she learned:

always communicate more, more, more
be ready for something to go wrong, because something will
don't do it alone - get all the support you can from vendors, suppliers, internal depts
make sure you, as well as everyone else, have fun!

A multichannel approach
Olin does other forms of marketing and Dee cites Springshare's LibGuides as a useful tool for helping students to find resources in specific areas. The library has a Facebook page, uses Wikis, blogs, instant messaging and news feeds to reach its users (I applaud this multi-channel approach). Dee has also carried out considerable research among faculty and students to inform her strategic planning, and has created an external library advisory board (including vendors, researchers, a copyright expert, a consortia director and faculty from other colleges) to visit regularly and provide strategic advice as well as occasional tactical input. Isn't this a great idea - I wonder how many other libraries are capturing the skills of those around them in this way? Dee rates conferences as an opportunity to pick up on the zeitgeist and share experiences with others.

Exemplum, exemplum, an example from your own life ... One library realised its students weren't taking in the guidance they had received from the library as freshers, and were calling their parents for the kind of help the library should provide. So the library scrapped its freshers event and invited the parents to tea, so they would later tell their offspring to use the library.

The library as part of the bigger study picture
At Olin they talk about information fluency, not information literacy. Dee gathered together relevant standards and worked with students to come up with their own curriculum (which they called Lifehacks) with modules on sleep, nutrition, relaxation, and "everything else you need to be successful to study". She paints a compelling picture of a library that has been able to grow itself into being precisely what its students need it to be - I guess the challenge for others is to be able to evolve from a more traditional library into an interactive and welcoming environment such as Olin has managed to create.

Moving to e-only from a library perspective

2009-03-31T16:50:00.007+02:00

I attended this breakout session yesterday and was reminded how useful it is to come to UKSG each year. I was drawn to the title of this session and in particular the '...from a library perspective' bit. That, it seems to me, is the best thing about coming to UKSG. You get to hear the view from librarians and, working in publishing as I do, find this insight invaluable.

Sarah Pearson from the University of Birmingham gave a great overview of the many challenges facing her library (and many others too I'm sure) as they move further towards an e-only model. I hope she doesn't mind me giving the ending away but as Sarah herself admited this e-only model is not likely to arrive at her University library any day soon. Instead a hybrid of print and electronic content exisits.

She outlined the collection development principles currently in place saying that web-based resources are the preferred medium and how important it is to have a flexible budget that responds to changes in course content and research directions. She also said it was key to negotiate great value for money.

The UofB has 24,000 free and subscribed e-journals plus 1000 e-resources (340 subscribed) and 4000 e-books. Sarah highlighted the many benefits of opening up greater access to their collection and offering e-access to library users including distance learners. E-delivery adds value such as alerting services; citation links and discussion forums, which are not available in print of course.

Sarah outlined the benefits, such as opening up a much bigger collection to users for a lower fee, and the drawbacks of big deals, such as taking some journals that may not be used extensively and having less control over collection development. She summed up with some useful learning points to take away:

don't expect to go completely e-only
usage is an important tool but don't forget about feedback
big deals have benefits but there are trade offs
negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.

All in all I found the session useful and it certainly gave me a library perspective on the potential for moving to an e-only model and the pitfalls that entails.

Data Analysis Will Drive Decision-Making in Research – Jay Katzen, Elsevier

2009-03-31T16:43:00.009+02:00

Katzen starts off by reviewing the reactions to the recent economic crisis. World leaders are making grand statements about continuing to invest in R&D e.g. Gordon Brown said that innovation is the way out of the economic crisis. But we know that lean times are here: there is a hiring freeze at most universities in the States such as Harvard; there is a drop in funding levels so that e.g. Stanford is basing their budget on a 5% decrease; and private institutions such as the Wellcome Trust plan to decrease their endowments.

Aside from the economic crisis, other factors to take into account are that governments are playing a bigger role in research assessment; there is an increased competition for funding; as well as a clear drive for multidisciplinary research. And these pre-existing issues with performance measurement are now exacerbated by the economy.

The UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) released their analysis in 2008 and as a result there are fourteen universities in the UK getting less investment than the previous year, and forty institutions receiving funding that is below inflation. So there are more than fifty UK universities that have to make cutbacks somewhere. These include University College London, Kings College, Imperial College, and University of Cambridge.

The Australian Research Council also aims to use metrics to monitor and measure research to base funding decisions on.

So Lean times = Lean research. But no one can do less research. We have to do more, with less, and the key tools to help us deal with this will be around data and analytics. More data will be needed for evaluation and decision-making at every level of the academic institution.

The scholarly landscape will change, and technology will be key

The United States is ranked number 1 with 310k published articles in 1997 and 340k in 2007. In that decade China has moved from the number 10 spot to the second, and it is predicted that China will surpass the US in research output quantity within the next few years. We need to be aware of this, particularly as research continues to cross national boundaries, making measurement even harder.

So one question is whether research is optimized and efficient?

The average researcher spends 6.5 hours a week searching for information, and 5 hours a week analysing it. They spend more time looking for the information than they do actually using it and this has to be reversed.

We also know that forty-two is the average age when a biomed researcher gets his/her first research grant from the NIH but the approval rate is only 15%. So researchers spend a significant amount of time identifying ideas and proposals, but there is a lot of time wasted when not much is then approved for funding.

Katzen describes the investigation they have done into the researchers’ workflow; an exercise that aimed to spot gaps and see where tools can be developed to improve efficiencies, leading to increased published output and ultimately institutional ranking.

Katzen therefore disagrees with Derk Haank’s view that there is no information overload and that technology will not play a significant role in the publishing industry during the next decade. He argues that we can now make revolutionary changes to the whole research environment by using technology to connect the mass of information through new tools and methodologies to really analyse and evaluate performance through data. This will change the landscape for how people practice research, and technology will facilitate that. Katzen argues that “we are moving from traditional publishers to information solution providers”.

New Mapping Methodology For Reputation and Performance Measurement

The tools linking reputation ranking tools don’t yet exist; we cannot look solely at journal-based classification anymore, especially with multidisciplinary research increasing and non-English language research increasing. The number and scope of journals is too limiting and the level of aggregation is ineffective when we cannot see how different disciplines interconnect.

There is a new mapping methodology, presented at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which used co-citation analysis to look at the quality of output. There are thirteen categories but more than 40,000 subcategories so if institutions want to understand where their competencies really lie, they should look much deeper into the data and use this mapping methodology.

You can also look at this mapping technique to see which authors are driving certain areas. It’s also possible to look at a national level too: the NSF created these maps and looked at UK – previously they had thought that the UK had two areas of strength: in social sciences and in health services. But this doesn’t make any sense – where is the map that shows physics and maths are actually key drivers? It’s also useful in order to see where you are vulnerable internationally and where you should be careful. The NSF says that this new mapping methodology “gives us vivid insight into rapidly evolving research areas and the relationships among them”.

The people thinking about these things are generally Deputy Vice-Chancellors, Deans etc, but Librarians can and should play key and critical role in supporting their universities to become leaner organisations. One Library Director Katzen spoke with said that people view her as a procurement centre – she just buys it and switches it on and the job is done. But Katzen argues that the library role is significantly undervalued; they can and should be looking into the performance of their institution in order to adapt their services to be more involved in the research process.

Audience question 1: That analysis is all great but who will actually be the first to move to make the paradigm shift? Katzen answers that it will be the research councils and university deans who drive the need for this methodology (they already are) and publishers will support it with data and tools.

Audience question 2: Peter Shepherd asks that since there is a lot of historical citation data, whether this could be applied retrospectively to trace what triggered critical and sudden changes in the past. Katzen replies yes, there’s no reason why you can’t look not only at today’s performance but indeed this method would allow you to trace that. Shepherd states that this would be something scientists would really get excited about.

Publishing and catalguing datasets: it's time everyone got involved

2009-03-31T16:19:00.001+02:00

Presented by Toby Green from OECD.

Haver overview of OECD & definition of data sets & data access.

From PDF provide links to raw data.

OECD provides raw data via DOI in xls file for researchers to get at raw data. The next steps are to provide access to data cubes/sets of underlying data.

OECD working on building this access on their platform: OECD ilibrary. It is cross-searchable.

The Economist utilizes these data sets regularly but citation is very poor. Other authors also have trouble citing data sets. OPACs also not good at providing data set access.

The data sets become like black sheep that cannot be found. There is some scholarly publishing networks for journals & books that provide hard links to data sets. Not at all perfect & misses lots of sets.

OECD will create a dataset with authorized title; ISSB; DOI & MARC record attached.

Challenges:

Dynamic data sets (they change)
Versioning (recalculations all the time)
Preservation (not happening)

OECD issuing a white paper on Publishing Standards for DataSets

Speaking with CrossRef about citation standards for dynamic objects

Mid2009 will have

MARC records, ONIX records, Citation records

Question about licensing data?

Problem is where/how cited.

Question on how it would be discoverable?

Through these metadata channels would allow for discoverable

Statement: it will be interesting to see if data set discovery will increase fulltext usage. Currently, fulltext only way to get to data so it will be interesting to see.

Being cool with data: starting in 2007--two companies: Swivel & Many Eyes (flickr for data) can tag data, send to blogs, etc.

OECD loaded up Factbook data sets to see what would happen. Traffic has been slow but does allow for visualization tools that are pretty nifty. Thought it could make a good teaching tool. Free tools & encouraged to use.

Creating factbook for iPhone which will be offered for free. Also creating NCVA regional data eXplored. Hunt data using maps & graphs instead of access being just textual. Can then develop stories based on data retrieval. Example showed aging population.

Noted that this product is similiar to gap minder. Direct feed can be set up.

Question does OECD see themselves creating/selling data management platforms? With eXplorer--it will be open-source but other services may be for-fee.

IMF datamapper presented-based on OECD data in part.

www.gapminder.org: can provide trends & gaps occurring-podcasts of data

Newspaper websites gone crazy with data/charts/graphs

Loads of visualization resources being developed.

Where's My Jetpack

2009-03-31T16:15:00.009+02:00

The UK federation was launched in November 2006 and has reached 690 members and membership is still growing. It is a deliberately inclusive federation - it includes all of the education sector and anyone providing services to that sector. Federations are essentially enablers of communication between this vast membership.

Ian demonstrates that current implementations by institution shows an even division between use of in-house identity management and outsourced identity management. Service Provider implementations came much later in the day for the UK federation but are now outstripping institutional implementations.

The Jetpack refers to Ian's assertion that the future is already here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

The UK is the first adopter of concepts such as outsourced identity managers and adoption in the schools sector. A similar type of uptake is expected in other countries. Scale is important for adoption. The UK federation is now seen as a 'must have', this position has not been reached in the US.

Software diversity based on standards is important in the UK federation. This provides choice, business models and sustainability. It is also noted that people get support for their software choices from a variety of other places than the UK federation itself.

There is a problem with helping users find the right place to log-in - it is known as the 'discovery problem'. Although the UK federation provides a WAYF (Where are You From) process to help guide users, it is better if this is integrated in to the Service Provider interface - Service Providers know how to best present information about their customers.

Authentication processes are in the process of changing - usernames and passwords will not be the process used in the future. People are starting to use cards, tokens or USB devices for access, and this will get more common. This will quickly be followed by interfederation - federations talking to federations, thus making the experience more seamless for Service Providers and Identity Providers.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay.

From Timbuktu to Here

2009-03-31T12:35:00.007+02:00

How many electronic journals will have the shelf-life of the famous texts of Timbuktu, which are still readable and preserved today? This question set the theme for the session on Access and Preservation for Electronic Journals, led by Terry Morrow.

Continued access to journals is a shared problem, Morrow argues - everyone who gains a benefit from the availability of e-journals should take a part in solving the problem. The specific problems for e-journals are:

Continued access after a subscription has been cancelled, but does subscription = ownership?
What do you save? Articles are often built on the fly from various components, including complex metadata files.
Technology: don't assume that PDF will be around for ever.

Preservation is never a free option, but can be viewed as insurance cover for the future. These costs will be ongoing, not one off so a full risk analysis against costs should be done before preservation decisions are made.

The current economic climate is making the loss of journals very real with concerns about loss of vulnerable publishers and the ability to maintain subscriptions: the impact of the euro exchange rate on UK subscriptions is causing problems now for institutions.

Chris Rusbridge via the power of twitter and blogging poses the fact that this is a very real problem. There are a variety of different scenarios outlined by Chris with regard to the loss of journals, but the crux of the question is - who is responsible for taking the action to preserve journals. This ties in with questions from the room about how do we assess the value of the journals. A serious question for attendees at UKSG.

A range of preservation systems were described: LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, e-Depot, OCLC ECO, and British Library developments. Managing the trigger events for all of these systems and the roles and the responsibilities for all the stakeholders are different in each system.

There is a challenge for all of the attendees at UKSG to answer the question, am I responsible?

Library marketing: running an event to promote usage

2009-03-31T10:05:00.002+02:00

"Marketing isn't taught in library school, and I think we're at the point where it should be," says Ruth Wolfish from the IEEE. I have just followed coloured footprints along the hallway to Ruth's session so it was clear before I even arrived that it would be a break from the norm. I think the guys next door in the API session were jealous.

Ruth's starts with her tips for a successful event: make it meaningful, time it right for your audience, promote it well to the right people, get the endorsement of influencers in your target audience, make the benefits clear - and make it fun.

She then proceeds to set us a task list, starting with checking for conflicts and scheduling your project tasks. She suggests involving students in creating promotional materials, and seeking assistance from vendors and support staff around the university. She emphasises the importance of food in attracting attendees, and suggests a quiz or a raffle to keep people there until the end. Ruth's guidance even extends to design tips for your promotional posters - "uniform and easy to read" fonts, making primary messaging more prominent, avoiding too much text, being careful with colour combinations.

A really good event makes library staff more accessible - Ruth cites one library's Halloween event where librarians dress up; students see it as a "don't miss" event and remember the librarians personally afterwards. Ultimately the objective is encouraging more usage of the library and its resources (I was a tiny bit late for this session and I hope that objectives were brought up at the beginning as well as pitching up half way through - all marketing has to start with clear objectives against which success can later be measured).

Communicating your event
Library blogs are taking off - particularly in the US? I think - and Ruth shows us lots of examples, commenting on the layout of the text (make sure your offers are clear). She also shows examples of how universities are using Twitter "to communicate with our users more effectively" - library hours, catalogue updates, "whatever you want to say". It doesn't take the place of existing communication channels (website, newsletters) but adds to the library's means of publicising the e-resources on which it spends such a considerable amount. We look at one library's Facebook page which highlights all their events ("pizza in the library") and incorporates applications added by the library e.g. catalogue search, find articles, news feeds etc. Use the photo galleries to help build your library's presence and character.

Ruth moves on to "Little Ideas with Big Impact" - with examples from librarians all over the US, including "flyers in places people can't avoid (back of toilet doors)" and tear-off slips to remind people of the dates and times of your next library events.

I'm pleased that Ruth closes with measurement. I couldn't agree more with her assertion that you need to "make sure that you measure your success - that you have metrics when you're asked for them." She suggests thinking along the following lines:

What does the library do for the school?
Has usage gone up since you started running events?
Have you had more research requests?
Did you make new contacts?
Have you been invited to speak at classes?

Ref. Bhatt, J., Wolfson, R. "A successful collaborative partnership among the Faculty and Librarians at Drexel University and IEEE" - a study Ruth co-authored that may provide further insight into the value of library marketing.

No Revolutions For Scholarly Publishing – Derk Haank, Springer

2009-03-30T19:03:00.006+02:00

In contrast to Hindawi's predictions for a ‘Journal Commoditization’ revolution in the next decade, Haank’s view is that the major advancements in scholarly publishing have already taken place. For a revolution to occur people have to be very dissatisfied with the current situation and that is no longer the case since the shared publishing goals of 1998 have already been achieved. These were:

1) improving access;

2) seamless linking; and

3) improving value for money.

The CrossRef initiative has solved one of the biggest problems by providing pure linking to enable seamless access to everything, for everyone. The fear and excitement of the late nineties meant that publishers “invested heavily - too much in my view - in technology” and this resulted in having to charge much higher fees for publishers’ platforms, rendering content inaccessible to some users.

The technology will not be important in the next decade as people are no longer concerned with how systems work, only with the end product/use. “The techies are back in the cellar where they belong”. So Haank doesn’t care about the next Web (2.0/3.0 or 99.9) as we’ve already achieved a lot and it will not be possible to invest much further anyway.

We’ve talked about Open Access for ten years but only 3% of articles are published in the OA model – hardly a revolution. But of course OA will not disappear (noting his recent investment in BioMed Central!) but will build slowly alongside and in parallel to traditional publishing business models as an evolution, not a revolution.

More content is produced each year than the previous year but library budgets do not increase so we just need to get much more efficient every year instead of looking for the next big development.

Haank’s conclusion for 2014-1019 is that “we’re in for a boring decade” but pointed out that while he and Hindawi may disagree, they could both be right!

PS – Haank was asked about the "elephant in the room" and said that Springer is not up for sale but looking for a third additional partner not replacing current shareholders.

OPAC 2.0... and beyond!

2009-03-30T18:16:00.005+02:00

Presentation from Dave Pattern of Huddersfield University.

Started with a brief overview of the history of the library catalogue - from the card catalogue, to "OPAC 1.0" in the 1980s and web-based OPACs in the 1990s, which were arguably just displaying the card catalogue in a web browser.

Dave talked about MARC21 being a format optimised for printing catalogue cards, and introduced his first "conspiracy theory" - that cataloguers are gearing up for sabotage of web-based OPACs and the return of the card catalogue!

Looked at how OPACs are currently designed, and what librarians think users want. Showed some examples of ludicrously complex advanced search forms, requiring pages of instructions. Also mentioned the problems with expecting users to use Boolean logic in their searching - example of searching for "Oranges are not the only fruit" via the BL catalogue - title only came up if you searched "Oranges are the only fruit"! Catalogue search interfaces that require expert searchers, and over-complicated notification systems, led Dave to his second conspiracy theory - that we are trying to turn our users into mini librarians!

Went on to a reminder of Ranganathan's 4th law - saving the time of the user. Quoted Roy Tennant - "create a system that doesn't need to be taught". If the OPAC is too complex for our users, that is our fault [sidenote - thoroughly agree with that, it irritates me to hear colleagues criticizing the students for not knowing how to use the catalogue. Why should it be their responsibility to find ways around our clunky and antiquated OPAC?].

Talked about the results of a 2007 survey on OPACs - on a scale of 1-10 (ten being best), the average rating for "how happy are you with your OPAC" was 5.1; the average for "how well does your OPAC meet your users needs" was 4.5.

Moving on to OPAC 2.0, began by mentioning the Ann Arbor District Library catalogue, which has features like tagging, rating and reviews, and the option to bring up an image of the catalogue card for the item - which users can add "graffiti" to. Then went on to talk about the work done on the OPAC at Huddersfield university. In deciding what features to add, they looked at user suggestions, web 2.0 inspired features, and successful ideas from elsewhere. Dave described the OPAC as being in "perpetual beta" - new features are added as and when they come up, and are removed if unsuccessful.

Keyword searching was monitored, to find out how the system was being used. This showed that 23% of searches gave no results, and that users frequently gave up if they didn't get any results from their first search - probably because there was nowhere else to go from that point. Users expect suggestions and prompts for unsuccessful searches, not dead ends. Introduced features such as a spell checker, keyword suggestions for terms not in the catalogue (cross-referenced with answers.com) and suggestions of popular combined search terms for general searches with too many results. Also added a keyword cloud of recent searches on the first page, and a "virtual shelf browser" - originally as "eye candy" but both tools turned out to be very popular and useful. Several other features mentioned such as recommendations, RSS feeds for new titles, and the ability to add ratings and comments.

Looking at usage statistics - borrowing peaks in October, but usage of keyword suggestions and borrowing recommendations peaks in November - maybe when all the reading list books are checked out so users appreciate the recommendations. Also showed increase in the range of unique titles borrowed - suggests users are checking out books they may not have looked at before.

Dave concluded this section by pointing out that what is required is more than just cosmetic changes, otherwise it's just "putting lipstick on a pig". He also pointed out that the changes need to come from vendors, as many libraries do not have the resources to do the kind of work he has by themselves.

He went on with some suggestions for libraries who did want to try 2.0-ing their OPACs themselves, including encouraging ideas from staff, listening to user feedback, not being afraid to make mistakes, and monitoring usage - if a feature isn't being used, get rid of it!

Dave talked about what is needed for OPAC 2.0 - relevancy ranking by default, faceted browsing, spellcheck, RSS feeds - and what is still missing - more serendipity, in the form of tailored borrowing suggestions and "just in time" recommendations, and social features to allow users to build a community.

Session finished with some suggestions of some commercial products, open source and web services available for OPAC 2.0, and a reminder of the benefits for students (better recommendations), librarians (collection development) and academics (improved reading lists) of OPAC 2.0.

Slides available: www.slideshare.net/daveyp

2020: a publishing odyssey

2009-03-30T16:51:00.004+02:00

Ahmed Hindawi opened the afternoon plenary session by talking about the "three big changes" that will affect scholarly publishing in the next ten years. He started by looking at other types of publishing and the issues facing those industries:

Newspapers have traditionally had reader payments and advertising revenues, but lose reader revenue when they go online and make their content freely available. Per-page revenue is a fraction of what it was. But newspaper publishers made the decision to go free, and did so because the content they publish is reproduced in many places. This would result in price wars that would only end at zero anyway. There are some exceptions - the Wall Street Journal has managed to keep subscribers because its content is differentiated.

Trade book publishers are just starting to embrace digital. Challenges: no print, less need for publishers? Anyone can get a digital book into a book store, when they couldn't with print. 30m out of print books are "coming back from the dead" and becoming available online - the long tail will vie for space with the new titles.

The music industry has seen well-documented problems with piracy.

Scholarly journals publishing doesn't have these problems: unlike newspapers, the content of scholarly journals is highly differentiated, and you're unlikely to just go and read a different article if the one you want is too expensive or behind access control. Scholarly journals are bought by organisations, so there's still a "middle man" in the sale as compared to author to reader trade book sales. And piracy isn't a big issue.

The three changes that Ahmed predicts will affect scholarly publishing:

Open access vs toll
The journal as a brand on author side
The journal as a brand on the librarian side

(Blogs and wikis have their place, but won't significantly impact scholarly publishing..)

Drivers for open access

Recognition of merits of OA by researchers
Serials crisis = difficult to expand toll publications
Green open access - publishers will realise gold is more secure and more financially viable.

The journal as brand on author side

Citation databases could lead to the creation of author impact factors that become more important than journal impact factors
This highlights the need for author identifiers! Scopus, Researcher ID, Contributor ID.

Journal as brand on library side

Budgets - librarians can't consider individual titles, and will go for Big Deals instead when budgets are tight.

So, five possible futures for scholarly publishing.

1. The Near Past
Journals are toll access, and are important to authors and librarians. It's what we have or have just had, and has resulted in the serials crisis

Possible Future 2: Here comes the Big Deal
Journals are toll, are important to authors, but are in big deals and their brands are not important to libraries. Will see consolidations. Unlikely?
Should expect intervention from external markets.

Possible Future 3: Journal commmoditization
Journals are toll, but lose their brands on the author side. Publishers will have to work hard to keep authors. Publishers will accept more manuscripts (all that are factually correct). New pricing models will emerge - based on subject and downloads. Will be an ongoing market price, so competition for profit will be all about saving costs

Possible Future 4: Open Access
Journals still have a strong brand with authors, but libraries don't need to purchase journals. High impact journals will be able to demand higher author publishing charges. Will be more competition between journals and publishers.

Possible Future 5: Commoditization 2.0
Open access and lost journal brand on author side. All journals are like PLoS ONE journals, publishing all rigorous artlcles. A&I databases will be only place to navigate content.

What will materialize will be more complex than any one of these examples. Open Access is important, but isn't the only issue. Commoditization can bring benefits. Scholarly journals have many stakeholders. It's important to be as "humble and objective as possible" and consider all of the stakeholders. There will be winners and losers.