Archives
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Canadians Fight
Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist argues that when Canada gives public money to scientific researchers, that it should require that the research be made available to the public through open-content publishing, rather than locked up in expensive journals that require Canadians to buy the research they’ve already paid for.
Boing Boing: Canadian-funded research should be available to Canadians
Sounds familiar
Open Access — laura
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Grow the Profession
It’s one of my favorite soapboxes that we need to publicize ourselves more. With the sheer amount of options members of our society face today, just offering excellent service isn’t enough to make them think of us. Plus, there is the common preconceptions of what librarians do. While the way we are characterized is fairly positive overall, most people have no idea of the services we’ve developed to keep up with the times.
While tv ads are too expensive for any library’s budget, Grow the Profession: Marketing the Librarian points out some easy and inexpensive things an individual librarian can do to raise awareness of her/his skills and accomplishments.
Career Info — laura
Digital Libraries
September’s JoDI: Journal of Digital Information is all about digital libraries with several interesting articles.
Library Links — laura
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
DRM PDF
Cory Doctorow’s talk on DRM has been formatted as a print-centric PDF. Perfect for educating people without getting too mixed up in the tech terms.
Open Access — laura
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
A Not-For-Profit Publisher’s Perspective on Open Access
Martin Frank, Margaret Reich and Alice Ra’anan, A Not-For-Profit Publisher’s Perspective on Open Access(pdf), a preprint forthcoming in Serials Review, 30, 4 (2004). A critique of OA arguing that OA journals cost more than their proponents admit, that OA archiving will harm journals, that the NIH OA plan will harm journals, and that OA to medical research will not help patients. Abstract: “Recent legislative activity in the US House of Representatives and the UK House of Commons has added fuel to a debate over electronic access to the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) literature that was initiated in 1999 with the introduction of E-Biomed. On-going efforts to change the landscape of STM publishing involve moving it away from a subscription basis to an author pays model. This article chronicles the swift evolution of electronic access to the scientific literature and asks whether the scholarly community will really be better off with government-mandated open access (OA) publishing.”
The authors of this article seem to feel that not-for-profit publishers are being tarred with the same brush and subsequently penalized alongside the profit-driven businesses. They refer to their habit of making articles older than a set limit freely available and brush aside the fact that these limits change from journal to journal. The problem is that if the librarians don’t know that the articles are free, they might as well not be.
Open Access — laura
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
BMC Repository Service
Under its program, for a fee, BMC will �build, launch, maintain, and populate� repositories for institutions that could not otherwise afford to, or may lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house. Institutions can choose to pay a �one-off set-up fee,� to BMC, which will then build a repository to an institution�s requirements. They can hire BMC to maintain the repository or take over operation and maintenance themselves at any time. The institution remains the owner of the repository.
Library Journal - Using DSpace, Biomed Central Launches Repository Service
The article mentions scientific literature so I would guess that they aren’t limiting the service to only health related information.
P.S.- They offer syndicated feeds for daily news and all of their journals.
P.P.S.- The service now has it’s own website.
Open Access — laura
Monday, September 20, 2004
Seven benefits of OA
Paul Chiao and Christian Schmidt, Open Access gains attention in scholarly communication, Molecular Cancer, September 6, 2004. An editorial describing the OA policy of this OA journal, published by BioMed Central, and enumerating seven benefits of OA. Excerpt: “[1] All articles become freely and universally accessible online; so an author’s work can be read by anyone at no cost. [2] The authors hold copyright for their work and grant anyone the right to reproduce and disseminate the article….[3] A copy of the full text of each Open Access article is permanently archived in an online repository separate from the journal, such as PubMed Central….[4] Authors are assured that their work is disseminated to the widest possible audience….[5] The information available to researchers will not be limited by their library’s budget….[6] Open Access could help to increase public interest in, and support of, research….[7] A country’s economy will not influence its scientists’ ability to access articles.” (Thanks to Charles W. Bailey, Jr.)
Open Access — laura
Thursday, September 16, 2004
More Identity
LibraryTechtonics: Creative Librarian reads my mind……or my blog.
Actually both :-).
First there was the Library Juice article, which made a great point.
Next was the Wired News article where the idea of the stereotype not really fitting seems to finally be moving into the press. (While mainstream media have blandly stood by as the free flow of information is threatened, some librarians have been agitating.
is such a great line.).
Career Info — laura
OJOSE (Online JOurnals Search Engine)
OJOSE (Online JOurnals Search Engine) is a new academic search engine. It covers a large number of free and priced journals and databases, and even some books. When a search brings up priced content, you will usually see a citation and abstract; clicking for full-text can bring up a pay-per-view offer, the full-text (if you detected to be affiliated with a subscriber) or an error. It links automatically to machine translation and saves your search history for an hour.
While it’s a great resource, I found the interface a little confusing. FYI- the right frame is information only, the real search form is on the left.
Open Access — laura
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Identity
…realize about the librarian stereotype. Every human trait has a valuable and a less-functional face to it. We tend to talk about the librarian stereotype strictly in terms of its undesirable aspects. But it is related to our strengths as librarians also - to our thoughtfulness, our focus, our desire to help.
Very thought-provoking.
Library Links — laura
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
NIH OA plan
…the National Institutes of Health has established a policy mandating open access to the full text of research results from projects it funds. Conservative estimates have placed at least a quarter of the quality medical research done in the world as funded by NIH grants and contracts.
All the material will end up deposited at PubMed Central….
Wow. Eventually, PubMed Central could become the default place to find medical information for most of the world as PubMed became the premier citation database for the health sciences. Working in a health sciences library, the majority of the information our patrons look for come from NIH grants.
One of the arguments that keeps coming up against OA is that the authors have to pay to have their work published. However, my library and I believe many others buy “institutional memberships” to certain repositories that then allow their work to be included at no cost to them. It would also be strange if publication fees weren’t considered legitamate expenses of the grant itself.
Open Access — laura
Monday, September 13, 2004
The reason for OA
There’s more to the open-access movement than financial reasons.
Re-analysis of clinical trials recently made open access has confirmed the link between suicidal tendency and paroxetine, a member of the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs. The link had previously been suspected but was difficult to establish because the studies were not readily available.
Open Access — laura
Thursday, September 9, 2004
Support and Mainenance of OSS
There is a lot of valuable information that gets passed along on email lists that then disappears into the ether. Most archives are open and searchable, but you must still know they are there and what terms to use when searching. Plus, the search engines are not the most sophisticated. So, with permission, I’m posting a question and answer letter that went out on OSS-4-Lib.
The knowedgable answers from a professional actually implementing an open-source ILS are worth more than a hundred of my opinons.
Open-Source Software — laura
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Self Marketing
Information professionals usually don’t think of marketing themselves as a big issue. We know are the key to accessing information; we are service- and customer-oriented; we know our business - so, customers will just come to us, right?
Unfortunately, we do need to market ourselves - not just to be known, but also to let our customers know who we are and what we can do to help them. Here, I share my experiences with marketing myself successfully as an information professional, both inside and outside my organization.
Many of us seem to feel more uncomfortable pushing ourselves than we might feel in advertising our libraries. However, since libraries are largely service-oriented organizations, we are the services we offer. Others can buy books and databases but the true usefullness of a library comes from having someone to find information in the jungle that grown up around us and translate it into English for the users.
Career Info — laura
Tuesday, September 7, 2004
NIH releases its OA plan for public comment
The NIH has released its open-access plan, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information (September 3, 2004) for public comment. Excerpts:
This notice is to announce and to seek public comments regarding NIH�s plans to facilitate enhanced public access to NIH health related research information. NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding. This would include all research grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, as well as National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowships. We define final manuscript as the author�s version resulting after all modifications due to the peer review process. Submission of the final manuscript will provide NIH supported investigators with an alternate means by which they will meet and fulfill the requirement of the provision of one copy of each publication in the annual or final progress reports. Submission of the electronic versions of final manuscripts will be monitored as part of the annual grant progress review and close-out process.
NIH considers final manuscripts to be an important record of the research funded by the government and will archive these manuscripts and any appropriate supplementary information in PubMed Central (PMC), NIH�s digital repository for biomedical research. Six months after an NIH supported research study�s publication�or sooner if the publisher agrees�the manuscript will be made available freely to the public through PMC. If the publisher requests, the author�s final version of the publication will be replaced in the PMC archive by the final publisher�s copy with an appropriate link to the publisher�s electronic database.
Comments may be submitted by email or web form, and are due November 2. (PS: It’s very important that US citizens who support OA send comments. You can be sure that opponents of OA will send comments.)
Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
Open Access — laura
Friday, September 3, 2004
OPAC (Non)Evolution
- First, read Users Trump Library Vendors Again! >The Shifted Librarian
It’s true libraries have limited resources, but they already have a vendor for their catalog, and that vendor should be the one leading the way.� Libraries must begin demanding these types of services from the vendors. It’s crazy to see users writing code to compensate for a lack of services from library OPACs.
- Then TechnoBiblio: Market awareness
Listen to your customers - if not they will make you obsolete
- Finally- librarian.net : a library weblog: why don’t vendors care about us?
For me, this just drives home the true nature of the buyer/seller relationship and the OPAC lock-in. Support is expensive, and if it doesn’t lead to more sales it’s just barely worth the money of the vendor because where else is your library going to go?
Three quotes to remember. The opac sits like an anchor in the middle of my library’s website. It does one thing (sorta) well but takes up an innordinate amount of the Electronic Services department’s time and energy. As Jenny pointed out, simple things we’ve asked for repeatedly have never arrived and even though I use Unix regularly, I’m terrified of the administrative interface.
I truly believe that OSS systems are the way libraries should be heading for their system needs. We all have the major building blocks in common, yet for the best fit each system needs a certain amount of personalizing. With an open-source base system, a single programmer could create a customized system for the cost of his/her yearly salary as opposed to the licensing fee of the commercial brands.
I’m sure I appear to be a fanatic about open-source but the only reason I’m discussing it for something this important to library services is the aforementioned problems in getting what we need from the vendors. The world is moving fast these days and we have to keep up.
Library Links — laura
Thursday, September 2, 2004
OCLC Repository
OCLC Research Publications Repository contains works produced, sponsored, or submitted by OCLC Research. In general, the works are research-oriented and are in the subject area of library and information science. Many items describe OCLC Research projects, activities, and programs and were originally published by OCLC, while others are from peer-reviewed scholarly journals
Library Links — laura
Educause Article
Stephen Downes writes about blogs as educational tools in Educause. I highly recommend you read it for yourself because it’s very well-balanced and insightful. I couldn’t resist including some of my favorite bits below.
…the events of September 11 brought home to me the immediacy of blogging. We ran ongoing coverage, submitted via SMS to my e-mail, as one of our own made her way from the dust and debris of New York’s financial district to her home on the west side. Blogging not only allowed us access to the event; it made us part of the event. And with that, the form had indeed finally come into its own.
Blogging is something defined by format and process, not by content.
What makes blogs so attractive, in both the educational community and the Internet at large, is their ease of use. A blog owner can edit or update a new entry without worrying about page formats or HTML syntax.
As Richardson says, blogging as a genre of writing may have “great value in terms of developing all sorts of critical thinking skills, writing skills and information literacy among other things. We teach exposition and research and some other types of analytical writing already, I know. Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking
Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting.
Educational Blogging, EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5
