Science Library Pad

let's all sing a song of code

To develop is to be in the physical world, with all its rich social connections (and all its frustrating constraints) and yet to be able to tap into the invisible virtual world, to craft new things out of thin air.

This touches on the whole "should X be coders" debate. I'm inclined to agree with Rushcoff's Program or Be Programmed - we have to not just use the tools, we have to understand at least some of the underpinnings and be empowered to hack away to change things.

The trend today seems to be to teach JavaScript and I think that's fine.  HTML and JavaScript will get you a long way.  (If you protest that JavaScript is too far away from proper programming to give people a good start, remember that many of the people who are now professional programmers got their start writing in BASIC in the 1980s on various small computers.)  I do think for people who want to do more, there's a whole set of sysadmin skills that are very useful as well.  The important thing is there is a whole range of skills - just in the same way that everyone is expected to read and write but only a few people will have a PhD in English Literature, we should expect (and provide the opportunity for) some basic computer science skills, without everyone needing to do a full degree in CS.

In the UK there's quite a bit of discussion about moving the computer curriculum from teaching how to use Microsoft Office (I shudder to think this is actually considered "computer training") to covering more foundational concepts and teaching how to code.

A story arrived in my Twitter stream that illustrates just how fundamental this set of skills can be - with painful honesty Shawn Graham tells a tale of failure and lessons learned - a community that succeeded on the front end, but fell apart (no documentation, taken over by spammers, no backups) on the back end: How I Lost the Crowd: A Tale of Sorrow and Hope.

We need to get to a place where people can have great ideas and know how to implement them, either themselves or by knowing the right resources to draw upon.  To some extent the new outsiders are the people who don't know how to code.  In professions that once seemed perhaps distant from technology such as journalism and the humanities, coding is becoming a core competency.  Fortunately there are great initiatives like Girl Develop It, Young Rewired State and Mozilla Webmaker (the source of the video I embedded above).  No matter where you are it's almost certain there's a meetup or three for beginning coders.  Let's get coding.

Previously:
July 24, 2007  software development, staffing and new library technology
December 7, 2005   librarians 2.0 don't need to be coders 2.0

the perils of generational thinking

Jian Ghomeshi tweets

Most Gen X-ers know exactly where we were when we heard the news that Kurt Cobain had taken his life 18 years ago today. RIP Kurt.

http://twitter.com/jianghomeshi/status/187872833613987842

There are a few problems:

1) No one can agree what years "Generation X" spans.

2) "Most"?  Really?  A generation-defining event?

Jian is 44 (born 1967), according to Wikipedia.

Generation X has been broadly used to cover anyone born from 1961 to 1981.  This is an absurdly broad span of time.  The idea that people who are 51 have had the same generational experiences as those who are 31 is ridiculous.  Culture and technology now move in roughly 5 year windows; just slightly wider perhaps than the 4-year university experience.

Jian, who is in my generation, claims Cobain as a generation-shaping experience.  I don't give a f*** about Cobain.  I have no idea when he died.  It had no impact on me whatsoever.  My generational shared experiences are the Challenger Shuttle explosion and 2001-09-11.  The only musical experience I found scarring was when CBC took its rich all-classical CBC Radio 2 service with erudite announcers and turned it into some kind of lightweight musical experience / adult music channel, at which point I immediately stopped listening to it, after having it as a daily companion for over a decade.  (Their format change in order to chase some imaginary younger radio-listening demographic.)

Jian is at least talking from within his generation, unlike the more typical scenario where members of an older generation speculate about a younger one based on anecdotes.

All of which to say that we need to be very careful with talk of "The Millenials" and their technology expertise.  These stereotypes fare poorly in the light of diverse reality.  Due to rapid change, true generation cohorts in recent times are only about half a decade wide, with all the inconvenience this creates for sweeping generalisations.  True generation cohorts share perhaps some common economic environment and general culture experiences.  Even that is blowing apart as we see wide economic divergence and a vast diversity of possible cultural experiences (an absence of a true mass culture).  For example rather than the experience of mass TV, we now have a range between the (few) who still watch live TV and those who consume television days, weeks, months or an entire season after it airs (if they watch the show at all).

In terms of technological expertise I think it's folly to conflate keyboarding skills or ability to tap an iPad with any kind of understanding of technology or insights into the underlying principles and infrastructure.  Sending an email doesn't make you an expert in SMTP.  In fact, the tools available are encouraging a narrow range of multimedia creation (text, audio, photos, video) while making it much more difficult to engage with the technology underpinnings (very few people are writing computer code on their iPads).

Also we need to separate technology innovation from generational change.  Just because your kids were born in 2007 and the iPhone was released the same year doesn't mean your 5-year-old is part of some "iPhone generation".  Whatever tools they use as they move into adult life a decade or more from now may be quite different.  And as Douglas Rushkoff indicates in Program or Be Programmed, simply tapping on an app doesn't mean you have any appreciation whatsoever of the underlying technology tradeoffs and constraints, not to mention truly transformational aspects such as the wholesale ceding of control over private information that many of these technologies bring.  (See for example the Washington Post coverage of apps that transmit private information, the ongoing Wall Street Journal What They Know series, and the recent ACLU work showing widespread warrantless use of cellphone information.)

So we need to be a lot better at separating rapid technology change (Google launched in 1998-1999, Facebook launched in 2004, the iPhone as mentioned just in 2007) with generational attributes.  Someone in Gen X can use a smartphone.  Someone in the Millenial generation may have no skill with the iPad.  It's a lot more about individual attitudes and experiences than some vast cultural changes.  Almost no one has a computer science background, even as coding abilities rise in importance for journalism and for civil society.  We should be thinking about the implications of technology change, and thinking about the kind of work environments we want to create, not assuming a wave of generational change will come in and create some sort of instant collaborative high-tech utopia.  We need to plan and create the future we want.

Human Library at Ottawa Public Library

On January 28, 2012 the Ottawa Public Library will provide a range of people that can be "checked out" of the library for 20 minutes.  Different branches have different people.  There is also a partnership with the CBC and the War Museum.  A few examples:

At the War Museum

No. 2 Special Wireless –Second World War

Born in Lachine, Québec and of Russian descent, Hyman Yanofsky joined the Canadian army to fight Hitler. His job was to intercept messages from the enemy as he travelled through Europe.

At the Stittsville branch

UPDATE

OC Transpo driver

When Jim Smith started out with OC Transpo, he drove the early morning shift. After more than three decades on the job, as he prepares for retirement, he's back picking up passengers on those first runs of the day.

ENDUPDATE

At the Nepean Centrepointe Branch

Blind Octogenarian

A doctor diagnosed Theresa Dupuis with acute glaucoma just before Christmas 1990. He told her she'd go blind within 10 years. Theresa now considers her vision loss as a gift and swears she wouldn't take her sight back if offered to her. The octogenarian loves cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing, kayaking, yoga and meditation.

CBC TV News Anchor

Adrian Harewood is the co-host of CBC News Ottawa Monday to Friday starting at 5 p.m, and host of the late night news each weeknight at 10:55 p.m. He grew up in Ottawa. Adrian first got the broadcasting bug when he volunteered at campus stations CHUO and CKCU here. He has filled in as host on such well-known programs as As It Happens and Sounds Like Canada.

Ottawa Public Library - Human Library

Saturday, January 28, 2012 11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Registration opens at 10:45 a.m.

The library tweets at @opl_bpo  The War Museum is on Twitter @CanWarMuseum

The hashtag is #HLott

Google Scholar adds personal profiles displaying citations

I guess the "make everything social" decree went out to Google Scholar as well.

There is now essentially a scholarly social network built in - individual user profiles displaying citations, links to colleagues.

Today we’re introducing Google Scholar Citations: a simple way for you to compute your citation metrics and track them over time.

...

You can enable automatic addition of your newly published articles to your profile. This would instruct the Google Scholar indexing system to update your profile as it discovers new articles that are likely yours. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.

You can also create a public profile with your articles and citation metrics

Google Scholar Blog - Google Scholar Citations - July 20, 2011

There's more information at http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html

Citations is in limited release, you have to sign up on a waiting list, usual procedures.

Here is the profile for Anurag Acharya: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nGEWZbkAAAAJ&hl=en

Previously:
November 20, 2004  Google Scholar  (my first mention of Scholar, shortly after it was launched)

DataCite conference - Data and the Scholarly Record: the Changing Landscape - Aug 2011

DataCite will hold its second Summer Meeting on August 24th and 25th [2011] at the historic Shattuck Plaza Hotel in Berkeley, California. The Summer Meeting will be a 1.5 day event and is open to all. You can register at:
http://datacite2011.eventbrite.com/

DataCite blog - DataCite Summer Meeting “Data and the Scholarly Record: the Changing Landscape” - June 30, 2011

DataCite is a service for providing permanent DOIs to data sets, in particular to enable consistent citation of data sets in the scientific literature.

There are many international partners in DataCite, CISTI's role is to establish DataCite Canada.

Bibliothèque nationale de France - open data and Semantic Web

The open data portal is live at

http://data.bnf.fr/

There is also information about their use of linked data (semantic web) at

http://data.bnf.fr/semanticweb

Info via @arthurlutz Arthur Lutz and @davidbgk

RT @davidbgk: Tiens, le portail #OpenData de la BNF est propulsé par CubicWeb :) data.bnf.fr/semanticweb

retweeted by @LiberTIC

BNF social media presence

blogs - http://blog.bnf.fr/

notably their digital library blog Gallica http://blog.bnf.fr/gallica/

which has an accompanying Twitter account @GallicaBnF

via their Twitter list of BnF accounts @GallicaBnF/bnf I find there is also a BnF labs account and blog

@LaboBnF

http://labobnf.blogspot.com/

The main library doesn't appear to have a Twitter account, but it does have a Facebook page, as well as a presence on French video sharing site DailyMotion and YouTube

Facebook - BnF - Bibliothèque nationale de France

DailyMotion - BNF

YouTube - BibliothequeBnF

open access to publicly-funded EU research and data

In a speech to the LIBER 40th Annual Conference (Liber 2011) conference, Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda stated that the European Commission will be extending open access requirements so that it covers all EU-funded research as a principle, and she mentions that she is working to extend the current OpenAIRE infrastructure to include scientific data.  She also talks about the key role of research librarians to preserve scientific research & data.

She briefly discusses the Europeana repository, including full-text search, and a goal to hold 30 million digital objects by 2015.

Here's her presentation (YouTube video)

In case you're wondering about the first library she mentions at the beginning, I think she's referring to Nineveh.

She has a blog http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/neelie-kroes/ and frequently tweets from @NeelieKroesEU

The Liber conference tweeted from @liber2011bcn and used hashtag #liber2011

Video link via @carenmilloy via @ccbuhr

JCDL 2011 in Ottawa

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

http://www.jcdl2011.org/

http://www.jcdl2011.org/registration

June 13-17, 2011

Restaurants

Here's a map with some restaurants - mostly ones I have been to (and like a lot), as well as a few others that are highly recommended.  Most of these places fill up fast, so you should make reservations.

I haven't found there to be one review site that dominates, but UrbanSpoon will give you a reasonable sense of the places people in Ottawa are going.

There are restaurants and pubs along Elgin Street and Bank Street.  There are also lots in the Byward Market, but I don't know the Market very well.

Getting Around

The Market is to the north of the University of Ottawa.  If you want to go to the downtown core area to the west of campus, there is a pedestrian bridge (the Corktown Bridge) across the Rideau Canal at Somerset Street.

The various OCTranspo buses that stop at Campus Station can also take you directly or connect you to most locations in the city.

Bixi bikeshare will also be available, however detailed information about it won't be released until May.

UPDATE 2011-06-07: Bixi bikeshare info available at http://capital.bixi.com/  ENDUPDATE

Apps

Ottawa is an open data city.  There are lots of apps from the Ottawa Open Data Apps directory and the Apps4Ottawa contest that can help you discover and navigate around Ottawa.  (You can also check out the list of apps that won the 2010 contest.)

The city also paid to develop an app called Discover Ottawa.  The Museum of Civilization paid to develop an app as well.

Currency

Below is some updated info on Canadian money, from an OECD blog post I wrote for a conference they had in Ottawa in 2007 (now only available from archive.org).  This info will sound pretty basic for anyone who has been to Canada or who is used to using debit and credit cards, but I thought it might be useful.  Note for Americans: At the time of this writing, the Canadian dollar is worth more than the US dollar (today's exchange rate is 1 USD = 0.96 CAD).

The currency is the Canadian dollar.

1 canadian dollar in us dollars

1 canadian dollar in euros

The commonly used currency includes:

• a dollar coin, golden in colour and slightly larger than a quarter, the dollar coin is often called a "loonie" as it has a Loon depicted on the face
• a two dollar coin, bi-metallic with an outer silver ring, slightly larger than the dollar coin, often called a "toonie"
• bills in $5, $10 and $20 denominations
• larger denominations are of course available

Rather than carry large amounts of cash, however, many Canadians use transaction cards, and almost all stores are equipped with card readers.

Canada is in the process of transitioning to chip & PIN technology - most card readers still support magstripe reading, in addition to chip reading.

For a debit card, some stores, commonly large pharmacies and grocery stores, also offer "cash back", which is the equivalent of a bank withdrawal - the maximum is usually $50 to $100.

There is a slight tendency to use debit cards for smaller purchases and credit cards for larger ones, however most stores won't be surprised to see you use a card for a purchase of any amount from tiny to large; many Canadians, including myself, carry little or no cash and use cards for almost all transactions. 

All of Canada's major banks provide ATMs (bank machines) throughout Ottawa.  Do be aware that within stores you may also find so called "white label" third-party bank machines.  While these are safe to use, they charge even higher withdrawal fees than bank ATMs. 

There are TD Bank machines on the ground floor of the Rideau Centre shopping mall, if you enter from Rideau Street, underneath the skyway to the Bay, the machines will be on your left, just past the Shoppers Drug Mart. 

Both debit and credit card networks are interlinked with major international networks. 

The use of cheques to pay in stores is virtually non-existent; I don't think I have ever seen someone pay by cheque in a store in my entire life.  Stored-value card use is also minimal.

There is Calforex Currency Exchange / Bureau de change on the 3rd floor of the Rideau Centre shopping mall, there are also other currency exchanges in the downtown core.

video from ICSTI Workshop - Multimedia & Visualisations for Science

Just a quick post to gather together links to the videos from the sessions at the ICSTI Workshop "Multimedia & Visualisations for Science" held at Microsoft Research in Redmond on February 8, 2011.  You should be able to get downloads in most any format, if the player doesn't work for you.  The entire day's worth of video is online.

Featuring Michael Ackerman!  (No relation.)

• Session 1: An emphasis on interactive multimedia and visualization
• Session 2: Tools and technologies for communication and problem solving
• Session 3: Accelerating discovery through multimedia and visualization
• Session 4: Combining and refining data to reach new discovery

You can also find links to the presentation slides at ICSTI.

I think the hashtag was #icstiw11 but it wasn't clear, I also saw use of #icsti11 and just #icsti

Speakers / hosts who are on Twitter include

• Rafael Sidi (@rafaelsidi)
• Lee Dirks (@ldirks)
• Peter Fox (@taswegian)
• Jennifer Lin (@jenndox)
• and Microsoft Research itself (@MSFTResearch)

Thanks to Jennifer Lin for tweeting the link to the videos.

CISTI seeks external feedback

<marketing-mode>

Your comments on CISTI needed - deadline extended to May 7, 2009

CISTI would like your feedback on the following questions via the CISTI Committee on Health Sciences Information.

Email feedback to vice-president@chla-absc.ca by May 7 on these questions:

Question 1 – What is the role of a Canadian national science and health library in the 21st century?

Question 2 – From your perspective:
 - Who would be the new CISTI's key clients?
 - What are the target services/offerings/solutions for these key clients?

Question 3 – What top 3 of your needs do you see a Canadian national science and health library filling?

via CHLA - Dianne Kharouba's blog
</marketing-mode>

Dean Guistini has already posted his responses in his blog.

Usual disclaimer: This blog is not an official communication channel for CISTI.  Please use the regular CISTI Enquires or Media Relations channels if you have any questions.

library and publishing contests to develop software and innovate

Current Contests:

* OCLC launched their third Research Software Contest on April 13, 2009.
* The second repository Developer Challenge will be at Open Repositories 2009 (May 18-21, 2009)

Past Contests:

* The Elsevier Grand Challenge just wrapped, reflect.ws was the winning entry
* CISTI's internal Innovation Challenge wrapped up on March 19, 2009.  The winner was "Research in the News" (you can read more on the site).

This is only a brief survey and I'm sure I have missed some, but I'm blogging on the tiny keyboard of my netbook, so I am only doing a short posting.  Please let me know of any others.

The OCLC (Dis)Integrated Library System

Andrew Pace writes

OCLC is extending the WorldCat Local platform to include circulation and delivery, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components. A quick start version of WorldCat Local--available at no additional charge to FirstSearch WorldCat subscribers--is a first step to WorldCat Local and to a truly next-generation cooperative library management service.

...

Five years after I advocated dismantling library management systems, I am confident that using web-scale architectures and a cooperative service model are the right way to put things back together again. The OCLC cooperative is not only uniquely positioned to provide this solution, it is part of our obligation to libraries.

via Lorcan on Twitter

An interesting development. One wonders how it will fit in with OLE, Evergreen, DLF ILS API and other initiatives.  Also I would be interested to know if it will extend to true, article-level integration/linking for licensed content, which has been the barrier to true usefulness for the ILS in a modern academic library setting (right now we have the catalogue for books, separate article-level systems, and then federated search on top to combine the results).

Web 2.0 from a publisher perspective, using 2Collab as an example

One of the big challenges for all of us developing Web 2.0 is finding out what the users actually want.  That's part of why libraries and publishers are taking various lab, web development group, developer network and contest approaches.  Another big challenge is trying to build a community around your tools.

Just a quick review of some of the online activities:

There are lots of library labs, and a few publisher initiatives, including Elsevier Labs, Elsevier Scopus Labs (accessible only to Scopus subscribers), Ingenta Labs, and Nature's Web Publishing group (I don't think it has a home page, but you can see some of their work on Nature Launch Pad).  In the sort of library-vendor space OCLC and Talis have developer networks.  I think some of the other library catalogue vendors may have developer spaces, but they are usually closed.

Looking at a few more Elsevier things specifically:

Elsevier has SciTopics, which is also on Twitter.

Elsevier also just announced the winner of their Grand Challenge, the Reflect project (if you follow my FriendFeed, you may see some familiar names in the winning team, like Lars Juhl Jensen and Michael Kuhn).

Which brings us to Elsevier's 2Collab.  I had a chance for an advance preview of 2Collab in late 2007.  It takes a somewhat different tack to other academic bookmarking tools, focusing a lot on group collaboration.  I had a chance to see Camelia Csora present about 2Collab as a research collaboration tool (PDF) at NISO Discovery Tools forum in 2008.

There are lots of challenges with these kinds of tools.  Can we integrate them into user workflows?  Can they understand bibliographic metadata, do lookups on DOIs, read COINS from source and embed COINS into their bookmarking pages?  Can we build standard APIs for these services?

Camelia has moved on to ebooks, and I see in my FriendFeed today that the new Product Manager for 2Collab, Michael Habib, will be presenting about 2Collab as a publisher collaboration tool

http://www.slideshare.net/habibmi/engaging-a-new-generation-of-authors-reviewers-readers-through-web-20

You can read more in his posting Engaging a New Generation of Authors, Editors, and Reviewers - Presentation for Boston Editors' Conference.

One of the big challenges in this area is getting people into the new network in order to collaborate - this is the issue that most of the "scientist social networks" have - there's no one there.  Even using Google Docs to collaborate tends not to scale very well, as you end up having to invite and reinvite groups of people to each new document.  FriendFeed as a collaboration space I think has a lot of advantages, in that it brings an immediate, individual benefit (mindcasting/lifecasting unification of web activity) as well as a critical mass of people, as well as lightweight group and discussion tools.

That's not to say you couldn't use 2Collab along with FriendFeed - and it occurs to me that one immediate step all the publishers (and other service providers) could take would be to work with FriendFeed to add their academic bookmarking services added as top level "import" sites.  Right now, despite a strong scientific user community, FF only has the non-academic sites in its list: 

• delicious
• Diigo
• Furl (which is now gone, bought by Diigo)
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon
• Twine
• はてな

The key point is it can no longer be either/or. It's not my site OR your site, it's all of our sites, interconnected. It's also/and.  I have to be able to go seamlessly from LibX to Zotero to Mendeley to Connotea to EndNote to 2Collab to Papers to FriendFeed and back again.  If Zotero has a great tool, I should be able to call it using an API from LibX.  Data can't be trapped at point of creation, it has to be able to flow around the web to be useful.

CLA preconferences: Democracy and Emerging Technology

Just highlighting a couple of the many Canadian Library Association preconferences, before the main event in Montreal.

* Democracy & Technology (DemTech) - May 29, 2009 - Off-site: J.A. de Seve Cinema, J. W. McConnell Library Building, Concordia University (note this is NOT at the main event site)

DemTech 2009 will showcase cutting edge projects that use information technology to encourage citizen access and foster democratic participation. DemTech is a pre-conference of the 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show of the Canadian Library Association, sponsored by Apathy is Boring, VisibleGovernment.ca and members of the CivicAccess.ca community.

You can see the DemTech.ca site, as well as some information on the CLA site.
I have been gathering some information related to this topic in my FriendFeed Open Government Canada room, and there will also be a local event, ChangeCamp Ottawa, on May 16, 2009.

* Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG) Library Camp - May 29, 2009 - Palais des congrès

The morning sessions will include presentations by John Fink (McMaster University), Jason Hammond (Regina Public Library), and Jessamyn West (yes THE Jessamyn West of librarian.net) The afternoon will be an "unconference", where participants will share and learn on a variety of topics pre-determined by the group. (Note: this is not a "sage on the stage" afternoon – come armed with a curious nature and a will to participate.)

There is a FriendFeed room, a wiki, and a blog in addition to the CLA site.

Registration deadline for both these events is Friday, April 17, 2009.  You can register by faxing in the form, or by signing up on the CLA site and submitting your info online.

I will be attending DemTech.

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

The Generation Ship - lessons for your library from Star Trek

A Generation Ship is a spaceship that will take many years to reach its destination (a not unreasonable idea, considering the vast distances between star systems, and the enormous energy needed to accelerate a ship to even a small fraction of the speed of light).  Because of the vast span of time that its voyage takes, entire generations of humanity grow, live, and die on the ship before it reaches its destination.

It is therefore more a means of transmitting a culture, than of transporting individual people; it is in some sense a memetic container.

The problem with generation ships, as explored in many science fiction stories, is that it is hard to retain cultural coherence over long spans of time.  If you launch the ship from Canada in 2009, the people who arrive at New Canada 1000 years later are going to be genetically very similar to those who left (evolution doesn't operate strongly over 1000 year time spans, particularly in a controlled environment) but their culture may have drifted as far from Canada 2009, as Canada is different from Europe 1009.

One of the common methods a generation ship uses to enforce cultural non-evolution is to use Authority.  This may take various forms: a computer which can last the lifespan of the ship may be the Authority whom all must obey, enforcing cultural norms century after century; the society itself may be reshaped into an authoritarian mode so as to remain conservative and stable across human lifespans; or in some cases, the original Creators are kept in suspended animation, awakening briefly every generation to realign the society back to its original design.

A generation ship is thus often a conservative cultural institution, transmitting knowledge across vast spans of time.  That is, basically a library.

Of course, one of the other issues with a generation ship is that after being in space for so long, the society onboard begins to forget their ultimate goal, and may forget that they're on a space ship at all (often helped by the fact that in order to be sustainable across centuries, a generation ship is often a world ship - a vast space large enough to hold an entire functioning ecosystem - a ship so big that most inhabitants may never see its boundaries).  In short, on a generation ship they begin to believe that the ship is the world.

This is what happened to the ship, the "world" of Yonada, a generation ship built by a people called the Fabrini, in a Star Trek (the original series) episode.

The ship has a rather complex design, a central sphere beneath the surface of which is an underground city, corridors and rooms filled with life, with what appears to be a somewhat barren and uninhabited surface above (it seems probable that travel to this surface is restricted).  The surface appears to have mountains and a sky above.  What the inhabitants don't know (in fact are forbidden to know) is that the "sky" is actually the inner surface of a second sphere, an asteroid shell that surrounds them (a similar idea of a dome showing a false sky is seen in The Truman Show).  They are a world within a world.

This leads to a striking line, a bit of classic SF, in which an old man describes how he disobeyed the authoritarian rules of the society, and once climbed a mountain: "for the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky".

The system that the Fabrini have chosen is one with religious overtones (religion is a good vehicle for preserving memes across generations), with an all-knowing computer, The Oracle, which monitors the proper behavior of the inhabitants, through a thought-detecting device implanted in every citizen.  While this device can impose punishment for incorrect thoughts, it appears that over time it has become mostly social sanction that retains conservatively the ideas of the society.

In the Oracle's room there is a Book, known only to the woman who is the head of the society.  It is not permitted to be opened until the ship has reached its destination.  Until then it is an object of worship for her.

So, is your library a generation ship?

Do you worship the container of the book, not its contents?

Do you enforce the rules handed down, generation after generation?

Have you lost sight of your destination, forgetting even the box you're in, unable any longer to see the walls that surround you?  Have you forgotten the goal of the library is sharing knowledge?

Have you become simply an engine for blindly replicating your existing processes, without ever questioning what the original purpose of those processes was?

Are you now actually actively preventing the sharing of knowledge, because your legacy processes have become more important than your original goal?

Do you believe the library way is the right way, that all must be trained in the proper techniques, that when people do not follow the correct approach they are wrong, they don't understand.  Do you believe that the library is enduring, unchanging, always good, always correct, it is others who must adapt themselves to the library?

Do you bow to authority of the ages, instead of reinventing yourself for today?

When someone tries to bring new ideas, when outsiders arrive, how are they treated?

Just some thoughts about libraries, from Star Trek.

Previously:

December 16, 2008  guilds in a time of rapid change

The Scholarly Communication Problem

I arrived late to the JISC Libraries of the Future online video stream, so this may not be a full picture of the discussion, but what I heard was mainly the Scholarly Communication Problem.  This problem is extremely well known and I have heard it talked about--forgive me--endlessly, without (m)any solutions proposed.  It goes like this:

Universities / research organisations pay researchers.
Funders grant money to researchers.
Universities / research organisations give money to libraries.

So far so good.  Then a strange dance:
researchers submit work to publishers who perform several functions:

• they assemble the various files together (text, charts, figures etc.)
• they select notable papers
• they send them out for peer review and manage the review (e.g. ensuring comments are in on time)
• they edit the copy itself for clarity and do QA
• they apply necessary metadata, get a DOI etc.
• they do layout on the copy so it looks nice

They don't actually perform the peer review, this is done by the reseachers.

Then libraries and funders pay publishers for this bundle of services, despite the fact that one chunk (peer review) is performed by the researchers.  Funders may also pay extra for OA, or sometimes journals have direct fees for publishing at all.

The impact factor of publications lends a certain authority, and is then used in determining both individual and institutional "worthiness".  This necessity of publication drives what I believe the gentleman from Harvard called a "cocaine marketplace" - once you're hooked by publishers, they can keep raising and raising the prices.

Then funders and libraries may pay AGAIN, to have the researcher submit the document to the repository followed by what is essentially a mini-publishing workflow run by librarians - again assembling the files together, again doing QA, applying necessary metadata and perhaps assigning a handle.

So: organisations effectively pay researchers to research, to peer review, and to submit to journals,
and then pay the publishers to get their own research back.  They maybe pay researchers and a bunch of other people to do this in a mini-version again, paying to get their own research back, in their own repository.  So paying for the same research two or three times.

THIS PROBLEM IS WELL KNOWN

Talking about these over and over and over again does nothing to solve this problem.  In fact I think talking about this any more without providing concrete (preferably implemented) solutions should be banned.

To fix it you:
1) identify what services researchers could self-organise (or be organised by libraries) to perform, like peer review
2) identify what, if any services from publishers are still needed, and pay only for those
3) go directly to public OA publishing of the peer-reviewed manuscript
4) find a new way to measure the "worthiness" of individual researcher and organisation output

There are lots of people who have identified this issue, I can submit my thoughts from three years ago - June 21, 2006 - my article on peer review for Nature.

There are a small number of groups taking a "just do it" approach to solving this problem.  There need to be many more.  There's also a whole set of related issues, like how to you manage versions in this environment, how do you manage discoverability when content may be all over the place, and how do you think about "notability" when a document may be an ongoing dynamic collaboration, rather than a static final publication with a fixed set of authors.  And this is not even touching the issues of "data as publication".  There's plenty of work to be done.

librarians - Peter Murray-Rust challenges you to share your vision of the future

PMR has been blogging and Twittering and FriendFeeding over the past week or so about "libraries of the future".  He wants feedback.  He wants vigorous debate.  He wants disagreement.  Can you tell he's a scientist?

It’s now 9 days since I started thinking about what I was going to say at the JISC LOTF09 meeting at Oxford next week. I’ve sent out 15 posts ion this blog. I’ve used the LOTF09 tag. I use twitter and FriendFeed...

I thought I was going to have a useful debate where ULibrarians criticized and critiqued what I had written. Nothing. If ULibraries wish to survive (at least more than book museums - which is important) they have to shout about it.

Now in fairness, I have to say it's not entirely reasonable to jump into the middle of a community (particularly with controversial posts) and expect immediate engagement.  But nevertheless, librarians, if you want Peter Murray-Rust to be able to reflect the richness of the discussion about libraries in the future when he speaks at Oxford next week, now's your chance.

plan your strategy first - select your library technologies later

A fantastic post from Meredith Farkas about why Web 2.0 initiatives succeed or fail at libraries - It’s not all about the tech - why 2.0 tech fails.

Whatever we’re doing should be tied to the library’s strategic goals and planning.

If it’s not tied to the library’s goals, then how will it be seen as a priority? Similarly, 2.0 technologies should be planned for in a strategic way, which I think has not happened at a lot of libraries. Some libraries jumped on the blogging bandwagon because they thought (or were told) that every library must have a blog. Other libraries started wikis because staff were really excited about the idea of having a wiki. Neither are good reasons to implement a technology. We first need to understand the needs of our population (be it patrons or staff) and then implement whatever technology and/or service will best meet those needs. We need to have clear goals in mind from the outset so that we can later assess if it’s successful or not. These technologies may be fun, but they’re simply tools.

The paragraphs above are as good a description of the need for a strategic planning function (which, being an enterprise architect, I naturally think of as an Enterprise Architecture function) at a library.  This is what I said on FriendFeed

It is absolutely not about the technology. In enterprise architecture terms, it's about determining the target (most commonly, a strategic plan) and then ensuring all activities are aligned with that plan. It can be hard for an org to understand that both working really hard, but on the wrong things AND indulging 'side' projects because the tech is trendy will get them nowhere. If it doesn't move you forward to your goals in a sustainable way, don't do it.

That's not to say you shouldn't allow "20% time" for experimentation, but draw a clear line between a blog experiment, and an official public blog presence. One can be tried and disappear, the other had better be sustainable.

Dorothea has quite rightly called me out for talking in my blog more about the technology than the people,  (The great thing about blogging is I get to test my ideas and their expression against an audience that thinks about these issues from many different angles.)  So I want to be very clear: the specific technology implementation does not matter, at a high level.  You must first decide, will creating this business function (e.g. "store organisational output") move me towards my strategic goals.  You must do this with a clear-eyed view of the ROI (that is, don't ascribe silver-bullet capabilities to a commodity technology - my joke at work is, to the extent that an IR is just a hard drive spinning in a corner, I could run an IR from home - I have 750GB of RAID 1 mirrored, networked storage).  The point being of course that an IR is not just a hard drive, it's a whole set of people and processes that make it valuable, sustainable, and worthwhile.

In summary - based on where you want to go (your strategic goals):
1. Chose the right set of aligned activities.
2. Ensure you have the right people and process to support those activities.
3. Only then concern yourself with the particular technology implementation details.

This is an echo of what I said in "librarians don't need to know SEO" - start at the high level first, don't just grab onto the latest buzzword.  I wish I could fit more about enterprise architecture into this blog, but it is a huge topic (I'd make a joke about "I have a wonderful solution, but sadly I've run out of space on the margin").  I have spent years trying to explain various aspects of it here, see the Enterprise Architecture category for my various attempts (including this one).

ICSTI 2009 - Managing Data for Science

The ICSTI 2009 conference has a great lineup of speakers on its programme.  (I can't claim any responsibility for this, since while my organisation has helped with planning the conference, my small personal contribution has just been a few suggestions about the web presence.)

Many of the names you may recognize from enthusiastic blog postings of mine, so as you can imagine, I'm looking forward to going.  Speakers mentioned in this blog (with a link to the relevant posting) include

• Francine Berman (ARL library escience theme presentations - October 9, 2006)
• Richard Boulderstone (BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog - March 7, 2007)
• Jan Brase (system for easy access to sci info using DOIs - Jan Brase - June 11 - IATUL 2007 - June 11, 2007)
• Lee Dirks (data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy - June 22, 2007)
• Liz Lyon (presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation - March 31, 2006)
• Paul Uhlir (the concepts of open science and information commons - September 8, 2006)

The event will be June 9-10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.  Early registration ends March 31.  I think it will be a great opportunity to discuss science data, e-science, and the roles that our libraries can play.  I am using tag icsti2009.  I hope to see many of you there.

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revisiting potential research-support roles for the library

Three years ago, I wrote this list of potential research-support roles for a library in the digital environment:

1. institutional repository for pre-prints and post-prints of the research organization's publications
2. data repository for the research conducted at the organization
3. providing advanced (data/publication/information/discovery/etc.) tools that integrate into the researcher's workflow

These are numbered for convenience, not importance.
What do I think, three years on.

Institutional Repositories

1. While institutional repositories are valuable, they currently benefit primarily organisations, not researchers.  They provide a unified view of an organisation's published output.  For individual researchers, their priority may be just on getting published, or if they do want to disseminate their work, they may just post it to their own website (and sad to say, may get more Google rank having it there than in their repository).

Because of this property, there is still a huge content recruitment challenge for IRs.  I saw this at SPARC Digital Repositories 2008 where, to be blunt, the tone seemed to be mostly "we built it and they didn't come".  And in fairness to individual organisations, even Wellcome with its billions and its mandatory policy isn't getting good compliance:

The Wellcome Trust have been monitoring compliance rates, and have been disappointed to find that these are currently very low. As a result of this, they intend to more actively monitor compliance, and in future will be contacting researchers who have not had articles published as Open Access papers.

Wellcome gets tough on Open Access depositions - Peter Murray-Rust's blog - March 7, 2009

Even if you just look at the language we use - "recruitment", "compliance" - it's clear that IRs have become about coercion, which should be making us seriously question their value.  The good news is that there is a lot of good thinking about this - for example Les Carr suggests the idea of making the repository a file system for researchers, and many have suggested making repositories more web-friendly (or eliminating this special container we call IRs altogether, and just using regular web tools).

If providing an institutional repository is your primary or core value to the organisation, you are putting yourself at tremendous risk, because a savvy administrator may notice that you can purchase hosted repository services from BePress and BMC Open Repository.  Any time a primary function (however valuable) has become commodity, you are at risk.

Data

2. Data is a strange thing.  Unlike the publisher resistance to article repositories, there is pretty much universal agreement amongst all parties that data should be openly shared.  There are many reasons it is mostly not being shared.  Data can have very complicated licensing.  By its very nature, it is complex to manage and interpret.  And researchers who are, to be blunt, somewhat indifferent to sharing their papers, may actively resist sharing their data as they may feel it is the foundation of their future research.  There's lots of good work being done - just today Peter Murray-Rust points to some practical developments in Open Data in Science - and John Wilbanks and his team have been doing deep and valuable work on data licensing as part of Science Commons (see e.g. Databases and Creative Commons), but we are a long ways away from massive, agreed-upon sharing and preservation of data.  Also a risky area in which to bet your organisation, but a good area to be doing small, practical experiments in data sharing and preservation with willing researchers.  Canada unfortunately lacks an equivalent of the UK's national Digital Curation Centre to help make this happen here.  There is an effort to gather information as part of Research Data Canada, but I don't know how widely known it is.

This is an activity that will have great value, once all the hugely complicated issues begin to be resolved.  Data is very different from journal articles - it lacks a standard format, and the resources it can consume - into the petabytes make it a daunting task for any organisation or set of organisations to take on.  I really admire the practical work that Amazon is doing with Public Datasets (thanks I suspect in large part to the vision of Deepak Singh).  The most practical things we can do right now is share what data we have, think about what open data will mean, and try to get more and more data openly shared.

Advanced Discovery and e-Science

3. This is an important area that I think offers enormous potential for libraries.  In Canada it is also hugely challenging because we have no national equivalent of the US NSF Cyberinfrastructure or the UK National e-Science Centre.  The best we can do is kind of grassroots e-science, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, since the common understanding of e-science is that it is about tackling large scale problems with large scale infrastructure.

Where I think things are possible is on the smaller scale, building and integrating advanced discovery and integration with researcher workflows piece-by-piece.  (This shouldn't be read as "build all" - integrating includes e.g. helping researchers integrate Connotea, Zotero, etc. into their workflows.)  Many researchers are not that web-aware beyond Google searching - there are all kinds of tools that they could use.  The library has a role in providing information about those tools.  In the near term, there are some very quick wins just providing better discovery and information management tools, most of which are already available for free on the web.  In the medium term, there are intriguing possibilities to support researchers with Virtual Research Environments.  And in the long term, true semantic discovery may be possible, with very advanced computational and visualisation tools supporting very sophisticated computer- and data-driven science.

Many pieces of this environment are being built.  The library has a key role in integrating them and educating researchers about them.  As indicated above, this is everything from

basic citation management - Connotea, Zotero and many others
to
Virtual Research Environments as being investigated by JISC and the British Library (PDF)
to
text mining on full-text, as planned by UKPMC
to
semantic discovery as is being pioneered by EMBL, Biogen Idec library, and many others in many fields (too many to list, but just in biomed see e.g. Semantic Mining in Biomedicine Symposiums and "Pharmas Nudge Semantic Web Technology Toward Practical Drug Discovery Applications")

As you can see this is an exciting space with many activities going on.  The (research) libraries that can have a meaningful presence in this space (which currently has some daunting technical and infrastructure requirements at the high end) will, I believe, be able to sustain themselves by providing truly relevant and valued services to their researchers.

An important point must be made here: if you don't have some point of connection with your researchers - some discovery tools on your site and in their browser that the library provides, then you have no point of contact or credibility upon which to base all the advanced capabilities you may want to bring to bear.

UPDATE: I wanted to add some closing thoughts about the focus of this post.  I'm a technology planner (that's a large part of the meaning of the rather grander "enterprise technology architect" job description I have).  That means my main focus is on the technologies the organisation uses.  Not the specific implementations (DSpace vs. Fedora) but the general classes of technology-enabled business functions in the organisation that are provided.  So what I'm working through above is what kinds of approaches will be sustainable technology differentiators.  That is, where can your library add technology-supported value that will be recognised by researchers.  This has some implications for the people roles, the jobs the librarians would do, but I'm not examining that aspect.  ENDUPDATE

Some of the topics about data and e-science that I have discussed above will be covered in the ICSTI 2009 conference in Ottawa this June (about which more in the following posting).

Clay Shirky on newspapers

Clay Shirky has a great post for any organisation trying to navigate the Digital Chasm (I know we usually say "digital transition" as if it was all going to be nice and smooth and continuous, but that's part of his point, it isn't).  Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

I want you to think about that.  Here's what I wrote as a FriendFeed comment on the item: "Fundamentally it's an issue of the mental models of the pre-digital world not transferring over. In the physical world you may steal something because you want it, but more likely, you steal it because you want to make some money. People who steal may have no interest in what they're stealing, other than money. When the digital Law of Infinite Perfect Copies applies, there is no money in copying. That means the people who copy your content most passionately are people who LOVE YOUR PRODUCT."

I don't think media in particular has gotten its head around this.  In the digital world, when people like your product, some will buy, but many will share.  Both of these are expressions of engagement with your content.  People may switch seamlessly between buying and sharing - they may buy the DVDs, but BitTorrent episodes that aren't available on DVD yet.  They may watch legal clips online, and carry ripped content around on their iPods.  They.  Don't.  Care.  The industry has been trying over and over and over again to convince us that the person who in one instant is buying the DVD is a noble upstanding citizen supporting industry, and the EXACT SAME PERSON who an instant later copies some music and gives it to a friend is an evil pirate who hates capitalism and is stealing food from artists' children.  This is insane.  This is not true.  Stop doing that, it doesn't work.  What part of Infinite Perfect Copies do you not understand?

More from Shirky

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times.

If digital blows up the library, the solution is not to say "the library is really really important, this can't be happening".  The solution is to provide real services in the real world that patrons actually use.  Not the services you think they should use, services that they actually want.

Three years ago, I wrote "is the research library obsolete?" and its followup "paved paradise: the future of (a particular type of) research library?".  The point of which is: if your main business is serving up digital content (PDFs of articles from licensed journals) remotely to researchers sitting at their desks -- which I realise is certainly not the case if you're a public library, but which is the case for my library -- then the entire enterprise you've built up, the big building designed for visitors who no longer come, the carefully protected stacks full of paper, that entire enterprise is dying and you'd better have a plan for what your library does next in the real world.  Trying to pretend that basic discovery and access to digital content are a differentiator (let alone ascribing value to stacks of print) in a world of Google Scholar and ScienceDirect is fantasy, not reality.  If you don't provide more than publisher sites + free search can offer, you're dead (a situation which now faces an organisation I am rather familiar with).

To conclude with some forceful words from Shirky

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

via FriendFeed

SIDEBAR: It's important to mention that one of the reasons for the current newspaper crisis, beyond the macroeconomic downturn, is that many of them, whether directed by moguls or corporations, were highly leveraged.  Empires built upon debt.  This sort of financial manuevering looks brilliant when credit is cheap and the economy is growing and the classified ads look like a license to print money.  No doubt each buyout and takeover was lauded in its day.  And it was of course just part of an overall pattern that loaded almost every part of the economy down with debt.  But nevertheless, when credit is hard to get and the economy is shrinking and the ad-based newspaper model is under threat, it looks idiotic.

UPDATE: One of Canada's two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail had a major feature on this topic today - Is democracy written in disappearing ink?

My comment on FriendFeed was: I'm concerned that, just as in the words of Churchill "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." that it is possible that "the mainstream media are the worst form of journalism except all the others that have been tried". Unfortunately, just because blogging *may be* worse, that doesn't mean blogging won't replace MSM.

Libraries in Computers - March 31, 2009

I was thinking about the post title and it occurs to me - no offense to InfoToday - that "Computers in Libraries" is kind of an old way of thinking about things.  The reality today is Libraries in Computers.
This is not a new idea - Mark Weiser was writing about ubiquitous computing in Scientific American in 1991.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Is your library becoming a part of your patrons' everyday life?  All this to introduce CIL 2009 session

D203: Embedding Services: Go Where the Client Is

coming up on March 31, featuring my colleague Natalie Collins.  She'll talk about the process that got us to "allowing discovery to happen in the user’s regular work environment".  If you want more details, a previous post about a thousand words may give a hint.

Kindle 2 burns on the horizon

Front page news on Amazon.com and being promoted to Amazon Associates, the Kindle 2 has arrived.
Personally, I don't see why you would buy books you can only license, never own.  Books on a device that's available only in the United States.  Isn't technology amazing?  It can create arbitrary barriers that never existed before in the physical world.

But if you want one, here you go.  It's US$359 and will be released February 24, 2009.

pre-order Kindle 2 from Amazon.com

 

I do have to admire Amazon for understanding a deep truth of the digital world - in the end, you can only monetize physical things.  Apple understood this by making their money on the iPod, not the music.

UPDATE: Also the note at Amazon that "original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2 [if they order one]" reminds me that this is new technology.  That means unlike paper, which is rather well-established, the Kindle will become obsolete.  Rapidly.  Those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for 20 years - no problem, reach over and open them up.  In 20 years, how many generations of book-reading technology do you think you will have to go through, between upgrades and failures?  At hundreds of dollars for every replacement.  For content that you don't even own in any meaningful way.  I don't think that's progress.  ENDUPDATE

Personally I think a more interesting development is Google Book Search Mobile.  As well, the New York Times reports that Amazon is also working on delivering "Kindle books" to cellphones, presumably with the same DRM.  There is no sign of that being available from Amazon today (and I don't see what their incentive would be, since it breaks the "you only make money from physical things" model).

Full disclosure: The above are Amazon Affiliate links (price and everything are identical, I just get a percentage of your purchase).

NRC Personal Learning Environment project is hiring

via Stephen Downes
(NRC = National Research Council Canada)

The R&D activities will focus across two dimensions: how access to a wide variety of learning opportunities can best be managed in an online environment; and how technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services. In essence, the scientific problem is one of designing an educational infrastructure based on future best practices and then developing an educational application that will work within that infrastructure. The positions, which are for three years, include:

• Researcher specializing in education and pedagogy
• Researcher specializing in art, design and new media
• Researcher specializing in library and information management
• Technology specialist with an emphasis on database support
• Technology specialist with an emphasis on application development