Science Library Pad

the de-zoned BL struggles with its popularity

Would that we all had such problems with our reading rooms.

in 1998 the library moved to a modern red-brick building on Euston Road, and four years ago it liberalized its admission policy. It opened its new reading rooms not only to writers and academics who depend on material from its singular collection, but also to “anyone who has a relevant research need,” a spokeswoman said.

Which is all fine. But “anyone” includes college undergraduates, and the problem with them, at least in the eyes of the older researchers, is that they tend to behave like the teenagers that many of them are.

...

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

New York Times - Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - April 28, 2008

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill while the historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues. Library users complain that the line to enter the new building in St Pancras, central London, has recently been extending across its enormous courtyard.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, Lady Antonia said: “I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, in freezing weather. Then I queued to leave my coat for 20 minutes [at the compulsory check-in]. Then half an hour to get my books and another 15 minutes to get my coat. I’m told it’s due to students having access now. Why can’t they go to their university libraries?”

Of particular irritation is the notion that many undergraduates now come to the library to relax, meet and text friends, and play on laptops, rather than to read books. “It’s become a social gathering,” Lady Antonia said.

The Times - Frustration for authors as students hog British Library reading rooms - April 21, 2008

One Big Library Unconference - Toronto - June 27 2008

John Dupuis announces

the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation,
215 Spadina Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Areas of interest:

    * The future of libraries
    * Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
    * Uses of social software in libraries
    * Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Looks really interesting, it's great to see more experimentation with the unconference format.

the end of cognitive zoning

Lots of buzz around Shirky's cognitive surplus post.
To me the idea is very similar to my assertion that peer production happens mostly in the bright areas of the world at night map, in the places where we have the leisure time to do these things.  (See where in the world are users generating?)

Shirky's idea is presented as reclaiming the time that was lost for generations to television, but I think of it as more like cognitive re-zoning.

We still live in the echo of the Industrial Age.  And the Industrial Age gave us efficiency, Taylorism, and as part of that, zoning.

How our space is organized has a deep relationship with how our lives are organized, which in turn shapes the possibilities for the lives we can lead.

Think about old houses, each small room for its specific purpose, the kitchen, the dining room, the front reception room (closed, for guest visits only).  Now think of new, unzoned designs, the flowing great rooms that are now preferred, kitchen into dining room into living room.

Zoning permeated, and still permeates, our lives.  There are 9-5 weekdays, where you PRODUCE (or if a student, LEARN), and 5-11 weekdays and all day weekends, when you CONSUME.

Drive into the city work zone to PRODUCE, drive out to the suburbs to CONSUME.

All nice tidy zones.  And zones which made sense in the industrial age, since to live next to where you worked at that time was to be next to a giant smoking clanking factory.  And if you're doing physical work all day, you really do need downtime just so your body doesn't collapse.

The problem with zoning in the post-industrial age is that it's an epic disaster.  A disaster of urban planning, and a disaster of social engagement.  PRODUCE and CONSUME excludes a lot of desirable things.  Like say, Think, Reflect, Eat, Discuss, Discover, Continue to Learn... basically, most of the things that make life worth living.

And in the unzoned life in the unzoned city, all of these things can flow naturally together.  Not in a destructive way, in which PRODUCE expands into your downtime so that you are always working, but in an organic way, so that you are able to mix working, learning, thinking, relaxing...

Sometimes people say to me about blogging, isn't it a waste of time, where will people find the time, which is nonsense.  All old-style PRODUCE does is define a tiny set of things: meetings, emails, legacy inefficient processes, as "work", and anything else as non-work.  So you end up in a time of constant change when you've literally defined learning and planning out of your work day.  It's no wonder people can't adapt to change.

Lorcan has a great quote from the Economist in his blog, which he is using to discuss mobility, but which I will use to talk about the death of zoning

“a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”

I think the language is interesting: "ad-hoc workspaces".  Because a workspace should be what - fixed?  Established?  Serious?  I would put it another way: there is no work zone and home zone.  There is only place and context.  Today the coffeshop is a place to sit in the sun and chat with friends, tomorrow you're writing a report there on your laptop.  Today your computer room is for playing World of Warcraft, tomorrow you're filling in a spreadsheet.

Think about your spaces and your cognitive activities in an unzoned world.  How do things change?  We've already seen great progress in libraries on this, as they accept food and noise and gaming and more.  And I think we're also starting to see progress in some organizations as people's work activities and groups are unzoned, so the we can cross silos and we can mix blog reading and writing in with Very Serious Business Meetings.

As well, as luck would have it, we already have some models that we can draw upon, as most of the world's great cities give us examples of mixed, zoneless life, where you can move from work to shopping to eating to an art gallery to a park, all within the space of a few blocks.

In case you're wondering why I uppercased producer and consumer, it's to highlight how these roles are reintegrating, or dezoning, back into prosumer, as envisioned notably by Toffler.

Previously:
December 18, 2006  the Internet, it's made of people

availability, discovery, and delivery - redux

• Availability does not equal accessibility: researchers’ top concern about scholarly communication is that they cannot access all the content they wish to access
• Researchers tend to use tried-and-tested discovery tools, or those which their library specifically trains them to use. Google and other web search engines remain the most-used search tools for work-related information. The main problem with discovery is coming up against an access barrier
• Researchers do not always know how to seek out a freely-available copy of an article that they want and which they have discovered behind a toll barrier

Key concerns within the scholarly communication process: report to the JISC Scholarly Communication Group, March 2008 [Word document]

via Lorcan Dempsey

I find it interesting that the focus of concerns is around delivery, not discovery (perhaps this is how the questions were framed).

I think the academic library faces two challenges:

1. Ensure that your researchers can always get from their chosen discovery environment easily to
1. Get to your licensed resources
2. Get to free copies, if licensed versions aren't available
3. Get to purchase options, if free copies aren't available
2. Ensure that as many of your resources as possible can actually be discovered

I'm not convinced that we're doing a particularly good job of addressing these fundamental challenges even after years of working on proxies, federated search, link resolvers, and "live in your environment" plugins and external website settings.

It seems to me that librarians were so focused on trying to control the discovery experience, trying to make people discover resources "properly", following established librarian search protocols, that the simple challenges above were not addressed.

I think we need to spend a lot of time with researchers letting them search however they want, and seeing whether they dead-end either by not being able to get to a resource at all, or by landing at a paywall for a resource we license or can get to for free.  Fix that first.

And I'm not entirely convinced we have all the tools we need to fix that problem right now.

Then once you have addressed consistent delivery, work on improving discovery.  I think discovery is much harder to fix.  And to some extent, there should be vendor pushback.  I don't care how rich or comprehensive a licensed resource is, if my users can never discover it, then the message to the vendor should be "enable easy ways for my user to discover your resources within their preferred discovery environments, or next year we're not licensing your content".

Previously:
Lorcan and I had a bit of a back-and-forth about discovery and delivery in 2006.

August 08, 2006  Discovery and disclosure - Lorcan Dempsey
August 09, 2006  online library role in discovering and delivering - Science Library Pad

Building SkyNet for Science - presentation for NISO Discovery Tools Forum

My presentation is available at

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/building-skynet-for-science-discovering-new-frontiers-using-embedded-knowledge/

A lot of it is conceptual, so you may want to wait until the audio is available from the NISO site (hopefully next week).

UPDATE 2008-03-28: I forgot to mention that all of the supporting links for the presentation (will be) available at http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/nisodiscovery2008  ENDUPDATE

I thought it went well, although as first speaker up there is a disadvantage of not seeing how other people set up.  I was in a bit of a rush to get started so that I would finish on time, so I didn't do a great job of attaching my mike and I just held the wireless transmitter in my hand.  With the transmitter in one hand and my laser pointer gripped in the other for the entire 50 minutes, it's possible I looked a bit of a prat.

I usually try to remember to keep my hands free for presentations so that I can use more natural body language, anyway lesson learned.

I also forgot to say "The future is not set.  There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." before the last slide.

There are some common themes emerging from the presentations, I'm always amazed when a bunch of people develop presentations in isolation and then they actually all fit together when presented.

I've posted some photos of the presenters in my Flickr under nisodiscovery2008 (my cameraphone can upload directly to Flickr over WiFi), they also show up because of the machine tag linkage on the Upcoming page.  No pics of Chapel Hill yet as I don't have a car and it turns out while we're only about 4km from the town, the most direct route for me to get there I think would be to walk beside a six-lane divided highway, which is not too appealing.

UPDATE 2008-03-28: The carbon offset for my flights from myclimate.org (including the trip to Open Repositories) was about C$118.

Open Repositories 2008

Through an unexpected series of events I find myself going to Open Repositories 2008

http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

The lineup looks great including a keynote from Peter Murray-Rust, and two (!) sessions on Scientific Repositories.

There is also a Repository Challenge for developers with a £2,500 prize, which is like a million US dollars now (finally, Canadians get to make US dollar jokes).  Kudos to David Flanders for leading this "let's just build stuff and see what works" approach.

I will be blogging under tag/category or08, and twittering under hashtag #or08

I made an Upcoming event, mainly because then if you add the machine tag

upcoming:event=455039

to your Flickr photos, it will automatically put in a nice "Taken at Open Repositories 2008" logo.

NLA announces Library Labs

The [National Library of Australia] has recently opened this "Library Labs" wiki space:

https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/LABS/Home

The aim of this space is to let our colleagues know what we are doing, to invite comments, questions and feedback and to provide a space for discussion and collaboration.

We have started to redevelop our digital library services using a service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions where these are functional and robust.  We are also aiming to take a common ("single business") approach to collection management, discovery and delivery.

We are interested in forming a community of Australian business analysts and developers who are working on similar problems and who are interested in  interoperable, standards-based solutions. We are also interested in working with colleagues at an international level to provide prototypes and testbeds for new and emerging standards.

via Warwick Cathro
Assistant Director-General, Innovation
National Library of Australia

Semantically-enriched search results coming from Yahoo

In an upcoming talk I will be continuing a theme I started at Allen Press, calling for more semantic enrichment of scientific information online (I am of course, only one of many making such calls).

It is therefore timely to see Yahoo offering an open platform for harvesting and returning semantically-enhanced search.

There was a pre-announcement on TechCrunch, followed by the official word on the Yahoo Search Blog

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo Search Blog - The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem - March 13, 2008

You can sign up for more information at

http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/open.html

So what would an appropriate set of semantic information be for a scientific article, what would your ideal search display include?  # of citations?  Impact Factor?  Chemical and gene sequences?  Price?  (Sometimes information wants to be expensive...)  How much can we fit into a couple of lines that will help to select one article over another in results?

UPDATE: And Yahoo is just one player in this space, as Paul Miller indicates in his posting Looking for a dominant Semantic Web search engine.

via Twitter mostly

9th International Bielefeld Conference

Happened to be checking the conference website and I see that, although it's one year off from its previous 2-year cycle, the International Bielefeld Conference is pre-announced to be back February 3-5, 2009.

Bielefeld University Library will continue its successful series of conferences in early 2009.

Like the previous ones, this conference will provide an international platform for trendsetting and stimulating discussions among customers and providers of information services, especially among scholars, information specialists, publishers, library managers, and patrons.

http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/

Well, I know what I'll be adding to this year's list of proposed events (my planning cycle is March-March).

I think it's invitation only though...

I don't know what's best for a tag, I'm going to go with 9ibc for now.

Previously:
April 28, 2006  conference proceedings: ICSTI eScience, Bielefeld + Taiga + LtF on academic library future
February 15, 2006  roles and challenges for the academic library in e-Science

Science Policies and Science Portals - registration open

Registration is now open for

IFLA 2008 Satellite meeting
Science Policies and Science Portals

Canada, Montreal, Polytechnique Montreal - Friday August 8th 2008

I also made an Upcoming.org event.

I've proposed a tag: ifla2008science

Next Generation Discovery - NISO Forum - March 2008

Next Generation Discovery: New Tools, Aging Standards
March 27-28, 2008
Chapel Hill, NC

Discovering scholarly information and data is essential for research and use of the content that the information community is producing and making available. The development of knowledge bases, web systems, repositories, and other sources for this information brings the need for effective discovery -- search-driven discovery and network (or browse) driven discovery -- tools to the forefront. With new tools and systems emerging, however, are standards keeping pace with the next generation of tools?

I will be presenting.
I also (after fighting with Yahoo accounts) managed to make an Upcoming event.

Other confirmed presenters include Peter Murray, Karen Hawkins (talking about scitopia.org), and Eric Schnell & Dave Munger (talking about researchblogging.org and the BPR3 initiative).

I'm proposing a tag: nisodiscovery2008

UPDATE 2008-03-10: And a Twitter Hashtag #ndf08

CNI Fall 2007 presentations, podcast

Lots of interesting material from fall CNI.

An audio interview with Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development at the State and University Library in Aarhus, Denmark about the Summa search system and other academic library topics.

Current Experiments & Future Directions in Scholarly Communication - Timo Hannay, Nature

The eCrystals Federation: Open Data Repositories Supporting Open Science
Liz Lyon, University of Bath
Simon Coles, University of Southampton
Manjula Patel, University of Bath

Summa podcast link via DigitalKoans

Previously:
October 26, 2006  the future of the scientific paper and more on open web science (Timo Hannay)
March 31, 2006  presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation (Dr Liz Lyon)
October 11, 2005  ILI2005 - Tuesday 11th - Living with Google: New roles for libraries (Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard)
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:00 - Developing e-infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms (Dr Liz Lyon)

future of academic libraries - presentations

Presentations from "The Future of Academic Libraries - the Road ahead" seminar held earlier this week in Oslo are available, including

The future of academic libraries - the road ahead - seen from Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF)

What are the challenges for the academic libraries in the near future?

• Become user oriented in all respects
    – Become digital
    – Develop user-friendly simple systems (“as well known daily systems”)
    – Push the systems to the users in all ways
    – Forget one stop shopping
    – Accept not all content will be used
    – Deliver extra value (content or service)
    – Implement resource sharing – nobody can do everything nationally or internationally

Which services do the academic libraries’ institutions (and users) expect them to deliver?

• Content acquisition (licensing)
• Integrated search and delivery
• Research registration
• Institutional repositories
• Information literacy support
• Study environments
• Virtual reference desk
• VLE support?
• E-science support?

presentation by Bo Öhrström, Deputy Director, Danish Library Agency and overall responsible for DEFF

The presentation also talks about the need for shared infrastructure

Integrated search as an architecture

• Not only a search engine – but a national architecture
• A university has only 5% of the relevant information resources for a user in its own holdings
• The user wants to search in all relevant quality research information independent of which institution provides them.
• The library needs cooperation with other libraries about
    – larger amount of data
    – more seamless document delivery systems
    – new technology access control systems

Denmark has two integrated library search systems, Summa (open source) and Primo (Ex Libris).

There are also presentations with the perspectives from Talis (UK), Finland, Sweden, and Norway.

Link via BiblioBabl.

Previously:
February 05, 2007  Danish library strategies
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 11:40 - Overview of DEFF SOA activities

whither the generalist library in a world of domain specialists?

Peter Murray-Rust blogging about the Academic Publishing in Europe conference (APE 2008)

Panel Discussion: What Matters? The Future Role of Libraries in Science and Society? Swallowed by OA Repositories, turned into University Presses or kept as Book Museums?

Here I have a problem. I appreciate that libraries have many roles and I’m a keen supporter. Guardianship of scholarship, preservation, access, etc. But this doesn’t come across in science. I see librarians because I’m working on information-rich projects but if I didn’t I wouldn’t. How many PhD chemistry students will come to the library. (We have a lovely library in our building, funded by Unilever, and students like working there because it’s quiet. But we wouldn’t build the same facility today. And Henry tells me that Imperial has closed its departmental library. They have a nice quiet work area - with terminals - but it’s not a library.  Librarians cannot make a new role out of being super-purchasing and contract officers for information - scientists neither see nor care. So I challenged the panel with this and similar points.

Science and technology move so fast that none of us can keep up. Subject librarians trained on the classical model cannot provide what scientists need. The bioscientists look to PubMed, EBI, PDB, etc as the repositories of knowledge - not to their institutions. What they need are information scientists embedded in their laboratories. People who know how to hack perl, python, Java, XML, RDF, RSS, etc. Where the flow of meta-information is from the scientist to the information scientists as well as the other way round. It’s a tall order. But the average 18-year old does not look in a library for scientific information - they look to Google and Wikipedia (which is why I contribute when I can find time).

Thes views are reinforced by what the biscoientists and physicists are doing. They create domain repositories. They either have large national or international organisations which are beneficient and wish to oversee the free movement of scientific infomation. With bio- it’s Pubmed and Pubchem, NCBI, PDB, EBI, etc. and with physics it’s arXiv and SCOAP3. These are domain repositories and that’s what we critically need.

I can see that certain primary research will naturally go to IRs - mandated fulltext, theses, etc. But  many will see Pubmed and SCOAP3 as the primary places, not their institution.

I guess underlying this is an element of social networking that the Internet exposes: allegience to local institutions is an artefact of physical proximity.  When physical interaction is a real part of your community, this is not a problem - the local public library remains a real meeting place.  The university library acts as a neutral meeting ground and study area.  But we find in the online environment, people tend to coalesce around their interests, not their locations.  When you go online, do you go to your city or neighbourhood web network (if such a thing even exists?) or do you instead go to sites around your personal network and interests: your Facebook friends, a digital photography site, your Warcraft Guild page and Guild Bank, your aggregator with blogs that interest you.

I never really quite got this school spirit thing of "our" team versus "their" team.  You may find that scientists consider their peers in their discipline as the group to which they owe their loyalty, not their institution.  That means their content and their efforts are going to flow to the online representations of their scientific network, whether that's domain repositories, conference sites, or specialised scientific discussion groups.

This is a challenge for the physical library, which brought together disparate groups on the basis of being the gatekeeper of physical content, and then built services (e.g. reference) for the crowds of people who flowed in.

One possible role is for the library to participate in the domain networks, as we see with the roles of NLM and British Library in PubMed Central and UKPMC.  And it's certainly a legitimate role to be the collector of the institution's output in an IR, as long as you recognize that the IR is just going to be one node in a much larger network of content that may be aggregated on a domain basis (e.g. one can imagine a chemistry portal that draws on PubChem, anything "chemistry tagged" across any IRs it can search, and other chem resources).

IFLA 2008 satellite conferences for science and medical libraries

IFLA 2008 will be in Quebec City this year, but I have discovered there are quite a few associated satellite meetings in different venues.  I don't know if I will go to IFLA proper, but I plan to attend the science portals preconference in Montreal.  Here are a few of the events that are relevant to science libraries:

Disappearing disciplinary borders in the social science library - global studies or sea change?
Dates: 6-7 August 2008
Location: University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Contact person: Lynne M. Rudasill <mailto:rudasill@uiuc.edu> 
Website: http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/ssls/

National Science Policies and Science Portals
Dates: 8 August 2008
Location: Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal (Montreal)
Contact person: Irma Pasanen <mailto:irma.pasanen@tkk.fi> 
Website: http://lib.tkk.fi/ifla/IFLA_Science_Portals

The role of evidence based research in medical libraries
Dates: 9 August 2008
Location: Québec City (exact location to be advised)
Contact person: H. Todd <mailto:h.todd@library.uq.edu.au> 
Website: to be announced

Rethinking Access to Information: Evolving perspectives on information content and delivery
Dates: 6-7 August 2008 (arrival and social event of 5 August)
Location: Boston Public Library, Boston, MA (USA)
Contact person: Poul Erlandsen <mailto:poer@dpu.dk> 
Website: website with link from IFLA website

ICSTI video - "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information"

Videos of the presentations from the ICSTI 2007 Public Conference "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information" are now available.

You can see the programme with links to presentations, and the video page is separate, with links to each topic (RealVideo format - click on the camcorder icons on each sub-page, not on the presentation titles), I was in Quality, certification and peer review - Part 1, my presentation was Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone (RealVideo, 35 minutes).  I encourage you to check out the other topics, I found there were some really informative presentations.

(As I said in my previous posting about my presentation, the title is not great, it's more like "categorizing the problem space of journal article exploration, and what new features or metrics we might use in this new space, as well as what new scholarly objects we might certify by applying peer review".)

My hair is, as usual, sticking out at some odd angle.  Fortunately for you, most of the time the video shows the slide I'm talking about. It's probably not entirely clear from the video, but about 14 minutes in the projector died, so I was left talking beside a blank screen (I could still see the slides on my own monitor) for about 5 minutes until everyone decided they'd had enough of that and we took a break and came back when the projector was fixed.

The next (closed, members-only) ICSTI meeting is coming up next week in Paris.  I don't know whether there is an accompanying public workshop.

UPDATE: The first version of this post ended up with an amusingly unfortunate URL.

library 2.0 presentation from GTEC 2007

A Google search for library 2.0 books happened to turn up this presentation

Library 2.0 Library Services & Web 2.0 (PPT) - GTEC conference - October 16, 2007

by Donna Bourne-Tyson of Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) in Halifax, NS

A couple things I hadn't known

NRCan libraries in delicious - http://del.icio.us/nrcanlibrary

Dalhousie University implementation of LibGuides - http://libguides.library.dal.ca/

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

the researcher of the future

The picture that emerges from internet research is that
most visitors to scholarly sites view only a few pages,
many of which do not even contain real content, and in
any case do not stop long enough to do any real reading.
This is either a symptom of a really worrying malaise -
failure at the library terminal - or maybe a sign that a
whole new form of online reading behaviour is beginning
to emerge, one based on skimming titles, contents pages
and abstracts: we call this `power browsing’. We
urgently need to understand the root causes of this
phenomenon.

Students usually prefer the global searching of Google to more
sophisticated but more time-consuming searching provided by
the library, where students must make separate searches of the
online catalog and every database of potential interest, after
first identifying which databases might be relevant. In addition,
not all searches of library catalogues or databases yield full-text
materials, and NetGen students want not just speedy answers,
but full gratification of their information requests on the spot.32

It can be said with confidence that librarians do not
currently design information systems around this form of
user behaviour and how best to accommodate it
represents their real challenge. The way forward has to
be via a flexible, `suck-it-and see’ model. Trying things
out in the digital space, monitoring the reaction and
adjusting accordingly. Moving from counting hits to
watching users.

The significance of this for research libraries is threefold:

• they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines

• they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop

• they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce

Information Behaviour  of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) [above from page 31]

Also see press release including audio (MP3, 77min 22sec, 66.3MB)  of launch event.

Other than the fact that "suck it and see" doesn't translate very well or clearly on this side of the Atlantic, it all seems sensible advice.

I guess we should have a new slogan... "The Research Library: Your Trampoline of Knowledge"

via CISTI's Michael Ireland, via CISTI's Frank Oda

Access 2008 CFP

Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Date: October 1-4, 2008 (Hackfest: Oct 1; Conference: Oct 2-4)
CFP Deadline: Friday, February 22, 2008
URL: http://access2008.mcmaster.ca

Access is Canada's premier library technology conference, featuring a single stream of sessions that deal with technology planning, development, challenges and solutions. ... now accepting proposals for prepared talks on the following topics (other ideas are more than welcome):      

• customized web applications and search interfaces
  
• open source software
  
• national and provincial/state-wide consortia technology initiatives
  
• information policy
  
• digital and social media
  
• library catalogue innovations
  
• digitization projects
  
• institutional repositories
  
• end-user searching behaviours
  
• protocols and metadata

...or anything else suitably geeky, innovative and/or awe-inspiring

Previously:
Access2005 Access2006 Access2007

ACRL 2007 Environmental Scan is out

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released their 2007 Environmental Scan (PDF), dated January 2008.

Issues around intellectual property, data management, and skillsets (and associated new information technologies) are some main themes.

via User Education Resources for Librarians

Library Support for E-Science - ARL Final Report

A challenge:

Whither Science Libraries?

What are contemporary library uses and needs
of the scientific community? Are subscriptions to
e-journals sufficient? The emergence of escience
raises important questions about the
services and infrastructure within ARL libraries
in support of science.

Libraries may, in fact, be creating obstacles to
emerging interdisciplinary models of science.
Branch libraries based on separate collections in
related areas of the sciences are cited as a
hindrance to multidisciplinary research at a time
when online access transcends discipline-based
collections.  Other recent behavioral
assessments suggest that libraries are often not
perceived as part of the evolving research
infrastructure in support of interdisciplinary,
team science.

There is a perception that science librarians,
more than ever before, need to be actively
engaged with their user communities. They need
to understand not only the concepts of the
domain, but also the methodologies and norms
of scholarly exchange. This level of
understanding and engagement goes well
beyond knowledge of the literature. It requires
being a trusted member of the community with
recognized authority in information related
matters. This new paradigm suggests a shift in
focus from managing specialized collections (the
“branch library” model) to one that emphasizes
outreach and engagement.

Many science librarians, of course, are already
doing this. There are examples of science and
health science librarians working with faculty in
teaching courses, participating in research
projects, and publishing. Are these models
extensible? Can we re-conceive the science
library for e-science?

Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries - Final Report and Recommendations (PDF) - Association of Research Libraries: Library Support for E-Science - November 2007

A way forward - Model Principles.  I must admit, when I was blogging for the OECD, I had a hard time grasping the shape of the conversations that were going on.  This set of model principles (based on a draft from Chuck Humphrey), from Appendix B of the ARL E-Science Final Report, provides a clear set of topics that research libraries should consider (I have trimmed some entries - see the document for full versions):

1. Open Access: Research libraries will support open access policies and practices regarding scientific knowledge and e-science.

2. Open Data: Access to open data is a movement supported by research libraries, taking into consideration the ethical treatment of human-subject data.

3. Collaboration: Research libraries will collaborate with multi-institutional, interdisciplinary
research projects by developing and supporting digital repositories for their research outputs,
data, and metadata.

4. Digital Stewardship & Preservation: Research libraries will have institutional repositories that meet international preservation and interoperability standards and practices.

5. Equitable Service and Support: Research libraries will work collectively to ensure that gaps do not develop in the levels of support provided across e-sciences.

6. Professional Development & Investment: Research libraries will develop the human capital to provide the range of knowledge management skills at the appropriate level needed by esciences.

7. Metadata Standards & Metadata Creation: Research libraries will spearhead initiatives to develop metadata standards supportive of scientific data.

8. There is no number 8.

9. Virtual Communities: Research libraries will contribute to the establishment of and
participate in virtual laboratories or organizations developed across e-sciences.

10. Sustainable Models: Research libraries will participate in the development of and contribute to sustainable business models for the resources and services essential to e-sciences.

11. Communication: Research libraries will participate in initiatives to increase wider
professional and public understanding of e-science contributions to knowledge and its
infrastructural requirements.

* The June 2008 OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy will be
considering a set of digital information principles, indicating a broad international interest in
developing principles for cyberinformation. (See
http://www.oecd.org/department/0,3355,en_2649_34223_1_1_1_1_1,00.html )

This gives me a great opportunity to connect to more information from the 2007 OECD Participative Web meeting in Ottawa.  You can read my blog postings about the e-science presentations, and I have been remiss in not pointing out the video (Windows Media) of the presentations (the session starts at 05:30 into the stream).  The presentations are in English (the introduction is in French).

PS For a more direct (and memorable) link to the OECD Future of the Internet Economy work, use http://www.oecd.org/FutureInternet 

Info about the ARL final report via Bev Brown, from asis-l and CNI Announce.

Code4Lib Journal 1

The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is up.
There is an article about the NCSU CatalogWS API - Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform.

I think it's great to have a library journal that can focus on more technical topics.

Previously:
November 06, 2007  NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007

open science and the web for research library 2.0?

Peter Murray-Rust points me to Dr. Liz Lyon's keynote for a November 2007 ARL Directors meeting

Open Science and the Research Library: Roles, Challenges and Opportunities?

I saw her present at InfoGrid 2005 and I've downloaded subsequent ones, this one is more Web 2.0 centric than others I have seen.  She has done a lot of deep thinking about the challenges and opportunities related to dealing with scientific data in our new cyberscience world.

Along related lines Bernard Dumouchel (former CISTI DG) wrote a short comment which asserted that supporting open science was a key possible future role for the academic library, it was for the September 2006 ARL Task Force on Library Support for E-Science ARL/NSF Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe, the paper is

New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe - CISTI submission (PDF)

Unfortunately ARL moved all the files from this event, breaking all the previous links to presentations and reports that I had made.  Data stewardship irony, no?

This is the new site they made, it has working links

http://www.arl.org/pp/access/nsfworkshop.shtml

Previously:
March 31, 2006  presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation
February 15, 2006  roles and challenges for the academic library in e-Science
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:00 - Developing e-infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms

learn from music industry, we all can

Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Edgar Bronfman told mobile operators that they must not make the same mistake that the music industry made.

"We used to fool ourselves,' he said. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."

Mobile operators risk the same, he said. Fewer than 10% of mobile owners buy music on their handset, the vast majority of which is ringtones.

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," he said. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content. They want it to be easy to buy with a single click - yes, a single click, not a dozen. And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are. 24/7. Any player in the mobile value chain who thinks they can provide less than a great experience for consumers and remain competitive is fooling themselves."

MacUser - Music boss: we were wrong to go to war with consumers - November 14, 2007

widely reported

All of us who are adapting to the new ways of operating in the digital environment can learn a lesson from this.