Science Library Pad

CISTI seeks external feedback

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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
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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.

Transformation

It's possible you may have missed this official announcement on CISTI Transformation on our new main page, what with us not having any RSS for news (but we do have excellent detailed Dublin Core metadata for the page, which I guess is more important).

NRC was part of the Government of Canada's Strategic Review process, and as a result will be re-aligning some of its resources and programs. As part of this realignment, NRC-CISTI will be undergoing changes over the next year.

(There does not appear to be any way to link to the information box containing the above text.)

You may have also missed the Research Press announcement, what with that site also not having any RSS for news.

On February 18th, 2009, The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) announced the results of a strategic review of NRC programs conducted by the Federal Government of Canada. As a result of this review, the Government of Canada and the National Research Council of Canada have decided that the journals and services of NRC Research Press will be transferred to the private sector. 

Over the next year, a new not-for-profit corporation will be created for the NRC Research Press journals and services.

Transformation of NRC Research Press

The Government of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat, Backgrounder - Strategic Review states

Through the strategic review process, departments will also determine whether there are any lower priority, lower performing programs for possible reallocation of funding to higher priority, higher performing programs within the department or government.

One might imagine what might happen to one's organisation if a department determined that one's organisation was a lower priority, lower performing program.

(In case you're wondering how this works, I'm not permitted to say anything about this topic that doesn't appear on NRC, CISTI, or GC pages of approved messaging.  If you have any questions, please use official NRC communications channels; as always, this blog is definitely not an official channel of any kind.)

I don't think I'm breaking any rules by stating a few additional facts that I believe are part of the public record (it is the public's money, after all, so I'm pretty sure they're allowed to know how we're spending it):

1) CISTI's operational budget (which includes staffing) remains basically unchanged until end fiscal 2009-2010

2) Fiscal 2009-2010 ends on March 31, 2010

3) Here is a handy countdown clock

In what one might consider somewhat related news, I have created an account on LinkedIn.

CISTI in Google Scholar and Facebook - official news

I always have to walk a fine line because it takes a while for official messages to be approved in the Government of Canada. We've got some approved releases, so therefore I'm happy to now be able to safely enter

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Ottawa, ON, March 23, 2009 – NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) is meeting the research community where they work through our new collaboration with Google Scholar.

CISTI Media Room - Google Scholar

Ottawa, ON, March 23, 2009 – In an effort to generate awareness about the products and services offered by NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), NRC-CISTI is now on Facebook.

CISTI Media Room - NRC-CISTI on Facebook

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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.

a thousand words?

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=a+thousand+words&hl=en&lr=

Note: AFAIK you must use either scholar.google.ca or be in Canada to see all aspects of this result.

UPDATE: If you want a search that will take you more directly to the PDF option http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=Simulations+of+the+2.5D+inviscid+primitive+equations+in+a+limited+domain&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

UPDATE 2009-02-27: If you want to see a third type of result, try http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=Biochemistry+and+molecular+cell+biology+of+diabetic+complications&hl=en&lr=

journal article recommender

CISTI's André Vellino reports

I have finally finished a first version of the Synthese Recommender for journal articles. It is now up on the CISTI Lab web site, complete with a flash video tour, in lieu of documentation.

I know that André would really appreciate any feedback you have; the whole purpose of CISTI Lab is to give you advance access to technology so that we can engage with users worldwide and adjust our offerings (and our thinking) to match your real needs and workflows.

The recommendations are currently biomed based I think.

Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming

I completed a presentation about Web 2.0 at work, I would say overall it was about 60% successful.

First, here is a version I did at home, slides plus audio (SlideShare calls this SlideCasting).

Web 2.0 timeline and future

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 ib2)

You can click through the slides as usual, but if you press the green play button (arrow) in the centre, you will also get audio.  (I will have a follow-up post about how to make a slidecast.)

If you have some background in Web 2.0 you may want to start on slide #46, "Social Netwhat?"

UPDATE 2008-12-15: Thanks to some great work by CISTI Communications, the video of my presentation is available.  The camera is only on me, so you may also want to bring up the slides to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  The lighting is not great so it's a bit murky, but good I think for a first attempt, the audio is clear.  It's about 50 minutes of me presenting, plus an additional 5 minutes or so of information from our head of communications about how government employees can use Web 2.0 appropriately for work.

Google Video: Web 2.0 timeline

In case you're wondering why GVideo and not YouTube, GVideo allows unlimited size and length of video (I think YouTube limits are 1GB and 10 minutes).

Note: I would really consider the SlideCast audio to be the "full" presentation, in the video I ran out of time at the end to fully cover the social networking and lifestreaming parts.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 2008-12-19: If you want just the 1.5 hours of audio narration (I'm not sure how much sense it makes without the slides), it's available as an audio stream or in various formats for download at

http://www.archive.org/details/Web2_December2008

ENDUPDATE

(Not) Fitting 1.5 Hours into 45 Minutes

When I ran through the slides at home, even with a big section of organisation-internal stuff taken out, it took an hour and a half, this should have been a warning to me.  I only was supposed to present for 40 minutes (40 minutes for me, 5 minutes of material from our communications department, and 15 minutes for questions in a one hour slot).

As a presenter it's really my duty to make sure I fall in that time constraint.  I'm there for the audience (otherwise they could just look at the slides online) and an important part of that is leaving time for questions and comments, because as we know from the Wisdom of Crowds, the audience is going to have more information and ideas collectively than even the best-informed presenter.

When I told my supervisor that my test run went an hour and a half, and that I had cut out 2.5 slides, leaving me with 45 slides (or 43 slides plus opening and closing title slides), he suggested that I cut ruthlessly but there wasn't any part I was prepared to lose.  I guess one of the consequences of picking a large topic and then spending time over a period of months preparing it is you grow quite attached to the form and content of your presentation.  I really did think that I could "just say less" for each slide to get under the time limit.

More realistically for my speaking style (which tends to be a bit detailed and digressive) I should have had about 30 slides for 40 minutes.  I was thinking about it and it really is two presentations, the first piece is reasonably general and takes you through the history of Internet and Web at CISTI and NRC, through a timeline of Web and Web 2.0, to the current situation with these technologies at the Government of Canada and CISTI.  The second part moves into more advanced topics, explaining the nature of social networking and finishing with the very recent development of lifestreaming.  (If there had been time beyond that, I would have talked a bit about how mobile devices are shaping web use, and how we appear to be moving into a more personal and real-time web.)

The logical cutting points for the presentation would have been to end on the slide just before the social networking section (Social Netwhat?), or end on the first slide of that section, or end with the first "Zero Degrees of Separation" slide.  Lifestreaming is a topic that really needs another 45 minutes of presentation all on its own.  I really should have done more runthroughs until I could get the material under 40 minutes, as it was, what happened was that I was watching my time carefully and made it through the first section of the material ok, and then looked at my watch at the start of the social networking section and realised I had another 30-45 minutes worth of material to present in 5 or 10 minutes before the absolute end of my time at 15:00.  I should have just stopped then in order to allow some questions.  Instead I gave a very rushed and probably neither very comprehensible nor useful sweep through the remaining slides down to "Web 2.0 Warnings".  (I should have realised when I was telling people online to *start* at slide 46 for the social networking section, that there was no way I would be able to reach and cover it fully in my presentation - anyway in the online version you can start there and hear me very unhurriedly go through the material.)

The Venue, Presentation Technology and the Perfect Storm

I had a good venue and great support from the technical staff and presentation committee, who agreed to all of my unreasonable presentation diva demands, including a wireless clip-on mike and using my Mac to present using Keynote.  This was an additional complication for them because we use Adobe Acrobat Connect so that people in our offices across the country can see the slides, fortunately it installed and ran fine.  For audio we use a separate voiceconferencing service and a Polycom speakerphone.  To add to the tech mix, I was trying out Salling Clicker on my Nokia N82, it worked quite well, just a couple issues, one (that I was aware of in advance) is that the N82 has a sensitive position sensor, so if you're swinging it around in your hands while presenting, the screen tends to rotate, which also rotates which buttons move the presentation forward and back (I always used the "down" button to advance, since it works in either screen orientation).  It would probably be good to lock the screen from rotating before presenting.  Another issues was that for some reason a couple times it got out of slide-turning mode and into the general presentation selection mode.  It has a nice feature of displaying slide notes on-screen, but I found I didn't actually use the on-screen notes, I always present without notes anyway.  (As a sidebar, I didn't know Salling was an actual person, until with zero degrees of separation he contacted me to answer a Tweet about how to see more than one phone-screen of notes for a slide.)

The presentation was also video-ed, they were concerned about the video camera's audio though.  In retrospect, there are a bunch of other audio recording options we could have added, including:

• recording the audio from my mike directly somehow
• recording the voice conference either through the service itself, or through channeling it to some recording software/service
• both of my phones (K790 and N82) I'm sure can record an hour of audio easily
• I actually have a dedicated audio recorder that I never remember to bring.  It can also store over an hour of audio, has reasonably good pickup (I could have placed it next to the speakerphone) and is easy to work with since you can just plug it into USB when you're done and download the standard-format file it creates (I think it makes a Windows audio file).  It's an Olympus WS-320M.

The logistics side was quite complicated due to a series of unforeseen events.  First the number of RSVPs for the presentation exceeded the firecode limitations for our usual room, so in the weeks before the presentation they had to arrange for an auditorium in another building, which of course means different setup, (somewhat) different network, sending out a room change notice etc. etc. all of which the committee handled very ably.  Then, with everything arranged, on the day of my presentation the entire transit service (mostly buses) for Ottawa went on strike, plus there was a fairly big snowstorm (snowfall from 15-25 cm, later upped to 30cm, with risk of freezing rain).  How did the day go?  Well here's how the Ottawa Citizen put it: Strike, storm lead to commuter chaos.  (My workplace is about 35 minute bus ride from the downtown core where I live, and Ottawa is a very widely distributed city, so people come to my workplace from many different directions with often long commutes.)

I was grateful that anyone showed up at all, I was worried there would be about 5 people in the audience.  I (as usual) forgot to take an audience photo despite having both of my cameraphones, but I would guess around 25 people.

Part 1: History of Web 2.0 - Some Key Messages

The messages that I wanted to convey included:

• libraries were a little slow in some cases to embrace Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, but around 2006 there was a tipping point and I would consider that now e.g. library conferences are leaders in web-enabling (what Lorcan Dempsey calls amplified conferences, a concept which Brian Kelly has, well, amplified and extended).
• That being said, the academic sector, including academic libraries and some large research and technology organisations were early to the Internet and to the Web.  In fact it's not an exaggeration to say these groups were the Internet, in the pre-Web days.  USENET newsgroups were filled with scientists and students asking questions and having conversations.  The Web itself came out of CERN, and so it's not surprising that scientists were also early to the Web.  So when we say scientists aren't using Web 2.0, to some extent it's because they already have well-established communities online, and because science has always been about your peers, they already know their networks and connect to them online and offline.
• My organisation in particular was (based on my amateur USENET sleuthing), posting to newgroups in 1988, talking about xmosaic in 1993, and putting up websites in 1994.  That's about as early as you could possibly adopt - so I don't think we can say that (academic) libraries are necessarily always late adopters.
• Many libraries unfortunately got "stuck" in the mental model of the browse-based web that existed from (very roughly) 1995 to 1998, the pre-Google Web.  It was a very compelling analogy:
  • physical address-> web address (URL)
  • front desk -> front page (home page)
  • browse through stacks -> browse through web pages
  • library -> digital library
• Unfortunately this model of the web, where users type in specific URLs and then browse for content usually within a single site, the Yahoo model of locating information, the model that is even embedded in our terminology of "web browser", is completely false in the post-search world, the post-Google Web.  In the post-search world what matters, the only thing that matters really, is rich content that gives you PageRank.  The page that shows up may be many layers deep within your website, and people may stop there only briefly, before jumping to another site in order to satisfy their need for photos of rabbits with pancakes on their heads (err, or whatever particular topic you provide expertise on).
• Web 2.0 is about many things, including this rather awkward term of "user-created content".  (I kind of messed up my message here, I was trying to say, with the Communications team in the audience, that Web 2.0 is typically personally-identifiable, amateur content, whereas organisational communications are typically more anonymous and professional - I think I may have unintentially given the impression that Web 2.0 communications are "cool", when I just want to say that they're different modes of presenting information, they both have their pluses and minuses.)
• I also didn't have time to cover some interesting work that Alison Ball and others are doing with delicious bookmarks and the Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group

Part 2: Social Networking and Lifestreaming

Skipping towards the end of the presentation (as this posting is getting as over-long as my presentation itself) there are some trends that we can see.  One is that we have many new options for making social connections online - but you have to keep in mind that the solution you choose is going to depend on where your network already exists.  If, like is often the case with librarians, your colleagues, your social network is already in mailing lists, then it's going to be very difficult to get much benefit from new social tools.  I give a very simple example, which is that my generation (I finished my undergrad in 1990) is primarily email-based.  If I want to reach my friends, I send them an email.  I can send them messages in Facebook until I'm Faceblue, but they'll never get them, because they never check Facebook.  So this kind of "build it and they will come" idea ONLY works if either people don't have good ways to connect to their social network, or if somehow you convince enough of them to move over (which is tremendously difficult to do).

That being said, IF your connections (friends, work colleagues, whatever) are using social, Web 2.0 tools, you can see their lifestreams, their patterns of activity.  This may be in Facebook (which really was just intended for university students to tell each other where they were, what parties they were going to, and to share drunken pictures of themselves), in Twitter, which I think of as a kind of digital watercooler, and in FriendFeed, which is a sort of meta-site for aggregating all your activity in other Web 2.0 sites.

So your choice of social network online will be shaped by where your current (or desired) community already participates.  Additionally (and I'm grateful to Owen Stephens for this insight), your choice of tool may depend on how you consume the information, in particular, mobile device versus computer screen.  Facebook and in particular Twitter have mobile versions that work very well on a small smartphone screen, their "short snippets of stuff" design takes this environment into consideration (and Twitter can even be used entirely just through SMS).  FriendFeed, with its longer message fields, extensive comment threads, and more complex content, is not at all as well suited to this environment.

Additionally, as we move past Google at 10 Years, we're starting to see a change in search and information exchange.  In the Before Time, because looking up information was expensive/timeconsuming, we often turned first to friends or to reference experts like librarians when we had questions.  Then we had the era of keyword search.  But with the rise of Instant Messaging, SMS, and other more real-time social network interaction, people are again turning back to asking questions first.  That is, they will post a question to their social network, and use keyword search only as a supplement to the information they get from their peers.  This may seem like we've actually gone back to an old way of doing things, but as with all historical cycles, it's both similar and different.  People are asking others questions again, but now they can ask many more people at once than ever before (in theory, you can ask the entire Internet world - sometimes called "crowdsourcing").  There is, I think, an opportunity for librarians to re-introduce themselves into this new real-time question-driven environment.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an overall conclusion, for me it's that as someone who is web-based (rather than mobile), with a widely-dispersed web presence, and whose community is fairly intensive web users, FriendFeed is the best Web 2.0 tool for me.  Facebook I didn't like much at all, it mixes work and personal together and neither my work nor my personal community are particularly active users of it, so it doesn't make any sense for me to spend much time there.  So you can catch me Web 2.0 lifestreaming at

http://friendfeed.com/scilib

As a presenter, there's always a risk of putting yourself forward as the Expert, and I want to say that I very much don't consider myself a Web 2.0 Expert of any kind, I'm not even in the right generation to be talking about Web 2.0 (although perhaps being an outsider to this environment gives me a chance to see things that the Digital Generation may take for granted).  I invite your questions, comments and corrections (and I wish I'd made time to do so in my presentation yesterday).  You collectively know much more than I do.

CISTI jobs: Data Management

Manager, Data Management

LS-4
This is a continuing position.

Your Challenge

Reporting to the Data Management and Metadata Coordinator, the Manager, Data Management

• plans, organizes and manages the operation, support and enhancement of  Innovative Interfaces integrated library system (ILS) applications, as well as the production of output products from the ILS;
• plans, organizes and manages the analysis and mapping of source data for ingest to CISTI’s digital repositories and databases;
• represents NRC on Government of Canada metadata committees;
• maintains state-of-the-art currency on electronic data management and metadata standards;
• more...

Language Requirements
Bilingual imperative CBC/CBC

Closing Date
09/08/2008 (13 days)

for other positions see NRC Careers

CISTI jobs: Collection Librarian

Collection Librarian

Ottawa - Ontario

LS-3
These are two (2) continuing positions.

Your Challenge

The Collection Librarian negotiates license agreements and renewals for electronic collections; analyses collection data; evaluates and selects new material for the collection; participates in setting the CISTI Collection Development Policy; acts as a liaison with Canadian government and other sci/tech libraries on collection and licensing issues.

Language Requirements
English

Closing Date
Posted until filled

implementing SOA at CISTI

My colleague Stephen Anthony has posted his author version of his peer-reviewed article for The Serials Librarian, "Implementing Service Oriented Architecture at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information".  At 14 pages, it's the most comprehensive and detailed look available at the challenges our organisation was facing, the Enterprise Architecture approach we took to help improve our technology planning, and the Service-Oriented Architecture that we are building as a result.

It's from 55 (1/2) which should show up eventually at

http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J123&detail=TOCList#TOCList

and, assuming I'm constructing the URL correctly, specifically at

http://www.haworthpress.com/store/Toc_views.asp?TOCName=J123v55n01%5FTOC&desc=Volume%3A%2055%20Issue%3A%201%2F2

Stephen reports the full citation as

Anthony, Stephen K. "Implementing Service Oriented Architecture at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information." The Serials Librarian, 55 (01-02), pp. 235 - 253.
DOI: 10.1080/03615260801970907 (doesn't yet resolve)

official press release about NRC repository

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CISTI has released its official PR on the upcoming repository.

NRC Publications Archive: Extending the reach and increasing the impact of NRC research

It includes some clarifications about what will be stored and the extent of access that can be provided.</marketing-mode>

Steve has some notes about the underlying technical architecture.

Mandatory IR deposit as of 2009 for National Research Council Canada

From an internal email (with permission)

[The NRC Senior Executive Committee] SEC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports in [the forthcoming NRC Institutional Repository, to be called] NPArC. The SEC has also approved an update to NRC Form 22 Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) that will explicitly state NRC’s intention to deposit these publications in NPArC.

As this blog is by no means an official source of information about my organisation, if you have any questions I ask that you go through regular NRC or CISTI communications channels.

http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/newsroom/index_e.html

http://cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/media/newsroom_e.html

UPDATE 2008-07-23: There is now an official press release from CISTI.

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

NRC Research Press launches updated site

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NRC RP has a new site (which if you know anything about the constraints of Canadian government CLF and official languages is an accomplishment in itself).  An explanation of the open access compliance of the journals is prominently featured in the bottom centre of the front page.  I find the site has more modern look.

http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/home.html
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my presentation on SOA for libraries at DLF Fall Forum 2007

Overall I think it went very well, the room was packed (to my considerable surprise) and I got good questions from the audience - for once actually too many questions for my allotted time, so I unfortunately stole 10 minutes from Chris Mackie, whose presentation followed mine.

The slides are up on Slideshare, they were done in Apple Keynote, in case you're wondering.

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/serviceoriented-architecture-for-libraries/

All of the links and background info for the presentation are available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/dlf2007akerman

The following is not the actual narrative, but it gives you enough to follow the (mostly conceptual) slides:

I started with a great quote via Katherine Kott of DLF Aquifer, from the previous night's session on collaboration, stating that we need "vision translated into operational success".

Service-Oriented Architecture addresses problems in technology planning,
design and implementation.
First, we must understand what some of these problems are.
Fundamentally, technology implements the desires of the organisation.

Too often we focus on our immediate desires ("What do you want") rather
than long-term planning.
This has meant we get what we asked for (e.g. incremental catalogue
interface changes) rather than what is best for the organisation
(transformed catalogue)

In order to better align our implementations with our goals, CISTI uses
an SOA derived from our Enterprise Architecture.  In our EA methodology,
we start with business needs (Who are you?), and only then proceed to
identifying the gaps to be filled.  But you must look beyond the current
state (Why are you here?  Where are you going?)

So what are the transformational challenges we face?

In a way, we are in a fantastic world for the traditional goal of a
library - ubiquitous, zero-cost, perfect copies of information.  No more
scribes devoting their lives to copying a few books.  But this has
tremendous implications in terms of preservation, versioning, citation
etc.

Also, there are major changes in moving from a physical world where we
engineer bridges, to a virtual world where we "engineer" software.
Software doesn't have most of the constraints that apply in the physical
world, and we have to be careful with analogies to physical objects.  It
would make very little sense (except perhaps to a US Senator) to build
half a bridge, or a bridge that goes nowhere.  But in the software
world, building components, even if they are only part of an overall
goal, can be extremely useful.  And software is not location constrained
- it can be accessed from any location - there should be no "software to
nowhere".  The network is everywhere, and we need to understand how that
transforms our systems design.

So how do we apply the notions of architecture that we understand from
the physical world, and that have for centuries and continue today to
enable us to build very complex structures with many components (heat,
lighting, electrictiy, plumbing, etc.)

Well, we can use the idea of modeling.  Just as we make models of
physical objects, we can make models of business processes.  But we must
ensure that we don't get stuck in our models or frameworks, and do move
to implementation at some point.

CISTI has found that its methodology, which is focused on getting to the
implementation framework, and beyond that to design and development, has
been invaluable for turning business ideas into implemented software.
We are fortunate in that we are a library with substantial in-house
technology resources, including a dedicated architecture team (the only
library EA team in the world??)

SIDEBAR: I met the Head of eArchitecture for the British Library at my presentation, so now I think I should say "one of the very few library EA teams in the world".  END SIDEBAR

This structure may be different for
academic organisations, with faculty groups that have departmental IT,
central IT, and academic consortia.

Within this larger mehtodological framework, SOA is an approach to
identifying "servicifiable" functions in the organisation, and building
larger service offerings from various combinations of services.

In the architecture analysis phase, CISTI models all of our
technology-related activities, at a high-level this model describes all
the technology-supported activities, with functions such as "provide
library service" that then decompose down into many many lower-level
models.

Recently we have been specifically modeling a Trusted Digital
Repository, using the OAIS model and converting and adapting it.

This EA modeling work then leads to the derivation of SOA services
[depending on audience profile I may talk a lot on this slide about the
details of SOA, or not].

CISTI has used and is using SOA successfully as the foundation of
various projects - this is not just theory.

SOA is also not an agility-killer bureaucracy - services actually
provide pieces that can be used for small experiments, while
simultaneously moving the organisation in its stated general direction.

Ideally, we should all be collaborating on SOA, rather than building SOA
silos.  I have blogged a lot about this, but with little response.  Are
the individual framework groups only talking amongst themselves?  How
can we use their efforts most effectively?

SOA is certainly being explored in many areas of the library space,
including various digital library initiatives and modeling efforts (some
of which will be presented in other forum sessions).

SOA also offers the possibility of improving the catalogue by breaking
it into component services, and enabling the sort of simple layers
(widgets, mashups, javascripty stuff) by providing sustainable,
well-architected underlying service capabilities.

For academic libraries in particular, SOA offers a compelling
opportunity to connect with existing and future scientific activities,
as many Cyberinfrastructure projects have SOA at their cores.  Can we
use modelling at even the highest level (the entire scientific
communication cycle) to guide our service implementations?

Ultimately to build sustainable, non-siloed, modern information systems
to support scholars and citizens worldwide, we need to build many
bridges (this one happens to be built of lego components, in case you're
worried that giant ducks have invaded the US).  Between libraries and
scientists, between technology and business, between funders and
software developers, between computer science and library science...

We need to move beyond frameworks, using solid governance to ensure that
SOA plans become running SOA code, while avoiding getting stuck in giant
projects that don't deliver.  As well, even if you don't have the scale
or the capacity to build your own SOA, you can still participate as a
service consumer.

I'm not crazy in this (at least I hope not), as evidence for which I
present some starting points about SOA in the academic and library
sectors.

Questions...

The End

SIDEBAR 2: In case you're wondering, there's a slight science fiction theme running through the presentation, inspired by the "federation" part of the organisation name.  The Four Questions are from Babylon 5, the goodish aliens, the Vorlons, ask "Who Are You?" and represent the forces of order, the evilish aliens, the Shadows, ask "What Do You Want?" and represent the forces of chaos.  "There Are Many Copies" is from the opening sequence in the new Battlestar Galactica, using the great Creative Commons images I found worked out as a nice way of avoiding using a screencapture (plus using a screencap might have been a bit distracting as it shows a scene from BG where the many copies of Sharon Valerii/Number Eight are not so much wearing any clothes).  I had a better closing quote but I couldn't remember it, so I used a tag line from Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, to close out the "where are you going" questions theme.  END SIDEBAR 2

SIDEBAR 3: I was actually amazed to be able to locate the "bridge to nowhere" Google Earth image.  I had seen the unfinished highway bridge out of the airplane window as the plane was coming in to land in Philadelphia and by the time I thought to GPS-mark it or take a photo it was already past.  Incredibly, doing an image search on

"bridge to nowhere" Pennsylvania

brought it up as the first hit - Google Search, Google Earth and the Internet continue to amaze me. END SIDEBAR 3

SIDEBAR 4: I bought my carbon offsets from MyClimate.org

flight from: Ottawa, ON [Macdonald-Cartier International Airport], Canada, YOW
flight to: Philadelphia, PA [Philadelphia International Airport], USA, PHL
flight via: Toronto, ON [Lester B. Pearson International Airport], Canada, YYZ
return, economy
flight distance: 1'845 km
flight passengers: 1

CO2 Emissions: 0,511 t

Total costs for compensation of your flight: SFr. 20.00

According to Google

20 Swiss francs = 16.3543582 Canadian dollars

one search, multiple publishers, articles on your desktop: CISTI PPA

<marketing-mode>

CISTI offers a Can$12 flat-base-fee^*, credit card payment, electronic article delivery service: Pay Per Article (yes, it sounds like "paper article"; I didn't choose the name).

There is a single search box, it does a search across many CISTI holdings available for immediate or 24 hour delivery, including a little publisher you may have heard of called Elsevier.

http://ppa-ac.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/payperview/jsp/find.jsp?lang=en

http://ppa-ac.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/payperview/jsp/faq.jsp

As always, if you have questions about this or any other CISTI service, don't contact me.
Contact CISTI Help Desk, your CISTI client service person, or CISTI Communications, as appropriate.

^* C$12 plus taxes and publisher fee.

</marketing-mode>

10th Interlending and Document Supply Conference - October 29-31, 2007

10th ILDS Conference - Interlending and Document Supply - Resource Sharing for the Future: Building Blocks to Success
October 29-31, 2007
Singapore (Hosted by the National Library Board, NLB)

http://www.nlbconference.com/ilds/
or
http://www.nlb.gov.sg/ilds

CISTI's Michael Ireland and Bronwyn Woods will be presenting "eBook loans – an e-twist on a classic interlending service".

Note: Although there are paper and presentation links, they currently serve up empty files - they won't be active until after the conference.

2008 Sangster award for Cdn grad student to attend CODATA in the Ukraine

The CNC/CODATA is accepting applications for The Sangster Award. This award, valued at Can. $3000, will enable a graduate student enrolled in a Canadian university, or recent graduate (within 3 years of graduation), to attend and present his or her work at the 21st International CODATA Conference, Scientific Information for Society - from Today to the Future, 5 - 8 October, 2008, Kyiv, Ukraine.

CNC/CODATA - The Sangster Award

Deadline is March 31, 2008.

CISTI jobs: Technology Architect

Technology Architect

Closing Date
06/26/2007 (CLOSED)
Applications will be accepted until 23:59 Eastern Standard Time

Ottawa - Ontario

CS-3
This is a 3 year term term position from the date of reporting.

Education
A Bachelor degree in computer science, computer or software engineering, or other related field.
Formal training in Enterprise Architecture is an asset.

Language Requirements
English

some CISTI jobs available

We're a fairly large organization, so we almost always have posters up for one position or another, here are a few from the current June 2007 list, jobs in Ottawa

Business Systems Programmer / Analyst 
Closing Date: 06/21/2007
Institute: NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI)

Technical Business Analyst 
Closing Date: 06/19/2007
Institute: NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI)

Internet Communications Officer 
Closing Date: 06/22/2007
Institute: NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI)

You can see lots more at

http://careers-carrieres.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/careers/jobpost.nsf/PostByCity_E

2007 IATUL and ELPUB programmes - open access and beyond

The ELPUB 2007 and IATUL 2007 programmes are up.  Both will feature topics in the areas of open access and scholarly communication.  It's interesting to me how much the technology and interests of the scholarly publishing community and the academic library community seem to be converging.

At ELPUB 2007, CISTI's Judy Best will be presenting

Challenges in the Selection, Design and Implementation of an Online Submission and Peer Review System for STM Journals

CISTI job - Partnership Devel Officer, Health

Partnership Development Officer, Health Portfolio

Closing Date
04/18/2007 (16 days)

RCO
This is a 2 year term position from the date of reporting.

Education
Master’s degree in library and information science or an equivalent combination of relevant experience and a master’s degree

Language Requirements
Bilingual imperative CBC

article on Federal Science eLibrary Pilot

Federal Science eLibrary Pilot: Seamless, equitable desktop access for Canadian government researchers (or try alternate DOI-based URL)

Author(s): Beverly Brown, Cynthia Found, Merle McConnell
[Beverly Brown and Cynthia Found work at CISTI.]
Journal: The Electronic Library
ISSN: 0264-0473
Year: 2007 Volume: 25 Issue: 1 Page: 8-17
DOI: 10.1108/02640470710729083

Conclusions and next steps

Participants who used the pilot eLibrary overwhelmingly indicated it had a positive or very positive impact on their work activities and productivity. Specific positive impacts included:

    * pilot users cited significantly reduced time spent finding and verifying information, allowing them to concentrate on critical activities such as manuscript preparation, peer review activities, professional reading and other research and laboratory activities;
    * pilot site librarians felt that offering coordinated access to more electronic journals through a Federal Science eLibrary would free their time for other professional activities, allowing them to serve their clients better and better meet their expectations for e-content; and
    * remote users found increased access to e-journals had a positive impact on their ability to stay current and find needed information while in the field.

The NRC-CISTI infostructure proved to be a reliable platform for the pilot project. This type of infostructure could be used to support the delivery of a Federal Science eLibrary service to federal government researchers anywhere in Canada.

2007 Cdn Health Libraries conf in Ottawa

The 2007 Canadian Health Libraries Association (CHLA) conference will be in Ottawa, May 28-June 1.
The programme is available as a web page or PDF.

CISTI participated in the organization of this conference, and will also be providing a number of speakers, including

• Pam Bjornson, CISTI Director-General on Digital Initiatives
• Mary Low on CISTI and the Power of Partnering

Previously:
July 5, 2005  presentations from Canadian Health Libraries Association (CHLA) [2005] conference, including CISTI update

today - ICSTI event on academic user behaviour

ICSTI's 2007 Winter Meeting is wrapping up today

London, January 19-22, 2007

Programme:
Friday 19th: STI National Centres meeting (held at the British Library)

Saturday and Sunday 20th-21st: ICSTI technical meetings

Monday 22nd: Public conference, held at the British Library and entitled USER BEHAVIOUR AND ITS METRICS: Understanding and monitoring the needs of scholarly authors and researchers

CISTI's Director General Bernard Dumouchel and a few others from CISTI are attending.