Science Library Pad

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

<marketing-mode>
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
</marketing-mode>

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.

are you #1?

Wise thoughts from Library Geek Woes

how realistic is it to try to be the #1 stop, virtually, for our patrons?

It's not. The world(s) of our customers does/do not revolve around us, no matter how much we might wish it so. Online, the competition is even more mind-boggling than offline. Libraries have been slow to realize that they can't compete with Google (Really. They can't. Let's move on.). Now some libraries believe that they can compete with the likes of Yahoo! as an Internet portal, or create online communities to rival those of Digg or MySpace. This is a result of misguided thinking and not understanding the current, crowded market. New social tools and communities are born every day (check out Mashable), and they have better programmers and bigger budgets and they still can't compete with the bigger services.

What I find amusing/sad is the obsession with Google and "beating" Google.

Next time you use Google, measure the amount of time you're on their site, before you've clicked away to the page that interests you.  5 seconds?  Less?  This is what we're concerned about, 5 seconds of someone's attention at the beginning of a search?  Wouldn't you rather be a high-ranked, useful search destination, or link to your content from other high-ranked search destinations (e.g. Amazon)?

I don't have a problem with Google.  Google sends me thousands upon thousands of visitors per year.

The library problem with Google is that libraries know jack about getting good rankings.  And no, you don't need SEO bulls--t to get good rank, you need lots of good content, frequently updated, that's easy for Google to index.

It's ridiculous that I, writing my little blog, outrank my entire 300-person organization in a search for canada library science, but I do.  That's not a failure of Google... hmm, who does that leave...

#9 Science Library Pad: Canada library building in Second Life
Science Library Pad. Thoughts on the use of technology and other issues for ...

#10 Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, is a science library and a world leader in document delivery for all areas of science, ...

LGW link via LIS News

extensive ARL report on digital data stewardship

Some info related to cyberinfrastructure and libraries.

The ARL (Association of Research Libraries) / NSF Digital Data workshop has issued its hefty report

Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering (PDF, 36 MB, 160 pages)

A couple points from the Executive Summary (page 11)

* Historically, universities have played a leadership role in the advancement of knowledge and shouldered substantial responsibility for the long-term preservation of knowledge through their university libraries. An expanded role for some research and academic libraries and universities, along with other partners, in digital data stewardship is a topic for critical debate and affirmation.

* There is a need for a close linking between digital data archives, scholarly publications, and associated communication. The potential for an expanded role for research libraries in the area of digital data stewardship affords opportunities to address these important linkages.

Also, the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure met recently (Oct 31 - Nov 1, 2006) and there are various presentations from that event that may be of interest.

via Bernard Dumouchel (CISTI DG)

Previously:
October 09, 2006  ARL library escience theme presentations
September 21, 2006  ARL - Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe

The State of Science & Technology in Canada

The Council of Canadian Academies released their first report, The State of Science & Technology in Canada, on September 12, 2006.

They have gathered together a great deal of information; the complete report is 228 pages long.

The news release (PDF) highlights various findings, including

The committee notes that the S&T capacity of the government of Canada is a valuable national asset, since the government is often the only feasible provider of many important services such as standards setting, national statistical services, public goods such as the meteorological service and the geological survey, science in support of regulatory functions, and maintenance of long series of observational data (e.g., to support climate science). Survey respondents gave high ratings to three major federal institutions: the infectious diseases laboratories, National Research Council Institutes and other federal labs, and Statistics Canada.

(Emphasis mine.)

The Summary and Main Findings (PDF) weighs in at 51 pages, so, err, here are a couple pretty charts I copied:

BOF on SOA at Access 2006?

Anyone interested in a BOF on Service-Oriented Architecture at Access 2006?

I don't know how the Access BOFs work, but I do see there is a slot

Thursday, October 12, 2006

5:00pm - 5:45pm     Birds of a Feather
7:30pm -     Improv Night at the Velvet Room

With so much excellent thinkage on SOA, it would be nice to see what info can be exchanged.
In case you're wondering, CISTI is already developing its services within an SOA today.

You can read my Service-Oriented Architecture category for more info, it has the past two years of my links and thoughts on the topic.

UPDATE 2006-10-15: I held the BOF, you can read my report.

ARL - Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe

This event is part of the ARL Task Force on Library Support for E-Science.
For those of you outside North America, ARL = Association of Research Libraries, covering most of the university libraries in the US and Canada (see member libraries).

As I mentioned at the escience workshop today, there is an ARL-NSF workshop (invitation only) next week, but the position papers are free online:

NSF Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships:
The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe

September 26–27, 2006

UPDATE 2006-09-24: CISTI's position paper (PDF) is now available.

EA Roundtable in Chicago, November 2006

UPDATE 2006-11-27: This conference was cancelled.  ENDUPDATE

CISTI's own Daping Tan will be presenting with the EA mentor/guru/consultant whose methodology we use, Jane Carbone, their session is

Integrating EA into the Organization - Roles, Processes, and Policies

The conference runs November 7-9, 2006 in Chicago.

Enterprise Architecture Roundtable 2006

If I have further info about this conference, I will be tagging it EAR2006.

Chunka Mui will be presenting on Emergent Knowledge.

You can view the slides (PDF) from a previous presentation Emergent Knowledge:The Spark for Information Advantage.

He's selling his essay on Amazon.com

but you can read an earlier version on his blog

Emergent Data

In a range of industries, including insurance, financial services, healthcare, and complex consumer and industrial products, emergent data is changing the strategic context in which companies manage their organizations, products, customers, and markets. In the right hands, new information about product and process conditions, customer preferences, and other environmental factors are sparking numerous innovations. But, because these data types are just appearing, their strategic significance is often not well understood, so it is usually ignored, and rarely leveraged.

CISTI jobs including heads of communications and network management

See the NRC Careers site for more information.

Head, Communications
Closing Date: 08/31/2006
Language Requirements
Bilingual imperative CPC/CCC

Head, Systems and Networks Management 
Closing Date: 09/06/2006
Language Requirements
Bilingual imperative CBC/CBC

Cataloguer 
Closing Date: 09/06/2006
Language Requirements
English

Electronic Development Librarian 
Closing Date: Posted Until Filled
Language Requirements
Bilingual non-imperative CCC

SciTech grey lit and ASEE conference report by Susan Salo

slaw.ca grey literature theme week - Science and Technology GL - August 9, 2006

guest blogger Susan Salo, head of CISTI’s London NIC (NRC Information Centre)

...

While other national libraries may continue to add the majority of traditional grey literature types to their collections, CISTI has moved in many cases to a just-in-time model of document supply for such document types as standards, patents and theses. In fact while standards and patents may traditionally be thought of as grey literature, standards, often easily obtained from their original suppliers, may in more difficult cases be obtained from aggregators whose sole business is the supply of worldwide standards. Likewise, patents from the most common jurisdictions can be downloaded from the patent office web sites. Patents from more obscure countries can be obtained from a patent provider.

STLQ - Conference Report: ASEE Engineering Libraries Division - Chicago June 2006 - by Susan Salo - August 10, 2006

Susan Salo's report from the ASEE Conference in Chicago in June 2006. Susan is a CISTI Information Specialist and is Head of the NRC Information Centre in London ON, and is a member of the Engineering Libraries Division of ASEE

academic content and the Long Tail

I think the Long Tail concepts have a lot of relevance for those engaged in providing Internet services. I want to look in particular at the provision of academic content.

Let me step back for a moment to the book itself. It examines the Long Tail from a variety of angles. In an earlier draft of my book review, I had broken these down as:

• availability
• discoverability
• creativity

All three are essential to the Long Tail effect. It can be useful to use these to frame what business you are in. Are you about all three, or just one in particular?

For example, PhotoBucket is in the availability business. You get a bucket of storage, you dump your photos in. It is mostly not in the discoverability business. That's up to the users, as they post the photos in various places on the net. I would also consider Amazon S3 and Open Access repositories to be mainly in the availability business.

Google, of course, is a classic example of a discoverability business. And I think it's really in understanding the differences between availability and discoverability that we can learn a lot about our businesses.

Libraries are mainly about availability, as far as I'm concerned. I think one of the big conflicts has been that some libraries thought they were in the discoverability business, this is why they perceive Google to be a competitor or a threat. One of the big areas of confusion, I think, is that physical availability is about providing the container. If I can find the book in its one-and-only-one possible shelf location, then I can provide you with the service. In the online world, availability is about providing the content. This is also a business that libraries thought they were in, but again I would argue, they really weren't.

The other thing is that availability is not as "glamourous" as discovery, particularly since the Internet experience is discovery-centric, often starting with a search query. I think what happened, as was discussed at the Info Grid conference, is there was a big digital library push - taking offline content and making it available online. This has been a big success, but then what we found out is that in the online world, simple availability isn't enough. Social networking and other informal discovery methods had not made it into the online digital libraries, since that wasn't their focus.

Availability is, however, important work, as long as we understand that it is just one part of the three essential elements. I was at the Acadia University Herbarium this week. In a way, I felt like I had stepped back in time - while their facility is very modern, what it holds are shelves upon shelves of plants, pressed flat, glued onto paper, and labelled. All very Victorian explorer age to me. They are in the process of "dematerializing" this collection, not literally, but in the sense of scanning it in for availability online. Out of the 200,000 specimens, so far two summer students have gotten 1000 online this summer, so you can see that there is lots of work left in the availability business. (Also see Technology brings new life to Acadia University's herbarium, press release, November 25, 2004.)

That being said, I think basic availability is well understood - digitize your backfiles, digitize books, digitize plant sheets... it's fairly straightforward. The challenge is really around discoverability in particular. I think that many of us in the academic content business thought we were discoverability experts, but err, discovered that is not really the case. We need to find ways to partner with companies that do have expertise, as well as expanding into areas of true (not "the way we think people should work") discoverability. As I indicated in my book review, I think this is the major area for exploration, and the one in which the research sector can benefit most from commercial developments and corporate expertise. Rather than fighting Google, we should be seeing the benefits of partnership.

I have certainly heard internal reference to CISTI as being a Long Tail business, due to our deep holdings of (paper, undigitized) academic content. The business side is certainly interested in finding ways to drive document delivery demand "down the Long Tail". It would certainly be interesting to see some analysis on the extent to which docdel and ILL (the Long TaILL?) follows the powerlaw curve. Are there "hits" in the world of docdel and ILL, or are we mostly serving from the tail already? I'm more interested in making sure that no knowledge is "missed" - in the torrent of information we receive from the net, are important articles not reaching their potential audience (whether it be individuals concerned about a particular medical condition, or researchers who could benefit from an additional piece of information).

I certainly think that with full-text, you open up many opportunities. In a book about psychology, there might just happen to be a paragraph with a side story of a Viennese cafe you are researching. Normal systems of classification would never enable you to discover this, but full-text search across books (and articles) will.

Tapping into creativity is a whole other dimension that I won't really cover, there are some overlaps with discoverability, e.g. if you let scientists tag articles as in Connotea, is that discoverability or creativity? Anyway, another business you can be in is providing the tools to support creativity. And isn't creativity at the core of research... hmm...

Beyond Academic Content - the Internet of Stuff

I think that as more and more of our offline world goes online, we will better understand these challenges. Many of the big business opportunities covered in Anderson's book are, to my mind, the result of moving inventories online. We have had, for decades, very efficient systems for getting stuff into organizations (whether it be a library, or an individual home), but perhaps by design, very inefficent systems for getting stuff out. There is a huge funnel that exists to pour stuff into your house, but if you wanted to get it back out of your house, you had pretty limited options: the trash was and is a very popular option, followed by the hassle of classified ads and garage sales. eBay gets a lot of attention because of the auction model, but actually what it tapped into was the Internet of Stuff, the World Inventory. (A lot of sales on eBay are immediate, at the "Buy It Now" price.)

This is mainly, I think, a North American problem, as we are very fond of accumulating huge amounts of stuff. I am hoping that we will start to build much more efficient systems that allow us to "search globally, buy locally". It is a bit unfortunate, I think, that it is easier to discover and buy stuff from across the entire continent (say in my case, to buy stuff from California and have it shipped to Ottawa) than it is to quickly locate items in stores a block or two away from my house. Some companies have made strides in this direction - e.g. TheSourceCC provides the ability to check local store inventories, but things are still in pretty primitive stages I think.

Perhaps one day, we will have the Inventory of All - the location of every item available, anywhere in the world, with attached price or conditions. This has lots of scary implications, but are LibraryThing and related applications telling us this is the direction that people want to go?

Previously: my review of The Long Tail

enterprise architecture library... thing

What do you do if you're in a technical library, but you are not, technically, a librarian?
You embrace the joys of cataloguing.  Repeatedly.
Our little architecture library has its own page of manually-entered titles on our internal wiki, and now
Steve has manually input them all into LibraryThing.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=cistiarchitecture

I had come up with a clever way to get them into Universal Import, but LibraryThing Import is either paralyzingly slow, or broken, at the moment.

Of course, you can't actually borrow the books in our library (unless you're at NRC CISTI), so it's unclear how much public good we're providing.  I do plan to write some reviews - perhaps we're a node in an EA, SOA etc. book club?

Alouette Canada Open Digitization Initiative officially launches

It’s time for Canada’s history to be accessed and preserved in a systematic, enduring way – one that is accessible for Canadians – and other citizens of the world. AlouetteCanada hopes to fill that role.

“Our vision is that Canadians will be able to know themselves through their heritage and the world will have the opportunity to better know Canadians.” declared John Teskey, President of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. “Our common aim is to provide easy online access to the extraordinary wealth of written and other records by and about Canadians.” 

“Libraries, archives, museums and other interested communities are all invited to play their part,” stated Carole Moore, Chair of the AlouetteCanada Steering Committee. “The aim is to develop a coordinated plan for online access to Canada’s recorded heritage.”

This is an open invitation for everyone who is willing and able to come and play their own unique part in developing our collective Canadian online memory. We would like to hear from local history societies, archives organizations, genealogists and others across the country.

from CARL - AlouetteCanada Open Digitization Strategy Launched (PDF) - June 21, 2006

They have a website now at

http://www.alouettecanada.ca/

CISTI's Mary Low is on the Communications and Marketing Committee, and CISTI DG Bernard Dumouchel is on the Charter Projects Committee.

Technical Committee members include

• Peter Binkley (Quædam cuiusdam)
• Mark Jordan (digitizationblog)
• Art Rhyno (LibraryCog)
• Mike Ridley (Towards the Information Ecology)

(Please let me know if there's anyone's blog I've missed.)

Is it just me, or do librarians love committees?

Previously:
December 29, 2005  digitization for Canadian books: Alouette

NRC CISTI job: publication officer

Publication Officer

Ottawa - Ontario

IS-3
This is a 1 year term position from the date of reporting.

Education
Bachelor's degree in Biology or a related life science (honours degree preferred)

Language Requirements
English

Closing Date
05/24/2006 (9 days)

Experience
Experience in writing or editing English will be considered an asset.
Experience in scientific journal publishing will be considered an asset.