Science Library Pad

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.

Second Nature: Science and Science Fiction

Title: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Speakers: Prof Mark Brake and Rev. Neil Hook, Glamorgan University

Date: Mon 28th April [2008]

Time: 9am SLT, Midday NY time, 4pm GMT, 5pm London time

Location: Second Nature Island

from Nature Network - Joanna Scott's blog

I certainly think a common background of consuming science fiction informs both physics and computer science (the only science areas I've worked in).

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking.  I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

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

an end to health care waiting - CIHR Café Scientifique

I thought Café Scientifique was just a clever name from CIHR (we do this sometimes in the Federal Government to get around bilingualism issues) but it turns out it is a Movement.

Wikipedia comes through with the info as usual: Café Scientifique

CIHR has held and will hold events across Canada, the next one is

All I ever do is wait! Putting an end to health care wait times

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008, 6 p.m.
Mercury Lounge
56 Byward, Ottawa
Please RSVP: cafescientifique@cihr-irsc.gc.ca

Also LIVE on the Web at www.webcastcanada.ca/cihr-irsc

CIHR - Café scientifique - or in French, err... Cafés scientifiques des IRSC

Ottawa *Camp

There are various OttawaCamps

http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/OttawaCamps

specifically BarCamp (unconference), DemoCamp (lightweight, brief event where people do demos), and CaseCamp ("a marketing-oriented ad-hoc gathering")

Ottawa Demo Camp 7 was last month, Centretown News wrote about it (the URL will change when it goes into the CN archive unfortunately)

The room is packed with about 60 people, their attention focused on the speaker. His name is Luc Levesque and he’s the general manager of TravelPod, a blogging company. He’s showcasing the Traveller IQ Challenge, a website application that tests a person’s knowledge of geography.

...

Levesque is just one of the seven presenters at Ottawa’s DemoCamp. The event aims to connect entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in an informal setting where they can share ideas.

(TravelPod is more like an online site for sharing info about your travels, than just a blog.)

Previously:
May 23, 2006  Ottawa BarCamp - April 22, 2006
May 23, 2006  three stories of travel websites

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

Ingenta - Publishing Technology Trends

In December 2007, Ingenta held the first event in their new Publishing Technology Trends seminar series.
Topics:

• "Authoritative? What's that? And who says?"
  Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer, Ingenta
• "Beyond articles"
  Toby Green, Head of Publishing, OECD
• "Adding value to visitors"
  Paul Goad, Managing Director, TACODA
• "Keeping pace with online challenges"
  Randy Petway, VP, Publishing Technology
• "Key issues in the development of publishing"
  David Worlock, Chief Research Fellow, Outsell

See their posting (part of their eye to eye February 2008 newsletter) for more information and links to the presentations.

New World of Open Access - Ottawa - Oct 10, 2007

The University of Ottawa Library, in association with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), hosted a public seminar entitled Open Access: the New World of Research Communication on Wednesday October 10, 2007.

Open Access: the New World of Research Communication

Speakers were Kathleen Shearer, CARL Research Associate; Stephen Choi, MD, FRCPC, Co-Editor, Open Medicine; Christian Sylvain, Policy, Planning and International Affairs Director, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); and Professor Michael Geist.

The presentations are available along with audio

http://web20.uottawa.ca/academic/library/openaccess.mp3

(Note: Although the audio starts out in French, the main seminar is in English.)

There's a webcast as well but I couldn't get it to work.

via Resource Shelf

science in Second Life: CSIRO and Nature

CSIRO

Participate in this Second Life seminar as Dr Peter Clifton discusses anti-ageing and the prospect of human life extension.

3 September 2007, 2 AM Second Life Time (Pacific timezone)

Examining the prospect of human life extension

Dr Gautam Tendulkar will be discussing how CSIRO is using Second Life to research the limits of virtual worlds, data exchange between worlds and custom interfaces.

17 September 2007, 2 AM Second Life Time (Pacific timezone)

Researching the limits of virtual worlds

both at

ABC Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ABC%20Island/130/137/43

Nature

a discussion with Phil Holliger from the Medical Research Council Molecular Biology Lab in Cambridge. Phil works with ancient DNA: DNA samples retrieved from specimens of forensic, paleontological or archaeological interest. DNA naturally degrades over time, making it very difficult to amplify and analyse, and Phil will be talking about a new way to more accurately repair the damage, which he recently tried out on a 60,000 year-old cave bear.

13 September 2007 at ?6 PM GMT?

Events on Second Nature and Events on Second Nature (2)

On one of Nature's Second Nature islands in Second Life, presumably.

my presentation on Internet community for Allen Press Emerging Trends

Here's my presentation "The Internet - A Scholarly Community?" from the 2007 Allen Press Emerging Trends seminar:

Download AllenPress.ppt (converted to PowerPoint)

Original Keynote format available upon request.

I have also posted it to Slideshare.net

There are supplementary bookmarks available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/ap2007akerman

I thought the presentation went well.  A lot of the content is in me talking, so I don't know how much you'll get from just the slides.

Sidebar 1: Using K790 as Bluetooth Remote

I tried using my K790 phone as a remote control but that was not a big success for a couple reasons:
1) It kept going to sleep, so instead of just clicking to the next slide, I first had to hit a safe button to wake it up, then click to the next slide
2) Although Bluetooth should have good range (10 metres), I wasn't able to control from either end of the stage and at at least one point, I lost the connection altogether and had to re-establish it

So: not recommended unless you're going through your slides quickly (or know how to disable sleep mode) and you're fairly close to the podium.

Sidebar 2: Carbon Offset for Travel

I'm doing double carbon offset, on the theory that at least one of them might do some good:

Green My Flight Summary
Itinerary:
OTTAWA - YOW to WASHINGTON - IAD: 725.0 km

Total Distance: 1449.9 km
Total Emissions: 197.0 kg
Program Cost: $7.00

MyClimate

flight from: Ottawa, ON [Macdonald-Cartier International Airport], Canada, YOW
flight to: Washington, DC [Washington Dulles International Airport], USA, IAD
return, economy
flight distance: 1'448 km
flight passengers: 1
CO2 Emissions: 0,34 t
Total costs for compensation of your flight: SFr. 13.71
+ SFr. 5 "handling charge"
+ credit card foreign exchange fees

(Google says 18.71 Swiss francs = about 17.50 Canadian dollars)

thoughts and notes on Allen Press Emerging Trends Seminar

I enjoyed the Allen Press seminar, I really value the opportunity to meet with people working on ways to support scholarly activity using technology, and to see presentations of some of their work.

The strongest theme I heard from the technology side was a plea for increased semantic markup of journals, to build the "web of data".

I find it interesting that the more I progress in my career, the more I find most challenges are about people/"humanities" issues and finances - I often wonder whether some courses in human behaviour and economics should be mandatory for all technologists.

In this vein, some other themes I heard were more about psychology and sociology:
- can we find ways to recognize and reward scientific contributions outside of the published paper?
- if you're not providing an explicit reward, can you find ways to tap into activities that researchers already are doing (e.g. helping them to capture and annote citations, as Zotero does)
- is it possible to construct systems that discourage negative behavior (e.g. to prevent "flamewars" of vitriolic discussion)

As I suggested in my talk, I think we need to leverage knowledge from existing systems, like the "ignore list", moderation, FAQs, and other conventions of USENET discussion groups.

My presentation will be online within the next few days, it's been ready for months, but I still need to make sure all of the supporting Connotea bookmarks are available.  The presentations are also supposed to be up on the Allen Press site within a few days.

UPDATE 2007-04-15: My presentation is now online.  ENDUPDATE

By some sort of technogeek harmonic convergence, I ended up at the speakers' dinner the night before sitting with Konrad Förstner (homepage, blog) and Josh Greenberg.  Not only did we have a lively discussion, it worked out well because the three of us were all speaking in the same section of the programme, at the start of the day.

Konrad's presentation is already available: Revolutionizing scientific communication and collaboration (PDF).

I took some raw notes on a few of the presentations.
I don't know how useful they are, but since this work blog started as a place to hold my conference notes and make them searchable, it seems appropriate to continue this tradition.

Donald King

sources used by researchers for their work
- journal article 35%
- discussion with colleagues 20%

the ultimate factor for an information channel is its accessibility

Competition for scientists' time
- additional time is due to communication activity

National Survey

* key attribute: trustworthiness
* followed by timeliness
* followed by quality

trustworthiness of websites (as judged by surveyed researcher) was low

trends in scientists' reading patterns

* reading more
* rely on libraries more

everyone has to continue to learn

trends in how articles are identified: no big change 1977 to 2006

main shift is from A&I to online searching

most readers obtain articles from library collections, not preprint archives

252 artices read per scientist per year (increase from 150 in 1977)
source is about 50/50 library collection and other (131/121)

reasons
* decrease in personal subscriptions
* more reading of articles identified by online bib searches
** electronic collections have broadened access to articles

a lot more articles now identified by automated searches, 63 per scientist now

library collections: about 80% electronic use - this saves readers about 20 hours/year
breadth of reading has increased, read double the journals from 1977

time per article has declined from 48 minutes to 34

Article Age - older articles are judged more valuable and are more likely to come from libraries

(decline in personal paper journal libraries)

Reading of Older Materials may be increasing (with digitization)

* Libraries will continue to be an essential participant in the journal system for the foreseeable future

* Newly proposed system models need to be advance cautiously and with demonstrable successes

Q: Are researchers still browsing in the same way?
A: Mostly from personal paper subscriptions.
Also browsing means keeping up with literature in general.

------------------------

Jaron Lanier
"Avoiding Mob Science"

about Ted Nelson

about history of Internet/networking

people as "pack animals"
social roles

when you allow anonymous comments on blog entries... it can evolve into fighting packs

Internet allows "increased efficiency" of harassment

How to use governance to bring out the best in people?

morality and economics

open source: a lot of talent spent duplicating things that were already available, and diverted into
politics

we can start to observe now what does and doesn't work on the web

- ArXiv (quiet "kook filter")
- edge.org is similar

having a lot of openness is good, but total opennes is a disaster

filtering "can be cheap but it can't be free"

economic challenges - Web 2.0 seems to transmute volunteer labour into money

hard to make "partially open systems"

the iPod is a dongle

"Can we physicalize scholarly publishing in some new way?"

be realistic in adopting Web 2.0, prepare for negative behavior, design to manage it
preserve the value of scholarly publications and the scholarly process

Q: Could a tshirt be a way to physicalize a journal?

(Richard's comment: "I wrote this paper and all I got was this lousy tshirt" :)

-----------------------------------------------

Panel: The Great Promise of Research Data Commons

slide showing decline of availability of (collected/generated) research data over a creator's lifespan

John Wilbanks
"The Research Data Commons"

a commons approach makes research go faster, and makes it easier to use technologies that don't yet exist

seems to be easier for fundamental data vs. individial experiments

example of Bermuda agreement

to make the sharing possible, you need markup and storage

when there are gaps in the data, you block the ability to map the network of knowledge

"we need to treat the literature itself as data, because we need computers to process it for us"

"this has to be about answering questions, not technology"

the commons will help scientists to ask better questions

three things for publishers to do:

- markup
- provenance - e.g. link to other stuff from same author
- trust

sw.neurocommons.org

-----

Steve Bryant
PubChem
"An open information resource linking chemistry and biology"

Entrez
1,500,000 users/day
50,000,000 hits/day

having the data available lets you do many computations with it,
as well as comparisons with other data sets

NIH Roadmap

"GenBank model"
highly automated

18,000,000 chemical structure records

links to contributor web sites and other NCBI databases

about 35,000 people/day

optimize discoverability

(complex example)

exploratory structure-discovery tools

(Richard says: free the humans)

-------

Robert Peet
"Data sharing and exchange: Experiences within the Ecological Society of America"

supplemental data

way to cite and find data

need to change the culture to encourage deposit of supplementary info

vegbank.org

To be published somehow as online proceedings.  "U.S. National Vegetation Classification"
- dynamic standard

www.ecoinformatics.org

metadata, datasets, workflow

Taxonomic database challenge: Standardizing organism and community names

* movement within ESA to require access to data

Set standards
- formats
- archiving and access

* assure quality control (peer review)

Digital repositories and libraries
* archive and provided access
* meet instituational responsibility to granting agencies
* (one I missed)

Publishers
* Embed citation links for standard data elements
* (others)

Q: Open Text Mining ?
A: Creative Commons is trying to jumpstart

------------------------

Peer Review, Dynamic Documents, and the Wisdom of Crowds

Irv Rockwood

Recommends as a good overview "Peer Review in Health Sciences" (PDF), from the BMJ

"it's easy to criticize peer review, but it's harder to come up with a better system"

New possibilities:
- open peer review
- author selects reviews
- post-publication review

ETAI all articles posted for 90 day review
- revise, pass-fail

Biology Direct
- author selects reviewers
- reviews published alongside author's response

PLOS One
- prepub review on technical issues
- open peer review

Is editorial peer review broken, and if so, what should we do about it?

Jaron Lanier

- there's a tendency to (try to) use Web 2.0 to replace hard work with superficial easy work

Chris Surridge
PLoS ONE

- peer review slow, inefficient, more papers than ever

asked to do three things
1. separate good from bad
2. select papers for journals
3. give status to a paper
(4. improve the paper)

academic editors decide whether to publish (perhaps using some degree of peer review)

David Baldwin
Eco Society of America (Ithaca, NY)

- humanities has system of "working papers"

Q: different models of peer review for different disciplines?
A: yes

e-journal preservation workshop presentations

Lots of interesting presentations available from the March 27, 2007 E-Journal Archiving and Preservation Workshop organized by the UK Digital Preservation Coalition.

Rethinking Resource Sharing 2007 Forum

Creating a new global service framework that allows individuals to obtain what they want based on factors such as cost, time, format, and delivery. This framework will encompass promoting and exposing library services in a variety of environments.

Forum III 2007

April 19-20, 2007
Chicago, IL

http://www.rethinkingresourcesharing.org/

In a comment on "Rethinking Resource Sharing: Get It", Gail Wanner says

We’ll also be looking for testers, interface programmers, and developers to take the [Get It] extension even further should people want an opportunity to assist with this user driven initiative.

open attention data event in New York

The Attention Trust has as its mission to

Empower people to exert greater control over their "attention data," i.e. any records reflecting what they have paid attention to and what they have ignored. We accomplish this by promoting the principles of user control, by distributing our Attention Recorder, and by supporting the development of other appropriate tools, standards and practices.

As best I can understand, this is about giving you the choice of which aggregation service(s) you want to explicitly permit to gather and analyze user activity data (e.g. web site and web page popularity).

They're having an invitation-only event next week (March 12-13, 2007) they're calling "Open Data 2007"

On Monday night, March 12 [2007] @ 7p, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer is going to talk with us about the 150-year evolution of Reuters as an Open Data platform.

On Tuesday, March 13 [2007], starting from 8a until 6p, we are going to hear from a number of startups that- despite their seeming differences- have each incorporated Open Data directly into their products.

Open Data... Closed Invitations?

via Paul Miller

BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog

Slides and audio (MP3) are available for various presentations from the BioMed Central Open Access Colloquium held on February 8, 2007.

I was particularly interested by

UK PubMed Central within the open access movement by Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy and Programmes, British Library - PowerPoint, MP3 audio

via Francis Ouellette, indirectly

I also notice that BMC has various blogs, which appear to have all launched in January-February of this year.  Lots of interesting info about various tools to explore articles and data.

To keep you up to speed with the latest developments at BioMed Central, and to give you our take on relevant news from elsewhere, we're pleased to launch the BioMed Central blog, along with a Chemistry Central blog and a PhysMath Central blog.

Previously:
January 08, 2007  UK PubMedCentral (UKPMC) launches
September 08, 2006  the concepts of open science and information commons

2007 Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communication

The programme for the 2007 Allen Press Seminar on Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing™ is up.

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking on the panel "Online Scholarship 2.0".  The title of my presentation is "The Internet - A Scholarly Community?"  I'm placing my slides in the Creative Commons, they should be online here in my blog and on Slideshare.net sometime on or after April 13, 2007.

There's a good lineup of speakers - I'm looking forward to meeting them and seeing their presentations.

If I do any blogging related to the event, I will use tag AP2007.

report on Library Future Roles webcast

I liked the EDUCAUSE Webcast Architectures for Collaboration—Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries.  Peter Brantley (currently of CDL, soon to be Director of the Digital Library Federation) gave a very clear-eyed assessment of the current state of library IT engagement, and proposed many areas in which the library can do better.

I have to admire the boldness of a presentation whose 4th slide is "Libraries have failed in critical ways".

He said that a key role that libraries have to embrace is to enable discovering books, and searching inside of them.

He had many well-constructed phrases, I particularly liked "technology wipes out our current understanding of how libraries engage the world".

He then moved on to explore the many roles that libraries can still play, both in the physical and digital worlds (including Second Life).

I asked a rather long question about the DLF Architectures group, their DLF Service Framework, library SOA and relationships to the JISC e-Framework.

In his response (and several other times in the presentation) he highlighted the DLF Aquifer project.

If I understand it correctly, it's about building frameworks for discovery and use of distributed digital resources.

We support scholarly discovery and access by:

    * Developing schemas, protocols and communities of practice to make digital content available to scholars and students where they do their work
    * Developing the best possible systems for finding, identifying and using digital resources in context

When asked about new DLF initiatives he has planned, he indicated a few key areas:

• mass digitization
• policy issues (e.g. rights, privacy)
• new virtual communities
• new media and discourse

He had a lot of ideas about engaging with faculty and students, as well as making better connections between the library and IT, and between libraries and publishing.

In particular, he said that libraries should explore the community aspect of dealing with faculty and students - libraries as enablers of community.

In terms of IT engagement he said libraries need to move together with IT to enable deep information discovery.

He also talked about ensuring that we take full advantage of the potential of virtual worlds, and not artificially constrain ourselves to old ways of operating in them - new libraries in new worlds, or to paraphase: No OPAC IN SECOND LIFE!

He said we need to rethink social learning, recognizing that virtual spaces are social spaces with the added aspect that they are freed from normal physical constraints.

He also talked about investigating new social media, having the library as a richer and more imaginative participant in the digital publishing process.  Again a paraphrase: "imagine what the book looks like in an interactive, networked future."

He said libraries need to re-engineer scholarly communication with faculty and with the public.

He mentioned a critical task, which is that we as libraries need to learn how to get our content harvested and ranked appropriately by search engines, perhaps by working more closely with the companies making such engines.

He identified "Collaborative problems, collaborative solutions":

• massively distributed information
• rich data
• new indexing architectures
• mining and mapping our data to build interactive linkages
• challenge of providing ubiquitous access

Successful digital libraries bridge communities, build new services, and help others discover new services to build.

Digital Libraries are the architects of collaboration.

Publishing should be increasingly online and interactive, there should be digital workflows.

Challenge of "open access" to our applications - challenge for IT and libraries.
He talked a lot about how to permit remix, mashups, and combinations/

Of course my solution to that challenge is to ensure that libraries are building on a good service-oriented framework.  I very much hope that the DLF will further pursue SOA initiatives under his guidance.

Thanks to Glen for pointing out this webcast.

In case it's not clear, you can hear the audio of the presentation (which is essential, as the slides are just very high-level talking points) by following the instructions on how to log in to the "HorizonWimba archive" on the presentation page.  Once you're in the interface, switch to the Archives tab and scroll way way down to the bottom.  (Unfortunately, I currently get 503: Service Unavailable from their QuickTime server.)

UPDATE 2007-01-31: I was able to play the QuickTime audio on both my home Mac and home Windows box, with Firefox.  On the Mac the slides didn't display though.  It would be nice if EDUCAUSE offered just the audio as an MP3 / podcast.

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.

Net Neutral Canada?

Net Neutrality:
A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada

Date and Location:
February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.

see Librarian Activist for more info

some e-science events in 2007

3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing
Bangalore, India, December 10-13, 2007
CFP deadline: Papers due July 15, 2007

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE - EGEE'07 - will take place 1-5 October 2007 at the Europe Congress Center (ECC), Budapest, Hungary
(mostly about grids)

Sixth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2007), 10th - 13th September 2007 Nottingham
deadline for submission of mini-workshop proposals is 22nd January 2007

German e-Science Conference 2007 (GES2007)
2nd-4th of May 2007 in the city of Baden-Baden
CFP deadline was January 1, 2007

Spanish Conference on e-Science Grid Computing
1st and 2nd March 2007 in Madrid
CFP deadline was 4th December 2006

Norway - National Arena in eScience, 2007-2010

To foster collaboration between researchers in eScience, the Research Council of Norway has established an annual meeting series as part of the eVITA programme.

Norway - eScience Meeting 2007 - January 29-30, 2007 at Dr. Holms Hotel, Geilo

Curation and Access services

I just ran across the C21st Curation: access and service delivery lecture series.
Slides and audio are available.

Some of interest to me:

Curation and Access for Scientific Research
  British Library
  Neil Beagrie

The Digital Revolution - and service delivery in national institutions
  National Archives
  Natalie Ceeney

Scholarly communications and the role of researcher funders
   Director of Communications & Information, ESRC.
   Astrid Wissenburg       

Scholarly communication- Trends and Developments
   Head of the Scholarly Communication and Innovation Support at the British Library
   David Brown

Note: the Epic 2015 "Museum of Media History" link given in the last presentation no longer works, it should be http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/  Link via Wikipedia - EPIC 2014.  I found it a bit of a slow watch, and their predictions go rather rapidly awry, at least at the detailed level.

Rethinking Resource Sharing: Get It

Somehow this managed to fly beneath my radar, it looks like because it's people talking document delivery / ILL language to other librarians, rather than people talking Web Services to library IT people.

Here's what I discovered

A browser plugin which annotates web pages with links to “getting” options for published resources held by libraries

The GET-IT plugin scans web pages for book-like resources and attempts to annotate the page with “getting” options provided by libraries, tailored where possible to the user.

from Kent Fitch's presentation A New paradigm for “getting” (PowerPoint) from Libraries Australia Forum 2006 (LAF06)

I have to express some mild annoyance, mixed with hope, to read statements like

Mission of the [Resource Sharing] Initiative

* Create a new global service framework that allows individuals to obtain what they want based on factors such as cost, time, format, and delivery.
* This framework will encompass promoting and exposing library services in a variety of environments.

from presentation Rethinking Resource Sharing (PDF) by Candy Zemon, given at NISO Workshop Discovery to Delivery, November 3, 2006.

A "global service framework", hmm, where have I heard that before, it's almost as if they want to build an architecture based on services, how shall I put it, a sort of "Service-Oriented Architecture".

No offence to librarians, but if you want to build an SOA, how about actually calling it an SOA, and working with the Web Services and SOA working groups?  Does everything have to be a separate initiative with a giant Steering Committee that uses special language ("Resource Discovery") so that no one outside knows what they're talking about?

Why can't we all get along?  And speak a common technology language?

Isn't the Get It button already used by OpenURL resolvers?  Is this going to make things simpler, or more confusing?  Are the LibX people involved?  Are we going to end up with a bunch of competing browser extensions?

Apparently you can attempt to find some information starting points at
http://www.ala.org/rusa/stars/

Here's my modest proposal:

1. Let's have a single, shared set of terminology and a single, shared library Service-Oriented Architecture

2. Let's make one high-functionality browser extension and lobby Microsoft, Firefox et al. to have it included in the default installs

 

IT directions for National Library of Australia

Libraries, IT and Everything
Mark Corbould
Assistant Director-General
Information Technology
National Library of Australia (NLA)

presented at Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
December 15, 2006

presentation notes by me, Richard Akerman

- strategic vision of the national library of australia

- function: basically, maintain a national collection and make it available

- 479 staff
- over 550,000 [physical, presumably] visitors
- 110 million page views on website, up 59%

~ 9 million items (including 2 million manuscripts and 2 million serials)

Access

- 365,000 physical items delivered
- 45,000 reference enquiries (4,000 via Ask Now)
- 13 million digital objects delivered

~80 TB of digital object storage, including Australian Web Domain Harvest
- main stuff digitized is unique cultural heritage
- 40% of digital collection is oral history

Web Site Usage

- nice chunk on PictureAustralia, new chunk on MusicAustralia

- IT Strategic Plan (3 years, annual update)

Strategic Directions [phase] 1

* for a long time it was build, describe, preserve and provide access to the physical collection

Strategic Directions [phase] 2 [in addition to phase 1]

* since 2000 "to provide rapid and easy access..."
- outcome: online federated discovery services with "no dead ends"

Looking Outwards

* Internet-enabled collaboration
- lots of freely available content
- organizations are making their content available for remixing and repurposing
- low barries to participation
- light-weight trust models, no MOUs
- sharing personal views of contemporary events
- creating social networks around areas of interest
- near enough is good enough
- loss of control
- need to be less risk averse

Strategic Directions [phase] 3 [in addition to previous]

* In 2006, "to enhance learning and knowledge creation by further simplifying and ... services..."
[slide switched before I got the rest]

Key IT Outcomes

1 ensure collecting record of Australia
2 To meet user need for rapid
5 Ensure relevance

[yes, he skipped a couple]

IT Goals

many including
* Develop and deploy new full-text search software
* Provide online spaces to support publishing, collaboration, contribution and interaction

The rest of the world wants to find stuff in Google etc.
"we've got to get our data out there"
worked with Google to get their books in Google Scholar

Get this item

* Bookshops
* Suppliers

Also A9.com - Libraries Australia is searchable by using OpenSearch lightweight protocol

working to do federated search across museums and other organizations, using OpenSearch

Libraries Australia [national union catalogue I think]

* considered replacing individual library catalogues (as a starting point) with
"Libraries Australia, as the  primary database to be searched by users"

to do this you need to be able to integrate well with all the OPACs, which of course is a problem

Expanding Borrowing

* Wake-up calls: statistics and commentary
- [Lorcan] Dempsey "Materials are not being united with users who want them" [not sure of quote,
switched to next slide]
[You can see the entire quote and more info in Kent Fitch's presentation A New paradigm for “getting” (PowerPoint) from Libraries Australia Forum 2006 (LAF06)]
- Long Tail argument

Current Fulfillment
- charge $13 for ILL, total cost actually $49

steady decline in ILL

ILL: Strong disincentives to participate
- Expensive
- Slow
- Loss of control of assets
- Inconvenient / impossible

Fulfillment

Making "Search, find, get" seamless

* Lend directly from library to reader - NetFlix model - "NetBooks"

Also get your presence into e.g. Amazon.com "Borrow this book from Libraries Australia" (using greasemonkey)

PictureAustralia
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/

includes pics from Flickr
about 6000 images harvested

  "All you need in Aussie" - by Alicia Zappier 
  Originally uploaded by desertgirl.

MusicAustralia

* bought metadata catalogue of australian contemporary music - will interface to ecommerce gateway

Model

* "metadata discovery should be free, but you may have to pay for fulfillment"
* or I would say "easy access is more important than zero cost"

AustraliaDancing

* "Take Part" - customized wiki

There's more...

* People Australia, based on using authority file
* Open Access Journals - "really cheap and easy, blurs between publishing and collecting"

Issues

* Sustaining existing services
* Managing expectations
* Supporting innovation
* Enabling rapid prototyping
* Being vibrant and relevant

Ok, but how

* Reorg IT

* Review IT Architecture
- Service Oriented [emphasis mine]
- Consolidate metadata repositories
- "single business" model

* Create an IT-aware organization
- Communicate, collaborate and train

42 IT staff, over 400 library staff

Additional tech notes
- using Lucene full-text search
- using Confluence - new IT architecture is on a wiki
- training business analysts in BPM

Q: How does IT decide on priorities for projects?
A: Through the operational plan, reviewed by Corporate IT Group that sets the priorities

If necessary, escalate to corporate management.

Q: Web Harvest?  How made accessible?  Federated discovery - what challenges?
A: Paid the Internet Archive.  Ran for 6 weeks.  About 180 million files.  On a PetaBox, installed in
Australia.  Internal access but not public.  Also the Internet Archive will put it up.

Permissions/legal issues within Australia.

Issues with robots.txt - if you follow robots, you may not get inline images or CSS.

Federate search is basically around OpenSearch, plus may need to add relevance ranking.

Q (me): How are you doing relevance ranking?
A: Currently Teratext

but going to use Lucene.

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