Science Library Pad

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=

Elsevier Patient Research beta

Elsevier has launched a beta pilot that supports patients and their family members looking for medical information; providing access to individual full text journal articles from selected Elsevier publications. The articles are delivered via email for a minimal handling fee of $4.95.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/about

Permitted Uses

You may access in a given twenty-four hour period a reasonable number of Content items, and you may download and print such Content after it has been delivered to your e-mail address. Such access and use is for your own personal use, although you may also share and discuss such Content with family members and medical professionals involved in your medical care or the care of a family member. You can make further copies for such family members and medical professionals.

Prohibited Uses

Personal use does not include the use by researchers, instructors or students for research purposes or educational use.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/terms

You can see the list of journals covered at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/patientresearch

There is a Facebook App, that provides a search box and also lists "popular articles".

It's not clear to me how you search without using the Facebook App.  There are some hits on various articles visible in Google.  The terms of service says

After ordering the article and confirmation of payment, we will e-mail the document to you typically within 2 hours, but no longer than 24 hours.

Facebook App seen via Carol Serroul.

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.

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.

UK Research Reserve

An interesting idea for "resource sharing" (as the library terminology seems to be).

The role of the UKRR would be to provide a venue for coordinated reduction in collection sizes, for securing the future of the higher education 'collective collection', and to provide ongoing access. The idea is that at least 3 copies of any item would be kept, one at the BL and one each at at least 2 other libraries who would agree to commit to long term retention.

...

This is a natural evolution for the British Library. In her presentation to the meeting, Jan Wilkinson, of the British Library, discussed the decline in revenues from document supply, and how they looked to the UKRR as a way of replacing those revenues.

(The latter point being of interest as CISTI is also a leading doc del provider.)

see UK Research Reserve Update [pdf] for details

via Lorcan Dempsey - Research Reserve

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.

online library role in discovering and delivering

Lorcan Dempsey has a thoughtful post Discovery and disclosure, about making your content visible (disclosing its availability) in as many venues as possible.

As I indicated in a previous post, I think libraries are having a hard time thinking about availability, discoverability and creativity in an online world.

To me it is useful to understand these as a workflow:

1. create content
2. discover content
3. get content (find out where it is available)

I am going to set creativity aside again, since I don't think libraries perceive they have a major role as e.g. video studios, audio recording studios, pottery studios etc.

I think the key is to understand that people always want to get (this is sometimes termed as "people want to find, not to search").  In the physical world, the library is a logical starting point for discovery, since it will also be the place where you get most of the content.

And lets be clear: the discovery process in the physical world is both complex and often unsatisfactory.  The card catalogue plays a role, the physical shelving and proximity of the books plays a role, and the staff are essential.  But a card catalogue is a pretty thin metadata source - there's a limit to how hard you can make those few items of data work.

Now, lets move to the online world.  The workflow (I briefly wrote "worldflow") is the same, but the individual steps use different technologies in different locations.  Again skipping creativity.  As long as there is "enough" content online, the discovery will start online.

And, this is critical, it will start at whatever site offers the best discovery experience.  Now, what data would you rather be mining: thin card catalogue data where the model is (or was until recently) exact title match, or rich full-text data that includes a web of interconnections.

Now remember, this discovery is just a starting point.  Libraries bemoan losing the search experience to Google.  But that's a false perception.  How long are you actually on Google?  Five seconds before you click on the first result?  Less?  It's not like Google has captured the user experience.  Google is a brief stopover on the way to the web.  What people want is the third step in the workflow: actually getting the content immediately from the web.

As long as you understand the library's role online as making content available, you can see there is still a role for the library to play.  But, understand that people want immediate gratification: to the extent that the library can deliver immediate full text, they will be most interested. 

Also understand, as I mentioned previously, that people are no longer interested in the book as container, they are interested in the book as content.  That's why full-text search is so important. 

Let's compare the user experience on the query xml soap outsourcing on WorldCat and Google Book Search

http://worldcat.org/search?q=xml+soap+outsourcing&submit=Search

No results were found for: 'xml soap outsourcing'

http://books.google.com/books?q=xml+soap+outsourcing&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0

1 - 10 with 26 pages

That is the critical difference in discoverability betwen library catalogue driven systems, and full-text search systems.  I assert you literally can't make the cat data work hard enough to approach the discoverability experience offered by Google and Amazon.  Therefore, surrender, and reposition yourselves within the workflow.

Let's explore this further.  In the physical world, existence + location = availability.

If the library can tell you "we have Five Fists of Science" and it's on shelf X, or on loan and due back on date Y, it's available.

Available for you to come in person to the library and physically get.

Online availability is different.

Online existence + deliverability = availability.

It doesn't suffice simply to know that a book is in the library, what I want to know is when the book (or its contents) can come to me.  That means online availability includes delivery options as a crucial element.

Can I get it immediately on my desktop as an e-book and/or audiobook?  Can I have it on all my mobile devices?  Can I get the book from the library in the mail?  Can I get it couriered to me today?  Can it be delivered with my newspaper tomorrow morning?  Can I get it from Amazon?  Can I get it used from Abebooks or Alibris?  Does someone who lives near me have a copy?  Is it on Project Gutenberg?  Available as a book-on-demand printed copy?  Can someone come read it to me?   Can someone read it to me over the telephone?  Is there a book club that is covering it?  Can someone explain it to me? ...

You can see that in the online world, you're no longer in the warehousing business.  You're in the logistics and collaborative partnership business.  You have to decide where your library should fit, are you a single one of the above options, or are you an enabler for all of them?

There is no logic, to me, in the library trying to run this supply chain.  I think libraries need to outsource and insource - connect out to partners as well as let them connect in to you.

What's your delivery strategy?

Have you considered partnering with:

• your postal service
• local and national couriers, e.g. FedEx and UPS
• other local delivery services, like your local newspapers
• volunteer organizations
• ebook and audiobook providers
• mobile device providers
• Google, Amazon, AbeBooks, Alibris, WorldCat, LibraryThing, Project Gutenberg, ...

I see WorldCat is making some tiny steps in this direction, offering the option to order from Amazon.com, and to even provide the affiliate money to a chosen library.  Both of these are however US-only options.  Amazon.ca and Canadian postal codes do not appear to be an option.

Steve Cohen also makes a good point that even if a book is available in a WorldCat library, you may not have permission to get it.

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

Council of Federal Libraries 2005 - 11:30 - Agatha Bystram Award

11:30 Agatha Bystram Award for Leadership in Information Management

Dr. Ian Wilson presents the award
(Makes a side comment about challenges of blogging within federal regulatory environment.)

Two awards this year:
1 CISTI team receives award for Secure Document Delivery

Donna Meighan gave a brief speech accepting the award on behalf of CISTI.  CISTI team members were present.

SDD is DRMed PDFs to the desktop.  It uses the FileOpen plugin.

2 Human Resources - Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS)

providing tools to help all the different stakeholders communicate

Additional Links (post-seminar):
You can see the complete list of Agatha Bystram nominees for 2005 and previous years.

IFLA 2005 preliminary programme - docdel session

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) 2005 conference preliminary programme is available.

There will be a session in which CISTI will participate, here are a couple associated brief papers:

125 SI - Document Delivery and Resource Sharing
Perspectives on supply of electronic documents

• The use of a digital rights management system for document supply
  ANDREW BRAID (The British Library, Boston Spa, UK)
• Transforming document delivery in the e-content environment
  LUCIE MOLGAT (CISTI, Ottawa, Canada)

SLA2005 - docdel vendors - Sunday June 5

I wasn't at SLA on Sunday, so it's nice to find this report on Some Sunday Sessions from the PAM Division blog.

Another Sunday session was the SciTech Vendor update, featuring three presentations on document delivery by CISTI, The Linda Hall Library and The British Library. The presentations themselves were quite standard marketing pitches, outlining their various collections and ILL services. Each was done quite well -- it's hard to see how anyone could go wrong using any of the above services.

...

At the end of the session, someone in the audience basically asked the BL representative why someone should choose them instead of CISTI. I would like to commend both the BL and CISTI reps for handling the situation diplomatically. No blows were exchanged.

Atlantic Scholarly Information Network blog and info

I don't know much about the Canadian ASIN (Atlantic Scholarly Information Network) project, but they do have a blog with some info.  (Prepare for acronym fever.)

The CAUL [Council of Atlantic University Libraries] have begun implementing the ASIN Portal which includes single-signon authenticated access to the combined licensed and public resources of the CAUL libraries. The [Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA) conference] session will cover the individual components of the Portal including federated/broadcast searching, OpenURL resolution, Relais document delivery and Subject Rooms which are all maintained by the Sirsi’s Rooms context management system.

Via Stephen on CISTI Architecture internal bliki.

document delivery review, discussion of OA

Mike McGrath, Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature, Interlending & Document Supply, 33, 1 (2005) pp. 42-48. ...
Findings - Finds that Open Access does not seem to have a great impact on document delivery at present but its influence is growing and may well accelerate.

via Open Access News