A post on the SERIALST list yesterday by Linda Hulbert, Associate Director of Collection Management and Services at the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library in St. Paul, Minnesota details one library’s response to contractual conditions being imposed by Wiley.  I found it interesting because it highlights the challenges facing not only libraries, but content providers, and the perils of inflexibility.

The entire post can be found on the SERIALST Archive; I am including a large part of it in this post:

Another company is looking at the Elsevier model and using it. Unfortunately, unlike Elsevier where a library might get more content than they could pay for and unlike Elsevier which does not require that a library participate, Wiley is requiring all multi-site libraries to have a no-cancellation, minimum life time spend. Add insult to injury, we are not a multi-site library by any other vendor’s definition! But Wiley has designated us so. Without recourse.

So, I am sending this letter to many people at Wiley and in the library community. Please, help resist these kinds of publisher practices.

*****
I am writing to you today in your capacity as someone concerned with [higher education, customer service] at John Wiley and Sons.

Wiley provides an EAL license which has three major features: two year agreement, a guaranteed minimum spend (no cancellations without adding titles) (ala Elsevier) and, for that ‘lock-in,’ libraries will have a cap on the annual inflationary increases. Wiley requires multi-site libraries – which they have declared we are – enter into an EAL license for electronic journal content.

We have two problems with this rigid requirement:

1. Wiley is now treating my university as a multi-campus university. Let me assure you that all other vendors treat us a single site because, while we have libraries in Minneapolis and St. Paul, we have a single IP address, single president, and a single Accounts Payable for all campuses (including Rome which has 4 seminarians studying abroad!).

2. The EAL license is required for all online journal content we purchase from Wiley/Blackwell in 2010. Currently, our online-only spend is about $3,000, our print +online is over $33,000, and our total spend is about $66,000 for journal content with Wiley. What does that mean for the University of St. Thomas? We would not be able to cancel – i.e. lower our ‘current’ spend. That means that as tuition dollars dry up, as the university’s contribution to the libraries shrink, we cannot cancel titles in the Wiley contract. It’s ironic that while we would be locked into a multi-year contract during these incredibly unpredictable and difficult financial times, Wiley could change their title list at will – buying or selling titles as the market dictates.

We have spoken with your representative, Diane Conroy, and there are no alternatives IF we want online journal content from Wiley. She is adamant.

Hence, our only option is to cancel all of our online content. I assume that is not Wiley’s goal but the only one we see available to us since we cannot agree to a multi-year, dollar spend commitment. We will cancel what we can – I can see about $30,000 in cancellations (27 titles) without too much pain. We will purchase print-only in the cases where we have had print +online and we will cancel our online-only and move back to print-only. As we all know, even good content that is print-only will become marginalized by our users and as it does, we’ll easily be able to justify canceling the remaining print titles. And, of course, we will not be purchasing new journal content from Wiley.

When September comes, if we have no agreement with Wiley for 2010 permitting cancellation and permitting single year subscriptions, we will have to take these draconian steps.

I will be sharing this letter with the Wiley board of directors, others in Wiley management, the serials community, the licensing community and other colleagues in the library community.

Thank you for your attention.

We in the library community need to be prepared to bend, but not to break.  If a vendor isn’t meeting us halfway, then we need to consider walking away.  There is always more than one way to achieve our mission, and we have to have that in mind and act accordingly. I hope Wiley takes notice of this library’s action, and looks to see how it can best serve both their customers, as well as their company’s, needs.

Open Jurist is a great add-on to the free case law resources I wrote about a few days ago.  Consisting of over 600,000 opinions from the federal court system, including the United States Supreme Court and the Federal Appellate Courts.  This looks to be a great resource for research into federal court cases.

One minor negative:  one of the first searches I performed, Bush v. Gore (the Supreme Court decision regarding the 2000 presidential election) didn’t work as it should have because the case is listed as “George Bushs v. Albert Gore“.  The “s” at the end of the word kept it from the first page of results.  I initially thought it might have referred to the plurality of petitioners (“et al.”), but a Google search actually produces no results when the “s” is included.  I looked for a way to notify those who run the site, but only found an e-mail address that was to be used “if you have access to more cases or know where we can get more of them”.  Any website meant to offer a service should have (at least) a method for general contact.

(Note:  see comment regarding the “one minor negative” paragraph!)

found via ResourceShelf

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a PDF guide available for download titled Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.

To both illustrate and promote the practices, they have just released a video called Remix Culture : Fair Use is Your Friend.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

found via Lessig 2.0

Feedmil is a search engine for RSS feeds.  It does this specific task very, very well.  Search for feeds relating to any keywords you wish, and modify your results using a set of slides that emphasize/de-emphasize words that show up in your results.

I wish they had a more detailed “about” page, especially information on how they determine popularity, authority, quality, and relevance.

found via RSS4Lib

Common Chemistry is a resource from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) which allows one to search for chemical information using a variety of search terms, whether the terms be common names (aspirin, table salt), basic chemical names (acetylsalicylic acid, sodium chloride), or even the official CAS registration number (50-78-2, 7647-14-5).

Although this does not search the entire CAS database, it is an excellent starting point for most of the chemical information questions posed students and the general public.

Note the link to the Wikipedia entry (just above the disclaimer) for many, but not all, results; not many “authoritative” resources are confident enough in their users to connect them with resources developed and maintained by the crowd.

found via ResourceShelf

The Legal Technology blog on the Law.com website recently listed ten resources for free case law, detailing their respective strengths:

Get Your Free Case Law on the Web (link updated 2 Dec 2009)

found via ResourceShelf, crediting Law Librarian Blog

Eric Shonfeld at TechCrunch writes:

“Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.”

Twitter.  RSS.  Facebook.  Digg.  You-Name-It-Feed.  It is becoming apparent that this is the next big shift in internet usage, and, as with the previous shifts, it is hard to guess what the effects will be, and who will be affected.

And this, like previous shifts, will not supplant previous internet use trends.  HTML, or some form of it, will still be very dominant.  Blogs and Wikis will continue to exist, and will be useful tools for certain types of communication and interaction.  Integration will continue to be the norm, with the “now” infusing itself throughout.  How will this change be considered dramatic?

“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”

This “cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”  Think about this.  How much of your web presence is based on control:  control of layout, content, contributors, and most of all, control over the rate at which change occurs?   For a library web site, how much of this control is able to be ceded before the concept of a library web site itself changes, without controls?

As with many future technology issues, now is the time to begin thinking, discussing, understanding all of this.  We cannot begin the process of deciding or planning, because none of us can predict how this will play out.  What will we have in place to deal with this, to anticipate this, to harness this?  One benefit of this process will be the inevitable inspiration that some will have about the potential of streams; a future must-have library web site technology might come from this.

Start thinking!

Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on the differing attitude of copyright between those who wish to wish to honor a creative work and those who wish to diminish it.  An excerpt:

“The upshot of this is that you’re on much more solid ground if you want to quote or otherwise reference a work for the purposes of rubbishing it than if you are doing so to celebrate it. This is one of the most perverse elements of copyright law: the reality that loving something doesn’t confer any right to make it a part of your creative life.”

An added bonus is a reference to a Firefly-based fan fiction that I hadn’t encountered before, titled My Own Kind of Freedom.

found via Library Link of the Day (16 May 2009)

Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of internet resource that has just gone “live”.  Many are calling it a new type of “search engine”, which it technically is, but it isn’t a search engine in the way we are used to envisioning one.  Others are calling it an “answer engine”, which isn’t a bad description.  Wolfram takes the user’s query and builds a response from a variety of resources that resembles what one might get from an almanac or or encyclopedic resource.  Wolfram’s own “about” page avoids any particular label.

Right now it has a relatively limited set of resources.  It does well with towns, states, people, movies, word definitions and many scientific questions in the areas of mathematics and chemistry (which is understandable considering that it was built using Mathematica as the foundation.  It doesn’t do well with music, books, television shows, and abstract concepts.  Much of this has to do with the data sets and methodology that is in place, and I expect to see much greater depth and breadth represented as time goes on.

I have spent a bit of time last night and this afternoon playing with it, and am fairly impressed.  Try a few queries, and be sure to view the “Source Information” link at the bottom of the results.  This provides a fairly generic listing of the resources used for that type of query.  Not all of the sources were necessarily used for your particluar query, but were the sources from which the data was extracted.  One can see that with the addition of additional resources, Wolfram could become powerful first step for research.

Some sample queries:

• DeKalb, Illinois
• World According to Garp (movie)
• World According to Garp (novel) [note that this one fails... no resources yet for literature]
• Heaviest Gas Element [many variations of this don't work, an example of syntax, I suppose]

and it doesn’t know quite how to handle leading articles, either:

• The World According to Garp (movie)

This is going to be a great reference; it needs time to mature and for additional data sets to be included.  This is certainly one place where the use of library cataloging information would be very, very beneficial.  Imagine being able to connect the dots between books, authors, publication dates, settings/locales, etc. and other data sets.

There are many sources of data that are mostly silos waiting to be tapped, Infochimps.org being one example.  How quickly and effectively they are able to incorporate useful data will partly determine how successful this resource becomes.  Improving their context recognition (i.e. figuring out what a person wants to know based on their typed input) is the other, perhaps harder, challenge.

Other sources of commentary and information:

• Resource Shelf’s Brief Users Guide to Wolfram
• Quizzing the World’s First Answer Engine
• MetaFilter’s entry, and resulting discussion/commentary
• Wikipedia’s Wolfram Alpha entry

In closing, I like their nod to 2001, A Space Odyssey in their load exceeded error screen:

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that...

Google has made the jump into supporting Microformats as well as RDFa, calling their implementation “Rich Snippets”!

This is great news on several different levels. Semantic markup within web pages provides a way to target searches much more effectively.  TechCrunch provides an excellent example:

“If I was to write a post that mentioned “The President” without naming him, Google probably wouldn’t realize that I was talking about President Obama – it might think I was referring to another US president, or perhaps the leader of a company. But using RDFa I could tag the words “The President” with “Barack Obama”. That tag would be visible to machines spidering the page for indexing (resulting in smarter search results), but wouldn’t be shown to users reading the post. In effect, it’s a way to tell search engines about your content without exposing your visitors to extraneous text.”

In addition, sites that provide well-structured metadata have the potential to be much more usable (and useful).  Library web sites, especially OPACs and Resource pages, should include structured information that details the context of the displayed content.  Using microformats in our web sites will benefit everyone involved over time.  As David Peterson notes on the SitePoint blog:

“Now that Google is supporting structured data it is high time to learn how to use this stuff.”

Saw a post on TechCrunch that indicated that Amazon has opened their offerings of blog subscriptions for the Kindle reader to all blogs that sign up.  So now Libology is available to readers of the Kindle… with two caveats:

1. It costs.  A lot.  Way more than you are paying now.  A whopping $1.99 per month (and I have no say in the price, so there).
2. I get some of the money, a whopping 30% (that’s 66 cents per month per subscription).

So really, if you don’t feel the need to pay to read this stuff, don’t.  Keep reading this stuff for free, though.  And if you are philosophically inclined (or reclined) against my getting paid, then, again, don’t.

Seriously, if you are really into the Kindle, and find the blog-perusing experience to be great, then I am glad to provide Libology as an option, just as I have provided a mobile-browser friendly version.  They do offer a 14-day trial if you want an excuse to try it out.  Just don’t feel guilty about canceling… I understand, trust me!

6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline is a post on the zenhabits blog which addresses the stress we go through as we try to accomplish projects and achieve goals.

I like that he stresses that discipline is an illusion; what we need to focus on instead is motivation.

The only thing I might add to this would be that we often times set ourselves up for failure in our projects and goals.  Evaluating what we truly want, what can realistically achieve with the resources we have (time, money, energy, etc.), and what is actually worth doing can make all the difference.

found via Journey of a Kitten

The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has weighed in on OCLC’s proposed policy changes.  Of note:

“The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships. We share the concern, voiced by many, that the policy hinders rather than encourages innovation, and we urge the Review Board to carefully examine this issue. It is unclear that the policy has been constructed with a focus on an evolving role of OCLC in enhancing the missions of an international library community with diverse and complex interests.”

This may not seem like a strongly worded statement, but take a look at the list of consortia behind the statement (located at the bottom of the statement, linked above).  Is your library, or geographic region, represented by one or more of these?  Based on the consortia I recognize, this statement has thousands of libraries behind it.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick, you shall go far”, Theodore Roosevelt’s iconic statement, applies very well to this statement.

My own addition to the current state of events is that the broad-based library community needs to be strongly involved with the record use policy, especially now that OCLC has solidly entered the ILS arena with their new WorldCat functionality.  If they are able to use access and use of the records as a way to encourage/coerce/retain customers, they likely someday will.  It makes good business sense, even if it is lousy public relations.

Further reading:

blog.ecorrado.us

Thingology

Bibliographic Wilderness

Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian

Shane Fitzgerald, a Sociology student at University College in Dublin, Ireland (not Ohio), performed an experiment in March in which he placed several fake quotes about death in the Wikipedia entry for Maurice Jarre, who had just died, including this one:

“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.”

His intention was to see how the fake, but seemingly relevant, information would be used on the internet.  He expected it to be picked up by blogs and social networks, and wanted to see how far it would go.

To his surprise, the quotes were picked up by the major media, and appeared in many publications considered far more authoritative than Wikipedia.  Fitzgerald notified many of the media outlets of the experiment, and many have issued corrections, including the Guardian.  To his additional surprise, however, many have not issued corrections.

For most library people, there is a healthy respect for Wikipedia.  It is a powerful tool, one that can save time and effort in research, and can answer many questions for which we do not require a high level of authority.  One does need to understand how far the information is to be trusted.  We see quite a few people who scorn any reliance on Wikipedia, some even in the library world (who should know better).  One would expect that journalists would have at least the same level of skepticism.

Today I present a modified version of a (hopefully properly remembered) Japanese saying.  The original, which refers to Fugu, a delicacy made from a toxin-containing pufferfish, is, to my memory:

Those who eat fugu are stupid.  But those who don’t eat fugo are also stupid.

My version of this quote is:

Those who rely on Wikipedia are foolish.  But those who don’t rely on Wikipedia are also foolish.

found through ResourceShelf

Was the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine incident an isolated case, or is it the first of several Elsevier journals that only appear to be legit?

Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division, issued a statement today that suggests that a division of the company may have created the bogus journal without the knowledge of the top levels of the company:

It has recently come to my attention that from 2000 to 2005, our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.

We are currently conducting an internal review but believe this was an isolated practice from a past period in time. It does not reflect the way we operate today. The individuals involved in the project have long since left the company. I have affirmed our business practices as they relate to what defines a journal and the proper use of disclosure language with our employees to ensure this does not happen again.

Note that this statement uses the phrase “published a series of sponsored article compilation publications”.  Some sleuthing by Jonathan Rochkind and Bill Hooker indicates that Excerpta Medica, a subsidiary of Elsevier, might have published quite a few of these sponsored-yet-unacknowledged journals.

My own poking around Excerpta Medica’s website with Google has produced an interesting Pdf titled Best practices for managing publications through a drug’s lifecycle and balancing scientific rigour and credibility with commercial goals.  The document is a summary of a presentation given at by Hester Kuipers, who at the time was Program Director, Medical Communications for Exerpta Medica.  Here is a brief quote:

Scientific publications in peer-reviewed medical journals are a valuable and credible vehicle to support a medical marketing strategy. Though part of most marketing plans, publications are not a promotional activity, but rather a medical one. The relationship between scientific publications and marketing messages can best be described as the first supporting the second rather than the second driving the first.

The presentation makes it clear that the research must have primacy over the promotion; hopefully the “series of sponsored article compilation publications” turns out to be the exception and not the rule for Exerpta Medica.  Elsevier should investigate this thoroughly and publicly acknowledge the extent of the deception; the credibility of each and every one of their peer-reviewed journals is at stake.

some links found via ResourceShelf and through postings on the Cooperative Information Resources Managemnt (CIRM) list

Peter Murray has an incredibly good selection of links about the Google Book Search Settlement on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog.  Really.  Spend some time perusing them.

Ever hear of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine?  Sounds official, as well as medically specific.  Did you know it was published by Elsevier?  That is is Peer Reviewed?  And that it published an article on the effectiveness of Fosamax?

How about that it was cooked up by Merck as a promotional tool, and that they paid Elsevier to publish it?

I worked in a pharmacy for eight years; I have seen first-hand the differences between the drug manufacturer’s publicity and the actual usefulness of medicines.  I am not too surprised that someone at Merck did this (though not as surprised as I will be if the FDA doesn’t lift a finger to make it clear that this level of deception is unacceptable), but am a little surprised that Elsevier went along (though maybe not too surprised (here, too)).

This is a horrible situation, and library organizations should be demanding that Elsevier establish the bona fides of the journals we pay for, and that our patrons use for their research.  Sure, we can probably trust that the big-name journals are what they say they are, but there are hundreds of obscure journals, with titles sounding just as official as the fake one, that we cannot know for sure who they represent, and how they conduct their research, without a great deal of research.  Elsevier needs to salvage their credibility, and soon.

found via Bibliographic Wilderness

Freecycle is a site which organizes regional groups of people and organizations around the idea of reusing items rather than throwing them away.  This idea is similar to the various discards listservs, as well as CraigsList’s free section.

When you sign up, you are actually joining a Yahoo Group in which people will post what they have for others to take and use, as well as post for wanted items.  I am surprised that this has not been tried on such a large scale before; it is a natural use for social networking.

found via Walt at Random

This post will contain just a couple of links, but there is a wealth of information on the other end of each:

• 101 Great Free Sites and Downloads You’ve Probably Never Heard Of has been put together by PC World.  I will bet you have heard of at least a few of these, and I would recommend using this as a starting point in your search for resources and applications (i.e. if you see something helpful, look for other resources that provide the same… PC World sometimes skips great resources for simply new and flashy resources).  found via ResourceShelf
• 30+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media is a post on the SitePoint blog, which is a great resource for web developers.  This list is fairly focused, but many people forget about the treasure trove that is Creative Commons when they look for pictures, sound or other media resources.