Libology Blog

In an example of how much open access may change scholarship, it was announced the Dead Sea Scrolls will be scanned in high resolution and made available online and open access.

As more primary sources are made available for study, scholarship will become more democratic.  This will have both positive and negative aspects, but as with the greater availability of scientific studies, the primary result will be beneficial.

found via Open Access News

Mike Dunford writing in of The Questionable Authority has written a post that compares the business model and profits of journal publishers with oil companies.  One figure that he arrives at is shocking, to say the least, but also illustrative of the current journal market:

Gas prices are going up. You’ve been combining trips, cutting your milage as much as you can, driving a more efficient vehicle, and your fuel costs are still going up. You drive home from work, stopping along the way to put $30+ dollars worth of gas into the 10 gallon tank in your Prius. You sit on the sofa, turn on the news, and hear that Exxon-Mobil just reported quarterly profits of about $1,500 per second. The price of something that you need to buy is going through the roof, it’s making things inconvenient for you, and the people who sell it are making money faster than the mint can print it. How happy are you?

If you want to understand the anger that the major publishing houses are generating, that’s a good place to start.

Publishers don’t make money at anything close to the clip that Big Oil does, but they’re not doing badly. Elsevier is probably the biggest fish, and they come in at a respectable $1,700 per minute. That’s 60 times less than Exxon-Mobil, but it’s still a nice chunk of change.

He goes on to discuss the relationships between authors and publishers, and the reaction to the open access movement.  All in all, this is a good essay that can provide some perspective for those outside of the library and publishing worlds.

found via Open Access News

Peter Suber at Open Access News has an excellent post on the language being used when discussing copyright infringement of textbooks. I personally prefer what I have in the title of this post; results may vary.

We have been through this with digital music. Music publishers and distributers were all up in arms about downloading music, but now they have come to see that the paradigm is shifting and what was needed was a change in their approach. People will follow the rules, generally, as long as those rules make sense to them.

Watch for the misuse of language on both sides of the argument, and remember that the movement in publishing is towards open access and digital downloading. The sooner everyone understands this and adapts, the sooner people will get what they want/need at a fair price, and publishers will make a fair profit.

One area of scholarly research that I enjoy following is Therapeutic Massage.  Having taken an introductory class taught by an excellent instructor, as well as enjoying regular sessions, I have found the benefits to be many.

So it is a pleasure to see an overlap between my massage interest and libraries with the forthcoming introduction of the International Journal of Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork : Research, Education, & Practice by the Massage Therapy Foundation.

I used to keep up with a couple of the journals in this field, but since changing jobs have not had access to them.  The added bonus of this journal’s Open Access format will let me keep up with new ideas and studies via the web.

found via Open Access News

Think of Infochimps.org as not only a wikipedia of data sets, but as potentially the greatest data mash-up tool yet.

Imagine having loads of census, weather, sports, and other statistical data available in one big database.  Then standardize the fields so that you can interconnect the data sets with each other.  From the Infochimps site:

“A central, community-driven repository solves these problems and presents amazing possibilities. Once we interconnect the datasets along concepts they share, instead of 100,000 datasets, there’s just one. Study the physics of baseball by comparing the hourly weather during every single baseball game to game outcomes. Uncover political campaign irregularities by comparing neighborhood per-capita income, historical voter trends, and public campaign finance records. Plan real-estate decisions based on what news-and-other-media keywords rank highly in each area.”

Still don’t see the possibilities?  Browse through the datasets that are already loaded.  Then check out what is coming in the near future.  This will likely be the first place we will want to go for statistical information, as long as it is fast and easy to extract what we need.  I am looking forward to seeing what they (or some other enterprising web designers) come up with to work with data on the web.

(does this sound vaguely familiar?  you might be thinking of Freebase.com, previously discussed here)

found via Open Access News

A great, thought-provoking post on the OpenStudents blog : Open Access meets Undergrad Research… Please?

If I were to be researching a paper on a topic that has a strong open access presence (and the easiest way to see these topics is to check out the main page of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), open access would be my first choice for articles.  Not only is there no hassle in accessing them (you only need a live web connection), but you can be sure that your paper’s readers would have the same, easy access.

Making open access a part of the research process, whether it is coming from an instructor, library reference, or peer, will serve to strengthen people’s research and to add a large group of resources to those we already offer.

found via Open Access News

There are many ebook web sites; there are many free ebook sites, even. Planet eBook is special, and you should take a look for yourself and see what I mean.

They have been around only a few months, their offerings are few (just under 40 books, by my quick count), and the books are all available on other sites, such as Gutenberg (now the second place I will look for books of this type).

What makes them special? They offer the books in a very clean, pdf format (that even allows for cutting-and-pasting of the text!) while emphasizing their openness for people to access, use, or distribute. The only restriction is that one cannot sell them.

I think that it would be an easy and fruitful project for libraries to add these links to their records as they become available. A better balance of quality and access is unlikely in the near future, in my opinion.

I was impressed by the quality of the work that has gone into the creation of this site, and hope to see it grow, book by book, into the online core of any quality classic collection.

found via Open Access News

Wired.com has a great set of photographs detailing the process that goes into scanning books for the Internet Archive’s text  project.

The process isn’t what I envisioned… I expected something that would look like it came from the radiology department of your local hospital rather than that relatively normal Canon EOS SLR digital cameras.  Of course, to gain a bit of perspective, one needs to see just how upscale these cameras are

• Canon EOS 1D
• Canon EOS 5D

found via HangingTogether.org

Open Bibliographic Data : The State of Play is a post by Rufus Pollock at the Open Knowledge Foundation which examines a variety of sources for cataloging and database information.  He makes the observation, which I think is on target, that when it comes to bibliographic data

You might even think, given the public-spiritedness of librarians, that this is the kind of area where not only could it be openly available but it would be openly available….

There is a movement out there working to create an open repository.  It would make everyone’s job easier, especially if this repository could incorporate some type of authority checking by the users.  Imagine leveraging the same type of error checking that Wikipedia uses, but on our catalog information.

One can dream…

found via Open Access News

In a long interview on the state of the semantic web, Tim Berners-Lee (if you don’t recognize the name, you should really read this) briefly discussed DataPortability, the ability to move information freely and easily from one site to another:

“So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, ‘Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.’ Or, ‘You should all know who my colleagues are. I shouldn’t have to tell you again.’”

“So, the users are saying, ‘Give me my data back. That’s my data.’ That was one of the cries originally behind XML, it was a desktop application. Don’t store it in a format which I can’t reuse. So, now it’s, ‘Give it to me using the idea of standards. If you do that, then I can do things with it.’” (around 42 minutes into the interview)

Libraries are still playing catch-up in the social data area. We are starting to implement tagging and book recommendations, but we are not all that far along with implementing things. What this quote reminds me is that we should also be keeping an eye towards making it easy to export data out of our systems. Easy to use formats (like xml) and open standards and interfaces should become the norm for libraries.

This isn’t suggesting that we open all our data… it is not our place to provide patron reading or personal information. We shouldn’t make it difficult for patrons to do that themselves, if they so choose (although I feel we should make an effort to let them know the potential negative effects of placing information on the web).

We should, however, be using that data to generate social links between books (people who checked out “A” also tended to check out “B”, with A and B being books, authors, videos, etc.) and make it easy to access the patterns that result from any informational web site use.

Just something to keep in mind when we select our online tools and software…

interview found via TechCrunch

Free-Reading is “an ‘open-source’ instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading.” Aimed at Kindergarten/First Grade learners, it is a collaborative means to establish an education program that combines the strengths of those who work on the project, and makes it available to teachers and organizations via a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Oh, and the State of Florida just added this program to their list of approved textbooks. Not only can they save a significant amount of funds that would otherwise be spent on texts, the class materials will be current and likely to be updated by a wide variety of professional educators.

found via Open Access News

Review : Directory of Open Access Journals (Pdf), by Heather Morrison is a very good introduction to what is becoming a top-tier collection of journals.

Although some of the statistics are a bit dated (due to a strength of the DOAJ - they are adding journals fairly rapidly, and are currently past the 3,000 mark) the review hits the mark, making a great case for libraries to connect their patrons with this excellent resource.

from ResourceShelf

If you work at an academic library, especially a school which emphasizes publication, then the issue of Institutional Repositories is critical to understand.

Even if you don’t fit the above, these repositories, combined with Open Access, will strongly effect librarianship, and the way your library accesses resources.

An excellent introduction to IRs can be found in Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite (Pdf), by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (found via Resource Shelf)

Also worth reading is Today’s Digital Information Landscape by Eric Lease Morgan (mentioned here previously), which has a section on institutional repositories.

I have encountered a few interesting items relating to online, full-text books during the past few days, and thought they would make a good snapshot of where things stand at this time:

• Google Book Search : the Good, the Bad & the Ugly is an article in the current issue of Campus Technology which gives a great, non-technical overview of what the project is doing, and where it might be going. (found via LISNews )
• Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale (Pdf) is the text of Luc Vincent’s keynote at the ICDAR 2007 conference. Don’t read it simply because he heads Googles Optical Character Recognition (OCR) team - read it because it is fascinating and informative! (posted to NGC4lib by Owen Stephens)
• Finally, there is The Top Inventions of 2008 by Michael Hart (inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg). This isn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill predictions article. This looks at technology that is just around the corner (USB 3.0, Flash memory capacity, and the number of OCR scanned books) and realizes that we will soon be able to carry around more full-text books on a USB flash drive than exist in most libraries. Think about how that possibility will change our profession. (found via Open Access News )

Just a couple of sites that feature calendars, since many of us will want/need new ones this week:

TimeAndDate.com features resources involving, you guessed it, times and dates. Check out their customized calendar generator at the top of the right column. This is a sample result that can be handy in many situations.

And, as mentioned last September, you may like the 2008 Open Access Calendar (Pdf) from Alma Swan of Key Perspectives.

Issue 1 of the Code4Lib Journal is now available!

The journal is an open-access journal dealing with, well, the more techie aspects of libraries. Even if you aren’t into systems and web coding, you should still look this over. The articles give a snapshot of creative technical solutions for libraries, and include:

• Beyond OPAC 2.0, an overview of CatalogWS, an application programming interface (API) for library catalogs. The idea behind the software is to create a universal way to access library catalog information across different Integrated Library Systems (ILS).
• Book Review : The Success of Open Source, by Steven Weber, which is actually a fantastic brief overview of what Open Source is, from a library perspective.
• 700 Dollars and a Dream, which is a column about a small library that installed and implemented Koha, an open-source Integrated Library System (ILS).

Even if you aren’t into the tech aspects of libraries, check out this journal. It never hurts to look into the leading edge of the profession, and you might encounter a new solution for your own library!

found nearly simultaneously via Catalogablog and a Web4Lib list posting by Tom Keays

Read this post on Thingology, the blog for LibraryThing, then check out the OpenBibliographicData petition on the Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki. If you agree with the petition, I urge you to create an account and add your name to the list.

How important do I think this is? I was online only to get a phone number to call in to work, and checked my overnight e-mail messages. I decided that it needed to be blogged, and that it couldn’t wait (especially since I seem to have misplaced the original e-mail - my apologies to the person not getting credit for passing this information along).

MIT has expanded their OpenCourseWare initiative to include science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) for high school students.  Dubbed Highlights for High School (a name that, for me at least, evokes Highlights magazine), their stated purpose is to “inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists”.

This sounds like it will be a great repository for college level students to review this material, as well as a resource for the general public.  Keep this site in mind for future use…

from Open Access News

Three items have caught my eye this past week, and they all point in the same direction, even though they each are about something fairly specific:

1. First was an article about a bill working its way through the Ohio General Assembly. If passed as is, it would mandate that all state schools must provide via. their libraries two copies of every textbook used in their classes. The cost, in todays textbook market, would start in the hundreds of thousands. (received via the OhioLink-gen listserv)
2. Next was an article in ars technica about the federal education bill that would require colleges and universities to police their networks in order to prevent file sharing. (I wonder if universities will be able to allow legal file sharing at the same time? Some don’t, apparently.) The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities provide an alternate means of acquiring copyrighted files… meaning that they would need to partner with music subscription services. (found on The Patry Copyright blog )
3. Last was an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education detailing a project that works to provide textbooks to people in developing countries. These include donated used texts, but the focus is increasingly moving towards free and open textbooks available online. (found on Open Access News )

Put these together and what do you get? An incredible amount of pressure, financially and legally, placed on educational institutions to move towards open access. If a significant number of texts in use on a campus are available as open access, the issue of providing them becomes more a matter of format (print vs. screen) than of anything else. Look at the costs involved for policing and providing copyrighted materials. Open texts, as well as other open access media, will look very attractive to those who have to implement these laws (assuming they pass).

Think of squeezing a watermelon seed between two fingers… at some point it will move in a particular direction, and very quickly. Be prepared….

OpenStreetMap is a U.K.-based project that fulfills a great need:  an open, collaborative mapping project.  Ever find an error in MapQuest, Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps?  Can’t do much about it, can you?  OpenStreetMap will be able to be updated and corrected by their user base, and will be available for free, as in both beer and speech.  Think of it in terms of Wikipedia, which also illustrates the possibilities for errors and abuse, as well.

They have just jump-started their U.S. mapping effort with mapping information from the U.S. Census Bureau.  They have a long way to go, but with some local effort from people across the country, they could be a serious contender for our mapping needs.

Check out your local area to see what they have, and what they still need for their maps.

found on Linux.com