Libology Blog

The Library and the Bazaar is an essay by Greer Hauptman that discusses copyright options, libraries, and the freedom to read.

Of note is his argument that with greater control being exerted by publishers over access to content (think e-journals) it becomes important to recognize how critical access to information is to the library’s mission.  Now think about this in terms of e-books where we might be ten years from now.

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

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

In an article in today’s New York Times about magazines making their backfiles freely available online, there is a discussion about one magazine in particular:  Sports Illustrated.

Starting this Thursday, March 20th, the entire run of SI will be available through their new site, called The Vault.  Read the article to get the gist, but it sounds like they have gone the extra mile to make it easy to use, comprehensive, and powerful.  I am not terribly interested in sports, but I suspect that the Vault will be my first stop for sports-related questions (maybe second after Wikipedia, depending on the question).

from the SerialsT list

Kind of an interesting post on Open Access News over the weekend.  It seems that the license requirements for Elsevier’s electronic journals include printing a copy of the article, then scanning the article, before a library can provide that article as an interlibrary loan (ILL).

Part of my job is the scanning of articles for ILL, a task that is simultaneously interesting and monotonous.  I cannot think of any reason for their policy, except perhaps to make it inconvenient to provide their articles via ILL.  I will be watching to see if there is further developments….

Kind of an interesting post on Open Access News over the weekend.  It seems that the license requirements for Elsevier’s electronic journals include printing a copy of the article, then scanning the article, before a library can provide that article as an interlibrary loan (ILL).

Part of my job is the scanning of articles for ILL, a task that is simultaneously interesting and monotonous.  I cannot think of any reason for their policy, except perhaps to make it inconvenient to provide their articles via ILL.  I will be watching to see if there is further developments….

SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding is an attempt by libraries and publishers alike to break out of the licensing process that many in both camps find problematic.

Simply put, it is a straightforward agreement that a particular library subscribes to a given resource, and that the “shared expectations” of each side will be respected.  All this with no licensing contract.  An invoice and payment, and their presence on a registry maintained by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), serves as the legal basis for the transaction.

This reminds me of those business deals where you know that the person you are dealing with is thinking long-term, and that a handshake means more than a legal contract would with someone else.  It will be interesting to see how well this works in practice… it would be great to streamline access to information in a way that benefits everyone involved.

found via the SERIALST list

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.

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

ResourceShelf has a list of highlights of the Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices.  The highlights are pretty interesting, and the cost of the complete survey results ($80 for a paper version and a whopping $89.50 for a downloadable pdf) make the highlights that much more interesting.

It seems that Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers nomination process has hit a severe bump: every nomination that was submitted through their online form prior to November 5th has been lost.

If you nominated someone, well… you need to nominate them again.  The nomination deadline has been extended to November 28th.

An additional note (from experience): without knowing what happened with LJ’s process, I will stress that with online forms redundancy is the best policy. It is well and good to drop form information into a database, but send it to an e-mail account as well (or even two different accounts). It can be time-consuming to re-create the information, but certainly it is less of a hassle than having that information completely disappear.

previously here

discovered via Catalogablog

Nope, the list hasn’t been announced yet.  In fact, Library Journal is asking for nominations:

The editors of Library Journal need your help in identifying the emerging leaders in the library world. Our seventh annual Movers & Shakers supplement will profile 50-plus up-and-coming individuals from across the United States and Canada who are innovative, creative, and making a difference. From librarians to vendors to others who work in the library field, Movers & Shakers 2008 will celebrate the new professionals who are moving our libraries ahead.

I have been impressed with the Movers & Shakers lists over the past few years, and look forward to that supplement (which will arrive with the March 15, 2008 issue).  The people profiled are all putting themselves forward in the library world in interesting ways that benefit us all. 

The deadline has been extended to November 15th, so if you know of anyone deserving, be sure to fill out the online nomination form by then!

found on Catalogablog

The Streetwise (pdf) column in the September 2007 issue of Strategic Finance contains a summary of a report titled “The Informal Organization”.

The focus of the report is that formal management structures are not how organizations actually work.  Informal organization, self organizing groups with the goal of getting a particular task completed, is the key to success.

The organizations with the highest success will be those who recognize and encourage informal organization, and encourage feedback and communcation among and between all levels of the management structure.

The complete report is available by mail at no charge by sending an e-mail to Alexandra Corriveau ( Alexandra@sommerfield.com ).  I have ordered my copy, and I suspect it will be a beneficial read.

Oncology by OncologyStat is an experiement by Elsevier to see if they can provide access to scholarly journals for free using an ad-based revenue formula.  In addition, they offer many resources for medical staff, patients, and families.

The press release stresses that their target audience is “US oncologists, hematologists, oncology nurses, and all other healthcare professionals involved in the treatment, care and diagnosis of patients with cancer”, but when you go through the registration process it is clear that students, Librarians, and even the general public are able to avail themselves of this service.

If your library serves those who need current scholarly information for oncology, you have another good resource to add to your collection!

found on Open Access News

A Quick Look of a Few Free Science Search Tools is a post on ResourceShelf (if you only have time to follow two blogs, they should be the other one!) that provides a good starting point for finding free and/or open access science resouces on the web.

An interesting, but non-conclusive, study has found that open access journals are ten times less likely to cease publication than their traditional counterparts.  Might this become a reason for journals to adopt open access - namely to broaden readership and improve their chances of survival?

from Open Access News

BibMe is a great site for locating and generating bibliographic citations in MLA, APA and Chicago styles, which you can then download to your computer, or store on their server (if you sign up for a free account).

In their Help section, they provide detail as to where they get the bibligraphic information to generate the citations:

from BiblioTech Web

Open Medicine is a new journal from Canada which is striving to be an online, open access alternative to the likes of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). 

There have been many new open access journals in the past couple of years (see the Directory of Open Access Journals for an idea of what is available), but this is one we should keep an eye on, because JAMA and NEJM are such high profile publications.

from Open Access News  

On Coyle’s InFormation, a blog written by the ever-interesting Karen Coyle, there is a discussion about the transcripts of a Section 108 Study Group meeting hosted by the Library of Congress on the topic of copyright, libraries and digitization.  These meetings are happening because Section 108 was written to create guidelines for photocopying, and digitization/internet issues aren’t covered in any clear way. 

Sounds a bit dry?  Actually, it isn’t.  Karen does an excellent job of selecting key passages that reflect the lines being drawn in the debate over what should, and should not, be allowed in the realm of library research and inter-library loan(ILL).  If you care about ILL services, database access, and access to information, you really should read her blog entry.