'Research Methods in Information' chapters 3 & 4

Ok, yeah, I'm a little behind in writing up my notes. But I have continued to read so here are my notes on chapters three through six.

Chapter three is called 'Defining the research'. Here she gives the reader a 'pre-operational structure' of research with descriptions of each part of the structure as well as continuing to use a particular case as an example. Emphasis is giving to the problems inherent in trying to 'prove' a hypothesis. There is a really good, concise, clearly written section on defining variables. Finally, she clarifies the distinction between the goals and the aims of the research project.

In chapter four she describes the usefulness of a written research proposal no matter what the contact of the research project. I particularly enjoy (and, I confess, agree with) the emphasis that she places on putting the responsibility for the research project squarely on the researcher. In this chapter, she does so in the context of the care that the researcher should take in complying with all requirements applicable to writing the research proposal.

Some of my favorite quotes from this chapter are:

"Whatever choices you make you will need to demonstrate that you understand the nature of the choices you have made." (p.54) Further down the page, she alludes to this again in the context of qualitative data analysis.

"You are opening a can of worms [in undertaking a research project] as soon as you begin to ask questions, do not expect to find all of the answers." (p.56)

NASIG 2007: final thoughts

I attended two other sessions that I either arrived late for or was focused on other things while attending.

The first was Bob Schufreider's session on "Making sense of your usage statistics" which I'm sorry I didn't arrive on time for because I am very interested in making better use of our usage statistics. Bob works for MPS Technologies who makes the ScholarlyStats product that we've just trialed.

The second was the final key note speaker, Daniel Chudnov from the Library of Congress. His basic theme was the need for lowering barriers between libraries and everything else on the web. He points out that every major media outlet is using dynamic service links which cries out for OpenURL, they’re doing it and we (libraries)’re not.


I'm really disappointed not to be able to access all of the conference handouts. For the first time this year, NASIG put program handouts on the web using Moodle which is very exciting for me since I tend to take notes on my laptop in sessions anyway and its lovely to have a copy of the speaker's materials at the tip of my fingers. But this was obviously not meant to be since, try as I will, I can't get the site to either recongize me or send me the email that contains directions for resetting the password they gave me.

However that's the ONLY negative note about this year's conference. The venue was lovely and convenient; the programs were timely and interesting and offered great variety. And the attendees were just as pleasant as always.

NASIG 2007: Education trifecta: win attention, place knowledge, show understanding

This session was presented by Virginia Taffurelli, Betsy Redmond, Steve Black. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to introduce them and thus had the opportunity to talk a bit with Steve Black, whom I hadn't met before, about the lack of attention to serials and electronic resources in library school curriculum. He teaches one of very few courses dedicated to this topic (among ALA accredited LIS programs in North America).

Virginia and Betsy presented some of the basics of developing and delivering course content. Virginia spent most of her time describing the use of course delivery software (WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle), and Betsy focused on practical tips for delivering a CE course. Their focus was a CE course in fundamentals of acquisitions for ALTCS.

Steve reviewed the syllabus for his course (which he made available to us in print). He talked about his reasons for writing his own textbook; he had contacted Nisonger to ask if he was going to revise his 1998 text and Nisonger had said no. It was published in November 2006. Prior to that he had used a copy of the manuscript in classes for two years and solicited feedback from the students which he found very useful.

He covered the objectives for the course which include a small module on cataloging a serial (they catalog on paper in class then as homework they compare what they’ve done to a MARC record online).

I really enjoyed this presentation and hope that someone follows up next year to answer some of my remaining questions: why is LIS education seemingly ignoring serials and e-resources management? what is covered in other serials courses (or modules within courses)?

NASIG 2007: How does digitization affect scholarship?

This was probably the best session I attended.

Ithaka, http://ithaka.org/research, is an organization that studies the advance of technology and how it can/should be managed. Their mission is to help academic institutions to adapt to and use technology.

The presented, Roger Schonfeld, started by asking the audience what characteristics a scholarly journal should have (format, aggregated?, open access?, indexed where?, commercial or non-profit?, sustainability) in order to develop a framework for analyzing the affects of digitization.

Two side markets = a system comprised of at least two user groups who need each other which is characterized by a platform (or intermediary) that balances the interests of both groups (sides of the market). He used the credit card network as an example where the merchants and the card holders are the two groups and the card companies are the platform or intermediary. The concept of two-sided markets is the framework that Ithaka used to examine their question about the affect of digitization on scholarship.

The two sides of the scholarly journal are readers and authors. One of the motivations that operates between the two groups is quality (high quality authors attracts high quality readers and high quality readers attract high quality authors). This characteristic is static in relation to the format in which the journal is published (the exchange mechanism = format = platform that joins the two groups).

In the traditional pricing model, the reader side involves subscription fees and on the author side are pages charges and advertising fees. The question is how are/should they be distributed?

Demand side
What are the sources of value of a journal on the (librarian) side? (audience participation)
- research/curricular support
- impact factor
- use
- ARL ranking
- Preservation of the record of scholarship
- Accreditation
- Platform stability
- Areas of collection emphasis
- Peer review
What are the sources of value of a journal on the reader side?
- findable
- usefulness and credibility of content
- currency
- author quality
- accessibility
- relative importance to field
- do they publish in it?
- Peer review
- Indexing
- Impact factor (as a proxy for quality)
Supply side
What are the sources of value of a journal from the advertiser’s perspective?
- number of subscriptions
- quality of reader
- reader’s interest in products
- cost
- findability
What are the souces of value of a journal from the author’s perspective
- reputation with colleagues
- how widely read / cited
- circulation
- speed of publication
- peer review
- impact factor
- cost to submit
- marketing and promotion

Findings from a survey of 4100 faculty members about the characteristics important to authors:
The most important characteristic was circulation (80% of participants sad that this characteristic was very important), no cost to publish (65%), preservation is assured (60%), highly selective (50%), accessible in developing world (45%), available for free (35%).
- authors submit to journals that can maximize the impact of their work on their field
- some disciplinary differences in the above data
- how has the impact of a journal changed in recent years? (digitization, more widely accessible)

Their research question is how does digitization effect the system of scholarly communication?

They’ve collected data (cited by and citing characteristics of 100 journals in each of three disciplines) and are in the process of data analysis which should be published/available in the late summer or early fall. They used regression analysis (Poisson process).

Results:
- the higher the frequency of citation, the lower the number of citations in that article (graph).
- digitizeding the journal-title years has increased inbound citation by between 7 and 17% (confidence interval)
- the effect grows steadily as the materials are available online longer
- different sources of online availability (channels) offer different effects; e.g. 3-15% increase occurs when there is one channel and 8-18% increase occurs when there are a large number of channels through which a journal is available
- questions raised: Are some channels more effective than others? Do some channels yield more impact? Is wide availability the key?
Results when the data are restricted to 1995-2005 in order to look at effects of/on born digital journals
- there is a strong and significant effect from digitization (but more analysis is needed)
- the publisher web site is not always the optimal distribution mechanism to increase citations
- longer embargos decrease the ability of a give channel to increase citations
- more questions: disciplinary variation? Effects of source item year of publication?


Their preliminary conclusion is that digitization does have a storng and significant effect on scholars’ ability to find and cite revelant reference give an advantage to
He’s obviously passionate about his topic and a very natural speaker which makes him very engaging. This is a fairly sophisticated research project and he did a very good job of explaining it in terms that were pertinent and understandable to librarians; partly because of the really good questions that the audience asked. Probably this will be my favorite session. It would be interesting to see what else Roger and his colleagues have done.

NASIG 2007: Hurry up please. It’s time – State of Emergency … aka The Paranoia Presentation

A library pundit is the best way I can describe Karen Schneider. She is one of those people who are blessed with a quick, sarcastic wit and a well developed intellect to support it. I enjoyed her presentation very much although I’m not entirely sure that I agree with all of her ideas. Please also bear in mind that this was the first session of the second day of the conference and, in addition to not being quite awake yet, I was fretting about the three meetings I had to chair during the rest of the day.

• From the perspective of a writer/essayist, what she calls the “production process of the serials ecology” includes: reflection, research, revision, work shopping, submission, revision, layout and printing.
• Relevant features of the ecology include: a nominal income to editor, author’s compensation is a year’s subscription to the publication but also provides the chance for her to write about a topic that is important to her.
• Memory work: history is built from artifacts as opposed to the memories of the people who lived it. She proposes that librarians work is memory work which gives it a curatorial aspect.
• She quoted Andrew Abbott from his book The System of Professions (which I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it) who says that a profession has (or should have) “complete, legally established control” over its domain. This, she maintains, is the basis of what she calls the ‘state of emergency’ in libraries since our control of collections and collection building (if, indeed, we ever had it) is being eroded or encroached upon by entities outside the profession.
• She maintains that particularly in the area of serials, we’re particularly susceptible to this. For example the publishers with whom we’re made “big deals.”
• Some of the concerns that she’s currently mulling are
o Why are we (libraries) allowing Google to create a proprietary collection of the world’s books? (apparently Google’s contracts with both the University of California and the University of Michigan include a clause that keeps the institutions from delivering the content that they’ve allowed Google to digitize to anyone other than Google, something I didn’t know). Same with Microsoft’s book project. AND Google search doesn’t reach the Microsoft book “silo” and vice versa, you can’t access content in Google books using any other search engine. I find this incredibly worrisome. The open content alliance is an non-proprietary version of the Google book search.
o Why do we (libraries) need to pay an organization an annual fee to give us temporary access on a remote server to the content that we already own? I’d say because our users are requiring us to.
o Why does Time-Warner have to be so greedy? For example, the recent postal rate increase impacts small presses to a much larger extent than it does publishers like Time-Warner who nas negotiated a lower postal rate. This is damaging to the serials ecology.
• Removing information from the public record is a concern of hers that she illustratd with the closing of the EPA libraries which she sees as a part of a larger movement of information being lost from the public/historical record. LOCKSS/CLOCKSS is a library grown innovation designed to protect the interests of librarianship and is . There is no license to create a “LOCKSS box”, it’s free, open-source software.
• Lessons:
o The right path is not always instinctive, obvious, or well marked
o ignore the dazzle and read the fine print
o bring our values (as librarians) to the table
o possession IS the law

• Interesting thought: people slam Disney over the 2003 copyright ruling but don’t blink an eye at apple who distributes a proprietary sound format for ipods. What makes Apple different from Disney?

ALA 2007 schedule

After a lot of time examining maps and program details, I think I've finally nailed dow my ALA schedule. This is not as easy as it sounds since often there are three or four interesting sessions going on at once and location and distance between venues must be factored in as must time to visit with vendors in the exhibit hall AND at least a little sightseeing. Anyhow, here it is...

Saturday, June 23
8 - 10 am -- Informing the future of MARC: and empirical approach
(This one's being given by a library school prof of mine, Bill Moen)
10:30 - 12 noon -- Research: A user experience
12 - 1 pm -- Ebsco Acadmic Library Luncheon
3:30 - 3 pm -- Information seeking behavior from childhood through college
4 - 6 pm -- either The ALCTS electronic resources pricing discussion group or Utilizing learning theory in online environments depending on where the latter one takes place
7 - ? -- dinner

Sunday, June 24
7:30 - 8:30 am -- Alexander Street Press breakfast
9 - 10:30 -- Exhibits
10:30 - 12 noon -- New minds, new approaches: Juried papers by LIS students
11:30 - 1 pm -- CSA / RefWorks Lunch 'n learn
1:30 - 3:30 -- Eye to I: Visual literacy meets information literacy
3:30 - 5:30 -- National Gallery
6:30 - 8:30 -- Ex Libris customer reception

Monday, June 25
8 - 10 am -- The furture of information retrieval
10:30 - 12 noon -- Four star research
11:30 - 1 pm -- ProQuest luncheon
1:30 - 3 pm -- Fresh approaches in service delivery: linkings users and services in creative ways
3 - 5 pm -- Exhibits
7 - ? -- dinner

As usual, I'll try to post my thoughts on the sessions I attend, but also as usual, the timing will depend on the availability of internet access and electricity!

"Research Methods in Information", chapter 2

Chapter 2 is all about reviewing the literature and contains a wealth of useful tips for strategically conducting a literature review no matter what level of review one needs to accomplish. The structure of this chapter (and perhaps the whole book, we'll see) is marvelously clear. She sets out the steps/skills/stages (information seeking and retrieval, evaluation, critical analysis, synthesis) and explains the process(es) for each one including some really practical ideas for organizing them.

One of the things I'm finding most exciting and at the same time frustrating about the book so far is the suggested further reading lists at the end of each chapter. Exciting because they contain more information about topics I'm interested in and frustrating because I'll never have time to read them all.

I've been thinking about this last a bit recently because I've been feeling as if I need to find a workable (for me) way of organizing what I read (as well as what I need/want to read) and have even begun working on creating an Access database as a way to accomplish it. One of the things I'd like to be able to do is trace the network of relationships between documents (this one cited that one, etc.), partly because I think it would be interesting to see and partly because I think it might help me to organize the ideas (which already are too many to keep in my head).

"Research Methods in Information" chapter 1

This chapter introduces the reader to three major research paradigms: positivism, postpositivism, and interpretivism. It contains a brief history of each as well as an overview of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies that compares and contrasts the characteristics of each, particularly the criteria upon which judgments of quality are made.

Thoughts on this chapter:
It is thick with terminology with which inexperienced researchers and students may not be familiar but that is somewhat offset by their inclusion in the glossary.

I find myself thinking of it as a textbook for a research methods class. From that perspective, it seems useful.

I like the way she qualifies her brief overviews with repeated suggestions that the interested researcher read further on each topic...and provides recommendations on where to start such reading.

Here's my favorite quote from chapter 1: "Whichever paradigm you associate your research with, whichever methodological approach you take, demonstrating the value of your investigation is essential. This applies to practitioner research and student research: we all want our findings to be believed and are responsible for ensuring that they can be believed." (page 18)

However, I also like this one: (on establishing objectivity in quantitative research: "Findings are a result of the research investigation, not a result of the researcher's interpretation of those findings." (page 22)

"Research Methods in Information"

My latest book to review for LJ is called "Research Methods in Information" by Dr. Alison Jane Pickard and I'm very excited about it. It's a handbook/textbook for those of us working in the information professions which, of course, is right up my alley. So I'm going to try something new here. I'm going to post my notes as I'm reading, more to keep myself organized than for any other reason but also on the off chance that there's anyone out there who shares my interest in research methods who might have a comment or insight that I don't have. Of course, I'll also post a link to the review when it's published.

So, in her introduction, Dr. Pickard lays out the importance of research in the fields of information studies, communications, records management, knowledge management and the related disciplines: (1) increasing the body of knowledge that makes up those professional fields, (2) the need for research skills in professionals in those fields, "Knowledge and experience of research is a fundamental part of what makes the 'information professional' ", (3) to allow practitioners to continue to grow in their professions as well as to better accomplish their tasks (e.g. benchmarking, assessment, strategic planning, and so on).

Next she describes the framework on which the organization of the book rests which she describes as the research hierarchy which moves from the research paradigm on which methodology is based and, in turn, on which the selection of a research method is based, and, in turn, on which selection of the research technique and instrument are based.

The research paradigm is the world view or underlying assumptions about the world that the researcher starts with. The methodology which is either qualitative or quantitative and is distinguished from the research method which is the strategy or approach to the problem taken by the researcher. The technique is an approach to data collection that is dictated by the research question. And the research instrument is the unique operationalization of the selected technique.

Now, rereading what I've written, I can already make two statements. First, I'm going to try NOT to simply summarize the book here. Rather I'm going to try to limit myself to comments about ideas that jump out at me as being noteworthy in some way. And second, I'm already engaged by and in total agreement with the idea that research is not just the realm of scholars who wish to contribute to a body of knowledge but rather research is accessible and achievable and useful, perhaps even necessary, for professionals in the information professions.

Too good not to share

She gave a key note speach at NASIG last week and, after reading her blog for a couple of days, I am rapidly becoming a fan: http://freerangelibrarian.com/.

NASIG 2007: Betting a strong hand in the game of electronic resources management

Paoshan Yue and Liz Burnette
Paoshan and Liz presented two versions of electronic resources workflow in their libraries. Paoshan described the evolution of e-resources workflow at the University of Nevada Reno Libraries and Liz presented a general model for building an e-resources workflow. This presentation was a little weak, lacking in content; the content was a bit too general. I would have liked more specifics about the actual workflows in their two libraries. However, it did get me to thinking that one of the ideas that I’ve been applying to web site design would apply equally in this situation. Many of us are trying to fit e-resources into our existing print serials workflows and that’s not something that we have (or maybe even should) be doing. The session got me to thinking about what other ways we might organize our e-resources work and other angles from which to approach that question.

See http://www2.library.unr.edu/serials/ERMworkflow.pdf for an example of
UNR's current workflow.

NASIG 2007: Alternatives to licensing of e-resources

Selden Lamoureaux & Zach Rolnik

This session was everything I expected it to be. I KNEW someone was working on this, I just didn’t know who. Now I know. It’s a NISO working group called SERU (Shared E-Resources Understanding) and they seek to find ways for libraries and publishers to come to agreement about the purchase of e-resources without the need for a contract or license.

Their argument goes like this: contracts are a barrier to access. They force both libraries and publishers to expend staff time and effort to negotiate licenses for e-journals and e-resources subscriptions. End-users suffer from the delays in access to information as a result of the need to negotiate licenses and libraries, especially smaller libraries, are put at a financial disadvantage.

Efforts are being made to reduce these costs by creating a global license, including SERU. The SERU Working Group has found a fair amount of consensus on many of the issues to be included and have a number of good reasons to believe that it might be a viable alternative.

It’s not a standard license, click-through license, or a replacement for ALL licenses. Instead, it calls for libraries and publishers to agree to accept copyright as the governing law over the provision and use of information services and uses the purchase order to describe the terms of the sale.

ALPSP and SSP both support SERU as do ARL and SPARC.

For more info and to register as a user at www.NISO.org/committees/SERU (note that registration is not open yet but will be soon).

NASIG 2007: Electronic resources workflow management

Paoshan Yue from the University of Nevada, Reno and Liz Burnette from North Carolina State University Libraries presented two models of managing electronic resources workflow and integrating it into existing libary workflow. Paoshan focused on technical integration of e-resources into serials workflow by presenting the evolution of UNR's procedures for making e-resources available from aquisitions to cataloging to accessibility. Their final (well, at least in use at present) workflow is presented at http://www2.library.unr.edu/serials/ERMworkflow.pdf.

Liz presented the staffing side of integrating e-resources into serials workflow. She emphasized the need to begin by examining existing procedures and the procedures required for e-resources processing before trying to integrate the two. She also explained an unexpected advantage of the process that they discovered at NCSU: the decrease in the occurence of inevitable slowed production when a staff member is away from the library or leaved altogether that resulted from cross-training several staff members to complete each task or step in the work flow.

This got me thinking about how we have really just squished e-resources and e-journals into our existing processed at TAMUCC and sparked a desire in me to go back and take a look at what we're doing and why. I was reminded of what I've learned about a point that was made about library web sites. That we tend to structure them in a manner similar to the organization of the physical library and that really doesn't need to be the case. Similarly, I think e-resources workflow does not necessarily need to be patterned on print serials workflow.

NASIG 2007: "What's the different about the social sciences?"

Leo Walford from Sage Publications presented this session in which he compared the characteristics of social science journals (and social science and scientists) and science, technology, and medical (STM) journals. Some of the points he made were:
- Social science journals are seen as smaller, less technologically demanding, and not published by large STM publishers. They are, therefore less expensive.
- How relevant is pricing in the world of big deals? While subscription prices increased between 1988 and 2005, the average price per page actually dropped by about 25% as a result of 'big deals'.
- Scocial scientists are less aware of the opportunities afforded by open access that are STM scholars but share a trend toward fewer visits to the physical library with them.
- (this is the point I found most interesting) Since the social sciences receive dramatically less grant funding compared to STM, when they apply the standard 1 to 2% of grant funds to paying for open access to their research publications they don't end up with enough to support the author pays model of open access that is becoming prevalent in STM publishing.
- In addition, social science journals have a longer shelf-life (meaning they are useful/cited for a longer period of time in general than STM journals), which leads publishers to impose longer embargos on their content, which makes the failure of the author pays model of open access that much more of a problem.

NASIG 2007 conference: opening session

I'm attending the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) meeting this week in Louisville, KY. In addition to fulfilling a number of organizational duties (committee work, etc.), I'll be attending a number of workshops and presentation which I'll be reporting on here.

This morning the first session waa an all-conference session at which which Bob Stein spoke about "The Evolution of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era". He has some very interesting (and controversial I think, at least among librarians) ideas. His main point was that what have existed as marginal notes in paper books for hundreds of years are actually converstations between the author and the reader (as well as between readers) that are very much like comments on a blog or the open peer review that some pre-publications go through.

An odd conversion of events

I finished reading a book this weekend about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It's one I'm reviewing for Library Journal so when the review is published I'll try to remember to add the link to it. In the meantime thought, what really stuns me about it is the way individuals, serving their own purposes for the most part, just happen to spur events that impact a whole nation and which impacts reverbrate for years.

The Scopes Monkey Trial happened because the town fathers in a small Tennessee town sought to boost the town's economy. At the time, it was against state law to teach Dawinian theory of evolution in public schools. By encouraging a young high school teacher named John Scopes to allow himself to be indicted for breaking this law by teaching evolution in the local highschool. The ACLU leapt to defend him and thus began one of the most widely followed trials of the early 20th century.

IUG 2007 – Annual Serials Renewals Made Easy

Jane Theissen of Fontbonne University (yeah, THAT Fontbonne!) made this presentation.

Jane walked us through the steps she takes to involve faculty in the annual serials renewal process. They also have Ebsco Subscription Services as their subscription agent. She creates a review file of current subscriptions in Millennium and then adds usage data and current price to it in a spreadsheet. Then she estimates price increases using Ebsco’s Historical Price Analysis Report. The spreadsheet is sorted by fund code (academic department) and distributed to each academic department for changes, approval, etc.

Fontbonne has about 300 subscriptions and this is a fairly simplistic formula but I think that it could be a place to start a comprehensive review. Also, they do this during the spring semester (before receiving the official renewal list from Ebsco.

She noted that one disadvantage of her current process is that although the changes they recommend are made in May, they don’t take effect until the following January (when most journals begin new volumes and thus new subscriptions).

In response to a question from the audience, she told us that they don’t have any individual subscriptions for e-journals only, they receive all of their individual subscriptions in print (unless they are included in an electronic aggregation).

Another audience member mentioned that he had learned from Ebsco that sometimes they actually end a library’s subscription and begin a new one and that results in the library receiving duplicate issues.

IUG 2007 – Holdings Conversion using Global Update

Steve Shadle and Sion Romaine of the University of Washington Libraries made this presentation.

Their project involved taking their free text holdings statements and converting them to MARC21 For Holdings formats in the 853 and 863 fields in order to make them transmittable to OCLC. They anticipate that this will streamline ILL processing and improve user finding journals. In the first phase of the project they converted approximately 169,000 records. They added 007 and 008 fields, converted call number tags, and converted holdings statements tags.

They presented planning and preparation steps. Preparations included normalizing and correcting existing data by identifying errors and typos, deleting extra spaces, etc. and identifying how holdings are expressed currently and whether they need to be standardized. Using regular expressions in the matches function in Create Lists would be useful for accomplishing this.

There are number of things you can do and cannot do with Global Update, specifically, you cannot make changes using regular expressions.

Using the example of converting the call number fields, Steve provided tips for practice. The key is to find the pattern in the existing data and then using that pattern, create an algorithm that will achieve the desired change. In their local project, they converted call number fields (947 in the c group), holdings statements (947 in the h group),

Oooh, adding a 947 field to the OCLC record before downloading will create a check-in record upon download according to Steve, I’ll have to check that out!

Steve talked about how to use regular expressions in the matches function of Create Lists. In doing this he provided a screen shot from Millennium Create Lists search box in which the matches function is used with regular expressions. He also provided a screen shot from Global Update that displayed the five-step algorithm they used to convert a set of holdings statements.

I think this is they way we can, first, update our periodicals holdings to MFH and then consider creating holdings statements for monographs and other materials.

An audience member asked about the feasibility of exporting the data to other applications like OCLC. Steve replied that once the data is in MFH, it’s very easily exported. I got lost when he started talking about he gory details of exporting but he did mention an ‘export table’ and I wondered whether that has anything to do with the import tables that my colleague Abel has been learning about this week.

IUG 2007 – Building license records in ERM

Diane Grover of the University of Washington made this presentation.

Until about five years ago, very few libraries did more than sign and file their license agreements with electronic resource vendors. At that point a number of libraries began to create systems, collections of license information and to develop standardized language to describe the elements of the license. Some of them were homegrown and some were developed by companies like III. Diane’s presentation described a retrospective project at the University of Washington Libraries to convert their paper license agreements to electronic and to include descriptive information from them in their III ERM.

They worked with a number of stakeholders in order to accomplish the project including stakeholders within the library like the ILL team, access services for reserves, the library web committee, and the library digitization committee. Stakeholders outside the library included the printing department (who prints course packs) and the attorney general.

They planned to include much of what had originally been preserved in paper files in addition to the licenses themselves, for example correspondence with vendors. Diane reviewed an active license record from their system and discussed some of the fixed and variable fields that they were using and why. They decided to store their digitized licenses on D-Space and then included links to them in their ERM license records. She also shared screen shots of their license records as they appear in the OPAC.

Other libraries are using other methods to accomplish similar ends. Some are hosting on their own web servers, others are simply using spreadsheets and database applications (like MS Access). Others are using Docutek ERes or the Millennium Media module. Some are also using OCR scanning to make the digitized licenses searchable. Most other libraries, like UW, are using some sort of security thus keeping them secure.

Some issues were common to most libraries: decisions about what data to record and what data to display for example. Most also struggle with the selection of language and terms that both users and library staff understand. They (librarians and staff working on the projects) also struggle with interpreting complex licensing language and terms. Diane shared a surprising outcome that she had not anticipated and that was that her librarians and staff became upset when they learned about some of the activities that licenses do not permit. And finally, all agreed that this kind of project is slow going.

Finally, she offered some advice about what to do and what to avoid as well as the outcomes within the library and the university that accrued from the project.

This was a really useful session that I REALLY hope that I remember to come back to when (if) we implement ERM. I do wonder though whether all this work is strictly necessary in light of the murmurs I’ve heard lately about the need for and possibly beginnings of development of a standard electronic resource license agreement.

Diane concluded the session with a discussion of some of the standards and de facto standards that are currently in development for ERM. She covered ERMI which is a de facto standard that is being widely used in the U.S. including in III’s ERM. She also mentioned the NISO License Expression Working Group (LEWG) which is working on an XLM based license terms transmission standard called ONIX-PL which is not completely compatible with the ERMI data elements. NISO is also working on a “non-license” approach called SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding).

IUG – My Millennium: How long since you’ve taken a look at this powerful and personalized patron information page?

Dinah Sanders, Product Manager and Dan Mattson, Library Training Consultants from III made this presentation.

My Millennium is a suite of tools that allows library users to obtain information without help from library staff. It contains basic patron information (name, address, etc.) as well as materials checked out, fines accruing, RSS feeds, etc. Dinah recommends turning it on and then making iterative changes and improvements since it is user ready “out of the box”.

There are a lot of options that can be varied by patron type. They allow you to do things like customizing functions specifically for library staff.

Some of the useful features include:
- The preferred searches feature allows the user to save frequently done searches to easily repeat them. It is also useful as an alert (via email) of new materials that result from a saved search.
- A function that allows them to update their own personal information. The library can customize the fields that patrons are allowed to update.
I wonder if this would be a useful way to maintain staff information like the telephone list.
- In conjunction with ResearchPro, III’s federated search engine, users can save searches or groups of resources that they frequently search.
This would be similar to the function in Search-All-Databases (Metalib) that allows users to create their own groups of resources.
- Patron ratings, III’s first product that allows users to provide their opinion about library materials. Since it only displays stars, there’s little potential for abuse and therefore it would require very little library staff intervention and moderation. You can turn it on by patron type and thereby target a specific audience (e.g. faculty).
- Users must opt in (and can opt out) of a reading history function that allows them to track materials that they’ve checked out. There is no staff access to reading history, the only way to access it is to log in as the user.
- Oh this is COOL: when logged in, users can limit searches to only the items in their reading history AND, with release 2007, they can export the contents of their reading history to their “shopping cart” (and, presumably, from there to an external application like MS Word or Excel).
- Also coming with release 2007 is a “my list” function that will allow patrons to create and maintain a list of materials, whether or not they’ve checked them out.
- Also coming with release 2007 is a “forgot your password?” function, the use of which is obvious.
- A feature that can be turned on is a special, library staff display of a bib record on the patron side that includes some of the fixed field data like date of last update, creation date, record number, bib level, material type codes, and so on.

One disadvantage for our library is that it collects more information about our users than we typically keep, for instance, their reading history. I wonder if the My Millennium info disappears when students, for example, are purged and reloaded at the end and beginning of each semester? Dinah answered yes, that it disappears when the patron record is purged…which brings up another question, and that is, a student’s reading history might not be sustained from semester to semester which could be a problem especially for doctoral students AND that ratings would not tend to develop over time (the natural emergence of a community opinion, that would normally develop according to systems theory, emergence would be blocked, stunted).

IUG 2007 – Quick start to ERM

Ted Fons, III Senior Product Manager and Caitlin Spears, III Library Training Consultant

ERM is a central place to store information about electronic resources and exposes that information to staff and library users. Quick start to ERM is a collection of things to help libraries to get started with ERM once they’ve installed it. There’s a training guide, records to install, updates to the fields on older implementations.

Quick start is a service that can be purchased from III for older installations. http://csdirect.iii.com/documentation/training/#qs is the address for the Quick Start Guide that goes with the Quick Start service. Note that this is a password protected link that will only be available to III customers with a username and password.

Caitlin’s part of the presentation included a very useful timeline for implementation and then she went back and reviewed the steps in detail. One of the most useful parts of this is the fact that they can take our existing data (in an Access database, an Excel spreadsheet, or existing bibliographic records for instance) and upload it into ERM.

There are really only two required fields for resource records: the resource name and the resource ID. There are no required fields for license records. There are two required fields for contacts records: contact code and contact name. Resource records also provide the capability of sending an email reminder of things like a renewal date or other important date to the maintenance of the resource.

Coverage data can be imported via CASE, vendor provided files, external knowledge bases (e.g. SFX…see session M5 for more info about a script that allows importing coverage data from the SFX knowledge base), or library maintained fields. Load is enabled by the resource ID in the coverage field. If a matching record in the libraries’ system is not matched in the load data, a brief bib with holdings data is created. Matching is based on the “i” index (ISSN field). There is also the capability of editing the coverage information that comes in with the load.

Caitlin included some examples in her presentation, for instance a resource search in the Cornell University Libraries site, a journal search from the University of Arizona Library site and the Yale Law Library.

ERM can also provide an “A-to-Z” list of electronic resources. Some more examples are Bowling Green State University and Georgetown Law Library. The A-to-Z list of resources is searchable by title and by subject (some of which come out of the box and which are customizable).

Additional Quick Start immediate capabilities:
-user level resource “terms of use” and resource advisories
-reminder emails
-staff level license and resource information
-integration with WebBridge, III’s open URL link resolver
-the ability to import usage data using SUSHI
-title overlap reports

Finally, they provided a link to a document authored by Mark Strang at Bowling Green State University that includes a pictorial guide to ERM records, wwwoptions, and some html files which is available at
http://innovativeusers.org/cgi-bin/clearinghouse/view.pl?id=123.

IUG 2007 – Implementing e-claiming of serials issues via email

Shirley Lincicum of Western Oregon University Libraries made this presentation.

III’s e-claims product enables libraries to send claims directly to a subscription agent’s system via email using the Millennium Serials claim function. Shirley’s presentation was exceptionally well organized. She covered the pre-requisites required in order to implement e-claiming followed by the initial set up requirements with both III and your serials vendor (they use Ebsco almost exclusively), then pointed out limitations and considerations and finally walked us through the process they use at WOU.

The only really work intensive part of set up is including information required by the serials vendor in check-in records. Ebsco can help with this in two ways; (1) by sending the required data with the annual renewal invoice (if you receive it electronically) and (2) by sending a list called Ebscan of barcodes that the library can scan in to each check-in record.

An interesting feature of the e-claims process in Millennium Serials is that it creates a “hidden” review file of claims to be sent which can be printed out or saved to a file and then used in some pre-claim processes including shelf-reading to be sure than an issue has not arrived and simply not been checked in and verification that the issue has actually been published (with Ebsco the simple way to do this is checking the JETS service within Ebsconet to see if the issue has been received).

The obvious benefit to sending e-claims via email is the time savings that accrues from simply creating the claims list in Millennium and routing the data to the subscription agent via email as opposed to entering it into the subscription agent’s system one title at a time. Other benefits include the one I mentioned above; the ability to output a list of potential claims for further processing before sending it on to the subscription agent. Shirley also pointed out that it cuts down on the mundane communication between the library and the subscription agent which frees up both the librarian and the customer service rep to focus on issues that actually require human intervention.

Some interesting by-product information from this system was (1) that another option for communicating claims information between library and subscription agent is FTP (although this does not allow for two way communication, e.g. acknowledgment that the claims have been received by the subscription agent) and (2) that a potential use for fixed fields in the check-in record is coding claims restrictions which allows the library to select a subset of all subscriptions to send through the Millennium claims process.

IUG 2007 – WWWOptions, WebPub and new screens, oh my! OPAC redesign for 2006 and WebPAC Pro

Aimee Fifarek of the Scottsdale Public Library made this presenation.

This program began with some in depth, html rich, slides that describe the initial set up for WebPAC Pro. The first thing she showed us was how to use the style sheets to customize the appearance and content of the tabs, both main tabs and help page tabs. She noted that the naming convention for different tabs (active and inactive and appearance and content) differ which can be confusing if you’re not aware of it. There are some small but important changes that need to be made in order for the pages to appear properly in IE7.

Some of this was not terribly useful for me since I don’t actually design or work on our library web site. But I am on the Information Architecture Working Group at my library which is charged with creating the architecture (structure) of our new web site. The confusing thing is that the web site is different from the OPAC. The OPAC is usually embedded in the overall library web site and, up to now, typically the OPAC was designed (colors, fonts, etc.) based on the web site but we’re finding that we’re starting by designing (customizing) our OPAC using WebPAC Pro and then applying that design (and the style sheets underlying it) to the rest of the web site.

Most of Aimee’s power point slides include a citation to a page in the manual. It was interesting that she made a point to mention that the manual was actually pretty helpful for the functions she’s talking about (apparently this is not always the case).

But the really cool thing about WebPAC Pro are the options that you can install once you’re installed it. They include inbound and outbound RSS feeds, a spell checker, and the ability to allow library users to write their own reviews of items in the collection (some of the things that Mark Strang talked about in his session, Enhancing the Virtual Catalog Experience. Unfortunately, these were the things that I was really interested in hearing more about, particularly if and how they are using them but she didn’t spend much time on them.

In response to a question from the audience, Aimee made the point that users are used to rapid change and web development. The library web page is not a reference book, it’s not static, and most users are going to expect to see changes (improvements) there from time to time. I would add that, in keeping with the whole user-centered design movement, the ‘gurus’ all agree that one of the benefits of including the user in an iterative design process gives them the impression that the library cares about their opinions and needs and responds to them.

IUG 2007 – Playing with matches: Using regular expressions in Create Lists

Richard V. Jackson of Huntington Libraries made this presentation.

Create lists is a function of Millennium that allows library staff to automate the creation of groups of bibliographic records. It’s used for a huge variety of functions, for instance, listing newly acquired materials, listing journals that serve a specific discipline, listing records that are in need of revision of some kind. ‘Matches’ is one way, a fairly sophisticated and seldom used, means of including records that describe materials with particular characteristics and excluding others.

‘Matches’ uses what are called ‘regular expressions’ which are combination of literal characters and meta-characters (characters that tell the system what to do, e.g. directing Millennium to look for a single letter in a particular field only if it is the last character in that field would involve telling Millennium what you are looking for, the single letter, and also telling it to limit the results to only those records where the letter occurs at the very end of the field).

Jackson reviewed and defined the function of all of the meta-characters using a nice variety of examples.

This particular search function significantly broadens Millennium Create Lists’ capability for sophisticated searching that I’ll will find tremendously useful in what I do now and what my library can do in the future, not least of which is building creative RSS feeds.

IUG 2007 – Enhancing the virtual catalog experience: WebPAC Pro and the WebPAC Pro bundle

Mark Strang from Bowling Green State University made this presentation.

The spell checker function works like you’d expect it to work, if a user misspells one of their search terms, options for correct spellings are displayed along with any results for the initial search. If they misspell more than one of their search terms, drop down boxes display that contain options for correct spellings for each potentially misspelled word! In our initial usability tests at the Bell Library, two of our four participants misspelled a search term at some point during the testing and all of them were ultimately unsuccessful in task completion as a result. That indicates to me that a spell checker would be tremendously useful to them. My dream would be that we could implement the spell checker in the initial version of our new design so that I could compare successes against the data we collected in those initial test.

If a library chooses to implement it, Encore also supports inbound and outbound RSS feeds. Strang didn’t spend any time discussing inbound feeds but instead spent his time talking about configuring outbound feeds. Most libraries’ initial use of outbound feeds seem to consist of new materials lists generated by Create List queries. Strang discussed the advantages and disadvantages of basing feeds on the query vs. a review file. In essence, using a query is the preferred method because it allows automatic updating of the feed as opposed to a review file which is static and must be updated (and thus a new feed item) manually.

The feature that generated the most questions and comments from the audience is called Community Reviews. Community reviews allows library users to write their own reviews of library materials. Strang’s library was using it to present student reviews written as a class assignment that library staff were putting up on their site, they were not currently allowing users to post their own comments. This, however, is possible and can be monitored by library staff.

Of these three functions, it seems to me that both building RSS feeds and monitoring reviews would require a permanent commitment of staff time. Not necessarily Systems staff time but library staff time certainly. A couple of questions occurred to me during this session in that regard. First, I wonder how much (if any) access to MilAdmin is required to monitor reviews since the Systems Department may be reluctant to give a lot of access to a non-Systems staff member.

IUG 2007 – Encore: Introducing our new discovery services platform

Dinah Sanders from Innovative Interfaces made this presentation.

Encore is a new Innovative product still in development and beta test and let me tell you, it is really cool! Essentially, Encore is a metasearch product that allows the library to customize the sites to be searched and then presents results in a number of different sections of the screen depending on where they come from in relevance ranked order that is also somewhat customizable by the library. It brings together the OPAC, proprietary databases, and the Web all at once. Yeah, it does sound a bit like Google , and to some extent it is. The one big difference is that it is controlled by the library in terms of results display and searches not only freely available web resources but proprietary databases and thus can point users to many more, reliable results customized to a particular library’s users.

The one major disadvantage of Encore that I see is that they have not addressed finding articles yet…at all. Since that is what our users seem to have the most difficulty with, and given the trend that I see in the literature that reports on academic library web site usability testing towards users failing to differentiate between different materials (books, videos, journals, articles, etc.) and different formats of the same item, I would be reluctant to implement Encore until it supported searching for all kinds of materials.

Innovative Interfaces Inc. Users Group Annual Conference 2007

I've been at the Innovative Interfaces Inc. (III) Users Group (IUG) conference all week taking notes like mad at some very intersting sessions. Unfortunately, internet access has been almost non-existant (unless I chose to pay my hotel $13.95 a day which I didn't) so the next ten or fifteen posts will be about the sessions I've attended and what I've learned.

Google is so cool!

Preface: I'm curled up in a chair at home this afternoon, COL (= cats on lap). It's cold and rainy and we got sent home early from work because the electricity in the library is not working. I'm really trying to work, really, I am, but so far I've been working on some committee stuff for NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group, http://www.nasig.org). This led me to creating a forum on one of the NASIG web pages for my first time conference attendees to use to ask questions before the conference. Which means that I have to remember to check it at least once a day or some questions will go unanswered so...

I was playing around with my personalized Google homepage, trying to add a link to this forum that I need to monitor and, after some fumbling, I figured out how to add a list of bookmarks to my page. Easy. This only happened after some fiddling around on their help pages where I also discovered that I can change the look of the banner at the top of my personalized Google homepage. So, of course, I tried out all of the 'themes' and selected the beach theme. But then (here's the really cool part) when I confirmed my choice I was asked for my zip code because the theme changes with the time of day!!! So during the day it's a day beach scene with the sun up but at night it's a night beach scene and, presumably there's a sunrise and a sunset. I've only had it for a few minutes so I can't confirm all that yet but I'll keep you posted. I love Google...and not just for rainy day entertainment!

Customer service?

I've been in two Barnes & Noble bookstores in the last week and at both places, there was a line formed waiting to talk to a staff member at the customer service desk. It occurred to me that there is rarely a line waiting to talk to a staff member at the reference desk in the library and the reference desk performs something of the same functions as the customer service desk in B&N. So what do you suppose would happen if we changed the sign above the reference desk to customer service? Would we too be deluged with customers? Would we be happy to help everyone, no matter what their question or would we be complaining that the questions being asked were too mundane for people with our training, education, and skills?

Spring break fun

I think this makes it official. If there were any questions in your mind about my nerdiness before, I'm just about to squash them. I'm all excited because I'm going to spend my spring break next week reading and writing a review of the Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion! I responded to a call for book reviewers that Library Journal recently sent out and, much to my surprise, they responded and asked if I'd like to review reference books. Of course I said yes!

One small problem is that Library Journal is published by Elsevier and their standard author contract requires me to give up all of my copyrights to the reviews I write and they accept for publication. But I've got a list of web sites where I can go to find examples of language to use to ammend that (when I find it, I'll share it with you).

Oh, just to balance things out a bit...I'm also really excited that I have a daffodil just about to bloom in my back yard.

Mashups

I attended a really good webinar on Tuesday about mashups. Mashups are a software application that allows you to combine data from two or more sources (usually web sites) to create a new web site. Most of the earliest mashups were created using Google maps combined with all kinds of other information like home prices, weather, traffic, etc. Here's a couple of examples of the cool things you can do with mashups:
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

This is a mashup that displays patterns in news reporting across countries.

http://www.frappr.com/blogginglibrarians
This one is a map with "push-pins indicating the physical location of librarians with blogs.

This is something cool that I'd love to play around with in my spare time (hah!). If I ever get around to it, I'll share my creations here!

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

I'm working on a literature review for one of my classes this semester that also happens to be a BIG project at work. I've come across the name Jakob Nielsen a lot so tonight I decided to check out his web site, useit.com. Of particular interest to my blogger friends will be his top ten design mistakes for blog usability. I'm certainly guilty of some of these...and it's got me seriously considering switching the LiveJounal.com...

ALA Midwinter Meeting - 4 OCLC Connexion User's Group Meeting

OCLC Connexion is a cataloging tool used to create bibliographic catalog records in the OCLC database that underlies WorldCat and several other OCLC products so this post will probably only be of interest to catalogers or those interested in cataloging.

David Whitehair from OCLC was the first presenter and the first topic of discussion was recent changes to Connexion. He began with enhancements that are available to users of both the client version and the web version:

• WorldCat records now include both 13 digit and 10 digit ISBNs.
  
• When the database hits 100,000,000 records (which will happen quite soon, go to www.oclc.org/worldcat/grow.htm to watch the progress) since a record is added about every 7 seconds. They've upgraded the system to accommodate the additional digits required by this growth.
• Bibliographic Formats and Standards has been upgraded to reflect MARC Update changes.
• Since OCLC merged with RLG loading of records from the RLG Union Catalog are being loaded into WorldCat; the load is in progress (there are about 50 million records in all) and about 15% of them are records that represent items new to WorldCat.

There are several changes that are available only to users of version 1.70 of both the Connexion Client and the browser:

• the ability to extract metadata from MP3 files
• the ability to view superseded version of LC name and subject authority records (read only)

Other enhancements include:

• guided entry for archival materials provides guidance for the entry of fields 541 and 583
• the 035 field includes the OCLC control number
• a link has been added that allows you to link to a library catalog to view the patron view of a record

For Connexion Client 1.70 users only:

• version 1.60 will be discontinued April 2007
• this version won't work with Windows Vista
• it includes a new quick search box at the top of the screen
• they've added a quick tools drop down box to quickly enter common strings of text (now one no longer has to create a macro that is tied to a particular key or combination of keys in order to enter a common string of text)
  
• they've added scripts for cataloging in foreign languages (Bengali and Devanagari are the most recent language scripts added, scripts for other non-latin languages already in place include Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, and Thai)

[There was a discussion at this point about whether or not 'non-latin' and 'non-roman' were synonymous. No consensus was reached...catalogers are so funny!]

Then he covered OCLC enhancements that aren't strictly Connexion enhancements:

• OCLC Terminologies Services (see www.oclc.org/terminologies for a tutorial)
• user statistics are available for no additional charge
• they've also made some enhancements to CatExpress (a simple cataloging tooused most often in small public libraries and school libraries), see www.oclc.org/catexpress.
• z39.50 catalogers now have access to the authority file and non-latin scripts
• OCLC e-serials holdings service was debuted.
• they'll take a file from Serials Solutions, TDNet, or Ebsco and set and maintain title level holdings (these features are free of charge), this would be useful if you're using OCLC's collection development tools
  
• coming soon is an option to receive MARC records for your e-holdings (however, there will be a charge for this service)
• WorldCat Selection is a new service that OCLC created for acquisitions staff that alerts selectors and enables them to download MARC records for recent purchases

He went on to discuss some future enhancements that are in the works including Connexion Client 2.0.

There's a new MARC update coming in 2007 as well.

Their Content Cooperative Pilot project continues, see www.oclc.org/productworks/contentcooperative for more info.

They've also partnered with several book jobbers (Baker & Taylor, YBP, Majors) to create a service that will deliver MARC records customized to your library for newly purchased items.


Geoffrey Skinner from Sonoma State University presented on "Interactive Searching in Connexion" in which he spoke about how they use OCLC's batch load process to upgrade brief bib records.

Sonoma State is an Innovative Library using their ERM module. It's been 1 1/2 years since they brought up ERM and updated their holdings so they were faced with a large number of brief records. The process included (1) downloading data from brief serial records containing e-issns, (2) creating a local Connexion file into which to upload the records, (3) review error report and decide whether to correct the records that failed to loads in the text files by hand, (4) upload the corrected records.

He describes it as an iterative process that ultimately results in local records that include appropriate access points including subject headings and more complete holdings records in WorldCat.

[To me this sounds like a tremendously time consuming project that would consume a great deal of staff time. But I tend to question the benefit of including e-resource records in the local catalog anyway since we use a number of mechanisms for locating journals including a link resolver and an a-to-z list. In addition, at my library we've recently reviewed our e-resources contracts to decide which vendors/publishers allow or disallow use of articles in their collections for things like ILL, e-reserves, and inclusion in course-packs and course delivery software. Many do but some do not and, for those who do not, I'm not quite sure I see the benefit of maintaining precise holdings in WorldCat. Especially given the dearth of more high priority projects. If anyone sees some benefit that I haven't I'd be interested in hearing from you.]

ALA Midwinter Meeting - 2 Tales, Tips, and Tools: Google in your Library

Tales, Tips, and Tools: Google in your Library

Ben Brunnel (Library Partnerships Manager)

“To organize the world’s information and make if universally accessible and useful” is Google’s mission and has been since 1980.

The idea is to have Google be accessible to anyone with an internet connection whether it’s on a computer, a cell phone, etc.

Advanced Search

The average user never select advanced search. But, you can use search operators in the regular search box. For instance us “~” to search for similar words and use link: [url] to find out how many sites link to the [url].

Type “weather 78412” to get the weather. Type “13 euros in usd” for currency conversion. Works with all kinds of conversions. Go to www.google.com/help/features.html to see them all.

Select “Language Tools” link on the main search page to use their language translator; you can copy and paste text to be translated. You can also translate entire web pages.

www.google.com/librariancenter for the poster mentioned above. And don’t forget the Google Librarian Newsletter.

Google Co-op

There’s a section at the top of a search page that allows you to “refine” a search. The co-op part comes in when they opened up the assigning of categories of refinement to a webpage. The categories are fairly limited at this point (only six). Create your own search engine. Realclimate.org is an example of such a search engine. Go to Google Co-op, sign up, give your search site a name, invite people to contribute if you want to, then copy and paste the code they give you into your page. And if you don’t have your own site to paste code to, you can create your own in Google. The idea is that you select the sites that are searched. More info at the www.google.com/librariancenter and join the mailing list (Google Groups). Also www.google.com/coop.

Google Book Search (books.google.com)

Is Google’s attempt to make books as easy to search and find as other web content. The difference between book search and web search is the results, which differ depending on where they got the book. Some come from partnerships with publishers who have allowed Google to digitize their books and index every word and page and make the index available online. The others come from libraries with whom Google has also partnered including NYPL, Harvard, Ohio State, U of Wisc, Univ of California, UVA, Univ of Texas’s Spanish language collection (announced yesterday), and a couple of Spanish universities. [He showed us the graphic for a number of Google book search sites in other languages, interesting that the word “Google” seems to be the same in all languages]

Includes FT of books in the public domain (20%), no full text (allowing usually about 20% of their pages but some are moving towards making more available) but indexing for books in print (5%), the other 75% are in the gray area in between where finding the book itself is sometimes as difficult as finding out who owns the copyright. FT includes any handwritten notes that exist in the copy of the book that is digitized.

Public domain books are available for download. They also provide links to find the book (e.g. booksellers including OP titles/vendors) and a link to the WorldCat public version that you’ve used which will tell users which libraries the book is available at.

Note that even if all of the pages of a book aren’t available to view, all of the pages in the book ARE indexed and include links to purchase the book or find it in the library.

Books where they’re not sure about the copyright are made available by proxy via an “about the book” page that includes three snippets (never more), links to purchase and find the book, and additional info about the book (including references to the book). There’s an “about the book” page for all books in Google.

You can search library catalogs using the advanced search page in Google book search. It generally searches the national union catalog of the country you’re in (e.g. WorldCat).

They’ve also created “collection” sites like www.google.com/shakespeare (they call them microsites) and banned books for banned book week, www.google.com/banned and scary books for Halloween at www.google.com/halloween. Someone asked if there is a list of collection sites and the answer was that there might be, he wasn’t sure.

You can also get a Google book search search box/button for your own site at the book search site at the about site.

For more info go to www.booksearch.blogspot.com

[This kind of goes with the expansion of libraries that they talked about this morning in the social networking session this morning]

Google Scholar

It’s not a database. It’s an algorithmic full-text search of scholarly materials online. www.scholar.google.com

Includes cited and cited by counts with links. Displays links, citations to as many versions/iterations of an article as they have indexed. You can add a link to your library. They recognized that ranking by number of hits doesn’t allow good access to new article that haven’t been cited a lot yet so they added a link to ‘recently published’ works. Click on “preferences” next to the search box where you can set preferences to download to your favorite citation manager (RefWorks, EndNote, others). ScholarSFX is a free link resolver designed exclusively for GoogleScholar [but you should probably use your version of SFX}. Blackboard course delivery has incorporated Google Scholar. Add a search box to your web page in the same way he told us to add a link to Google Book Search.

Quote from the creator of Google Scholar: “it’s better to be frustrated than ignorant” (given as the reason that they index citations as well as full text articles).

Interesting note: the idea that sparked their page ranking was that if you could digitize and link all of the books in the world by citations you could get a pretty good idea of what the most popular books are. {I have a little problem with this, the same problem that makes citation a difficult and possibly less useful proxy for popularity or authority].

Each section concluded with a couple of success stories from librarians who had posted them on the Google librarian center (where you can also get posters and help sheets on Google Scholar).

Google Earth www.earth.google.com

It’s an application you download to your desktop that is linked to an enormous database of satellite images of practically the whole world. The ideas isn’t just to find pictures of places but also to find information about those places so Google added “layers” to the earth application. There’s a places layer that allows you to bookmark you favorite places. There’s also other layers that you can customize the information that you get. He showed us an image of Mt. St. Helens and then added a layer that displayed the positions of earthquakes and volcanoes. They’ve partnered with National Geographic to allow them to add icons that link to NG articles written about the places you’re “visiting” on GE. Another layer places country flag icons on your map which link to the CIA World Factbook data on that country. The European Space Agency, Discovery Networks are other layers available.

www.google.com/educators is another section of their website that librarians might find useful and informative.

He said what’s great about Google earth is that you can spend hours and hours visiting new places and when you’re done you don’t feel as if you’ve been wasting time, you feel like you’ve learned something and it was fun…another reminder of this morning’s session about social networking.

ALA Midwinter Meeting - 3 ACRL/SPARC Forum on Public Access

SPARC is the acronym for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. The forum is on public access and features a panel presentation and discussion. By "Public Access" I assumed that they were talking about open access.

[I arrived late to the session and missed the first speaker's presentation]

Carl T. Bergstrom, Dept. of Biology at the University of Washington spoke about "Fostering a Culture of Open Access"

Benefits to academics of open access: Authors attain a broader distribution of their work which, in turn, will bring them higher citation rates, global accessibility and make their work available beyond academia. Readers attain instant access to what one wants to read as well as accessibility via a very power search and indexing. He also cited the economic benefits of OA to publishers in a subscription model, to publishers (and readers) in the author pays model.

He posed the question do authors self-archive their publications? He described a study of the top ten economics journals that seemed to indicate that in most cases (9 of 10) one could find the articles published in them freely available on the Internet. In the field of physics, about 95% of articles published in the top journals are freely available on the Internet. But in political science and evolutionary biology the percentages are strikingly lower. He hypothesized that the difference between fields is differences in the publishing and information sharing cultures of each discipline.

An additional benefit that he sees is that people actually read and respond to research papers which is accelerating the rate of research and knowledge. He suggests that academics foster a culture of open access at every stage of the research process.

He's working on a project that seeks to create a criterion for judging article relevance other than impact factor (which he feels is not a good proxy for journal influence). His criteria, eigenfactor uses the entire network of links similar to Google's page rank process. The Eigenfactor process allows judgements to be made of how much time researchers spend with each journal. It also allows an examination of cross-disciplinary citation and the impact of non-journal publications in various fields. It includes journals that are not included in the ISI index at all. See http://eigenfactor.org/.

Ellen Duranceau presented on "Eight Principles for an Emerging Ecosystem"

The idea of the "commons" is not a new one, just updated thanks to new communication technology.

She's taken Simon Levin's eight principles (Fragile Dominion) for maintaining the ecological system and what he calls the biological commons and applied them to the information commons.

1. Reduce uncertainty: move beyond traditional services and systems. Provide support for the OA repository, for faculty publishing in the OA domain. This can come from faculty but should also come from administrators.

2. Expect surprise: grow awareness of new publishing opportunities and prepare for them.

3. Maintain heterogeneity: resilience is necessary because there will be no single model to support OA in the near future.

4. Sustain Modularity: move away from hierarchical organizational structures, make services available to users to use in their own ways via modular designs.

5. Preserve redundancy: archiving models should have built-in redundancy; sufficient

6. Tighten feedback loops: includes new pricing models that make the market work; what's reasonable? The University of California's value-based pricing is one that might help answer that question.

7. Build trust: "evolution works most effectively when individuals interact most with their near-neighbors"; building cross-disciplinary relationships on campuses as well as between other campus groups (like librarians and administration).

8. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you: "we're all in this together, it's an ecosystem", "we can harness the forces of evolution and self-organization for the common good"

ALA Midwinter Meeting - 1, Social Networking for Libraries: Best Practices

This session is presented by Jasmine de Gaia of OCLC and included a panel presentation and discussion.

Jasmine started by defining social networking and its relevance. Content, community, and collaboration: the whole is greater than the parts (systems theory!). More than 50 million Americans create web content. There's great potential for libraries to make that content and the results of the collaboration to library patrons.

Panel: Jenny Levine (from ALA), David Lee King (Topeka-Shawnee County Public Library) , Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at Univ. of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana).

Each panel member gave a short presentation about the ways they're using social networking in their libraries and in their jobs.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe works primarily with undergraduates. Lisa remarked that social networking is not a new concept noting that academic libraries, for example, often place subject library branches within the department that they serve. Their primary communication tool is their course management tool (WebCT) where they're placed a link the library and its services like their ask-a-librarian service. They've created a library toolbar for both IE and Firefox. It includes search capability for their library collection as well as the state library collection.

They have a myspace page, http://www.myspace.com/undergradlibrary, where they take a passive approach, not going out and befriending all of their students. However it seems to be a success because they have over 500 friends. They also have a Facebook site. They get reference questions as well as pleased surprise from student users who find them. They market via downloadable flyers as well as an ask-a-librarian business card with their MySpace and Facebook links.

UCIC uses Trillian for their ask-a-librarian service which is integrated into their reference desk where they do f2f, phone, IM, and email reference. The point is that they've integrated social networking into their reference services.

Here's an interesting link: http://infoisland.org/ is a "SecondLife" virtual space that they have tried to use to extend their undergraduate library "space".

David Lee King, introduced himself via a history of his computers since 1982 in photos. He is Head of Digital Services. The public library where he works has outgrown their physical space so he was hired to expand services via a digital space. He is starting by defining and explaining a digital branch to both patrons and library staff.

David's 4 Things to Remember when planning a digital library project:

1. don't plan to death, technology is moving so fast that it will have passed you up by the time you finish planning

• start with the end result rather
• figure out who will do the work
• make sure it's customer focused

2. training staff, train often and using different techniques
3. inviting participation

• you need at least two people to communicate
• why not invite customers to participate?
• either passively by requesting comments
• or actively
  

4. top-down and bottom-up

• administration and front-line staff

Jenny Levine works for ALA who wants to develop an online community for librarians. Talked about her own development as a social networker. She talked about generational differences in communication. In particular, the parts she gets and the parts she doesn't get. She enjoys social networking but she doesn't get why she enjoys it. One of the things she has discovered is that it has become mobile. For example, in FaceBook you can set you status, minute by minute to share with your friends.

She thinks that the difficulty for libraries with social networking is not understanding how to or even why but it's spotting the opportunities. We don't have to go find information today, it comes to us. For example, using RSS feeds to push particular bundles of information, sending information to the places where the users are. She talked about a virtual space for a parenting group where a library could push articles from EbscoHost using an RSS feed, post a collection of parenting books, and advertise library activities for children.

The next part of the presentation was a panel discussion that was structured around some questions that Jasmine posed.

There was an interesting discussion about marketing library services that caught my attention because most of the examples included allowing library patrons to create and market library services that are relevant to them. This sounds a bit like an action research project (one of my classes this semester is Action Research).

One of the values a library has to offer is qualifying content, what are your thoughts about how libraries can market that? Lisa said that they enjoy a high level of trust at UIUC but that most studies show that undergraduates base their decisions on speed and efficiency rather than trust. Jenny agreed that it is a good idea to develop the idea of librarian as expert. David added that a library develops a reputation for being trustworthy and should consciously develop that reputation.

What are the best way for libraries to distinguish their services and allow patrons to create content? David reminded us that even though our sites are available to people world wide on the Web, our users are generally local. Lisa talked about teaching faculty to use tools like RefShare to create annotated bibliographies to students.

A member of the audience asked how the panel would suggest connecting patrons with the wealth of information contained in print in the library. David commented that students today don't care whether something is in a book or on the web, in other words, they're format agnostic (which a number of scholars describe as a characteristic of the Millennial Generation), he's more focused on connecting the patron with the content.

Here's an interesting side observation: of the three panel members, two were using mac laptops and one was using a pc.

a game

Ok, so this is really only nominally learning related but it's FUN! And practical since it promotes accurate typing. Querty warriors space invaders meets Keyboarding 101!

SciFi bookclub meme

Discovered this while browsing through my bloglines this evening. Unsure of exactly what a meme was, I consulted Wikipedia which describes it as "refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another". Lest you condemn my sources, I also consulted the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas which says that a meme is "nothing less than a meta-concept for describing the transmission of knowledge among persons and cultures. Memetics—the study of memes—is, briefly stated, evolutionary theory applied to ideas." I'm still not sure I get it but am sure that I'll need to add it to my list of things to study. For one thing, it sounds suspiciously like it has to do with complex adaptive systems theory.

ANYWAY...here's how this one works: Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love. I added a + next to the ones I always wanted to read but never got around to.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov +
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein ****
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin [?]
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley +
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card +
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson +
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling ***
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute *
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks +
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Qualitative research

I'm taking a class on qualitative research methods this semester and so, naturally, all of a sudden I see aspects of qualitative research everywhere (same thing happened to me a year and a half ago during a class on communications theory). For instance, I've been listening to a murder mystery book on CD lately on the way to and from work and have been struck by the protagonist's interviewing skills as well as the author's talent at description. Yesterday afternoon I started playing around with a demo version of a qualitative data analysis software package that lets you select portions of text to which you can add memos and tags and then you can look at the network of memos and tags and make connections among them. So this morning it struck me, as I was adding a couple of web sites that colleagues had brought to my attention to my del.isio.us pagee and adding tags and comments to them how similar del.isio.us is to this qualitative data analysis software.

Tonight in class I think (hope, it's on the syllabus) we're going to talk about qualitative data analysis software so I'm going to bring this up and see if anyone else thinks it's as cool as I do.