Industry Trends, Analysis and Breaking News
UKSG and NISO Release KBART Recommended Practices
Jan 19
Announced at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston by the United Kingdom Serials Group
(UKSG) and the National Information Standards Organization
(NISO), the KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools)
Working Group has published their initial set of practical
recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata
between content providers and knowledge base developers. Such
information is key to enhancing the user experience; inconsistent
or incorrect metadata results in dead or misdirected links
frustrating students, faculty and researchers.
The HTML version of the Working Group recommendations is accessible at: http://www.uksg.org/kbart/s1/summary while the PDF version is accessible here.
NFAIS member organizations ProQuest,
OCLC, MarkLogic and
EBSCO all had active representation in the
committees and working groups involved in the development of this
set of recommended practices.
Fueling Usage through Mobile Phone Apps
Jan 15
Anyone following the plethora of news announcements released in time for ALA Midwinter is aware that mobile is currently one of the hottest area of activity in the library environment. All the more reason then to view this video (from Ohio television news station, NBC4) that shows Mike Teets, Vice President, OCLC Enterprise Architecture, demonstrating the recent iPhone application from RedLaser, that supports usage of local library collections. It's fueled through WorldCat data. (OCLC's formal news release about the application may be viewed at: http://www.oclc.org/us/en/news/releases/2010/20101.htm ).
In their formal press release, Mike Teets is quoted as saying "Mobile devices are fast becoming the medium of choice for access to information for many people." OCLC is creating multiple apps to satisfy the needs of users in a variety of settings by satisfying queries at the point of need. In a subsequent email exchange that I had with Teets, he shared with me that "a single purpose, single platform app is not likely to be successful in meeting member library needs." OCLC recognizes the user's need to work across multiple environments, specifically:
- platform specific apps (Red Laser, more coming),
- multi-platform apps (Boopsie partner http://worldcat.org/m, Netlibrary ebooks on Nook and Sony readers),
- mobile web applications, i.e. not downloaded app (nothing yet, concepts brewing),
- mobile friendly standard web access (improving http://worldcat.org for direct access from phone browsers)
- Text based mobile devices (SMS access to QuestionPoint)
This varied approach offers benefit to both users and the libraries that serve them.
OCLC is a member organization of NFAIS.
The 2010 Horizon Report
Jan 14
The 2010 Horizon
Report (PDF download) is a collaboration between the New Media Corsortium and the
Coalition for
Networked Information. Although the report has not yet been
formally released,
The Chronicle of Higher Ed offered a write-up today from their
Wired Campus blog.
This year, the report is indicating that the time to adoption for mobile computing and open content is expected to be a year or less. Further out in the adoption time line are electronic books and simple augmented reality -- perhaps two to three years off. Most exciting, however, are the gesture-based computing and visual data analysis that the Horizon advisory group anticipates in a four to five year timeframe.
This is a must-read for those in the information
community.
Report and Recommendations From The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable
Jan 13
In mid-2009, the House Committee on Science and Technology in conjunction with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) convened a body of stakeholders to discuss scholarly publishing. They were specifically asked to "develop a consensus regarding access to and preservation of the results of federally funded research that addresses the needs of all parties." Roundtable stakeholders from within the NFAIS membership included the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and Elsevier.
The Roundtable's core recommendation was that "Each federal research funding agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal."
The
report with associated documents are
accessible at the site of the Association of American
Universities.
The efforts of the CrossRef organization (most specifically, their new Crossmark initiative), received particular notice for support of both interoperability as well as certification with regard to the version of record of published research.
Participants were asked to "either agree to or decline to sign
the current draft of the report in its totality." Neither the
representative from Elsevier nor the representative from the Public
Library of Science felt able to sign; statements from each as to
the rationale also appear on the AAU site (link above).
The Potential for the Web in 2010
Jan 08
The Edge's
annual question for 2010 is How Is The Internet
Changing The Way You Think?
http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html See pieces by Clay
Shirky, Howard
Rheingold, James J.
O'Donnell and Sherry Turkle.
More than a hundred intellectuals offer their ideas. Extensive food
for thought.
Impact of Mobile in the Library Environment
Jan 04
In reviewing news clips from the month of December, I came across this ResourceShelf entry, directing me to several presentations from academic librarians on mobile technology.
In particular, I want to draw attention to the
keynote presentation by Rachel Vacek (University of Houston
Libraries), an excellent overview of the ways in which university
libraries are integrating mobile technology to better serve their
patrons, complete with useful statistics. It's worth viewing. In
one of those serendipitous occurences, the same day that those
presentations were made available,
ReadWriteWeb linked to an outstanding research report from Morgan
Stanley, which indicates that the forthcoming era of mobile
computing is likely to create an even greater wave of change to
information behaviors than did desktop computing.
Reviewing the Past, Looking to the Future
Dec 16
Earlier this week, Internet marketing guru Seth Godin released an 82-page book (PDF only) into the wild entitled What Matters Now. It's an anthology of short pieces by 52 thought leaders such as Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired, Fred Wilson, Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, and David Weinberger, Senior Researcher, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Other contributors represent the worlds of diplomacy, business, marketing, engineering, the arts, and computer programming. What makes the publication of interest is the way in which the contributions emphasize themes in the modern world - mobility, enrichment, social interaction, focus amid myriad distractions, creativity and more.
The Simplifier Lab has posted both the full publication as well as individual items in PDF.
On December 15th, Morgan Stanley released detailed research into just how significant The Mobile Internet will become in the next 12 months, concluding that the "rapid ramp of mobile internet usage will be a boon to consumers and some companies will likely win big while many will wonder what just happened." The research is presented at great length as Gary Price of Resource Shelf points out.
In understanding how we've changed in the past decade as well
predicting what lies before us in the next few years, it would
appear that the information community as a whole (libraries as well
as content and technology providerss) will be well-served by
reading both.
Member News From London Online Meeting
Dec 03
Within the information industry, the Online Information event held annually in London is noted for a burst of vendor releases. This year's announcements include:
- Ovid Highlights the Latest Productivity Workflow Enhancements to Ovid Universal Search and its New Psychology Lexicon
- AIP announces new features for next-generation hosting platform, Scitation C3
- Elsevier relaunches biomedical database 'Embase'
Ovid, AIP, and Elsevier are all member organizations of
NFAIS.
For additional coverage of the event, visit the Information Today blog!
Read more »Semantic Web: Fact or Myth?
Nov 20
There are times when a stellar result is only achieved through cooperation across several communities. That was the case with the recent one-day program co-sponsored by NFAIS, CENDI and FLICC, The Semantic Web: Fact or Myth?. The program featured an outstanding array of speakers recruited by the sponsoring bodies, including Dr. Ralph Swick, Acting COO of the World Wide Web Consortium, Dr. Robert Kohout, Program Manager at DARPA, and Dr. James Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The take away (for me as a non-techie) from that event was the understanding that (a) the basic platform infrastructure required to support the development of the Semantic Web was now in place and (b) the next step in development was to increase access to raw data collections so that technologists could use such sets in honing the capabilities of the system and expanding practical use. One of the closing statements made by Dr. Ralph Swick was a plea that the agencies and private sector entities in the room not wait to make the data available even if the data did not conform to a specific ideal standard. Developers in different communities might then begin combining those sets and running the technology against those sets, resulting in visualizations that expose unidentified relationships or patterns, applications that speed research workflows for specific communities or enhance the broader knowledge of all.
Read more »Did You See It In The Times?
Nov 10
NFAIS members are aware of the usefulness of Twitter for
purposes of current awareness; see for example the twitter stream from
NFAIS member organization, AIP. Are they aware as well of
The Twitter
Tim.es? A social recommendation system, TwitterTim.es looks at
the tweets of those you follow as well as those who are re-tweeting
items from those same individuals. It then generates an aggregated
set of items as a customized newspaper. *Very interesting*. For
example, I doubt that I would have seen
Mark Cuban's piece on the significance of Twitter replacing
Google as a mechanism for news-gathering, had it not been for seven
Twitterati pointing and retweeting it, driving it to the head of
my newspaper on TwitterTim.es.
Tweets From A Library Conference
Nov 04
Run a search using #chsconf09 and listen to the tweets emanating from this year's Charleston Conference, a well-established conference devoted to library acquisitions and collection development. The tidbits that I gleaned this morning were provided by @annielivre (Anne Behler of Penn State) a participant in the pre-conference workshop on ebooks (Ebooks - Not Just Another Binding).
The first tidbit shared was a cost of $100 associated with the book's "parking spot" while the second was the difference in cost per use for print ($28.00) vs the cost per use of digital ($4.00). The latter item was attributed to a representative from the University of Texas - Austin. While relying on Tweets for business intelligence can be a bit dicey, following up on those dollar amounts might prove worthwhile.
Read more »The STM Report
Nov 03
During the Frankfurt Book Fair, the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) released a research report authored by Mark Ware and Michael Mabe, entitled The STM Report: An overview of scientific, and scholarly journals publishing. An update of an initial industry benchmark report done in 2006, the report delivers a positive picture of the private sector's contribution to the dissemination of scholarship, noting that "access to literature has never been wider nor cost per download lower." Yet, one of the final sentences of the report (pg. 63) reads, "Political, societal, and cultural pressure for increased access to all kinds of content will not go away and publishers have not yet convinced the whole community that evolution of the existing business models provides the most effective and sustainable way to achieve this."
In predicting outcomes for the next 3 to 5 years, the STM report notes:
- the likelihood of a drop in advertising revenues for those scientific peer-reviewed journals able to attract such advertising to offset production costs
- the likelihood that Chinese research output and the quality of that research output will overtake the US within the next decade
- that the licensing of bundled content (the "Big Deal") will remain the dominant model for ensuring access, with the likelihood of increased flexibility in areas of collection development and pricing models.
The full text of the announcement of the report as well as the
report itself may be found here:
http://www.stm-assoc.org/news.php?id=255
MPublishing
Oct 27
The University of Michigan Press blog links today to an extensive outline of their new MPublishing initiative. With a mission of being the primary academic publishing unit of the institution, MPublishing will consist of four segments:
- the university press,
- the scholarly publishing office,
- an institutional repository,
- and a copyright office.
All of these will be housed (organizationally speaking) under the University of Michigan Libraries.
In terms of disciplinary coverage, the current strength of the
university press is in the humanities and social sciences, but the
formal statement makes a point of stating that MPublishing expects
to publish in the sciences as well, specifically the biomedical and
medical areas of scholarly publishing.
Selection Criteria and Information Resources
Oct 26
In looking over the RSS feeds this morning, I noted an entry from the Law Librarian Blog relating to the usability of a particular information resource (see The Witches Brew that is...). The librarian wasn't too pleased with the system, specifically noting that "The way too Google-ish inspired structure is accompanied by a decent set of SE filtering tools to mitigate some of the design flaws but, OMG, good luck getting a handle on how to use them and then, more importantly, on training others in their use so you aren't the only person on-site sufficiently skilled to perform effective...searches."
In this instance, the librarian felt that other competitive vendors were doing a better job at providing a usable service, albeit at a higher price, pointing out, "...dollar for dollar (Vendor A)'s editorial quality in labor and employment law far surpasses Vendor B. In addition to editorial content, (Vendor A)'s organization of all online content, SE, and website-like interface for its self-hosted services are so user friendly that patrons "get it" with a minimal amount of librarian assistance."
The take-away from that entry for vendors should be that librarians don't always go for the cheaper information resource, even in stringent times. They seek out an appropriate combination of quality content, quality indexing, usability and pricing (even if, as this entry suggests, the ultimate selection offers a slightly less high-tech service than its competitor). Re-engineer legacy product accordingly.
Read more »Scholarly Communication and Mobile Computing
Oct 20
When discussing mobile access and delivery of content within the context of scholarly communication, many providers of scholarly and scientific information do not see an immediate relevance to their products and services. As a result, they choose to delay any further consideration of this new delivery channel. They just don't see the potential for now. In hindsight, this may prove to be a mistake, for as noted in a comment on the website Academic Evolution, "The walls of scholarship are coming down, and mobile computing is one of the loudest trumpets at Jericho." While written with Open Access Publishing in mind, the comments are totally applicable to traditional journals and databases as well. Citing the first three iPhone applications currently used to access papers in the arXiv archive, it is noted that "…dedicated applications for direct access to full-text authoritative publications change the game...they have crossed a key threshold for scholarly communication and set the stage for things to come." Definitely an interesting read and in combination with Michael Nielsen's essay entitled, Is Scientific Publishing About to be Disrupted?, a very motivational one.
A number of forward-thinking content providers have already
taken the leap into mobile delivery of scholarly and scientific
content, among them are NFAIS member organizations such as the
American Institute of
Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine
and RefWorks-COS. You can learn from
their experiences in a one-day Workshop on the Mobile
Delivery of Content: Challenges and Opportunities scheduled for
October 30, 2009 in Philadelphia, PA and, if you are unable to
travel, you can register as a virtual attendee and have access to
the archived webcast for up to four weeks after the meeting. Don't
be the last to understand the potential of mobile computing, for as
stated in the closing of the Academic Evolution. "Hold on to your
cell phones. The new era of scholarship is calling."
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