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Libraries, patrons, and e-books - Pew Report

Libraries, patrons, and e-books - Pew Report

Some comments from respondents:
"I am reading more because it is easy and accessible"
"...if I find myself with a free couple of minutes, I can read a couple of pages.”...:"
"I have always been a reader, but I’m reading more books now that I have an e-book reader, and I’m getting through them more quickly. … I find that my family members and I also spend more time discussing the books that we are reading..."
"I read a lot more with e-books. I’ve ventured out into new genres and authors that I would never have found in the print world..."
"“I read multiple books all the time. An audiobook for my car and commute. An e-book for ‘whenever’ and print books for relaxing at home...."
(librarian)  “I love the ecological benefit of not having the waste of needing to buy a lot of copies and then having to discard half of them two years later,” one library department head told us. “I love that we don’t have to hassle patrons to bring e-materials back. I love that there are no damages, no worn out items, no sticky stains.”

New Roles, New Responsibilities: Examining Training Needs of Repository Staff

This study reports on a survey of Australasian institutional repository staff to identify skills and knowledge sets.

The Disappearing Web: Decay is Eating our History

The Disappearing Web: Decay Is Eating Our History

By Mathew Ingram on September 20, 2012

Bottom of Form

One of the characteristics of the modern media age—at least for anyone who uses the Web and social media a lot—is that we are surrounded by vast clouds of rapidly changing information, whether it’s blog post,s or news stories, or Twitter and Facebook updates. That’s great if you like real-time content, but there is a not-so-hidden flaw—namely, that you can’t step into the same stream twice, as Heraclitus put it. In other words, much of that information may (and probably will) disappear as new information replaces it, and small pieces of history wind up getting lost.

According to a recent study, which looked at links shared through Twitter about news events such as the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East, this could be turning into a substantial problem. The study, which MIT’s Technology Review highlighted in a recent post by the Physics arXiv blog, was done by a pair of researchers in Virginia, Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson. They took a number of recent major news events over the past three years—including the Egyptian revolution, Michael Jackson’s death, the elections and related protests in Iran, and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus—and tracked the links that were shared on Twitter about each. Following the links to their ultimate source showed that an alarming number of them had simply vanished.

In fact, the researchers said that within a year of these events, an average of 11 percent of the material that was linked to had disappeared completely (and another 20 percent had been archived), and after two-and-a-half years, close to 30 percent had been lost altogether and 41 percent had been archived. Based on this rate of information decay, the authors predicted that more than 10 percent of the information about a major news event will likely be gone within a year, and the remainder will continue to vanish at the rate of .02 percent per day.

It’s not clear from the research why the missing information disappeared, but it’s likely that in many cases blogs have simply shut down or moved, or news stories have been archived by providers who charge for access (something that many newspapers and other media outlets do to generate revenue). But as the Technology Review post points outhttp://www.technologyreview.com/view/429274/history-as-recorded-on-twitter-is-vanishing-from/?ref=rss, this kind of information can be extremely valuable in tracking how historical events developed, such as the Arab Spring revolutions—which the researchers note was the original impetus for their study, since they were trying to collect as much data as possible for the one-year anniversary of the uprisings.

Other scientists, and particularly librarians, have also raised red flags in the past about the rate at which digital data are disappearing. The National Library of Scotland, for example, recently warned that key elements of Scottish digital life were vanishing into a “black hole” and asked the government to fast-track legislation that would allow libraries to store copies of websites. Web pioneer Brewster Kahle is probably the best known digital archivist as a result of his Internet Archive project Open Library).

Although the Virginia researchers didn’t deal with it as part of their study, a related problem is that much of the content that gets distributed through Twitter—not just websites that are linked to in Twitter posts, but the content of the posts themselves—is difficult and/or expensive to get to. Twitter’s search is notoriously unreliable for anything older than about a week, and access to the complete archive of your tweets is provided only to those who can make a special case for needing it, such as Andy Carvin of National Public Radio (who is writing a book about the way he chronicled the Arab Spring revolutions).

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in a recent post, an external service called Gnip now has access to the full archive of Twitter content [http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/for-a-price-gnip-brings-you-access-to-all-public-tweets-ever-sent/], which it will provide to companies for a fee. And Twitter-based search-and-discovery engine Topsy also has an archive of most of the full “firehose” of tweets—although it focuses primarily on content that is retweeted a lot—and provides that to companies for analytical purposes. But neither can be easily linked to for research or historical archiving purposes. The Library of Congress also has an archive of Twitter’s content, but it isn’t easily accessible, and it’s not clear whether new content is being added.

Twitter has talked about providing a service that would let users download their tweets at some point, but it hasn’t said when such a thing would be available—and even if users did create their own archive in this way (or by using tools like Thinkup from former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani) it would be difficult to link those in a way that would provide the kind of connected historical information the Virginia study is describing. And it’s not just Twitter: There is no easy way to get access to an archive of Facebook (FB) posts either, although users in Europe can request access to their own archive as a result of a legal ruling there.

For better or worse, much of the content flowing around us seems to be just as insubstantial as the clouds it’s hosted in, and the existing tools we have for trying to capture and make sense of it simply aren’t up to the task. The long-term social effects of this digital amnesia remain to be seen.

  http://www.businessweek.com/

Reading Diary: Open Access by Peter Suber -

Some really interesting comments on Open Access
"...For librarians reading this book****, it is definitely a plus that Suber doesn’t take the condescending route and proclaim libraries and librarians to be casualties of increased OA. On the other hand, libraries as institutions that passively pay exorbitant subscription bills tend to figure more in the text than librarians as active participants, leaders and allies in reforming scholarly communications. Although I’m sure it’s not intended to read this way (and there are a couple of good plugs for libraries & librarians in the last chapter), it’s not hard to imagine faculty members reading this book imagining that their libraries need rescuing rather than coming away with the idea that their libraries are full of librarians who would be happy joining them storming the barricades. Change will happen faster and better if we hang together.............................

Finally, who would I recommend this book to? First of all, this book is a must-have for any academic library. No question about that......"

****we have this book ON ORDER in the RUL

Thanks to Brenda for this interesting Twitter alert!

Articlefrom the Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: “…….. When I referee an article for a journal, it usually takes three to four hours of my time. Recently, two Taylor & Francis journals asked me to review article submissions for them. In each case, I was probably one of 20 to 30 people in the world with the expert knowledge to judge whether the articles cited the relevant literature, represented it accurately, addressed important issues in the field, and made an original contribution to knowledge.
If you wanted to know whether that spot on your lung in the X-ray required an operation, whether the deed to the house you were purchasing had been recorded properly, or whether the chimney on your house was in danger of collapsing, you would be willing to pay a hefty fee to specialists who had spent many years acquiring the relevant expertise. Taylor & Francis, however, thinks I should be paid nothing for my expert judgment and for four hours of my time.
So why not try this: If academic work is to be commodified and turned into a source of profit for shareholders and for the 1 percent of the publishing world, then we should give up our archaic notions of unpaid craft labor and insist on professional compensation for our expertise, just as doctors, lawyers, and accountants do.
This does not mean we would never referee articles free. Just as the lawyer who is my neighbor bills corporate clients a hefty fee but represents prisoners in Guantánamo pro bono, so academics could referee without charge for nonprofit presses but insist on professional rates of compensation from for-profit publishers that expect us to donate our labor while paying mansion salaries [over $US 1 million/annum] to their chief executives and top managers….”

Guidelines needed to prevent impact-factor abuse

Citations play a big part in assessing a journal's quality but what happens when many of those citations come from papers authored by that journal's editorial board? Paul Peters considers the need to establish guidelines for appropriate citation practices

Academic libraries need to evolve to continue to meet the needs of their users in an open-access world, reports Sian Harris

Some snippets from this article:

"A big potential change for libraries will be the effect of OA on allocation of university budgets.."

.. still a strong culture of mistrust and misunderstanding about OA amongst researchers and that communicating with researchers and institutions about it will be an important function for libraries..."

"Managing metadata will be very important for good discoverability but functions such as metadata management and preservation are likely to be done on a web scale rather than on an institutional level, they noted. Libraries are also well placed to – and in many cases already do – manage institutional repositories...."

 " Value will be added by digitising and making available unique collections and libraries will increasingly need to work together and share functions and services...."

"While research librarians have been amongst the strongest advocates of OA models, the implications of these models for research libraries and their future role in supporting the research process are less well understood,..."

Academic eBooks and the User Experience (not an easy road!)

After our frustrating experience with the latest e-book we have purchased I found that the highlighted sentences (below) from  this article summed up my own feelings on e-books in the RU Library!
_______________________________________________________________________


"....With the price of textbooks rising, and institutions building their space in the online learning environment, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in the number of eTextbooks on our syllabi. For those institutions that purchase textbooks for reserves, the lending issue takes on an even more immediate concern. With Ingram’s VitalSource platform delivering 80,000 digital textbooks in 17 languages to 1.6 million students and faculty at 6000 campuses in 180 countries (according to The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections), we will need to figure out ways of making eBooks work in the academic research process more seamlessly.
We are ten years in to the eBook revolution and we’ve learned a lot. Unfortunately, most of the tools on the market are designed to silo users into a branded experience with a specific vendor-driven tool. Big companies have big reasons to keep users in their walled gardens. Being aware of the issues is one thing, but we, as academic librarians, need to find ways to ensure that the needs of the academic researcher do not get lost in the currently consumer-focused marketplace."

So what is an unglued ebook? (interesting initiative)

An unglued ebook is an already-published book that's been rereleased under a Creative Commons license, after obtaining permission and compensating the rights holder.

see this site 

European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL)

Anyone interested in presenting a paper? European Conference on Information Literacy

Organized by the Department of Information Management of Hacettepe University and Department of Information and Communication Sciences of Zagreb University, European Conference on Information Literacy (or ECIL) will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, from 22-25 October 2013.

This is a 'must read' from Eve Gray on Open Access in Africa!

Very interesting piece on Eve's blog:
 "...I have come to think that the green/gold debate is in fact a distraction from dealing with more insidious issues in our research publishing systems. These include the dominance of journals at the expense of other forms of publication; the almost universal adoption of the ISI and its Impact Factor as the basis for recognition and reward; and, most insidious of all, the marginalization of great swathes of global research through the implementation of this commercialized ranking system...." (Eve Gray)

 

Eve will moderate the session on OA and Improving Assessment of Research and Scholarly Publication at the Berlin 10 Conference in November in Stellenbosch (Roelien, Ujula, Debbie & Eileen will be attending this).

N ACCESS AND IMPROVING ASSESSMENT OF RESEARCH AND SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

List of books banned by governments

List of books banned by governments

 

(Mendeley) Connecting academic research to the outside world

(Worth a read)
"....One of the core ideas behind Mendeley has always been to use the huge amounts of data our users are uploading to make science more open and transparent. The Mendeley Institutional Edition creates a data dashboard on an institutional level: it tells a university exactly which journals are being read by their researchers, which lets librarians optimize their journal subscriptions and provide a better service to their researchers. It also enables the university to track their research output – what journals are their faculty publishing in, and how is this research being taken up in the rest of academia and in the outside world? Moreover, when a university subscribes to the Mendeley Institutional Edition, all of their students and faculty get upgraded to Mendeley premium accounts – we have now started to roll this out at places like Stanford University...."

Helicopter Librarian: Expect the Unexpected

Helicopter Librarians ... hover until the student is prepared for take-off!

Report reveal impacts of open access on libraries

From Research Information: "...Caroline Brazier, director of scholarship and collections at the British Library, also believes that discussion about the implications on OA on libraries is important: ‘Increasing numbers of academic researchers and policy makers in several countries are embracing the idea that the results of publicly funded research should be as widely available as possible. While research librarians have been amongst the strongest advocates of OA models, the implications of these models for research libraries and their future role in supporting the research process are less well understood,’ she said. ‘We must look beyond discussions on the pros and cons of ‘gold’ versus ‘green’ models to fundamental issues such as the future of research collections, changing skillsets and services required to support researchers of the future, at institutional and national levels. We hope this report conveys the urgency and significance of these issues to the wider research community.’"

The Inevitability of Open Access

A disruptive industry?
 This analysis  (from the latest C&RL issue) suggests that Gold OA could account for 50 percent of the scholarly journal articles sometime between 2017 and 2021, and 90 percent of articles as soon as 2020 and more conservatively by 2025.

Library Distributes Peter Suber’s Open Access to New Faculty

 

Library Distributes Peter Suber’s Open Access to New Faculty

According to Peter Suber’s new book Open Access: “When a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new works grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable.”

(one would have thought he would have published his book as an open access work!!!!  RUL has it on order)

 

Library subject guides: A case study of evidence-informed library development

Library subject guides: A case study of evidence-informed library development. 

Another topic which could be investigated at RUL?

Core reference competencies

Identifying Core Reference Competencies from an Employers’ Perspective: Implications for Instruction

"....reference in academic libraries today is not the same service it was even just a decade ago....What knowledge, skills, and competencies do current practitioners and hiring managers believe to be valuable for the provision of reference services now and into the future? What areas do managers find lacking or underdeveloped in their new hires? How well do current library science programs prepare students to meet employer expectations for reference positions?