April 2013
6 posts
2 tags
Abby Clobridge, "You Say You Want a Revolution? -... →
Pull quote: “Conversations about open access are no longer about whether it is a good idea; rather, the focus is on best practices, sustainability, and maximizing OA’s impact. With this shift in conversation, it is imperative that information professionals are ready to support open access and all it entails.”
5 tags
Laura Krier, "What’s Wrong with MARC? (NISO... →
Pull quote: “Sometimes I think cataloging is the third rail of library discussions, but I’m going jump right on it: It is not the library’s responsibility to employ catalogers. It is the library’s responsibility to make our resources easy for our users to find, and if we can do that faster and cheaper, we have an obligation to do so.”
7 tags
Kevin Smith, "Let Me Count the Ways," Peer to Peer... →
Pull quote: “But three recent events and publications have me made more deeply aware of something I think scholarly authors are also beginning to discover—that the traditional commercial publishing model is actively harmful to the interests of good scholarship. Not just failing to keep up with changing conditions, but lagging behind in ways that threaten the quality and integrity of the...
4 tags
danah boyd, "why I’m quitting Mendeley (and why my... →
Pull quote: “I cannot say the same thing for Elsevier. As most academics and many knowledge activists know, Elsevier has engaged in some pretty evil maneuvers. Elsevier published fake journals until it got caught. Its parent company was involved in the arms trade until it got caught. Elsevier played an unrepentant and significant role in advancing SOPA/PIPA/RWA and continues to lobby on...
3 tags
Mike Eisen, "Door-to-door subscription scams: the... →
Pull quote” And yes, a lot of these suspect journals charge authors for publishing their works, just like open access journals like PLoS do. But suggesting, as the article does, that scam conferences/journals exist because of the rise of open access publishing is ridiculous. It’s the logical equivalent of blaming newspapers like the NYT for people who go door-to-door selling fake magazine...
3 tags
Library Loon, "The Mendeley endgame," Gavia... →
Pull quote: “Elsevier will grab behavior data while the grabbing’s good, analyze it, make business decisions from it, and then drop all pretense of caring. They will let Mendeley fade, its loyal userbase straggling away, its dedicated developers moving on (within Elsevier or outside it).”
March 2013
13 posts
1 tag
Lorcan Dempsey, "Defining the library ...... →
Pull quote: “I like the way each of these emphasises the role of the library in a cycle of creation and recreation. The library is not an end in itself but an institution which helps create new knowledge.”
3 tags
PF Anderson, "A Personal Timeline of Library... →
Pull quote: “One of my favorites was a librarian who announces at every monthly board meeting, ‘There have been no legal requests for patron records.’ Then, if she is ever asked, she will go silent, and the board will know. It happened. Many libraries emulated this once she thought of it, and there are libraries all around the country where we make forced silence obvious and...
3 tags
Alycia Sellie, "Street Librarianship, Without the... →
Pull quote: “First, we need to share our own work as widely as possible. This means investigating and getting comfortable with open licenses for our writing, images and creative work as well as our code. Further, we must be critical of proprietary systems that are costly and hard to use—from Blackboard to Facebook. We need to use alternatives to the technological giants, and we should talk...
3 tags
Richard Nash, "What Is the Business of... →
Pull quote: “You begin to realize that the business of literature is the business of making culture, not just the business of manufacturing bound books. This, in turn, means that the increased difficulty of selling bound books in a traditional manner (and the lower price point in selling digital books) is not going to be a significant challenge over the long run, except to free the business...
8 tags
Kevin Smith, "The quest for 'super-property,'”... →
Pull quote: “Publishers were seeking a ‘new deal,’ a super-property right that is unprecedented in any other market place. And what libraries ‘won’ (remembering that no library was a party to the case) was simply the right to proceed as we have been for many years. I have no doubt that if the lower courts had been upheld in this case, publishers would begin to demand...
3 tags
Kevin Smith, "International First Sale is upheld,"... →
Pull quote: “It appears that the Court took very seriously that ‘parade of horribles’ that were suggested if they upheld the Second Circuit — libraries would be unable to lend some materials without a license from publishers., student could be prevented from buying or selling second-hand textbooks, etc. According to the Court, these were too distressing, and too likely to...
3 tags
Bob Stein, "The Future of the Book is the Future... →
Pull quote: “Although we date the ‘age of print’ from 1454, more than two hundred years passed before the ‘novel’ emerged as a recognizable form. Newspapers and magazines took even longer to arrive on the scene. Just as Gutenberg and his fellow printers started by reproducing illustrated manuscripts, contemporary publishers have been moving their printed texts to...
4 tags
Jacob Berg, "Dear Aspiring Librarians (On MLIS... →
Pull quote: “What we have here is a lazy, crude metric that attempts to get at something like “reputation,” but the magazine’s staff doesn’t know how and doesn’t care to know how to really do it.”
3 tags
Jim DelRosso, "Libraries’ Glass Escalator," The... →
Pull quote: “In fact, I’ll go further and say that any male librarian who does not take a step back and consider that the raises, promotions, and laurels he receives come to him easier than they do to his female colleagues is doing himself, his peers, and his profession a disservice.”
4 tags
Chris Bourg, "The great librarian identity crisis... →
Pull quote: “But I wonder if there is a way to “change the narrative” (hat tip to Bess Sadler for the phrase). What if the story was that the work libraries do is so important and so cool that everyone wants a piece of it? Or that libraries are such logical places for a broad range of services and resources that of course we need to hire folks with a broader range of education and skills and...
A Library for the Subway →
counterpunches:
A trio of students from the Miami Ad School—Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez—have came up with an innovative concept that allows people to read the first ten pages of popular books while riding the subway. Using near field communications (NFC) technology, commuters select the desired book from a list of popular titles and read its first ten pages—upon finishing,...
3 tags
Heather Piwowar, "Why Google isn’t good enough for... →
Pull quote: “Google isn’t an acceptable answer to Searching across academic papers (toll access, green OA, gold OA, whatever) because it doesn’t support a way for people to digest the search results, add value, and apply the results in new and innovative ways. Google search results can only be used on Google’s website manually, or embedded as-is in other websites.”
2 tags
John Mark Ockerbloom, "From Wikipedia to our... →
Pull quote: “So I’ve added some example library resources boxes in a few Wikipedia articles that seemed particularly relevant this month, including those for Women’s history, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Flannery O’Connor. Look down in the “External links” or “Further reading” sections of those articles for the boxes, and view the page source of the articles to see how those boxes are...
February 2013
8 posts
5 tags
Chris Bourg, "What kinds of experts are important... →
Pull quote: “My big take-aways are that we ought to be hiring or developing humanities and social science librarians with strong scholarly and technical expertise; which for the social scientists ought to include strong statistical and methodological training.”
8 tags
Jacob Berg, "Vine and Web-based Library... →
Pull quote: “Quick, simple, elegant, Vine offers something more than a snapshot, but less than a three-minute tutorial in which one’s eyes glaze over, or constantly pause and rewind to keep up.”
2 tags
Whitney Hess, Improving the human experience one... →
Pull quote: “There are in fact skills that every user experience designer must exhibit, regardless of sector, seniority, or specialization:
A proficiency in building empathy for customer needs
An aptitude for communicating with colleagues across organizational functions
The initiative to investigate a problem and generate a multitude of solutions for it
An eye for intuitiveness and...
Karen Coyle, "Book people v. article people,"... →
Pull quote: “If we want ‘equal access to information,’ as we often claim we librarians do, then we need to do something about journal article pricing. I’d be quite willing to pay $2-$4 for an article, but the $30-$40 price range is ridiculous. I’m sure that these journal companies sell very few, if any, full-price articles. As we’ve seen with other media, when...
11 tags
Nancy Sims, "What is the government's interest in... →
Pull quote: “For the government to even consider intervening in this case signals (incredibly much more intensely than I have thought in my most cynical moments) that they do not think there are any valid interests in copyright other than that of business entities engaging in commercial, market activities.”
13 tags
Scott Jaschik, "Library supporters worry U.S. may... →
Pull quote: “Jonathan Band, a Washington lawyer who is an expert on copyright law, said via e-mail that his ‘suspicion is that the Copyright Office has asked DOJ to file an amicus brief in support of the publishers. Hopefully other agencies, e.g., the Department of Education, will weigh in and advise the DOJ that supporting the publishers would be a bad idea from a political, public...
6 tags
Colleen Greene, "Redesigning Our Academic Library... →
Pull quote: “Despite the use of OU Campus being a mandate from above, my library web team has been generally pleased with the product. As a web developer and systems administrator, I am thrilled with the quality and responsiveness of their customer service and technical support. As a library web developer, however, I have to admit that OU Campus does not fully meet the design and usability...
4 tags
Richard Nurse, "Library data for library users,"... →
Pull quote: “One of the areas that would be useful to look at would be some form of student dashboard for library engagement. So this could give students some data about what engagement they have had with the library, e.g. resources accessed, library skills completed, library badges gained, library visits, books/ebooks borrowed etc. Maybe set against averages for their course, and perhaps...
January 2013
24 posts
6 tags
Hyrum Denney, "Sticky Menus Are Quicker To... →
Pull quote: “Participants were then asked whether one of the websites felt easier to use. Six of the 40 participants had no preference, but of the 34 that did have a preference, 100% of them indicated that the website with the sticky navigation was easier or faster to use. Many comments along this line were made, such as ‘I don’t know how the websites were different, but I felt like I...
7 tags
Jonathan Rochkind, "Kinda like Google Books for... →
Pull quote: “It sounds like their approach is fair… …which doesn’t mean it’s legal. The opt-out nature they describe above is similar to the kind of thing that got Google Books and HathiTrust sued…. except it’s actually less legally defensible because they aren’t just using ‘snippets’, they really are selling complete digitized work.”
4 tags
Chris Bourg, "A feminist defense of browsing,"... →
Pull quote: “All of this has me troubled by our tendency (yep, I’ve been guilty myself) to dismiss talk about the value of physical browsing as merely wistful or nostalgic. There is something very real and important there, and I think shining a feminist lens on the issues is likely to help us see what it is, so that the libraries we are building for the future are inclusive of all kinds of...
4 tags
David Lee King, "I Was Hacked!" David Lee King →
Pull quote: “Because, well, you know … it happened to me, it can happen to you, too.”
ARL Policy Notes: First Sale Fast Facts for... →
arlpolicynotes:
If you read this blog (or follow me on Twitter), you’ve probably at least heard of the “first sale doctrine.” Maybe you’ve heard about the Supreme Court case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons, and that it might affect library lending, but the details seem complex and technical. The Library Copyright…
7 tags
Jon Udell, "Why Johnny Can't Syndicate(And What We... →
Pull quote: “I want things to work differently. I want to manage my affairs by syndicating, tagging, and republishing data feeds. Now I grant you that’s a tall order. It presents all sorts of technical challenges. But trust me, those are solvable, I don’t worry about that. I worry more about the human challenge. We won’t get the right kinds of solutions unless customers...
6 tags
Richard Nurse, "Making the library’s search box... →
Pull quote: “So you look at bringing together content from different systems, probably using the Bento Box approach…where you search across your different systems using APIs etc and return a series of results from each of those systems. You then get a series of results that come from each of the different systems and incorporate the relevancy ranking of discovery systems, rather than...
7 tags
Alan Cockerill, "Removing Library Jargon from our... →
Pull quote: “Our user testing showed confusion about article searching with significant numbers going to the eJournal portal (an A-Z listing from Serials Solutions) browsing for a likely journal title, then browsing the issues for a relevant article.”
5 tags
Peter Brantley, "A Maverick Library," PWxyz →
Pull quote: “BiblioTech fits into Judge Wolff’s pattern of encouraging the long-term development of San Antonio. The vision anticipates a multi-location facility providing community information needs, with the first site serving as a model; it would be open into evening hours, available to registered County residents, and would provide access to up to an anticipated 10,000 ebook titles,...
5 tags
Rebecca Rosen, "The Viral-Media Prof Whose Kids... →
Pull quote: “One of the more surprising ways that the Internet age resembles the pre-Civil War period [Ryan] Cordell studies is not culturally nor technologically, but legally. ‘The period that I work on is before a lot of modern copyright law went into effect,’ Cordell told me. ‘It’s kind of a wild west back then, when something that’s printed in a newspaper or...
4 tags
Jakob Nielsen, "Auto-Forwarding Carousels and... →
Pull quote: “This example design is flawed in so many ways, but the worst offense is probably in making something move that should be static. It’s sad to think that extra money was wasted on jazzing up this design with harmful moving features, rather than just creating simple content that clearly communicates the company’s value proposition.”
3 tags
Eric Hellman, "Edward Tufte was a Proto-Phreaker... →
Pull quote: “AT&T could have ruined Tufte’s life by bringing in the police, but they didn’t. They made sure that Tufte and his friend told no one, didn’t try to sell their system to the Mafia, and didn’t cause anyone harm. Except for a few late-night cocktail parties, Tufte never told anyone the story, until tonight, at the New York City memorial gathering for...
4 tags
David Free, "College & Research Libraries to Move... →
Pull quote: “The membership survey informed discussions and the final decision to invest resources in the online platform rather than sustain print.”
8 tags
Wayne Bivens-Tatum, "Politics, Economics, and... →
Pull quote: “To what extent has it been appropriate to sacrifice the short and long term good of patrons in the humanities for the short term good of not having to resist price increases or rethink journal packages that slowly squeeze monograph budgets to death? Are historians or literary scholars or musicologists less deserving because they’re not in the sciences? If so, why bother to offer...
7 tags
Chris Bourg, "Books (all kinds) and ejournals are... →
Pull quote: “For me, the big take-away from the details below is that large majorities of faculty across all disciplines rate Print Books, Electronic Books, and Ejournals as Important or Very Important. The fact that both print and electronic books are important to all faculty is more evidence to me that the easy stereotypes that scientists don’t need print and humanists resist digital are...
5 tags
James Gleick, "Librarians of the Twitterverse,"... →
Pull quote: “The Library of Congress dreams of being able to provide scholars instant results for all kinds of queries—’to be able to answer any question a researcher puts before the archives,’ as Dizard says—but that may be a long way off. Right now, to run a single query can take days.”
3 tags
Walt Crawford, "Academic library spending on... →
Pull quote: “Putting that in dollars, e-serials took $245 million more out of academic library budgets in 2010 than they did in 2008.”
5 tags
Karen Harker, "Analyzing changes to journal prices... →
Pull quote: “Are we buying too much? Is the growth in content truly worth our money?”
3 tags
Micah Walter, "cultural source code," micah walter →
Pull quote: “We also wanted our website to be more approachable. We designed it with a minimalistic attitude and a somewhat whimsical style. You’ll see small jokes here and there and the language is meant to be more engaging and less ‘institutional.’ We know that in order to be really relevant we need to disconnect ourselves from all of the institutional hand waving and...
2 tags
Mills Kelly, "Back of the Book History," edwired →
We never could know who checked out a book and for how long, but the old back of the book due date stamp system at least gave us some indication of how popular the book was, even if it only told us that one person checked it out over and over and over. At least we could know that it was being checked out. Now all circulation information is available only to the librarian who can see the screen...
5 tags
Lukas Kloster, "(Discover AND deliver) OR else,"... →
Pull quote: “[I]t is time to stop thinking publications and start thinking data. This way the academic library could transform itself into a new central data services hub.”
3 tags
Rebecca Rosen, "A Simple Suggestion to Help Phase... →
Pull quote: “I will not speak on or moderate all-male panels at technology and science conferences.”
4 tags
Kendra K. Levine, "Professionalism: On changing... →
My warning is this though: think about the transition and all the little things and what you’re paying for. Drastic staff changes can happen overnight, but you can’t just drop everything for the new model like that. It take work. We’re not done with the transition yet, but it’s be pretty painful and I really wish we had more wisely focused our efforts when we had the staff to help, but that ship...
