I went to the ASA to give a talk about the class I taught last spring, “Reading Culture in the 19th-Century Library,” and the resulting exhibit that’s now on display. The talk was called “Self-Improvement and Unplanned Pleasures in the Public Library, or, Why I Had to Change the Title of this Presentation.” It’s really not a big deal to change a conference title, but in this case the change itself became my topic: how my idea about what was important in the class had to change based on the students’ responses and their independent work.
I planned the course intending to use the George Peabody to show, not just the emergence of the public library and its connections to developments in print technology, literary tastes, education and the growth of cities, but also how the public library movement was contradictory in its ideals and actual practices. That is, all the great ideas about self-improvement, civic duty, democratic participation and cultural progress that “books for the masses” would supposedly accomplish—well, they were compromised in practice, as demonstrated by the gap between Peabody’s founding letter (and similar documents like the Report of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library) and the library’s policies and procedures. I thought this was interesting in itself, and also a great representation of the cultural dynamics of late 19th- and early 20th-century progressive ideology.
What I found out as I taught the course was… students did not find this gap all that surprising or dismaying. If you’re curious about why, check out my presentation, which I’ll post in JScholarship shortly. Happily, the students’ final projects—book collections which became the exhibit—are wonderfully adept at revealing the nuances of 19th century reading practices and their connections to larger social issues. In short, without the burden of exemplifying the canned argument I had prepared, the students did a better job at actually showing that argument in action.
The panel itself, called “Archive This?!,” was about the politics of archive formation. Lauren Coats from Louisiana State University gave a talk about the proliferation of Christopher Columbus’ letters and how they appear differently in different archival contexts—often without the metadata or interpretive frameworks that help readers understand their status as objects. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun from Brown University talked about “undead” information, as exemplified/examined by a new project she is creating on the scalar platform, developed by the same folks at USC who created the multimedia digital journal Vectors. After the presentations, there was a spirited discussion with folks from museum studies programs, libraries, history and American Studies.
Two other highlights of the conference: getting to hear my favorite historian of ephemera, Ellen Gruber Garvey, talk about Civil War scrapbooks and the circulation of newspaper poetry. Also great was the meeting of the digital humanities caucus, which used a lightning talk format. People on the program spoke briefly and frankly about successes and challenges with a variety of digital projects and opportunities, most of which involve scholars, librarians and technologists working together. A few examples:
• Multiple Interpretive Markup on the Horatio Nelson Taft Diary
http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-692.html
Susan Garfinkel and Jurretta Heckscher, Libray of Congress
What’s the next step for the “American Memory” digital materials at the Library of Congress? This is one example.
• Our Americas Archive
http://oaap.rice.edu
http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219
Lisa Spiro, Director, Digital Media Center at Rice University
Bringing together dispersed digital collections.
• “American Enterprise” at the National Museum of American History
http://americanhistory.si.edu/americanenterprise/
Kathy Franz, Associate Professor of History, American University
Creating a pre-exhibition website to solicit feedback from the public to help set up exhibit.
• “Ranking America” blog
http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/
Mark Rice, Chair, American Studies, St. John Fisher College
Great source for twitter! This project led him to a series of articles in Forbes and a new class.
• Searching for Siqueiros
A. Joan Saab, Associate Professor of Art History & Director, Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
Based on her research on the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros, this will be a community-collaborative digital book about his impact on the visual culture of L.A., using the scalars platform that is currently in development by the folks at Vectors.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Charleston Conference
I also attended the 30th annual Charleston Conference and found it very helpful in terms of my new role of managing our electronic subscriptions for the Excelsior College. I attended a negotiating with vendors preconference on Wednesday that brought together people with different perspectives in dealing with licensing, which made for a balanced and insightful view on how to best negotiate these contracts.
The conference itself was jam-packed and I attended over 20 sessions! Some of my favorites included:
The conference itself was jam-packed and I attended over 20 sessions! Some of my favorites included:
- Let them Eat Everything…Embracing a Patron-Driven Future, Rick Anderson, University of Utah. Thought-provoking point: Libraries do fundamentally crazy things when we have no options. We get good at these things and then they become core services? ex. ILL, Big Deals, reference & instruction (like telling 25 fishermen to fish for 20,000 fish)
- Who Do we Trust? Meaning of Brand in Scholarly Publishing and Academic Librarianship, Kent Anderson, Dean Smith (Project Muse), Hazel Woodard, Allen Renear (Univ Of Illinois Lib School)- Brand is interesting, we all trust the brand, but why? Because it represents something else-the process. However, how far should we stretch this? ex. Nature communications.
- Open Textbook Models: View from the Library, Greg Rascke NC State. Discussed FlatWorld and their business model; Then, NC State's library policy to purchase one of every required textbook.
- Executive Roundtable Q& A- Y.S. Chi, Elsevier and Kent Anderson. A question focused on how publishers are dealing with supplemental data, how much should go online and how should it be posted?
- What can our Readers Teach us? John Sack, Associate Director for Highwire Press Thinking outside the box- Readers want information and we give them a container (books, articles, journals, etc.) and they have to unpack them. *If we can find what users want, we can get out of the box.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Geology Field Trip to Gettysburg with Professor Bruce Marsh
On November 10, Keith Kaneda and I went on a field trip to Gettysburg with Professor Bruce Marsh of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department and two of his students. Keith and I are working with Bruce, trying to get his data, photos, field notes, etc. related to his fieldwork in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica into proper form, suitable for ingest into the Data Conservancy's archive. This field trip was a welcome change of pace for me and, in fact, was one of the highlights of my time (almost 12 years now) here at Johns Hopkins.
I myself know nothing about rocks, so being surrounded all day by geologists was a treat. (And if you don't think rocks are interesting please track down our own Keith Kaneda and just have him start talking. It's really as simple as that. Mark my words, within about 45 seconds you will feel the Pull of all things Geology. Really.)
Aside from the tangential lecture on the Battle of Gettysburg, I was interested to learn that the geologic structure of the Gettysburg area is really similar to that of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, that the great rift upon which Gettysburg sits is actually a geologic dividing line between the Appalachians and all that is to the East, and that all that is to the East was left behind when the continent of what is now Africa broke apart from what is now North America. I learned about geologic dykes, and about the red rock, iron-rich, I've always seen while traveling through the Maryland Catoctins. I learned that it's thought the Appalachians were once higher than the Himalayas are now. I learned that trying to calculate the how high a mountain on Earth could possibly be is a hard problem, yet observing mountains on Mars may help us out in this regard.
(I learned that sitting in the middle of the back seat of a Nissan Murano is more comfortable than where the other two guys at your elbows are sitting because you are perfectly balanced and are not constantly sliding toward the door.)
Keith pointed out various items of interest on a detailed geologic map of eastern Pennsylvania, while Bruce went to greet Professor Ben Edwards of Dickinson College and Professor Steve Sparks of the University of Bristol, U.K. Professor Sparks was visiting to give the 2010 Joseph Priestley Lecture at Dickinson that evening.
It was interesting to watch as these seasoned geologists interacted. We stopped in downtown Gettysburg to examine the rock foundation of a building there, they pulled out their loupes to more clearly see the crystalline structure. They spoke in a code I did not understand -- and yet I always felt on the verge.
This form of participant observation is, for me, one of the joys of working in higher education. I always feel like a small glitter of knowledge has somehow drifted down upon me, in this case it was a glitter red and iron-rich.
As we gassed up at the Kwik-i-Mart on our way out of town, I thought I might buy a bumper sticker there for my darling sixteen-year-old stepdaughter:
"My Step-Dad took a geologic tour of Gettyburg and all I got was a chunk of Dolerite."
Mark Cyzyk
I myself know nothing about rocks, so being surrounded all day by geologists was a treat. (And if you don't think rocks are interesting please track down our own Keith Kaneda and just have him start talking. It's really as simple as that. Mark my words, within about 45 seconds you will feel the Pull of all things Geology. Really.)
Aside from the tangential lecture on the Battle of Gettysburg, I was interested to learn that the geologic structure of the Gettysburg area is really similar to that of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, that the great rift upon which Gettysburg sits is actually a geologic dividing line between the Appalachians and all that is to the East, and that all that is to the East was left behind when the continent of what is now Africa broke apart from what is now North America. I learned about geologic dykes, and about the red rock, iron-rich, I've always seen while traveling through the Maryland Catoctins. I learned that it's thought the Appalachians were once higher than the Himalayas are now. I learned that trying to calculate the how high a mountain on Earth could possibly be is a hard problem, yet observing mountains on Mars may help us out in this regard.
(I learned that sitting in the middle of the back seat of a Nissan Murano is more comfortable than where the other two guys at your elbows are sitting because you are perfectly balanced and are not constantly sliding toward the door.)
Keith pointed out various items of interest on a detailed geologic map of eastern Pennsylvania, while Bruce went to greet Professor Ben Edwards of Dickinson College and Professor Steve Sparks of the University of Bristol, U.K. Professor Sparks was visiting to give the 2010 Joseph Priestley Lecture at Dickinson that evening.
It was interesting to watch as these seasoned geologists interacted. We stopped in downtown Gettysburg to examine the rock foundation of a building there, they pulled out their loupes to more clearly see the crystalline structure. They spoke in a code I did not understand -- and yet I always felt on the verge.
This form of participant observation is, for me, one of the joys of working in higher education. I always feel like a small glitter of knowledge has somehow drifted down upon me, in this case it was a glitter red and iron-rich.
As we gassed up at the Kwik-i-Mart on our way out of town, I thought I might buy a bumper sticker there for my darling sixteen-year-old stepdaughter:
"My Step-Dad took a geologic tour of Gettyburg and all I got was a chunk of Dolerite."
Mark Cyzyk
Digital Library Federation Forum 2010
The most interesting thing by far about the Digital Library Federation Forum (DLF) was the Project Managers Group meeting, but my colleague Tim DiLauro has already reported on that. Please take the last statement with a grain of salt, as I was one of the organizers of the meeting :-) So, I will report on a couple of other meetings.
Four librarians from UCLA gave a very interesting presentation on the role of the library as a research partner with faculty. One way they do this is by providing discipline-based IT and research support through the Lab for Digital Cultural Heritage and the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE-HASIS). The latter provides high performance and statistical computing for researchers in Humanities, Arts and Architecture, and Social and Information Sciences. They have developed the notion of a "digital projects pipeline" that helps connect scholars with digital support groups in the library and other parts of the university. The pipeline provides researchers a single contact point to find the proper resources and expertise in developing digital projects. It also helps coordinate work across participating groups for interdisciplinary projects.
The UCLA folks also showed a series of video interviews with faculty members talking about their view of the role of the library in the research process. There was universal agreement that the library remains an important physical space and a collaborative virtual space. One researcher said that librarians need to change from a culture of "service" to "research collaboration" as in a scientific lab. Another spoke of librarian/scholar collaborations as "renaissance teams". UCLA has been one of the leading libraries to employ CLIR postdoctoral fellows, so they are showing a great commitment to an active engagement with researchers.
This was a working session that exemplifies the direction the DLF forum is going. Rather than simply offering a series of "talking heads" throughout the conference, this Forum included a more interactive experience with reading discussions, working groups, and other collaborative sessions. This working group, led by librarians from UCLA (again) and the University of Iowa, looked at what staffing models were needed for the "digital research commons" and how digital library staff can introduce nontraditional methods and workflows into traditional settings such as preservation and technical services.
After very brief presentations about the two questions raised above, we split into two groups for discussion. I participated in the group that discussed the introduction of nontraditional workflows and methods into traditional settings. One thread of this discussion was the question of whether we are digitizing materials for access or preservation. While there was agreement that both were important, there was frustration that we are choosing items more for preservation purposes than for access. There was also a lot of discussion about the staffing levels in the library. Many complained that not enough staff had been re-allocated from traditional services to digital library services. This remains a tough problem since libraries continue to provide many types of services. We need to be especially careful to recruit staff who are comfortable with a wide range of technology and a tolerance for ambiguity in their job assignments.
Digital Library as Partner in Transformation
Four librarians from UCLA gave a very interesting presentation on the role of the library as a research partner with faculty. One way they do this is by providing discipline-based IT and research support through the Lab for Digital Cultural Heritage and the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE-HASIS). The latter provides high performance and statistical computing for researchers in Humanities, Arts and Architecture, and Social and Information Sciences. They have developed the notion of a "digital projects pipeline" that helps connect scholars with digital support groups in the library and other parts of the university. The pipeline provides researchers a single contact point to find the proper resources and expertise in developing digital projects. It also helps coordinate work across participating groups for interdisciplinary projects.
The UCLA folks also showed a series of video interviews with faculty members talking about their view of the role of the library in the research process. There was universal agreement that the library remains an important physical space and a collaborative virtual space. One researcher said that librarians need to change from a culture of "service" to "research collaboration" as in a scientific lab. Another spoke of librarian/scholar collaborations as "renaissance teams". UCLA has been one of the leading libraries to employ CLIR postdoctoral fellows, so they are showing a great commitment to an active engagement with researchers.
Digital Library Growing Pains
This was a working session that exemplifies the direction the DLF forum is going. Rather than simply offering a series of "talking heads" throughout the conference, this Forum included a more interactive experience with reading discussions, working groups, and other collaborative sessions. This working group, led by librarians from UCLA (again) and the University of Iowa, looked at what staffing models were needed for the "digital research commons" and how digital library staff can introduce nontraditional methods and workflows into traditional settings such as preservation and technical services.
After very brief presentations about the two questions raised above, we split into two groups for discussion. I participated in the group that discussed the introduction of nontraditional workflows and methods into traditional settings. One thread of this discussion was the question of whether we are digitizing materials for access or preservation. While there was agreement that both were important, there was frustration that we are choosing items more for preservation purposes than for access. There was also a lot of discussion about the staffing levels in the library. Many complained that not enough staff had been re-allocated from traditional services to digital library services. This remains a tough problem since libraries continue to provide many types of services. We need to be especially careful to recruit staff who are comfortable with a wide range of technology and a tolerance for ambiguity in their job assignments.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
SPARC Repositories, Baltimore, November 8-9, 2010
On November 8 and 9 I attended the SPARC Repositories conference in downtown Baltimore. (For whatever they're worth, I've attached my notes below.)
The highlights of this conference for me all happened on the second day. First, it is always a great pleasure to hear Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), speak. As always, a little voice inside admonishes me to "Sit up straight, Sonny, and listen to the Master." Truly. Lynch openly mused about global repositories and the problems associated with Big Data: How far away from Big Computation should they be? Big Bandwidth? Should these all be co-located? Big Questions were raised here.
The luncheon keynote, by Dr. George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office, Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, was another highlight, an enjoyable, entertaining, even folksy lunchtime
survey of the evolution of, well, the Internet, the Web, disruptive technologies, everything that's current. Direct quote, aimed at commercial publishers: "Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle." !
I actually found the closing panel on sustainability, particularly the final panelist in this session from Hong Kong University, to be the most interesting. And what I found most interesting about it was tangential to the subject of the panel itself: David Palmer from HKU, in addition to noting how his repository is sustained (through a grant from Hong Kong's higher education directorate), showed off some of the things they've been able to do with it. They are using their repository as a "reputation management system" and have created a page/space for every single professor at their university. They've reaped data from their university's research management database; they've reaped data from departmental Websites about each professor; they've created a ResearcherID for every professor, then used it to reap bibliographic and bibliometric data from the indexing/abstracting services; in an effort at authority control, they've had each professor load a copy of the Publish or Perish software locally, then use it to identify his/her authoritative name in Google Scholar, and have likewise used Publish or Perish to cut and paste bibliometric data directly into each professor's space inside the repository. They have reaped so much data that the internal organizational flow has begun now to change, from a Departmental-Website-to-Repository flow, to a Repository-to-Departmental-Website flow. I say "Bravo!"
Mark Cyzyk
##########################################################
Mark Cyzyk's Notes
SPARC Repositories
Baltimore
November 8-9, 2010
November 8
Opening Keynote
Michael Nielsen: Quantum Physicist
Open science
Linux industry
Survey of "open" projects. Open source projects. Wikipedia
Might this be used in the science community?
Polymath Project Mathematics in the open
Gower's blog. Fields medalist
rules of collaboration
Be polite; only one idea per comment
"restructured expert attention"
Not the future of scientific publishing, but fundamentally changes the way scientific knowledge is constructed.
Citizen science
Galaxy Zoo, e.g.
Failures: Scientific wikis; open peer review; scientific social networks
Little incentive to participate
No reputational reward for participation
What is successful? Open projects supporting conventional scientific goals and practices -- generating papers
Conservative ends
Genesis and evolution of scientific communication/publication
"Bermuda principles" for release of genome data
We all agree to release our data
But only for human genetic data
Need to apply this idea
Open data
Grant agencies can mandate sharing
But scientific communities must agree
Panel:
REPOSITORY-BASED PUBLISHING SERVICES: STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS (OR FAILURE)
Moderated by Patricia Renfro, Columbia University
Wendy Robertson, Digital Resources Librarian, University of Iowa
Mark Newton, Digital Collections Librarian, Purdue University Libraries
Ventura Pérez, Assistant Professor of Bioarchaeology, UMass Amherst
Nathan MacBrien, Publications Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley
University of Iowa Libraries, believe libraries should be actively involved in ePublishing.
Digital Commons.
Not tied to specific technologies
Interaction with UIowa Press. Humanities monographs
Working paper series
Small society journals
Special digital projects. Iowa City Flood digital exhibit
Host back volumes for University Iowa Press
Conversion of Biographical Dictionary of Iowa into online version
MOU between Library and Press/Faculty/Editors
Graphic design/usability
Editors are not particularly technology savvy
Purdue University Libraries
Collabortation with Press
Press is a unit of the Libraries
Digital Commons repository
Press uses infrastructure too
10 repository journals. eJournals published directly to the repository
Repository as publishing platform
IMLS one year planning grant, with University of Utah, Georgia Tech
3 workshops to be held in May 2011. Survey
UMass Bioarchealogist Narco violence US Mexico border
"Landscapes of Violence" journal. Open access journal. Interdisciplinary
BEPress
Lack of access to peer-reviewed journal content counts as "structural violence"???
Yaqui massacre 1902. Repatriation of human remains, US to Yaqui
Local access to scholarly publications about them
Took two years to get his journal up and running
Difficult to assemble an Editorial Board
Don't want mere figureheads
Cultural changes in tenure process required if Open Access is to be successful
Institute for International Studies, Berkeley
Open access book publishing
GAIA
Collaboration with CDL and UC press
Publish 5-8 titles per year
One person staff
UCPubS publishing platform
Print on demand through Press. online retailing
Digital edition available through eScholarship repository
Humanities and social sciences, nervous about open-access, bottom-up publishing
[NOTE: A lot of institutions using BEPress/Digital Commons.]
OPEN DATA
Moderated by Kathleen Shearer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries
Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre
Gail Steinhart, Research Data & Environmental Sciences Librarian, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University
Charles K. Humphrey, Head of Data Research Services, University of Alberta
Digital Curation Centre
Ways of thinking about Open Data: Government data; research data
World data centers - atmospheric; oceanographic
Legal obligations to deposit
UK Data Archive - 40+ years old
Must retrain people to be data curators. Not a lot of data curators out there right now.
Data Management Planning (DMP)
DCC checklists for DMP. Online tool.
DCC training, 1-5 day course
Citing data, linking data
UK Research Data Service (UKRDS)
Data collections at Cornell
Topology: Research; Resource; Reference data collections
"Small" data is important
Need for data librarians. Not many out there
Data eScience librarians
Research Data Management Service Group (RDMSG) at Cornell
Data Staging Repository (DataStaR): A place for researchers to post datasets in a controlled setting
Curating and preserving datasets and providing them for cross-disciplinary discovery and use
Submit data, share data, publish data via DataStaR. RDF store for metadata. Data files stored in Fedora
In production now
Have published a few dozen datasets
Data discussion group at Cornell libraries
Data library at University of Alberta
No national data archive
The data landscape in Canada, a patchwork
MS Excel as primary tool for entering and managing data! This is what researchers use.
Distribute OAIS functions across organizations? One model of how to tie things together
Or create a cloud of services, micro-services
Community cloud of services. No silos
Canadian Research Library Association -- adopting this at the national level
How they do it in the U.K; how they do it at Cornell; how they do it in Canada.
Tuesday, November 9
GLOBAL REPOSITORY NETWORKS
Moderated by Neil Jacobs, acting Program Director for the Information Environment, JISC
Jun Adachi, Director of Cyber Science Infrastructure Development, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information
Martha Giraldo Jaramillo, Executive Director, RENATA
SPARC Europe. Why is Europe far ahead in open access? European Commission mandate.
Establishing European PKP network, fall 2011
JISC definition/rationale for repositories
COAR Confederation of open access repositories. European
Mentions EDF in France mid-seventies, does not mention its failure! (Bruno Latour book)
Topology of repository tools, platforms, gateways, networks
Growing -- not building -- a global repository network.
500 nmember library consortium in Japan. Negotiating power.
Clifford Lynch
Is the repository the right unit of infrastructure to be thinking about?
Global infrastructure. Big data, staging areas, moving it, local workflows
Repositories situated relative to large computational facilities, large bandwidth networks.
Difficulty of coordination, internationally
E.g., human subjects research across institutions. Difficult nationally; all but impossible internationally
The notion of global repository networks slams up against this.
CLARA Latin America network
82 repositories in LA
LUNCHEON & KEYNOTE
George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office, Federal Networking and Information
Technology Research and Development program
On Publishers: "Hell hath no fury like a vested interested masquerading as a moral principle."
Excellent and entertaining overview of the evolution of all that is current.
MAKING THE CASE FOR FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
Moderated by Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University
Sue Kriegsman, archivist and librarian, Harvard University
David Palmer, Scholarly Communications Team Leader, Hong Kong University Libraries
Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship Services, Cornell University Library
Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, under the Libraries.
Three years old. Support open access policies
Five Harvard Open Access policies
DASH - Dspace repository -- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard
Drupal on top of Dspace
Students hired to collect content from faculty
Faculty Activity Reports, put a button on the form "Upload to DASH"
Sustainability of arXive. Requesting voluntary contributions from top 200 institutions. $391K in 2010.
Main principles for supporting Open Access scholarly resources, a list
Open Access is not necessarily free -- there are costs involved
$7 per submissions; 1.4 cents per download
380K per year budget
Main expenses: Programming and user support
Hong Kong University Scholar's Hub
2005 institutional repository in Libraries
Knowledge Transfer grant to HK higher education, 6 million shared
--> Knowledge Exchange. part of Vision
Dspace
25,000 grants
1500 HKU researcher pages. Each professor gets a page. Author profiles
Web scraping of info on departmental Websites
Mandate for theses since 2001
ResearcherID from Thomson-Reuters. Created ID for every HKU professor. Used this to reap bibliometic data. COOL.
Publish or Perish software. Please choose preferred name. Asked individual professors to copy and paste from Publish or Perish into Scholars Hub bibliometrics page. COOL.
Automated data updates to HKU departmental Websites. Data now flows in a different direction. COOL.
Hub for collaborative research.
Decision support. Fund allocation. Research assessment.
Reputation Management System
A big mashup
A big success!
The highlights of this conference for me all happened on the second day. First, it is always a great pleasure to hear Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), speak. As always, a little voice inside admonishes me to "Sit up straight, Sonny, and listen to the Master." Truly. Lynch openly mused about global repositories and the problems associated with Big Data: How far away from Big Computation should they be? Big Bandwidth? Should these all be co-located? Big Questions were raised here.
The luncheon keynote, by Dr. George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office, Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, was another highlight, an enjoyable, entertaining, even folksy lunchtime
survey of the evolution of, well, the Internet, the Web, disruptive technologies, everything that's current. Direct quote, aimed at commercial publishers: "Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle." !
I actually found the closing panel on sustainability, particularly the final panelist in this session from Hong Kong University, to be the most interesting. And what I found most interesting about it was tangential to the subject of the panel itself: David Palmer from HKU, in addition to noting how his repository is sustained (through a grant from Hong Kong's higher education directorate), showed off some of the things they've been able to do with it. They are using their repository as a "reputation management system" and have created a page/space for every single professor at their university. They've reaped data from their university's research management database; they've reaped data from departmental Websites about each professor; they've created a ResearcherID for every professor, then used it to reap bibliographic and bibliometric data from the indexing/abstracting services; in an effort at authority control, they've had each professor load a copy of the Publish or Perish software locally, then use it to identify his/her authoritative name in Google Scholar, and have likewise used Publish or Perish to cut and paste bibliometric data directly into each professor's space inside the repository. They have reaped so much data that the internal organizational flow has begun now to change, from a Departmental-Website-to-Repository flow, to a Repository-to-Departmental-Website flow. I say "Bravo!"
Mark Cyzyk
##########################################################
Mark Cyzyk's Notes
SPARC Repositories
Baltimore
November 8-9, 2010
November 8
Opening Keynote
Michael Nielsen: Quantum Physicist
Open science
Linux industry
Survey of "open" projects. Open source projects. Wikipedia
Might this be used in the science community?
Polymath Project Mathematics in the open
Gower's blog. Fields medalist
rules of collaboration
Be polite; only one idea per comment
"restructured expert attention"
Not the future of scientific publishing, but fundamentally changes the way scientific knowledge is constructed.
Citizen science
Galaxy Zoo, e.g.
Failures: Scientific wikis; open peer review; scientific social networks
Little incentive to participate
No reputational reward for participation
What is successful? Open projects supporting conventional scientific goals and practices -- generating papers
Conservative ends
Genesis and evolution of scientific communication/publication
"Bermuda principles" for release of genome data
We all agree to release our data
But only for human genetic data
Need to apply this idea
Open data
Grant agencies can mandate sharing
But scientific communities must agree
Panel:
REPOSITORY-BASED PUBLISHING SERVICES: STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS (OR FAILURE)
Moderated by Patricia Renfro, Columbia University
Wendy Robertson, Digital Resources Librarian, University of Iowa
Mark Newton, Digital Collections Librarian, Purdue University Libraries
Ventura Pérez, Assistant Professor of Bioarchaeology, UMass Amherst
Nathan MacBrien, Publications Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley
University of Iowa Libraries, believe libraries should be actively involved in ePublishing.
Digital Commons.
Not tied to specific technologies
Interaction with UIowa Press. Humanities monographs
Working paper series
Small society journals
Special digital projects. Iowa City Flood digital exhibit
Host back volumes for University Iowa Press
Conversion of Biographical Dictionary of Iowa into online version
MOU between Library and Press/Faculty/Editors
Graphic design/usability
Editors are not particularly technology savvy
Purdue University Libraries
Collabortation with Press
Press is a unit of the Libraries
Digital Commons repository
Press uses infrastructure too
10 repository journals. eJournals published directly to the repository
Repository as publishing platform
IMLS one year planning grant, with University of Utah, Georgia Tech
3 workshops to be held in May 2011. Survey
UMass Bioarchealogist Narco violence US Mexico border
"Landscapes of Violence" journal. Open access journal. Interdisciplinary
BEPress
Lack of access to peer-reviewed journal content counts as "structural violence"???
Yaqui massacre 1902. Repatriation of human remains, US to Yaqui
Local access to scholarly publications about them
Took two years to get his journal up and running
Difficult to assemble an Editorial Board
Don't want mere figureheads
Cultural changes in tenure process required if Open Access is to be successful
Institute for International Studies, Berkeley
Open access book publishing
GAIA
Collaboration with CDL and UC press
Publish 5-8 titles per year
One person staff
UCPubS publishing platform
Print on demand through Press. online retailing
Digital edition available through eScholarship repository
Humanities and social sciences, nervous about open-access, bottom-up publishing
[NOTE: A lot of institutions using BEPress/Digital Commons.]
OPEN DATA
Moderated by Kathleen Shearer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries
Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre
Gail Steinhart, Research Data & Environmental Sciences Librarian, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University
Charles K. Humphrey, Head of Data Research Services, University of Alberta
Digital Curation Centre
Ways of thinking about Open Data: Government data; research data
World data centers - atmospheric; oceanographic
Legal obligations to deposit
UK Data Archive - 40+ years old
Must retrain people to be data curators. Not a lot of data curators out there right now.
Data Management Planning (DMP)
DCC checklists for DMP. Online tool.
DCC training, 1-5 day course
Citing data, linking data
UK Research Data Service (UKRDS)
Data collections at Cornell
Topology: Research; Resource; Reference data collections
"Small" data is important
Need for data librarians. Not many out there
Data eScience librarians
Research Data Management Service Group (RDMSG) at Cornell
Data Staging Repository (DataStaR): A place for researchers to post datasets in a controlled setting
Curating and preserving datasets and providing them for cross-disciplinary discovery and use
Submit data, share data, publish data via DataStaR. RDF store for metadata. Data files stored in Fedora
In production now
Have published a few dozen datasets
Data discussion group at Cornell libraries
Data library at University of Alberta
No national data archive
The data landscape in Canada, a patchwork
MS Excel as primary tool for entering and managing data! This is what researchers use.
Distribute OAIS functions across organizations? One model of how to tie things together
Or create a cloud of services, micro-services
Community cloud of services. No silos
Canadian Research Library Association -- adopting this at the national level
How they do it in the U.K; how they do it at Cornell; how they do it in Canada.
Tuesday, November 9
GLOBAL REPOSITORY NETWORKS
Moderated by Neil Jacobs, acting Program Director for the Information Environment, JISC
Jun Adachi, Director of Cyber Science Infrastructure Development, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information
Martha Giraldo Jaramillo, Executive Director, RENATA
SPARC Europe. Why is Europe far ahead in open access? European Commission mandate.
Establishing European PKP network, fall 2011
JISC definition/rationale for repositories
COAR Confederation of open access repositories. European
Mentions EDF in France mid-seventies, does not mention its failure! (Bruno Latour book)
Topology of repository tools, platforms, gateways, networks
Growing -- not building -- a global repository network.
500 nmember library consortium in Japan. Negotiating power.
Clifford Lynch
Is the repository the right unit of infrastructure to be thinking about?
Global infrastructure. Big data, staging areas, moving it, local workflows
Repositories situated relative to large computational facilities, large bandwidth networks.
Difficulty of coordination, internationally
E.g., human subjects research across institutions. Difficult nationally; all but impossible internationally
The notion of global repository networks slams up against this.
CLARA Latin America network
82 repositories in LA
LUNCHEON & KEYNOTE
George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office, Federal Networking and Information
Technology Research and Development program
On Publishers: "Hell hath no fury like a vested interested masquerading as a moral principle."
Excellent and entertaining overview of the evolution of all that is current.
MAKING THE CASE FOR FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
Moderated by Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University
Sue Kriegsman, archivist and librarian, Harvard University
David Palmer, Scholarly Communications Team Leader, Hong Kong University Libraries
Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship Services, Cornell University Library
Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, under the Libraries.
Three years old. Support open access policies
Five Harvard Open Access policies
DASH - Dspace repository -- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard
Drupal on top of Dspace
Students hired to collect content from faculty
Faculty Activity Reports, put a button on the form "Upload to DASH"
Sustainability of arXive. Requesting voluntary contributions from top 200 institutions. $391K in 2010.
Main principles for supporting Open Access scholarly resources, a list
Open Access is not necessarily free -- there are costs involved
$7 per submissions; 1.4 cents per download
380K per year budget
Main expenses: Programming and user support
Hong Kong University Scholar's Hub
2005 institutional repository in Libraries
Knowledge Transfer grant to HK higher education, 6 million shared
--> Knowledge Exchange. part of Vision
Dspace
25,000 grants
1500 HKU researcher pages. Each professor gets a page. Author profiles
Web scraping of info on departmental Websites
Mandate for theses since 2001
ResearcherID from Thomson-Reuters. Created ID for every HKU professor. Used this to reap bibliometic data. COOL.
Publish or Perish software. Please choose preferred name. Asked individual professors to copy and paste from Publish or Perish into Scholars Hub bibliometrics page. COOL.
Automated data updates to HKU departmental Websites. Data now flows in a different direction. COOL.
Hub for collaborative research.
Decision support. Fund allocation. Research assessment.
Reputation Management System
A big mashup
A big success!
Friday, November 5, 2010
Charleston Conference XXX
I attended the 30th Charleston Conference this past week. The conference was very heavy on acquisitions, patron driven decisions and models, and electronic books. Attendance included a lot of publishers, and a good opportunity to meet with software vendors, such as Ebsco and OCLC. I presented:
Sue Woodson also gave an excellent plenary session talk.
Three things of note I want to touch on, and then get into some questions that have been rolling around in my head, and are appropriate maybe to write down.
Printing on demand - The Espresso Book Machine is a cool product by OnDemandBooks. Imagine no longer purchasing titles according to an approval plan, and printing only the books that users want, in a matter of minutes per book, right in your library. Rick Anderson, of University of Utah, was singing the praises of this EBM in their library. Not a new concept, but been put through its paces for a few years now.
KBART - NISO working group to fix the weakest link in the metadata supply chain from publishers to link resolver knowledgebase. KBART has created a universally acceptable holdings data format to improve the OpenURL KB metadata supply chain. This group made its recommendation in january 2010 and has gotten some critical mass of publishers to take note. Information on KBART is available here.
User behavior - John Sack reported on an interesting user study conducted by Highwire. Very telling (or rather confirming) data on how users research (what tools they use and what habits), and how readers behave. Researchers are not using library catalogs or publishers web sites. Readers are not using e-books, many aren't even reading on the screen (printing PDFs and reading on paper).
Besides these three points, there were a handful of plenary sessions that were speculative towards the future of libraries. It is hard to predict the future. But, libraries have been evolving for decades, and will continue to evolve. The librarian will need to evolve too; library staff will need to take on different roles as libraries are going to shift their focus from collecting to providing service.
Some of these sessions were very thought provoking, and lead me to ask some questions that I did not hear from any of the speakers:
In the library, should we continue to focus efforts on description and discovery of non-unique material? If no one is coming to library search, should we continue to focus all our attention on providing a discovery interface?
I wonder if our time would be well spent if we focused on providing persistent, RESTful URLs to our content, and continued to improve our rich set of services related to known items (ie. FindIt). In this way, our content could be consistently crawled, and exposed for indexing by more mainstream external indexes.
Should we be focusing on the browser environment, pushing Firefox, Chrome, and IE extensions like libX? These extensions would guide users from the open web to known item services and through authentication.
Should we focus on authentication and focus on providing access instead of discovery? There is work that still needs to be done to publishers' interfaces to help guide users from the open web to licensed material. Most users are finding links to articles from search engines, not through a library search interface.
Can we assume that google, and the like, will provide better search of content than we can ourselves?
In what ways can we put technology to better use to automate backend workflows? More automated knowledgebase management? Better integration of ILL licensing terms from our licensing agreements to our ILL applications? More automated workflow in the approval process, such that two separate financial systems don't need to be maintained?
I will stop speculating ... for now
Sue Woodson also gave an excellent plenary session talk.
Three things of note I want to touch on, and then get into some questions that have been rolling around in my head, and are appropriate maybe to write down.
Printing on demand - The Espresso Book Machine is a cool product by OnDemandBooks. Imagine no longer purchasing titles according to an approval plan, and printing only the books that users want, in a matter of minutes per book, right in your library. Rick Anderson, of University of Utah, was singing the praises of this EBM in their library. Not a new concept, but been put through its paces for a few years now.
KBART - NISO working group to fix the weakest link in the metadata supply chain from publishers to link resolver knowledgebase. KBART has created a universally acceptable holdings data format to improve the OpenURL KB metadata supply chain. This group made its recommendation in january 2010 and has gotten some critical mass of publishers to take note. Information on KBART is available here.
User behavior - John Sack reported on an interesting user study conducted by Highwire. Very telling (or rather confirming) data on how users research (what tools they use and what habits), and how readers behave. Researchers are not using library catalogs or publishers web sites. Readers are not using e-books, many aren't even reading on the screen (printing PDFs and reading on paper).
Besides these three points, there were a handful of plenary sessions that were speculative towards the future of libraries. It is hard to predict the future. But, libraries have been evolving for decades, and will continue to evolve. The librarian will need to evolve too; library staff will need to take on different roles as libraries are going to shift their focus from collecting to providing service.
Some of these sessions were very thought provoking, and lead me to ask some questions that I did not hear from any of the speakers:
In the library, should we continue to focus efforts on description and discovery of non-unique material? If no one is coming to library search, should we continue to focus all our attention on providing a discovery interface?
I wonder if our time would be well spent if we focused on providing persistent, RESTful URLs to our content, and continued to improve our rich set of services related to known items (ie. FindIt). In this way, our content could be consistently crawled, and exposed for indexing by more mainstream external indexes.
Should we be focusing on the browser environment, pushing Firefox, Chrome, and IE extensions like libX? These extensions would guide users from the open web to known item services and through authentication.
Should we focus on authentication and focus on providing access instead of discovery? There is work that still needs to be done to publishers' interfaces to help guide users from the open web to licensed material. Most users are finding links to articles from search engines, not through a library search interface.
Can we assume that google, and the like, will provide better search of content than we can ourselves?
In what ways can we put technology to better use to automate backend workflows? More automated knowledgebase management? Better integration of ILL licensing terms from our licensing agreements to our ILL applications? More automated workflow in the approval process, such that two separate financial systems don't need to be maintained?
I will stop speculating ... for now
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Impact and Productivity Measurments
The DC Chapter of SLA and ResearchConnect (part of Elsevier) presented a one-day event on Wed., Oct. 27th, 2010. It was called:
Impact and Productivity Measurements in a Changing Research Environment
The 8 speakers came from around the globe and by the end of the day I felt like I was (temporarily) caught up with the fast-moving world of productivity measurements. A few comments about the speakers I enjoyed the most.
Dr. Henk Moed, Senior Scientific Advisor at Elsevier
The Use of Bibliometric Indicators in Research Evaluation: A Critical Overview
Henk provided a wonderful overview and emphasized the fact that numbers can indicate productivity but humans have to do the actual evaluation of faculty, departments, or institutions. He also pointed out that the metrics can be (and have been) manipulated.
Dr. Jevin West, Eigenfactor.org and Dept of Biology, Univ of Washington
The Eigenfactor Metrics: A Network Approach to Assessing Scholarly Journals
His interest in network biology got him interested in the citation network. He believes that understanding the citation network will help us with evaluating and navigating scholarship. Eigenfactor has expanded its data recently to include JSTOR. They are working on hierarchical maps now.
Dr. Frank Krell, Entomology Dept. of Zoology, Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Should Editors Influence Journal Impact Factors?
This was a VERY interesting and slightly depressing talk. His description of how editors could manipulate their journal impact factors was revealing. But the grey areas were cool. Isn't an editor hired to promote the journal? Shouldn't the editor take actions that make the journal more visible in the field? And his discussion of what a citation actually means just fed my fear that this is all a numbers game. Sometimes authors cite a work because someone else cited it; not because they read it. If an author needs to cite a work, but has 7 works that could be cited, how does she choose? Does a citation really indicate quality or popularity?
Dr. Sidney Redner, Physics Dept. Boston University
A Physicist's Perspective on Citation Analysis
Statistical physicists seem to like citation analysis. Dr. Redner echoed some of what Dr. Moed said earlier, you can play with the numbers, but you still need to understand someone's research in order to evaluate it. He walked through math that he said proves the h-index is directly tied to the number of citations a paper receives and doesn't add anything to the discussion of citation analysis. I've added a line to the Scholarly Metrics journal to point out that not everyone thinks the h-index is the bees' knees.
Impact and Productivity Measurements in a Changing Research Environment
The 8 speakers came from around the globe and by the end of the day I felt like I was (temporarily) caught up with the fast-moving world of productivity measurements. A few comments about the speakers I enjoyed the most.
Dr. Henk Moed, Senior Scientific Advisor at Elsevier
The Use of Bibliometric Indicators in Research Evaluation: A Critical Overview
Henk provided a wonderful overview and emphasized the fact that numbers can indicate productivity but humans have to do the actual evaluation of faculty, departments, or institutions. He also pointed out that the metrics can be (and have been) manipulated.
Dr. Jevin West, Eigenfactor.org and Dept of Biology, Univ of Washington
The Eigenfactor Metrics: A Network Approach to Assessing Scholarly Journals
His interest in network biology got him interested in the citation network. He believes that understanding the citation network will help us with evaluating and navigating scholarship. Eigenfactor has expanded its data recently to include JSTOR. They are working on hierarchical maps now.
Dr. Frank Krell, Entomology Dept. of Zoology, Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Should Editors Influence Journal Impact Factors?
This was a VERY interesting and slightly depressing talk. His description of how editors could manipulate their journal impact factors was revealing. But the grey areas were cool. Isn't an editor hired to promote the journal? Shouldn't the editor take actions that make the journal more visible in the field? And his discussion of what a citation actually means just fed my fear that this is all a numbers game. Sometimes authors cite a work because someone else cited it; not because they read it. If an author needs to cite a work, but has 7 works that could be cited, how does she choose? Does a citation really indicate quality or popularity?
Dr. Sidney Redner, Physics Dept. Boston University
A Physicist's Perspective on Citation Analysis
Statistical physicists seem to like citation analysis. Dr. Redner echoed some of what Dr. Moed said earlier, you can play with the numbers, but you still need to understand someone's research in order to evaluate it. He walked through math that he said proves the h-index is directly tied to the number of citations a paper receives and doesn't add anything to the discussion of citation analysis. I've added a line to the Scholarly Metrics journal to point out that not everyone thinks the h-index is the bees' knees.
Digital Library Federation - Fall Forum 2010
I attended the Digital Library Federation 2010 Fall Forum meeting November 1 - 3. The main meeting was bracketed by a Project Managers Meeting at the beginning and a Developers Meeting at the end.
This forum's Project Managers Meeting focused on Agile development and was put together and moderated by Sarah Shreeves from Illinois and Sheridan Libraries' own David Reynolds. Emily Lynema, Associate Head of Information Technology at North Carolina State University, gave a presentation on NCSU's experiences and thoughts around Agile Development and led a discussion in the first part of this meeting. That was followed by a couple of short presentations with lots of discussions. My big take-away is that while Agile proposes a set of parameters, seemingly successful projects have managed to stretch these in different ways. In my view, it's important to be agile about Agile: We have to adapt the approach to our own particular needs and environment.
The group then had lunch with attendees of the Taiga Forum and heard a presentation by and participated in an exercise led by Kristine Shannon, an expert on Agile methods.
A good overview of the Agile approach is available on this Wikipedia page.
The meeting was well-organized with a good mix of sessions. My only complaint is that there were several time blocks that had multiple tracks that were of interest to me. One of the stand-out sessions was a workshop-style discussion of preservation/curation microservices, small, focused services that implement a particular task or operation. These are similar in concept to the micro-services in iRods. These atomistic services can be linked together in different ways to perform a variety of more complex tasks.
In the closing session of the main part of the meeting, Rachel Frick, the Executive Director of the DLF, and members of the meeting's program planning committee led us in a exercise to brainstorm and vote on ideas for future roles of DLF as an organization. Attendees made and supported suggestions for these roles in 30-second synopses. Each of these were transcribed onto a flipchart sheet and attached around the walls of the meeting room. Attendees then gathered at ideas of interest, fleshed them out, and indicated their primary interest by hanging around at a particular sheet.
This approach might be useful for us to try within the Sheridan Libraries in future brainstorming and direction-setting exercises.
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