Some items of possible interest which were in a little email pile waiting for attention ......
Arrow
An Australian colleague alerted me to the redesign of the Arrow Discovery Service. Arrow aggregates access to Australian research repositories.
Welcome to the ARROW Discovery Service - where you can search 143,582 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.
The ARROW Discovery Service searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories. The list of currently participating universities, and the number of outputs currently in each repository, is listed at the left. [Arrow]
Search box is complemented by tag cloud access. Results filtering by facets, including institutional facets. Alerts can be set (although it does not have RSS feeds, as I notice Roddy MacLeod pointed out somewhere).
Catalog Widget
The Information Resource Centre (IRC) at Jacobs University, Bremen, has produced a catalog widget, jOPAC, as part of its broader initiative to produce a range of 'Web 2 tools'.
The IRC has started developing Web 2.0 tools. Because we want to be able to deliver digital (library and multimedia) services at the point of need, where our patrons are. And because we want to enhance our services by mashing them up with other available services out there on the web. [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]
The are using the Universal Widget API from Netvibes:
Using the UAW API allows easy implementation within various platforms, such as iGoogle, Macintosh, Vista, Yahoo Dashboard, and various others. This way, any developed tool can easily integrate within any supported platform - some of which you might already use! [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]
I was interested to see the University Confluence-based wiki infrastructure that the pages above are part of. Also interesting is the dedicated focus on such tools that IRC is making.
Linking from Wageningen
As linking between systems becomes more important, so does our interest in identifiers, and in mappings between identifiers. Here is an example from Wouter Gerritsma:
He goes on to describe a service from our OCLC Dutch colleagues that returns an OCLC number when fed a Pica Production Number, which they have in their catalog. And the results:
[Note: the links in the Wikipedia quotes do not work as I have not changed the relative URLs to absolute ones]
I was looking up James Connolly just now as I prepare some slides for a presentation at the 2008 LIR Annual Seminar. The event is being held in Liberty Hall, which has a historic relationship with Connolly, and I planned to use this as an excuse to show the Worldcat Identities page for him ;-) I noticed that one of the subject headings in the Worldcat Identities cloud for Connolly was for John Maclean. I went to look for John Maclean in Wikipedia (googling his name and Wikipedia which is how I tend to look for things). I clicked through and was surprised to read this:
There is a page listing all the different languages in which there is a Wikipedia with some statistics. I was particularly interested to see how they described their depth indicator.
The "Depth" column ((Edits/Articles) × (Non-Articles/Articles) × (1 − Stub-ratio)) is a rough indicator of a Wikipedia’s quality, showing how frequently its articles are updated. Note that it doesn’t refer to academic quality (which obviously can’t be mathematically computed anyway), but to Wikipedian quality, i.e. the depth of collaborativeness—a descriptor that is highly relevant for a Wikipedia. Depths above 300 for Wikipedias below 100 000 articles are dismissed as irrelevant. [List of Wikipedias - Meta]
The English language Wikipedia is the only one to have more than 1 million articles. A further eighteen have more than one hundred thousand and less than a million.
I have mentioned before the tremor an event can sometimes cause in your communications fabric, as it pops up among your Facebook friends, in your RSS aggregator, and so on. So with Open Repositories 2008. A note about amplifying activities from a description of the event ...
Update: Sarah Shreeves left a comment which I thought it useful to copy in here:
And, of course, the use of hashtags for tracking tweets about the conference: http://hashtags.org/tag/or08/. This was a really fascinating way to follow reactions / thoughts during the conference.
An interesting announcement from CLIR about a $4.27M competitive program to describe hidden collections has just appeared. The existence of such collections must be more fully disclosed if they are to release more of their value in research and learning:
With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources is creating a national program to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. The records and descriptions obtained through this effort will be accessible through the Internet and the Web, enabling the federation of disparate, local cataloging entries with tools to aggregate this information by topic and theme. [Hidden Collections]
This is a preliminary announcement and it will be interesting to see how the thinking behind the program is elaborated as more materials appear. The call for proposals will be in June. In particular, I will be interested to see some of the observations about organization, formats and federation frameworks expanded. See for example the following statements which relate to each of these topics respectively:
The program's strategy for building a distributed organization of cataloging and collection information assumes local autonomy and responsibility but also requires centralized agreements concerning governing principles that will ensure enterprise-wide coherence. [Hidden Collections]
Because tightly defined fields can impede interoperability, recent reports on hidden collections emphasize the need to make the categories and schemes of record creation and descriptions less rigid than those of the past. Cataloging special collections and archival materials has routinely been defined as a local practice. The shift to understanding hidden collections as a national problem entails an acknowledgment that in the 21st century, collaboration, coordination, and coherence of response to users is fundamental and takes precedence over local practice. [Hidden Collections]
The process will involve adopting a technology platform (or platforms) that will allow accurate descriptive information to be entered quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. The results of each project will be linked to and interoperable with those of all others to form a federated environment that can be built upon over time. Institutions must acknowledge local ownership of the data generated through the program and agree to its persistence. [Hidden Collections]
I mentioned iSoton a few weeks ago, an exploratory twopointification of a University of Southampton web presence (and see the follow-up conversation on Brian Kelly's blog). As many readers will know, Southampton is the home of major R&D, advocacy and support activities for open access (see the eprints.org page).
I was looking for the eprints pages earlier and landed on the University of Southampton's search pages. Very nice, I thought. Rather than just offer a straight search they try to anticipate some of the ways in which people might be looking for things, and they offer trails into appropriate parts of the website, as well as several different searches across University content. I was particularly struck by the fact that they offer a search of the University's Institutional Repository, labeled 'research publications' alongside 'people' and 'experts'. It is entirely reasonable that the University Website search page should offer a search of University research outputs; I wonder will such a search option on the institutional website ever become universally routine or expected?
Noticeable also are the links to Del.icio.us, which are present throughout the website. These link to the University of Southampton presence on Del.icio.us, and are an interesting example of an organization piggybacking on other services. I hope that there is some investigation of how this approach works, as we have very little real information about the impact of initiatives like this where there is a designed attempt to amplify a web presence through leverage of widely used, network-level channels.
And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation:
The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research output and that of your peers. It provides an indication of the quality and the consistency of the researcher's work by looking at the number of articles published and the number of citations received over time. In Scopus the h-index presents a metric that takes all of an author's articles published between 1996 to present into account and thus provides a transparent mean to evaluate the impact of an author in the most recent 12 years. You will also find quick links to your publications, citation counts and co-authors.
I am sure that this has gone to many readers of this blog also.
A very superficial examination shows that Scopus provides some useful approaches for merging and demerging result sets based on knowledge provided by the searcher. It pulls together a lot of contextual data in its profiles, based on mining of article details. I found it useful. I have not looked at Web of Knowledge recently so I do not know how it compares.
Four overlapping things struck me about this invitation and the service:
Reputation management. The direct appeal in the invitation is to the author's interest in his or her research impact or reputation. Reputation management is of growing interest, for individuals and for institutions. I think that this creates an interesting intersection between research support/administration services and library/information services around such things as the relationship between institutional repositories and the recording of faculty publications, consistent naming of authors and institutions so as not to fragment impact through incorrect pulling together of publications, faculty expertise databases, citation management, and so on. The interaction between personal disclosure (what I put on my website, or social networking sites, or ...), institutional management, and third party data aggregation/manipulation will also be interesting to watch.
Making data work harder. The SCOPUS profiles are based on extensive mining and manipulation of data to create the context on their pages (affiliations, citations, cited by, h-index, etc). Increasingly, in many cases, we will expect to see such further analysis to create context and depth. Think of what we see in a Google Book Search page, an Amazon results page, a Worldcat Identities page.
Socialising Knowledge networks. The academic literature and the tools we have created to organize it reveal networks of knowledge. Citations, subject indexing, cross-reference structures, and so on, create connections between people, documents, ideas, institutions. Increasingly, we can mobilize these connections in digital environments, and make other connections. Alongside these 'classical' networks, we are seeing newer social networks emerge. One of the more interesting developments we will see will be the integration of our classically created networks and these new social networks. I was interested to see for example discussions around user-driven name disambiguation at Crossref. SCOPUS offers you the opportunity to submit feedback on a profile: presumably this will develop over time to allow greater interaction between those doing the profiling, based on available data, and those profiled, based on their knowledge.
We know where you live. Related to the last point, I was interested, and quite impressed, that they could send me an email pointing me to my profile page and that it all worked out. I do not have a very common name; I wonder what criteria they had in place before they would send you an email, and how many of them went astray. It is also interesting to see a publisher of a bibliographic tool reach out to users/authors in this way, with an incentive for them to get interested in a particular product. It potentially creates an interesting dynamic for the library.
Chris Anderson introduces the themes of his new book, Free, in the current issue of Wired.
You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.") [Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business]
He refers to the 'concentrating' aspects of the web ...
The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It's not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it's about what that equipment can do. And every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, it does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero. [Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business]
His book will be a discussion of this drive to free on the web.
Coincidentally, I was involved in a discussion around Steward Brand's quote at work a week or so ago. You usually only hear the first part, "information wants to be free", and not the second, "information also wants to be expensive".
I was thinking of the Stewart Brand note when looking at Elsevier's recent announcements. One announcing the acquisition of ChoicePoint; the other announcing the sale of its Business Information Division.
ChoicePoint has a leading position in providing unique data and analytics to the attractive insurance sector (over 50% of Choicepoint's $982 million revenue and 80% of its business operating income from continuing operations in 2007) and highly complementary products and new capabilities in the screening, authentication and public records areas. [Reed Elsevier - Reed Elsevier to acquire ChoicePoint, Inc]
What we see here is a reallocation from the 'information wants to be free' arena, where business magazines (including Library Journal, part of the group being divested) are increasingly supported by advertising revenue and are in competition with a network environment rich in alternative sources, to the 'information wants to be expensive' arena where the value resides in providing business-critical information tightly integrated into workflow solutions.
In fact, in looking through the press releases about recent Elsevier acquisitions it is interesting to note how often 'workflow' is mentioned. Simply being available is no longer enough.
Note: see Michael Cairns on the Reed Business Information sale.
OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) has released a nice white paper which discusses issues in providing an end-user access environment for its shared resources, and more interestingly, how that environment engages with the behaviors and expectations of its academic users.
This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and drive discussion for the OCUL consortium in both the short term through the launch of a new Scholars Portal server in 2008, and in the long term by incorporating more 'social' means of sharing and organizing information within OCUL's Scholars Portal and the larger academic community that it serves. [Scholr 2.0]
As one might expect from a discussion white paper, there is a focus on questions and potential directions. Recommendations are given in several areas:
Enhance and improve the user interface • Enrich Scholars Portal content by bringing in metadata from sources outside the journal repository • Explore the implementation of controlled vocabulary, thesauri and authority control • Add user tagging functionality
Connect the citation network to user workflow • Provide table of contents (TOC) RSS feeds with links that facilitate authentication. If it is possible, allow users to generate their own RSS feeds. • Provide users of scholarly resources with social bookmarking services • Consider services that support the whole of the user’s research process and the development of online space for OCUL research communities. • Seek means for Scholars Portal to be integrated into Learning Management Systems used by OCUL
Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer • Provide both permalinks as well as COinS OpenURLs in the Scholars Portal server and to encourage OCUL libraries to adopt their own versions of LibX or promote other COinS readers • Investigate how to take advantage of the attribute-based information that Shibboleth can provide • Consider what semantic metadata could be provided through Scholars Portal
Over the Christmas break I read the interesting Global Ireland: same difference. And, in my convalescence, I have been looking at other materials on this topic. I had a look at OAIster. A search on Ireland and globablization returned quite a few results. I was interested in browsing through the results on the first page: six of the items were immediately available to me; four were not: I was directed to a publisher's splash page.
Now, I had, mistakenly, thought that OAIster focused on open access material so was surprised to see this. Looking at historic snapshots of the site on the Wayback Machine, I found the following on the 16th July 2006. There had been a stated focus on 'freely-accessible' material, but this changed.
OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Our goal is to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources (what are digital resources? why is the "freely-available" designation gone?) that are easily searchable by anyone. [OAIster Home]
Following the link [not working in the extract above] about the '"freely-available" designation' brings you to the OAIster Collection Development Policy, which is admirably clear, and reasonable for a service provider in their situation. Basically, as sites mix freely-accessible material and restricted-access-material in their harvestable sets, there is a heavy processing burden on an aggregator who wants to reliably separate these out. And OAIster has decided it is not going to do this work.
Often, data contributor repositories that we harvest contain records that point to both freely-available and restricted-access digital resources. Sometimes repositories partition these records into OAI sets (e.g., "freely accessible texts") that can be easily harvested, and sometimes they do not. When they do not, additional effort on our part is required to selectively filter only the freely-accessible digital resource records. This is entirely dependent on the records themselves-- the metadata itself must contain some indication of restriction policy (e.g., "This material is accessible to the public, freely and without charge.") in order for us to perform filtering. Records frequently do not contain this information and only by following the link to the digital resource does availability become clear. Consequently, the decision to keep or not keep an entire repository's records based on the discovery of some restricted records has been challenging. [OAIster | Collection Development Policy]
This is a reminder of the variety of collection development practice over institutional repositories which I have spoken about before (in relation to Minnesota and the Open University). I notice that the Open University self-describes its repository as Open Access, yet it contains a large amount of restricted access materials.
For good or ill, universities notice rankings. These are compiled in various ways, including peer assessment and citation analysis. I was interested to come across the work of The Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University which is "currently developing a new ranking system entirely based on its own bibliometric indicators". They present results for the 100 largest universities in Europe.
At the same time we are seeing discussion of a metrics-based approach to research evaluation in the UK, based on bibliometric analysis.
I was interested to read the following paragraph on the Leiden site:
The increasing use of bibliometric data in evaluation procedures and particularly in rankings underlines the vital importance of a clear, coherent and effective presentation to the outside world of universities in their publications. For instance, King's College, University of London (KCL), introduced a code of practice to ensure that all publications are properly attributed to the College. This is in light of recent evidence that up to 25% of citations from KCL academics in recent years were missed due to failure to use 'King's College London' in the address mentioned in the publication heading. [The Challenges of University Ranking]
I expect we will see more of this type of attention as there is a more oganized approach to university reputation management. I would be interested to know if any universities have similar guidelines about consistent use of personal and institutional names on publications to avoid fragmentation of publication counts.
Library authority control files are limiting in this regard, as they only include names associated with items which have gone through the cataloging process. Their continued usefulness probably depends on some broadening of scope.
I came across the Leiden work through the following article:
Bibliometric statistical properties of the 100 largest European research universities: prevalent scaling rules in the science system. Anthony FJ van Raan. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 59(3) 2008.
We will see much more activity connecting user environments and bibliographic resources. I am thinking of citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking sites (see citulike and unalog) and RSS feeds. Some of these may be specifically supported by the library (e.g. a citation manager service), some may be developed within an academic or scholarly context (e.g. Zotero, citulike, ...), and some may be general network services. People have multiple ways of creating personal and shared collections of data and links.
They are also an example of an increasingly important aspect of our bibliographic apparatus - we have discovery or 'rendezvous' experiences outside the library resource, where it would be good to be able to link back into a library service for fulfillment, or indeed into other services. As we expose more data to search engines, this provides another example. We don't have robust, general ways of doing this across resource types.
In this context I was very interested to read a report from work done at the University of Minnesota on the ability to resolve references in the RefWorks collections of graduate students and others. Here is the abstract:
Introduction. Digital library users collect, enhance and manage their online reference collections to facilitate their research tasks. These personal collections, therefore, are likely to reflect users' interests, and are representative of their profile. Understanding these collections offers great opportunities for developing personalized digital library services, such as reference recommender systems. Method. We recruited subjects by individual e-mails to the users of RefWorks - a web-based personal reference management tool installed for use at the University of Minnesota. To participate, subjects needed to give their consent and share their references with us. 96 subjects participated, majority (65) of who were graduate students, resulting into 30,336 references. Based on the type of the reference, these were stratified into one of the three valid identifying IDs - DOI, ISBN, or URL. Multiple reference resolvers (CrossRef, WorldCat) were used to enhance the overall resolvability of these collections. Analysis. Descriptive statistics and simple graphics analysis were used to describe the dataset. Results. Over 90% of the total references in users' personal collections could possibly have a valid ID (DOI, ISBN, URL), and therefore, are potentially resolvable. However, only about 17% of the references in these collections had a valid ID, and fewer than 11% actually resolved successfully. Using a combination of reference resolvers, the total resolvability of the references in these collections was enhanced from under 11% to over 41%. Conclusions. Users' personal reference collections have a tremendous potential of building, supporting, and enhancing personalized digital library services, such as reference recommender systems.
A nice picture. I saw it via Martin Weller who uses it alongside some general reflections about Facebook.
You only understand it by doing it - as many people have commented (e.g. Ewan), in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used. [The Ed Techie: The Facebook lessons]
I do feel a little overwhelmed at the moment by the various reports about search, generations, and web 2.0 that are being discussed. Yet another survey is less interesting than some reflective discussion or demonstration of possibilities and direction.
Incidentally, he also points to the Economist debate about the value of social networking in Education.
I find library strategy documents an interesting indicator of trends.
I do think that looking at how organizations present themselves and what is important to them in the documents they produce is revealing, documents such as annual reports, strategies, job ads, websites, org charts, and so on. It would be interesting to see more analysis of them. Of course, we would have to be cautious in assuming too much about what they do reveal! [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Self disclosure]
I recently came across the Emory 5 year strategy document (2008-2012). It is pretty interesting in its range and ambition.
Through the implementation of its strategic plan, the Emory University Libraries (the Library) will be recognized as a model research library that fosters courageous inquiry through the integration of print, digital, and multi-media resources. During the next five years, the Library will strengthen further its distinctive work in two areas: digital information technology and special collections. At the same time, leaders in specific areas throughout the Emory library system will work collaboratively with both internal and external partners to increase access to these exceptional tools, systems, and resources; support new modes of teaching, learning, research, and scholarly communication; and preserve, store, and manage traditional and digital materials for future generations. By fulfilling these objectives, the Library will play a central role in both the creation and dissemination of knowledge and serve as an intellectual bridge between communities at Emory and between Emory and the external world. ...
... The Library’s aggressive strategic plan, which will require roughly $100 million to implement, reflects the vision and priorities of Emory University. First, the plan leverages areas of particular strength within the library, namely advanced digital library technologies and renowned special collections, in much the same way the University’s strategic themes reflect areas of distinctive achievement and potential at Emory. Second, the plan proposes to mobilize leadership throughout the libraries to build a customer-centered organization and to increase access to resources for scholars both within and beyond Emory, just as the strategic initiatives look beyond our community. Third, the plan connects to the strategic themes by strengthening faculty distinction, preparing engaged scholars, reaching out to the external community, and increasing access to resources for scholarship in interdisciplinary fields. [Five Year Strategy for the Emory Libraries]
I was particularly struck here by two emphases which indicate a direction. The first is the very strong emphasis on "collaboration in production and dissemination of knowledge". The library aims to engage much more deeply with research behaviors, supporting faculty in their digital scholarship, and the creation and sharing of their research outputs. The second is the focus on the distinctive contribution of their special collections, "the laboratory of the humanities", on building these up and on connecting them to developing digital research environments.
The emphasis here is on institutional resources: the unique or rare materials that the library has acquired for its users, or the intellectual output of the university faculty. One of the interesting things to ponder is how the latter may be the "special collections" of the future, as the library takes these materials into curatorial care.
Network services have accustomed us to move from the personal to the global. Think of iTunes. I have my own local library on my PC which I can synchronize with mobile devices. It is also tightly integrated with the global network iTunes. And the MiniStore uses aggregate buying patterns to make recommendations to me based on what I have in my 'library'.
Variations of this pattern are repeated everywhere. Flixster allows me to rate movies, and relates those to those of my 'friends' and to the aggregate global network level (Flixster drives the Movies application in Facebook). del.icio.us, LibraryThing, Flickr: I can move from my own collection to a global resource in various ways, often assisted by navigational features based on shared attributes across collections and items.
Of course, the dynamic is different in different places. In LibraryThing, for example, the 'global' data level is made up from aggregate personal collections, and central to the service is the idea that connections between our collections are important connections between us. In iTunes, the 'global' data level is already provided as an indication of available purchases, and I do not get to see other people's collections. Although, as already suggested, I benefit from 'hints' based on aggregate buying decisions. In this way, the balance between 'personal' and 'social' value varies across services.
At the same time, we have seen a related interest in all sorts of ways in creating personal collections which may draw materials from many services. Look at Zotero or the work of the SImile project for instance. These personal collections may or may not connect up to global or shared data layers.
Whatever the context, and whether or not the service has a social orientation, the idea of traversing from the personal to the global is becoming an important characteristic of our web experience. Yet another thing for libraries to think about as they work towards reconfiguring services for the web environment ...
I am often asked about differences between the library environments in the US and the UK, or Europe more widely.
A major factor is scale of course. The University of California alone has a bigger library system than many countries, for example. Another factor is the major role and influence of nationally coordinated and funded programs such as those described in the articles above.
Here is Grainne Conole, professor of e-learning at the Open University writing about academic papers, conference papers, and blogging:
Coming back to the question of which represents academic discourse – to my mind it’s all three – in different ways writing a paper, giving a presentation and blogging all help me to formulate and take forward my thinking on a particular topic, a means of meaning making and transformation of the raw ‘data’ to new understandings – surely that’s one of the cornerstones of what being an academic means? [e4innovation.com]
And here is how she distinguishes between those modes of academic disclosure:
So the function and nature of the three media seems to be:
Academic paper: reporting of findings against a particular narrative, grounded in the literature and related work; style – formal, academic-speak
Conference presentation: awareness raising of the work, posing questions and issues about the work, style – entertaining, visual, informal
Blogging – snippets of the work, reflecting on particular issues, style – short, informal, reflective
Here is Dani Rodrik, a Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard, commenting on an earlier post of his where he queried whether the high opportunity costs of blogging (think of all those other things that could get done if you did not use the time blogging!) would drive out high quality economics blogs. No, he concludes:
And second, in my trip to Nottingham I was simply stunned by how many people reported reading my blog. Not only that, people actually remembered my posts--some going quite a while back. With this kind of positive feedback, along with others like this, it is hard to imagine closing the operation down.
Not so incidentally, one of the unexpected scholarly benefits of having a blog is that it is like keeping an intellectual journal. You get an idea, you jot it down in your blog. Some months later, you vaguely remember having had the idea and you google your own blog to recover it. I am not kidding: I google my own blog all the time...
And here is the evidence: the first third of my talk at Nottingham was based on a couple of blog posts from a few weeks back (this and this). So maybe that someone also over-stated the bit about opportunity costs...[Dani Rodrik's weblog]
It is interesting to see them both discuss blogging as an integral part of their academic lives. And their blogging is an important record of thinking about the academic problems they address. And an indication of their academic networks.
I regularly look at the blogs of several folks from the Open University: Tony Hirst's, John Naughton's, and now Grainne's (with whom I used to interact years ago when she was director of ILRT and I of UKOLN). I will occasionally land on Martin Weller's and am peripherally aware of Marc Eisenstadt's.
Ever since my (economist) colleague Brian Lavoie introduced me to Greg Mankiw's blog, I have intermittently followed it, as well as Rodrik's. They occasionally refer to their colleague George Borjas's blog, another Harvard economics professor. Of course there are some pretty high profile economics blogs, including blogs from the Freakonomics authors and, recently, Paul Krugman, both hosted by the New York Times. And there is the prolific Gary Becker, Nobel prize winning economist, at the Becker-Posner blog. I have found Mankiw and Rodrik interesting because of the general mix of light material, commentary on theirs' and their colleagues' work, and their high-level and engaged policy perspectives. The general nature of the blog discourse, to borrow Grainne's word, in that community is absorbing to watch.
Rodrik notes that his blog material appears to have enduring appeal for colleagues. Indeed, the intrinsic interest of the blog output of both the Open University and the Harvard bloggers, and its relation to their academic work, and their broader communities of interest, means that this is probably more generally true.
The blogging platforms used by these people vary. Sometimes they may be institutionally based, more often they will be on one of the main blog hosting sites. While they may be of enduring interest, little thought has probably been given to thinking about their longer term persistence.
Which brings me to my question. Universities and university libraries are recognizing that they have some responsibility to the curation of the intellectual outputs of their academics and students. So far, this has not generally extended to thinking about blogs. What, if anything, should the Open University or Harvard be doing to make sure that this valuable discourse is available to future readers as part of the scholarly record?
I find it convenient to think about current library systems activities in terms of support for three materials workflows: bought/print materials, licensed/electronic materials, and digital/digitized materials. This is being pragmatic rather than pure, and is open to challenge on many grounds. I have discussed these at more length here, and suggested some ways in which they are developing. Development is in two directions: each of the areas continues to develop itself, while at the same time there is a growing desire to find better ways of working across them (e.g. at the discovery layer, or in terms of a more unified approach to metadata creation/management).
Now, we have an agreed and well-understood set of processes around the first category. These are encapsulated in the integrated library system, and still quite strongly influence library organization. These include things like selection, acquisition, cataloging, circulation, catalog, and so on.
We have a less well agreed set of processes around the second area, and an emerging apparatus of systems support. This includes resolvers, ERM systems, A to Z lists, metasearch, and so on. A level of agreement is apparent in that substitutable systems are now available to support this activity. However, differences in organizational structure to support the area and low takeup of ERM systems suggest that we are in early days. One place where there is likely to be further evolution relates to the creation, management and sharing of the data used to drive these systems.
And we have a much less well agreed set of processes around the third area. Libraries are exploring repositories for digitized collections, they are creating institutional repositories, and building workflows for content preparation and ingest, metadata creation, and so on. In fact, there is no agreed level of service in this area: you do not naturally expect to find particular services here in the way, for example, that you expect to find a circulation system. Of course, this lack of agreement makes this a potentially expensive area. There is a lot of figuring out what to do, and routine off-the-shelf tools or services may not necessarily exist across the range of what you want to do.
This is an overly complex systems landscape, and it will have to be rationalized in coming years so that libraries can spend more time putting their systems to work in support of their users and less time actually getting their systems to work together at all.
Anyway, this is by way of prelude to an observation about repositories. A couple of repository launches have come over my horizon in recent weeks.
The first is the Digital Conservancy at the University of Minnesota, which I mentioned the other day. This aims to provide services in relation to two classes of material: faculty research outputs and university administrative materials that traditionally would have gone to the University Archives. As I suggest in my post this makes a lot of sense: the repository aims to support the full range of institutionally produced intellectual outputs.
The second was the Open University's Open Research Online, "a repository of our research publications and other research outputs." In this case, the service aims to provide support for all the research outputs of OU academics. So, what you will find are deposited open access materials. However, you will also find citations to books, journal articles, and so on, which are not actually available in the repository: you may be referred to a publisher site. The repository aims to provide a full record to research activity, not only the open access materials.
What we have here, then, are well-worked through services which offer overlapping but different views onto their University's intellectual outputs. This is not a major issue as universities work towards a view of what should be offered and what their constituencies value.
However, in the longer term, lack of agreement about services and supporting processes may be a barrier, on the management side where different systems support is needed, or on the user side where different services from different universities may lead to confusion, reducing the gravitational pull that familiarity supports.
Aside: Of course, in the longer run also, there are interesting questions about the relationship between these institutional services and network level services but that is a discussion for another day.
We have become used to managing collections of digital resources: images, music, citations. Zotero is one response to the question of how we will manage collections of scholarly resources. Raymond Yee's suggestive triple does good service describing the motivation: we want to be able to easily gather, create, and share resources. This general question has emerged strongly in library contexts recently.
The interesting Digital Lives project was advertized on various lists the other week.
As we move from cultural memory based on physical artifacts, to a hybrid digital and physical environment, and then increasingly shift towards new forms of digital memory, many fundamental new issues arise for research institutions such as the British Library that will be the custodians of and provide research access to digital archives and personal collections created by individuals in the 21st century. ...
... Digital Lives is a major research project focusing on personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories. It brings together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web-archiving, history of science, and oral history from within the British Library (one of the world’s leading research libraries) with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and The Centre for Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol. [Digital Lives :: About]
The project blog notes the related work of RLG Programs in this area. Here is the scope:
Problem statement: Personal collection-building tools abound in the online environment, from social bookmarking sites (De.li.ci.ous, PennTags, CiteULike, Zotero etc.) to iTunes and LibraryThing. As libraries seek to integrate their services into the flow of online scholarship and research and to build collections that mirror and support current scholarly practice, they must reexamine the place of personal collections in the research lifecycle. Are research libraries responsible for creating or supplying tools to support personal collection building? Are they responsible for acquiring and preserving the personal collections of the researchers, student,s and faculty they serve? Little is known about how the range of available tools might be integrated in the library service environment, or what opportunities are available for collaborative sourcing of solutions that can meet the needs of libraries, archives, and museums. [Personal Research Collections program [OCLC - New modes of research, teaching & learning]]
We use the following collections grid from time to time to help focus attention on particular collecting patterns in libraries. The bottom right hand corner represents materials that have not been highly stewarded and which are usually unique to a particular institution. The types of material which go in here are research and learning outputs (e.g. preprints, data sets, learning objects) and institutional administrative records (annual reports, and so on).
These share some characteristics. And in some ways, we can see them becoming the 'special collections' of the future when they move into more stewarded environments.
In this context I was interested to see the University of Minnesota's Digital Conservancy. Effectively, it is looking at stewarding the material in that quadrant: institutional research materials and administrative records.
The University Digital Conservancy is a program of the University of Minnesota Libraries that provides long-term open access to a wide range of University works in digital formats. It does so by gathering, describing, organizing, storing, and preserving that content.
Works produced or sponsored by the University of Minnesota faculty, researchers, staff, and students are appropriate for deposit in the UDC. Works might include pre- and post-prints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers and theses.
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