I’ve seen this Atlantic article popping up various places (called Is Google Making Us Stupid). The most interesting parts to me though were about how people read on the web, so don’t be scared off by yet another Google article.
Some interesting research in these…rnhttp://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2008/05/ieee-trans-on-education-special-issue.html
Silent movie created by LIS students at UDenver. Tries to overturn negative perceptions of Archives (dark, unfriendly and roach-ridden), but includes an unfortunate portrayal of unhelpful librarian
http://blip.tv/file/855937/ Provocative look at the future of Web 2.0 tools and how society will might interact with these tools.
John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who died yesterday (April 13, 2008) at the age of 96. He taught Richard Feynman. He worked on the Manhattan Project. He coined the phrases black hole and wormhole. He was also the son, brother, father and uncle of librarians.
In 1984, he gave the graduation address to the University of Texas library school. The theme of his speech, which focused on his father’s work as a public library director, was on Selling Library Service. It is well worth reading.
Nothing does more than information, rightly grasped, to open the doors of the world to a better tomorrow; and no agency does more than the library—in today’s new and wider sense—to provide the most reliable information, the best thinking on the whole sweep of human concerns. The library is the university of the people.
We all count ourselves as friends of civilization. We also know that there are enemies of civilization. That burner of books named Adolf Hitler was not the last. We see them today, and we will see more tomorrow. How can one of these enemies destroy all of what we call civilization? How can he most effectively stamp out a nation’s or a community’s breadth of outlook, destroy its sense of history, extinguish its visions of greatness, and reduce us all to unenlightened clods? Simple! Wipe out every source of information! And begin with the library! Why? Because that’s where people go to get their own information in their own way on their own questions.
It does not take hammer, fire, and dynamite to destroy our libraries and information centers. Indifference is enough. Just keep cutting the budget a little every year. Or keep the budget fixed and let inflation do the job of destruction just as effectively and more insidiously.
There is a still more subtle way to destroy what we hold dear. Promote the idea that television carries all that anybody needs to know. Create a docile people. Tell everyone to sit in front of the tube. Let someone else pick out what scenes we shall see, what English we shall hear, what standards we shall accept. Stay passive. Never think for ourselves. Never learn the art of expressing ourselves with clarity and strength. Never put together a well-reasoned statement on anything. Above all, never write. Cure people of that nonsensical idea that we should go to the library to get our own information in our own way on our own questions. This curative program, thoroughly adhered to, will make it unnecessary to burn books and dynamite libraries and information centers. Nobody will ever bother to open a book or consult an information terminal.
Nobody? Nobody read or write or speak? Then the enemies of values, of history, and of imagination, and of all that we call civilization, will have accomplished their aim without once having lifted a hand.
Probably nothing new in this interview/article for most of you, but an encouraging look at the way one professor/thinker views the plagiarism problem (plus he has positive words for librarians at the end).rnrnhttp://insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/03/writing
A recent essay in Nature on open access possibilities for chemistry data.
Murray-Rust, Peter (2008) “Chemistry for everyone.” Nature 451, 648-651 (7 February 2008)
The author (a chemical informatics specialist at Cambridge) doesn’t seem to see a role for libraries in this new information age, but only references libraries as being part of the old way of doing things:
The issue of open data is particularly problematic. Unlike astronomers, geoscientists and biologists, chemists have no global data-collection projects; their data are usually published in many different online journals and then collated by hand into CAS. In the era of real paper, limited page counts ensured that most chemical data were never published, and so are effectively lost. Even now, most electronic documents still use visual representations of a printed page (such as PDF files), rather than machine-friendly formats that allow data to be shared across different information systems. Moreover, the default business model for chemical publishing is ‘reader pays’. As a result, non-subscribers — that’s most of the world — have no access to a large percentage of chemical data.But things are changing. The web is an almost infinite, comprehensive source of free data. Young scientists don’t go to libraries and no longer look to traditional sources of information, but to search engines such as Google. They expect to be able to express their questions in natural language and to get instant answers. They have no time to learn proprietary systems with idiosyncratic approaches. For reference, one of the first places to look is Wikipedia.
Jeremy Frumkin
okay so well they are not new, but new devices are going to drive this now. [passes out OSU Libraries’ new rnKindle ebook reader]
Ebook distribution infrastructure is developing. Where do libraries fit in to the distribution channels? Issues with terms of service, how to deliver and share content… Libraries are not included in the business models of the ereader companies at this point. How do libraries figure out how to influence the business model - libraries already buy lots of ebooks and should be a big customer for ereaders
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rn– what does this mean? what concrete things are moving to the network? These three companies are working rnon library information at the network level, and are defining what it really means to be on the network level.rn
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Looking for increased clarity around this in the next couple of years.
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Q: What about looking at networks for storage?Amazon has a storage service. could Libraries use these to rndecrease costs associated with archiving digitized information?
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Q: How do you keep up with these developments?
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Blogs, visiting the websites of these places to see what they are doing. Right now looking at underlying rntechnologies, but there really hasn’t been an application that really helps define what “moving to the network” is rnand can do for libraries. Recommends Ted.com as a place to rnsee talks about new technologies
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Terry Reese
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rnTalk about things that are going to affect libraries in the immediate future. Library IT boom (and coming rnconsolidation) Licensing, the next digital library frontier. The Continued evolution of OCLC IT Boom Following rnCode4Lib - positions for systems development seem to be on the rise. used to be bigger IT shops in libraries. rnKind of an ebb and flow… ex. NCSU buying Endeca and Pines being developed in Georgia. Endeca - lots of rnFTP…How long can a boom be sustained? Lots of open source and new positions, but the amount of money rnbehind this is not like the dot.com boom 
So to sustain this, consolidation for IT solutions would be fruitful to rnpursue. Storage is an issues- 40 terabytes here. Libraries aren’t really wanting to be server farms - what are rnsome other ways to do this? Movement to hosted IT solutions, mixed with local development. Move some of the rnIT development and administration from the individual institution to the consortium. (examples DSpace and rnFedora) A need to identify services (locally or externally ) that are sucking the life from individual rninstitutions.”Vampire” services - is there a better way to deal with DSpace… the cost per item is really high. 6rn-7, 000 items, cost is 600-700 per item.rn
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data harvesting is changing the face of collection development - removing the traditional definitions of rn”collection” Federated search would work far better with improved access and licensing of data. How people rnlicense the data for harvesting / accessing / rnperceived licensing agreements - Terry has been trying to get the rncatalogs from other PNW libraries, but some data is locked into a specific context…and sometimes people rndon’t really know what they are licensed to do with metadata or other data. EbscoHost will allow harvesting of rnmetadata for LOCKKS, but for nothing else. Vendors are starting to think about these issues, libraries need to rninvestigate how to move forward with licensing agreements that facilitate the kind of harvesting and data access rnwe need.?
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( wolf in sheep’s clothing cartoon…)rn
How will OCLC let members in to the new things they are creating? How much will it cost? how does rnOCLC represent libraries outside the library world? They are sort of the Google of Libraries -but they’ve become rnvery protective of worldcat, etc. What will they open up. Trust relationships may need to be developed.
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Q: Talk about how you created your own library? Pulled metadata from a number of sources - all digital rnrecords.
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How will OCLC let members in to the new things they are creating? How much will it cost? how does rnOCLC represent libraries outside the library world? They are sort of the Google of Libraries -but they’ve become rnvery protective of worldcat, etc. What will they open up. Trust relationships may need to be developed.
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Q: Talk about how you created your own library? Pulled metadata from a number of sources - all digital rnrecords.
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The slides for this talk will be in Scholar’s Archive.
An article was recently published in The Journal of Cell Biology - Show me the data by Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill.
The integrity of data, and transparency about their acquisition, are vital to science. The impact factor data that are gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI) have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire (1), the success of grant applications (2), and even salary bonuses (3). Yet, members of the community seem to have little understanding of how impact factors are determined, and, to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability.
This article has been getting a lot of commentary in the library community (e.g., the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics listserv I’m on) and there is an interesting blog entry from the economics community - Citation Accuracy
Open Access News pointed out a very interesting article in the Journal of Cell Biology, Show Me the Data. Written by that journal’s executive editor, the executive editor of Journal of Experimental Medicine, and the Executive Director of The Rockefeller University Press, it first reiterates many quality issues with journal impact factors that seem to be well-known among biologists, but I suspect that they are news to many economists. Many of these issues also hold for citation rankings for individuals. Beyond that, there are other issues that make citation data suspect. Fortunately, there are potential solutions to many of these problems.
Blogs, wikis, tags, RSS feeds, Facebook, MySpace, chat, plus the student focus and organizational changes that we need to capitalize on web 2.0 technology and ideas.