New articles of interest
Articles linked from my delicious account this week include:
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
UM to sell digitized books on Amazon
First Google, now Amazon, UM has certainly got connections. They announced this week a plan to offer book reprints for sale on Amazon as reprints on demand. According to their press release,”The University of Michigan will make thousands of books that are no longer in copyright — including rare and one-of-a-kind titles — available as reprints on demand under a new agreement with BookSurge, part of the Amazon.com group of companies. The agreement gives the public a unique opportunity to buy reprints of a wide range of titles in the U-M Library for as little as a few dollars. As individual copies are sold on Amazon.com, BookSurge will print and bind the books in soft-cover form.” (more…)
LISWire: Developers of Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Receive Coutts Award for Innovation in Electronic Resources Management
Developers of Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Receive Coutts Award for Innovation in Electronic
Resources Management
SERU Recommended Practice from NISO Offers an Alternative to E-Resources Licenses
Baltimore, MD - July 22, 2009 – The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce that Judy Luther, President of Informed Strategies, and Selden Lamoureux, Electronic Resources Librarian at North Carolina State
University Libraries, are the recipients of the Coutts Award for Innovation in Electronic Resources Management for their work in developing SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding, a NISO recommended practice.
The award, sponsored by Coutts Information Services, is given by the Collection Management and Development Section (CMDS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS). It was presented to Luther and Lamoureux in an awards ceremony at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago on July 12, 2009.
"Selden Lamoureux and Judy Luther brought together librarians, publishers, and subscription agents to address the labor-intensive process of negotiating licenses for electronic resources, a process that has increasingly overwhelmed both libraries
and publishers," explained Andrea Imre, chair of the selection committee and Electronic Resources Librarian, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. "SERU offers a congenial and painless method for achieving a mutual
understanding between publishers and libraries. With the potential for drastically reducing the amount of time and money it takes to bring resources to users, SERU is a significant step forward in the electronic resource acquisition process."
"It's amazing to realize that the idea for SERU was first shared at the Charleston Conference a little more than three years ago," stated award recipient, Judy Luther. "Thanks to Karla Hahn's leadership as co-chair with me of the working group and
the support from NISO, consensus was reached among librarians, publishers, and agents, leading to the adoption of a best practice that can streamline acquisition of electronic products."
"The experience of working with SERU has delivered on its promise of fast, effective turnaround time for ordering e-journals from what used to take months to what can now take as little as an afternoon," confirmed award recipient Selden Lamoureux.
"A number of organizations have been quick to sign on and the value of SERU will continue to expand with the growing number of participating publishers and libraries."
"This is wonderful recognition of the contributions that the SERU project has made to the community," Todd Carpenter,
NISO Managing Director, declared. "Licensing is a significant bottleneck in the information distribution supply chain. Through its consensus process, NISO is able to bring together libraries and publishers to address these inefficiencies and
SERU is a great example of the results that are possible. Hopefully, this award and the recognition of its impact will continue to spur adoption of SERU."
NISO hosts on its website (www.niso.org/workrooms/seru/) the free SERU recommended practice and related support materials, including the SERU registry of publishers and libraries who have indicated interest in using SERU for electronic resources. Currently, the registry lists 35 publishers and content providers and over 100 libraries and consortia.
About NISO
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages
libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest
and across the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website:www.niso.org. For more
information please contact NISO on (301) 654-2512 or via email on nisohq@niso.org
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Karen A. Wetzel
NISO Standards Program Manager
Tel.: 301-654-2512
E-mail: kwetzel@niso.org
WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway helps libraries maximize Web visibility of digital collections via WorldCat
(July 24, 2009). OCLC has released the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway, a new service that helps libraries and other institutions maximize the visibility of unique primary source materials, such as digital photos, newspapers, letters and diaries, through WorldCat on the Web. The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is available to all users of OCLC CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software at no additional charge.
Popout
JISC, the UK organization that “inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies”, has published a 10-minute documentary on Libraries of the Future.
Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities
Ruth Reynard, Dean of Faculty Services for Career Education Corp, writes for Campus Technology about creating effective learning communities using social networking websites in Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities.
“Much has been written recently about the impact of social networking tools in teaching and learning and how educators can build on the skills of their students in using these tools. My discussion here does not negate that good work but introduces the idea that social networking is only the beginning of a longer and more complex process of socially constructed learning and ultimately collaboration and knowledge building. That is, if educators only integrate the ability of students to connect and socialize, deeper points of learning will be missed. While good teaching and learning rests on effective relationships (Cummins, 2000), in an active learning community, those relationships should evolve into actual idea exchange and knowledge construction.”
Twitter 101 for Business: A Special Guide
Twitter has launched a getting started guide for businesses who want to learn how to effectively use the microblogging app. Twitter 101 includes everything from specific case studies to Twitter terminology and even offers users the option to download a set of slides in order to train others on using Twitter. The guide is divided into the following sections:
eMarketer has published statistics which reveal that 41.6% percent of Twitter users use the microblogging application to keep in touch with their friends. Other findings include:
- Secondarily, men were interested in finding news and women in updating their status.
- Users under age 35 were more interested in broadcasting their status than their senior counterparts.
- Older users were more likely to use the service for work-related purposes.
- More women interacted with friends, family and celebrities than men, but men were more likely to follow bloggers.
Barnes & Noble launches world’s biggest e-book store
U.S. mega-chain Barnes & Noble announced in a press release yesterday the creation of the world’s biggest e-book store comprising “more than 700,000 titles, including hundreds of new releases and bestsellers at only $9.99.” Unlike Amazon’s Kindle-only e-books, e-books purchased through B&N’s store will be compatible with a number of platforms (aside from the Kindle, of course): iPhone, BlackBerry, and most Windows and Mac computers. Through a partnership with Google Books, the B&N e-book store will also offer more than 500,000 free and downloadable public domain e-books.
B&N als announced an exclusive agreement to provide e-books for the forthcoming Plastic Logic e-reader, a device that is geared toward business professionals. From Fortune:
Plastic Logic vice president of business development Daren Benzi says his device is geared for business travelers, and as such will support the display of PDF files, Microsoft’s MS Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, as well as newspapers and magazines. But e-books are a big part of the game plan. “Will we carry every single one of those 700,000-plus titles? I don’t know. We’ll announce that as we get further along,” said Benzi. “But we will have access to them all.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, The Book Oven analyzes how B&N’s move will affect the e-book market.
Amazon’s Kindle 2: “An alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization.” NOT!
At least, not according to author Nicholson Baker, who has written a long, occasionally pedantic article about his experiences with the machine for The New Yorker. The piece is full of typically florid Bakerisms: he likens the Kindle 2 to “a restaurant accordion,” refers to the “gray and Calvinist” typeface it employs, and complains about the page-turning deficiencies of the Kindle 1, which are “accompanied by a distracting flash of black as the microspheres dived down into their oil-filled nodules before forming new text.”
But the article is occasionally quite funny – offering, among other things, the title of an erotic novel that features “the mother of all orgasms” – and is a welcome respite from some of the more tech-oriented responses to the digital device. Baker offers an infuriating quote from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (“We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device” – yeah, that would be THE BOOK, you chucklehead), and compares switching from an iPod Touch to a Kindle 2 to “going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.”
Baker’s ultimate conclusion is that the Kindle 2 is a viable reading device if the book is compelling enough to make you forget the device itself. He uses the example of Michael Connelly’s thriller The Lincoln Lawyer:
I began pressing the Next Page clicker more and more eagerly, so eagerly that my habit of page turning, learned from years of reading – which is to reach for the page corner a little early, to prepare for the movement – kicked in unconsciously. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all. I was trying to hurry the Kindle. You mustn’t hurry the Kindle. But, hell, I didn’t care. The progress bar at the bottom said I was ninety-one per cent done. I was at location 7547. I was flying along. Gray is a good color, I thought. Finally, I was on the last bit. It was called “A Postcard from Cuba.” I breathed an immense ragged sigh. I read the acknowledgments and the about-the-author paragraph – Michael Connelly lives in Florida. Good man. The little progress indicator said ninety-nine per cent. I clicked the Next Page button. It showed the cover of the book again. I clicked Next Page again, but there was no next page. My first Kindle-delivered novel was at its end.
News Release: The Once and Future Book: O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference Opens Call for Participation
Sebastopol, CA, July 21, 2009 — The O'’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) will explore the critical trends emerging around the business of digital publishing February 22-24, 2010, at the Marriot Marquis in New York City. From authoring, editing, and layout to distribution and consumption, new technologies are changing all aspects of publishing. As digitalization and globalization continue to accelerate the rate of change, publishers face the urgent necessity of building a solid business on the shifting foundation of paid vs. free content, format and device innovations, conflicting standards and royalties. TOC offers publishers the blueprints for success.
Program Chair Andrew Savikas invites proposals for conference sessions and tutorials for this fourth annual TOC Conference, where the program will decipher the tools of change in this industry, show how to put theory into practice, and cut through the hype for a more profitable future in publishing.
Read the full press release.
via Stephen's Lighthouse by stephen on 7/14/09
Are you a little short on Vitameatavegamin? Are you feeling down and unmotivated? Is your Kazoo missing its buzz? Did you get lunchbag letdown or miss ALA this year and not get your motivation tank topped up?
Try watching these short and long videos - one or two a day for a few weeks.
100 Incredibly Inspiring Videos for Leaders
This one is a favourite:
40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes
If you're worried about your budget, watch this one. Stick with the program. Grit your teeth and show real determination.
via OCLC News on 7/17/09
Cover Story: Library cooperation in the 21st century. As competition grows for users' attention, 21st century libraries have more challenges—and more opportunities—for broad, flexible cooperative efforts.
via No Shelf Required by spolanka on 7/17/09
Last Friday at ALA I was part of a NISO/BISG panel on the changing standards landscape. There were many speakers, each discussing various aspects of eBook standards like business models, ISBNs, epub, DRM, and the standards and features needed by librarians (which was my part). I’ve summarized my presentation here and would welcome additional suggestions and ideas from librarians. Sue (more…)
via Blogging Section of SLA-IT by Jill Hurst-Wahl on 7/14/09
This was streamed live on the Internet during ALA and recorded for later viewing. On the panel were Clifford Lynch, John Blyberg, Roy Tennant, Joan Frye Williams, Eric Lease Morgan, and Geert van de Boogaard. Participating online were Marshall Breeding, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and Karen Schneider.
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Most Engaged Brands On The Web
What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below or on ENGAGEMENTdb, which was presumably created with Wetpaint’s site-creation software.
The study scores the engagement level of each of the top 100 brands across more than ten social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. Starbucks scored the highest, with 127 points. The top ten brands are:
1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)
The report categorizes brands into one of four types, depending on how many social media channels they participate in. The most engaged are “mavens,” while the least engaged are “wallflowers” (McDonalds and BP are examples). The study claims a correlation between social media engagement and revenue growth. The “mavens” saw revenues grow an average of 18 percent over the past 12 months, while the Wallflowers saw revenues drop 6 percent. I really doubt that their level of social media engagement had anything to do with their revenue growth, it is just that the strongest brands are the mo
2 eBook White papers
Picked up these two white papers from Springer at the ALA Conference. They are in pdf at the Springer site.
eBooks - Costs and Benefits to Academic and Research Libraries
Monday, July 13, 2009
Top Technology Trends: July 2009
(2009-07-12 12:04:10).
Although I am not attending this year's American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, IL, I will be participating virtually in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel. The following are some of the trends that I see playing out in the niche of library automation.
Discovery Interfaces Expand Scope
The genre of Discovery Interfaces has been an ongoing trend for the last few years. These interfaces aim to replace the traditional, stodgy OPAC with a modern interface, delivering library content through an interface more consistent with what patrons experience elsewhere on the Web. They offer visually appealing design, relevancy ranking, faceted navigation, and other standard Web navigation techniques. These products offer an attractive replacement for the online catalogs delivered with the ILS.
The initial phase of this genre of products delivered a new interface. Yet, they remained largely tied to the content managed in the ILS, despite the ever increasing investments in electronic content. In many cases, a federated search component would aim to supplement the primarily print content of the ILS with a clumsy mechanism for accessing e-journals and database.
We're now seeing a new wave of discovery products that deliver pre-populated indexes of e-journal content, providing access to the individual articles represented in the library's body of subscriptions on equal footing with the print materials managed within the ILS. Products in this genre include Summon from Serials Solutions, WorldCat Local from OCLC, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Primo Central.
The technology for a new-generation library interface with Google and Amazon-like features has become increasingly commonplace. Every library automation vendor offers one – Innovative Interfaces' Encore, Ex Libris' Primo, AquaBrowser now owned by R.R. Bowker, LS2 PAC from The Library Corporation, VTLS Visualizer, SirsiDynix Enterprise etc, and open source versions prosper as well: VuFind and Blacklight. Open source components such as Apache Lucene and SOLR, make the construction of a modern interface less of a technical feat.
Today, it's the scope of content addressed that differentiates discovery interfaces. It's now within reach to produce discovery interfaces that address the full breadth of a library's collection through a single consolidated index, spanning print, articles within e-journals, and each of the individual objects within the digital collections, institutional repositories.
The major change that enables this breakthrough involves a relenting of the stranglehold of publishers and providers of content. Until recently, few were willing to allow wholesale access to the content held within their information products. That left the primary means of discovery outside their native interfaces the far-from-elegant approach of metasearch that incessantly hammered their servers with a very low possibility of connecting a user to their content. The new paradigm of pre-populated indexes involves the risk of wholesale exposure of their key assets, yet stands to increase the use of their products through a more efficient search model.
Social networking powers library discovery
Web 2.0 concepts have been churning in the library technology space for half a decade, but have yet to become part of the core infrastructure that power libraries. Tags, ratings, and reviews have been an expected feature in new discovery interfaces, but have yet to make a substantial impact on the way that patrons interact with library collections.
Library Thing for Libraries and ChiliFresh have become popular add-ins to help existing library catalogs and discovery interfaces add a measure of user-generated content.
BiblioCommons aims to bring social networking into the patron's basic experience of the library. An interesting new approach to discovery interfaces, BiblioCommons brings user-generated content, social interactions among library patrons, and other Web 2.0 concepts into the process of selecting reading materials. Following a longish period of development, a dozen or so libraries expect to launch BiblioCommons catalogs by the end of the year.
I anticipate that social networking components will increasingly become embedded into the inner fabric of library products and not merely add-ons and afterthoughts.
These interesting products have yet to displace the legacy catalog. Despite a plethora of products available to replace them with more modern interfaces, the vast majority of libraries continue to offer vintage OPACs. Even in the best of times, the replacement cycles of automation products in libraries turn extremely slowly.
The demise of the single-library ILS
In today's environment of highly-scalable computer platforms and increased interest in resource sharing, the concept of each library operating its own ILS becomes less defensible. We're seeing a trend toward larger-scale implementations that serve many libraries:
- Vendor-hosted Software-as-a-service offerings that aggregate many instances of their products.
- Consortial, Regional and state-wide implementations that aggregate many libraries into a single instance of an ILS platform.
- OCLC's WorldCat Local cooperative library system that aims to provide a global platform for library automation to its member libraries.
Web Services and SOA advance
Development of technology products for libraries increasingly embraces SOA or at least offers legacy functionality through Web services. Projects such as the Mellon-funded OLE Project and Ex Libris URM aim to build new frameworks for library automation through a service-oriented architecture. Existing products increasingly use Web services to provide access to internal functionality and data. Today's environment that fully embraces the concept of openness and holds distain for closed systems. Open source, open APIs, and open access content continue to advance into the mainstream of library technology.
Are e-book ads the way of the future?
The Internet’s been abuzz with news of some recently filed Amazon patents. A blog post on the Fast Companywebsite looks at two of the patents, which point toward a new future in which ads are embedded in e-books.
The patents are designed to solve a supposed problem: that “out of print or rare books … typically do not include advertisements.” For electronic versions of magazines, the inclusion of advertising makes sense, as this would merely reflect how print magazines are already constructed. But if Amazon intends to use these patents for all materials available on the Kindle, including books, readers will start to get understandably uneasy. From Fast Company:
Would you be happy reading a copy of The Hobbit, only to find an embedded ad for pedicure treatments on certain pages? The framework for this to happen isn’t clear from the patent, though it would be reasonable to expect Amazon to start by offering the ads in books with discounted prices. Or the ads could appear in texts by self-published authors who need to fund their work but don’t have the backing of a traditional publisher. That would be a sensible way for Amazon to get the public accepting the idea, and it would be a great sales hook for Amazon to entice advertisers into the scheme in the first place.
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