The SlideShare blog has recently begun a series of blog posts called Slide Tips which are incredibly useful articles from the world’s leading presentation experts. You can subscribe to the series via RSS or have it delivered to your email box. A couple that I found particularly helpful are:
You can download the Executive Summary here. We got a look at the whole report and it is packed full of great data, including the two top 10 lists of Semantic Web opportunities detailed below.
Also in this post we're giving away 3 free tickets to Defrag for the best suggestions in the comments for 'web 3.0' apps. See below for more details.
Top-10 List [of Semantic technology opportunities] -- Consumer
1 Interest networking
2 Semantic social networking
3 Semantic bookmarks
4 Semantic search & QA
5 Semantic desktop / webtop
6 Semantic blogs, wikis
7 Semantic identity management
8 Semantic mobility
9 Semantic email & IM
10 Reality browsing, avatars, & context-aware games
Top-10 List -- Enterprise
1 Information sharing
2 Semantic search, discovery, & navigation
3 Semantic mashups and composite applications
4 Semantic infrastructure / middleware SSOA, SBPM, SWS, virtualization, policy-based computing
5 Semantic business intelligence
6 Semantic ERP applications CRM, PLM, SCM, HRM
7 Semantic governance, compliance, & risk
8 Semantic web sites, wikis, collaboration, interest networking, & collective knowledge systems
9 Semantic advertising, marketing, personalization, & customization
10 Intelligent systems knowledge-based research, design, engineering, simulation, planning, scheduling, optimization, & decision support.
(NEW YORK, October 28, 2008) Representatives from Fordham University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services (CUL/IS) will speak at Columbia University on the economics of scholarly publishing and the future of the monograph. The panel discussion, entitled "The Future of the Book: Can the Endangered Monograph Survive?" will take place on Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 3 p.m. in Alfred Lerner Hall Room 555 on Columbia's Morningside Campus. This event is free and open to the public.
Panelists include Helen Tartar, Editorial Director at Fordham University Press; Sanford Thatcher, Director of Penn State University Press and past President of the Association of American University Presses; and Ree DeDonato, Director of Humanities and History and Acting Director of Union Theological Seminary's Burke Library of CUL/IS.
For humanities scholars seeking promotion or tenure, having a published monograph—a work of writing on a single subject—is often a key requirement. Due to small, specialized audiences and growing financial challenges for university presses and academic libraries, the business of publishing these monographs has long been a troubled undertaking. The panel will discuss the future of the print monograph, especially in light of the increasing digitization of scholarly communication.
This event is the third in the speaker series on today's pivotal issues in scholarly communication organized by the Scholarly Communication Program of Columbia University Libraries/Information Services. Follow the live event remotely via Twitter at http://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. Video of each event will be available on the Scholarly Communication Program website. For information on the series, Research without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication, please email Kathryn Pope at kp2002@columbia.edu, or visit http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events/.
The Scholarly Communication Program is an initiative of the Columbia University Libraries/Information Services' Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. Established in April 2008 to encourage discussion about and innovative solutions to scholarly communication issues, the Program aims to support faculty members, librarians, staff, and students as they consider their options for creating, distributing, evaluating, reusing, and preserving new knowledge in a rapidly changing communications environment.
Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is one of the top five academic research library systems in North America. The collections include over 10 million volumes, over 100,000 journals and serials, as well as extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps, graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are organized into 25 libraries and various academic technology centers. The Libraries employs more than 550 professional and support staff. The website of the Libraries at www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb is the gateway to its services and resources.
Interested in some free learning? There are a couple of free upcoming webinars from the MaintainIT project that you may be interested in:
Like many librarians, you’re beginning to purchase e-books from a variety of publishers, and you’re confused by all the different licensing agreements, platforms, and pricing models. A solution to this madness? Use an e-book aggregator. Aggregators partner with multiple publishers to supply content (e-books, audio books, other media) and provide a platform for libraries and end users to search, order, access, and download the content on the Web. We’ll focus here on three of the larger academic aggregators—EBL, ebrary, and MyiLibrary. Ebooks Corporation’s EBL (Ebook Library) partners with 250 academic and trade publishers, offering more than 85,000 titles. Ebrary partners with 285 publishers to offer more than 120,000 e-books and content databases. The newest platform, Ingram Digital Group’s MyiLibrary, partners with 250 publishers and offers more than 110,000 titles.
For me, the major advantage of an aggregator is having a single platform or interface to host countless titles, with international coverage, and typically no special players or plug-ins. Furthermore, because aggregators partner with hundreds of publishers, librarians can centralize their selection and acquisitions processes, ordering print or electronic content direct from the aggregator or through one of the many book wholesalers, such as YBP, Blackwell, or Baker and Taylor. As a result of this centralization, only one contract or licensing agreement is needed. And libraries negotiate pricing models up front, so e-book prices are known in advance.
There are several pricing models, but the most popular are purchasing title by title for either single-user or multiple-user access or purchasing an entire e-book subject collection for multiple-user access. Subscription or perpetual-ownership models are available as well. Prices vary depending on the aggregator and number of users but are generally at or above the print list price. Additional benefits of using an aggregator include federated search compatibility, 24/7 access to full text, free MARC records, usage statistics, and the ability to customize the interface or offer it in multiple languages.
Because aggregators have so many advantages in common, I spoke with representatives from EBL, ebrary, and MyiLibrary to find out what they provide that’s unique.
EBL
EBL offers two very distinctive features: course packs and reserves. These allow libraries to create course-specific content, either linking to book chapters already owned or purchasing individual book chapters for reserve or course-pack use only. Both are password protected and can easily be created and edited. Additionally, EBL provides an alternative solution to ILL by offering a purchase-on-demand model in which all titles are visible to end users and rented or purchased as needed, subject to specifications in the negotiated contract. Generally, the e-book price is the same as print list price. The catch, you ask? Access is limited to 325 uses per year. If the circulation climbs above that, libraries purchase a second copy. Kari Paulson, president of EBL, states, “With this model, the library determines the rules for discovery and payment, and very rarely does anyone go above the 325 uses.” On the future of EBL, Paulson says, “Our mission is to continue to innovate both on the library and patron side to make e-books more interactive and make using them more interactive, and with better tools.”
Ebrary
Ebrary has a patented Infotools program as well as their ebrary reader interface. Currently, the reader is a plug-in, but a Java-based reader, which won’t require a plug-in, is in beta testing. The Infotools software is a customized set of utilities that links users to other online sources, including the library catalog, dictionaries, e-book reference collections, databases, search engines, and institutional repository collections. Ebrary also offers distinct APIs (application programming interfaces) to provide single sign-on and integration with course-management systems, like Blackboard. Libraries wishing to create institutional repositories can license the ebrary platform for hosted services or to run on the library’s own server. The ebrary reader software offers a single interface for commercial and library resources; usage statistics; PDF, XML, or other data-format submission; meta-tagging; and customization. Kevin Sayar, president of ebrary, says to expect a redesigned user interface, which will be more intuitive and limit the number of clicks needed to locate information.
MyiLibrary
MyiLibrary, with its connection to Ingram and the Microsoft Live Search Books program, offers a large amount of unique content not available for purchase through other aggregators. Additionally, Ingram Digital Group offers print and digital content distribution and print-on-demand services through their Lightning Source product and hosts content from their clients using their repository feature. Both Stanford University and the University of Toronto currently use this feature. In addition to the pricing models discussed above, MyiLibrary also offers a demand-driven model, where all titles are displayed but not yet purchased. Once the titles are used a designated number of times (a negotiated amount), they are automatically purchased by the library. This fall, MyiLibrary will roll out another new model, allowing end users to purchase or rent titles themselves or request the library to purchase them. According to Rich Rosy, vice president and general manager, Institutional Solutions, Ingram Digital Group, “It’s an exciting time with e-content in the institutional area from publisher and library perspectives becoming more prevalent. Because both publishers and libraries drive these initiatives, we like to talk with them equally to understand their needs.”
Sue Polanka is Head of Reference Instruction, Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio. For more on e-books, check out her blog,No Shelf Required, which provides a forum for librarians, publishers, distributors, aggregators, and others to talk about e-books and their place in libraries.
NetLibrary, due to it’s recent transformation, has a feature article in the Nov. 1, 2008 Booklist issue (and Booklist Online)
Academic aggregators - ebrary, EBL, and Myilibrary - were featured back in May, 2008.
All articles are linked from No Shelf Required, just check out the articles link.
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