Standards, yea!

Michael Jubb at the Research Information Network blogs about the new journal version standards released by the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group (seriously?). I'm all for standards, even if they appear a bit late, and slightly anachronistic.

I'm not sure how long we, as a society, will continue saying something is finished, especially items like "journal" articles. The standards presume a publication date, even if they've changed the terminology:

"Journal articles record the 'minutes of science' and are intended as a fixed record
of a body of work at a moment in time chosen by the scholar. This leads us to the Version of Record as a useful definition for formalizing academic achievement."

I'm disappointed to see that they dropped concepts, such as "siblings" (related papers on the same subject, probably using the same research), which could have made some review much easier. I also think it has limited the long-term use of the terms given the relatively rapid pace at which the means of dissemination of knowledge is changing, esp. compared to the length of time it took them to come up with the standards.

The report definitely deserves more than the quick reading I've given it. The current version is less than 27 pages, and still manages to introduce the terms, their definitions, and includes some of the formal discussions that took place during the process.

New Release to Watch from OUP

Cheryl Laguardia, a blogger at LibraryJournal.com, has taken a look at a new collection of digitized 19th-century materials from Oxford called "Electronic Enlightenment." Cheryl writes,

"They present this as a community resource, and are inviting researchers to contribute to the file by adding information about previously unknown correspondents and materials from the period."

It’s heavily gated, and doesn’t appear to have a teaser/free side without registration. I don't really like registering for items that I won't use (I really don't even like registering most of the time when I will use them). So, I'll be watching for user responses and commentary. I'm interested to see how it will compare with the Labyrinth, a "free" resourse on Medieval studies that has been around since the mid-1990s. Several years ago I used it on a research project for a local museum. It functioned more like a cross between an academic Wiki and a host for classroom lectures, etc. The Labyrinth has "recently" (since last I used it) added a tree/search structure, but otherwise looks the same.V ery useful, if not as pretty as OUP's product.

Papertech

Today's NYTimes.com heralds a forthcoming "tech-savvy" Esquire cover complete with battery pack and lit cover.

I have to admire Esquire for their attempts at marketing and survival. My initial reaction was to wonder how in the world they think something like this could possibly herald a different type of magazine experience. The Kindle, sure. Everyone knows that "the future of print" means the demise of most individual print products in favor of hyperlinked, interactive product online.

Then I thought--wait a minute. This is a society that gives away calculators in $12.99 purses. I know that it isn't exactly the same thing, but "adding machines" were still the size and heft of large bricks 30 years ago. What's to say that a "disposable" paper-like medium, hopefully run on flexible solar panels, won't hold the 500+ page content of the August 2023 Vogue, complete with scent-clouds to annoy your seat mate on the train?

Results vs. Innovation?

In The Chronicle Review's Note Bene today, "Lights, Camera, Publishing?," by NINA C. AYOUB.

It sounds like video, when it works, works wonderfully. I would love to try audio and video casts to add value to our text books. What could be better for promotion than listening or seeing the book being used in a classroom setting?

New-to-me, unaccessible tool

I knew there was software that made writing review and proofing easier for those involved than constant emailing or copying of files (pretty much every wiki software is made for that). I didn't know this company existed: http://www.scholarone.com/products_manuscriptcentral_aboutMC.shtml.

It looks so cool, it makes me want to submit a paper just to see it in action.

PoGo: The New Polaroid

The Chicago Tribune features a review of the PoGo, the new portable, pocket-sized digital photo print maker from Polaroid, From Camera to Prints in a Matter of Minutes.

It sounds like Polaroid updated their iconic instant-photo product, and very well. One thing it might be missing that the original Polaroid provided was a true un-duplicatable-snapshot, reliable as a recording of an instant in time and space in a way that no digitally-produced image can be.

DELOS (The Digital Library Association of the EU)

Seven months after its inception (the group it is based on is ten years old) this association already has 59 members, http://www.diglib.org/. It looks comparable to the Digital Library Federation of the U.S., http://www.diglib.org/.

The program for the Spring Forum for the DLF has some papers that look good, especially Asset Actions Next Steps: Atom/OAI-ORE and Zotero, as well as presentations that cover open access mandates, propose social science data networks, user-centered design, ARTstor, and this presentationon UIScholarWords at Indiana University.

Pogue's eBook Experiment

A comment on David Pogue's ongoing eBook comments and discussions, the lastest available here. I enjoy David Pogue's posts, but have to admit that I've never purchased a book by him, and, given the titles of the books that he mentions, I can't imagine why I would.

I remember seeing students copying entire texts at the Union and libraries back when I was in college (back when Gopher was more than a rodent). These copies weren't for Gopher-distribution. And I could never figure out how the students thought they were ahead making $.10 copies of a 400-page book instead of buying a used, and sometimes even a new copy. I guess the moral is that some people will make copies just to do so.

That said, I'm glad that the "Circuits" columnist is finally moving at least some of his books (legitimately) online.

JSTOR's Updates

One of LJ’s bloggers has a criticism of the new JSTOR functionality, met with a good, concise explanation of the updates and their reasons: http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1100000310/post/1320028332.html.

Hilarity Resulting from Unconscious Irony

This appeared in this morning's "Online Media Daily," quoted from Reuter's:

"In an on-stage interview with writer Ken Auletta of the New Yorker magazine, Schmidt said, "'Don't be evil' is meant to provoke internal debate over what constitutes ethical corporate behavior, rather than representing an absolute moral position."

Schmitt goes on to say that there is no "evilmeter" they can apply to test whether something is good or evil.

I read the quote to a co-worker who found the quote just as hilarious as I. Maybe it's the Midwestern Protestant training I received early in the development of my atheistic agnostic world view, but the phrase doesn't really allow for ambiguity. The philosophy behind it might. One would think that if something is on the "evil" side of the meter, one would cease, no? Well, no, if one follows Schmidt's logic:

"The goal of the company is not to monetize everything, the goal is to change the world.... We don't start from monetization. We start from the perspective of what problems do we have."

So, they don't start from monetization, they find out how they can monetize the solutions to problems. If a bridge for cars blocks a waterway needed for boats, is the bridge evil? One person's "solution" is another's problem. To make a better Google analogy, if an elephant sits on his trainer, killing him, is the elephant evil? I can't make the leap to evil being morally ambiguous. Even if one doesn't do "evil" it leaves a wide margin for behavior that, unintentionally or not, can do great harm.

The Future of DRM

Will audiobooks show paper books "The Way?" Today's LJ features coverage of BEA and the Audio Publishers Association Conference on DRM and audiobooks. Apparently industry studies have confirmed everyone's suspicion that DRM is a "speedbump," and that many people will go ahead and purchase (or lease) an audiobook without illegally ripping it.

That's not exactly what UIP's experience in making books available as webpages showed. Instead, making the digital copies available on our website seemed to erase demand of the paper copies. Of course, people were just linking and reading those books, not making their own copies. That might be the point on which the GSU e-reserve result hinges (discussed in a post earlier today). If libraries are making copies to post on their in-house webpages, it is most likely a clear violation of copyright. If they are creating pages of links to materials that they own in digital format, I can't see how that is a violation. We'll see.

Guttenberg-e went Open Access

I don't remember seeing this announcement back in February.

The titles are pretty standard low-print-run monographs. It sounds as though they're going ahead with new titles, even though the original Gutenberg-e funding has dropped off, and the press release states that the open-access model is not sustainable without outside funding.

It always surprises me when other professionals are surprised when professional publishing (not these bloggy things) costs real money. Computers, buildings, personnel (no matter how little we work for) are not free. That said, good on them for freeing the books for other scholars and readers to use.

Completely off-topic

A friend sent this link to the Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University. It's such a wonderful idea, and under a Creative Commons license.

I notice they do presume that one's accent is static, and accent's aren't, at least according to my descriptive English instructor. I know my own accent can vary from the blue-collar, small-town Central Illinois accent I grew up with ("Southern" to people from Northern Illinois) to white-collar, educated middle-class small-city Central Illinois. They're recruiting for samples, if anyone is interested in contributing.

Google Book Search Bibliography

One of the listservs I still get from my GSLIS days has semi-frequent posts of links to bibliographies. Today's is The Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 from Digital Scholarship.

I had forgotten (so quickly!) how much fuss was made about fair use and copyright when the project first started. The majority of the books, magazine and journal articles, and few white papers that he sites are from 2005-6, with only six from 2008.

Ironically the bibliography itself can be seen to highlight the drawbacks of Google Search. Most people, myself included, go first to Google or another search engine to find information about a subject. Unfortunately, with all Google's algorithms, they still cannot return a clear, concise list such as this one. Although if you search for Google Book Search Bibliography, this is the first return.

LJ Interview with Harvard's OA Architect

LJ's Academic Newswire today features an interview with Stuart Shieber, In New Job, Harvard Professor Downplays the Role of “Revolutionary”.

Highlights:
He is fostering a relationship with Harvard University Press in an effort to support the mandate. HUP is in the process of starting up an "open-access, faculty-edited journal,The Journal of Legal Analysis.
Ambiguous quote: "Authors don't get underwriting help from the library when they publish in OA journals, while they do from publishing in subscription-based journals," he explains. To put OA and subscription journals on a "level playing field," he suggests, "you'd want to underwrite OA journals just as you do subscription journals." Wouldn't a library (or journal otherwise underwritten by readers) be a subscription journal? I realize advertising, author fees, and donations are also forms of underwriting, but I found the quote confusing.

Microformats -- Standards by Any Other Name

From WebMonkey (via Wired).

Apparently early reports from Mozilla suggested that Firefox 3 would support MicroFormatting--the ability for your favorite calendar, contacts, and other programs to read data from websites. Unfortunately there appear to be no standards (metadata or otherwise) for this yet, so no one is sure how to make it happen.

All I can say is please. This should be so awesome when it happens (presuming it is opt-in, and companies can only mine the data with permission).

Web Users "Selfish"

OnlineMediaDaily linked to this story from the BBC online: Web users 'getting more ruthless.' According to the story, Jakob Nielsen's research shows that people are distracted less by the traditional tools websites use to hold their attention.

I wonder if this isn't a function of the changing use of the web. It is no longer a novelty, and fewer of us spend time "surfing" for fun. "They" wanted the web used for commerce--"they" should not be surprised when people treat it like a business experience. Get in, get out, with as little time and money wasted as possible.

So, my lesson learned is to make it even easier for our customers to get what they want, and take a chance that they'll leave early, but satisfied, and possibly more likely to return.

From email to . . . ?

I have to admit I really don't "get" social networking sites. I understand their purpose, but at this point they still feel like toys rather than tools in my hands.

MediaPost's Online Media Daily has a report from the Email Insider Summit, Habeas: Email Remains Primo Communication Method, that seems to suggest my views are still in the majority, even among younger users. Habeas' research shows that people still prefer email, and will for the foreseeable future, though the reporter mentions one college student who attended the conference would be content to use Facebook solely in his next (first?) job.

They're too intimate. I remember at least one anthropology instructor commenting on research predicting how many "intimates" (close friends and family) one could mentally keep track of, explaining relationships in the classic circles of a Venn diagram. Myspace and Facebook, in their current incarnations, seem to encourage "intimates" circles the size of the Assembly Hall across the street, with only token nods to physical and mental realities.

I have one work contact without an email account, and only a few more intimates offline. I think, for most small businesses (including publishing) email will continue to be a sufficient means of communication indefinately.

Web Page Highlighter

School Library Journal features awesomehighlighter.com in their Saved By the Bell: Sixty Second Tech Tip section. This could be an excellent resource for adults, too, saving all that printing and copying of web pages for meetings (such as our Web Committee meeting tomorrow morning).

LJ @ IDPF

Library Journal has a short item today on the International Digital Publishing Forum meeting last week.

I blogged about the announcement last month about Digital Book 2008 (the name of the conference). It turns out that the .epub is XML based, to support page-readers, but will reformat depending upon the reader. (Obviously we'll have to give up page numbers as a reference point.)

Today Wendy Davis blogged on MediaPost's OnlineExaminer that Napster is opening a DRM-free music store.

I still hold with my earlier comments that most publishers need to jump in to the eBook with little or no DRM. I think us small fishes could end up shelling out money for scalable walls that should go towards creating better, viable online content.

Lessig weighs in on Orphan Works, NYTimes

In today's article Lessig offers what I think is a clearer explanation of the new copyright laws than I remember from others--presuming that the "14-year" rule is true (and I expect that it is).

I agree with him that the law should be simple and cheap, and favor the copyright owner. I'm not sure if this replaced the 90's "Mickey Mouse" law, or if this is an addendum that will only help big companies that have their own in-house experts, anyway.

Artificial Work/Life Separation

Today I emailed a link to LibraryThing.com from my work email address to my home email address. I decided that's just stupid, and not working very well anymore. Why can't I blog small segments at work, and use Blogger or whatever tool I need to keep track of all the wonderful little (and sometimes big) doohickeys people are creating to keep myself informed and/or marginally organized?

This is a description of LibraryThing that I sent to a colleague:
"It’s a site where individuals can catalog their own personal libraries, with all the bells-and-whistles that communal (and corporate) distribution of effort can bring. They have different membership levels, from free through public libraries, and offer tagging and social-networking features. OCLC for the 21^st century."

I should have put it here first, then just pointed her here. In a vain attempt to keep my work and home life separate, I seem to be wasting time at both. It's not like I watch, or plan to watch, 30 Rock at work on Hulu, but maybe if I go ahead and blog all those pesky little, "Denise--see this!" notes at work, I'll have time to watch 30 Rock at home, or at least read my backlog of "Denise--see this!" notes.

Who makes a book? (Idealist version)

Yesterday I was a bit harsh in my evaluation of a couple of new models for writing, authoring, and publishing books. Today several other new ideas caught my attention that don't push my "bullshit" button.

Foreword This Week reported that The Wall Street Journal reported that HarperCollins has announced an as-yet-unnamed imprint that will not accept returns from buyers, nor will they pay authors advances. Okay, so this is just a bit late for rumor that smacks of a late April Fool's Day joke. Maybe the new imprint will be graphic novels, and will be eased by the existing no-returns, no-exchanges comic book sales model.

Forward also announced "Digital Book 2008." Wow, standards for digital books. One of the sponsors listed is Adobe, so maybe they can actually make this work. DRM in music is failing, and books cannot be performed live (most, anyway). What is the future of a true digital book? A DRM-based Kindle, or the ubiquitous PDF? Given the disposable nature of mass market paperbacks, an advertising-based model could work (chapter headers, rather than embedded, I hope). Long disquisitions won't be such an easy sell. But those might be worth paper, outside class use.

Boing Boing reports on We Tell Stories: web-native storytelling from Penguin. These look pretty good, and, if not exactly innovative, it is certainly innovative for a mainstream "classics" imprint to be making these available. I read the first "chapter" of "The 21 Steps" and will probably read the next. Slick.

And, Todd Bryant at Academic Commons announced Sophie 1.0, a "multimedia authoring tool released under a creative commons license." The comments indicate that the tool is definately a 1.0 version. Looks like something I might check out at 1.5 or 2.0. I hope it will last that long.

Goodnight

Cool looks, needs more substance

--Today the email experience council's [no link because the newsletter's link was broken] newsletter featured a link to Zinio's Digital Classics. I would love to sign up to use them, except I already have tons of email that I never get through. Plus, who needs another Publisher's Clearing House (without the Sweepstakes)? Looks great--much more visually appealing than Project Gutenberg, but not as big, or as *gack* noble.

--Mediapostpublications.com announced the launch of Prime Time Rewind. Again, a visually interesting, if clunky, interface with less? content, and much of the same content, as is already available on Hulu.com. Maybe it's the dorky librarian in me, but alphabetical by title is still a pretty easy way to find shows. Mediaposts's Wayne Friedman says the appeal of the new site is that it "uses the free video links of every available full-length network program and presents those shows in an easier format for consumers to access." Well, the link in their article was wrong, so maybe he was looking at a different site than I.

[--I found it a bit ironic that both of these email newsletters, from big-time professionals in the business, featured broken or incorrect links. If they only followed their own, very good, advice.]

Good Books Independently Cataloged

This morning The Chronicle featured this news story, "Librarians Duel Over the Future of Producing Bibliographic Records", essentially a story about the protests librarians are making against the IT-ification of the profession--the move to take the "know" out of knowledge in favor of "Knol" and the like.

I've also become aware of the UI libraries' move to consolidate and make other changes in a move towards "Planning for New Service Models" (ugh, more money-sucking administrative committees).

I started searching for a recent Journal of the American Academy of Information Science article on algorithms and academic search, instead finding this article titled, "A user-centered functional metadata evaluation of moving image collections." Thinking it, like about half of the articles in JAAIS, was close to what I was looking for, I clicked on the link at the bottom of the page: Related Articles, * Find other articles like this in Wiley InterScience. The first two returns weren't bad. The third, "Corporate public affairs research: chronological reference list," fourth, " Confocal laser scanning microscopy of calcium dynamics in living cells," and fifth, "Biliary drainage in obstructive jaundice: Experimental and clinical aspects" just illustrate the reason for the librarians' ire and words of caution. As long as "AI" and "algorithms" are nearly interchangeable for search and other associative tasks, humans cannot be replaced by machines. (Helped, yes.)

These are also reasons why traditional libraries have collections of related items. While the algorithm can look across Wiley's "collection" and make connections that a human would not necessarily see, it also makes connections that are largely nonsensical and a waste of time to mere mortals who, while we won't be replaced by humans twice as fast in 18 months, do not have 18 months of our lives to waste wading through bungled corporate computer code.

So, just as I alluded to in "Good Books Independently Edited" librarians are important to the efficient transfer of information just as editors are. And perhaps small and/or academic presses, and libraries, occupy niches that big corporations cannot fill.

Hulu, the guilty pleasure

A couple of weeks ago NYTimes.com announced that Hulu.com was through testing, and open for business. Coincidentally, the same week the cable bill jumped 20% and I canceled it. So, I had plenty of time to test the new computer, old DSL connection, and new TV on the Internet.

It's a lot of fun. It turns out its mostly old TV, just like cable. Like iTunes, the quality would not hold up to a screening of Good Night, and Good Luck or Lawrence of Arabia. Unlike iTunes and YouTube, it's not open for anyone and everyone to post content or links to content, as it functions as a distribution channel for some big networks and production companies. Hulu's other shortcomings include little news or non-fiction (like the Discovery Channel and NGEO) programming, which I do miss. However, there are plenty of sitcoms, movies, and dramas that I had forgotten I liked.

The show that convinced me Hulu is worthwhile is the turkey episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. Because of music permissions the show hasn't been released on DVD until recently, and then, as now on Hulu, the music isn't as memorable as it was when I was a child. Even so, unless you're a card-carrying member of PETA, I recommend it highly if you want a good laugh.

P.S. One more major shortcoming: Apparently content will be changed almost randomly, so don't miss the turkey drop, in case it's pulled before the DRM is hacked!

Must remember . . .

It's impossible to read everything I feel that I need to, let alone everything I want to. Add blogging, or writing, or otherwise keeping track of the reading and my thoughts about what I've read and . . . I really admire people who can do it regularly.

More things I haven't kept up with, but think are important:

--Charles W. Bailey has updated his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, as posted to COLLDV-L (a collection development listserv) . A well-developed list of more things that I should read! Actually, I've probably read about a third of it. Okay, maybe a quarter.

--With possibly the worst "well, duh," headline ever, the New York Times declared, Tech's Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True." Since the article appeared in the same week that I finally broke down and replaced my perfectly good seven-year-old Compaq with a new computer, it managed to make me feel less guilty about holding on to the old machine for so long (because it still works!), and about finally abandoning it due to the uncomfortable work-arounds necessary to actually use it. It's one thing to keep a TRS-80 as a perfectly good word processor--as a customer actually did in the mid-90s when I was working at Radio Shack. It's another to try to use an orphan program on a networked computer. Good-bye, Netscape (which I deleted a few weeks ago) .

--And this Inside Higher Ed piece is likely to be revisited at a later date: Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review. This is an article about Indiana Library's new online-only journal, Museum Anthropology Review. With a super-organized editor at the helm, it sounds like it's doing well. What the article doesn't mention is the structure and the organization, not just copyeditors and graphic designers, that a University Press or other publisher brings to the table. There is an entire department at UIP that has several people who spend a good portion of every day tracking articles, making sure that changes are made, drafts are turned in, and that everything is organized by arbitrary deadlines that ensure that Indiana University and other libraries, organizations, and individuals receive their online or print scholarship in a timely and coherent manner. Like most people in publishing I love academia, and have great respect for academics, but I have no illusions about the quality or timeliness of the writing that will frequently be the result when publishers are taken out of the equation. More power to Jason Baird Jackson, the intrepid editor.

"Engagement," or, who reads this stuff, anyway? (part 1)

Today I received a rate care I had requested from Soy Daily (Our World of Soy I could imagine reading, but I don't think I could handle it daily). I won't post the rate card, because they don't, but the top of the card listed their "bargain" rates pay-per-view rates that started around $20 per thousand; no guarantee (that I saw) of unique visitors. Below that were their display rates, with a button ad starting around $600/month on the main part of their site. they also offer an ad in their weekly newsletter for nominal flat monthly fee. They also prefer Paypal, but will accept checks with prior arrangement.

I hope this sort of pricing structure and flexibility becomes a trend. I think it might, based on the hopeful comments the folks at MediaPost 1, 2 have been making recently about the rise of online display (re: Yahoo) as a viable alternative to search (re: Google). More importantly, in the latter reference Jeff Hircsh celebrates the seeming decline of Click Through Rate (CTR) as the be-all-and-end-all of online advertising, as a measure of the ever-elusive concept, "engagement."

Good Books Independently Edited

Jim Lichtenberg of Lightspeed, LLC., wrote an entry in ForeWord's (Good Books Independently Published) Publishing Insider blog today called (with unconscious irony) "Where are the Editors?"

The editors work for independent (non-corporate) publishers. I'm not saying that no editors work at the big houses, but rather that many smaller presses, because of specialization and less greed, still focus on books, not product. Besides, for a real comparison to most of what HarperCollins publishes today, we should ask if anyone really ever edited classics such as Sinister Stories, or even Peyton Place? ("We need more emphasis--I know, -m- dashes!")

The basic premise of Lichtenberg's blog is probably true. Eventually well-crafted paper books might become a niche good the way storytelling has. Hmm. A print run of 5000 is considered high where I work, and the audience is frequently defined as the "educated lay-reader." In a country that hovers around (mostly below) a 30% college graduation rate (see here and here) where fewer and fewer people read, maybe we're already in the niche.

"The Sky Will Not Fall"

Library Journal's LJ Academic Newswire today reports on the passing of the NIH mandate bill. Most of the comments are summed up, oddly enough, in the UK blog from the Research Information Network.
I don't think the big STM publisher's predictions of doom and gloom will come to pass. At worst, they will need to adjust their business practices to account for the drop in use of articles after the twelve-month window. As they charge for database search use as well, costs are unlikely to decrease, though small libraries, societies and companies will probably continue to cut access to that 12-month window as they are priced out of the market. However, as this is a continuing trend, it will be difficult to blame it solely on the NIH mandate--though I'm sure corporate shills will try. This new mandate is a needed balance to the ridiculous rate for-profit publishers' journal costs have been increasing over the past twenty years, a move in favor of the public and government greatly needed to counter the tyranny of these corporations. The quote in LJ Academic Newswire from SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph sums it up best, "The sky will not fall."

Online as Opportunity

MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider today talks about the opportunities available to magazines that offer content online--and not just clickable articles.