Category Archives: Uncategorized

Innovate #vala14 #s13 #s14 #s15

Hue Thi Pham and Kerry Tanner Influences of technology on collaboration between academics and librarians

Interrelationships between collaboration, institutional structure, and technology.
Things like Google Apps tend to be used within departments – less use on smaller campuses because more casual face-to-face interaction. Level of use varies by discipline, faculty, campus.
Social technologies like Twitter used in lectures
Learning management system (eg Moodle) most important technology mentioned in interviews.
Institutional repository common space for depositing resources

Technology facilitating transition from traditional to digital library – more electronic resources, communicating over telephone, email, Skype. But purely online interaction means a reduced mutual understanding of partners’ contributions, and an old perception of librarians’ roles.

Divide between library system and learning management system leads to a divide between the two communities around these. Librarians complain they can’t do a workshop about an assignment without Moodle access to see the assignment. Academics say they think librarians could have a role but they don’t understand why they would need access or what they would do with it. Lack of coordination can be a problem – means LMS people and library people make decisions that each other isn’t aware of. Siloisation.

Library staff need to consider roles of interpersonal interaction with technology – value of tech, value of face-to-face interaction, importance of space design / architecture. Get automatic access to learning management system but avoid resulting workload. Need to find ways to integrate library management system with learning management system.

Audience comment: Involvement of librarian in discussion boards can be useful – some topics the academics are relieved to leave to librarian. But important to have awareness of mutual roles.

Lisa Ogle and Kai Jin Chen Just accept it! Increasing researcher input into the business of research outputs

Implementing Symplectic Elements at UoNewcastle. (37,000 students, 1000 academics plus 1500 professional staff) HERDC is reporting exercise to Australian government to secure funding – sounds similar to New Zealand’s PBRF. Work managed by research division but most data entry done by admin folk. Issues include duplicate data entry, variance in data quality, many publications never reported – funding missed out on. Library asked to assist from 2005 – centralised model addresses many issues.

Various identification mechanisms: scholarly databases, researchers, conference lists, uni website, library orders. All put manually into Endnote library, then manually copy/pasted into Callista database. Labour-intensive and would often be a 2-6 month delay for researchers, very frustrating.

Getting Elements. Loved harvesting from databases (based on search settings: “We think this is your publication, please log in to claim or reject it”). Originally not keen on opening up to researchers, but after demos got convinced researchers could add manual entry without compromising data quality as library/research staff can verify and lock it.

Benefits: database searches can be customised to minimise false positives/negatives. Can delegate others to act on researchers’ behalf. Publications appear on profile within 48 hours. Can upload Endnote libraries. Can include ‘in press’ publications without messing up workflow. Easily generate publication lists. Capture of bibliometric data. Pretty graphs on user’s dashboard.

Have been running 4 months, 2 thirds of publishing academics have logged in and interacted with system. (800 in first two weeks, and a lull over summer). 2900 publications in the system from current collection year (usually 3500).

Challenges: early adopter in Australian market. Development module took longer than expected – learned that everyone does HERDC differently.

Most negative feedback so far is from people who haven’t yet logged into the system. Someone complaining it was too hard – talked her through it over the phone and now fine.

Need to investigate further repository integration.

Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson Terra Nova: a new land for librarians?
Big issues emerging around vast amounts of data and trying to connect it. Global connectedness another impact.

Researchers needing a “dry lab” to work with data instead of hands-on wet-lab. Seeing this in many areas.
Researchers can’t afford to work solo any more. Much infrastructure costs beyond reach of individual researcher or individual centre. Problems are too much for one person.
Can get storage and computing power – but may need to work with data for ten years so need to be able to retain it and keep working on it through changing technology. Lots of outputs are governmental reports not journal articles.
Most large research projects these days involve communities – even incorporated bodies.
80% of papers in the EU are of people collaborating with people outside their institution.

NeCTAR have invested heavily in virtual laboratories because it’s not just about creating data but using it – of course this creates more data.
In theory nothing stops a researcher going to Research Data Storage Infrastructure for storage without their university knowing.
Various community solutions like Tropical Data Hub, Australian National Corpus – slide lists a pile and he points out that for each of these, some institution has put their hand up to take responsibility for maintenance.

Approach of institutions keeping their own data but having to share metadata. Requires lots of discussion around data schemas – what you expect to find in data descriptions. Eg Research Data Australia from 85 participating organisations and growing. Goal to get more data, better connected data, more findable/usable.

Two impacts around:
Research tools: New suite from NeCTAR and ANDS eg virtual laboratories, discipline-specific tools. Need to choose which we’ll support, which data collection schemes we’ll be involved in. May need to develop our own tools for specific disciplines.
Library/research collaboration: Moving more to a partnership model.

Libraries provide support for data management plans and citing data, but there’s huge demand for archiving/preserving data.

Impact on university libraries:

New jobs coming out for the “databrarian”.
Need research services to help develop common data structures
Participation in cross-disciplinary teams bringing librarian skills
Development of legal frameworks for acquiring, generating, storing and sharing data
Assisting with development of tools – lots of disciplines have different ways of exploring/analysing data so national collections/communities may have specific search (eg maps, chemical structure, vs facets) or visualisation tools.
Archiving and preservation services

Librarian support roles

Sourcing relevant data sets
Consultancy – identify faculty needs, refer back to experts
Targeted outreach services re data citation or data repositories
New support service tools and processes

Want to be able to offer a service to researchers and them not have to worry about where it’s stored, whether on campus or Amazon Web Services or whatever.

Cloud gazing #vala14 #s8 and #s9

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Michelle McLean, Residing in the cloud: looking at the forecast now and into the future
Service models:
Software as a service (LibGuides, Office365, HathiTrust)
Platform as a service (eg Yahoo Pipes, OCLC Web Services, Google App Engine)
Infrastructure as a service (Britash Library, Library of Congress, My Kansas Library)

Deployment models:
Private cloud
community cloud
hybrid cloud
public cloud

Essential characteristics:
Resource pooling
rapid elasticity
on-demand self-service
measured service
broad network access

Pros

Scale and cost
Change management done for you – you don’t have to worry about upgrades
Choice and agility – if you want something new just pay and you get it
Next-generation architecture
IT isn’t a library core business – let the experts do it. Better security, better sustainability, better reliability

Cons

Security – when people leave need to remove their access right away because access through the web. All big companies have had failures
Lock-in. Need to be sure you can take your data with you if you leave
Lack of control. If the website is down where is the problem?
Financial savings mightn’t be as good as predicted.
You lose your IT expertise if you outsource, but then you lose your first point of trouble-shooting.

Preparing for the cloud
Consider security, privacy, access, law, lock-in, whether it’s right for your business.
Cloud computing services are marginally more reliable that IT departments (99% vs 98% uptime). So make sure you have backup systems.

Derek Whitehead All on the ground: there is no cloud
Metaphor of cloud as fluffy, friendly, faraway – slideshows never show stormclouds!
Behind the metaphor nothing’s actually in the cloud, they’re in servers in a building on the ground in a legal jurisdiction (not always ours).

There are four basic perspectives on the cloud:

Technology
Content – “information located remotely” but information is rarely independent of computation
Personal – companies want us to locate our info elsewhere than our own computers so they can ‘develop a relationship’ with us [lovely euphemism there! -Deborah]
Legal – jurisdiction makes a difference though not quite as simple as “in Australia = free of PATRIOT Act”. Frequently mirrored, moved around, using redundancy to safeguard info. People mostly concerned about privacy legislation – strong in Australia and Europe.

Swinburne’s policy is to externally host/manage most where possible – “opportunistic vendor hosting”. Student email; HR; learning management system, library system, OJS, etc.

What do we want the cloud people to do for us? Vendor cloud hosting vs service aggregator provision. Huge range of hybrid or multisource options. But services have to be efficient, reliable, high quality, fast to access, and cost-effective.

Why would we do it? When a kid, generated own electricity – not a great way to live. Thinks IT will one day look back at the idea of having your own server in your basement in the same way. Cost minimisation, efficiency, economies of scale — all of these issues. Security is an issue because bigger targets for hackers, but also have bigger resources to defend against them.

Will need a realignment in skillsets. Getting ability to read/write/negotiate contracts is vital.
But libraries are leaders. Remember when we moved from print to CD-ROMs? (Okay, this was the wrong direction…)
Exit strategies where possible – harder in monopoloy situations.
Helped by clear customer benefits and freeing up buildings. Libraries have access to economies of scale, we’re comfortable with automation, it benefits collaboration.

Q: What’s the customer experience of change to the cloud?
A: Infrastructure/management should be invisible to customers. But having info in the cloud brings huge benefits: eg huge increase in number of articles used by academics when they can get them from their desktop.

Q: What if things go wrong?
A: With an external host you’ll have remedies in the contract if things go wrong – no such remedy if you stuff up yourself!

Big data, little data, no data – Christine Borgman #vala14 #p1

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Big data, little data, no data: scholarship in the networked world

Technological advances in mediated communication – have gone to writing to computers to social media and these are cumulative: we use all of these concurrently. And increasingly thinking of these in terms of data. Need to think about new infrastructures because this will determine what will be there for tomorrow’s students/librarians/archivists.

Australian notable for ANDS, and for movements to open access policies – only place she’s found where managing data is part of (ARC’s) Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.

Book coming out late 2014/early 2015 – data and scholarship; case studies in data scholarship; data policy and practice. Organised around “provocations”:

How do rights, responsibilities, and risks around research data vary by disciplines and stakeholders?
How can data be exchanged across domains, contexts, time?
How do publication and data differ?
What are scholars’ motivations to share?
What expertise is needed to manage research data?
How can knowledge infrastructures adapt to the needs of scholars and demands of stakeholders?

Until the first journal in 17th century, scholars communicated by private letters. Journals were the beginning of peer review, of opening up knowledge beyond those privileged to exchange letters. –However things began much earlier: brick from 5th-6th century inscribed with Sutra on Dependent Origination. Now we have complete open access in PLOS One. (Shows If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them? Data Sharing and Reuse in the Long Tail of Science and Technology.) Lots of journals, preprint servers, institutional repositories to submit to.

Publishing (including peer review) serves to legitimise knowledge; to disseminate it; and to provide access, preservation and curation.

Open access means many things – uses Suber’s “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” definition.

ANDS model of “more Australian researchers reusing research data more often”. Moving from unmanaged, disconnected, invisible, single-use data to managed, connected, findable, reusable data.

Open data has even more definitions: Open Data Commons “free to use, reuse and redistribute”; Royal Society says “accessible, useable, assessable, intelligible”. OECD has 13 conditions. People don’t agree because data’s really messy!

Data aren’t publications
When data’s created it’s not clear who owns it – field researcher, funder, instrument, principle investigator?
Papers are arguments – data are evidence.
Few journals try to peer review data. Some repositories do but most just check the format.

Data aren’t natural objects
What are data? Most places list possibilities; few define what is and isn’t data. Marie Curie’s notebook? A mouse? A map or figure? An astronomical photo – which the public loves, but astronomers don’t agree on what the colours actually mean… 3D figure in PDF (if you have the exact right version of Adobe Acrobat). Social science data where even when specifically designed to share it’s full of footnotes telling you which appendices to read to understand how the questions/methods changed over time…

Data are representations
“Data are representations of observations, objects, or other entities used as evidence of phenomena for the purposes of research or scholarship.”

You think you have problems on catalogue interoperability, try looking at open ontologies intersecting different communities.

Data sharing and reuse depends on infrastructure
You don’t just build an infrastructure and you’re done. They’re complex, interact with communities. Huge amount of provenance important to make sense of data down the line.

Data management is difficult – scholars have a hard enough time managing it for their own reuse let alone someone else’s reuse. Need to think about provenance, property rights, different methods, different theoretical perspectives, “the wonderful thing about standards is there’s so many to choose from”.

Ways to release data:

contribute to archive
attach to journal article
post on local website
license on request
release on request

These last ones are very effective because people are talking to each other and can exchange tacit knowledge — but it doesn’t scale. The first scales but only works for well-structured and organised data.

So what are we trying to do? Reuse by investigator, collaborators, colleagues, unaffiliated others, future generations/millennia? These are very different purposes and commitments.

Traditional economics (1950s) was based on physical goods – supply and demand. But this doesn’t work with data. Public/private goods distinction doesn’t work with information. There’s no rivalry around the sunset or general knowledge in the way there is around a table or book. So concept of “common pool resources” – libraries, data archives – where goods must be governed.

	Low subtractability/rivalry	High
Exclusion difficult	public goods	common pool resources
Easy	toll or club goods	private goods

While data are unstructured and hard to use they’re private goods. Are we investing to make them tool goods, common pool resources or public goods?

Need to make sustainability decisions – what to keep, why, how, how long, who will govern them, what expertise required?

—

Q: Health sciences doing well
A: Yes but representation issues. Attempt to outsource mammogram readings fell foul of huge amounts of tacit knowledge required. In genomics attempts to get scientists and drug companies to work together in the open, but complicated situation with journals who say that because the data is out there it’s prior publication when in fact the paper is explaining the science behind it; and issues around (misleading) partial release of data – recommends Goldacre’s Big Pharma.

Q: Scientists want to know who they’re giving data to. But maybe data citation a way to get scientists on board?
A: Citing data as incentive is a hypothesis. Really sharing data is a gift – if you put it on a repository you don’t have it available to trade to collaborators, funders, new universities. Data as dowry: people getting hired because they have the data.
Agreeing on the citable unit is hard – some people would have a DOI on every cell, others would have a footnote “OECD”. Citation isn’t just about APA vs Blue Book, it’s about citable unit and who gets credit and….

Collaboratively solving the research data management problems in Australia

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Talk by @markhahnel @figshare at #SymUCOZ14

In a study in Nature, 67% of researchers say lack of access to others’ data is a major impedance to scientific progress. 36% say they’d share their data. (31% therefore admitting they’re impeding scientific progress!)

Lots of funders require data and outputs to be available – but repositories not helping them do it.
Australia much further forward than UK, US, Europe (who now have mandates but no infrastructure)
ANDS – great website, guides for students, etc
Victoria University Research Data Management libguide

Being about to cite data is vital – elevates it to equality with papers
Currently people happily cite papers, but only 25% cite data only in reference list (as opposed to in the data availability section etc). Hitting people with a white paper doesn’t make them listen. So how can we report on impact? What use will ThomsonReuters’ data citation package be if they miss 75% of actual impact?

Taylor and Francis now providing datasets (in fact paying figshare to convert it back to the format it originally was submitted it to them in…)

People don’t care about research integrity, funders’ data policies, legislative change. Not even moral and ethical oblications. Somewhat about raising profile of yourself and research. What really engages them are:
* increased citation rate
* simplicity
* visualisation is cool

Institutions:
* How much data are we generating?
* Where the hell is it?
* What’s happened to the old stuff?
* How can we get our research re-used more than any others?
* I want to out-perform other institutions in league tables.
Receiving all this money and no idea where it’s going.

figshare for institutions – provides statistics, tracking impact.

Loyalty cards for scholarly publishing

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Two things I’ve come across recently which I don’t think I’ve seen before:

“Each article published in ACS journals during 2014 will qualify the corresponding author for ACS Author Rewards article credit. Credits issued under this program, at a total value of $1,500 per publication, may be used to offset article publishing charges and any ACS open access publishing services of the author’s choosing, and will be redeemable over the next three years (2015-2017).”
—American Chemical Society extends new open access program designed to assist authors

“Under [IOP’s] new programme, referees will be offered a 10% credit towards the cost of publishing on a gold open access basis when they review an article.”
—Changing the way referees are rewarded

(I’m presuming, though it’s not explicit, that these credits are additive, so if you published 2 toll-access articles with ACS you’d get $3,000 credit, and if you refereed 10 IOP articles you’d get to publish 1 article on a gold open access basis for free.)

I find this fascinating. The obvious catch for scientists is the same as any loyalty card: in order to use it you’ve got to keep shopping at the same company. It’s great psychology, because humans are notoriously reluctant to ignore the opportunity for a discount, so:

Someone who’s got credit owing will be less likely to publish in some other journal even if the final cost-to-author is equal and even if that other journal is a better fit for the particular article. (How much less likely I don’t know, but I do think it’d be a factor.)
Someone who’s got credit owing for OA publication would probably be more likely to pay the extra to publish OA rather than to publish toll-access for free but not get to use that tempting credit. (This might at least have a small side-effect of getting more people experience with the benefits of publishing open access.)

Both of these are obviously what the companies in question are banking on. I’m a bit concerned about what this pressure to publish with the same old big companies will mean for science – partly about competition, as in the world of supermarkets, but also partly the journals where articles should be finding their best fit. (Perhaps the whole ‘impact factor’ issue has meant that no-one’s ever considered only subject scope in that regard, but this definitely adds another confounding factor.) But given the clear financial benefits to the companies, I expect to be seeing more scholarly publishing reward cards popping up in future.

Reporting a crime to the police (aka my #roastbusters post)

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This post is not about my normal subjects, to which I’ll return another day.

Trigger Warning: Roast Busters, and reporting sexual assault

Certain people love comparing rape and burglary. “I’m not blaming the victims,” they’ll say. “I’m just saying, you can’t expect your insurance company to pay out if you haven’t installed a deadbolt and burglar alarm on your vagina.” Or something remarkably similar to that.

And in the news certain other people have been talking about victims being or not being “brave enough” to report – mostly people who seem to have never experienced let alone tried to report a sexual assault. So. Okay, I’m going to do this: here are my stories about reporting a burglary and reporting a sexual assault.

A couple of years ago someone tried to rob my house and was scared off by the alarm. When I came home I called the police who were nice and professional and unmemorable, as were the afterhours alarm repair company (the would-be burglar had tried to stop the alarm by ripping it off the wall), the carpenter who fixed my back door (no dead-bolt, they just kicked it in and splintered the frame), and my insurance company (who didn’t even ask if I had a dead-bolt). The police dusted for fingerprints but the burglar had worn gloves so that was that and life went on. It’s an easy story to tell, no-one ever questions it, everything’s cool.

On the 6th of September 1997, someone stopped across the street from my busstop, exposed himself and masturbated in a way designed to get my attention. (What do you even call this? All the terms I can think of carry a connotation of victimless crimes. He didn’t touch me, approach me, or speak to me, but I was nevertheless very much his target. So for the purposes of this post I’m going with ‘telepathic sexual assault’.)

I followed all society’s rules for how a woman should behave in order to not be a victim, and how a victim should behave in order to be taken seriously. To start with I was white, cis, and middle-class. I’d been working, not drinking. I was wearing ‘modest’ clothes. My assailant fit the conventional narrative of a stranger lurking in the bushes, not the uncomfortable truth that over 90% of rapes are committed by victims’ acquaintances, friends and family. I watched him leave so I could try and get a description. As soon as possible I went to the police kiosk in town and reported it. I was visibly and audibly shaken but forthright and articulate. I knew I wasn’t giving them much to go on, but I wanted it on the record in case he did it to someone else.

The police were nice and professional and told me that guys like this were cowards, so if anything like it ever happened again I should shout at or walk towards him.

When was the last time you heard the police say that if you come home to a burglary in progress you should confront the cowardly burglar?

The first time I told this story was three years later, on a mailing list, and doing it gave me an adrenaline reaction as if it’d just happened. Fortunately I was among friends (one of whom told me with authority that the police’s advice was balderdash) and it was cathartic and ever since then it’s just been a thing that happened one time.

So I thought. At lunch yesterday, thinking about Roast Busters and the perennial burglary comparison, I suddenly thought: after the burglary, the police dusted for fingerprints. Did they look for evidence after the telepathic sexual assault? I remember the mood at the time was very matter-of-factly that nothing could be done. Maybe I’m now forgetting a perfectly good reason for this. But. But. Suddenly there’s this question in my mind – Did they even think about looking? – and boom, adrenaline reaction. What had been a fantastic day was suddenly crap because of psychic residue from something that happened sixteen years ago.

I ended up writing to the police to ask what information I’d be able to access relating to that report. I expected there’d be some bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Instead, within a few hours I got an email saying:

I have checked and the only file I can see is a Burglary report you made on [date redacted].

So. I guess that answers my question. And honestly, having heard the far worse stories I’ve heard sixteen years on, I wasn’t surprised. It’s just one on the long, long list of reasons different people have for not reporting sexual assault: sometimes we do report it, but the police simply don’t keep any records of that report.

Administrivia:

I’m happy for this post to be linked to or, per my CC-BY license, to be quoted or reposted with attribution back to this url.
I welcome comments. That said, I won’t tolerate any kind of victim-blaming or rape apologia. Wishes for, or jokes about, rapists being raped in prison count as both of these things.
If you want to do something.

My first foray into coding with open data

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My first foray into coding with someone else’s data would probably have been when I created some php and a cron job to automatically block-and-report-for-spam any Twitter account that tweeted one of three specific texts that spammers were flooding on the #eqnz channel. I really don’t want to work with Twitter’s API, or more specifically with their OAuth stuff, ever again.

So my first foray that I enjoyed was with the Christchurch Metroinfo (bus) data – specifically the real-time bus arrival data (link requires filling out a short terms and conditions thing but then the data’s free under CC-BY license). For a long time I’ve used this real-time information to keep an eye out on when I need to leave the house to reach my stop in time for my bus. But if I’m working in another window and get distracted, or traffic suddenly speeds up, I can still miss it. I wanted a web app that’d give me an audio alert when the bus came in range.

Working with the data turned out to be wonderfully easy. A bit of googling yielded me information about SimpleXML and I knew enough PHP to use it. There was an odd glitch when I tried to upload my code, which worked perfectly fine on my computer, to my webserver with a slightly older version of PHP which for some reason required an extra step in parsing the attributes ECan use in their XML. But once I worked out what was going on, that was an easy fix too.

Then I did a whole bunch of fiddling with the CSS and HTML5, and the SQL is a whole nother story; and then I uploaded the source code to GitHub; and eventually even remembered to cite the data, whoops.

So now I have:

online, and I’m already starting to think about what other open data projects might be out there waiting for me.

(And now that the development phase is over and I’m using the thing live, I think my cat is starting to recognise that when this particular bird song plays, I’m about to leave the house.)

Ways of seeing: collections, stories, language and place #ndf2012

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Ways of seeing: collections, stories, language and place
Eleanor Whitworth, Arts Victoria
http://cv.vic.gov.au/stories/map/melbourne/
Culture Victoria has worked closely with indigenous communities to share indigenous cultural material and stories. The indigenous culture theme is one of the most visited sections on the Culture Victoria website. When we implemented the ‘browse our content by location’ search function, we thought carefully about the implications for representing indigenous content.
Language is not a sole determiner of personal heritage, but it is a significant one. Unlike New Zealand, where Māori is an official language, Australia currently has around 150 indigenous languages; none are official, and most are under threat. As Aboriginal communities identify connection to country and culture via language group, mapping our indigenous material to a single point that referenced a Western place name would have been grossly insufficient.
This presentation will cover our partnership with the Koorie Heritage Trust to map our content to the widely recognised 38 language regions in Victoria, including the decisions we made on representing borders and dealing with multiple spellings. The presentation will also provide examples of the power of cultural collections to foster connection and collaboration between museums and traditional owners; support intangible heritage; and link objects with stories and place.

Starts asking “Where are you from?” and plays clip YouTube clip Jimmy Little Yorta Yorta man

Eleanor would answer with a point; Jimmy with an area. She’d see the country as divided into large chunks and needs a point to give specificity; he’d see it as collection of language areas: http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/

Culture Victoria has collections and stories. Group stories under broad themes; link stories; search stories by location.

Collaboration with Koorie Heritage Trust. Each artwork accompanied by story, noting storyteller and language group. Language groups are strong identifiers for place so logical to extend browse-by-location function to include language groups. Used Gazetteer of Australian Placenames to help mapping – pragmatic but not always optimal as pinpoints area by geographic centre. Language groups aren’t point, they’re areas.

Problem #1: borders. This project is a “Victoria” project but this isn’t how indigenous people would see the area. Decided to include 38 groups that broadly overlap state of Victoria.

Problem #2: borders. How to determine areas of language groups? They change! Looked at three maps – interesting that over time they seem to become less detailed. Decided not to show visible borders – seemed best way to acknowledge fluidity. But still needed to determine for purposes of database/searching. Used maps, created polygons to overlay on map. Sometimes had to go by eye. Sent lat/long data to someone to create the polygon on the map. Some regions overlap a little, or a lot. Checked, refined.

Also had to consider spelling variants – phonetic interpretations. Some identify with one or another so system had to cope with all.

At the moment can only search by location but hope to add search by language group.

Did this exercise because had something to attach to the mapping: the stories.

Look at the stories on the website (eg the possum skin cloaks – which skins were from New Zealand as illegal to kill possums in Australia whereas encouraged here…)

Q: Can you tell us about the consultation you did?
A: Koorie Heritage Trust is made up largely of Aboriginal people – close relationship with communities. Lots of discussion about shapes as very sensitive, but mostly driven by community.

Q: Very Western structured presentation on website cf traditional storytelling cycle.
A: Some limits due to funding. But it’s the content that’s the cycle – the story circles around. This conference has raised questions of how you present data, present linking systems, in an interface that’s fluid and flexible – emerging technologies. Definitely aim to increase interactivity.

[ETA 11/7/2014: Slides and notes are blogged at Culture Victoria.]

Links of interest: ebooks, leadership, and change

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eBooks
In the Library With the Lead Pipe publishes a provocative and persuasive essay on the eBook Cargo Cult, beginning

“Libraries created the present crisis in scholarly publishing, and we are creating a similar crisis now with our approach to ebooks.”

A brief history of how libraries have handled (or given outsiders power over us by paying them to handle) the indexing of serials and how we’re doing the same with ebooks is followed by an overview of alternative models for ebook management – several great ones I’m familiar with including Unglue.It and Library License, and several more that are new to me.

Ellyssa Kroski has gathered her three posts on How To Compare e-Book Platforms (points to consider include technical requirements; content; functionality; and sales/pricing model) along with her presentation providing a background to these criteria.

Leadership
Two very insightful posts: the Librarian in Black posts 7 Lessons Learned While Being The Man; the Free Range Librarian responds with her own perspective in I am The Man — and you can, too!

Change
Jenica (Attempting Elegance) posts an 8-part blog version of her presentation on Killing Fear:

Overdrive to offer 3000 DRM-free books

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Via walking paper scraps, OverDrive Breaks the iPod Barrier for Downloadable Audio – by the end of June 3000 audiobooks will be available in mp3 format with no “digital rights management” (aka “crippling”) – so they can be played on Macs, iPods, etc. They’re also apparently going to release an “OverDrive Media Console for the Mac” which presumably lets their normal range of audiobooks be played on Macs (but not iPods etc).

This is great news, and hopefully one more sign that DRM might be gradually going out of fashion. It’s not just that it’s nasty to restrict how a person can listen to something that they’ve paid for; it’s that making it hard for people to listen to your music (or watch your videos or read your books) is a great way to induce them to look for alternatives – like piracy.

And DRM does diddly-squat to prevent piracy. Codes can be, and regularly are, broken; there’s free software all over the internet to extract audio and video from ‘protected’ files, and even if there weren’t there’s still audio capture and video capture programs (just like screen capture but more so).

So DRM a) doesn’t prevent piracy, and b) induces your potential customers to consider turning to piracy. So what was the point again?

Fortunately a lot of people are starting to realise that not only is DRM fairly useless, but giving stuff away entirely free can make you money. In the science-fiction world, for example:

the Baen Free Library (Eric Flint writes in 2000, “Dave Weber’s On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a ‘loss leader’ for Baen’s for-pay experiment ‘Webscriptions’ for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it’s become Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper!”);
Tor’s “Watch the Skies” promotion (sign up! the editors are nice people who won’t spam you, and this week they’re giving away Jo Walton’s Farthing, which is a stunning murder mystery set in a 1940s England where Britain made peace with Hitler. Jo Walton is also nice people, and the book is brilliant. Having a pdf of it is really nice — and I’m still going to buy it in paperback).

A huge number of books on my bookshelves are there because I first read them in a library; or I first borrowed them from a friend; or I first found a sample chapter or the entire thing free on the internet. I wouldn’t have taken the risk on them otherwise. So this is money I paid because — and only because — I could use things in ways that DRM actively prevents.

So what was the point of DRM again?