Tag Archives: open access

LIANZA and open access

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Moving to a new job has been keeping me happily preoccupied, but the email I received from LIANZA yesterday was just about calculated to spur me to break radio silence. To quote, interspersed with my commentary in [square brackets]:

From November 22, parts of the LIANZA website will be locked to members only. As the cost of developing and maintaining the website comes out of LIANZA membership fees, LIANZA Council decided to make certain pages exclusive to members. The Council worked with the Website Advisory Group to determine appropriate members-only content.

From November 22 you will need to login to the website to view these locked pages:

  • LIANZA Blog
    [Really? Does anyone really think I’ll log in to read a blog? I won’t even click a link to read a blog; I certainly don’t have time to log in to a website just to find out if there happens to be a post today. If the full post isn’t in my Google Reader, I don’t read it.]
  • Library Life newsletter features
    [I occasionally click a link from the email newsletter to read the full story. That’s about to become even more occasional.]
  • Latest issue of the New Zealand Library and Information Management Journal (NZLIMJ)
    [This implies that previous issues will remain accessible, which is something at least. But still a tremendous disappointment. I thought I’d been seeing a move towards opening NZLIMJ up, and had hoped to see it soon appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals. In the current climate, I think a library association should be promoting open access, not locking information down.]
  • Conference papers
    [!!!
    …
    Just… What a tremendous disservice this does to the authors! Conference papers are hard enough to search as it is; locking these behind a login only guarantees that no LIANZA non-members (and not many LIANZA members) will ever read or cite these. Don’t we want rather to raise the profile of New Zealand LIS research?]
  • Copyright resources
    […Okay, if you really must have an easter egg for LIANZA members I guess this qualifies as reasonable.]
  • Member profiles
    [Okay, sure, whatever.]
  • Advocacy Portal (already restricted to members)
    [Because it’s… vitally important that only LIANZA members advocate for libraries…? To be honest I can see the argument for this as a valuable resource. I just think it’d be even more valuable if we all – members and non-members alike – cooperated on advocating for both our individual libraries and libraries as a class.]
  • Code of Practice
    [This comprises the “policy and procedures that are to be followed, day to day, in the running of the Association.” So mostly only of use to members; otoh it seems a bit odd to keep it secret.]

Does LIANZA actually have evidence that there are significant numbers of people choosing not to be members because the content’s there for free anyway? Enough people to be worth causing this hassle to existing members?

Because as a member, this does increase the hassle for me to access the content, and therefore reduces the amount of content I’ll be bothered to look up. When I was a member of the Website Advisory Group, a big concern was getting conversations going on the website; hiding those conversations away just seems likely to exacerbate that problem. This move also reduces the visibility of LIS scholarship published by LIANZA, so makes it less likely I’d consider submitting to NZLIMJ (however see footnote). And philosophically, I’m not overly happy about paying a subscription to a library association that is working against open access to information.

Lucky for LIANZA’s coffers, membership comes with other benefits that still make it worth the annual cheque. Because the moment its website content is locked behind a login screen, its value to me plummets.

Footnote for authors: If your conference paper is about to be locked behind the login screen but you actually would like other librarians nationally and internationally to have a chance at finding your research, you can deposit a copy at E-LIS – a subject repository for library and information science. (And/or in your institution’s repository if it has one.)

Likewise for NZLIMJ articles – the author guidelines state a 6 month embargo for publication elsewhere, but I emailed editor Brenda Chawner to clarify this, and she says she interprets it to apply to formal publications, not repositories, and it would be fine with her if authors put copies of their articles into an institutional or subject repository.

How libraries can buy DRM-free ebooks

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Libraries hate DRM because our customers hate DRM because it makes the ebooks we buy really truly appallingly horrible to use. I can never find the cartoon when I want it, but it’s something like “How to download an ebook in 37 easy steps”. It involves lots of installation of software and restarting of the computer and logging in to things and troubleshooting, and the final step is to give up and look for it on BitTorrent. (ETA: As per Andromeda’s comment, here’s the cartoon.)

But what can we do when publishers require DRM before they sell anything to us?

Well, the new venture Unglue.it could change things. The idea behind Unglue.it is that:

  • author/copyright-holders pick a lump sum that they think is fair compensation for the rights to their book;
  • people who want to read the book pledge however much they want;
  • when the lump sum is reached, the book is released as a DRM-free, open-licensed ebook, free to the entire world. (If the lump sum isn’t reached, no money’s taken from your credit card.)

This is aimed at individual readers, but why shouldn’t libraries get in on the game? There are apparently some 16,000-odd public library branches in the USA: if each one of those made a one-off pledge of US$1 then American Book Award-winner Love Like Gumbo would be available to their members (and everyone else in the world) in perpetuity. That’s one heck of a cheap ebook. You can store a copy on the library server, or just link to it from the catalogue. You can print it out, if you want – as many times as you want. And you won’t have to buy it again after it’s been borrowed 26 times.

Currently Unglue.it has campaigns for five books. (If this takes off, and I’m convinced it will, there’ll be more.) If any of these books would be of interest to the members of your library, then figure out what’s a fair price (or what you can afford — whichever’s less) and then pledge just half of that from your book budget.

If you really can’t afford it (or purchasing really has to go through approved suppliers, no exceptions ever), well, then promote the campaigns to your members instead.

Or do nothing. When the books are funded, you and your members will get them for free anyway. 🙂

I just think that this is such a natural extension of our mission to use our funds wisely to provide resources to our communities that it’s hardly an extension at all. I think it’s the answer we’ve been asking for to the problem of ebooks. And I think it’s the best consortial deal ever.

So let’s go forth and Unglue!

Links of Interest – ebook lending, web design, bibliographic software, open access

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Lending eBooks
Colorado’s Douglas County Libraries has come up with a model whereby they buy, host, and manage the lending of ebooks (including DRM), rather than subscribe to publishers’ platforms. See more details on the model and a letter to publishers about how it works.

Here’s a cute way of reminding users of the value of libraries when they check out print books. It would be interesting to think of ways to make this work with e-resources…

Web design
See a demo of One-Pager, a free template for library websites designed and user-tested to make it easy to find the most important information – and to be immediately mobile-friendly and accessible. You can read more or download the code here.

Bibliographic software
Beyond Bibliographies: Collaborating with Citation Software (powerpoint) is a poster comparing Endnote, RefWorks, Zotero, and Mendeley.

Open Access
(I try to include a variety of stuff in these round-ups, but open access is kind of a strong interest of mine, so…)

Some keen-eyed librarians noticed that the previously open-access Reference and User Services Quarterly was suddenly open-access no longer; the Library Loon investigated and reported back. Apparently in future articles will be embargoed for a year, although as at writing older articles aren’t available yet either.

(This reminds me that I keep meaning to find out whether The New Zealand Library And Information Management Journal is intended to be open access or if it’s just openly accessible by default, so to speak. In any case they’re there at the moment – as are all the LIANZA conference papers from 2004. They’re not browsable/searchable in the most user-friendly format but I know from experience what the web group’s dealing with, and that just getting them all in one place is a fantastic achievement.)

The Library Loon also has a fantastic discussion about how to recognise scammy “open access” publishers.

SCORE Library Survey Report “aimed to get a national [UK] perspective on institutional engagement in Open Educational Resources through their librarians”.

Open Access in Chemistry – slides from a presentation at the 2011 ACS Spring Meeting giving an excellent overview of what it says on the tin – in terms both of numbers and of attitudes.

Links of Interest 30/3/2012 – article linker, impact factors of open access journals, and more

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Customer service
UConn Discovers What Students Want From Their Library – too complex for a pull quote, follow the link for a summary.

Two solutions for increasing the usability of that blasted Article Linker page:

Open Access
JQ at the University of Oregon writes about High-impact open access journals and includes some invaluable tables of OA journals ranked by SJR, SciMago, and Eigenfactor impact factors. These (sorted by subject) could be useful for promoting OA to departments and to students graduating from university who still want to keep up with research.

Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking looks at OA journals in the library science field:
This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contributions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing.

Data curation
Demystifying the data interview: Developing a foundation for reference librarians to talk with researchers about their data
As libraries become more involved in curating research data, reference librarians will need to be trained in conducting data interviews with researchers to better understand their data and associated needs. This article seeks to identify and provide definitions for the basic terms and concepts of data curation for librarians to properly frame and carry out a data interview using the Data Curation Profiles (DCP) Toolkit.

Subscription statistics
Subscriptions in Context (powerpoint) is a clear and elegant presentation for University of Central Oklahoma library faculty liaisons on all the factors the Serials department considers when evaluating subscriptions.

Just for fun
A Library Society of the World thread began, “Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a monstrous librarian” and went on from there.

How US intellectual property laws affect the rest of us, and what we can do about it

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How can it affect us?
Imagine a New Zealand website which sells (eg Fishpond) or gives away (eg NZETC – Eric Hellman discusses Project Gutenberg Australia) ebooks of material in the public domain. Now imagine that a law in the US allows for this site not only to be blocked from the US, but also to be removed from search engine results (search engines widely used throughout the world) and blocked from receiving any revenue from the US (including revenue for legitimate sales of in-copyright books).

Wait, what?
New Zealand’s copyright law puts books in the public domain 50 years after the death of the author (which is bad enough – I’m a fan of our original copyright period of 28 years OR life, whichever was longest); US copyright law currently means any book published after 1923 won’t get into the public domain until 2019, if ever (see also the Mickey Mouse Protection Act). The difference between the two means there’s a whole bunch of books which are legal for anyone to freely distribute in New Zealand, but illegal to distribute without permission from the rights-holder in the US. Currently we just cope with the disparity. I mean, the authors have been dead for at least 50 years anyway. However…

What are the proposed US laws?
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is written such that if any foreign site that is “US-directed” (defined as any site that doesn’t actively prevent people in the US from accessing it) distributes anything against US law, then the US can hit it with a bunch of sanctions. Theoretically these sanctions are probably intended to just prevent the site trading with people in the US; in practice, they’d prevent people in most of the world being able to easily access or use the site.

I’m not sure of the relationship of SOPA to the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA), but that seems to have similar intentions. “Don’t Break the Internet” at the Stanford Law Review Online discusses the potential effects of these two bills.

If that’s not bad enough, there’s the proposed Research Works Act (RWA) which is designed to make open access mandates illegal – and thereby cut down on the amount of open access material available to researchers worldwide. (The rationale is that private publishers publish it, so it shouldn’t be free to the public. But if the public is funding the research grants and paying the salaries of the researchers and the peer reviewers then why it shouldn’t be locked behind a paywall benefitting only the private publisher, either.) Here’s a thorough roundup of blogposts on RWA.

Who would want to do such a thing?
The Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing put out a press release in support of the RWA; here’s a list of AAP/PSP members. One of the sponsors of RWA has received campaign contributions from Elsevier. So has the other.

Elsevier is also on the List of SOPA supporters (pdf) along with quite a lot of other publishers (academic and fiction).

What can we do about it?
If we voted in the US we could contact our representatives and ask them to vote against these bills. But they probably don’t care much what foreigners think.

If this were really a free market we libraries could say “Nah, we’re not going to buy from [Elsevier] this year, we’ll give our money to some other science-publishing company.” But publishers have a monopoly on their titles, and academics would generally have words to say if we didn’t provide access to the Journal of Important Research in My Field.

But publishers don’t only rely on libraries’ purchasing money. They also rely on researchers (including non-US researchers, and including library researchers) providing them free articles to publish and providing them free labour in the form of peer review. So what any researcher can do is withdraw that free labour. And while we librarians are encouraging other researchers to take a stand, we can put our money where our mouth is.

For the record, I personally am not going to publish anything unless either a) I get to CC-license it or at least put a copy in my institution’s open access repository; or b) I get paid for it (unlikely in the scholarly publishing world, but relevant for fiction). Tenure’s not an issue for me so I demand either fame or fortune before I give my work away.

(I’ll create it for fun. But to give it away I require something more.)

French open data and historic monuments

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Way back I had this idea I’d keep up with library blogs in French (and another couple of languages I was semi-competent at, at least with the help of Google Translate) and feed back the occasional roundup of interesting stuff into the anglophone world. I did it a bit, then ran out of steam, then the rss feeds I followed got out of date so nowadays I’ve no idea where the really interesting conversations are happening.

But I still see the occasional tidbit, such as (via Des Bibliothèques 2.0) the launch of the official French Open Data website data.gouv.fr. (A nice touch is that down the bottom of the page they link to Open Data initiatives in a bunch of other countries too.)

And even more cool, (via the same), Monuments historiques, a mashup of data from data.gouv.fr, OpenStreetMap, INSEE, Wikipedia and DBpedia, and Yahoo! (see more on the sources and process) which lets you search or browse for nearly 44,000 monuments in France by type, historic period, region, Metro stop… and gives you data, description, and images about each monument in a really pretty interface.

Links of Interest 19/10/2011 – infolit & student success; serials; conferences

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The Swiss Army Librarian posts a regular “Reference Question of the Week”. One of the latest covers using file conversion websites to help a desperate patron who needs to print out a file in a format that the library doesn’t support.

Sense and Reference discusses three recent blogposts on libraries getting rid of books to create spaces.

The effect of library instruction on student success
Three C&RL papers:

  • The Academic Library Impact on Student Persistence: “a change in the ratio of library professional staff to students predicts a statistically significant positive relationship with both retention and graduation rates.” (Note that they show correlation, not causation; in their discussion they’re inclined to suspect that the effect of more library professional staff is an indirect one.)
  • Measuring Association between Library Instruction and Graduation GPA: “if more than one or two library workshops were offered to students within the course of their program, there was a higher tendency of workshop attendance having a positive impact on final GPA. The results indicate that library instruction has a direct correlation with student performance, but only if a certain minimum amount of instruction is provided.”
  • Why One-shot Information Literacy Sessions Are Not the Future of Instruction: A Case for Online Credit Courses: “Researchers analyzed the pre- and post-test scores of students who received different types of instruction including a traditional one-shot library session and an online course. Results show that students who participated in the online course demonstrated significant improvement in their test scores compared to the other students. This study shows freshman students’ needs for more comprehensive information literacy instruction.”

Serials

  • Jenica Rogers names names of vendors with annoying practices. Some vendors responded well; some badly. Jenica posted another followup on Vendors that delight me.
  • SCOAP3 is an initiative to set up a consortium that redirects library funds from paying for closed access High Energy Physics journal subscriptions to funding these journals to be made open access. The FAQ goes into more detail about how the model will work.

Conferences

  • LIANZA 2011 starts on Sunday – #lianza11 tweets from all attendees will be captured in a set of CoverItLive sessions and I’ll be liveblogging as much as my wrists allow
  • the worldwide online Library 2.011 conference will follow, running from November 2 – 4, with sessions held in multiple timezones.

Links of interest 7/4/2011 – reference and webdesign

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A bit of fun: Book Sculptures

College & Research Libraries (C&RL) will become an open access publication beginning with the May 2011 issue.

Citation Management Software: Features and Futures (RUSQ) compares RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero from both a user and librarian perspective.

Reference and virtual reference
Search for the answer, not the question – “Assume the answer to your question is out there, and think about how the answer might have been written.” I’ve been teaching students something like this, focusing on thinking about who would have written about something and where they would have published.

“Are We Getting Warmer?”: Query Clarification in Live Chat Virtual Reference (RUSQ)
“Results indicate that accuracy was enhanced for librarians who used clarifying questions in answering ready reference (factual) questions.”

Mu, X., Dimitroffa, A., Jordana, J., and Burclaffa, N. A Survey and Empirical Study of Virtual Reference Service in Academic Libraries The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37(2) pp. 120-129.
“Virtual Reference Services (VRS) have high user satisfaction. The main problem is its low usage. We surveyed 100 academic library web sites to understand how VRS are presented. We then conducted a usability study to further test an active VRS model regarding its effectiveness.”

Website usability
One-Pager is a simple, mobile-friendly, user-friendly “library website template that allows your patrons to find what they want” – described elsewhere as a solution to messy library websites.

A couple of papers from Computers in Libraries are reported:

Links of interest 20/10/2010

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QR Codes
(What’s a QR Code? See QR Codes: An Overview.)

Google has launched goo.gl, a URL shortening service (like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc) which as a bonus gives you a QR code: eg http://goo.gl/Xxyl links to this blog and http://goo.gl/Xxyl.qr gives you a pretty QR code you can paste onto a poster. Shortly thereafter, bit.ly joined in the fun.

On the downside I recall reading (somewhere on the internet; it sounded plausible at the time) that, cool as QR codes sound, since they’re mostly being used by advertisers, actual real people aren’t really all that keen on using them.[citation needed] On the upside, I’ve also heard anecdotes from people who do use them. And in any case they don’t cost any money and almost zero time.

Library tutorials

Open Access

Possible topics for crowd-sourced research

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Since first talking about this I’ve been pondering what topics would make good candidates to try out the model. I think it should be something that:

  1. is of interest to as many people as possible; and
  2. can be contributed to by as many people as possible;
  3. as easily as possible.

With these criteria in mind I’ve come up with two possible ideas:

A. Trends in patrons’ use of electronic equipment in the library
This is basically an extension of the article that inspired my thinky thoughts to start with, which did headcounts to measure laptop use in their library. We could extend this to, say, a headcount of

  • total people, of course;
  • users of library computers;
  • users of personal laptops;
  • PDAs;
  • cellphones;
  • and a handy ‘other’ category.

We could decide what time(s)/day(s) to run the headcount on, set up an online spreadsheet, and anyone wanting to participate could do their headcount and enter the data into the spreadsheet. Whether people can only participate once, or can do it recurrently, there’ll be value either way. It’s simple and quantitative and easy.

B. Librarians’ perceptions of the quality of vendor training
(ie training provided by vendors in the use of their products to librarians, in case that’s not clear)
This is. Perhaps a delicate topic. I’ve been thinking for a while about blogging about my own perceptions, all aggregated and anonymised but it still feels a bit “bite the hand that holds all our resources”, because my perceptions are not good. But perhaps it would be less awkward if it came from a whole lot of librarians. And vendors are starting to respond more and more to concerns raised in social media so maybe it would actually get some attention and help vendors provide better training.

OTOH this would be an inherently messy topic to research. It’d be a good test of whether crowdsourcing a qualitative research topic could work, but perhaps not a good test of whether crowdsourcing research per se is workable. There’d need to be a lot of discussion about what exactly we want to research:

  • Likert scales of measures on eg amount of new info, amount of info already known, familiarity of trainer with database, ability of trainer to answer questions…?
  • more freeform answers about problems with presentations eg slides full of essays, trainer bungles example searches…?
  • surveying trainers themselves to find out what kind of training they get in how to give a good presentation?

So.
So, for anyone interested in going somewhere with this — or just interested in reading the results — what do you think? Topic A, topic B, topic C (insert your own topic here), or all of the above?