Information Research Weblog

I find air travel a complete pain—sitting for hours doing nothing, but winding up feeling dog-tired! However, occasionally one finds something in a flight magazine or a newspaper and, on a recent trip to Porto (Manchester/Frankfurt/Porto and back - almost a full day of travelling each time because there are no direct flights!) I came across a couple of items of interest.

First, in USA Today (not one I read regularly), I found an article, Needless fight threatens Google's online library in which the paper argued, rightly in my opinion, that the publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to prevent Google from making bits of books available online (as I've said before). More interesting perhaps was the response from one Pat Schroeder, described as 'Former Democrat congresswoman', who is now president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. Sadly, this was a predictably blinkered response which could have been written by one of her aides and reflected an ignorance of the law relating to copying that is astonishing. (Incidentally, the piece appeared on 7th November, but I found it in what I assume is the European edition on the 9th.)

On the same flight, I picked up The Wall Street Journal - a newspaper that is so right-wing it ought to carry a health warning. However, the European edition for 9th November had an article comparing mapping sites and discovering that MapQuest did a better job of providing directions that either Google or Yahoo. But doesn't everyone use satnav these days? :-) (I couldn't find the article on the Website, even though the Journal is free this week. Free for a week, eh? Bid deal WSJ, one of these days you'll notice that a subscription news site generates no stories when there's so much free stuff around. Why don't you free up most of the site and make the key business stuff and the archive only accessible to subscribers?)

An interesting news item appears on the ZDNet site about an open source alternative to Google's project to digitise books.

Google has been much in the news as a result of its venture into the digital library - on a huge scale. Today's Observer (one of the so-called 'broadsheet' Sunday papers in the UK, for those who don't know it, and part of the Guardian family) has an article in its business section on Google's latest venture, in which John Naughton refers to Howard Reingold's seminal work on the virtual community:

Many years ago, Howard Rheingold, who was one of the first people to understand the social potential of cyberspace, posed an interesting question: 'Where is the Library of Congress, when it's on your laptop?' To most people at the time, it seemed a meaningless question. What lay behind it, however, was an attempt to think through a profound consequence of a networked society - what Frances Cairncross later dubbed 'the death of distance'.

Naughton also notes:

Once upon a time, being learned involved holding a lot of knowledge and information in one's head. Are we moving towards a world where the important thing is not what you know, but how to find it?

an idea expressed many long years ago by Dr. Johnson (as reported by James Boswell—in 1791):

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

which is also a very neat definition of the difference between 'knowledge' and 'information' :-)

Google was also the subject of one of Fortune's long articles last week, too. The focus was on the share price and the probability of investors getting their return (the verdict seemed to be, 'Be cautious'), but, among other things it has some interesting stuff on the competition.

Thanks also to Gerry Mckiernan and the ASIS-L mailing list for bringing another Google item to my attention; this time in the New York Times (you'll need to register to read the article, but registration is free).

The article contains a nice story about the irreplaceability of the physical book – for some purposes:

Mr. Jimerson said, 'A scanned image will only tell you some things, and the sheer volume of records makes scanning everything difficult'. But he added that he supported Google's plan in theory. 'I recall the story of a gentleman being in a library and watching a researcher sniff books', he said. 'It turned out that the aroma of vinegar was still embedded in those that had been treated with vinegar to prevent cholera during an epidemic'.

Thanks to Gerry also for another item in the New York Times – this time on Firefox. With Pennsylvania State University telling everyone on campus to switch from Internet Explorer, it would seem that Microsoft has a little problem on its hands – one that may result in a policy switch, unless arrogance holds sway in Redmond. If there is a policy switch it would require IE to be re-written from the ground up, so Firefox may go ahead by leaps and bounds. Try it—my guess is that, if you are an IE user, you'll need less than ten minutes with the new rival (well, not so new, if you've been using it for the past couple of years in its development phase) to convince you to switch.

Having recently published a new issue of Information Research, I thought it was time to find out how the ranking by 'hits per month' was standing. So here's the latest table. We see that some very recent papers appear to have struck a chord, while some of the oldest papers are still going strong.

T.D. Wilson The nonsense of knowledge management      Issue 8.1 Total hits 39553 Months active 24 Hits per month 1648.04

Terrence A. Brooks The nature of meaning in the age of Google      Issue 9.3 Total hits 5204 Months active 4 Hits per month 1301.00

Jannica Heinström Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour       Issue 9.1 Total hits 9090 Months active 9 Hits per month 1010.00

P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy An action research approach to curriculum development      Issue 1.1 Total hits 16507 Months active 19 Hits per month 868.79

Chun Wei Choo Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning      Issue 7.1 Total hits 19950 Months active 33 Hits per month 604.55

France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective       Issue 8.1 Total hits 12594 Months active 21 Hits per month 599.71

Zita Correia and Tom Wilson Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach      Issue 2.4 Total hits 11000 Months active 19 Hits per month 578.95

Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble The duality of knowledge       Issue 8.1 Total hits 11984 Months active 21 Hits per month 570.67

Kalervo Järvelin and T.D. Wilson On conceptual models for information seeking and retrieval research       Issue 9.1 Total hits 4819 Months active 9 Hits per month 535.44

Terrence A. Brooks Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval.      Issue 8.3 Total hits 7452 Months active 15 Hits per month 496.80

V. Mistry and Bob Usherwood Total quality management, British Standard accreditation, Investors in People and academic libraries      Issue 1.3 Total hits 9414 Months active 19 Hits per month 495.47

Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach      Issue 6.3 Total hits 18498 Months active 39 Hits per month 474.31

Sirje Virkus Information literacy in Europe: a literature review      Issue 8.4 Total hits 5152 Months active 12 Hits per month 429.33

Kirsti Nilsen The Library Visit Study: user experiences at the virtual reference desk      Issue 9.2 Total hits 2312 Months active 6 Hits per month 385.33

Barbara Niedźwiedzka A proposed general model of information behaviour      Issue 9.1 Total hits 3021 Months active 9 Hits per month 335.67

Joyce Kirk Information in organisations: directions for information management      Issue 4.3 Total hits 20602 Months active 63 Hits per month 327.02

Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig Knowledge management: another management fad?      Issue 8.1 Total hits 6826 Months active 21 Hits per month 325.05

Shrianjani Marie (Gina) de Alwis and Susan Ellen Higgins Information as a tool for management decision making: a case study of Singapore      Issue 7.1 Total hits 10054 Months active 33 Hits per month 304.67

Wallace Koehler A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1797 Months active 6 Hits per month 299.50

Bo-Christer Björk Open access to scientific publications - an analysis of the barriers to change      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1776 Months active 6 Hits per month 296.00

There's been quite a gap between the last posting and this one - but no one seems to have complained :-)

I've been in Barcelona for the past week - part Spring break, part participating in a meeting. In this case, the meeting of the European Association of Science Editors, where I was invited to speak on 'Information seeking behaviour and the digital information world'. I found it rather difficult to put something together for a different kind of audience.

The programme was an interesting one, with, in addition to my own, papers on 'Beyond electrification: innovative models of scientific publication' by Stefan Gradmann of the University of Hamburg; 'New models for publishing and academic initiatives from a librarian´s point of view' by Ingegerd Rabow of Lund University Libraries; 'The Virtual Health Library, an Approach to the Access and Dissemination of Scientific Information from Latin America and Spain', by Jorge Veiga de Cabo of the Biblioteca Nacional de Ciencias de la Salud. Madrid; 'Open Access Publishing: All Use is Fair Use', by Jan Velterop of BioMed Central and 'Long-term access and humanities scholarship' by Yola de Lusenet of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It's anticipated that the papers will be published in the Association's journal, European Science Editing, which is, itself, openly available, nine months after publication of the paper copy, so keep an eye peeled for it.

A new issue of Information Research is now available on the site. This issue is largely devoted to digital libraries, through a selection of papers presented at a conference on the subject held in Finland last September.

Thanks to Euan Semple for drawing my attention to an interesting item on the Pitch journal site.

The item is the Editors' introduction to the issue, in which it is suggested that in the field of education alone, there are now more than 140 open access journals.

Well, there's still a long way to go, but it looks as though things are building.

Digital libraries develop apace and the output of literature on the subject grows and grows. One agency doing a good deal of the generation is the Digital Library Federation, a consortium operating under the administrative umbrella of the Council on Library and Information Resources. The site is well worth taking a look at: there's a lot of highly relevant information, if you are involved in digital library development at all. For example, the Digital Library Documents sub-site. One of the latest documents is the report on the Fall 2003 DLF Forum, with abstracts of presentations and some PowerPoint files - worth browsing.

Paul Miller attempts to disentangle portals, gateways, and other linguistic confusions in the latest issue of Ariadne. However, doesn't the definition of 'Gateway' as:

"...collections of links and pointers to content of value, mostly elsewhere on the Web, and generally within a single defined topic or small set of topics. Their defining characteristics are that they are primarily a collection of descriptions of resources, rather than the resources themselves, and that the bulk of those resources tend to be held elsewhere and belong to others. Typically, the resources being described tend to be Web sites."

sound like a 'directory', 'guide' or even a 'catalogue'? In analysing the hits on Information Research, I've come to the conclusion that what I've previously labelled as 'Directories', 'Guides to resources', and 'Library catalogues' are all doing essentially the same thing - listing and providing links to resources.

On this basis, what would the guide to research methods be?

I suspect that 'gateway' was invented by techies who had never seen a catalogue :-) I'm not referring to Paul here, since he is obviously trying hard to disentangle the semantic confusion, but to the originators of the term. Does anyone have any recollection of its first mention?

I should add, that Paul's definition of 'portal' as involving customization, does strike me as a useful distinction to make.

Tom

It's been a little while since the last posting here, because I've been in Lisbon for a week, with very little in the way of Internet contact - just a few minutes on the hotel connection.

However, here's an interesting site, brought to my attention by Current Cites - where you will always find something interesting.

The site is that of the 2003 Dublin Core conference It's interesting for two reasons - the content, of course, but also the mode of presentation, using Siderean's proprietary "Seamark" navigation system.

Current Cites is an electronic publication I've drawn attention to before. Here are a couple of items that interested me:

I'm in the process of reviewing the latest version of EndNote, the bibliography organizer, and this version has a new feature, linking to the original source through the OpenURL protocol - coincidentally, Current Cites draws attention to an interview in the OCLC Newsletter with Herbert Van de Sompel, the originator of the protocol and a key figure in the Open Archives Initiative

The other piece is from First Monday that e-journal that is just a little younger than Information Research :-) This paper concerns 'open content' - that is, what you are reading now, and what you read in every new issue of Information Research. Magnus Cedergren, the author of 'Open content and value creation' states in the abstract:

In this paper, I consider open content as an important development track in the media landscape of tomorrow. I define open content as content possible for others to improve and redistribute and/or content that is produced without any consideration of immediate financial reward — often collectively within a virtual community. The open content phenomenon can to some extent be compared to the phenomenon of open source. Production within a virtual community is one possible source of open content. Another possible source is content in the public domain. This could be sound, pictures, movies or texts that have no copyright, in legal terms.

and in the body of the paper he looks at three examples of open content:

• Open Directory Project (ODP)
• Wikipedia
• Rick Prelinger's digital film archive

All in all, an interesting paper.

The economic impact of libraries

If you've ever wondered about the economic impact of libraries in society - and it must be on your minds more or less continually - then wonder no longer. OCLC has produced a nice .pdf file that tells all called Libraries: how they stack up. Among the interesting snippets:

U.S. libraries purchase an estimated $14 billion in goods and services annually—exceeding U.S. spending on videos and athletic footwear, and approaching the level spent by businesses on magazine advertising. U.S. libraries account for nearly half of the $31 billion spent annually by libraries worldwide.

And George Bush, of course, snipped $39,000,000 from the budget for libraries when he slipped into the White House - shows how much influence his wife, the former children's librarian, must have had. Of course, Tony Bliar and the New Thatcherites don't have to do that in the UK - they just crack down on 'waste' in the public services.

Licences for electronic resources

A useful little article on this subject at Free Pint by Paul Pedley of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The key point, of course, is:

It is important to point out that a licence does not confer ownership rights. It merely specifies the conditions upon which databases and other copyright works can be used and exploited, and by whom. At the end of the subscription period they may well no longer have access to the materials. Indeed, it may even be a requirement of the contract that anything which has been downloaded from the electronic information product is deleted at the end of the contract term.

In other words, "Oh sure, we'll sell you this stuff - but we're going to take it back when George snips another $39 million."

Both of these items courtesy of Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Librarians in court

This from Yahoo News:

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major US library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast -distributor of the Morpheus software - and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry's suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.

Read more about it

Here's question that rings a lot of bells these days and First Monday has a paper about it.

We're all aware, I imagine, of the problem, or potential problem of the unknown life of digitally stored information. An interesting case study is that of the BBC Domesday Project, which used interactive video-discs and the BBC micro-computer. Both technologies are now obsolete. It has to be remembered that this was a very early effort to apply the new information technologies to the accumulation and presentation of a massive amount of information - the date was 1986.

Thanks to Current Cites, my attention was drawn to a short paper on the subject in the Research Libraries Group 'Diginews'. The Camileon project is an Anglo-American collaboration (rather more positive than a recent manifestation), involving the Universities of Leeds and Michigan, aimed at developing strategies for the long-term preservation of digital materials. The Domesday Project constituted a test case for its efforts. The problem has been largely solved by the use of software emulation but:

Sadly, it is unlikely that Domesday will become available to the general public unless the IPR problems can be solved.

Things are going on on one's own doorstep and you never know!

The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitization Service at the University of Hertfordshire have been working (funded by money from the National Lottery) on a digital library of the proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1734, which is described as:

A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Fascinating stuff!

No - not the old man's bone structure, but the skeleton of the classification scheme.

An interesting presentation on "Improving Subject Access in OPACs using Dewey and View-Based Searching" by Steve Pollit and Amanda Tinker. Also, a guided tour of the system here.

Here's an item that chimes in with Terry Brooks's latest column in Information Research, brought to my attention by Current Cites.

It's an article by Clifford Lynch (of the Coalition for Networked Information) on 'institutional repositories', that is, official, mainly university, archives of digital resources:

...a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.

Terry mentioned DSpace as one of the players in this area of activity, and another is ePrints from the University of Southampton in the UK - however, the latter is intended mainly for working papers and similar documents, whereas DSpace is intended for all digital content.

One of Lynch's comments rang bells:

Our institutions of higher education have overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty for at least a decade now, to the detriment of both the faculty members and the institutions themselves. These faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication of scholarship; such innovations are essential to keeping scholarship vital and effective, and they must not only be supported but nurtured. Indeed nurturing these innovations reaches to the core mission of our universities, and to the core values of our universities.

Read the rest - it's well worth the time.

While searching for information on the King County wireless Internet system, I came across a conference series I hadn't seen before, which is available on the Web. It's the Virtual Reference Desk Conference series. The first thing that hit my screen was a discussion between Mike Eisenberg (University of Washington) and Charles McClure (Florida State University) in the second conference in 2000, which is entertaining as well as informative. However, there's a lot more there on the impact of the Internet, and of electronic connection between user and library that points to significant changes going on and likely to accelerate.

The latest papers (although, in fact, most are presentations rather than papers) available are those from the 2002 conference. One of the 'exemplary' papers is from Simon Bains at the University of Edinburgh on Testing Collaborative Electronic Reference Services: The Experience of UK University Research Libraries in the Use of QuestionPoint

All in all, worth a browse.

In the course of my browsing, I came across Walt Crawford's column in American Libraries on 'the PoD people' - that is, the phenomenon of Print on Demand. These days anyone with a word-processor can produce a book text that is good enough for publication - at least in technical terms, whether it is readable is another matter! Crawford suggests that a publisher might charge $100 to $160 to convert the text to PoD form and make a profit. Of course, many people are already producing books in this way - but putting them on their Web sites, rather than having them turned into print. Much of the stuff I have looked at would not be worth buying in any event, but one shudders to think about the problems caused for libraries by having to select what is good from this kind of output for the benefit of their readers. A number of e-book providers already exist, for example cBook Pro offers to guide you through the production process and claim s that thousands of sales can be made to impulse buyers. For the PDA market there are sites like Handheld Crime, which offer both free downloads to Palms and Pocket PCs and books for sale.

In other words, Crawford is probably right about the potential explosion of output.

Tom

Greetings from snowy Poland. I'm in the old city of Torun, which currently has snow falling. I'm at a conference here of the DELOS group - dedicated to digital libraries in Europe. The papers will be published in some form after the conference and should be of interest to many readers of Information Research. In the interim, after the conference, the powerpoint presentations will be on the Web site of ICIMSS - I'll keep an eye on this myself and let people know when they are available.