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Content
The Cost of Knowledge versus Elsevier
Feb 19th
There has been much coverage recently of the website petition launched by Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers, winner of the Fields medal, to encourage academics to publicly declare that they will not support any Elsevier journal. According to The Cost of Knowledge website, more than 6000 academics have currently signed up. Robin Peek takes an in-depth look at the issues in this ITI Newsbreak.
Students and academic texts
Nov 21st
Now that students (and their families!) are expecting to pay more for higher education, how have their attitudes to the delivery, format and cost of learning resources changed? As part of a one day conference organised by the Publishers Association, a panel of students shared their thoughts, experiences and wish-lists. They had interesting things to say to academic publishers, university programme directors, librarians and lecturers.
Key messages from the student panel
- Too much information – students are often overwhelmed by the amount of information, across a variety of formats, that they are attempting to manage. Although access to information is important, the critical skills to analyse and filter are greatly in demand
- There is an overwhelming need for information analysis skills
- Not all students want e-everything. Several panel members expressed their love of the hard copy text book. However, another called reading anything in print format ‘a chore’. Most students recognised that a mixture of formats is necessary or even desirable
- Overseas students sometimes need help in transferring to the UK model of education (especially if they come from an educational culture where they learn by rote). Teaching tools for overseas students would be greatly appreciated.
- Students would love, shorter chapters, chapter summaries, key learning points, revision aids etc.
Challenges and opportunities for academic librarians
The library is a trusted partner for many of the students. They rely on librarians to help them develop their information skills, to help with information quality assurance and to guide them to useful resources beyond the reading lists. When it comes to recommended reading, students are often asking students in the years above them for their honest opinions on reading list resources. At the same time, only one student reported that she was ever asked for her opinion on learning materials. Several students reported that they would be uncomfortable with criticising material/text books written by their own lecturers. Institutional librarians could perhaps help facilitate quality control and student feedback of learning materials and recommended reading.
Because of the cost of their education, students expect their learning resources to be made available by their institutions/ libraries – and think most of them should be free. They should also be available in any format they can. Libraries and publishers still have some way to go to ensure that e-textbooks are available to meet this demand.
The panel of students, from the LSE and the University of Greenwich, formed part of the Publisher’s Association one day conference ‘Students at the Heart of the system’ held in London on 21 November 2011
Open up your library data and unlock its power
Oct 29th
Libraries, museums and archives have a wealth of information about their collections that is too often locked away in isolated silos, according to open data expert Owen Stephens who was speaking at Internet Librarian International.
Opening up access to library data can enable others to innovate in unforeseen ways, adding value to the originating organisation as well as to the wider community.
Passing a box of chocolates round the audience, Stephens described a continuum of openness, rather than a binary ‘open/closed’ scenario. In an ideal world, data would be openly licensed, open accessible, openly discoverable and openly connected.
Stephens described the Discovery initiative, which aims to improve resource discovery by establishing a clear set of principles and practices for the publication and aggregation of open, reusable metadata.
A likely outcome of openness is that external users will find valuable new ways of engaging with the data. For example, Cambridge University documented the APIs available for their data and a student then built an iPhone app which enables users to find out whether a book is available in the library nearest to their current location.
To quote Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, “the coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else“.
How to dissect a website – and keep it healthy
Oct 27th
When it comes to sharing ideas for analysing library websites, Jennifer Phillips-Bacher of the Wellcome Library has some helpful analogies. She likens the first stage of content auditing to dissection. This is where you look inside to see what’s working – and what’s wrong. Jennifer’s content audit was a detailed and tedious task. Starting with the site map, every link must be clicked and each webpage analysed. Content type, URL, author, metadata, when the page was created/updated and other information was captured. In particular Jennifer recommends you keep an eye out for ROT – content that is redundant, outdated or trivial. The output of this type of content audit is an enormous spreadsheet.
The second phase is diagnosis. You can use the information you have gathered, as well as other tools such as Google analytics to understand exactly how people are using your site. You can see what content is never used and which are your most visited pages. Diagnosis helps you validate exactly what you are going to include, and omit, from your website. You can begin to identify your underserved audiences.
The next phase focuses on strategy. For the team at Wellcome, processes are being built in to ensure that the website is kept healthy and happy. Governance of the new website is critical. Accountability will be built into the website and an editorial strategy and content lifecycle will be developed. The team is consulting with a branding agency and all staff will be trained in writing for the web.
Even if you are not embarking on a full redesign of your website, brief content audit can reveal all kinds of interesting information. Start to explore your site’s analytics and see if you can find unmet needs and other opportunities. Audit and analysis can help make you stronger!
Jennifer was speaking at Internet Librarian International
The gamification of content – what marketers are saying
Jul 19th
Gamification means that content need no longer remain ‘passive’. Gamification techniques can help ensure your content will work harder for you, for longer.
Two recent articles in the professional magazine Marketing Week summarise the ways in which gamification is being used to enhance brand awareness and to support customer loyalty programmes. It is an approach that has already been adopted by such brands as Kellog, Disney and (as featured here) Marriott International. Future developments mentioned look set to help customers manage their household energy and petrol consumption.
And of course gamification techniques have already been used successfully by libraries. Finland’s National Library, for example, has used gamification techniques to enhance the crowdsourced, collaborative nature of its archive digitisation project. We can look forward to hearing of more gamification-based library projects in the months to come.
A ‘new’ model for ebooks
Jul 6th
If Amazon’s Kindle device (other devices are available!) is ‘the iTunes for ebooks’ then what is the Spotify equivalent? (Spotify provides free and fee music streaming to users in a number of European countries).
This week, the Spanish initiative 24symbols has announced it is to offer on-demand access to a library of popular ebooks in a model similar to that of music streaming. Integration with Facebook provides a social element to the service.
You can read more about 24symbols, including a review of its current, beta format on thenextweb.com.
Tablet news apps
Apr 29th
What do the features and functionality of the leading news/magazine apps tell us about trends in the development of mobile content.? Content Matters reviews the three current market leaders (Flipboard, Zite and Pulse) and summarises the lessons content developers should take from their success. These can best be summarised as:
- Less text, more visual
- Social sharing
- Content personalisation
- Swipe-centric user interfaces
For the author, a key differentiator for these services will be how they gain market share with publishers and the models they choose in order to do this. There is still much more to come.
Internet Oscar nominees announced
Apr 14th
The 15th Annual Webby Awards nominees have been announced and you can take part in the voting until 28th April.
Catogories include:
- Best home/welcome page
- Best navigation/structure
- Science
- Social media
Notable nominees include Wired.com (best copywriting); TED.com (best use of video); and Mashable (best business blog) and the BBC’s History of the World in 100 objects (best podcast). Groupon has received a nomination in the Retail category, while Lego.com gets a nomination for best home page.
The full list of nominations is well worth a scan.
Creation or curation?
Mar 21st
Rory Cellan-Jones (the BBC’s Technology Correspondent) was speaking on BBC Radio this morning about Twitter. He called it ‘the most important innovation for journalists in recent years’.
As he was speaking, I was reading this article by Steven Rosenbaum on Mashable who describes how social media has enabled a personal web publishing boom. Now that publishing tools have been opened up, the key challenge lies in getting value from this ‘information flood’. This includes ensuring that content creators gain access to appropriate audiences. As it’s got easier to talk, it’s becoming harder to be heard!
This is where content curation comes into its own. ”Data will be created with staggering speed, and systems will need to evolve to find, gather, and package data so that you can get what you need, when you need it, in coherent and useful bundles”.
This sounds like a job for the information professional!
A good airport read
Mar 16th
Passengers at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport can now take advantage of the world’s first airport e-library.
The English and Chinese language collection is available to read in the airport via thirty devices. The books cannot be downloaded onto users’ devices or taken away which must surely lead to some people having to leave behind a good cliffhanger so they can board their plane.
The service is run by the airport’s duty free shop. (This sounds like a set-up for a good joke. Clever responses to that statement, including cringeworthy puns are welcomed.)
