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Content
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.)
HarperCollins, e-books and the echo chamber
Mar 9th
Is there a plus side to the ongoing HarperCollins e-book controversy?
HarperCollins’ decision to limit public libraries to checking out an e-book 26 times before, as Phil Bradley puts it ‘it implodes on itself like a Mission Impossible cassette tape’, has caused a great deal of comment and complaint. Phil Bradley has much to say about this ‘retrograde’ step on his own (not Cilip’s!) blog as do librarians and others around the world. Some librarians are calling for a boycott of HarperCollins. The Library Journal reports that some US library consortia are already boycotting the publisher.
In fact, librarians’ ability to collaborate and comment using a full range of social media has meant that the debate has gone beyond the library ‘echo chamber’. In the US, the story has been covered by ABC news as an e-book backlash led by librarians.
Cory Doctorow, writing in the Guardian, calls the HarperCollins move indefensible. He argues that it is bizarre to import ‘finite durability as a feature’.
The coverage of the story shows that librarians can attract the attention of the mainstream media.
You can follow the ongoing debate on Twitter (#HCOD). HarperCollins’ explains its decision in an open letter to librarians on its blog.
Students benefit from digital literacy skills
Mar 4th
The University Library at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) gave 16 students e-readers and studied how they accessed their reading lists, used discipline-related e-books and articles and how they used the resources to assist them in their own academic writing.
Students, keen to participate and experiment with new tools, attended workshops at the beginning and halfway through the project. Students expect and appreciate ‘always available’ resources that are easy to access – preferably with one-click. They must develop and improve their digital literacty skills, and the library can help them do this.
For the library, being linked with new technology, and the regular contact with enthusiastic students had its own benefits.
The full story of the project is published here.
Information blackholes
Jan 31st
Hanna Kazerani spoke about organisational information blackholes at LIKE 21. This networking meeting was held in Clerkenwell in London and was a full house. Hanna has had a fascinating career path that has taken her from her native Iceland, via parliamentary speech writing to a range of consultancy focused roles.
Hanna spoke about some of the organisations she has worked with, and described some of the information messes her clients have got themselves into. Information governance frameworks are sadly lacking in many organisations. Even if policies are in place, what is often required is cultural and behavioural change. Much discussion over dinner of ‘carrot and stick’ followed.
LIKE will meet again next month to take on knowledge management.
The issues facing STM publishers
Jan 23rd
In 2004, Richard Poynder interviewed Derk Haank, who had moved from Elsevier Science to head Springer, a company formed by the merger of BertelsmannSpringer and Kluwer Academic Press. Now, in a wide-ranging interview for Information Today, Richard has again interviewed Derk. Their conversation covered many of the key issues facing STM publishers and their institutional customers.
When Derk joined Springer, he made the decision to launch Open Choice – a hybrid open access (OA) model that led the way for other subscription-based publishers. With the purchase of open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) in 2008, Springer became the world’s largest open access publisher. With the launch of SpringerOpen in 2010, Springer created a range of ‘pure’ OA (sometimes known as Gold) journals in the STM field.
Derk considers OA to simply be one of several business models pursued by Springer. The ‘traditional’ subscription model is just as sustainable as OA now and into the foreseeable future. However, Springer will be looking to the potential of ‘nontraditional’ markets too – smaller institutions, individuals and businesses for example might find Springer content of interest if the right pricing/access model can be found – via the iPad or other mobile devices perhaps.
The full interview can be found here, and provides an illuminating overview of the issues facing STM publishers – from OA and pricing to the ever-increasing growth in research.
What do students REALLY want?
Jan 19th
In an interesting blog post, Stephen Abram considers the findings of a recent (US) research report. The original research was conducted by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and asked US college students about their format preferences for textbooks. BISG found that ‘nearly 75% of students…say they prefer textbooks in printed rather than etext form’. Reasons cited for this preference included the potential resale value of the books and its ‘permanence’.
About 12% of the students surveyed said the prefer etexts to printed texts because of lower cost and portability while 11% preferred to rent textbooks.
Stephen Abram’s interpretation is slightly different. The survey was conducted before what he terms the ‘explosion’ of affordable tablets and e-readers in the consumer market which will almost certainly impact the uptake and acceptability of etexts. He also feels that students considered a ‘polarised’ view (either print OR etext) when in fact a hybrid model that combines e-texts with books would be much more likely.
Abram also states that it is often difficult for people who are surveyed to compare a situation they know (in this case text books) and an ‘imagined future state’. The e-text space is evolving with textbooks and library research services beginning to integrate. The space should be watched closely, says Abram.
EU and me, me and EU
Nov 28th
New Media Age reports on the launch of the new website that sets out to be an accessible resource for EU public information for a UK audience.
The website presents some positive stories of the work of the EU as well as publishing some EU ‘mythbusting’ content, some of which is highly entertaining (sadly, it turns out that the story ‘EU forces farmers to provide toys for pigs’ is untrue.
Interview with Stevan Harnad – 2010 the Tipping Point for Universal Open Access?
Mar 23rd
Open access advocate Stevan Harnad looks back over the progress made by the OA movement to date, in a detailed and far-reaching interview with Richard Poynder for Information Today. Harnad speculates as to whether 2010 will see the tipping point needed to usher in universal open access, with the aim of getting the 2.5 million articles a year that are published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals all freely available online.
Harnad is realistic in his assessment of the progress made to date: “…the history of OA so far has been one of gratuitous over-reaching that has not only netted little, but it has failed even to grasp what has already been well within reach for some time: free online access to refereed reseach.” But he is cautiously optimisitic about the initiatives underway in 2010.
