Entries from September 2008 ↓

I’ve been thinking about releasing my college football top ten for a few years. This year, I am going to do it. Look for my top ten every week fr the rest of the season. I decided to wait until now because I think you need to give the teams a few weeks to see where the are. Now that October games are next on the schedule, it is time. I should mention while I believe in strength of schedule, I also believe in winning. Thus, if you keep winning, you’ll get my vote. However, if you play lousy teams, you will till be towards the bottom of the teams that are winning, so schedule does matter. Also, I will give the benefit of the doubt for teams from the mid-majors. As East Carolina showed, they can beat the big conferences and it is clear that most of  “the big conference teams” won’t go on the road to play them. That is the big conference teams fault as much, i not more so than the fault of the mid-majors, so they should be penalized for playing cupcakes instead of good mid-major schools. True, not all big conference teams are like this, but I’m not going to reward the ones that won’t go on the road to play the Boise States, BYUs, and Fresno States. Anyway, enough rambling, here is my first weekly top ten.

1. Oklahoma (4-0)
2. LSU (4-0)
3. Alabama (5-0)
4. Texas (4-0)
5. Brigham Young (4-0)
6. South Florida (5-0)
7. Missouri  (4-0)
8. Utah (5-0)
9. Texas Tech (4-0)
10. Vanderbilt (4-0)

Thanks to a post on Roy Tennant’s blog, I have found out about a third Code4Lib regional group to go along with Appalachia and NYC Code4Lib regional groups that I previously wrote about. This one is in New England and hopes to have a one day event in mid-November or early December. Keep the regional groups coming!

The TALL blog that discusses online education with the University of Oxford has an interesting discussion on the divide of users of the ‘net. Instead of ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ they believe the terms ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’ are more accurate and as Andy Powell points out this appears to be “a much better characterization of what is going on than the somewhat pejorative, often ageist, use that is made of ‘immigrant’ and ‘native’.” I don’t necessary agree that digital native and immigrant is as negative as Andy appears to believe, but it does have some problems. As Lorcan Dempsey points out the generations don’t really explain fully what is going on. I know many people like me who would be classified as digital immigrants that are very comfortable with all of this online stuff and have a lot invested in our online selves while some digital natives couldn’t care less and use the Internet more as a tool than a place to go. As Lorcan points out, many digital “residents” really expect Web 2.0 functionality and “expect anything that moves to have an RSS feed, and their aggregate is a primary channel of information about the world” while others couldn’t care less.

I don’t have a huge amount of online teaching experience, but I have taught three online masters-level classes and I say that my observations match well with Oxford’s. While I do believe that their are generational differences and reasons why terms like ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ do start to explain things, it may be too limiting and may not take into account socio-economic and other environmental conditions – especially when you expand this in generational terms such as millennials, NetGen, Generation Y, etc.

The University of Michigan Libraries have installed an Espresso Book Machine. It takes the Espresso Book machine between 5 and 10 minutes to produce a “library quality” book. With the 2 million+ books Michigan has digitized and other copyright-expired digitized books (pre-1923) they have plenty of titles to choose from to print at a cost of $10 a book. The press release claims they are the first academic library to do so, but I can imagine more jumping on board – and not just for non-copyright materials. We are entering a new era of publishing and I can imagine publishers working with libraries and other entities to print books on demand. Instead of waiting to order a text book, just go to the library and print one. Also, this type of machine could be really useful in a partnership between libraries and small academic presses. Most of these small presses print very limited runs of books. Instead of sending the electronic copy to a commercial book printer, print it at the library whenever a new copy is ordered. This is something to keep an eye on as I believe there are many possibilities here besides the copyright expired materials – esp. for small academic presses and even for out-of-print books.

In a recent blog post, about IGeLU 2008, I mentioned a discussion about why you would include free e-books in your e-book discovery layer. This discussion got me thinking a little more about “acquiring” freely available e-resources. I have heard various librarians, in different ways, express that if they did not somehow purchase or otherwise actively select an item, it is somehow less valuable. I have no problem with the select portion, but I do have a problem with the idea that freely available stuff is, by its nature, less useful to include in your discovery layer. Yes, here are some low quality free e-resources, but in many cases the free content is as good, if not better, than stuff one has to purchase.

Identifying quality, freely available e-books and other e-resources might be an area that subject librarians can work in when the acquisition budget is spent, or drastically cut, for the year. This is also an area where groups of subject librarians from different institutions can effectively cooperate to identify quality e-books to include in each other’s collections. I know that this already happens to some extent with Web resources (for example, within WESS), but this could be expanded more and could focus on books, open access journals, and articles/book chapters held within scholarly repositories.

I don’t know of any specific tool designed to facilitate this kind of collaboration. Sending e-mails or editing a wiki might not be good enough. We would need an easy way for librarians to identify resources (maybe using a browser toolbar or widget) that will store these items in a centralized place, and allow libraries to extract the items in there subject areas for bulk inclusion into an ILS or other discovery layer. I am sure we already have some of the tools that can facilitate at least portions of this, but I don’t know if we have a way that allows for this to be done easily and quickly. Even if we did, we have an issue that not all of these resources have quality metadata associated with them. Who will create this metadata? While subject librarians are trained and have experience with identifying materials for their collections, often that are not trained or have experience with cataloging and/or creating metadata.

I’ll have to think about this more and possibly talk with some other librarians to see what we would need for this to work on a large scale, what is already there that can help, and how can the collaborative nature of this type of project could work. Oh yea, the other thing to ask is it really worthwhile? Maybe just taking everything in a particular collection of e-books is not a bad idea when compared with the cost and effort selecting individual titles. We typically already select a whole group of content put together by a vendor with journal databases were a vendor includes X number of titles. If we were choosing them one by one, I’m sure there are a lot of titles in these database bundles we have little or no use for. Maybe this approach will be sufficient with freely available e-books? But I still think the idea of cooperatively identifying free e-books is something that librarians need to explore more thoroughly.

Between September 6-10, 2008 I attended the International Group of ex Libris Users (IGeLU) conference in Madrid, Spain. One thing I really miss about Endeavor Users Group (EndUser) is the international aspects. The Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) conference is mostly attended by librarians from the United States, along with some Canadians. True, there are other international attendees, including some from the Caribbean, but they are very small in number. IGeLU, on the other hand has people from many European countries with a few Aussies, South Africans, Americans, Israelis, etc. thrown in for good measure. I think of IGeLU as mostly an European conference (or at least a “Western-world” conference, if I can use that term) and I really like getting the different view of the library world I get when I go to a conference such as IGeLU. That said, it still doesn’t have that same feel as EndUser did to me.

Having just gone to ELUNA a little over a month ago, I wasn’t expecting a lot of new news from Ex Libris management. For the most part this turned out to be true. However, there was one bit of important news for Metalib customers. Metalib 4.3 will be the last version of Metalib as we know it. Metalib 5 (or whatever it will be called) will be a complete re-write. The underlying database and administration portions of the code may be based on Primo but that is still unclear. The user front-end (i.e. discovery layer) will use Primo. Apparently customers of Metalib will not be charged extra for the Primo front-end to Metalib. That is, of course, if they only use the Primo front-end for Metalib. I think using the Primo front end for Metalib like this makes sense for Ex Libris on a couple of accounts. First, they won’t have to develop a new Metalib front end. That means less development is needed and less products to support. Secondly, it will give customers a little taste of Primo. If customers that get this taste decide they like the Primo front end, they may purchase Primo for use with other products. In other words, Ex Libris saves costs and might get a few more sales of Primo out of it.

Most of the user sessions were pretty good. I’m not sure if I got anything specific to bring back home and implement however. One session I enjoyed focused on Metalib. It was interesting to learn about how others are working with Metalib and doing things like creating RSS feeds out of it. However, the approach they used appeared to require a fair bit of work to implement, and with Metalib going away as we know it, I am not sure it would be worth it for us to try to do this now.

I think my presentation on RSS A to V went well. I definitely find it harder to read European audiences than I do American ones. I am not sure if that is because I am from the USA or not, but I think it might not be based on a conversation with a Swede who has presented in the USA a number of times. He said (and I agree) that Americans are more likely to provide visual clues that they are “getting” a presentation by doing things like nodding their head. Overall, Europeans seem to be more reserved in that aspect and seem to more intently focus/concentrate on what you are saying without showing much emotion during a presentation. I am not sure why this is, maybe it is a cultural thing or maybe it is because for most of them, while excellent English speakers, English is not their first language so it takes more focus/concentration for them. For those of you in the Mid-Atlantic states, you can see an encore of my RSS presentation at the Ex Libris Mid-Atlantic Users Group (EMA) meeting in early October.

One topic I found very interesting was the presentation and ensuing discussion abut the future of e-book management. Representatives from ELUNA, IGeLU, and, I believe, Ex Libris created a report about what customers need to manage e-books. As my friend Zoe says the “first you have to acknowledge that an e-book is not always a book in “e” form and then things just go downhill from there. ”

One of the things they mentioned was the enormous challenges of managing e-books. Some of the challenges include: variety of formats, different purpose and use (textbook, research book), diversity of hardware/software, digital rights management (DRM), pricing models, licensing models (do you lease or have ownership), digital curation, metadata creation, and discovery and accessibility. With all of the different formats, e-versions, and sources of e-books, putting like items together is a problem. One of the recommendations is that libraries need a solution that provides sophisticated de-duplication in a FRBR-ized manner. Libraries and library software vendors have there work cut out for them.

Three other things stood out to me about their recommendations. First, the task force felt that the ability to meta-search full content of e-books is not an immediate priority. Secondly they believe browsing is not required for e-book discovery. Thirdly, they recommend that the e-book management system needs to allow libraries to include not just licensed content, but freely available content as well if they wanted to.

Considering the challenges of getting the full-text content into a meta search tool (esp. with all of the possible sources of electronic texts) it would be a daunting task to have full text search in an e-books discovery application. With that in mind, I can understand this one – although I think it will be needed at some point (which the recommendation also implied). We have it for journal articles and patrons will come to expect it in e-books. Also, I just think that it would be really useful if you are looking for information about a specific aspect of a topic.

My initial reaction about the no need for browsing recommendation is that I do not agree. Yes, if students are looking for a specific book (esp. a text book), they don’t need to browse. However, when not having known items, I think a browse is very effective discovery method. The task force pointed out that some ILS don’t currently have a browse function. While this is true, that doesn’t mean it is good. Also, while you might not be able to browse the catalog, you can typically (at least in the USA) browse the shelves. The physical shelf browse-ability is obviously not available for e-books. I think browsing by author, title, subject, classification number, etc is very useful for electronic items. What is great about e-items is that they can be in multiple places at once, so you can assign multiple class numbers, authors, etc. The reasoning the task force provided for not needing browsing is that while it may work for hundreds or a few thousand items, browsing is not so useful for very large collections (which is what the task force expects libraries to be dealing with). I’m not sure if I agree with this logic, I regularly browse shelves of large research libraries with millions of volumes to great effect. Just recently I was looking for a book that was on the shelf about communities of practice and I discovered two other books that were useful to my topic I didn’t find in the catalog. Other occasions you might not know the exact spelling of an author names, so browsing becomes more useful, maybe even necessary. Without full text searching, I think browsing is that much more important. This is amplified if my assumption that our metadata won’t be much better then what we get in a typical full AACR2 MARC record. I’ll have to read the report and think about this some more.

The third recommendation to allow libraries to include freely available materials in the e-book discovery system seemed logical to me. However, it prompted a good deal of discussion. Someone from a national library asked why you would want to include non-licensed (or non-purchased) items that were not selected by her library. The answer from one of the panelists was “Why not?” What you think about it, what are the books that are out there that are freely available. Typically these books are coming from mass-digitization products involving libraries. This means these books were selected at some point by librarians; usually at major research universities. The reason why other libraries wouldn’t have these items is not typically because of the content contained in them, but instead because of costs. This is when the person who posed the question mentioned that they have a very specific collection policy on only collecting items about the history and culture of their country. I can see this is an important distinction. Of course, this is probably one of the reasons why the task force recommended giving the libraries a choice.

Ex Libris did offer the conference attendees a few insights on how they will deal with these issues, but my guess is that is getting closer to proprietary information, so I’ll keep it to myself for now.

Overall a good conference and it was nice to see some of the people I used to spend time with at EndUser who because of their location now go to IGeLU instead of ELUNA. I am already looking forward to the next IGeLU conference in Helsinki, Finland next September.

I have been thinking a lot about what copyright license I want to place on my presentation slides. Generally speaking, I am a fan of open access, and I want people to be able to reuse what I do for their own purposes. However, this can cause some problems. Keeping in mind that there are different Creative Common (CC) licenses you can choose, so these examples won’t be accurate for all licenses, here are some of my concerns. For one thing, an article can be re-posted somewhere. In theory, that may be a good thing that an article is in multiple places and there are more places to find it, but it also can weaken the gravitational force of the original when it comes to search engines and the like. While it was flattering at first to see I actually published a journal article in India (that was copied from an open access journal), I think it did detract from the original. This is not to say that anyone in India did anything wrong and certainly not anything illegal since the license allowed them to do so. As Andy Powell mentioned in June in a blog post about creative borrowing there are other reasons besides gravitational force that makes people doing this more then just “downright unhelpful.” When information is inaccurate or out of date it can do more harm than good. If I find an error in something that I posted, and know where is, I can make sure it gets corrected or at least that there is a disclaimer of some sort. Also, just simple things like contact information may change and it would be good to be able to make sure the up-to-date information is available which is not possible if people re-publish things in places I don’t know about.

But I think I can live with that if that is the only downside, even if it is annoying. The overall good probably outweigh the negative. However, I have a separate issue with slides used during presentations. If I am going to put slides up on my Web site or elsewhere under a CC license, I have to make sure that all parts of it are also available under the CC license or otherwise fall under fair use. Of course relying on fair use is a sticky situation because the concept of fair use can vary greatly depending on the jurisdiction.

One example of this problem is with Microsoft Office clip art. According to Microsoft, among other things “You may not use clip art to advertise your business.” This means using this clip art would make me unable to use certain CC-licenses. OK, you say, I can find Open clip art. While this is true, it can also add significant time to preparing presentations if you try to do this (esp. if you are working with someone who only uses Microsoft products). But this is just one small example. A better example might be something that happened recently while preparing a presentation. I needed (OK, I wanted) a picture of the inscription “Free to All” above the entrance to the Boston Public Library. I couldn’t get to Boston to take my own photo and I couldn’t find a CC-licensed one, but I found a great photo by informationgoddess29 that was just what I needed. I contacted her and she generously gave me permission to use it. Since I used this image, I can’t legally release this presentation under CC without getting her permission. Now, being a fellow librarian, she may very well have agreed to change the license if I asked, but that would be very forward of me to do that. This also gets tricky with Web sites that you are showing off or other content that belongs to the University you work at. Do I have to apply to have the University agree to release this under a CC every time I am creating a presentation? I would think I do, assuming they won’t give me blanket permission.

I could go on, but I think you can see my dilemma. I want people to be able to freely use my work, but I don’t want them to be duplicating it in different places on the Internet and possibly watering it down (without asking, anyway). But even more, when I am preparing a presentation, I may need to use content I don’t own. While a friendly e-mail can usually result in permission to use it, it generally will not get me permission to give it away to someone else. I could work on being more selective about the content I re-use, and I will try to do that, but it is not always feasible. Even when it is feasible, it may be very time consuming to do so (and I probably won’t do it in that case).

I wonder what others do? Have they never thought about it? Do they just ignore the license on the content from others that they include when licensing a presentation? Do they make sure they have the proper permissions to release the re-used content? Do they just decide not to use a CC license? I don’t know what I am going to do about this. I am thinking as long as I don’t use images/content that can easily be resold (i.e. I down scale images), and I use a CC license that doesn’t allow commercial use, no one will complain, however I want to do more than to think, and hope, that no one will complain. For that reason, I think I may not use a CC license on presentations by default. I think I may just put a note saying that if you want to use my stuff, just ask and I most likely will say yes. This way, I can respond with what content I legally can’t give away. Of course, if I am only using my content, I may still use a CC license so people don’t need to ask, but a blanket CC-license on my personal scholarly archive appears problematic.

Word is getting out about the OCLC WorldCat Hackathon that will be held November 7-8 in New York City. According to the Web site, the Hackathon is “sponsored by the OCLC Developer’s Network and NYPL Labs of The New York Public Library, the WorldCat Hackathon gives participants the opportunity for two full days of brainstorming and coding mash-ups with local systems and other Web services to take advantage of all that WorldCat, the world’s largest bibliographic database, has to offer.”

As Peter Murray laments, I also “wish I could get to NYC for the two-day event.” Since it is only one day away from work (it is on a Friday/Saturday), I don’t think being away from work would be a problem for me, but staying in NYC can be quite expensive and Binghamton is a little far to drive back and forth (besides, parking would be really expensive if I actually drove into the city). Hopefully I can figure out a way to put it into my schedule/budget.

With the new Ex Libris Open-Platform Strategy, it will be interesting to see if Ex Libris will follow and host a similar event for their customers. Certainly, OCLC’s base of programmers, hackers, and tech enthusists are going to be smaller, but something like this could still attract a number of people if the 2007 EndUser Voyager Hackfest is any indication. Maybe this would be more viable as far as attracting developers if it is held in conjunction with ELUNA or the IGeLU conference? Do any of the Ex Libris product users/hackers have any thoughts?

It is interesting to see regional chapters of Code4Lib popping up, being that while Code4Lib is a brand, a community, an idea, an IRC channel, a e-mail list, a journal, and many other things, but it is not an organization – at least not in a traditional sense. There is no official leadership, there is no board, no steering committee, no 501(c)3, etc. It is an organic entity that keeps evolving and growing. As part of that growth, two regional Code4Lib chapters have recently emerged. The Code4LibNYC chapter in New York and Code4Lib Appalachia centered around Western North Carolina. I am sure it will not take long for a few more people to step up and organize other chapters. It will be interesting to see how these chapters evolve and fit into the greater Code4Lib community. What purpose will they server. Will they host mini-conferences of their own? Will a chapter try to host the Code4Lib conference as a joint effort? There are many possibilities and only time will tell. It won’t take long to find out what happens in the first Code4LibNYC chapter meeting which will be held at the METRO offices in New York City on East 11th street from 10 a.m. – 12:00 noon on Wednesday, September 10th. The meeting will include a series of 5-10 minute lightning talks. I’d love to travel down to the city for it, but the timing doesn’t work for me at this time (esp. considering it is 3 hours each way and ther is no train from Binghamton).

Maybe next time it will work out that I can make it…. I hope so.

Over at Dan Chudnov’s One Big Library blog, Dan listed a few conferences he would like to attend. The conferences he listed are (see his post for details):

• PowerlessCamp
• virtual code4libcon
• 42camp
• AntiFest
• Speaker For the Dead Code Camp

I am not sure what 42camp is, but I love these ideas, especially the PowerlessCamp and the Antifest. As I mentioned back in July we need more well-presented negative results so people don’t repeat the same mistakes as others and also so people can learn from the negative results that others have had.

I think way too many people rely on electricity and technology to get things done at conferences and while I understand why, I think the idea of a PowerlessCamp is great. Heck, I’d be happy with just a PowerPoint free conference!

I can’t see turning any existing conference into a PowerlessCamp, but doing this one weekend in the summer would be great. I can see it done at a campground that offers group sites. People could come and camp (or just for the day). Other activities such as canoing or hiking could be easily arranged. Since a camp ground is cheaper then a hotel, it wouldn’t be relatively cheap to attend (once you got there).

I’m not sure where you would hold it. I’m thinking it would be tough to do it at a campground that is close to a major airport so people would probably need to drive. Because of this, turnout would probably be best if it was within a 5 or 6 hour drive of major population areas. If Code4Lib was going to get involved with something like this, that would most likely mean somewhere in the northeast since we have major populations of Code4Libers in DC, Philly, New York, Eastern Canada and other locations throughout the northeast US – maybe in Pennsylvania or New York? Anyway, I’m wondering how much interest there is in this. With this in mind, I decided to use a free domain registration I had left to register PowerlessCamp.org. I’ll be putting up a blog and maybe a wiki for people to use to discuss the concept.

So, here is my very loose proposal off the top of my head.

1. We have the first PowerlessCamp over a weekend during Summer 2009
2. It be roughly organized around the same topics as Code4Lib (software, mostly open source, for libraries)
3. It be located at a campground somewhere in the northeast.
4. The location should be somewhere that offers a variety of outdoor activities so we can do stuff besides the conference. Activities could include tubing, canoing, rafting, hiking, mountain biking, drinking beer.
5. Cell phones are allowed for emergency use only
6. Anyone who takes out a laptop will have it thrown in the camp fire
7. I am a little unsure about how to do formal proposals, but I think we should have some form of proposal system though. My guess is the conference will be small enough that everyone that wants will get a chance to talk. We just have to figure out the schedule in advance so we know how much time to a lot to everyone

Schedule wise, I’m thinking the conference “sessions” part would be on a Saturday, maybe starting around 11 AM or noon and going until about 6:00 or 7:00 PM when we start up the grills and campfire and open up a beer or two. We can make arrangements for group outdoor activities on Friday and Sunday. With maybe the first of us to arrive on Thursday evening and the last of us leaving Monday morning. Obviously, even though the conference in this scenario would only be on Saturday, a bunch of library geeks hanging out together won’t be able to last long without talking about geeky stuff, so the whole event would be educational.

What do you all think?