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We need to work together to save the Statistical Abstract of the United States

Mar 22 2011 Published by Christina Pikas under publishing

There are only a few references that are in every type of library including corporate libraries, government libraries, academic libraries, public libraries, and school libraries. Some sort of dictionary. Some sort of almanac (they’re cheap and they answer a ton of questions). The Statistical Abstract of the United States. You wouldn’t believe how many questions can be answered with this book alone. If your answer isn’t in this book, then you can find a table with the right sort of information and use the detailed citation to find the fuller information from the original data source. I’ve used it online, but I really prefer the print because it ends up being much faster. It’s one-stop shopping for lots of different government statistics from lots of different sources.

We just heard through multiple sources that the entire Statistical Compendia Branch of the Census Bureau is slated to be defunded in 2012 (Iris has info and links to a govdocs listserv). So not only will we lose this vital tool, we’ll also lose the State and Metropolitan Area Data Book and the County and City Data Book. I used these all the time in the public library to answer lots of questions about Maryland and our county.

I really can’t overstate the importance of these resources to finding and using government statistics information.

I would encourage you to write your senators and congressmen to see if we can save this important tool.

5 responses so far

Another Ebook Rant

Feb 25 2011 Published by Christina Pikas under information policy, publishing

Oh, this just kills me. It's absolutely despicable, and I don't mean cute like the movie.

(via Jill Hurst-Wahl) see this blog post from Bobbi Newman.

You know how I keep going on and on about ebooks and licensing? How you don't own them? DRM and all?

Well, one of the largest ebook providers to public libraries, Overdrive, has announced that "purchasing" a book on their system means you only get 26 check-outs. Then the book will disappear. (insert really unladylike language here).

One positive for libraries wrt ebooks has been the return on investment - but this could mean that a book costs about $1/checkout. That's totally not sustainable. I used to see books with more than 200 lifetime checkouts. Considering the fact that this would also include people renewing books (there is no real renewal, you have to check the book out again) if they didn't finish reading.

In print books you have the first sale doctrine. Here you are purchasing a block of uses (like we used to do with First Search databases for the librarians in the crowd). No point in models where you "buy" books at all. You should just get access to the database and pay an annual subscription.

We had a vendor try some crazy thing where we would pay them for all of their ebooks, but each one could only be downloaded once - ever. (crazy, huh? and this was tens of thousands of dollars).

Oh, oh, and another thing. They want to audit that you're not giving library cards to people outside your geographic area. Boooogus.

Overdrive should just stop carrying books from that particular publisher. Yeah, we would complain, but the principle is important.

7 responses so far

You don't buy ebooks

Feb 16 2011 Published by Christina Pikas under information policy, publishing

Let me say that again: You don't buy ebooks. You license them.

You don't buy ejournals, you license them. In most cases, you stop paying, you no longer have access. Ebook collections in the library? In most cases, you stop paying, you no longer have access.

Unfortunately, David Dobbs just learned this the hard way. iBooks you licensed disappear if your phone has been unlocked or jailbroken and you do the update. You broke some aspect of the license so they stop their part of the license - providing the content.

Remember when Amazon pulled back copies of Orwell books from Kindles? It didn't matter if you held up your part of the license in that case, they found that a third party had broken the law.

Libraries are trying to write licenses to have "perpetual" access but in many cases this only applies if you license individual books, not collections. We also like schemes that provide a backup like LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, or Portico. AND we do everything we can to make sure we hold up our end of the license (no bulk downloading, only the people who are supposed to have access do, etc.). This is why we sometimes seem like the watchdogs for the publishers.

Just get your stuff from a library, then when it goes poof you can just check it out again. Or if not, maybe a third party (like B&N or Amazon) would prevent the iBook issue (if not the other issues).

7 responses so far

scio11: ebooks and the science community

Jan 16 2011 Published by Christina Pikas under Conferences, publishing

Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, David Dobbs, John Dupuis

cz: ebooks have been discussed for a long time (like 25 years) – but we’ve been able to ignore them. There was a push in the net bubble, but now they’re back. Compare the growth graph to the more typical “sad gentle decline.” In the early days there was a lot of marketing about replacing a whole shelf of encyclopedia volumes with a cd-rom.

One model is to self-publish on Amazon.

cz also covers formats – like print or like an app. The example app has a lot of bells and whistles and moving things – pretty distracting.

tl: original Gutenberg. only about 10k books in Europe prior to the printing press, by the end of this period there were 10M. The rise of authors and the invention of copyright (UK), 1710.

dd: contracts and stuff

jd: how long did it take him to spend $10k on ebooks – one year – until Safari was available. He spends about 100k/year on ebooks, mostly in science and engineering. Publishers and authors don’t like this. They don’t like libraries because we make it so our patrons don’t have to buy their books. What is the ebook business model? Will it go like the music industry? Probably. People will still pay for books/content, but it will be more of an itunes model. He talks to publishers a lot and he tells them that the libraries are the last people standing who are willing to pay real money for high quality content. For these new content types – like apps. How can we share them? How long will they last? He’s interested in DRM – locking down content so people can’t do what they want with it. “I’m happy to pay. Think of libraries as the last people who are happy to pay.”

From the audience:

“we can control this market” (um, no. heh.) “work with a good designer but don’t let them drive the bus” (makes sense).

all of the different formats coming out at the same time, any apps should integrate with the other formats (in her opinion).

jd: the app is so seductive from the publishers point of view because they can monetize every reading transaction (he [and I] hates that). But think of the life of the app. Think of all of the platforms.

the textbook market has the expertise that would be needed for creating these high production apps.

what do editors do in this model? (they same thing they did in other times)

there’s the question about updating the app if there’s a correction or update. also do you lose your bookmarks, etc.

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Disappointed (so far) with the SRMO beta

Oct 15 2010 Published by Christina Pikas under publishing

Ever since I heard it mentioned a few months ago, I’ve been salivating over the new product coming out, Sage Research Methods Online (SRMO). It’s a collection of research methods books. Folks who do social science research will probably know this publisher immediately – I have 15 research methods books from this publisher in my citation manager and I’ve read parts of probably 10-15 more. Even more have been recommended to me but I haven’t read them yet.

When I saw a press release on ResourceShelf that the beta was out I immediately signed up. There’s free access until January to help with the testing (and do try, don’t just take all that I say uncritically).

Maybe I built it up too much, but I do have a lot of experience with ebooks at MPOW and so I know something about what works and what doesn’t.

First, I couldn’t find any of the books that I have in my collection. No Strauss, no Corbin, no Rubin, no Yin, no Maxwell (not the right one anyway), no Creswell, no Patton, no Wolcott (although I have 2 of his books and really don’t need any more). There is one by Miles and Huberman (a good one), but not the one I have. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff here, but not what I wanted.

So, ok, the cool book by Miles and Huberman. It’s just html text, there’s no pdf. Well, actually, I just found the pdf – if you go to download, it pdfs the html text. It’s a little weird and has these big footers. In Arial. The tables are sort of awkward – not sized for the page but running off the side. It’s one long page. The table of contents is in this little scrolling box on the left hand side, but the list of ancillary materials takes up the majority of the sidebar. It’s in a light font, and is somewhat hard to read. Good news is that the readability plug-in works for it so that helps with the light weight font.

Good stuff includes the ability to increase font size, a kind of cool bar that shows you how far you are in the book, the ability to go full screen, the ability to hide or show headings and page numbers, links to find in the library (oh and to buy, but whatever)….

When it comes to finding things, well, it seems a little strange. Looking up by author is mostly what I’ve been doing. I can’t really get anything useful out of the map of methods even though that’s supposed to be a strong point. There’s a category for writing up and a subcategory for dissertation, but it’s empty. When you go to writing up, you find book chapters on writing up dissertations. I did use the general search and found a definition in a reference book, so that’s cool. Browsing titles doesn’t really seem that useful. Maybe I don’t have something real to search for.

I wonder how much it will cost? Maybe they’ll add the favorite titles once it’s not free access? That would make sense.

I don’t know. Sigh… I was really, really looking forward to it.

One response so far

More Journal Impact Factor Manipulations

Oct 07 2010 Published by Christina Pikas under bibliometrics, Information Science, publishing, scholarly communication

Jason Hoyt and Antony Williams tweeted a new arXiv pre-print:
Nefarious Numbers

Authors: Douglas N. Arnold, Kristine K. Fowler

(Submitted on 1 Oct 2010)

Abstract: We investigate the journal impact factor, focusing on the applied mathematics category. We demonstrate that significant manipulation of the impact factor is being carried out by the editors of some journals and that the impact factor gives a very inaccurate view of journal quality, which is poorly correlated with expert opinion.

Subjects: History and Overview (math.HO); Digital Libraries (cs.DL)
Cite as: arXiv:1010.0278v1 [math.HO]This is a brief piece that walks through some manipulations of JIF in applied math - note the famous El Naschie makes a return (and you thought he was done when he left his Elsevier journal)

Kris Fowler is a librarian who is a member of the SLA Physics-Astronomy-Math Division.

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I wouldn't have caught the JSTOR issues

Aug 31 2010 Published by Christina Pikas under publishing, [Information&Communication]

It's an ongoing thing around here about how our vendors need to test their products more and take input from the librarians and end users. An update JSTOR made very recently is an example of how they need to ask a diverse set of users.

My biases: I come from a research institution with a large collections budget and I feel very strongly that users should start with research databases that are indexed and topical for subject based searches, not start with digital libraries. Digital libraries house the full text - now once you're there if you get recommendations or what not, fine.

So JSTOR - and they are very, very quickly fixing this - made it so a search done on their site would bring back results not necessarily available or accessible to the user. In other words, it doesn't default to show only subscribed items. Now, if this were a research database, it would pop up an open url resolver link so you could look for an owned/licensed copy. JSTOR didn't offer that either, so users at smaller institutions (or ones that don't license all of the collections) learned of interesting articles, but then were offered an opportunity to purchase them with a credit card, not assistance in finding a copy their library had already purchased. Meredith Farkas describes this.

If they had asked me? Neither of these things would have come up. First, we own most things that come back in the search (particularly in STEM fields). Second, I wouldn't search on JSTOR anyway, I search in Inspec, Compendex, Web of Science, Aerospace & High Tech, MathSciNet, etc., and then I link out using our open URL resolver to get to JSTOR. From time to time for my own interests, I'll browse the TOC there, but that's maybe once every few months.

So it's not just getting a librarian to give you feedback, it's getting a diverse group of librarians to give you feedback.

Oh, and the problems Wiley caused themselves? Well... apparently they didn't remember when they fixed this exact issue before. So you have to listen, respond appropriately, and then remember not to un-do!

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Supplemental materials or no?

Aug 12 2010 Published by Christina Pikas under publishing, scholarly communication, [Information&Communication]

I was surprised when I read this DrugMonkey post on J Neuroscience's ending supplemental materials. In fields without significant open data repositories with required deposit prior to publication, supplemental materials may be the only way to get the data to check the work or to build upon it (authors aren't very good at replying to requests to share data - studies show).

I really don't know anything about neuroscience, is this field different or is this coming in other fields? I know that astro and optics journals have been expanding their ability to take supplemental materials such that they are preserved and accessible. Here are some of the reasons found in Drug Monkey's post:

they were representing the data as peer reviewed, but it isn't reviewed to the extent the text is and what does peer review of data mean anyhow
there's an arms race among authors and reviewers to throw in everything but the kitchen sink proactively to not be criticized and to request that more data and more experiments be included in the supplement
the text should stand on its own merits

Anyway, I hadn't heard this view and I didn't know this is the way it was working in this field. I kind of thought the paper was reviewed on its own merits and the supplemental data was like a bonus track added later. Once again, I'm thinking of astro and optics journals. So is this view common or does it work differently in different fields? (Is there a paper the view of supplemental data in diverse areas of science?)

2 responses so far

Why this information industry land grab is different

Jul 15 2010 Published by Christina Pikas under Information Science, publishing, [Information&Communication]

And why we should care. Gary Price of the Resource Shelf pointed to a news story today, that Ebsco has acquired two more research databases: Criminal Justice Abstracts and Communications Abstracts. For those of you who haven't been following, Ebsco has recently acquired Ageline (it is now not available for free), NetLibrary, research databases from OCLC, The Music Index Online, World Textiles, ExPub (ChemExpert)... oh and exclusive rights to some magazines.

What we can expect from this is that those other databases will no longer be available on multiple platforms. Folks who aren't librarians might not know that there are database producers and then those who sell the interfaces. The producer gets the articles and then has humans read them and assign terms from controlled vocabularies ( or has machines do the same). In the past, you could pick both - there might be two or three, say, kinesiology databases, and these might each be available on 3-4 platforms. The platforms were like DIALOG, FirstSearch, Ovid (SP and others), EbscoHost, Illumina (from CSA), Web of Knowledge, and maybe some others.

There would also be a couple different research databases on the same subject, so you could get the one with the best coverage, the best indexing, and the get it on the platform that worked the best. Ebsco has been pulling the things they've purchased from other platforms, first of all. Second, they are buying multiple databases covering the same area, so there's some thought that these will probably be combined at some point. So we're left with one database on one platform. Ebsco host seems to be doing *all* the buying - so if we can't get along with them, then we're screwed. If they want to jack their prices up. Well guess.

Ben Wagner maintains and others ask if this is a death spiral for Abstracting & Indexing services. We *know* that these tools are necessary for a thorough search of the literature - Google is ok for a few good items, but you can't be comprehensive with it.

Or, is this a necessary down-select to separate the strong from the weak? Will the few that make it through this be enough and will this enable them to consolidate and persevere?

4 responses so far

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