It’s finally time. The summer has seemed filled with lots of extra projects that have slowed down my blogging. And now, I finally have time to do a bit of travel. So, for the next couple weeks, I’ll be away. This may turn into a travel blog for the next couple weeks. It depends on connectivity and time….

I’ll be back in September, rested (hopefully) and ready for a new semester.

Adding University of California would be a significant addition….

University of California May Join Google’s Library Project – Los Angeles Times
In a move with major significance for the worlds of academic research and publishing, the University of California is in talks to join Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online.

Google is keen to have access to UC’s 34 million volumes from 100 libraries on 10 campuses, which is described as collectively the largest academic research library in the world. UC wants to delve more deeply into the Internet revolution with a deep-pockets partner like Google paying the costs of scanning books.

Even with the addition of the University of California collections, significant gaps will remain. Brian Lavoie, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Lorcan Dempsey did an analysis of the original “Google 5″ libraries published in D-Lib Magazine (September 2005). They compared the collective holdings of the Google 5 against the system-wide collection in OCLC:

The proportion of the system-wide collection actually covered by GDLP, once duplicate holdings across the five institutions are removed, is about one third (33 percent), or 10.5 million unique books out of the 32 million in the system-wide collection. About two-thirds (67 percent) of the system-wide collection, or 21.6 million books, are not held by any Google 5 library.

The print on demand model services are becoming more main stream and naturally are becoming central to the business model for a number of publishers. This is particularly true for those publishers who are willing to print what are likely to have small target audiences. One of the issues this raises is marketing. One of the ways libraries obtain books is through major book vendors who obtain a stock of the books and make them available through approval plans, etc. If a publisher publishes only through POD, a new form of marketing will be required…

Technology Rewrites the Book – New York Times
The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.

I’ve been following a project at the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book), hosted by the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been guiding a project designed to address a number of problems in scholarly communication.

Working with a group of humanities scholars, IF:Book began identifying obvious problems: failing university presses, junior faculty having difficulties finding publishers, long delays between research/writing and publication, peer-review functioning as a gatekeeper rather than facilitating collaboration, and costliness of books/journals. Ultimately they began to feel that the current model for academic publishing does not promote the kind of scholarly communication and collaboration they desire. To quote from her recent announcement:

Our shift from thinking about an “electronic press” to thinking about a “scholarly network” came about gradually; the more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public). This need has grown for any number of systemic reasons, including the substantive and often debilitating time-lags between the completion of a piece of scholarly writing and its publication, as well as the subsequent delays between publication of the primary text and publication of any reviews or responses to that text. These time-lags have been worsened by the increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries, which each year face new administrative and financial obstacles to producing, distributing, and making available the full range of publishable texts and ideas in development in any given field. The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation.

Yesterday, Fitzpatrick announced the beginning of what the IF:Book is calling the Media Commons. This initial effort to establish a “scholarly network” will focus on the field of media studies. I thought you might be interested not so much in the field, but in the efforts by others in the humanities to develop new models for scholarly communication designed foremost to serve scholarly dialogue. In the the announcement, Fitzpatrick describes a broad variety of scholarly writing sustained by and facilitating a network of scholarly engagement. You can read the full announcement at the link below:

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/introducing_mediacommons_or_ti.html

Rice University Press is being revived in an attempt to break the problematic cycle of scholarly publishing…

Inside Higher Ed :: New Model for Scholarly Publishing
Rice University on Thursday announced a plan to shake up those interconnected problems. Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.

Following on my post from yesterday about Eric Lease Morgan’s paper on the “Next Generation” of the Library Catalog, Roy Tennant has an article in Library Journal calling for rapid change (as in: “fix them soon”) in the primary information discovery tools provided by libraries. Though uses the term “Library 2.0,” I see this as part of a larger movement that recognizes that traditional library models for information discovery, access, and use are inadequate for most users….

Library Journal – Fixing Library Discovery
Whether you are an early adopter such as NCSU of new opportunities, or are content to wait for library vendors to provide the next generation of finding tools, it’s clear that how library users will find information at a library is in a period of rapid change. This is a good thing, since library finding tools are mostly broken, particularly when compared to finding tools offered by companies such as Google and Amazon. We must fix them—and soon.

Many voices have been questioning the long-term viability of the library catalog. Here Eric Lease Morgan proposes a “next generation” catalog. From the executive summary…

“Next Generation” Library Catalog
People’s expectations regarding search and access to information have dramatically changed with the advent of the Internet. Library online public access catalogs (OPAC’s) have not kept up with these changes. The proposed “next generation” library catalog is an attempt to address this phenomenon. It’s design less like a “catalog” — an inventory list — and more like a finding aid. It contains data as well as metadata, and it is bent on doing things with found items beyond listing and providing access to them. It is built using open standards, open source software, and open content in an effort to increase interoperability, modularity, and advocate the free sharing of ideas.

Technically speaking, this “next generation” library catalog is a database/index combination. The database is made up of XML files of various types: MODS, TEI, EAD, etc. The index is a full-text index supplemented with XML-specific elements as well as Dublin Core names. End-user access to the system will be through a number of searchable/browsable interfaces facilitated by SRW/U. Services against individual items from the interfaces (such as borrow, download, review, etc.) will be facilitated via OpenURL.

The implementation of this “next generation” library catalog is divided into a seven-step process:

1. Allocate resources
2. Answer questions regarding information architecture
3. Conduct surveys, focus group interviews, and usability studies
4. Create/maintain the “next generation” library catalog
5. On a daily basis go to Step #4
6. On a quarterly basis go to Step #3
7. On an annual basis go to Step #1

Chris Anderson has a really nice discussion of two models of “peer-review” on Nature.Com where Nature is hosting a debate on the topic.

Technical solutions: Wisdom of the crowds
In the scarce world of limited pages in top journals, prestige is earned through those journals’ high standard and exclusivity. That comes, in part, from the process, which involves impressing the very discriminating combination of an editor and a few respected researchers. Defining ‘peer’ relatively narrowly is part of the game. It’s not always fair or efficient, but in a world ruled by reputation, having successfully run that gauntlet is proof of at least some kind of fitness.

But in the abundance market of online journals or that of post-publication filtering, where each paper is competing with all the other papers in its field, it’s more sensible to define ‘peer’ as broadly as possible, to maximize the power of collective intelligence. In that market, prestige is just one factor in many determining relevance for a reader, and the more filtering aids that can be brought to bear, the better. From that perspective, these are exciting times. The experiments of Nature, PLoS journals and others will reveal where and how these techniques work best. But Wikipedia and Digg have already demonstrated that they do work.

Decision Tree for Selection of Digital Materials for Long-term Retention

The Digital Preservation Coalition has developed an interactive decision tree for making preservation decisions for digital content.

Chris Rusbridge challenges some of the “truisms” of digital preservation in an easily readable and quite sensible article: “Excuse Me… Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?” (February 2006, Adriane, Issue 46)

1. Digital preservation is very expensive [because]
2. File formats become obsolete very rapidly [which means that]
3. Interventions must occur frequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain high.
4. Digital preservation repositories should have very long timescale aspirations,
5. ‘Internet-age’ expectations are such that the preserved object must be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, and
6. the preserved object must be faithful to the original in all respects.