Library Computers Used by a Third of Americans

Here are some interesting stats from a study paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The study shows that a third of Americans – about 77 million people – use public library computers to look for jobs, connect with friends, do their homework and improve their lives, according to a new study released Thursday.

While this is good news for libraries right now, I hope library usage does not decline significantly as the “digital divide” narrows.  I would hope that people would still see the value of libraries even if they have Internet connectivity at home.  If the public sees the library as simply a place to gain free Internet access, there could be serious implications for public libraries.  For the entire article, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/25/library-computers-used-by_n_512681.html

The Continuing Saga of Lack of Access to Full-text Resources

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/the-continuing-saga/
As any librarian at a small college will tell you, discovering information resources is always easier than obtaining them in full-text.  Over the last 30 years, the number of journals in publication has increased exponentially.  While subscriptions to high quality abstracting and indexing databases as well as aggregator databases are expensive, it pales in comparison to the cost of a large collection of the journals indexed by these databases.  Small colleges are at a greater disadvantage than larger universities because their library budgets are much smaller.  While almost all libraries have been forced to cut back on journal subscriptions in recent years, small libraries find this process even more difficult since they may have been short handed to begin with.  This is an incredible challenge for a small engineering library like Rose-Hulman.  For a college like ours that values teaching as its number one priority, professional research is a lesser concern.  Thus, laboratories and equipment are given a higher funding priority than the library.

Thus, since we are in the middle of winter quarter and most student research is being done now, we are continuing to feel the onslaught of student’s disappointment of finding resources that we do not have immediate access to.  The frustration increases with newer generations of students who are more Googleized and expect immediate access to resources they find.  As a result, ILL requests decrease.  While I gain great satisfaction in assisting students find valuable information resources they once did not know how to discover, I am becoming increasingly fatigued and frustrated over the increasing number of times we find a useful resource that a student either needs immediately or does not feel like making an ILL request for and which we do not have access to.  What’s a librarian to do without a magic money-wand to increase the periodical budgets by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Digital Piracy Hits eBook Industry

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/digital-piracy/
Digital piracy that has plagued the music industry for the last ten years has now hit the eBook industry.  We’re talking major numbers from a major author.   When Dan Brown’s novel “The Last Symbol” went on sale in September, it sold more eBook editions for the Kindle than it did for the hardback edition.  However, almost immediately it appeared in file sharing-sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent.  Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.  Ouch!  I admit, I know much more about digital music protection than I do eBook protection.  Not because I am into music piracy, but I am into digital music and kind of iffy about eBooks.  I thought the Kindle was supposed to have good rights protection in place.  Some publishers think that the piracy issue is overstated since they claim “that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.  Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.”

That may be true, but what does that have to do with anything?  100,000 copies is a heck of a lot of lost revenue for both publishers and authors.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that this trend will multiply.  While the rise of eBook purchases may represent a paradigm shift in book sales, it also indicates that the book publishing industry has entered into the messy world of digital piracy.  My advice, learn from the music industry and get ready to sue like there’s no tomorrow!
Information was gained from CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/01/ebook.piracy/index.html

Journal Archive Subscriptions Vs. Purchase: The Fear of Losing Digital Content Continues

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/journal-archive-subscriptions-vs-purchase-the-fear-of-losing-digital-content-continues/
One of the biggest fears of librarians since entering into the world of online journals is the fear of losing content once the paper version has been dropped.  Recently this issue has generated some serious discussion on the list-serve for the Engineering Libraries Division of ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education).  I don’t remember all of the specifics because I must have quickly read through dozens of emails and didn’t document the entire conversation, but here is a summary of the discussion.  In the past year or so, ASME, like many other societal publishers, moved their online journals to a “digital library” which encompasses more than just their journals.  It also includes their proceedings and eBooks.  The launch of this new platform did not happen overnight but occurred over the last several years while in “beta version.”  During this time, access was granted to journals back to 1990 and if I remember correctly, proceedings too, but I am not sure.

The current crisis arose when a librarian discovered that their library no longer had access  to the online journal content between 1990 and 1999.  They were told that their library had only subscribed to 2000 to the present and that content prior to 2000 was given as a freebie during the beta period.  Soon, librarians across the country discovered the same thing and the EDL list-serve became active with chatter.  For my library, we did some research and discovered that we began our electronic subscription in 2000 and that we still had our print copies prior to that so everything on our end was OK.  However, for other libraries, this created quite a crisis.  One library had moved those journals off site and one other had completely discarded their older copies.  It was also discovered that to gain online access to the archive from 1980 to the 1999, that it would cost $2,600 for a yearly subscription (not to purchase the content).  Another option was to purchase a CD for the content for each year at a cost of $250 per year.  It was unclear as to whether there was any index or organization to this CD content.  One reason for the confusion was that ASME was supposed to drop the bonus access to the 1990-1999 back-file content in July 2008, but there was a delay in doing so, a long delay.  They did not communicate this to their subscribers and as a result, there were was some misunderstanding, which in some cases had serious consequences.  ASME did in fact, state something about this in their January 2008 license agreements.  ASME has been quick to respond to this issue and has restored access to this back-content until March 2010.  But the notion of having to subscribe to an archive at the cost of $2,600 a year is absurd, especially since most libraries have already purchased these journals in print format.  For those libraries, I think a onetime purchase fee to the online back content would be reasonable.  Christina’s LIS Rant has a little more detail on this than mine – http://scienceblogs.com/christinaslisrant/2009/12/asme_debacle_unfortunate_mis-s.php

Another publisher has taken it much further.  SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers ) created their Digital Library and made it their only option for obtaining their content in digital format.  For years, we purchased the SAE Technical Papers on CD.  Each year our purchased CDs had the latest index going back to 1994 the Technical Papers for the previous year.  We had CD content going back to 1997.  We could also network the database and make it available on up to ten workstations.  While this was cumbersome in some ways, it was affordable and worked well for our users.  For several years they tried to push their new digital library on us but the cost was several thousand dollars more than we were already spending.  Finally, we were notified that they were no longer going publish the Technical Papers on CD and that the only option to receive the content electronically would be to subscribe to the digital library.  So we coughed up the extra money and we now access the Technical Papers online via a site license.  If we cancel our subscription, we will lose ALL of our content.  Not just the content that we have gained since we switched over, but everything going back to 1997 (what we have on CD).  Although we still have the CDs, the file names do not match up with the document numbers.  I doubt we will be able to install our latest index and so we will have all this content and no way to access it.  They’ve got us.  And this has infuriated many other librarians as well.  But that is not all.  The digital library indexes ALL of their content including standards, books, etc. going back over 100 years.  That means that most of the search results our users bring up will be to content that we do not have access to, and so our never ending stream of questions and complaints by students regarding content they find but cannot access continues to grow.  The search interface to the SAE Digital Library is an abomination!  There are THREE search screens and you have to search the right one and do it just the right way if you want to narrow it down to Technical Papers or to subscribed content only.  Since we still have not yet figured out how to teach our students how to find out if we have access to a particular journal, something we have tried with abandon to do but have yet to figure out, how can we expect them to know how to effectively search the SAE Digital Library?  It is absolutely maddening!  OK, one more shot at SAE and this has to do with some rather unorthodox license terms.  There were two stipulations I thought were completely unreasonable.  I won’t comment on the one I managed to have removed from the contract, but the one they would not budge on forbid Technical Papers to be transmitted via email.  That means if I am working with a student and we find a Technical Paper he or she wants, I have to print it and cannot email it to the student.  Can anyone name one other content provider that has that stipulation in their contracts?  I can’t!

The decade-long question regarding subscribed journal content vs. ownership and the fear of losing access continues to haunt librarians around the world.  It is only through collective action that libraries will have any form of leverage regarding this issue.  While I did get a little tired of the endless streams of emails regarding the ASME situation, I made sure to read them all and found a great deal of value in the communication that took place.  Most publishers have representatives who are members of these list-serves and they hear our complaints.  We may not always get our way, but they do listen and sometimes make changes when they realize that they not just dealing with us individually, but collectively.

Google Launches Real-Time Search Results

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/google-real-ti…search-results/
At first I thought, BIG DEAL!  Who wants to see people’s posts on Twitter?  Especially crap about Twilight!  But as I watched this video and saw the other sample searches such as road conditions and ski conditions, I thought “Hey, this is pretty cool!  I can see some major potential here.  Anyone who knows me personally, knows I could care less about ski conditions, but traffic conditions would come in handy.  This could be useful for major breaking news stories, etc etc.  Anyone have any other ideas where this could go?

Watch the video at the bottom this short article to see how it works  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-real-time-search-s_n_382894.html

Is Wikipedia Dying?

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/is-wikipedia-dying/
While the Wild, Wild West known as Wikipedia is not becoming tamer, there are signs that it could be dying, or at least going through changes or growing pains.  A front page story on the Wall Street Journal today reports that Winkipedia, the words fifth most visited web site with roughly 325 million monthly visitors is losing volunteers who write, edit, and police the online encyclopedia at an alarming rate.  In the first three months of 2009, 49,000 volunteers were lost compared to 4,900 the same time a year before.  It is unclear if people are quitting because they think the encyclopedia is done, or if they are becoming hostile to the newbies.  Wikipedia has implemented many layers of rules to help make it more reliable, control edit wars, hijacking, and other malicious behavior which makes it less freewheeling.  But if a higher percentage of writers and editors are “kooks” then the added rules won’t matter.

I admit, I use Wikipedia; I find it very useful.  But I take it with a grain of sand and realize how unpredictable the information may be.  It has a place, and I would like to see it stay that way.  But if “errors” like the one where Senator Kennedy was listed as having died months before he actually did become more commonplace, then Wikipedia will (or should) die by lack of users, not lack of volunteers.

Since this article requires a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, I can’t provide a link to full text.  This will give an abstract of the article.  For full text, most libraries should carry the Wall Street Journal.

Google Scholar now Includes Judicial Opinions

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/google-scholar-now/
Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com is now including full-text legal opinions from U.S. Federal and State District, Appellate, and Supreme courts in Google Scholar.  This is not expected to replace Lexis Nexis or Westlaw since it does not

cover the time dating from the beginning of our country, nor to the beginnings of the individual states. There are no hyperlinks to statutes, codes, regulations, administrative opinions, or anything else quoted or referred to in the text of the opinions. Finally, there is no citator service to verify that a particular opinion has not been overruled or vacated, distinguished, or otherwise declared of dubious value.1

Although I worked in a law library for two weeks, I am by no means a law librarian (I didn’t even know what case law was when I started).   However, I have used Westlaw and I can support the above statement.  The search functionality, the comprehensiveness, and the forward and backward linking capability cannot be matched by Google.  Google is very good at digitizing large amounts of material and making it available online for free, but they are no database vendor.

OK, time for me to insert a bit of snooty librarian attitude into this discussion.  OK, first off, I am not against Google; nor am I against relevancy ranking and the new so-called “discovery tools.”  In fact, I am exited by their potential in making research easier for undergraduates and look forward to exploring them further.  However, when you are dealing with high-end research, especially legal or medical research, you need the right tools to get the right information; and you need to know how to use them.  When  Google engineer Anurag Acharya was asked about their algorithm for showing search results, he said “magic.”  What we do know is that like Lexis and Westlaw, Google ranks cases from higher courts higher than lower courts and also by the number of times a case has been cited.  Overall, I think Google’s venture into case law is great for non legal professionals or for anyone who already knows of a specific case they would like to find.  But for legal professionals needing to do comprehensive research, the old tried and true (and very expensive) Lexis Nexis and Westlaw will continue to rule!

Source used:  http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Judicial-Opinions-Now-Available-in-Google-Scholar-58031.asp

The Library Website with a Face: Digitally Connecting to People Where They Are

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/the-library-we…where-they-are
Yesterday I gave a summary of the Indiana Online Users Group (IOLUG) Fall 2009 Meeting in Plainfield, Indiana on Nov 13, 2009.  Today I would like to expand a little upon what I spoke about.  I only spoke for 15 minutes, but it was about something I discovered that has profound implications for a small college library like mine.  My topic was “The Library Website with a Face:  Digitally Connecting to People Where They Are.”  In summary, creating a website where the users can always see if a librarian is available to help them and the ability to connect to them instantly through a chat widget.

At Logan Library, we experimented with a third party virtual reference service for one year.  We had very few virtual reference sessions.  First, to keep the price down, we could only have one librarian logged in at a time and there were large chunks of time when nobody was online.  Second, the chat link, a button that said “Online” or “Offline” depending on whether someone was logged in or not, was only located on the library website’s main page.  At the time that we stopped this service, we began a subscription to LibGuides, a Web 2.0 platform for creating subject guides.  By default, each LibGuide adds the guide owner’s profile to each page of the guide.  Profiles can include numerous types of contact information as well as a chat widget from almost any of the major IM services.  While the most commonly used widget by librarians is for Meebo, we decided to use AOL Instant Messenger and use their widget directly.  We found this best to suit our needs.  We also use Trillian instead of the actual AIM software because it allows us to set the time for the “away” message to coincide with the screen saver; thus we can set it to a very short amount of time so that if we walk away from our computer, the away message will kick in shortly thereafter.  This decreases the chances of users sending us a message and not getting a reply.  Since we only have two reference librarians, we also made it so that the profile of each of us was on the main page of each guide home page, thus they can see if either of us is available.  Finally, we added a “Help” tab to each guide which contains contact information and chat widgets to other library staff members who can help in other ways.  For example, our Interlibrary loan librarian’s box has her contact information, her chat widget, and her picture with the caption “I can help you with questions about Interlibrary loan requests.”   Likewise, each reference librarian’s caption says “I can help you with your research.”  This removes the ambiguity regarding who can help for certain questions.

As a result, we have seen virtual reference questions jump from a handful a quarter to a handful a day.  Most questions such as “what database would be best to search for a particular topic?” or “how can I find out if we subscribe to a particular journal?” can be answered quickly and easily.  In the past, most students would wait until they had time to come to the library to ask these simple questions.   If someone needs more in-depth reference assistance that is hard to do through chat, we can simply set up a time to meet them in the library to give them the appropriate attention.  Thus, knowing that most research is being done outside of the library and with the frequency of use, we know that we have filled an important void in our library service.

Our LibGuides site can be viewed at http://library.rose-hulman.edu and my presentation can be viewed at  http://www.slideshare.net/histrydude/the-library-website-with-a-face-digitally-connecting-to-people-where-they-are or by clicking the image above.

eBook Readers and Student Text Books

While I have never been a big advocate of eBook readers, I have found value in them. The value I have found tends to be more or less, the opposite of what the author in this article states. If I had the desire to read the epic novel, “War & Peace,” I would want to read it in a paper copy and then have it to place in my library. Back in 2000 when I started at Rose-Hulman, I was given the duty of experimenting with numerous eBook readers. The conclusion I came to then, I still hold today. I don’t see them replacing the type of book you would want to read cover to cover, at least not for most people, but I do see their advantages as a means of delivering text books to college students. The author of the article states that text books purchased for a class should be held onto when the class is over as part of their education. It’s an academic thing. He finds the idea of students not highlighting or annotating a text book so as to not degrade the resale value appalling. I can certainly relate to this notion as I held onto almost all of my text books. There were a few here and there that I sold, but most I kept. But the fact of the matter is, text books are extremely expensive, bulky, heavy, and for general education classes, will more than likely never be opened again. With students strapped for cash, it only makes sense to sell back these books that otherwise may one day be used as door stops or as I have used them, to prop up the head of my bed during times of sinus infections so I could breath at night. So what I said nine years ago, I still say today. Ebook readers would make a nice alternative for student text books. Being a laptop campus, our students walk around with back packs that hold their laptops, numerous textbooks, notebooks, and other items. You would think they were hiking the Appalachian Trail rather than walking across a small campus to attend a few classes the way these backpacks stick out two or three feed from their backs. I can envision a model where students could be given the option of either purchasing the eBook for permanent ownership, or by leasing it for a specific amount of time for a lower cost. There are barriers to this of course. While the Kindle has been the most successful eBook reader so far, the technology still needs some tweaking and the business model has a long way to go. Recently, Amazon removed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from their website and from their Kindle reader devices, copies these users assumed that they owned. The alarm caused by this development has caused people to once again to lose faith in the eBook concept. Call it good timing, or good luck, but that same week, Barnes & Noble announced the launch of its eBook store and its reader, the Plastic Logic eReader device which will be released in early 2010. The eBook industry is still unstable, but as we grow closer to standardization and more and more mediums of communication (books, news, articles, audio/visual) are accepted into the digital realm, there will be a place for eBook readers. And while textbook publishers may be a late adopter, I still expect there will be a place for them in the future world of eBooks.
Reference: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/11/03/golub

Tracked.com to challenge Google Finance and Yahoo Finance

Tracked.com is a new web service that provides not only ticker based company information, but it also provides user-driven information like CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and, to some extent, LinkedIn.  But it is not user driven in the sense of Wikipedia since users can not edit information or add entries.  But it is more customizable for the user and supposedly provides more robust information.
Information provided by Cnet News . http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10379942-26.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5