Tom Roper's Weblog

CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference

I'm off to Exeter for the CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference next week. I've created, as a service to conference-going humanity, an iCal calendar of the programme. To subscribe, go to webcal://ical.me.com/tomroper/UCRSCoFHE.ics; to view online, go to http://ical.me.com/tomroper/UCRSCoFHE

The twitter hashtag #exeter10 is already seeing a lot of traffic. But are we the only event in Exeter this year?

Conference going

Henry Green's remarkable trilogy of novels, Living, Loving and Party Going, could have been followed by a fourth on conferences. This thought was prompted by a post on the excellent American team blog, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, on the matter of library conferences. They discuss the various conferences American librarians attend; I wonder if we should not record the British experience too.

My conference going hey-day was in the late years of the last centruty and the early years of this. It was a heroic era. Tony McSéan, then Librarian at the British Medical Association, even proposed a journal, the Journal of Airport Librarianship, for those who spent more time in airports than in the libraries they were supposed to run. The joke was told of Derek Law, then at Kings College London,
Q: what's the difference between Derek Law and God?
A: God is everywhere; Derek Law is everywhere but Kings

See also Joeyanne Libraryanne's post, Conference Advice

UKSG

'So what was the most interesting issue that came up at the [UKSG] conference?' asked an e-mail that arrived this afternoon, as I hurtled south on the train to King's Cross. I was stuck for a reply. It's hard to process three days of rich ideas about more or less everything that librarians and publishers have to deal with in the modern world.

A frivolous answer would be 'tartan'. I don't believe Edinburgh has seem quite so much checked woollen cloth since George IV's visit in 1822. This was the theme of the conference dinner and, to my considerable surprise, I won the prize for its best interpretation. I wore evening dress, but substituted a pair of trousers in the Rothesay tartan for my usual midnight blue ones. I have no photograph to prove this, though some do exist, I believe; but I do have a handsome bottle of champagne, beautifully presented in a tartan cloth bag

So would the most interesting issue be homosexual necrophilia in mallards? Open access? The changing OPAC? The big deal? How to measure the return on investment and impact of library services? New ways of finding and presenting information and data, as shown by Conrad Wolfram? The basic human need to make lists, something that cropped up in more than one presentation? Social media, as used by researchers? The uses and abuses of bibliometrics? Statistical fetishism?

I'll write up my notes over the next few days, but I'll be hard-pressed to offer as good an account as the official bloggers already have, led by Charlie Rapple, @charlierapple on Twitter, at http://liveserials.blogspot.com/

  

En route to UKSG

I haven't been to a conference for a very long time, but UKSG very kindly asked me to lead a work-out session at their conference in Edinburgh which starts tomorrow. How could I refuse? Once one of the globe-trotting conference going jet-set of the library world, I haven;t been to one for too long. And Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities in the whole world. I look forward to a run round or possibly even up Arthur's Seat. I type this on a train with German wifi—it defaults to German Google and invites me to Melden Sie sich in Ihrem Google-Konto an.

It's a beautiful afternoon and I shall not moan about the troubles I've had with trains; that's what Twitter is for. I've taken a quick break from preparing my presentation on the Economics of Information Supply – is free information good enough? to reflect briefly on the conference ahead. I'll blog, of course.

There are some fascinating plenaries with an impressive range of international speakers:

• the technology of information consumption, with Adam Bly on Rearchitecting science: a vision for STM in the 21st century, Richard Wallis on Technology and change and Conrad Wolfram on Computation, communication and the new era of knowledge
• economics of scholarly information, with Ted Bergstrom on librarians and the terrible fix: economics of the Big Deal, Marybeth Manning on Reset – a publisher’s response to the changing economy and Carol Tenopir on University investments in the library: measuring the return
• rights and licensing, with Dorothea Salo on Who owns our work?, Eelco Ferwerda on New models for monographs – open books and Jill Russell on paved with gold: an institutional case study on supporting open access publishing
• researcher behaviour, with two speakers I've long wanted to hear, Tony Hirst on network ecology and the knowledge economy: why researchers need to get online and social and Lucy Power on life scientists go online – collaboration, communication and credit
• research quality assessment – controversies and challenges, with Hugh Look on the raw and the cooked: bibliometrics and the flight from judgment, Alain Peyraube on research assessment in the humanities and the ERIH project (European Reference Index for the Humanities), Peter Shepherd on PIRUS 2: developing a standard for individual article usage statistics and James Pringle on citation impact and research evaluation: current trends
• the intriguingly named Light Programme, with Brendan Dawes on stop making sense: human approaches to exploring information and Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research on Improbable research and the Ig Nobel Prize

I look forward to the break-out sessions too, in particular Anna Vernon's, who will be bringing the latest news from the JISC e-books for FE project.

JDCC09: sessions I tweeted

I'm fighting my way through the backlog of notes to write a final post on the JISC Digital Content Conference, wrapping up those sessions I haven't covered yet. The unreliable wifi at the conference means that while I managed live tweeting for some sessions, others exist as notes on the PowerBook. Given the very full coverage of the conference by the official conference bloggers, the slides, audio and video, and the aggregation at #JDCC09 I'm going to concentrate on my reactions to the sessions, rather than trying to give point-by-point accounts.

Plenaries

A Modest Proposal - A California Digital Library, Robert Miller, Director of Books at the Internet Archive: the memorable thing about Robert's presentation was probably his closing offer to digitise, gratis, ten books for any institution who wanted to try out the service. This sparked an idea for an after-conference dinner game: which ten books would you choose and why? I was impressed by the richness of the services hosted at the Archive: a biodiversity collection, a television archive of 27 channels, Yiddish literature online, early Korean printed books and NASA's collection of still and moving images.

Fostering knowledge: the JISC's contribution to the UK e-Infrastructure: Sarah Porter, JISC's head of innovation, amused us by comparing interoperability to a bourbon biscuit, while giving a cogent view of the way JISC will develop the networks now and in the future.

Content is king: but we are in a republic: Stuart Lee, in an entertaining presentation that included NSFW aardvarks, Star Trek, Ruskin's road-building and Alfred the Great urged us to tap the huge potential for community digitisation brought about by the mass ownership of digital cameras, something along the lines of a 21st century digital Mass Observation project

Parallel sessions:

Content in Education Strand - Supporting academic practice: embedding content in teaching, learning and research: people from the Reproduce project, hitherto unknown to me, presented on different aspects of their work. One issue raised was how to get people to use digital resources. One of the important lessons I learnt here was that the librarian's traditional approach of building subject pages or portals doesn't work for teachers, whose interests are far more fine-grained. JORUM is being relaunched as much more of a social area than a repository. We were also shown a site still under development which exploits the potential of NewsFilm Online, offering exemplars, practical examples and guidance

Looking Into The Future - Libraries of the future. With a new LRC opening in September, provided the furniture arrives in time, I was looking forward to this session. Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian introduced, and showed us the new Libraries of the Future video.

Then Les Watson, quick to emphasise he was not a librarian, took us through some possible futures, discussed some of the theory behind educational spaces and quoted Alain de Botton on the inhumanity and depressing atmosphere of a McDonalds in Westminster; Peter Godwin spoke about information literacy, but the Q&A was the most interesting part. A spirited discussion took place about the Saltire Centre, held up by some as the epitome of the new type of learning space, but denounced by a Glaswegian in the audience as 'not a library' and nothing more than 'an innovative use of an inner-city car-park' . Chris Batt asked us to consider if libraries didn't exist, would anyone now bother to invent them, though we had no real answer

Looking Into The Future - New technologies for delivering and accessing digital content. I found this session unsatisfactory. It was only at the end that we started to see something real when the very last speaker, Shelley Hales of the University of Bristol, showing a fascinating Second Life project, the Pompeiian house, a digital interactive representation of something itself a reconstruction, the Pompeian house built for the 1851 Great Exhibition and then housed in Crystal Palace until it burnt down. To get to Shelley we had to sit through an unnecessary Second Life for dummies presentation, and an ad man. Matthew of Shadowplay who, I'm afraid, added little, telling us for example, that 'the internet and digital media are transforming the landscape' or making unsupported assertions about iPhone ownership. Rather better was the first speaker, Dave Flanders, who spoke on form factor , format and agile prototyping, methods used in software development that were new to me

JDCC09: the urge and surge of international collaboration

At a session led by Sarah Porter on international collaborations, three projects presented.

Michael Popham of Oxford spoke about the Shakespeare Quartos project, which has digitised all 75 pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays in a collaboration between Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare library in the USA, giving scholars new ways to study variant editions of these texts. With a lot of cropping and post-processing, 32 copies of Hamlet have also been re-keyed, so are searchable and manipuable. Different partners in an international collaboration like this have different approaches: JISC and the NEH vary, for example in how they prepare bid documents. Sometimes issues of shortfall of effort had to be tacked and an excess of politeness could hold people back form chasing progress. While they used a wiki to document the project, a lot of management was done by conference call, possible since the US partners were all East coast-based. Images are now up on the BL site. Some work was held up by the need to recruit a software developer,

Susan Whitfield of the British Library presented on the International Dunhuang Project, digitising the contents of the library room at a Buddhist temple at Dunhuang on the Silk Road, preserved by the desert air. The library was sealed in around 1,000 AD, and rediscovered by Western archaeologists in 1900. 40,000 manuscripts, in 20 languages and a variety of scripts, both Sino-Tibetan and Altaic, were dispersed among the imperial powers. The project could not have started without international collaboration, the archaeologists of a hundred years ago being considered thieves in China and there are demands for the restitution of the materials. The collaboration DP: co-operation on conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, research and education. With eight full-time partners, Susan thought that the chief lessons of the project were that there should be something for all sides, like marriages. The project worked on collaboration, rather than colonialism. The website was localised for each partner, with responsibility for content shared; everyone keeps copyright and hosts their own images. The project had spent a great deal of time in training.

Saskia de Vries who, at the the conference dinner the night before, had borrowed my tie to demonstrate sailing knots spoke on the OAPEN a European initiative to offer open access monographs, peer reviewed books in the humanities and social sciences. They have signed up a number of publishers and work on a hybrid model: online content is free to view, while print-on-demand and e-reader content is charged for.

In questions and answers someone asked if the Quartos project software could be reused? Yes, was the answer, it's on sourceforge and can be picked up by anyone. Asked what one thing they would change if they could, one asked for cheaper air fares, another for better communication and outreach. Language differences were felt to be a big problem,

See also the official blog at http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/category/jdcc09/ and the twitter stream.

JDCC09: Nick Poole on Digital Britain or Digital Landfill: free puppies and ten problems

I'm fighting my way through the backlog of notes to write some more posts on the JISC Digital Content Conference. The unreliable wifi at the conference means that while I managed live tweeting for some sessions, others exist as notes on the PowerBook. I may summarise the tweeted sessions too, in time.

The third plenary session, on Wednesday morning, began with David Baker trying to sum up the previous day's parallel sessions, from a series of slides that I hope will be on the conference blog. He drew out some points from each: the hidden costs of digitisation, the need to improve the 'big deals' and to work with publishers without ideological arguments, that in order to engage teachers with existing resources, they have to offer value and be a good fit, and, finally, that innovation breaks rules and that users are collaborators. I'm not sure I understand the point about avoiding ideological arguments with publishers: do the ideological positions come from publishers, from librarians or from academics? If he meant we should stop trying to understand the economic imperatives that drive publishers' behaviour, I'm not sure I agree.

Nick Poole, the CEO of the Collections Trust, who blogs at http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/, gave us a very up-to-the-minute and enjoyable presentation, and contributed to the conference the memorable and resonant phrases, 'free as in puppy, not free as in beer', and 'less innovation and more doing' . Starting from the government document published only the day before, Building Britain's Future, he took us through the political and economic situation and how it might affect us. A new European Commission might have money for digitisation, but In the context of a weak pound against the Euro, the effects of the slump and 5-10% cuts in public expenditure, will the digital economy bail us out?

Digital Britain has five priorities: modernising the infrastructure, creating a climate for investment, securing high quality content, building skills, and giving universal access to broadband. But the Treasury look for public value, public sector efficiency and savings of more than £30bn on top of the Gershon savings of £26.5bn. There is a contradiction between cutting on this massive scale and at the same time requiring public services to increase their social impact. Politicians now think e-services can be harnessed.

Nick thought we had two options: to build on the last ten years' investment, or to witter on about standards and interoperability and consign that ten years' work to digital landfill.

He then gave us ten problems

1. Money: what is a digital economy? We can't buy our own lunch. What is the real economic value underlying transactions?

2. Politicians: we need some core principles which exist irrespective of which politician is at DCMS this week

3. Trust: these are centuries-old industries. How do we crowd source? We can't even build decent websites. We need a contract with users, or we are stuck with command and control

4. Projects: everything is project funded. Nick confessed to being allergic to innovation. In a phrase that struck a chord with the conference, he suggested we should have less innovation and more doing

5. Managers: would you like a business case with that? There is no business case. Free stuff can be 'free as in puppy, not free as in beer'.

6. Copyright: end copyright fear, and take risks. There is so far little case law so we have more freedom to act than we think

7. Users: keep changing. We should reject idealised models of what users might be or need and have a new social contract and collectivism

8. Strategy: new unified field theory.

9. Digital: can mean many different things: delivery of service online, use of computers, digitisation

10. Marketing: the delivery of the project is the outcome. Sustainability is achieved by production of a successful service

The heritage sector is becoming a public service broadcaster sending content into homes and can do things that the commercial sector would find uneconomic. He referred to the RIN work on researchers' needs, Dicovering Physcial Objects, Meeting Researchers' Needs and suggested there should be a researchers' charter.

Therefore, we need a culture grid which can reach an audience who wouldn't come to a museum website. We could do much more: joint procurement, collaborative prioritisation of digitisation, crowd source the interpretation of content, consolidate licensing and, at the political level, sound dissonant.

In questions, Catherine Grout asked about the Strategic Content Alliance. Nick thought there was nothing like it. It was doing things to solve problems, and participant were leaving their guns at the door

Tom Morgan (NPG) asked about the changing marketplace. If there is digital content and a finite pot of money should content be free at point of use or part of the market place? Nick though that the media market place is changing, like the Maryland decision to give away , assumeing some income later.

Is there a consensus as to what is value? No, it's what the user is willing to pay. [No, that's price, value is different, read Marx-TR] We are not clear about our value to users, for example to newcomers to the UK. We have to be clear about different between public and private value.

The stability of conference archives

I had an email the other day asking my permission for a presentation I gave at a conference in 2000 to be archived in an institutional repository at Washington State University; my small contribution was a paen to Vetgate, the animal health gateway built by the OMNI/BIOME project, and still going strong under Intute. WSU Libraries are developing a community for the Proceedings of the International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS) in the WSU Research Exchange, their institutional repository, to preserve these proceedings publicly and so that each paper will have a durable link for citing.

This is an excellent development. The Third ICAHIS took place in London in 2000, as a stream within the eight International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML). I\d previously attended the 2nd ICAHIS in Copenhagen. Since then they've held conferences in Budapest and Pretoria.

In 2000, one of the reasons for ICAHIS being a stream within with ICML was that ICML would archive the proceedings, but the archives haven't been available for several years now. Perhaps institutional repositories offer a more secure and durable way of preserving such records.

animal health, ICAHIS, institutional repositories

OCLC Symposium at Online

The only thing that interested me at Online this year, apart from a few encounters with old friends, and seeing Brian 'IWR Information Professional of the Year'  Kelly of UKWebFocus fame clutching his Oscar-like award, was the OCLC Symposium, Who’s watching your space?

Three speakers, John Naughton, journalist and academic at the Open University, Matt Brown of Nature Network and Cathy de Rosa, VP of Global Marketing for OCLC addressed us. John was keen to emphasise how much journalists have hyped the more well-known social networking sites, and how much they ignore anything outside  MySpace and Facebook. he identified the known business models as being advertising or monetising eyeballs as it is elegantly expressed, viral marketing, subscriptions, share-cropping and the walled garden approach. He thought that the growth of social networking had implications for privacy, for how were understand friendship, that they might challenge conventional authority structure's and might allow more efficient information sharing. But he thought that there would be a collision between the walled garden model and the open  nature of social networking sites, and he also cited the 'what next?' problem, where users, after the initial excitement of signing up to a network and discovering their friends, then wonder what to do next. He thought there might be possibilities for harnessing social networking in education, in corporate organisations and in libraries.

Matt demonstrated the Nature Network which was interesting, though I was left unclear about how hospitable it might be to other social networking tools. They have their open bookmarks and citations sharing tool, for example, Connotea, but I don't know how a Connotea user could share bookmarks with some who used del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, or citations with someone using citeulike.

Cathy highlighted some of the findings from  the report itself, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our online world, downloadable from OCLC as a pdf. For librarians, one of the key findings is that there has been a considerable fall in the use of library websites since their last report two years ago. There's lots in the report, though the samples used seem a little small to me.

In questions, Brian Kelly asked if we were not in a very similar situation to that of the web in 1993, that that which was dismissed as hype then has now proved to be sustainable? John Naughton didn't answer the question, saying that he didn't think we could know what social networking might mean for serious applications. In response to another question, John compared the possible situation libraries might find themselves in to that of travel agents.

 

Collaborative Collection Management

Sally Curry of the Research Information Network whose presentation at the WESLINE colloquium I blogged last week, e-mailed me to point out that I underestimated the extent to which collaborative collection management has developed: 'I was interested to read your comments about CCM. I am not sure that you are entirely correct about the lack of development since ASVIN. Some collaborative programmes have not just run for the duration of their initial funding but have managed to carry on such as SCoRe and the White Rose/British Library Collaborative Collection Management Project programme and CoFoR. And of course, one of the large developments in the area of collaborative collection management  is the UKRR'.

I'm happy to set the record straight and the projects Sally mentions may be found here:

SCoRe: a catalogue of printed company reports held in UK libraries
White Rose/British Library Collaborative Collection Management Project: a mechanism whereby very low-use monographs can be withdrawn from individual White Rose Consortium libraries (Leeds, Sheffield and York univeristy libraries) and offered to the BL’s own collections
CoFoR: a project aiming to promote collaborative collection management, which developed a downloadable toolkit (pdf format)
UK  Research Reserve: an agreement between higher education and the British Library whereby the British Library will store journals no longer required by HE libraries