Research, learning and scholarly communication

  • Three challenges: Engaging, rightscaling and innovatingJuly 05, 2013 – I was in Australia recently, primarily to attend the conference intriguingly entitled 'The edge of the world'. The presentation I gave is here, and is embedded below. This was the latest Theta conference, the Australian parallel to Educause. I very much enjoyed the host city, Hobart, not least because of...read full entry...
  • The university's curatorial roleFebruary 18, 2011 – I made a note in these pages a couple of years ago about the University of Edinburgh's mission statement. The University's mission is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge. The occasion was Chris Rusbridge's justified pleasure at seeing the mission changed to include 'curation'. At the time, Chris was...read full entry...
  • Using Wikipedia February 13, 2011 – We still don't appear to know what to make of Wikipedia. Consider these two cases. First, Edward Glaeser includes a reference to Wikipedia in the acknowledgements to his new book, Triumph of the city. Following common practices, Wikipedia is not listed in the bibliography or citations, because any Wikipedia fact...read full entry...
  • Evolving research life ...October 17, 2010 – I was interviewed for the British Library's Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research exhibition, which opened last week. I have not seen the physical installation yet but there is an online presence. See the gallery of digital research initiatives they showcase, for example, or the network research tools. One theme...read full entry...
  • The infrastructure is getting thicker ..October 17, 2010 – Andy Powell has a nice post on general trends in educational use of networking. The context is a reflection on the future of federated access management but the points he makes are more generally interesting. He talks about the economic situation, outsourcing to the cloud and shared services, the varieties...read full entry...
  • Library literature again ... September 26, 2010 – First a mention of two recent articles .... Rick Anderson has a very nice piece in Educause Review about budgets, libraries and scholarly publishers. It is an interesting reflection on systemic change, always difficult to manage as it involves reconsidering why things are done as well as how they are...read full entry...
  • Outside-in and inside-out reduxJune 06, 2010 – I have been using this phrase, outside-in and inside-out, to discuss a contrast in information management practices that is becoming more important. Here is how I spoke about it a little while ago in these pages: Think, for example, of a distinction between outside-in resources, where the library is buying...read full entry...
  • 'Reading at Library-scale'/'distant reading'May 30, 2010 – Franco Moretti has an interesting short book called Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for literary history. He proposes a way of reading literary history which involves abstracting patterns across large stretches of a literary field rather than examining "concrete, individual works". In particular, he works with three organizing models: graphs,...read full entry...
  • Reading lists, citation management and bibliographic tissueMay 22, 2010 – Here is something I wrote a couple of years ago under the title Personal reference collections as digital libraries. A little updating of examples and I think it still holds: We will see much more activity connecting user environments and bibliographic resources. I am thinking of citation managers, reading lists,...read full entry...
  • AuraMay 16, 2010 – John Naughton has a nice column in The Observer today. He talks about how as part of welcoming Dan Cohen to Cambridge, the University Library prepared a display around Newton's Principia. John enjoys the experience ... I've owned a beautifully produced facsimile of the Principia for decades, so it wasn't...read full entry...
  • Research analyticsMay 15, 2010 – Analytics is big business. Organizations are increasingly turning to the analysis of transactional and other data to inform decision-making. Websites are refined based on analysis of traffic. Companies may use analytics to optimize inventory. And so on. I was struck by the parallel with business analytics when reading some brochures...read full entry...
  • People are entry points too ... reduxMay 02, 2010 – I have been reading The power of pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. They provide a broad framework for thinking about current changes and how people and firms should position themselves to operate effectively. A major part of this is a shift from managing 'knowledge...read full entry...
  • Scientific publications as social objects ...February 12, 2010 – The Comprendia Blog has an entry about social networks in the sciences: Are Any Social Networks for Life Scientists Gaining Traction? It is a report of a 'quick and dirty' analysis of visitors to a range of sites. Not everything you might expect is included; Mendelay for example does not...read full entry...
  • Reputational surveyJanuary 06, 2010 – As university rankings attract more attention and as national/regional policy discussions continue about whether and how to concentrate research excellence, Thompson Reuters have provided a little more detail about their plans to work with Times Higher Education to develop their own framework to support university profiling and ranking. Our aim...read full entry...
  • Institutional researcher pages: an exampleJanuary 02, 2010 – I have written a couple of times recently (here and here) about institutional and indvidual reputation management. Think, for example, of faculty profiles: the managed disclosure of expertise and research activity. This has often been an informal personal or departmental activity. However, there is now a variety of institutional initiatives...read full entry...
  • Research assessment and the library ...December 27, 2009 – I am pleased to note the appearance of a new report on research assessment and the role of libraries. This has been prepared as part of our Research Information Management stream of work in support of the RLG Partnership. The study is a comparative review of formal assessment regimes in...read full entry...
  • Social tools and scienceNovember 15, 2009 – In her report on Open science at webscale, I was interested to see Liz Lyon give the following list of tools used to share their work by researchers. Currently, researchers are using open science tools such as: Connotea for reference management Mendeley (which applies LastFM principles associated with music selections...read full entry...
  • Libraries and e-scienceNovember 13, 2009 – Emerging data-intensive e-science presents many support challenges for institutions, disciplines and national bodies to work through. The role of the academic library in this multiscale world is also an open question. Two recent reports discuss e-science (or 'cyberinfrastructure' or 'e-research') in general terms and repay reading. Liz Lyon, the Director...read full entry...
  • Reputation enhancement reduxNovember 12, 2009 – I wrote recently about the growing interesting in reputation management on the web. Reputation management on the web - individual and institutional - has become a more conscious activity for many, as ranking, assessment and other reputational measures are increasingly influenced by network visibility. In particular, it raises for academic...read full entry...
  • Research support servicesOctober 26, 2009 – I am pleased to note a collaboration between OCLC Research and the Research Information Network in the UK to explore changing research support needs in universities. We tend to focus on how technology changes library practices, but the impact of technology on libraries will be less important in the long...read full entry...
  • Reputation enhancementSeptember 29, 2009 – Reputation management on the web - individual and institutional - has become a more conscious activity for many, as ranking, assessment and other reputational measures are increasingly influenced by network visibility. In particular, it raises for academic institutions an issue that has become a part of many service decisions: what...read full entry...
  • Libraries and publishing: a couple of examplesSeptember 04, 2009 – As interaction with the book literature, publishing, the role of large print collections, and research and learning behaviors are all changing in a network environment, academic libraries have been looking at their role in the scholarly communication and publishing process. I came across two examples of library activity which prompt...read full entry...
  • Strategic reading and bouncingAugust 30, 2009 – I was very taken by Timothy Burke's presentation at the first open meeting of the Library of Congress Working Group on Bibliographic Control. What was especially interesting was how he outlined a variety of ways in which he needed to interact with the literature. In his own specialties, he expected...read full entry...
  • Scientific data setsMay 27, 2009 – As attention to research data management and re-use grows I was interested to see the Gateway to Scientific Data provided by CISTI at the National Research Council Canada. Access to data from scientific research is increasingly important to collaborative research. This section aims to improve access to scientific research data...read full entry...
  • Reputation enhancementMay 20, 2009 – I was interested to see the combination of services presented on the Research and Enterprise pages of the London School of Economics. These include: The LSE experts directoryLSE Research Online (the institutional repository)Links to corporate relations, commercialization activites, and to podcasts, videos and other public outputs. I was especially interested...read full entry...
  • Books in the humanitiesApril 27, 2009 – In the context of recent discussion of monograph publishing in the humanities I was interested to read this recommendation in Marc Taylor's NYT op-ed this morning. It is a critique of graduate education ..... 4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most...read full entry...
  • E-journal impact .... April 21, 2009 – The Research Information Network in the UK has released a report about the impact of e-journals ... 'E-journals: their use, value and impact' takes an in-depth look at how researchers in the UK use electronic journals, the value they bring to universities and research institutions and the contribution they make...read full entry...
  • Research data set managementFebruary 02, 2009 – Via Pam Bjornson, Chair, Research Data Strategy Working Group, I learn of a report from Research Data Canada: Stewardship of research data in Canada: a gap analysis [pdf]. The method is interesting: This report provides a statement of the ideal state of research data stewardship in Canada and a description...read full entry...
  • Libraries and research information practiceJanuary 21, 2009 – I am pleased to note the appearance of a new report which synthesizes research findings about scholarly information practices and draws out lessons for libraries .. Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau and Carrie M. Pirmann. 2009. Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications...read full entry...
  • A referenceable listJanuary 19, 2009 – My colleague Constance Malpas has created an interesting Worldcat List in support of ongoing work: Selected print-only, refereed scholarly journals in the humanities with fewer than 50 aggregate library holdings. Holdings count limited to recs containing ISSN and English-language cataloging. [RLG Prospective Journals Preservation Project - sample titles] This is...read full entry...
  • Reading, skimming, avoiding ...January 17, 2009 – I have been meaning to mention Carole Palmer's observation that we are seeing 'reading avoidance' as an emerging behavior among researchers, as they increasingly depend on abstracts, citations, and other reading cues and clues to 'avoid' full engagement with the materials themselves. Here is what I wrote in my recent...read full entry...
  • Liber shifts gearsDecember 12, 2008 – And speaking of the Liber Quarterly, it is good to see that they have made it freely available on the web. It will be interesting to see if we now come across more references to it. My colleague Ricky Erway has an article in the current issue. This provides an...read full entry...
  • The changing education experienceDecember 03, 2008 – The Guardian published a supplement on the 'digital student' the other day. There is some general context and there is a range of short pieces on specific approaches or projects. This is all written for a general audience so there is no great detail and it is quite anecdotal. As...read full entry...
  • Social networks and citation tools for scientistsDecember 01, 2008 – And speaking of Nature Network, I was interested to see this list of 'social networks' for scientists at the Science@Cambridge site. Science Social Networks Research Gate Nature Networks 2collab Within3 (for Medics) [science@cambridge: science portal for Cambridge students | Cambridge University Library] And the following list of citation tools, including...read full entry...
  • A bright future ....November 19, 2008 – The Research Information Network, a national research and policy unit in the UK which looks at the information needs and practices of researchers, has produced what it calls a Guidance Booklet. The title is Ensuring a bright future for research libraries: a guide for vice-chancellors and senior institutional managers. The...read full entry...
  • Repository interoperabilityNovember 11, 2008 – JISC has just made available a report by Nicky Ferguson and colleagues about consistency of metadata and policies between repositories. In the UK, a large number of Institutional Repositories have been set up very recently. Often, it seems, they lack sufficient clarity of policy and purpose. In interviews with depositors...read full entry...
  • On the record: two views from the GuardianOctober 29, 2008 – There is an interesting and reflective commentary about the historical record and 'unpublishing' in the Guardian. I particularly like the comment about tattoos. The consequences of putting information about yourself into the public domain are more far-reaching in a world where things you say are linked to, easily passed around...read full entry...
  • Jazzing up information/scholarly literacyOctober 28, 2008 – Writing about scholarly method, Paul Courant discusses 'information literacy' and 'scholarly literacy'. Partly in response to these concerns, there has been much talk about the importance of developing "information literacy". I will argue here that our most important audience is already information literate and then some. [3] Our interest should...read full entry...
  • User behaviorsOctober 21, 2008 – My colleague Lynn Connaway has been working on several collaborative projects looking at user behaviors over the last few years. Together, she and colleagues have produced a nice body of work looking at user attitudes and behaviors to library services, and to information work more generally. I thought it would...read full entry...
  • Books as HistoryOctober 12, 2008 – I have just read with enjoyment David Pearson's finely produced Books as history [Oak Knoll Press][Worldcat]. His theme is that the artifactual properties of books have historic, aesthetic or other interest independent of the texts they convey. He opens with some consideration of the place of the book in the...read full entry...
  • Optimal disclosure of published materialsOctober 01, 2008 – Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner released an interesting report a little while ago on How scholars navigate to scholarly content. This is a followup to a similar study carried out in 2005 [pdf], and one of the interesting strands of this report is an account of changes in that period....read full entry...
  • Supporting research data management needsSeptember 28, 2008 – Several recent reports discuss the evolving environment of institutional research data management with particular reference to library issues. Here is a list, with a quote from each and a comment or two. Skills, Role & Career Structure of Data Scientists & Curators: Assessment of Current Practice & Future Needs. Alma...read full entry...
  • QOTD: reading is community workSeptember 15, 2008 – The University of Bristol has an interesting offer: A BA in English Literature and Community Engagement. I wonder if any of the students work with or through libraries. The Department of English offers a part-time BA (Hons) in English Literature and Community Engagement. This is an undergraduate degree, taught entirely...read full entry...
  • Up front repository workSeptember 15, 2008 – Mark Leggott has an interesting post on how they plan to construct and populate their institutional repository.With a minimum of training our hope is that the presentation of a 90% complete IR record will encourage faculty to complete the process. Some future enhancements will include parsing the Sherpa-Romeo record to...read full entry...
  • Helicopter parentsSeptember 06, 2008 – A recent story in The Guardian about helicopter parents points to a earlier fuller discussion of the topic. The five types of helicopter parent, identified by Paul Redmond in the Guardian involve themselves not only in the application to university, but in every aspect onwards – open days, choice of...read full entry...
  • Amplifying the meaning of the amplified conferenceAugust 28, 2008 – I have found the phrase 'amplified conference' useful as a way of talking about the surrounding communications techniques which accompany many recent conferences. These allow conference content to be communicated more widely, conversations about the conference to take place, and even the conference to reflexively adapt based on network input....read full entry...
  • Name authoritiesJuly 14, 2008 – Libraries have invested significantly in name authority work over the years, and have created extensive infrastructure to help manage names of people and organizations. The relationship between this work and broader interest in this topic is something that will need to be addressed in coming years if this work is...read full entry...
  • Changing research behaviors and librariesJuly 08, 2008 – Libraries are not ends in themselves, although it is tempting to talk about them as if they are. They support research, learning, civic engagement, personal development, .... This means that it is as important, or more important, to understand how technology is impacting those behaviors as it is to understand...read full entry...
  • Two from Elsevier: Article 2.0 and interdisciplinaryJune 30, 2008 – Two unrelated notes about Elsevier initiatives. The first about a competition in which they are making available an article-based data set for recombination in external environments or applications. The second about a study of Science Direct usage which shows different patterns of interdisciplinary behavior across disciplines. Although, one could push...read full entry...
  • Beyond actually existing Institutional Repositories ...June 10, 2008 – Repositories and Web 2.0 discusses the relative merits of existing institutional repositories and putative network level shared repositories which provide more incentives for depositers. It continues an argument in favor of network level shared repositories that Andy Powell has been making for a while. Andy has made the presentation available...read full entry...
  • Keeping research dataMay 14, 2008 – The JISC has made a report on digital preservation costs available. "This study has investigated the medium to long term costs to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the preservation of research data". One aim was to provide a methodological foundation on research data costs for national and institutional initiatives. Our...read full entry...
  • A gallimaufrey of itemsMay 02, 2008 – Some items of possible interest which were in a little email pile waiting for attention ...... Arrow An Australian colleague alerted me to the redesign of the Arrow Discovery Service. Arrow aggregates access to Australian research repositories. Welcome to the ARROW Discovery Service - where you can search 143,582 Australian...read full entry...
  • Scots WikipediaApril 05, 2008 – [Note: the links in the Wikipedia quotes do not work as I have not changed the relative URLs to absolute ones] I was looking up James Connolly just now as I prepare some slides for a presentation at the 2008 LIR Annual Seminar. The event is being held in Liberty...read full entry...
  • Conference amplification creates tremorApril 05, 2008 – I have mentioned before the tremor an event can sometimes cause in your communications fabric, as it pops up among your Facebook friends, in your RSS aggregator, and so on. So with Open Repositories 2008. A note about amplifying activities from a description of the event ... One interesting innovation...read full entry...
  • Full disclosure?March 23, 2008 – An interesting announcement from CLIR about a $4.27M competitive program to describe hidden collections has just appeared. The existence of such collections must be more fully disclosed if they are to release more of their value in research and learning: With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the...read full entry...
  • Search University research outputs here?March 21, 2008 – I mentioned iSoton a few weeks ago, an exploratory twopointification of a University of Southampton web presence (and see the follow-up conversation on Brian Kelly's blog). As many readers will know, Southampton is the home of major R&D, advocacy and support activities for open access (see the eprints.org page). I...read full entry...
  • You're so vain ... you probably want to look at your h-indexMarch 16, 2008 – And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation: The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research...read full entry...
  • Free and not freeMarch 16, 2008 – Chris Anderson introduces the themes of his new book, Free, in the current issue of Wired. You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New...read full entry...
  • Engaging academic users in a library serviceMarch 09, 2008 – OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) has released a nice white paper which discusses issues in providing an end-user access environment for its shared resources, and more interestingly, how that environment engages with the behaviors and expectations of its academic users. This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and...read full entry...
  • Mixing open and restricted access materialsFebruary 26, 2008 – Over the Christmas break I read the interesting Global Ireland: same difference. And, in my convalescence, I have been looking at other materials on this topic. I had a look at OAIster. A search on Ireland and globablization returned quite a few results. I was interested in browsing through the...read full entry...
  • Ranking and citingFebruary 10, 2008 – For good or ill, universities notice rankings. These are compiled in various ways, including peer assessment and citation analysis. I was interested to come across the work of The Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University which is "currently developing a new ranking system entirely based on...read full entry...
  • Personal reference collections as digital librariesJanuary 31, 2008 – We will see much more activity connecting user environments and bibliographic resources. I am thinking of citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking sites (see citulike and unalog) and RSS feeds. Some of these may be specifically supported by the library (e.g. a citation manager service), some may be developed within...read full entry...
  • POTD: Facebook fatigueJanuary 18, 2008 –  No Facebook - Blessington St, St Kilda Originally uploaded by avlxyz A nice picture. I saw it via Martin Weller who uses it alongside some general reflections about Facebook. You only understand it by doing it - as many people have commented (e.g. Ewan), in order to understand web...read full entry...
  • Library strategy at EmoryDecember 13, 2007 – I find library strategy documents an interesting indicator of trends. I do think that looking at how organizations present themselves and what is important to them in the documents they produce is revealing, documents such as annual reports, strategies, job ads, websites, org charts, and so on. It would be...read full entry...
  • The personal to global traverseDecember 09, 2007 – Network services have accustomed us to move from the personal to the global. Think of iTunes. I have my own local library on my PC which I can synchronize with mobile devices. It is also tightly integrated with the global network iTunes. And the MiniStore uses aggregate buying patterns to...read full entry...
  • Ariadne and national differencesNovember 02, 2007 – A new issue of Ariadne has appeared. It continues the recent repository theme with articles on the EU-wide Driver initiative and the centrally supported open access initiatives rolled out under the Dare program in the Netherlands. I am often asked about differences between the library environments in the US and...read full entry...
  • Quotes of the day (and other days?): persistent academic discourseOctober 28, 2007 – Here is Grainne Conole, professor of e-learning at the Open University writing about academic papers, conference papers, and blogging: Coming back to the question of which represents academic discourse – to my mind it’s all three – in different ways writing a paper, giving a presentation and blogging all help...read full entry...
  • Processes and repositoriesOctober 16, 2007 – I find it convenient to think about current library systems activities in terms of support for three materials workflows: bought/print materials, licensed/electronic materials, and digital/digitized materials. This is being pragmatic rather than pure, and is open to challenge on many grounds. I have discussed these at more length here, and...read full entry...
  • Personal collectionsOctober 15, 2007 – We have become used to managing collections of digital resources: images, music, citations. Zotero is one response to the question of how we will manage collections of scholarly resources. Raymond Yee's suggestive triple does good service describing the motivation: we want to be able to easily gather, create, and share...read full entry...
  • Collections grid and digital conservancyOctober 09, 2007 – We use the following collections grid from time to time to help focus attention on particular collecting patterns in libraries. The bottom right hand corner represents materials that have not been highly stewarded and which are usually unique to a particular institution. The types of material which go in here...read full entry...
  • Research behaviors and the libraryOctober 09, 2007 – An interesting report [pdf] from the University of Minnesota Libraries looks at the behaviors of researchers in the sciences. It extends the earlier work done by the Libraries on researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Not unsurprisingly there is a major focus on having resources available online and when...read full entry...
  • QOTD: pensions and open accessSeptember 06, 2007 – One of the features of the open access discussion in recent years has been the collection of significant reports authored or co-authored by Alma Swan. I was struck by this paragraph in a recent entry on her blog: Many people argue for Open Access on the grounds that publishers make...read full entry...
  • The academic library and its usersAugust 30, 2007 – I mentioned Jim Collins' book on the social sectors the other day. I have just acquired Susan Gibbons' book, The academic library and the net gen student: making the connections. I was interested to see her make use of Collins' material in the opening chapter where she suggests the following...read full entry...
  • Publish or perishAugust 28, 2007 – Publish or perish is interesting looking: Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics: .... [Publish or perish] Among the statistics it generates are: Total number of papers;...read full entry...
  • CommunicationAugust 20, 2007 – Update: my comments about the published literature below are about the library literature, a very specific set of journals and organizations. I am not trying to make any statement about the general value of the 'published literature' relative to blogs or other media. We have lots of places to 'publish'...read full entry...
  • QOTD: Top economists publish less in reviewed journals?July 26, 2007 – MIT economist Glen Ellison writes: I started this paper by pointing out two trends: economists in several highly-regarded departments are publishing fewer papers in the top field journals; and Harvard’s economics department is also publishing fewer papers in the top general interest journals.Several pieces of evidence bolster the view that...read full entry...
  • The amplified conferenceJuly 25, 2007 – It is interesting to watch how more conferences are amplifying their effect through a variety of network tools and collateral communications. Stuart Dempster of JISC has just sent me a note about the recently held JISC e-Content Symposium (see reports of discussion on the Strategic Content Alliance blog) and associated...read full entry...
  • ReferencesJuly 07, 2007 – Alma Swan has an interesting post discussing the value added by the publisher in copy editing and concludes that it is ... variable. She notes a publisher study: Wates and Campbell looked at copy editing changes carried out on a set of science, humanities and social science articles at Blackwell...read full entry...
  • Data curation againJune 21, 2007 – I mentioned the forthcoming report on data from Liz Lyon of UKOLN the other day. It has now appeared. Liz Lyon Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships - Consultancy Report [Word] [PDF] (Permalink) [UKOLN - staff - Dr Liz Lyon] Despite its UK focus, this report should make...read full entry...
  • Data curation: a couple of thingsJune 09, 2007 – Curating our Digital Scientific Heritage: a Global Collaborative Challenge is the title of the third international Digital Curation Conference. I was interested to see scientific data described in this way as heritage given our sometimes restrictive use of heritage. Although the topic of data curation is now being more widely...read full entry...
  • What does the boss think?May 30, 2007 – Attitudes of presidents and provosts on the university library is the title of an interesting article in the current issue of College & Research Libraries [68(3), May 2007]. The authors found that, although leaders recognize the symbolic value of the university library, it is the functional role of the library...read full entry...
  • Social mediaMay 27, 2007 – I have just watched the video [video opens on a web page] of a fascinating talk by Joshua Prince-Ramus, the principal architect of the Seattle Public Library. He talks about two core positions. The first is that books are a technology, something, he suggests that people tend to forget. They...read full entry...
  • Soft bibliographic powerMay 15, 2007 – Dario Taraborelli has a reflective post on the potential impact of tagging and social software on scientific communication. His particular interest is how such approaches might "challenge traditional evaluation processes".Online reference managers are extraordinary productivity tools, but it would be a mistake to take this as their primary interest for...read full entry...
  • Academic Library OrganizationMay 04, 2007 – One of the reasons I liked Key Perspectives' report on Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and their Services [pdf] is that it highlights a variety of important questions for libraries, and for the institutions which they serve. I hope to come back to some of the specifics of this report,...read full entry...
  • Faculty and FacebookMay 01, 2007 – Here is an interesting short paper on student/faculty relations in Facebook by a couple of researchers from Georgia Tech [pdf] They found that contact in Facebook did not have an impact on student perception of faculty. Although, here they note that a 'ceiling' effect may be at play, where these...read full entry...
  • Supporting research and learning invisiblyApril 21, 2007 – The (admirably brief!) Macquarie University Library strategic plan states: Over the next three years we will be designing and implementing a new technical architecture to underpin all our activities. In this new electronic environment we aim to become "invisible" - by making our services and resources available in a seamless...read full entry...
  • A perspective on the academic libraryApril 16, 2007 – The pattern of central funding for education and cultural areas in the UK has led to the emergence of a rich centrally managed support, policy, planning and service environment. One might have an interesting discussion about where this modus operandi is successful (removing redundancy and fragmentation by providing service at...read full entry...
  • Books are technology tooApril 16, 2007 – The Google digitization of books appears to have caught the public imagination. Recent weeks have seen high profile articles in The Economist [subscription required]and The New Yorker as well as several newspaper pieces (see the links and response on this OUP blog entry for example). Google Book Search is a...read full entry...
  • Harvard tagsApril 07, 2007 – An interesting couple of videos [here and here] from a workshop organized by Harvard University Libraries on tagging. Harvard University Libraries hosted a forum this week, “Social Tagging @ Harvard: A Del.ici.ous Alternative or Passing Flickr?,” that looked at the online practice of tagging and sought to weigh the separate...read full entry...
  • Our digital identities: bricolage, prefabrication and disclosureMarch 28, 2007 – In recent presentations I talk about workflow in quite general terms. I suggest that we have seen the focus of our attention shift from the database, to the website to workflow as the web environment becomes richer. We want to get things done on the network, not just find things....read full entry...
  • Patterns of collecting of non-us books in ARL librariesMarch 21, 2007 – ARL has just released a report on patterns of collection of non-US books in member libraries based on an analysis of their holdings in Worldcat [pdf] The report “Changing Global Book Collection Patterns in ARL Libraries” was prepared for the Global Resources Network (GRN) by: Mary E. Jackson, Auto-Graphics, Inc....read full entry...
  • The scholarly and cultural recordMarch 11, 2007 – There is an interesting piece by Katie Hafner in today's NYT arguing that materials left undigitized may be overlooked as the digital record becomes primary. These Steinbeck artifacts are not the only important pieces of history that are at risk of disappearing or being ignored in the digital age. As...read full entry...
  • The publication profile of the Divine BohemianMarch 06, 2007 –  From an article in Sunday's NYT:A FEW brush strokes have come to define the otherwise obscure 18th-century composer later known as Il Divino Boemo, or the Divine Bohemian: Josef Myslivecek. [Josef Myslivecek - Music - New York Times]The article discusses Myslivecek's influence on Mozart and his decline in popularity....read full entry...
  • Institutional cyberinfrastructureFebruary 26, 2007 – Thomas J. Hacker and Bradley C. Wheeler describe how changing research practices are creating new support demands and argue for the benefits of centralized cyberinfrastructure on campus. They talk about strategies for managing the conversation with schools who are developing their own infrastructure. This is in an article, Making Research...read full entry...
  • Data curation educationFebruary 25, 2007 – What is data curation? Here is one view: Data curation is the active and on-going management of data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education. Data curation activities enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain its quality, add value, and provide for re-use over time, and...read full entry...
  • QOTD: A new literacy?February 18, 2007 – In typically portentous tones, George Steiner notes the declining influence of the humanities and proposes a new literacy based on mathematics, music and architecture:A new literacy, as I imagine it, would have a core syllabus in mathematics, in music, and in architecture. The three domains of the human spirit can,...read full entry...
  • Self disclosureFebruary 18, 2007 – In several venues recently I have suggested that it would be useful to do some content analysis on various documents to see how institutions are describing themselves, their priorities, their relationships and so on. I am thinking of strategy documents, annual reports, but also things like websites, organizational charts and...read full entry...
  • Wikipedia again: an addressable knowledge baseFebruary 08, 2007 – Sometimes when you write something, related stuff just piles up. So I did a note on Wikipedia the other day. Then I was looking at an announcement on the University of Edinburgh's site about The British Academy Warton Lecture on Poetry, to be given this year on Yeats by his...read full entry...
  • QOTD: WikipediaFebruary 06, 2007 – John Sutherland writes about the decision of history faculty at Middlebury College to bar students from citing Wikipedia in their work. As it happens, I think the Middlebury decision is wrong. They should, I think, have put together an introductory course on 'scepticism', illustrated by Wikipedia entries good and bad,...read full entry...
  • OCLC ALISE awardsFebruary 03, 2007 – Each year, in association with ALISE, OCLC makes several grants to faculty at schools of library and information science to assist them with their research. Check out the successful candidates for this year, and see what work has been supported in previous years....read full entry...
  • Metadata complexesJanuary 30, 2007 – The current Ariadne has an interesting article outlining the work done by Eduserv and UKOLN on an application profile for e-prints. This application profile represents a relatively innovative approach to metadata, taking as it does the FRBR model and applying it to scholarly works. By making use of the benefits...read full entry...
  • Communicating communications researchJanuary 30, 2007 – While looking at the Open Journal Systems pages I came across a link to the International Journal of Communication. This is probably old news to folks but I thought it quite interesting. It is a publication of the USC Annenberg Center. It is edited by Larry Gross and the distinguished...read full entry...
  • A couple of reportsNovember 28, 2006 – A couple of relevant reports have just come over the horizon .....First, from the Research Information Network in the UK comes an overview [pdf] of researcher resource discovery behaviors and preferences:Search and discovery are critical and integral parts of the research process. As this study shows, researchers devote considerable amounts...read full entry...
  • Data curationNovember 20, 2006 – Chris Rusbridge is the Director of the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh. About the DCC:Scientists, researchers and scholars across the UK generate increasingly vast amounts of digital data, with further investment in digitisation and purchase of digital content and information. The scientific record and the documentary heritage...read full entry...
  • Research library symposiumNovember 19, 2006 – Transcripts and audio recordings of the proceedings of the Research Library in the 21st Century Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin are available. I spoke on one of the panels....read full entry...
  • QOTD: Wikipedia for studyNovember 08, 2006 – Hitwise has an interesting analyis of seasonal patterns of web traffic traffic. What I noticed was how Wikipedia use was influenced by the academic cycle. Notice the increase in visits to Wikipedia in May (during finals) and slight decline during the summer months. YouTube overtook Wikipedia in market share in...read full entry...
  • CURL strategic planSeptember 27, 2006 – I was interested to come across the CURL Strategic Themes 2006-2008. CURL, for non-UK readers, is the consortium of research libraries in the UK and Ireland. Four themes are suggested: To contribute to the development of a national framework for research support To facilitate new approaches to support for research...read full entry...
  • Open DataSeptember 14, 2006 – Peter Murray Rust writes about Open Data on his recently inaugurated blog. His work in chemical informatics is well known and may be of interest to some readers. However, I am drawn to write this entry by another small point. Having discussed the origins and uses of 'open data' as...read full entry...
  • Some e-science resourcesSeptember 03, 2006 – One of the primary characteristics of current change is that the network is 'coming inside': it is becoming a part of routine activities and they are being reconfigured in the process. This is happening everywhere, and in science it goes under the name of 'e-science' or 'cyberinfrastructure'. The UK Research...read full entry...
  • The pursuit of usersAugust 24, 2006 – Scholarly Information Strategies are well known consultants. They make some presentations available on their website. There is some repetition, but that is not, after all, uncommon ;-) They explore changing patterns of scholarly publishing and communication in a network world. The themes will be familiar, but it is interesting seeing...read full entry...
  • Net Gen?August 18, 2006 – Norm Friesen critiques what he calls the Net Gen myth....read full entry...
  • JISC/CNI presentationsJuly 29, 2006 – As I have remarked a couple of times in these pages, conference agendas are often an interesting manifestation of current thinking. Presentations from the JISC/CNI conference are now appearing. Topics of interest in this case include a mix of policy, practice and research: changing patterns of information use in research...read full entry...
  • Libraries, research and learningJune 23, 2006 – Academic library services will co-evolve with changing learning and research practices in network environments. So much is clear, even if the picture is still a little blurry. We have come through a period - a decade and more - where the main emphasis has been on putting materials on the...read full entry...
  • Registries, research and jobsJune 09, 2006 – A colleague drew my attention to an advert for a Bioinformatics Curator at the University of Manchester, which interestingly touched on several different issues that have been on my horizon recently. Here is an excerpt from the ad:We have an opportunity within the highly successful myGrid project for a bioinformatics...read full entry...
  • Addressable - accessibleApril 30, 2006 – I suggested a while ago in these pages that one reason for the wide use of Wikipedia was that it was an 'addressable knowledgebase'. Entries enter the web conversation because they are referencable, they are on-web. In this context I was interested to read in Bubblegeneration: In many cases, communities...read full entry...
  • WebCiteApril 26, 2006 – Alf Eaton sent me a note about WebCite in the context of my discussion of the integrity of citation in a digital environment. WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure...read full entry...
  • Excitations ...April 23, 2006 – In these pages a while ago I wrote about Wikipedia as an addressible knowledgebase: a part of its great attraction is that one can invoke elements of that knowledgebase with a URL. Jerry MacDonough made the reasonable point that one cannot rely on a URL to have a stable referent...read full entry...
  • Science, data and the recordApril 01, 2006 – Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, hosted a very interesting event on the future of science: Science 2020. The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements necessary to accelerate scientific advances...read full entry...
  • Conversations and evidenceMarch 21, 2006 – The Reading 2.0 conference has had some nice coverage. One of the interesting takeaways for me was the variety of requirements or use cases that drive service, and the dangers of substituting either-or discussion for and discussions. I kept thinking of two non-exclusive emphases: conversation and evidence. Major network presences...read full entry...
  • Open Content InitiativeMarch 13, 2006 – The Open University, supported by the Hewlett Foundation ($4.45M), is going to make learning materials freely available for use and reuse on the web. This continues the OU tradition of open broadcast of its television teaching materials.The Open University will draw on its experience in supported open learning to provide...read full entry...
  • Research support: COS and CSAFebruary 13, 2006 – Community of science provides various research support services, including a matching service between funding opportunities and researchers, and between those looking for and those providing particular expertises. Community of Science (COS) is the leading global resource for hard-to-find information critical to scientific research and other projects across all disciplines. We...read full entry...
  • Citable resourcesFebruary 13, 2006 – Ross Atkinson argues:The library also has a responsibility at the citation level - ideally ensuring that all information cited in local publicatons remains accessible. This should be the case especially for electronic information: if Web pages, for example, are cited in publications produced at a library's institution, then that library...read full entry...
  • Quotes of the day: Reading lists and bookstoresJanuary 28, 2006 – The Times Higher Education Supplement (the UK equivalent of the Chronicle) has a piece about reading lists which had a couple of interesting paragraphs (unfortunately behind a paywall). About reading lists:But it was the digital revolution that really threw the relationship into disarray. Students no longer put up with faint...read full entry...
  • NetworkflowsJanuary 28, 2006 – One way of characterising recent developments is to look at our locus of engagement with the network. We can see a trend from database, to website to workflow. And this is not really surprising. As more of our working, learning and playing lives moves onto the network we need better...read full entry...
  • A book on institutional repositories, no less ...January 07, 2006 – I notice with interest that the Institutional Repository is a sufficiently mature topic for a publisher to publish a book on it and for authors (Richard Jones, Theo Andrew and John MacColl) to write one. Incidentally, this was the first time that I noticed that Amazon.co.uk includes sponsored links. Speaking...read full entry...
  • Keeping the public in publishing?January 03, 2006 – We are used to buying books. To sharing them. To giving and receiving them as gifts. To quietly marking them. Even sometimes to proclaiming ownership in a bookplate. We are used to copying parts of them for study, to quoting from them. Books circulate - through libraries, private collections, bookstores...read full entry...
  • Institutional repositories and research assessmentDecember 11, 2005 – Australia and the UK have frameworks in place for the evaluation of research and the selective allocation of funding based on that evaluation. This has potential implications for institutional repositories as one factor of the evaluation exercises is the need to better record, and potentially manage, research outputs. The UK...read full entry...
  • QOTDNovember 12, 2005 – From the Economist:Although search technology is constantly tweaked to provide better performance and more relevant results, studies by Microsoft have shown that around half of all search queries fail to provide the information that users want. "We need to get offline content online. Offline is where trusted content is, and...read full entry...
  • Nature technologyOctober 25, 2005 – There is an interesting presentation [ppt] by Timo Hannay of Nature Publishing Group on the UC Berkeley Database Group Seminar pages. This shows how a major publisher is thinking about what it means to be a service in a network environment. It discusses how they are looking at structure and...read full entry...
  • WikibooksSeptember 28, 2005 – I had not come across Wikibooks before, which is a collection of textbook 'modules' created in the Wikipedia model. Wikibooks is one of the Wikimedia family. Naturally enough, coverage is still intermittent. I do not know what sort of momentum it has picked up. There is a skeleton - if...read full entry...
  • IR frameworksSeptember 13, 2005 – Institutional repositories for the research sector: feasibility study [pdf] is a report prepared for the National Library of New Zealand. I was interested to see the role of the National Library moving this forward. From the initiative's Wiki:A repository framework for New Zealand The National Library of New Zealand, in...read full entry...
  • Project ArrowSeptember 07, 2005 – I have mentioned Arrow a couple of times: Arrow is an Australian project looking at national Institutional Repository infrastructure. Geoff Payne, the Arrow project manager was in OCLC recently discussing how they might integrate some of our schema transformation work. He gave a well received presentatation to OCLC staff and...read full entry...
  • UIUC blogsAugust 21, 2005 – My favorite course in library school was children's literature, taught by Pat Donlon, the former National Librarian of Ireland. Having said that, I did not come across our (current) favorite children's author, Mairi Hederwick, until several years later when I was looking in the bookstore in Edinburgh Airport for something...read full entry...
  • Vernaculars of learningAugust 18, 2005 – New learning environments for the 21st Century, a presentation by John Seely Brown, is worth a look [pdf]. There are lots of suggestive moments. He looks at the learning and the learning environments of network people. "Today's digitally experienced students learn differently and have new vernaculars." These include the languages...read full entry...
  • In the flowJune 24, 2005 – Workflow is important. We often think of the network as multiple individual opportunities: a mass of websites. However, just as we increasingly work, learn, research, and play in a network environment, so will services evolve to reduce effort and improve effectiveness. These services will support flow construction and resource integration...read full entry...
  • 93 people want to start using the library ..June 08, 2005 – This is one of the things that is among these people's 43 things to do. Some nice comments too, if you look at what people say about this particular goal....read full entry...
  • University hosted blogsJune 06, 2005 – Jeremy Smith at Case reviews some university-managed blog hosting services.I spent some time this evening hunting around for other Universities that offer blog hosting services. I just wanted to check out the other digs and see how Blog@Case, in its current form, stacks up. Obviously, I can't log on to...read full entry...
  • The challenge of research dataMay 22, 2005 – The curation of research data poses an interesting question for those contemplating the future of research libraries. It is another of these areas where a local response will co-evolve with developing systemwide responses, where the 'system' in qestion may be the parent institution, a disciplinary focus, a national research infrastructure,...read full entry...
  • Search and memoryMay 01, 2005 – An interesting post on Ida takes tea talks about the use of bookmarking tools - such as Furl - as a sort of memory. And further:These (perhaps unanticipated) social and cognitive attributes of web service tools tend to support John S. Rhodes' related claim that search engines such as Google...read full entry...
  • Reeling and writhingApril 24, 2005 – There was some comment on the post I did about library journals a while ago. My concern was about impact: we go on about how much library skills and experience have to contribute but we ensure that the documentary record of those skills and that experience is buried in niche,...read full entry...
  • Services for intermediate consumersApril 13, 2005 – Google, Yahoo!, Amazon .... For many these services are the first and last resort of research. They exercise a major gravitational pull on users [*]. We are rightly preoccupied with their impact on library services. A major reason for this is because we recognize that increasingly these are the windows...read full entry...
  • Net generation students and librariesFebruary 24, 2005 – Joan Lippincott of CNI writes about Net Generation users and libraries in a new publication: What are some of the major disconnects between many of today's academic libraries and Net Gen students? The most common one is students' dependence on Google or similar search engines for discovery of information resources...read full entry...
  • UBC e-strategy webpagesJanuary 27, 2005 – I was interested to come across the University of British Columbia's e-strategy website which collects general awareness, policy and service information. They identify e-learning, e-research, e-business, connectivity and e-community lines of activity....read full entry...
  • Dspace for learning materialsJanuary 23, 2005 – From the CWSpace website: CWSpace is an MIT iCampus project conducted by the MIT Libraries' Digital Library Research Group and MIT OpenCourseWare staff. The research is based on MIT's DSpace digital archive system, and takes as its principal focus the archiving of educational materials found in MIT OpenCourseWare. [CWSpace, an...read full entry...
  • Accessibility and e-learningJanuary 22, 2005 – From the UKOLN web site:Accessibility Debate - A lively debate on Web accessibility has begun following the publication of an automated accessibility analysis of the Web sites of various UK disability bodies. The initial debate focuses on the merits of automated versus manual accessibility checks. UKOLN, together with its fellow...read full entry...
  • Support for e-research, e-science, cyberinfrastructure, ...January 07, 2005 – I have been involved in a couple of conversations recently about cyberinfrastructure and e-research, and more particularly about how research libraries can create value for science faculty on their campuses. 'If we don't create more value for the bio-sciences, then we're toast' was one memorable remark I heard ... The...read full entry...
  • Cornell University Libraries report on open access publishingJanuary 04, 2005 – Cornell University Libraries have made available an interesting report on open access with recommendations for library policy.The Task Force on Open Access Publishing was convened by Ross Atkinson in January 2004.The purpose of the Task Force is to study the information available on Open Access publishing and to provide the...read full entry...
  • Samuel Pepys is bloggingDecember 08, 2004 – In a delightful conceit, Phil Gyford presents Samuel Pepys diary in the form of a blog. This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England (read more about him). A new entry written by Pepys will be published...read full entry...
  • CitingDecember 08, 2004 – Google and Amazon have each made citations more visible in recent weeks. It has been widely noted that Google Scholar will often disappoint users by providing a [citation] entry that does not resolve to an actual document. Less remarked is the very welcome ability to be able to follow a...read full entry...
  • UC Office of scholarly communicationDecember 01, 2004 – The California Digital Library hosts the UC Office of Scholarly Communication which usefully brings together some materials on its website. UC's California Digital Library establishes an Office of Scholarly Communication in response to: the continuing economic crises in scholarly communication and the growing concern about the impacts; the broadening desire...read full entry...
  • University rankingsNovember 22, 2004 – The Times Higher Education Supplement [subscribers only - guest subscription available] has compiled a list of the 'top' 200 universities worldwide. The list is interesting as a sign of the growing international competitiveness of higher education. It appears that it will be refined in future years. A major contributor to...read full entry...
  • Eric Wainwright on future of academic librariesOctober 10, 2004 – Eric Wainwright writes reflectively and interestingly about the future of the academic library. [PDF]...read full entry...
  • Rehak's papersOctober 03, 2004 – Dan Rehak is very active in the development of specifications in the learning technology arena. He is based at the Learning Systems Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon. Two recent papers intersect with our interests. Good&plenty, Googlezon, your grandmother and Nike: challenges for ubiquitous learning & learning technology [PDF]. This caught...read full entry...
  • ARROW discovery serviceSeptember 26, 2004 – The Arrow (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) project has a preview search system up. This discovery service provides access to Australian scholarly materials. It currently indexes metadata from 6 university repositories. [Australian Research Repositories Online to the World]...read full entry...
  • Academic bloggingSeptember 25, 2004 – I had been going to mention UThink, the blogging platform provided the University of Minnesota Libraries. Here it is mentioned in a Guardian article which considers academic blogging more widely, interviewing faculty and others about their use of blogs. Most blogs are individual efforts, but earlier this year, the University...read full entry...
  • National access to EEBOSeptember 11, 2004 – JISC has secured long-term access to Early English Books Online for the UK community. They are looking at an interesting approach to further development of the resource by soliciting candidates for digitization from academics. Now JISC, as part of a deal struck earlier this year with ProQuest to make EEBO...read full entry...
  • Universities are more like country clubs than health clubsAugust 29, 2004 – From the column of Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics, in Management Today:There was even concern that major US universities might begin to colonise the continent with satellite campuses. So we were reassured to hear from Larry Summers, president of Harvard, that he saw little scope for...read full entry...
  • Hal Abelson on copyright and intellectual commonsAugust 19, 2004 – The journal Transformations: liberal arts in a digital age has an interview with Hal Abelson of MIT on copyright and scholarship.HA: A University is a complicated place, and there are lots of different kinds of interests there. So, you can't apply one single uniform policy for everyone's research production. Also,...read full entry...
  • Datuments - data and documentsJuly 24, 2004 – Murrary-Rust and Rzepa discuss 'datuments', where a datument is "a combination of data and document created using formal markup to allow the processing of individual data components". A datument is a hyperdocument for transmitting "complete" information including content and behaviour. We differentiate between "machine-readability", merely that a document such as...read full entry...
  • UK parliamentary report on scholarly communicationJuly 23, 2004 – The House of Commons - Science and Technology - Tenth Report Scientific publications: free for all has just been published and caused pleasant surprise among advocates of open access. It repays reading, and is surely significant given its recommendations and the standing of the body which produced it. Academic libraries...read full entry...
  • Arrow, Fedora and VTLSJune 19, 2004 – Arrow is an Australian project developing institutional repository facilities for Australian Universities. The National Library of Australia will provide a 'national discovery layer' for the initiative. At Members' Council somebody compared an institutional repository to a vertical file system; Arrow has a vertical file system motif on its web pages....read full entry...
  • Changing face of A&IJune 12, 2004 – Overview of changes in A&I landscape from John Regazzi of Elsevier. This simple supply chain, however, has been transformed today into a complex, some might argue 'too complex,' information network. [Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture - 2004]He makes some statements about scientists' and librarians' preferred sources of authoritative information which have...read full entry...
  • UK e-University dismantledJune 09, 2004 – There have been some high profile failures in higher education in the shared distance learning space. The UK eUniversity is the latest casualty. Dr Ian Gibson, who chairs the science and technology committee at the Commons, called the UK's e-university "an absolute disaster". [BBC NEWS | Education | 'Shameful waste'...read full entry...
  • Nature web focus on scholarly publishingMay 22, 2004 – A collection of articles on open access to scholarly literature: Nature web focus: Access to the literature: the debate continues....read full entry...
  • Public higher educationMay 11, 2004 – Transcript of Second HEPI Annual lecture: the destruction of public higher education in America and how the UK can avoid the same fate by Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor, is now available. Let me just assure you that first of all I have spent half of my adult life...read full entry...
  • Data curationMay 09, 2004 – Interesting overview of survey of scientists, librarians and others about need for research data curation services. Includes a schematic of future e-research data flows. [ppt in pdf]...read full entry...
  • Elsevier CEO on open accessApril 18, 2004 – Reed-Elsevier argues value of existing publishing model. The use of scientific information is spreading as technology allows more researchers to access more information more frequently. Since 1999, the number of articles downloaded via Elsevier's electronic portal ScienceDirect has doubled each year, reaching 175 million downloaded articles in 2003 as its...read full entry...
  • A science commonsApril 04, 2004 – Concerned about the potential effect of recent policy on the conduct of science, the Creative Commons initiative is looking to explore a Science Commons:The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in...read full entry...
  • Trip report VALA conference MelbourneMarch 08, 2004 – I presented the closing keynote [ppt] at the recent VALA conference in Melbourne Australia [VALA2004 Conference Programme and Links to Papers]. (Added 13 March: just came across a trip report for the VALA conference by Steve Thomas, University of Adelaide.) Here are some brief notes about the meeting ......read full entry...
  • Research data and librariesMarch 03, 2004 – Tony Hey is interesting. A distinguished physicist and computer scientist, he is currently on secondment to run a major UK e-science initiative, putting many millions of pounds into grid computing, data management and other large-scale infrastructure for science. In a recent interview he expresses impatience with libraries who, he reckons,...read full entry...
  • Institutional repositoriesJanuary 29, 2004 – Some suggestive observations about institutional repositories in the summary of a CNI roundtable discussion. In many ways, discussing "institutional repositories" is misleading, in that the term is too limiting and focuses on a tool rather than the strategic imperative, which is planning for institution-wide digital asset management and developing both...read full entry...
  • How good is the catalog?January 25, 2004 – Pretty interesting piece by a member of faculty in the history department at Swarthmore. I quote at length -- follow the link for the full piece.Using our library's catalogue, Tripod, I was both impressed at how generally strong our collection is for a small liberal-arts college (shared with Bryn Mawr...read full entry...
  • Garfield on open accessJanuary 14, 2004 – Since it has been demonstrated that on line access improves both readership and citation impact we can certainly expect that the vast majority of the low impact journals would be well advised to make their journals open access. Whether this increases their impact remains to be seen, but increased readership...read full entry...
  • UK research fundingJanuary 02, 2004 – An interesting report has just appeared which profiles research funding in UK higher education. It notes the growing concentration of funding in a smaller number of institutions, the dominance of science funding, and the smaller scale of UK activity when compared to that in US universities. The report is discussed...read full entry...
  • SPARC Open Access NewsletterJanuary 02, 2004 – It is difficult to keep track of the 'open access' discussion. An important source is the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, now edited by Peter Suber. The current issue contains an overview of 2003 developments. Open access in 2003 The many-copy problem and the many-copy solution What's the ullage of your...read full entry...
  • Research at OSUJanuary 01, 2004 – I was the guest of Tom Rosol, interim Vice President for Research at OSU, at the OSU-Purdue game last year. I was interested to read his summary of research support activities at OSU for this year, presented to the OSU Board of Trustees. OSU accounts for 40% of university R&D...read full entry...
  • Digicult reportsNovember 10, 2003 – Several interesting reports on the Digicult pages. Most recently, Learning Objects from Cultural and Scientific Heritage Resources....read full entry...
  • BlogsNovember 02, 2003 – There was some discussion about blogs at the all staff meeting the other day. I have little sense of what penetration Catalogablog has, or how widely read Jon Udell's weblog is, or who looks at Dave Beckett's JournalBlog. I do know that they are all valuable, well-informed resources. They are...read full entry...
  • A guide to institutional repository softwareOctober 24, 2003 – There has been quite a bit of discussion about the Budapest Open Access Initiative Guide to Institutional Repository Software in various places. One question to emerge is whether there is a place for software specialised to the needs of eprints or other classes of material, or whether general digital library...read full entry...
  • Jian Qin and Learning Object VocabularyOctober 24, 2003 –  The Learning Object Vocabulary (LOV) was generalized from sources in instructional design and technology, learning theories and practices, and conventional library classification and thesauri. This version has the following main categories of learning models, learning objectives, and learning objects. Sources used in creating this ontology include DDC, ERIC Thesaurus,...read full entry...
  • Article on changes in scholarly communicationOctober 21, 2003 – Suzanne E Thorin provides an overview of changes in scholarly communication for a recent ARL conference....read full entry...
  • The thematic research collectionOctober 20, 2003 – John Unsworth writes ... ... I predict that the genre of scholarship that will replace the book will be the thematic research collection. [ARL 228: The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities]...read full entry...
 
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/research-learning-and-scholarly-communication/
orweblog.oclc.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-23
121280
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:64SVZFKV6ZTJWEUL7C2ZP754QVL6WKZM
<urn:uuid:efebf567-e033-4b7e-9275-ffffa528d7de>
2014-07-23T16:16:37Z
132.174.1.121
sha1:S33EPZO5WXWLNSSYW26ZL5DVUHKNMGNX
<urn:uuid:8890d337-034f-4249-8258-475e1a0917f1>
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/research-learning-and-scholarly-communication/
response
<urn:uuid:ef3d7f93-3903-49be-826e-378dad1405c9>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-131-23.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf