hangingtogether.org

The famous (and famously reclusive) author J.D. Salinger died on 27 January this year, two days after the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns – a day which is celebrated across Scotland and in many parts of the world. Salinger and Burns are of course connected, since the title of Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is based on a mishearing of the Burns song Comin’ Through the Rye by the protagonist, 17-year old Holden Caulfield:

… I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22

The idea of being a ‘catcher’ struck me when I attended a conference held at the British Library last week, Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context. Neil Jacobs of JISC mentioned Glasgow University Library’s policy of seeking to ‘catch’ researchers close to the end of funded projects to ask if they would like help with their outputs. Certainly, it is easy to argue for libraries to be the ‘catchers in the rye’ when it comes to digital scholarly works and outputs – and the obvious place to deposit these materials is the institutional repository.

However, we were gathered at the BL to hear about subject repositories – including EconomistsOnline which was being launched during the event. And we heard about several very successful subject repositories in a number of very good presentations. The event left me reflecting on a number of things. For example, some subject repositories are success stories almost against all odds. Services like arXiv and RePEc have captured their respective corners of academia so effectively that they go on existing and attracting even without much resource (almost none in the case of RePEc), and their proven value is such that people probably would pay to maintain them (as arXiv is now proposing for its heaviest users). This makes them the inverse of many institutional repositories, which can’t attract content almost irrespective of the amount of resource invested. Read the rest of this entry »

Metadata harvesting (collecting metadata from others and aggregating it in a collection) is not new. Although there are any number of ways to do this, the OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting is often used and has been around for years. It defines a small set of actions that allows anyone to discover what sets of metadata are available for harvesting from a digital repository, which metadata formats are offered, and select and download those records. Thousands of repositories worldwide support it, sometimes even unknowingly, because many repository applications such as DSpace and ePrints come with OAI-PMH support out of the box.

This has led to a world in which there are metadata aggregators and even agreggators of aggregators. It has also led to potential confusion and difficulty. Records that are picked up from their “native” location and indexed and displayed elsewhere may not be depicted as the creator of that metadata intended. They also may not be refreshed in a timely fashion, thereby potentially leading to records that are out-of-date persisting in various corners of the Internet.

This is why when my colleagues on the services side of the house announced the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway I sat up and took notice. This heralds a new world in which those being harvested can exert some control over not only how frequently their records are updated, but also how those records are depicted in the aggregation — in this case, WorldCat. Through a simple web-based interface, you can provide your OAI-PMH base URL, have the Gateway test harvest some records, view how those records would display in WorldCat, and change the mapping if you wish. Another benefit is that your records will then appear in all of the places WorldCat is syndicated.

A pilot project to test the Digital Collection Gateway was just announced, beginning March 1, and we are seeking volunteers to try it out and provide feedback. During the pilot you will be asked to:

• Attend a two-hour webinar reviewing the use of the Gateway
• Upload a minimum of 500 metadata records to WorldCat
• Offer feedback and input on your experience with the Gateway to our support and product teams so we can improve the tool and workflows

If you would like to help us create a next-generation harvesting infrastructure, in which you control your metadata more than ever before, email us at oaister@oclc.org.

At recent meetings I attended in Washington D.C. there was significant hallway discussion about the Open Researcher Contributor Identification (ORCID) initiative. Given the science orientation of the meetings this initiative to resolve the problem of name ambiguity and attribution in scholarly publication was particularly welcomed. As you’ll see if you visit the ORCID site this is early days for this pre-competitive multi-publisher effort whose goal is to establish

“an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard.” Their mission is “to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.”

Meeting one was convened by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing not long ago with the first meeting in November 2009. The roster of participants is impressive and the continued involvement of Elsevier made those with whom I talked hopeful that this would be as successful an effort as CrossRef has been. A recent editorial in Nature Credit where credit is due (pdf) is quite to the point about the implications of success.

My colleagues, Thom Hickey and Janifer Gatenby, have been involved. OCLC has much to contribute here given Thom’s leadership of the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) effort and Janifer’s in the development of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). The scope of ORCID is narrower than ISNI as the latter is intended for the identification of “identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains.” This goes across all fields of creative activity not just science. As Janifer said,

“ISNI could become a cross domain identifier so that a researcher who also plays in a rock band (and wants it known that he is one and the same) can be identified.”

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In September I hired a firm of environmental impact consultants, California Environmental Associates, to conduct a three-month study of interlibrary loan processes, with an eye toward lowering the carbon footprint of resource sharing operations worldwide.  Affordable best practices was our goal.  OCLC Research and OCLC Delivery Services co-sponsored the study.  Together, the consultants (Aarthi Ananthanarayanan and Laura Keller) and I visited two academic libraries in the San Francisco Bay Area and initiated telephone interviews with staff at a dozen other libraries of various types and sizes across the country.   

For years ILL practitioners have been streamlining their processes for efficiency and sustainability.  So, happily, we found many amazing best practices already in place.  The key contribution of the consultants was to determine the carbon emissions, per book loaned, per mile, for several of the libraries in the study.  Then, by analyzing the processing, packaging and shipping practices of those libraries, Aarthi and Laura were able to determine which practices had a positive or negative effect on the emissions numbers.  The result is a list of recommended “green” interlending practices that are finally as scientifically quantifiable as they are common-sensical.

The first thing that jumps out from the data is that when a library uses primarily new packaging material for sending out ILL items, the packaging material itself accounts for more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions per package for that institution.  Thus, right off the bat, an interlibrary loan unit can cut its carbon footprint nearly in half by re-using packaging material whenever possible.

There were a couple of surprises among the findings, at least for me.  One, padded mailers are vastly less harmful to the environment to manufacture than corrugated cardboard.  (This doesn’t mean that using boxes to ship ILL materials is bad, only that boxes should be used only when extra protection for the material is required.)  Two, paper with 30% recycled content is usually available at approximately the same price as virgin paper, and functions just as well in copiers.  So why should any interlending operation be using new paper?

Other best practices were easy to predict, the surprise being only in the magnitude of their impact on the emissions numbers:  digital is better than print; near is better than far; ground is better than air; local/regional couriers are preferable to national/international shippers (because they often supply reusable packaging); aggregating items going to the same destination is better than sending one at a time; nylon bags are better than plastic bins (unless the bins are always full).

The point of issuing these recommendations is that benefit accrues each time such practices can be utilized.  The practices outlined here are not always possible, or even appropriate.  But if many libraries across the entire system conduct the bulk of their routine interlending business along the lines recommended by this study, Mother Nature will breathe a little easier.  And that’s always a good thing.

You can see slides containing some of the data here.  A detailed written report containing all the data, the study methodology, and lavish thanks to the generous folks and institutions who participated in the study shall be forthcoming.  In the meantime…have you hugged a tree today?

The final report of the Museum Data Exchange grant will be released on the OCLC Research website later this month. As a first impression of key outcomes, I’ve posted the executive summary below. Stay tuned!

The Museum Data Exchange, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together a group of nine museums and OCLC Research to create tools for data sharing, build a research aggregation and analyze the aggregation. The project established infrastructure for standards-based metadata exchange for the museum community and modeled data sharing behavior among participating institutions.

Tools
The tools created by the project allow museums to share standards-based data using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

COBOAT’s default configuration targets Gallery Systems’ TMS, but can be adjusted to work with other vendor-based or homegrown database systems.

Both tools are a free download from here.
Configuration files adapting COBOAT to different systems can be shared here.
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Last month I mentioned the publication of A comparative review of research assessment regimes in five countries and the role of libraries in the research assessment process, which had been produced for us by Key Perspectives. It is a detailed report, and I also said that we’d shortly issue a companion report with some background information on the question of research assessment – ie the system by which universities are evaluated for their research performance by the bodies that fund them, with some of the key findings for each country, and with some recommendations for research libraries. That companion report, Research assessment and the role of the library, was published yesterday, and I thought I might draw attention here to the recommendations for research libraries that it makes. These are:

These challenges are easy to state, and most of us would readily assent to them. Some academic librarians may even claim to be doing several of them already – particularly in the operation of repositories, and in the provision of expertise in bibliometrics in some cases. But how many non-library organisations would recognise these as library roles? Would our funding bodies? The President’s or Vice Chancellor’s Office? Our research councils? Research publishers? Our politicians? Until these roles can be seen from the outside, we have not ‘claimed our territory’. Read the rest of this entry »

A smaller number of us than usual will be going to ALA Midwinter this week, as we are cutting back on expenses just as is everyone else. But we will be there, if in fewer numbers, so I thought it would be good to highlight the most important events for you. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I clearly mean those events at which food, drink, and informal conversation are paramount. What did you think I meant? So here goes:

Saturday, January 16

5:30 - 7:30 - RLG Meet and Greet, Westin Waterfront, OCLC Red Suite (ask at the hotel desk for the room number)

This is a good opportunity to not only have informal conversation with myself, Dennis Massie, and Karen Smith-Yoshimura, but also other colleagues from the RLG Partnership. As usual, we will have some drinks and nibbles.

Sunday, January 17

7:00 - 8:00 - OCLC Update Breakfast, Westin Waterfront, Grand Ballroom (please sign up for this event)

This well-attended event is where you can have a great start to the day with plenty of food and coffee and a rundown of what we’ve accomplished recently.

12:00 - 1:30 - Developer’s Network Luncheon, Westin Waterfront, Webster Room (please sign up for this event)

This is where you will get to see what people are doing with OCLC Web Services and what’s up with the OCLC Developer Network. If you speak Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, or any programming language, or manage those who do, this is the place for you.

5:30 - 8:00 - OCLC Blog Salon, Westin Waterfront, Stone Room

Always a good time, with plenty of cool people showing up, this is not just for bloggers but for anyone interested in the use of the latest technologies in libraries. Be there or be…well, you know.

Of course OCLC has many more events at Midwinter, including several other important RLG Partnership events, but need I repeat my criteria? I hope to see you at one or more of these in the upcoming days, hopefully in a situation and a time when we can have an informal chat.

Best wishes to our readers from all of us at hangingtogether and OCLC Research. We’re grateful for the attention you give our thoughts and hope to continue contributing to the design of the future library, archive, and museum.

As a final thank-you for the year I urge you to install Readability in your web browser. It makes reading on the web much more comfortable by removing all the clutter from those crowded web sites that studiously avoid everything Jakob Nielsen has tried to teach web designers.

I’ve promoted it before in the commentary of our Above the Fold newsletter (to which you should subscribe; we work hard to find relevant articles that you might not see in the ordinary course of professional reading).

I was motivated to offer it up here because it made David Pogue’s Best Tech Ideas of the Year 2009 column in today’s New York Times. Here’s what he said:

READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.

You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.

You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

Go forth and install it.

Here’s to a clear-eyed and comfortable time in 2010!

Research assessment is a very big deal in some countries. Countries whose university systems are largely publicly-funded routinely check up on the research quality of individual universities to ensure that they are squeezing the best possible performance out of their systems. They do this because they see a link between high-quality research and economic development. The economic potential of research is growing in importance as national ‘knowledge economies’ recognise the need for international research excellence, and see universities as a key driver.

We have just published a report which reviews the research assessment regimes of five countries, and the role of libraries in the processes of assessment that exist. This report was produced by Key Perspectives Ltd, a UK consultancy, and it surveys the research assessment situation in the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, Denmark and Australia. We chose countries that we knew were doing interesting things in assessment - or in preparation for its introduction. The high political stakes involved were evident even as the report was being written. In the UK, the pilot exercise for the system that will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ditched one of its proposed new thrusts (bibliometrics) and found another (economic impact) for the country’s universities to stress about. In Australia, a recent change of government led to temporary abandonment of a system that tied assessment outcomes to government funding, and arguably lost the country some ground in the international scramble for both reputation and economic advantage.

The Review provides a fascinating account of different cultural understandings of the purposes of assessment, and a glimpse of the trend of concentrating research excellence in a small number of top universities that is now taking shape in many countries, as the competition for research income, top faculty and students becomes one that occurs within a single international marketplace. We found countries that tied research assessment to large amounts of government funding, and others that did not (yet); countries that operated systems based on bibliometrics and others that mistrusted them; countries that devised league tables of journals and awarded points to researchers on those they published in - and others that assembled national panels of experts to determine the rankings.

Libraries are involved in these assessment exercises in a range of ways, from the clerical (data entry) to the highly strategic, and from the specialist (bibliometric expertise) to a role as providers of general infrastructure (institutional repositories). Whatever differences there may be in the assessment systems adopted by different countries, they all share a focus upon the research outputs produced by their researchers and faculty. These outputs are managed by libraries - both indirectly (via publications) and, increasingly directly (via arrangements with the authors themselves at pre-publication stages). Does this suggest that libraries play a central role in research assessment within their institutions? Or that they should? At the very least, shouldn’t libraries seek a shared view on this question?

I’ve recently returned from the Netherlands (Holland as the locals call it and Rotterdam to be more specific) where I attended the 2009 Digital Strategies for Heritage Conference (DISH2009). The main organizers of the conference are the Netherlands Institute for Heritage and the DEN foundation. The latter organization, Digital Heritage Netherlands is the Dutch national knowledge platform for information technology and cultural heritage run by my long-time friend and colleague, Marco de Niet. I was on the advisory board for this biannual event and chaired a panel during the conference.

It was very well-done. I believe that this gathering has now become the most important heritage conference for Europe (it would be the equivalent of a combined WebWise and Museums on the Web in the United States). There were over 600 delegates from twenty-three countries in attendance. They were a good mix of digital heritage practitioners, project leaders and administrators and they approached the conference from a shared vision of mobilizing heritage materials on the web that doesn’t exist in the US.

There were a small number of American attendees most of whom had keynote or other significant roles on the conference program. I think that some of them didn’t understand the extent of the investments that have already been made in the Netherlands and more generally in Europe nor the extent to which a shared motivation has taken hold. This was not an audience that needed to be hectored about the need to present their collections and their institutions on the web or the imperative of a user-centric perspective in doing this work.
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