hangingtogether.org

At the end of 2011, we are doing a mini series of blog postings to reflect on some of the year’s highpoints. This posting is the second in the series.

“Seeking Synchronicity” was published as an OCLC members report in 2011, but is based on many research projects on virtual reference, both research conducted by OCLC Research Scientist Lynn Connaway and Rutgers Professor Marie Radford, and others. Marie and Lynn have helpfully boiled down findings to a very readable set of recommendations and guidelines about virtual reference and optimizing your chances for satisfaction and success.

What has stuck with me after reading the report, is the importance of building relationships. Practicing good customer service goes well beyond virtual reference.

You can view a webinar (and find more information about the project) here.

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?

At the RLG Partnership Annual Meeting in 2007, Timothy Burke told the assembled research librarians ‘you have to figure out how to be hydraulic engineers of information flow rather than the guardians of the fortress’. It’s an image that has stuck with me. Everywhere now in our professional literature we see the challenges of our work represented by the imagery of flow and fluidity. We try to scope and identify workflows that are changing or need to change. The platform of the web dips and peaks faster and differently than we can predict, and as it does so content suddenly flows in different directions, taking new channels. Stability in this environment is rare, and a relief when we find it, even though it may lie in places that librarians take some time to trust – like Google and Wikipedia.

I often show a slide produced by Rick Luce, Vice-Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University, when describing the territory of our Research Information Management (RIM) programme. This appeals to me because it indicates that library attention needs to be focused on the workflow layer, rather than the repository layer that sits below it.

Understanding the particular environments of researchers, and the flows that matter to them, is perhaps not a new challenge for research libraries, but it is a newly urgent one. In the pre-digital world the flows were not digital flows, with the capture challenges and opportunities that now exist. The library dealt mainly in the solid world of published literature. It collected from the physical outputs that emerged at the end of flow processes, and could structure its operations around that bounded reality (within its ‘fortress’ print stores, to use Tim Burke’s analogy). Now, we see potential for library services everywhere, because we have systems that capture flows, and allow them to combine, split and replicate wherever it is useful for them to do so, and legal barriers do not obstruct. But to do so optimally, we need to understand researchers’ worlds at a level of detail that is still not familiar to libraries. Read the rest of this entry »

Mendeley is a social web application for academic authors that has been receiving quite a lot of attention recently. Victor Keegan wrote about it in The Guardian last week, likening it to the streaming music service Last.fm:

How does it work? At the basic level, students can “drag and drop” research papers into the site at mendeley.com which automatically extracts data, keywords, cited references, etc, thereby creating a searchable database and saving countless hours of work. That in itself is great, but now the Last.fm bit kicks in, enabling users to collaborate with researchers around the world, whose existence they might not know about until Mendeley’s algorithms find, say, that they are the most-read person in Japan in their niche specialism. You can recommend other people’s papers and see how many people are reading yours, which you can’t do in Nature and Science. Mendeley says that instead of waiting for papers to be published after a lengthy procedure of acquiring citations, they could move to a regime of real-time citations, thereby greatly reducing the time taken for research to be applied in the real world and actually boost economic growth. There are lots of research archives. For the physical (but not biological) sciences there is ArXiv, with more than half a million e-papers free online – but nothing on the potential scale of Mendeley. Around 60,000 people have already signed up and a staggering 4m scientific papers have been uploaded, doubling every 10 weeks. At this rate it will soon overtake the biggest academic databases, which have around 20m papers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The main feature article in last week’s Times Higher, A threat to scientific communication: do academic journals pose a threat to the advancement of science?, by Zoë Corbyn, examines the scholarly journals system and asks some penetrating questions about dysfunctionality in the academy, at least in the UK. We are all aware of some troubling issues caused by the link between journal publication and academic reputation, both individual and institutional. This article is one of the boldest yet to appear in the press on the subject, and it suggests that the detriment to the advancement of knowledge due to the stranglehold of the impact factor, compounded by the artificial behaviours induced by a regime of research assessment tied to funding, is now at a level that warrants serious attention. One of the most perversely reassuring things about the article is that it quotes several senior academics, editors and policy makers, whose concerns include many that librarians have been shaking their heads about for years now. Rather than rehearse the article, which can be found on the Higher’s website, I provide below my extrapolations of some of the most disturbing symptoms identified both by the correspondents in the article, and by those who are still sending in responses to the article on the website:

Remedies suggested centre upon the academy taking back the means of control into its own hands, which should provide some encouragement to initiatives such as open access repositories, though their role needs considerable development if they are to provide a corrective. Among the measures suggested are:

Coming from scholars themselves, these views are important for us to note for our Research Information Management work, where some projects are getting underway with surveying researchers in focus groups and via interviews. It seems clear that the academic community has a number of concerns and possible solutions that librarians have not yet thought of, or dared to think of.

The University of Leeds has made two prestigious acquisitions recently which have been deemed worthy of announcing from the university’s own news page. In early June, the university acquired the archive of Marks & Spencer, one of the UK’s most prestigious stores, which began its life in Leeds some 125 years ago (and has created an online exhibition drawn from its archive). Now headquartered in London, the return of the company’s archive is a nice example of regional cultural repatriation, and will undoubtedly provide a basis for a great deal of interesting research as suggested by the University’s Vice Chancellor, Michael Arthur:

We already have one of the best academic libraries in the country, and the arrival of this tremendous archive will further strengthen it. The collection spans economic, social, artistic and cultural history and will be of interest to staff and students from all parts of the University as well as the public.

And just a few days ago came news of the acquisition of a collection relating to Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, a controversial early 20th century English novelist. This collection adds to Leeds’ substantial holdings in Victorian and early 20th century literature, and illustrates well the importance of cultivating vital relationships in a collecting strategy that gives gravity to a strong research library.

I was interested in these library stories that had made the ‘front page’ of the university’s website, since Leeds is anxious to improve its reputation internationally. The university’s ambitions are expressed very starkly in one of the the standard footnotes for editors: ‘The University’s vision is to secure a place among the world’s top 50 by 2015’. News stories based on research developments, awards to staff or students, and prestigious acquisitions like these, are of course now common on university websites, and a standardised list of notes to editors is frequently used. But even in the reputationally aggressive UK, it is unusual to see a university stake its claim quite as boldly as this. This is probably because the league tables themselves are still not widely respected nor held as authoritative – though Leeds may be banking on that position having changed by 2015.

It does as yet have some distance to travel though, since the Times Higher table currently lists Leeds in 104th position, having dropped 24 places since the previous year. The Shanghai Jiao Tong Index has it in 131st, down one place. But the new edition of the oddly named Ranking Web of World Universities, which judges institutions on the strength of the web presence of their research rather than on prizes won or citations, has boosted Leeds from position 180, in January, to 167 in July. Perhaps stories about research, including research collections, are beginning to have the desired effect.

I have just been reading a recent article by Kathy Enger* published in Library & Information Science Research that examines the potential value of citation analysis as a selection tool in academic library acquisitions. Enger proposes that citation analysis of the journal literature might be used to identify potentially high-impact books for inclusion in a college or university library collection. The reasoning here is quite interesting: based on the observation that humanities and social science scholars rely more heavily on monographs than journals as a vehicle of scholarly communication, a sampling method is used to identify high impact journals in the social sciences and then cull from these the top cited authors. If these authors have also published books not already represented in the local collection, the titles are acquired on the premise that the content is likely to represent ‘high value’ scholarship. Library circulation figures are later examined to determine if these titles are used (borrowed) more frequently than titles selected through traditional means.

This seems like a proposition worth testing. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a good article* in the most recent issue of JASIS&T by a group of Canadian scholars who challenge James Evans’ controversial claim that the increase in online availability of research publications has resulted in more focused and narrowly concentrated scholarly citation patterns. Evans’ study (2008) was the subject of a previous post on the ‘narrowing prospective.’

Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras and Eric Archambault present research findings that suggest that the dispersion of citations has actually increased over the past century.  According to their research, the range of literature cited in contemporary scholarship grows over time as a function of the total supply or availability of published research. The percentage of papers cited at least one time increases steadily as the body of literature grows and matures. They characterize the implications of these findings in fairly categorical terms:

All these measures converge to demonstrate that citations are not becoming more concentrated but increasingly dispersed, and one can therefore argue that the scientific system is increasingly efficient at using published knowledge.  Moreover, what our data shows is not a tendency toward an increasingly exclusive and elitist scientific system, but rather one that is increasingly democratic.

Larivière, F., Gingras, Y., & Archambault, E. (2009): 861.

I was struck by the authors’ references to the ‘scientific system’ of scholarly communication, since it connotes not only a methodical approach but also a set of norms and expectations about the progressive advancement of human knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday I attended a meeting in London on the UK Research Data Service – a project which has until recently been a feasibility study, run jointly by RLUK and its IT services equivalent body, RUGIT, and funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England with support from JISC. The consultancy was undertaken by Serco Consulting. Four universities participated as case studies – Bristol, Leicester, Leeds and Oxford (the latter two both RLG Partners – as is the LSE whose Library Director, Jean Sykes, has been the RLUK lead on this project). The day-long conference confirmed that the feasibility study had demonstrated the case that some sort of research data service is required for the UK, and described the next steps to be taken. Andy Powell covered the event in a live blog, and Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, blogged about it in a number of entries here. As well as RLUK and RUGIT, also at the table are national bodies with complementary remits, the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, the Science & Technology Facilities Council – a Research Council with a special brief to provide research facilities – the Research Information Network (which is not a network, but a research-conducting organisation) and the Digital Curation Centre.

There had been some anticipation of a grand announcement and the securing of many millions of pounds worth of funding to set up the UKRDS. This did not happen. In fact, although it is quite easy to make the case for a service which preserves and curates the data generated by research in the UK (or anywhere), it is much less easy to say how that work should be done, or even that a single new service should be set up to do it. And there is an interesting professional issue which surfaces in discussions on this topic in the UK, since the library community is now very familiar with national services funded and managed by JISC on behalf of the Funding Councils, and so automatically imagines services with national scale (a number of examples were described by Paul Hubbard and are given below). Creating such national services appeals also to administrators, and in a climate in which the UK is worried that it is beginning to lag behind other countries (the meeting heard from the Australian National Data Service and was reminded of the National Science Foundation’s DataNet initiative), there is an inclination to propose models which are well-defined as to responsibility and coverage, but are not necessarily tuned to the complexities of the problem. Thus the librarians’ model can seem inadequate to researchers who work directly with the data, and to some of those bodies (such as the Research Councils) who already fund data curation activity within domain-based models. Lorcan touched upon this issue recently, referring to a Chris Rusbridge post in the DCC blog, in the context of multi-scalar solutions. This meeting in some ways acted as a venue for a dialogue between these two camps – librarians and those who supported library support-like national services, on the one hand, and specialist researchers and their support services on the other.

Without a strong consensus on the need for the various potential stakeholders – JISC, the Funding Councils and the UK’s seven Research Councils – to concentrate all of their funding for this activity into one new service, what will emerge will be a pathfinder approach, undertaking data curation and preservation selectively to begin with, with an intention later to scale it up. Other universities have shown interest beyond the four English universities already on board (Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff) and will join if the Scottish and Welsh Funding Councils decide to participate. None of the various players will host research data centrally; that responsibility will be distributed within the institutional environment. But the UKDA, STFC, RIN and DCC will somehow ‘sandwich’ the distributed data between a supportive bottom layer and an overarching presentational top layer (we were reminded that code is much cheaper to move than data).

For the library community, some of the discussion had a familiar ring to it from the discussions around the population of institutional repositories. We have learnt – somewhat painfully – from the experience of ‘building’ institutional repositories that saying (as more than one speaker at this event did) that we need to change the culture is a little like saying we need peace on earth. Devising training programmes for junior researchers will not in itself modify long-held behaviours. There was interesting discussion on where investment should be made to effect real change: not on researcher behaviours, but on system drivers (eg cranking up the reputational value of data may be assisted by measures such as increasing the length of time for completion of PhDs, so that researchers will be both more inclined and more able to cite the data of others, and to make their own data citable). The Wellcome Trust requires data management plans as a condition of grant funding, and demands that these are peer reviewed.

One of the most interesting presentations of the day was made (via video-link) by Dr Ross Wilkinson, Executive Director of the Australian National Data Service, which has been operating for only a few months, and is funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. Their approach is to make data discoverable both Google-style (‘you come to us’), and Amazon-style (‘we come to you’, ie via recommendations). The ANDS service also uses the currency of the search-engine discoverable web page for each collection and project in the system, with a variety of linked options available from pages.

Whatever else it seeks to do, this service is based on the need to accommodate discovery from web search engines. Ross said it bluntly: ‘forget portals; get pages findable in Google’. Their approach also includes the development of persistent identifiers and a Collections Registry. It is a model which seemed to possess the clarity of vision and get-ahead mentality which the UK national service advocates were striving for.

But the specialist researcher group were not fully convinced. Malcolm Atkinson (Director of the National eScience Centre) had earlier reminded us that Google and Amazon think carefully about the computational needs of those whose data they store. The Australian model passes that problem back to the research domains themselves. There was also a theological disagreement between Kevin Schurer, Director of the UK Data Archive – who argued for quality over quantity in data deposits – and Ross Wilkinson, who argued for web-findable inclusivity at the expense of high quality. Indeed, it seemed to me that he was essentially applying our Shifting Gears argument in relation to digitising special collections – or that of the seminal Greene-Meissner paper on archives, More product, less process – to research data – the first time I have seen the arguments applied in that context. Quality should be improved in response to demand, not in anticipation of it.

Towards the end of the day there was a bid to get the process moved on. Paul Hubbard, Head of Research Policy in HEFCE, maintained that the UK has an exceptional record in creating strong and efficient research information resources. He gave examples of various UK-wide services developed in recent years – the Research Support Libraries Programme which ran from 1999-2002, the system of designated (and specially funded) National Research Libraries, the British Library Document Supply Centre and its current manifestation as a suite of services, the UK Research Reserve, JISC Collections, JANET, the Digital Curation Centre and the Research Information Network. He could of course have pointed to some examples of national research support services which have struggled to make headway, or fallen by the wayside, and an analysis of what makes for success might be valuable for the UKRDS. Clearly, HEFCE is hoping that it will be supported and successful, and the use of these examples reveals the intention to establish it as a national, library support-like service. Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC, then spoke about possible funding models, and called for a new cadre of ‘data management professionals’ to be created, ‘in the same way that the library profession created ‘digital librarians”. They would presumably have the role which Kevin Schurer had earlier pointed to in professionalising certain aspects of research data management (whereas too often it is still the case that the Principal Investigator in a research project is data generator, publisher and distributor). A voice from the non-library camp pointed out that some Research Councils (NERC, specifically) already employ professionals with data management skills, to which Malcolm Read replied that the skills of librarians in this field were nonetheless highly appropriate.

Progress was made, but clearly there are issues still to be resolved in how the UK will tackle this new service need in a way which satisfies all of the many stakeholders. The pathfinder phase seems a sensibly cautious way to start work while keeping on listening to these several voices at the same time. If it results in an ANDS-like service, with a more product, less process ethos, and pathways to the specialist domain needs of the many communities of researchers with value-added requirements, it could increase its chances of eventually taking its place in the group of successful UK national research support services which represent the aspiration of the organisers of this event.

The title of this post is my homage to another famous Belgian.

I have been posting from the 9th International Bielefeld Conference in Germany. In yesterday’s closing keynote, Herbert Van de Sompel gave a most unusual presentation. Preparing, on his return to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for a six-month sabbatical, he used the occasion to review the work he and his various teams have done over the past 10 years or so – and bravely assessed the success or otherwise of the major various initiatives in which he has been involved – SFX, OpenURL, OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and MESUR (not for the acronymically faint-hearted). Incidentally, the 10-year boundary was as much accident as design. With the exception of one slide (pictured) showing his various project clusters, he had not prepared a new presentation, but instead paced around in front of a succession of old ones – some looking pretty dated – displayed in fabulous detail on the gigantic screen in the Bielefeld Convention Centre main hall. With a plea for more work on digital preservation, he stated that he had discovered that those Powerpoint presentations which were more than 10 years old were no longer readable.

The SFX development work, done at the University of Ghent, has resulted in some 1,700 SFX servers installed worldwide, which link – at a conservative estimate – to some 3 million items every day. Less successful, in his view, was the OpenURL NISO standard. It took three years to achieve, and – despite his ambitious intentions at the time – is still used almost exclusively for journal article linking. Reflecting on this, he remarked that the library community finds it hard to get its standards adopted outwith the library realm.

Herbert was also ambivalent about OAI-PMH. The systemic change predicted at the time of its development has not happened, and may never happen. He remarked that ‘Discovery today is defined by Google’, and in that context PMH did not do a good job because it is based on metadata. Ranking is based on who points at you (see my earlier post on the Webometrics ranking). ‘No one points at metadata records’. But it still provides a good means of synchronising XML-formatted metadata between databases.

He feels that we are moving on from a central concern with journal articles in any case. ‘What do we care about the literature any more? It’s all about the data (and let’s make sure that the data does not go the way of the literature!)’. He offered some reflections on institutional repositories in passing. They are not ends in themselves (though often seem to be). There is a difference between their typical application in the US and in Europe. European libraries use them more for storing traditional academic papers – versions of the articles which appear in peer-reviewed journals. In the US, there is a tendency to use them for ‘all that other stuff’. They are relatively unpopulated due to the fact that authors find it hard to care once they have had the paper accepted by their intended journal. But the other problem is workflow. Most repositories require deposit procedures which are outwith faculty workflows. Worse – content is being deposited by faculty all over the web – on YouTube’s SciTV, on blogs, in flickr. They have no time left for less attractive hubs. We need a button with the simplicity and embeddedness of the SFX resolver button to be present in these environments before we will truly optimise harvesting of content into the repository. There is a challenge …

The ORE work learned lessons from PMH. PMH did not address web architecture primitives. That was why Google rejected the protocol. It did not fit with their URI-crawling world view. ORE therefore used the architecture of the web as the platform for interoperability.

As for the MESUR project, directed by his compatriot Johan Bollen, Herbert described it as ‘phenomenal’. MESUR took the view that citations as a measure of impact were appropriate for the paper-based world. But now we should assess network-based metrics (the best known of which is Google’s PageRank). A billion usage events were collected to test the hypothesis that network metric data contains valuable data on impact. The hypothesis, he believes, was proved correct. There is structure there, and the ability to derive usable metrics. Indeed, the correlations produced by MESUR reached the fairly radical conclusion that the citation analysis data we have been using for decades is an outlier when compared with network-based methods.

Overall then, more plus points than negatives. And not only was his audience not inclined to criticise, but he was urged to stay and complete his presentation even though it ran over his allotted time by about 20 minutes at the end of an intensive day. How many people in our profession could discuss their work with reference to so many iconic projects? He concluded with a simple message – which he had come to see clearly as he prepared this review: we do what we do in order to optimise the time of researchers. Some recent studies, such as the UK Research Information Network’s Activities, costs and funding flows in scholarly communications (discussed earlier in the conference by Michael Jubb, Director of RIN), and the more recent JISC report, Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits, express researcher time in cash terms. It amounts to billions of pounds each year.

How much money has been saved and so made available for further research by the projects developed and overseen by Herbert and his colleagues? There is optimisation to be proud of.