hangingtogether.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.