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Archives for November 2006

This Just In . . . Google Shrinks a Bit

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This just came in from Gary Price by way of the ERIL-L listserv:

After 4+ years Google has announced that they are stopping the Google Answers
service.

This RS post:
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/11/29/google-saying-goodbye-to-google-answers/

has info and links as well as:

1) Google Answers history and the rise of Yahoo Answers

2) This is not the first time a large engine has shutdown a QnA service

3) Offer a look at the many QnA services (free) that libraries offer 24×7 from
any web computer. I added this section since many RS readers are not
librarians.

4) Point out a comment from Google’s Marissa Mayer about her take on Google
services. She told BusinessWeek earlier this year that 60 to 80% of Google’s
products many eventually go away.

cheers,
gary

—
Gary D. Price, MLIS
Librarian
Director of Online Information Resources, Ask.com
Editor, ResourceShelf and DocuTicker

Google is actually getting slightly smaller . . . believe it ot not . . .

Happy Turkey!

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There’s a great deal to be thankful for this year. Too much to write about here, really.  So let’s talk about copyright instead:

NEW YORK – Cell phone owners can now break locks to use their handsets
with competing carriers, while film professors have the right to copy
snippets from DVDs for educational compilations, the U.S. Copyright
Office said Wednesday.

Other rights declared in the government’s triennial review of the 1998

Digital Millennium Copyright Act
seek to improve access for the blind and to obsolete works and let
security researchers try to break copy-protection technologies embedded
in CDs

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six
exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the
first time, the office gave an exemption to a group of users.
Previously, Billington took an all-or-nothing approach, making them
difficult to justify.

"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is
willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers
and computer security experts," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with
the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Frankly, I’m
surprised and pleased they were granted."

But he said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a
number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one
that would let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple
Computer Inc.’s iPod and other music players.

I, too, am glad to hear of the exemptions the government is willing to make, but am unclear on what it actually means. Time will tell . . .

Happy turkey!

First, Re-Open the Libraries

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This article from Kelpie Wilson hit a particular note with me because until 2 years ago my wife worked as a reference librarian at the NYC EPA Region 2 library on Broadway.  She watched for 3 years as a staff of three librarians, one media specialist and one tech services paraprofessional were relocated, outsourced or just plain let go.  There may be one librarian there now–there were two the last time I checked, about a year ago.  Here’s an excerpt–the rest of the story is here.

    First, Re-Open the Libraries
    By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Wednesday 15 November 2006

    It
never got down to actual book-burning, but the Republican choke-hold on
government would clearly have taken us there. In August, under the
guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection
Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public
and to its own staff.

    The
EPA’s professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the
libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress
protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this
budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to
reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and
to continue to demoralize its employees."

    The
EPA’s precipitous move to close the libraries was based on a $2 million
cut in Bush’s proposed $8 billion EPA budget for 2007. EPA bureaucrats
did not wait to see if Congress might restore the funds or shift budget
priorities in order to save the libraries; it acted immediately to box
up documents for deep storage, and shut the doors.

    While
the official EPA line is that all of the documents will be eventually
be digitized and made available online, this will cost money that the
agency does not have, so for practical purposes, all of the thousands
of reports and maps that now exist only on paper or microfiche will be
lost to the public and to agency scientists. They might as well just
burn them.

The Future of the Catalog: Deconstruction or Reinvention?

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Thom Hickey described his experience speaking at a conference organized by the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Association of College and  Research Libraries on his blog.  The conference title: The Future of the Catalog: Deconstruction or Reinvention?  Personally, I’ve managed to convince myself that everything in the world of libraries is a matter of reinvention. Deconstruction and analysis can only take you so far, I’ve found.  Perhaps a better question is whether Libraryland is reinventing us in a Procrustean sort of way or we are reinventing it the way Peter the Great reinvented 18th century Russia. I’d like to think we’re in charge, but everyone reading this knows that institutions have a way to getting what they want regardless of what their caretakers think.  Oh, well. 

At any rate, it looks like it was a pretty nifty conference.

Peak Oil and Libraries

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Disclaimer: I am posting this more to hear back from other folks who can point me
to actual library journal articles on this subject than to suggest that
we’re screwed, although I suppose I can do both. That said . . .

I admit it: I’ve jumped on the peak oil bandwagon. Which is probably not a great decision for my psyche, concidering that I’ve been fighting a running gunbattle with depression since my early 20’s, and this is a class A-1 depressing subject, but more on that in a moment.  Part of my interest is the fact that I happen to be a sucker for a good disaster story, and the more popular thinkers on the topic seem to live up to their subject matter in a way that’s just plain fun. (If you’re not sure what I mean by that, read this article by Aaron Naparstek called "Peak Freaks" to get a better idea.) The end of the world is a compelling tale and we as a species seem to like stories about the end of the world. We just like them better when they’re abstractions.  Nobody local enjoyed evacuating New Orleans last year, for example, or worse, having to stay for whatever reason.  On the other hand, the Katrina saga did wonders for ratings for all manner of mass media outlets.

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Duke U. Press Joins LOCKSS

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An announcment from Duke University Press & Duke Libraries, care of Kimberly Steinle:

For immediate release: Nov. 8, 2006

CONTACT: Mandy Dailey-Berman (Duke University Press, Journals Publicity  Coordinator)
mdberman@dukeupress.edu

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, DUKE LIBRARIES TO SUPPORT LONG-TERM STRATEGIES  FOR PRESERVING ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY JOURNAL CONTENT

DURHAM, N.C. — Duke University Press and Duke University Libraries will  be participating in Portico and the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Alliance, two long-term strategies to preserve electronic scholarly journal content for future scholars, school officials announced Wednesday.

“The mandate to preserve scholarly work is an implicit and critical component of a library’s mission and one that has been vastly complicated by both the shift to electronic publishing and the fiscal challenges that libraries now face,” says Kimberly Steinle, Duke University Press’s library relations manager. “Portico and LOCKSS offer libraries reliable solutions to these problems, securing perpetual access to archived online content, while also eliminating the financial burden of creating an archive.”

Kevin L. Smith, scholarly communication officer at Duke, adds, “We recognize that academic research libraries such as those here at Duke University need to invest in digital repositories that help scholars maintain access to and control of their research product at various stages. Both LOCKSS and Portico represent substantive progress on the broad issue of electronic archiving.”

Portico was launched in 2005 with support from JSTOR, Ithaka, the Library of Congress and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Portico’s mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that it remains accessible to future generations of
scholars, researchers, and students. In pursuit of this mission, Portico operates a secure, permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.  To date, more than 5,200 journals have been promised to the Portico archive, and a broad range of scholarly publishers and libraries have chosen to participate in Portico as an important component of their archiving strategy.

Initiated by Stanford University Libraries, LOCKSS is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to the local copy of authorized content they purchase. Running on standard desktop hardware and requiring almost no technical administration, LOCKSS provides accessible copies of e-journal content as it is published.

You can take a look at what LOCKSS is planning here.  Portico’s got the same basic idea, but there are differences, so take at look at them, too.

Quotes of Note 2.0

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Something else I found while looking at the past posts on Andy’s website:

What Democrats will Do In Their First 100 Hours in Congress.

To paraphrase, they say they would:

· Put
new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

· Enact
all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

· Raise
the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step.

·   Cut
the interest rate on student loans in half.

· Allow
the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

· All
the days after that: "Pay as you go," meaning no increasing the
deficit

These plan points, if enacted, would be good for all of us who are not personal friends of the Bush family.

We’re not even going to discuss the fact that the United States Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines Times have called for Donald Rumsfeld’s removal as Secretary of Defense (nobody else in the mainstream media is, either).

Vote for something completely different tomorrow.

10 Things About Electronic Resources That Librarians Need to Know

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I haven’t been around much the past few days. There are a few reasons for that. We’re starting to bind journals again for the first time in months.  I’ve taken over a number of knowledge management duties for the library that are forcing all of the librarians here to rethink their work flow models.  I’m putting together a proposal for the 2006 METRO Digitization Grant for delivery in about three weeks.  We’re integrating PubMed into our Article Linker subscription.  And I’m working with my boss on getting our journal subscriptions evaluated and renewed, so there is a lot going on right now.

That said, while I wondered about how to deal with the knowledge management responsibilities, I got to thinking about what I learned from my 20+ years working with computers and how that knowledge helps me plan work both tactically (day to day) and strategically (quarter to quarter, year to year).  I’ve always liked machines, and as I got older and learned to think more abstractly I found that I liked thinking about systems in general. (I was one of those truly nerdy kids –now a nerdy adult–who would  wonder who first created the laser death ray and why  everybody in one sci-fi universe or another seemed to have them.  Did the inventor not patent the thing? Couldn’t he have licensed it to the army? To the Time Corp? What about antimatter bombs? Heck, while we’re at it, who invented the time machine?  Did people pay royalties to H.G. Wells when they built their own? If not, then why not? And how big an economy does a planet really need just to build a single Super Star Destroyer?)

The point is that in my daily interactions with the librarians here it became clear that I know more about these things than most of them do.  And that’s fine–reference librarians don’t need to know every detail about the information systems they use the same way a concert violinist need not know how to build a violin.  But that lack of knowledge works both ways–there are some things our network just can’t do, or at least, can’t do without enormous additional resources (time, money and staff, but mostly time . . . and money).  Even our library’s director–for whom I have enormous respect as both an administrator and a librarian–sometimes thinks of the system as a magic box that works like any ship’s computer on Star Trek.

Well, the world . . .  she don’t work that way. What follows are some extremely basic and blunt thoughts on the things that the planners of Libraryland might wish to take into account if they feel so inclined.   Think of it as a friendly and well-meant rant.

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