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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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Election 2006

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First, wish MEDLINE a happy 35th birthday.

Now for some political resources, lifted in part from Resourceshelf.org (where would any of us be without these guys?):

Resources of the Week: Election 2006
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the
blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."
-- George Bernard Shaw 

Be that as it may, the Tuesday after the first Monday in November is
coming up fast, and election-related information is a hot commodity.
Earlier this week, we highlighted one absolutely indispensable
political site, Project Vote Smart.

This amazing resource offers so much information that browsing here
can be like drinking from the proverbial firehose, but if you know
what you're looking for, it will save you a lot of time hopping around
the Web from site to site. Databases available here include:

* Biographical Information -- "Project Vote Smart compiles
  biographical details and contact information for over 40,000
  candidates and elected officials. We make every effort to provide
  these details for everyone who runs for President, Congress,
  Governor, and State Legislature in every state."

* Campaign Finances -- "Project Vote Smart provides detailed
  breakdowns of campaign finance contributions for your elected
  officials at the state and federal levels."

* Issue Positions (NPAT) -- "The National Political Awareness Test
  (NPAT) is a key component of Project Vote Smart's Voter Self-Defense
  system. Major leaders of the media, major parties and Project Vote
  Smart repetitiously ask candidates one central question: ''Are you
  willing to tell citizens your positions on the issues you will most
  likely face on their behalf?' The NPAT is administered to all
  candidates for presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state
  legislative offices."
 
* Interest Group Ratings -- "Despite their bias, special interest
  group ratings can help indicate where an incumbent has stood on a
  particular set of issues in the past few years. They can be
  especially useful when ratings by groups on all sides of an issue
  are compared. Web site links, if available, and descriptions of the
  organizations offering ratings are accessible by clicking on the
  name of the group."

* Voting Records -- "Project Vote Smart provides easy access to
  Congressional and State voting records and maintains a collection of
  key votes grouped by issue. Key votes typically include the initial
  passage of legislation and final conference report vote versions
  (the compromised versions of bills passed in separate House and
  Senate version)."

* Public Statements -- "Ratings. Our researchers collect public
  statements for the President, Vice President, Governors, all Members
  of Congress, and position papers for current candidates, who submit
  them along with their responses to the NPAT. Congressional floor
  statements, press releases, editorials, letters, columns, and
  television show and committee hearing transcripts are added daily."

The rest of the article is here.   (And while you’re into election resources, take a look at Andy’s columns from today and yesterday.)

FactCheck.org, MeSH and TypePad Metadata

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First, a big WooHOO! to Factcheck.org for receiving domestic and international awards.  If you haven’t subscribed to their e-mail news listserv you’re missing a lot.  I love this site.  If you’re looking for truly professional (i.e., fair and thorough) analysis of political ads and such, this is the place to go (or at least the place to start.)  Click on the previous links and experience the love first hand.

The 2007 MeSH is available now so I went and book marked it.  In truth, this has probably been available for some time and I just noticed it now, which is kind of sad since I use this page nearly every day for catalog work.  At any rate, there it is.

And we have broken the 7,000 visitor barrier (we’re at 7056 as I write this), for which I must thank  a billion or so librarians sporting body art of various types, styles and tastes,  offering  tidbits of information about themselves to satisfy my rampant curiosity.  Most of the traffic this site gets happens through federated search engines (lots of Google, rather less Yahoo, a mix of others) bouncing hits off past metadata entries, and in an average week, it’ll see about sixty or seventy web browsers pass through on their ways to elsewhere.  I’d love to find out how many are repeat visitors–I’d love even more to learn how many folks have linked to the RSS here.  I’ve gone through the Typepad help area and made a few calls to the help desk but I can’t find any support for that sort of statistic gathering.  Am I looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place?  Any and all advice would be appreciated.

Informal Poll and Thank You

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After publishing yesterday’s post about tattooed/pierced librarians and other white collar workers, I went to the libraries community on livejournal.com and ran a very informal poll. (Very informal.)  Just to see how many librarians were into body art, you understand.

The post isn’t 24 hours old yet and I’ve gotten over 50 comments.  (Wow!)  The comments keep on coming, too (if you have an LJ account and are so inclined, you can add your comment here.)  Not to mention the traffic on this website spiking mightily in the past few days, partly from this, partly from a link to the anti-library post from Lawrence, Kansas, that appeared on LISnews.com to push this blog to the brink of 7,000  visitors.

Wow! And thank you.  And please come again.

On your way out, take a look at this truly uplifting bit that appeared in ResourceShelf.com this morning.  I guarantee at least a couple of well-deserved  feel-good moments.

Tattoos, Piercings, Slip into Dress Codes

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I found this news bit on Yahoo! News this morning.  The article wasn’t written with libraries (or librarians) in mind in the strictest sense, but it’s interesting to me that the writer does in fact focus on a librarian in Kentucky with some very nice tribal work.  Personally, I knew a long time ago that if I was going to stay even marginally marketable anywhere outside NYC, I was going to have to "self censor" the tattoos I got (you won’t see anything on me at work, but I don’t generally wear anything more revealing than a polo shirt and dress pants either).  For that matter, I can point to a coworker who has a tongue piercing and a major tattoo, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she shows up to work every day.  But as I said, in NYC you can get away with a lot more than you might be able in, say Ohio, where I think they still have the death penalty for speeding.

I do think it’d be an amazing experiment–not that I know how to go about conducting it–to have a day where everybody in the world of work would just show off their body art–tats, piercings, what have you–just to see who was int he club and who was not.  How many doctors, lawyers, politicians, and undertakers would there be?  There’d a a lot of librarians, at least if my local sample is any indication (see previous note about speeding in Ohio).  And they wouldn’t all be weekend bikers, either.  How about plumbers, electricians, and IT people?   Housewives? (Househusbands?)  Preachers?  Writers?  Actors?  Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers?  PR execs (one of them made it into the article I linked to, so you never know)?

Maybe that’s the point.  You never know.  And, as long as the customer services is consistently good, does it really matter?

Libraries: Limited & Obsolete?

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This article by Mark Hirschey appeared in the Oct. 2, 2006 issue of the Lawrence Journal-World. The title "Libraries Are Limited, Obsolete" describes it pretty effectively, but I think  it’s worth reading, even if you don’t agree with it. Perhaps especially if you don’t agree with it, since I’m not convinced that Hirschey’s point of view is all that uncommon.

And, I’ll be honest, my first instinct is to dismiss this guy out of hand.  My second instinct is to get royally pissed off, and my third instinct tells me to take a deep breath, actually read what he wrote and consider it. Think about it.  Write about it.  So I did.  My response to Hirschey’s point of view is behind the edit.

Some librarians will read that last sentence and imagine that I’m selling out by lowering myself to his level to respond.  I don’t think that’s the case.  Like it or not, libraries are service organizations.  Some make money from more specialized activities than others and most are supported by at least some public and private funds.  If the day comes that we are unable to defend our livelihoods to those who write those checks, then those checks will cease to be written. If we cannot convince people to actually come in and use the resources we have available, then we’ll have failed to serve those potential patrons in any meaningful way.

So with that in mind, I’ll point out that while  Hirschey’s argument is far from iron-clad,  it’s not entirely uniformed.  He’s right to point out that huge portion of our patrons come in to use our electronic resources rather than the printed volumes.  And he’s also right to point out that $70 million–a number I pulled from the comments beneath the article–is an enormous amount of public money to be spent on any kind of project (if it’s correct).  And let’s face the ugly fact that at least some larger libraries might do well to occasionally rethink who they are serving and how.

At any rate, I think that dismissing Hirschey and those who believe as he does is a mistake.  Let’s try to convince them that we’re worth keeping around.

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