EbscoHost and NetLibrary integration

Today I attended a presentation from EBSCO representatives on the recent acquisition of NetLibrary. Here are some notes that may be of interest to RIS folks:

Basic Timeline:

• Preview version - April 2011 (current and EBSCOHost versions available).
• Live EBSCOHost version - July 2011.

Additional Notes:

• NetLibrary content will show up in EBSCOHost's database selections options menu as "Audio Book Collection" and "eBook Collection". (i.e. NetLibrary branding will be phased out).
• 10 or 20 page print limit will bump up to 60 pages per titles (sometimes 30 pages per section limits).
• Looking to do: print page ranges, multiple non-sequential pages.
• To view/access any ebook/audiobook need to log in to My EBSCOHost. 
• Notes feature will continue to be available - most likely to get moved over.
• New Oxford American Dictionary integrated with eBooks.

Liz in ACQ is getting copies of slides for anyone interested in more details, screenshots, etc.

"A minor gap can lead to major problems" - ethnographic studies on reference

 A lot of ethnographic studies I've seen so far have focused on matters related to the physical space of the library or usability aspects of the library website. So I was happy to come across the ERIAL Project, one aspect of which looked at reference services. Looking through their slides from the RUSA program, I found their summary statements note-worthy (possibly because they resonate with what I've suspected from my own observations and experience - it's always note-worthy when research validates your opinions doesn't it? :) so I thought I'd share a selective excerpt of point here:

• A minor gap in the student’s information literacy knowledge led to a major problem in finding the material
• Small obstacles can lead directly to a failed search, negatively affecting students’ learning outcomes
• Very few students ever seek help from a librarian
• Students don’t understand what librarians do or their role at a university
• Students who have instruction sessions are more likely to seek help from a librarian
• Students will seek help from librarians after a faculty recommendation

There's a world outside the ivory tower?

Interesting article in the New Republic about scholarly communications. See http://tinyurl.com/27bgv9s. "Toward a New Alexandria" by Lisbet Rausing.

It covers some familiar ground, but then says this:

"If scholars continue to hide away and lock up their knowledge, do they not risk their own irrelevance? An immediately important debate, I think, is to be had over how academics fail to engage with their natural constituency (and former students): journalists, business leaders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and civil servants. These people are the ruling classes, if you would like. They are the ones who house and feed professors. Is it really in academics’ long-term interest to not let these well-educated and well-intentioned people as much as glance at, say, the Index of Christian Art? Is it really in their interest not to show the public their scholarly articles and academic monographs?"

I've heard lots about the problem of scholars publishing for each other in ways that will bankrupt libraries, from the points of view of scholars and libraries. I've heard much less from the point of view of outsiders wanting to read that scholarly publishing. Interesting.

Print your own book from Wikipedia content

This blew me away.

You can create and print your own custom book out of Wikipedia content, and it's really easy to do.

(Nice demo video, too.)

Handheld Librarian Conference II - Highlights

I attended a few sessions of Handheld Librarian Conference II, that took place earlier this month: Feb 17-18, 2010.


Overall the quality of sessions were okay - not nearly as impressive as I had expected from the topic of mobile technologies - the exception of course being the presentation by NCSU Libraries' David Woodbury, Markus Wust and Jason Casden - which was awesome! Here are my takeaways from the experience:

1) The mobile trend asks the question: what is/should/could be the interface between the physical or 'real' world and our virtual or online activities and environments (and in our work, Libraries)? QR codes seem to be an important part of trying to address this question. (see 7 Things you should know about QR Codes from Educause: PDF)

2) The notion or idea of "engineering serendipity" from Damon Horowitz of Aardvark (see YouTube video here.) Interesting to think about how this does/n't fit with the work of Libraries.

3) There are different approaches to mobile development, from creating mobile sized web pages from using plug-ins or widgets that convert web pages into mobile versions to building mobile pages using a framework for development. Decisions may be affected by how much IT or programming and development skills staff have, and related to that, the size of the organization.

4) My delicious bookmarks on "mobile" got some new entries.

5) Getting staff together from different departments to web conference together can lead to informative and thoughtful discussions.

All sessions have been archived and should be available for the next 6 months or so for NCSU Libraries staff (see David Woodbury's email this week for the password) : http://www.handheldlibrarian.org/schedule2010/

Pipes and Current Awareness

Many journal publishers now make RSS feeds available from their websites. These feeds are made available in slightly different ways across publishers. Here are a few examples:

Informaworld provides feeds for subject clusters of titles, such as "Business & Management" and "Economics".

Sage offers pre-set clusters at the title level for "current issue", "recent issues", "most frequently read articles" and "most frequently cited articles".

Emerald offers Table of Content feeds for some of their titles, and a general feed of recent publications across all titles.

Tools like Pipes can be used to 'rewire the web' and customize the aggregated output of content published online, from blogs to journals. A basic example of how you can do this is to "create a pipe" to "fetch feeds" and then "filter" them for the presence or absence of keywords, and "output" matching citations to either the Pipes display page or your preferred rss feed reader, or embed it in your own site.

You can also share, copy and adapt pipes that other people may have created. You can search for pipes because they have been tagged - e.g. at time of writing 13 pipes have been tagged with "academic" and "libraries".

fyi, I'll be taking a closer look at this at NCSULA's Cool Tools in March.

The Revolution will not be subscription-based

Thought this article was interesting - it's a bit of a rant but still articulate about how about "free" works and doesn't work with libraries.

...we have to stop thinking “what business model can support our current modes of scholarly communication” by a shell game of charging scholars and/or charging libraries for commercial publishing services and instead focus on “what’s the best process for disseminating high-quality scholarship in a digital world?”

Also might be worth reading Doctorow's review of Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price (options to download mp3 here - for free).